Rousseau: the construction of the Nation-State and supranational organizations

• Grant number: 08/01732-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: November 01, 2008
• End date: April 30, 2009
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy - Ethics
• Principal Investigator: Maria das Graças de Souza
• Grantee: Evaldo Becker
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The issue about the establishment and legitimacy of Nation-States and the possibilities or impossibilities of its own overcoming by the establishment of what we use to call General Society of Mankind or, specifically, the questions related to the links among various nations with defensive or expansive purposes, which were studied in the ambit of the 'Peoples Rights' theoretical framework, have been widely debated during the period of Modernity, so that these questions have been constituted themselves as founding pillars of the current discussions that are being developed in the scope of public international law and supranational organizations. In this sense, this research aims to study the problems related to the establishment of legitimate Nation-States and also the main difficulties noticed when there are trials of transcending the barriers that limit particular states toward the establishment of supranational bodies. These issues will be discussed to light of some of the major modern authors. Among them, we emphasize some writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) such as his unfinished project of Political Institutions and the Writings about Abbé de Saint-Pierre, and also texts from authors against whom Rousseau wrote. Thus, it is important to examine the following works: Hugo Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis (1625), Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651) and Abbé de Saint-Pierre, the Projet pour rendre la paix perpétuelle en Europe (1713) and, finally, the opuscules form Immanuel Kant: Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose (1784) and To the Perpetual Peace (1795). (AU)