Guizot, o dell'Europa una e molteplice

This essay examines the idea of Europe developed by Guizot in the famous course on the Histoire de la civilization, and its innovations with regards to the framework outlined by the eighteenth century, seeing it as a geopolitcal application of the author’s philosophy of history and "doctrinaire" liberalism. For him, if in European civilization the very essence of progress is achieved - whose meaning is a never-ending tendency to match principles and facts, the ideal and the real -, this is due to the plurality of forces in field, because only by the interplay of different and always relative values the sovereignty of reason establishes itself. In the second part the essay discusses the primacy which Guizot assigned to France as the country that best represents this model of civilization; it shows that in his speech universalism and national particularism still coexist, but opening on very different future scenarios.