La conscience historique déchirée des Modernes : perfectibilité (B. Constant) ; éducation esthétique (F. Schiller) ; théodicée (F. Schlegel)

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The divided consciousness of the Modernes: perfectibility, aesthetic education, theodicy.B. Constant, F. Schiller and F. Schlegel were contemporaries who had met on occasion. Each writer developed an authentic philosophy of history whose themes can be summed up respectively as «perfectibility», «aesthetic education» and «anti-chiliastic theodicy». These three positions in no way coincide and typify the extreme heterogeneity of the historical thinking of the «Modernes». In this article the view which is put forward can be summarized thus: 1) each of these writers does indeed have a philosophy of history worthy of the name; 2) this philosophy has to be grasped and reconstructed in the light of their individual views about Modernity; 3) each writer constructs an articulated model of world history with an original mainspring, various stages in development and a normative end point; 4) each of these philosophies of history is closely linked to a more or less explicit political philosophy; 5) the problem of constitutionalism, to which only B. Constant’s work offers a precise response, is the criterion which enables us today to discriminate normatively between these three positions.