Paese che vai: i caratteri nazionali fra teoria e senso comune

When we declare that the French are effeminate and the English are tenacious we use a particular tool that belong to our western culture from the times of Hippocrates: the idea of national character. Bodin and Du Bos, Montesquieu and Hume, Herder e Madame de Staël, Michelet and Hegel, Tocqueville and Spencer, Weil and Bateson, they all contributed to shape this tool. The "theory" of characters (if we can use this expression) offers us the image that western peoples gave (and give) of themselves and others, and their ideas of commerce or exclusion. Can we possess and acknowledge a national character without loosing our liberty and openness, and our personal character, and without falling into nationalism? After a short prologue on the ancient authors, we try to delineate an answer by the account of the philosophical views of national characters and their (physical or moral) causes, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in some thinkers of the twentieth century.