ABSTRACT
The nunc stans of today’s Europeans is the feeling that the European project or tradition has increasingly become problematic. After the extremely savage wars of religion the unmitigated brutality of which often foreshadowed the charming face of our century of genocides, the turning point, a turn unexpectedly propitious for the emergence of the hermeneutical political tradition, came with a wave of tolerance, a specifically European innovation. The hermeneutical aspect of the Marxian reconstruction was apparently perfectly balanced by its (Hegelian) promise to complete, and to terminate, philosophy at the very moment when it reached the one and only absolute truth. In Kant’s political philosophy, res publica noumenon, perpetual peace, and humankind are three ways of describing one and the same state of affairs. The sextette is an incommensurable expression of the new age born with the French Revolution and its new concept of the political.
