Eurocentrism: the national construction of a universal philosophy in nineteenth-century France

Focusing on the specific case of Victor Cousin’s constitution of French philosophy as a modern philosophical rationality, this paper aims to analyse how French philosophical nationalism was based on and worked toward the dissemination and elaboration of a modern Eurocentric philosophical rationality in the nineteenth century. This national construction of a supposedly universal, though Eurocentric, philosophy in nineteenth-century France is examined from four perspectives: (1) Cousin’s project and special conception of the history of philosophy; (2) the Cousinian transnational, and particularly, Franco-German conception of philosophical universality; (3) Cousin’s justification of French philosophy as the only modern rationality; and (4) a specifically French slant on the politics of philosophy embodied in the institutionalization of philosophy. This paper challenges Eurocentrism from the inside by analysing the specificity of the construction of a modern European philosophical rationality and highlighting how nineteenth-century French nationalism served Eurocentrism and vice versa. This paper thus allows us to identify the factors that explain why Eurocentrism still largely prevails in European philosophy, particularly in French school curricula. Finally, it puts us in a position to identify, within the historical construction of modern rationality as a European exception, tools for questioning its professed universalism.