Entre clasicismo y modernidad. Sobre el sentido del realismo político en la obra de Julien Freund

Abstract

Julien Freund’s political philosophy has often been interpreted as a decisionist and polemocentric view of politics based on Schmittian echoes. Without entering into the problem of its intellectual roots, I intend to justify in this article the sense in which the French author assumes the realistic tradition of politics, distancing himself however from a cratological and a nihilistic interpretation of politics, which tends to reduce public affairs to the strategic control over means. I understand, in contrast, that Freund’s realism coincides with his “mesocratic” or “liberal” perspective in an “archic” sense, not minarchist or neutralizing. This requires a change of approach in the study of Freund’s work that fundamentally avoids two extremes: the reduction of political to the sole dialectic of command and obedience in detriment to the integrity of all its factors, and the overvaluation of means in relation to the goals of political activity.