El Krausismo español y la cuestión nacional

Abstract

At the beginning of the last century Spanish Krausism defended a conception of national reality which corrected the essentialist current, the sanctification of the nation, by valuing positively the individual concretion of the different peoples of the world and by opposing this concretion to the abstract cosmopolitanism of the time. Krausism in Spain attacked the socialistic current of the time which intended to transform this reality into a superstructure of the dominating class. With this specific doctrine, Krausism did not create a nationalism of liberation, but it did indeed intend to liberate nationalism with the help of its ideas of a modern type of humanism grawing upon old historic roots. With the exception of the historical distance, the Krausian conception of the nation can still offer us valuable reflection for our times because it conceives the nation as the natural and inevitable social structure, as an opportunity for true aperture towards humanism, and not as the negative alternative for closing up to the exterior, what is so typical of localism.