CITIZENSHIP IN MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO: FREE EXAMINATION AND POLITICAL PARTICIPATION

Abstract

Unamuno, like all the great classic Western thinkers, is eternally relevant to the present time. His reflections concerning what a democracy should be are in this sense an expression of the timelessness of his political thought. Certainly the question of what democratic citizenship is and involves is motivating the thinking of many of today’s philosophers; it is also no less certain that no other author has been so consistent in taking to the limit the relation between the idea of that concept and its implementation in his civic life. Unamuno – as an irascible “intellectual-politician” in self-exile in Paris owing to his confrontation with the Miguel Primo de Rivera dictatorship, the monarchy and the king– is the highest example of how current democracy and citizenship should be understood and practised in terms of political intervention established on free examination of conscience. And it is precisely here where the influence of German liberal Protestantism played as decisive role in his intellectual formation, especially for an author so adept in heresy as deconstruction of orthodoxies and dogmas that disallow individual thought in its freedom and autonomy.