Joseph de Maistre, ¿conservador o reaccionario? Una reevaluación conceptual de su pensamiento político

This article discusses the inclusion of the counterrevolutionary Joseph de Maistre in the problematic category of political reactionary, but maintains that he is a conservative. To achieve this objective, a theoretical analysis is made in accordance with the requirements of textual hermeneutics and with the contributions of the history of ideas and conceptual history. With this in mind, in the first part of this work the problems of the use of the concept of reaction for political theory are detected and its unjustified application to De Maistre's thought is demonstrated. In the second part, the concept of substantive conservatism is deployed to define the conservative current with a view to, in the third part, reconsidering his work from the conceptual framework presented. The heuristic suitability of the proposed category for the understanding of the Savoyard author is concluded.