Zeev Sternhell

Zeev Sternhell was born in Przemysl, Poland, in 1935. Of Jewish descent, he survived the Nazi persecutions with the help of two Catholic Polish families. At the end of the war, he settled in France, attended a French school, and, as he himself says, enthusiastically discovered the principles of freedom, human rights, and the secular state, which were faithfully and devotedly promoted by the French public education system. In 1951, at the age of 16, he immigrated to Israel. He worked in a kibbutz and studied history and political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He pursued postgraduate studies in Paris at the Institute of Political Studies, where he completed his doctoral dissertation. He served as a professor of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (holding the Léon Blum Chair). An active member of the peace movement in Israel, he was a founding member of the "Peace Now" organization and a regular columnist for the newspaper Haaretz. He opposed the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. In 2008, he was awarded the Israel Prize for Political Science, an event that provoked strong reactions from nationalist and far-right circles in the country. Notably, on September 25, 2008, he was slightly injured by an explosive device at his home. Sternhell, a tireless scholar of the works of Enlightenment classics Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Kant, argued that the history of the last three centuries is marked by the ongoing conflict between the supporters and opponents of the Enlightenment. There are two opposing ways to understand modernity: one that seeks individual happiness, freedom, progress, and tolerance, and another that extols cultural particularities and community values. The supporters of the Enlightenment have a common goal of liberating the individual from the constraints of history and the bonds of tradition. As a rational being, free and autonomous, man no longer needs history, religion, or guardianship. The enemies of the Enlightenment, from Herder to Huntington, praise history, culture, and language, opposing the idea of individual autonomy and the universality of human rights. If enlightened modernity is that of liberalism leading to democracy, the other modernity, which appears at the beginning of the 20th century, takes the form of the revolutionary, nationalist, communitarian Right, which is a sworn enemy of universal values. Main works: - "Maurice Barrès et le nationalisme français," 1972. - "La Droite révolutionnaire, 1885-1914. Les origines françaises du fascisme," 1981. - "Ni droite ni gauche. L'idéologie fasciste en France," 1983. - "Naissance de l'idéologie fasciste" (with Mario Sznajder and Maia Asheri), 1989. - "L'Éternel Retour. Contre la démocratie, l'idéologie de la décadence" (ed.), 1994. - "Aux origines d'Israël. Entre nationalisme et socialisme," 1996.