Little by little, not without astonishment, I rediscovered the great names of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who had been the master thinkers of my grandfather and other Mexican liberals. They did no offer me a doctrine or a catechism: they were and they are a source, an inspiration.
Eighteenth
My next book is also set in the eighteenth century. It’s about the Revolution, with the focus on the year 1776. It’s about Washington and the army and the war. It’s the nadir, the low point of the United States of America.
However, the sciences of society and of history retained their old subservient relation to metaphysics for a long time – well into the eighteenth century.
Pure phenomenology claims to be the science of pure phenomena. This concept of the phenomenon, which was developed under various names as early as the eighteenth century without being clarified, is what we shall have to deal with first of all.
Liberty had many friends in the eighteenth century.