Thymos. History of a Platonic concept and its conservative uses, from Leo Strauss to Alternative für Deustchland (AfD) ; Thymos. Circulation et appropriations conservatrices d'un concept platonicien, de Leo Strauss à l'Alternative für Deutschland

International audience ; Inspired by the new French social history of political ideas, this paper tackles the conceptual history of thymos in the 20th and 21st centuries, by examining its circulation and uses in various historical-political contexts. Following its emergence in various texts of the early Leo Strauss, this article shows how the concept was first implanted in the United States by the neoconservative Straussians (Allan Bloom and Francis Fukuyama), before being re-imported into contemporary Germany (with Peter Sloterdijk and his student, the AfD intellectual Marc Jongen). The main thesis is that the thymos framework retains a certain stability over time, despite a great variation in its appropriations: it is thus always characterized by a double normative charge which expresses a conservative ambivalence towards the (liberal) order of things, oscillating between its defense (protection of the status quo) and its subversion or radicalization “from the right”. The article also reveals that thymos is not only mobilized in ideological struggles, but also in conflicts between intellectuals: “Thymos”, “spiritedness”, “desire for recognition”, “anger” also have the function of expressing a “revolt” of the conservative intellectual in the face of his dominated status in the intellectual or university fields, positions which often contrast with his relative influence in other fields. ; S’inscrivant dans le cadre des nouvelles recherches françaises en histoire sociale des idées politiques, cet article propose de reconstruire la « carrière » du concept platonicien de thymos dans l’histoire intellectuelle des 20e et 21e siècles en examinant sa circulation et ses appropriations variées, ainsi que les différents contextes dans lesquels il a été mobilisé. Après avoir restitué son émergence dans la philosophie politique des années 1930 du jeune Leo Strauss, on s'intéresse aux modalités de son implantation outre-Altantique chez les Straussians néoconservateurs (Allan Bloom et Francis Fukuyama), avant d’examiner sa ...