About person, democracy and sacrifice in María Zambrano (and an appendix)

Abstract

In Puerto Rico, María Zambrano published the first edition of her book Persona y Democracia (1958), which from the second one (Bar- celona, 1988) included the subtitle La historia sacrificial and a new prologue. She divided the book into three parts, entitled: i. The Western crisis, ii. Thesis of Western history: man, and iii. The humanization of society: democracy. In this paper the contents of the book are commented upon, with emphasis on two subjects: the references to the Classical World (Greece and Rome in particular), and Zambrano’s teacher Jose Ortega y Gasset as the starting point of some of her thinking. The paper concludes with an appendix, which comprises manuscript corrections Zambrano made in a first edition copy.