NOTES

Translator’s Introduction

1. Pierre Manent, Seeing Things Politically, trans. Ralph C. Hancock (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2015).

2. Manent, Seeing Things Politically, 203.

3. Spinoza: a being’s sheer perseverance in being. See Ethics, part 3, beginning. Hobbes, throughout his Leviathan, and beginning in the very first chapter, translates conatus as “endeavour.”

4. Daniel Mahoney (above, in the foreword) captures Manent’s understanding perfectly in the traditional phrase “liberty under law.”

5. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 91, quoted by Manent in the appendix, “Recovering Law’s Intelligence.”

ONE Why Natural Law Matters

1. The six chapters of this book are based on six lectures delivered in March 2017 at the Institut Catholique de Paris. The Étienne Gilson Chair was founded in 1995 on the occasion of the centennial of the institute’s Faculté de philosophie. Named in honor of the twentieth century’s greatest historian of medieval ideas, the institute wishes to be the means of a new inquiry concerning metaphysics, its history, and its contemporary standing in the diverse philosophical traditions. Since its creation, it has each year invited one person known for his contribution to historical or speculative research in the metaphysical domain to deliver a series of six lectures in French.

2. Olivier Roy, Le Djihad et la Mort (Paris: Seuil, 2016), 99, 161.

3. Rousseau, On the Social Contract, bk. 1, ch. 6, in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 3:360 [trans. Hancock].

TWO Counsels of Fear

1. In the language of modern “contractualist” political philosophy, this reduction takes the form of the proposition according to which society is not natural to humanity, or that humanity is not naturally sociable. This proposition must be understood in a dynamic sense: the power and the right of nature for humanity do not reside in association but in separation.

2. See for example Thomas Hobbes: “These small beginnings of Motion, within the body of Man, before they appear in walking, speaking, striking, and other visible actions, are commonly called ENDEAVOUR. This endeavour, when it is towards something which causes it, is called APPETITE, or DESIRE . . . and when the Endeavour is fromward something, it is generally called AVERSION.” Leviathan, ed. C. B. Mcpherson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), ch. 6, p. 119. It is of course in Spinoza that the notion of conatus takes on the most marked “metaphysical” character. See in particular propositions 6–9 of bk. 3 of the Ethics.

3. Translator’s note: see ch. 3, n. 8, on the extensive connotations of Manent’s term “operation.”

4. See Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 11, p. 161.

5. See introduction to Hobbes, Leviathan.

6. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 61.

7. “I gently take human beings as they are,” says Philinte the “realist.” Moliere, The Misanthrope, 1.1 [trans. Hancock].

8. As Alceste the “idealist” says (ibid., 5.4).

9. Translator’s note: Head or chief of a company of mercenaries (Italian).

10. “So Giovampagolo, who did not mind being incestuous and a public parricide, did not know how—or, to say better, did not dare, when he had just the opportunity for it—to engage in an enterprise in which everyone would have admired his spirit and that would have left an eternal memory of himself as being the first who had demonstrated to the prelates how little is to be esteemed whoever lives and reigns as they do; and he would have done a thing whose greatness would have surpassed all infamy, every danger, that could have proceeded from it.” Machiavelli, Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus-Livy, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), bk. 1, ch. 27, p. 63.

11. Machiavelli, Prince, ch. 17, p. 67.

12. Machiavelli, Discourses, bk. 1, ch. 47, p. 98; bk. 3, ch. 6, p. 229; ch. 21, p. 263.

13. Machiavelli, Prince, ch. 18, p. 70.

14. Ibid., ch. 7, at the end.

15. “What is the use of these lofty points of philosophy on which no human being can settle, and these rules that exceed our use and our strength? I often see people propose to us patterns of life which neither the proposer nor his hearers have any hope of following, or, what is more, any desire to follow. . . . It would be desirable that there should be more proportion between the command and the obedience; and a goal that we cannot reach seems unjust.” Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. D. M. Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958), 756, 757 (bk. 3, ch. 9).

16. Prince, ch. 18, p. 70.

17. Ibid., ch. 26.

18. Machiavelli, Discourses, bk. 1, preface, p. 6.

19. Ibid., bk. 3, ch. 1, p. 212.

20. Machiavelli, Prince, ch. 15, p. 61; ch. 18, p. 70.

21. Emerging in the context of Christianity, the notion of conscience supports and complements the Aristotelian analysis of practical life and of reflective choice so well that the two elements prove to be inseparable; once the notion of conscience is dismissed, modern practical philosophy (if these two adjectives can indeed be put together) will no longer be able to find its way in practical reasoning.

22. Luther, The Bondage of the Will, in Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation, ed. E. Gordon Rupp and Philip S. Watson, Library of Christian Classics 17 (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1969), 261–62.

23. Ibid., 190.

24. Ibid., 305–6.

25. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, qq. 2 and 4.

26. As Thomas emphasizes in the article Utrum homo possit scire se habere gratiam, since God, the principle and object of grace, is unknown to us owing to his transcendence, his presence or absence in us cannot be known to us with certainty. Ibid., I-II, q. 112, a. 5.

27. Luther, Bondage of the Will, 309.

28. “Hoc est artis, transilire a meo peccato ad justitiam christi, das ich so gewiss weis, das Christi frumkeitt mein sei, so gewiss ich weis, dass dieser Leib mein sei.” Table Talk, cited in J. Maritain, Trois réformateurs (Paris: Plon, 1925), 25. One might perhaps translate as follows: “It is quite an art to leap from my sin to the justice of Christ, and thus to be as certain that Christ’s piety is mine as I am certain that this body belongs to me.”

29. Luther, Bondage of the Will, 109–12.

30. Ibid., 200–201, 206–7.

31. Ibid., 127.

32. This point is perfectly developed by John Calvin in Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.19, “Christian Freedom.” See, e.g., John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, Library of Christian Classics 20–21 (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), 833–49.

THREE The Order of the State without Right or Law

1. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 15, p. 217; also ch. 26, p. 314.

2. Ibid., ch. 15, p. 211.

3. Except, in a sense, for the law that enjoins us to seek peace, which, as we have seen, is not properly a law. (See n. 1 above.) There is no law that determines the justice or injustice of human actions but the law of the sovereign: “And the Makers of Civill Laws, are not only the declarers, but the Makers of the justice, and injustice of actions, there being nothing in mens Manners that makes them righteous, or unrighteous, but their conformity with the Law of the Soveraign.” Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 42, p. 586.

4. Ibid., ch. 14, p. 190.

5. One can say that it has no meaning because, and as long as, it has no effectiveness, but this is to confirm that, in the state of nature, it has no meaning.

6. The changes in laws and in behaviors produced by the civil rights movement in the United States provide what is doubtless the most eloquent and convincing example of an extension of rights that enlarges and deepens the meaning of the human association itself.

7. Rousseau, “Lettre à Christophe de Beaumont,” in Œuvres complètes, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 4:936. “He is an animal” confirms and intensifies “he is nothing,” meaning that the being in question has no human characteristics.

8. Translator’s note: Opération is a rich term in P. Manent’s French, resonating with the Latin “operatio,” which, in Thomas Aquinas’s thought, and then in Dante’s usage in De monarchia, for example, indicates the active realization of a naturally ordered function, an activity that is by nature meaningful because it participates in the synthesizing production of a whole that is good. Of course the term does not carry its full, premodern implications when the author applies it to modern authors and processes. I render it typically by the admittedly paler English equivalent “operation.”

9. Machiavelli, Prince, ch. 9, p. 39.

10. Hobbes, Behemoth, ed. F. Tönnies (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1969), dialogue 4, p. 159.

11. Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952; first published in 1936), 149–52.

FOUR The Law, Slave to Rights

1. See footnote on the Greek term archē (ἀρχή) at the beginning of ch. 6.

2. Only a political body can give itself a law and thus be “autonomous” or “independent.” As Thomas Aquinas sums up the matter, one can only say “each is himself the law . . . insofar as he takes part in a [collective] order regulated by some government.” Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 90, a. 3. To use the terms rigorously, no one can give a law to his own actions: nullus, proprie loquendo, suis actibus legem imponit. I-II, q. 93, a. 5.

3. It must be noted that today’s campaigns that aim at discouraging smoking emphasize self-mastery much less than health. In the world of autonomy, self-mastery cannot be a significant objective or moving force.

4. Montesquieu expresses himself prudently but inopportunely on this point: “The idea of empire and of domination is so composite, and it depends on so many other ideas, that it is not one that he [man] would have at first” (The Spirit of the Laws, 1.2 [trans. Hancock]). If he does not have it at first, he will never have it. Montesquieu can envision a development of growing complexity since he makes use of the impressive but vague notions “empire” and “domination.” The notion of command has a simplicity and density that make it impossible to see it as the result of a composition of primitive ideas empty of any “note” of command.

5. Translator’s note: A reference to the elegant manners of a woman in Baudelaire’s poem “À une passante” (To a woman passing by).

6. Translator’s note: These Greek terms denote mastery or lordship, the masculine and feminine forms perhaps suggesting civil and ecclesiastic government.

FIVE The Individual and the Agent

1. This is the complete form of the phrase (roughly: “Let it be, let it go”)—more commonly known by just its first half—first proclaimed in the eighteenth century in the cause of economic freedom. It is attributed to the French economist Vincent de Gournay.

2. Totalitarianism—that is, specifically modern tyranny—is based on an ideological version of representation: the “party,” in the name of the “class” or the “race,” claims to represent the “people,” or at least the “better part” of the people. Hence the perverse mechanism of a succession of identifications, which is particularly explicit in the case of communism and has often been noted: the secretary general “represents” the party, who “represents” the proletariat, who “represents” humanity in the final stage of its emancipation.

3. On the meaning of “archic,” see the first note in ch. 6.

SIX Natural Law and Human Motives

1. Translator’s note: Manent here is drawing upon the Greek term archē (ἀρχή), which associates a beginning with an act and therefore with ruling. Compare the connotations of our term “principle”—a ruling origin.

2. Translator’s note: The French honnête, rendered here “honest,” is a more capacious term than our English “honest” has become, as the author suggests in the following sentences. It carries connotations including what is fair, decent, upright, and honorable.

3. Translator’s note: The author alludes to the killing of a girl whose father or brother considers her to have misbehaved.

4. Translator’s note: “Liberalism” is here used in the European sense, which refers not to the left of the political spectrum but to the political doctrine that favors capitalism and the free market as well as, more generally, the idea of individual rights.

Appendix Recovering Law’s Intelligence

1. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, qq. 90–108.

2. “Et dans la plaine immense et le vide dormeur . . .” From the poem “Le moulin,” by Émile Verhaeren.