Le molte crisi dello Stato nazionale: il contributo di Reinhart Koselleck

Abstract

In the contribution we intend to develop a historical-genealogical reflection on the topic of the nation state and its crisis. In the first part, after discussing how the concept of the state constitutes one of the main themes of historical sociology, the question of its current crisis will be problematized, starting from a literature that, moving from an empirical perspective, highlights what are the critical factors that grip this historical formation nowadays. In the second part, we intend to put forward some objections to the reconstruction of the crisis of the state as it is presented today, resorting to the contribution of Reinhart Koselleck, a German intellectual and historian, whose notion of crisis itself, which he develops in a broader reflection on the history of ideas, will be briefly explored, and whose reconstruction of the crisis of the absolute state, presented in his celebrated volume Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society, will be discussed. According with Koselleck, it will emerge how giving historical depth to the notion of crisis, showing its origin coeval with the formation of the state itself, and assuming its polysemanticity as a heuristic value, is particularly useful in order to distinguish between historical-structural and contingent factors of crisis, and to reveal how the state is indeed a reality capable of readjusting to current contexts. The conclusions will reflect on this pliant notion of the state that is perfectly in line with the interpretations proper to historical sociology, which demonstrates, including through this specific case study, the relevance of its approach to illuminating issues of our time.