Rethinking the link between “the person” and “democracy”. Waves of vital thought for a new history

Persona y democracia is a central work in the development of María Zambrano's thinking, and it remains so in our times. Indeed, we find in this text the very coordinates of what she means by historical consciousness, moral responsibility, memory, freedom, and ethics: words that form part of the constellation connecting the concepts of the person and democracy. Her argument is based on the need to move away from the spiral of sacrifice that has characterized human history since its beginnings, in order to embark on an ethically-inspired way of living through the realization of a policy and a history cleansed of the will-to-power, and of an idea of the person free from notions of absolutism. This is evident in her fundamental vision of history as a progressive revelation of what “human” means, and as the opening of channels that over the course of time are able to widen the horizons of human possibilities, born of those “moments of illumination” that nourished hope in times past and will do so in the future.