Understanding political beliefs: advantages and conditions of a culturalist notion of an event

Abstract

This paper departs from the assumption that the construction of Europe – a complex project that mixes cultural, political, social, and institutional dimensions –, cannot be planned nor developed while ignoring the relation between actions and beliefs. To address this requirement, it is essential to establish an epistemological space in which the different levels of political activity and political thinking can converge and communicate the following: (i) the level of concrete political actions; (ii) the level of the general mechanisms of understanding and; (iii) the level of the experience of daily lives of its citizens. Then, we propose a conception of an event, taken from the contemporary French historiographic school. We will attempt to illustrate its potential for the study of political understanding and defend the convenience of adopting it as a starting point in the construction of an open epistemological space – one that can be shared by the different disciplines that approach the field of politics.