Abstract

ESPINO MARTIN, Javier. Classical reception and history of ideas in 18th century. The Ciceronian virtus and honestum in "The honor of the nobility" of Montesquieu, and the "Civic education" of Gaspar Melchor De Jovellanos. Tópicos (México) [online]. 2017, n.53, pp.325-372. ISSN 0188-6649.

Through the methodology of a selection of theorists of the "Reception Aesthetics", we intend to analyze the interrelation between Marco Tulio Cicero's "Horizon of Expectations" (in Gadamer and Jauss's terminology) and that of two Enlightenment intellectuals: Montesquieu and Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos. Thereby, we intend to fill in the "blanks" (according to Iser's terminology) that Enlightened readings of Ciceronian political ethics create in regard to the concrete concepts of "virtue" and "honesty". Thus, we intend to develop these concepts according to Ciceronian worldview, in contrast to Montesquieu and Jovellanos's Enlightened perspectives, and to highlight the related turning and rooting points in Cicero's thought itself. Finally, we will answer the question of to what extent the roman rhetor conditioned the political conception of virtue and honesty both in French and Spanish Enlightenment (in which the prominent interference of English empiricism will also be taken into account), and in what ways these "modern" authors readapted and transformed the "classic" thinker's ideas according to their own "Horizon of Expectations".

Keywords : "Horizon of Expectations"; "blanks"; Cicero; Montesquieu; Jovellanos; honesty; virtue.

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