The crisis of communism did not resonate with explosive consequences in Paris in 1989—the year of the great antitotalitarian revolution in the “other Europe”—but rather in 1974 with the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s ideological bombshell, The Gulag Archipelago. With that event, one can date the end of the ideological hegemony of the Marxist vulgate in French intellectual life and the beginning of the renaissance of non-Marxist and non-“existentialist” political philosophizing in that great custodian of European culture. The work of an earlier generation of non-Marxist French scholars, such as François Furet and Claude Lefort, is increasingly known in the Anglo-American world, but the path-breaking work of a younger generation of “neoliberal” thinkers is just beginning to be noticed in the United States.
This book is an introduction to the work of one of the most serious and penetrating of the new French political theorists, Pierre Manent. It consists of fifteen of his essays written between 1983 and 1997. These essays address a remarkable range of subjects: the Machiavellian origins of modernity, Alexis de Tocqueville’s analysis of democracy, the political role of Christianity, the nature of totalitarianism, the character of modern individualism, and the future of the nation-state. In addition, there are penetrating reflections on the significance of such philosophers and statesmen as Charles Péguy, Charles de Gaulle, Raymond Aron, Aurel Kolnai, Allan Bloom, and Leo Strauss. But what unifies these diverse writings is a meditation on the nature of modern freedom and the permanent discontents that accompany it. This essay serves as a general introduction to the political thought of Manent, placing the essays within the context of his work as a whole and his analysis of the nature of modern liberty and its effects on the integrity of the human soul.
Manent, born in 1949, was for many years maître de conferences at the College de France and since 1992 has been a teacher at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He is, among other things, a former assistant to the great French anticommunist political thinker Raymond Aron (who initiated the French rediscovery of Tocqueville and of non-Marxist political analysis in the 1950s and 1960s), an independent-minded scholar who has contributed to the revival of liberal (in the older and larger non-American sense) political thought in France, a former editor of and current contributor to the important “neoconservative” journal Commentaire, and a serious Catholic deeply influenced by the work of Strauss. Moreover, it is in no small part due to his efforts, as well as those of François Furet and Jean-Claude Lamberti, that Tocqueville’s writings are now widely recognized in France as an indispensable guide for understanding modern history and society as well as a rich theoretical alternative to discredited Marxist-inspired critiques of liberalism.
Manent is the author of Naissances de la politique moderne: Machiavel, Hobbes, Rousseau (1977), Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy (1982, 1996 in translation), An Intellectual History of Liberalism (1987, 1994 in translation), and the two-volume anthology with commentary entitled Les Libéraux (1986). Manent has written numerous articles on such thinkers as Joseph de Maistre, Karl Marx, Leo Strauss, Raymond Aron, and Carl Schmitt, as well as on various topics and issues in the history and philosophy of politics.1
Manent’s work judiciously combines historical studies, philosophical reflection, and political-cultural analysis. At the center of his work is an effort to grasp the meaning of “our liberal destiny.”2 Manent is particularly concerned with the effects of modern democracy on the maintenance and sustenance of substantial human ties. While his writings are sometimes quite demanding, they are also remarkable examples of lucid and concrete philosophical writing. Manent avoids abstract analysis and addresses the effects of democratic individualism on “the moral contents of life,” on serious religiosity, sustained political judgment, and the full range of human attachments and affections, including a coherent sense of national identity. While eschewing any traditionalist or reactionary rejection of liberalism, Manent nonetheless stands apart from the current crop of non-Marxist French political thinkers by his considered refusal to idolatrize “individual rights” as the spiritual lodestar of modern society. He is a liberal conservative (we might say a “neoconservative” with appropriate sensitivity to the distinctive French context) who appreciates the dependence of democratic societies on premodern moral capital and on qualities of human nature that are presupposed, but not sufficiently cultivated, by a liberal political order. Nor is Manent a typical adherent of the “social sciences,” which, in their claim to scientific rigor, dominate the study of human affairs in the academy. In his latest work, The City of Man (1994, 1998 in translation),3 Manent brilliantly explores the origins of the modern social sciences, which he argues are located in a fundamental, dogmatic, and unsustainable abstraction from the question of the nature of man.
Manent’s view of liberalism is thoroughly nonideological and avoids the dogmatism that too often characterizes both defenders and critics of bourgeois society. His work includes intelligent, critical, and sympathetic accounts of the major liberal, nonliberal, and antiliberal theorists, from Machiavelli to Rousseau, Marx, and Schmitt. His aim is to understand the origins, nature, and consequences of the liberal project. This deliberate enterprise arose as a self-conscious response to Europe’s “theological-political problem”—a problem coextensive with European politics since the fall of the Roman Empire. The problem facing Europe was diagnosed with particular acuity by Marsilius of Padua and Dante, two Christian Aristotelians of the thirteenth century who wished to defend the independence and integrity of the profane world from ecclesiastical despotism exercised in the name of the highest goods of man.4
But Marsilius and Dante were precisely “Aristotelians”; they wished to defend the goods of the temporal and natural realm against the superintending claims of the priests who represented the supernatural realm. Manent brilliantly shows how the strategy of “ostracism” pursued by the Christian Aristotelians of the Renaissance was inadequate to the radicalness of the theological-political problem. Precisely because it depended upon a hierarchy of human or profane goods, the defense of the autonomy of the political, of the “regime,” was inherently vulnerable to the claims of the church and its representatives that the supernatural completed and perfected nature.
The modern response to the theological-political problem was to reject the Dantean-Marsilian as well as the Thomistic solutions (i.e., to reject all versions of what Hobbes called “Aristotelity”). The modern enterprise entailed the construction of a new notion of sovereignty in which power and opinion and nature and law were firmly and irrevocably separated.5 Both the mixed regime of Aristotelian political theory, which aimed at balancing, mixing, and “doing justice” to the variety of human goods, and the old regime with its estates and its ecclesiastical establishments were to be replaced by the modern representative state. This state represents individuals, not “spiritual masses,” and grounds itself not in any questionable and potentially despotic opinion about the “good” but in the very certain reality of mankind’s bodily need.6
In An Intellectual History of Liberalism, Manent follows Strauss in seeing Machiavelli as the architect of the modern enterprise, the thinker who first delineated the possibility of a politics closed to the good, of a politics that could be utterly self-contained because it is closed in on itself.7 Machiavelli explicitly denies the possibility of a common good because he denies that human beings have access to a hierarchy of goods that stands above or moderates partisan claims. Manent shows how Machiavelli rewrites and radically transforms the classical mixed regime.8
The people and the great, the many and the few, remain the substance and material of political life for Machiavelli as well as for the Aristotelian tradition. But there is a vital and striking difference. For Aristotle, partisans are partisans precisely because the claims of justice that motivate and justify their actions are partial or incomplete. For the mixing, sifting, weighing, and balancing of partisan claims to occur, there must be a standard of justice outside partisanship—whether that be the “best regime” or the well-balanced soul of the philosopher-political scientist—to guide the mixing of civic, human, and moral goods. For Machiavelli, in contrast, the few and the many are absolutely enclosed within their respective “humors.” Machiavelli eliminates the “dialogic” dimensions of political life, the discussion about political goods that characterizes the practical ideal of classical political science.
He replaces Aristotle’s sublime impartiality that does justice to the truth inherent in the partial claims of both democratic and oligarchic partisans, as well as the less politically influential but nonetheless weighty claims of virtue and wisdom, with a radical partiality that “despairs of arriving at the universal, and which contents itself with offering to the human will, the objective of a liberty which is always to be won, within the limits of society or history” (see his essay “Toward the Work and Toward the World: Claude Lefort’s Machiavelli” in this volume). Machiavelli formulates the distinctive moral stance of modernity that recognizes the radically indeterminate character of human freedom built upon the stern requirements of natural and social Necessity. This dialectic of human willfulness and Necessity marks all of the fundamental currents of modernity and is at the origin of modern man’s unshakable conviction that human freedom consists of a perpetual “flight from evil” rather than a humanizing pursuit of natural or supernatural goods.9
Following Strauss, Manent recognizes the transvaluation of values that characterizes the Machiavellian analysis. Machiavelli builds upon the sure foundation of the people—the people who merely wish to be left alone. The people’s “goodness” is simply negative; it consists of the fact that they do not wish to oppress or be oppressed. Machiavelli’s analysis is both proto-democratic and proto-bourgeois, because for all his emphasis on the “glory” of the prince, the prince can do nothing great or lasting without the solid cooperation of the security-seeking people—one might say that the only workable or reasonably stable polity is a bourgeois one. A polity conducive to the needs of human beings is based not upon a positive notion of the human good but on the democratic and morally neutral foundation of the people. To realize such a political solution, one must learn from Machiavelli the fundamental lesson about the “fecundity of evil.” Machiavelli’s rendition of the manner in which Cesare Borgia established civil order in Romagna and thereby left the people “satisfied and stupefied” powerfully reveals the political order as an “alchemy of evil, a never complete suppression of fear through fear.”10 As Strauss put it, the foundation of all politics is in “terror” and not “love.”
In his work, Manent traces the modifications that liberalism undergoes on essentially Machiavellian foundations. Thomas Hobbes constructs a sovereignty based on the radical separation of power and opinion, an “absolute” sovereignty that guarantees the security and property of individuals. Hobbes’s “Leviathan,” with its artful overcoming of the state of nature, is “the institutionalization of the memorable performance of Cesare Borgia in Romagna.”11 Manent shows how all the subsequent great liberal and antiliberal thinkers were post-Machiavellians whose politics responded to the human circumstances made possible by liberal modernity. Their theorizing and diverse political prescriptions presume the base, the prior existence of the modern “solution” to the theological-political problem.
According to Manent, the deepest threat to the integrity of the human being brought about by the modern project is the gradual but revolutionary and ceaselessly unfolding separation of the “individual” from the moral contents of life. (This, Manent suggests, is the “democratic revolution” whose providential and inevitable character filled Tocqueville with “religious dread.”) The modern individual in fact is a person who is connected, as all social beings are, to social organisms and intermediate institutions that continue to provide some of the motives of human thought and action. But families, churches, and other intermediate associations and social bodies that embody substantive opinions about the human good have an increasingly diminished status in the formal or political life of democratic peoples. For a long time, the radical character of the sovereign representative state that represented individuals with their rights—and not what Marx called the “material and spiritual elements” of society such as propertied elements, family, religion, and the “knowledge” of philosophers and priests—was obscured by what Manent, following Marx, calls the “bourgeois ideology.” This “conservative liberal” ethos melded democratic representation and prescriptive tradition in a mixture that obscured the transformative character of the democratic revolution (and thereby humanized and moderated it). Conservative liberals such as François Guizot falsely believed that the democratic revolution could come to an end, that an end of modernity or history could preserve both formal liberty and the natural superiorities and moral contents of life in a happy and unprecedented coexistence (see especially the essay “Totalitarianism and the Problem of Political Representation” in part four of this volume).
But whereas the democratic state presupposes the spiritual and material elements of society, it does not formally and therefore genuinely represent them. It depoliticizes and therefore tends to relativize the opinions that are the basis and reflection of the natural and common world. Only our rights to have and privately defend and “exercise” our opinion have a political status. The substance of our opinions is relegated to the private realm of civil society where it remains a matter of personal “conscience,” with no direct or visible political consequences. This lack of political status, this relegation of the contents of life to a private realm of protected rights, cannot help but transform and diminish the contents and motives of human life. They “are ‘presupposed’ by the liberal representative state. In order for there to be religious freedom, there has to be religion, to have economic liberty, there must be an economy. [But] presupposition ... is the weakest form of affirmation” (see “Totalitarianism and the Problem of Political Representation”).
As a result of this process, the human being becomes more and more of an “individual” and increasingly inhabits a kind of civil state of nature where free and equal individuals are supposed to coexist, dependent on and agreeing on only their possession of individual autonomy and the requirements for protecting it. The goal established by the most radical and self-conscious modern thought is for human beings to become ever freer because more unconnected beings. We moderns are “condemned to be free” and that sentence, the source of the distinctive pathos of modern thought, is also a blow struck at all forms of social authority understood as “heteronomous” domination. Important currents of modern literature reflect the ambition of modern thought to unmask the illusory character of human bonds (a point forcefully made in Manent’s essay “On Modern Individualism” and in his introduction to Bloom’s Love and Friendship in part five of this volume). But Manent makes clear that this ambition is based on a willful and unjustified refusal to confront the inescapable question of what human beings have in common. Aristotle was right to affirm that human beings are “political animals” precisely because it is the city or political community that allows men to fulfill their natural propensity “to put in common actions and reasons” (Nichomachean Ethics [1126b11—12]: see also “Democracy without Nations?” in part six of this volume).
In contrast to the Aristotelian affirmation of a common good, the logic or nature of democratic modernity is to assert the radical primacy of the will, of the individual exercising his or her rights with no necessary connection to the contents of the moral life. The radical separation of what Manent calls “power” and “opinion,” so central to the modern constitutionalism of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, paves the way for the pure freedom, diagnosed by Hegel in the Phenomenology of the Mind, which turns out to be a pure Negation, the willful annihilation of the spiritual and material elements of society in the name of an unencumbered autonomy or individuality.12 In the Jacobin and Bolshevik effort to create “a new man” wholly freed from the inheritance of the past and willing only his own freedom, one sees the radicalization and “perfection” of modern liberty, a liberty that is “pure because without motives” or human content.
The two totalitarianisms of the twentieth century, Nazism and communism, are simultaneously reactions against and intensifications of modern individualism. Despite their repeated claims to be harbingers of a new kind of community and a new kind of individual both were “actually unprecedentedly virulent promoters of ... the absence of the natural human bond” (“On Modern Individualism”). They, of course, go far beyond modern liberalism in their effort to forge human ties that have no natural or traditional supports. They aim to destroy or replace prosaic bourgeois society, but at the same time they reveal the impossibility of the project for a freedom divorced from any or all natural or social determination. The totalitarianisms thus embody the self-destruction of Machiavellian modernity.
This self-destruction of modern liberty was not anticipated by the first liberals. They believed they were freeing Europe from the fanaticism of “pious cruelty.” They believed they were making possible the comprehensive enlightenment of human society. Manent has argued that liberalism has fundamentally failed to understand itself. The early modern liberals were convinced that a new political science could construct a civic artifice, a sovereign state, and a “civil society” that would liberate human beings from the civic controversies engendered by the clash of religious opinions and from the danger of a state of nature where the natural rights to life, liberty, and security are threatened by aristocratic pretensions and oppression and by the scarcity characteristic of premodern economic life. Liberalism, however, has paradoxically created a social condition approximating a civil state of nature whose free and equal individuals are increasingly cut off from both the moral contents of life and the minimum requirements of even liberal citizenship. As Montesquieu astutely observed about the English of his times, they are more “confederates than fellow citizens.”13
Tocqueville was the most profound student and critic of this humanity-threatening “individualism.” It is from his work that Manent draws powerful insight and inspiration in analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of modern democracy. Many American neoconservatives draw comfortable conclusions from Tocqueville’s work, finding in his analyses powerful arguments about the dignity and sobriety of a properly constituted liberal democracy. They are not, of course, wrong. Tocqueville is a friend of moderate liberal democracy. Manent, however, differs from many American neoconservatives in that he explicitly recognizes Tocqueville’s serious reservations about the democratic order. Like Tocqueville, and unlike some of his contemporary admirers, Manent is fully aware of the profoundly radical character of the democratic society based upon liberal premises.
The founders of liberal modernity explicitly rejected any notion of a common good. They intended and promoted the radical separation of power and opinion. They wished to privatize and diminish, although not eliminate, the contents of human life. In other words, they began with a deliberate political neglect of the soul and its claims. The soullessness of modern democracy, much noted by its “cultural” critics from both the left and the right, was a deliberate part of the design of liberal democracy. Today, thoughtful people cannot help but ask, What in liberal democracy is worthy of the commitment and rational assent of those who care about the integrity of the human soul?
To answer this question, it is necessary to turn, at some length, to Manent’s analysis of Tocqueville and democratic individualism in his remarkable Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy. Manent begins with the “naive” presupposition that Tocqueville’s elaboration of democracy can explain us to ourselves.14 By confronting Tocqueville’s elaboration of democracy, democratic citizens can gain an appropriate distance from the omnipresence of democratic categories and hopes without abandoning their commitment to the preservation of the democratic order or their belief in its real and abiding justice. They are thus able to stand at a distance from what Manent calls the “democratic dogma,” without ceasing to be measured friends of democratic liberty. In this spirit, Manent summarizes Tocqueville’s teaching in a terse and evocative formulation: To love democracy well, it is necessary to love it moderately.15
But what is this democracy whose nature Tocqueville unfolds and that Manent’s book attempts to articulate for us? One must begin by clearing up one potential source of confusion in any discussion of modern democracy. For Tocqueville, democracy is not, as in the Greek or Aristotelian view of politics, a political regime in an eternally unchanging cycle of political orders available to man as man. It is, rather, a new human and social dispensation, characterized by “equality of conditions” where the place and efficacy of socially rooted and politically authoritative “influences” and “contents of life”—what American political scientists call “social capital”—are displaced by an all-encompassing hypothesis of radical freedom and equality. (This theme is developed at length in the essay “Democratic Man, Aristocratic Man, and Man Simply: Some Remarks on an Equivocation in Tocqueville’s Thought” in part two of this volume.)
Three intertwined “generative principles” bring this about: a new egalitarian social state, the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, and the dominance of public opinion in a democratic order. In the end, these formulations, although initially vague and abstract, suggest the same, extremely concrete, explanation: Modern democracies are dominated by an opinion that affirms that the only legitimate form of obedience is obedience to oneself or obedience to oneself through a majority will that represents the individual in his undiminished sovereignty. Tocqueville brilliantly established that this dogma of “the sovereignty of the people,” the “generative principle of the republic,” is “the same which directs the majority of human actions.” (This theme and quotation resurface repeatedly in these essays.)
When we understand that the principle of “the sovereignty of the people” is applied to every aspect of the social order, then we can begin to appreciate fully the novelty and radicalness of the distinctively modern democratic order. Manent’s analysis is subtle, refined, measured, and true to the nuances of the Tocquevillian elaboration of democracy. Manent shows that, for Tocqueville, the democratic understanding of man is based upon a profoundly true insight about the conventional sources of aristocratic authority and influences. Tocqueville proclaims the comparative “justice” and “naturalness” of the democratic idea and political order. But this is only part of the truth about democracy and man.
Here Manent restores greater depth and perspective to the current accounts of Tocqueville and corrects the standard view of him as a cautious and measured, but unabashed, partisan of liberalism and liberal democracy. Manent shows the paradoxical character of democracy and of Tocqueville’s approach to it. Undoubtedly just, democracy profoundly threatens the cultivation of intellectual eros, the articulation and manifestation of the civic and manly virtues, and even the ability of individuals to act together or upon each other (i.e., to influence each other within society). At its extreme limits, democracy creates an apolitical, apathetic individualism that risks dissolving the social and civic bonds into a “dis-society.”16 Because the democratic dogma is based on an abstractly true, “purely formal,” and “dizzyingly empty” abstraction, it threatens the nurturing and sustenance of those excellences that give substance to individual freedom and choice.17 Democracy, moreover, exalts in an exaggerated and potentially enervating manner the real, but limited, “virtue” of mildness or “humanity.” In Manent’s succinct formulation, “democracy embodies nature in a way that puts nature in danger.”18
In the closing chapters of Democracy in America, Tocqueville highlights the danger of a democratic, or tutelary, despotism that arises when the nature of democracy is unchecked by a sovereign “art of liberty.” Friedrich Hayek and other contemporary classical liberals have rightly highlighted Tocqueville’s fear of an oppressive, managerial, bureaucratic state that formally represents the general will but saps free individuals of individual responsibility, economic initiative, and personal prudence. This is certainly one feature of Tocqueville’s analysis of “democratic despotism,” but it is only one aspect. Manent places it in its broader and proper perspective: Tocqueville understands democratic despotism to entail a despotism of mildness or softness itself.19 This “despotism” comprehensively undermines the associative, civic, and intellectual capacities of democratic man.
Democratic despotism is precisely soft despotism, marked, to be sure, by an egalitarian centralized state but made possible by the disarming of the soul by a dogma that recognizes only the legitimacy of sovereign, rights-bearing individuals and of the state that speaks for them. This dogma publicly delegitimizes those groups, bodies, activities, or authorities that are required to give content, direction, scope, and firmness to the individual and collective activities of people. It weakens the public character of mediating or intermediate structures.
However, despite his sometimes chilling diagnosis of the dangers of democratic despotism, Tocqueville is no partisan of hardness or cruelty à la Nietzsche or the proto-fascist right.20 Democratic mildness undoubtedly humanizes life, eliminating the cruelties of aristocratic conventions and providing a place for natural sentiments, especially within the bosom of the family. But even the family is radically transformed by the democratic principle. The ties between parents and children are democratized and thus made “sweeter” and more “natural,” but they risk finally being thoroughly democratized in a manner that dissolves them or empties them of substance altogether.21 The family risks becoming a “contractual” arrangement devoid of sufficient hierarchical or authoritative influence. Hence, democracy completes its revolutionary work, pitting nature against nature.
So what do Manent and Tocqueville recommend? Are we left to contemplate and to bemoan the paradox of democracy as an order where nature inexorably undermines itself? Is there a political alternative to modern democracy that offers a way out of this seemingly cruel impasse? The answer is both no and yes. For Manent and Manent’s Tocqueville, justice and prudence demand unhesitating loyalty to liberal or constitutional democracy. In his moving concluding section of the book, Manent criticizes democracy’s two main enemies: its stubbornly unreflective reactionary opponents and its far more numerous and therefore dangerous “excessive or immoderate friends.”22
The reactionaries who reject the progress of democracy “do not know what they are doing or what they want.” They fail to appreciate the ways in which their own thoughts and sentiments have been transformed by the democratic tempest. Their dream of a reactionary utopia, where “natural and necessary inequalities” are restored, is paradoxically based upon a democratic prejudice that allows them to exaggerate their knowledge about the true nature of human beings. In the French and European context, Manent clearly highlights the once significant, but now minuscule, band of reactionaries who failed to heed Tocqueville’s advice that the aristocratic party should educate democracy by correcting its faults and by working to preserve those predemocratic “contents of life” that democracy threatens but that are indispensable to its well-being. “It is true that democracy is in a very real sense the enemy of human grandeur, but the enemies of democracy are much more dangerous enemies of this grandeur.”23
The excessive friends of democracy are its most dangerous and disingenuous enemies. They claim to be merely friends of real liberty and genuine equality. But they fail to realize that liberal democracy is compatible with the “nature” of man precisely because it limits itself to protecting formal liberty and not to using government to actualize the democratic dogma in every aspect of personal and social life. The obstinate desire to realize the democratic abstraction, without respect for those compromises, inheritances, and persisting natural and conventional inequalities that characterize liberal democracy, is precisely an invitation for the unprecedented modern expression of despotism that we call totalitarianism. Just as modern democracy as a social state cannot be classified within the classical cycle of regimes, so totalitarianism is an eminently modern and “democratic” phenomenon whose magnitude, perversity, and humanitarian pretensions radically distinguish it from premodern tyranny.
Tocqueville shows that there is one alternative for friends of human liberty and dignity. They must exercise an art of liberty whose central feature is the deliberate cultivation of a science of associations, a political art that preserves local liberties and mediating structures between the “sovereign” individual and the “central power” and that gives freedom and moral support (but not state establishment) to a religion that sets limits to unencumbered human willfulness.
One of the strengths of Manent’s sobering analysis is that he clearly adumbrates the unfinished and unfinishable character of this noble and necessary art. This recognition can help restore a sense of measure to our sometimes inflated contemporary political expectations. For American conservatives who are natural recipients of Tocqueville’s teaching, a salutary inference can be drawn. There can be no permanent conservative “revolution” that will cure the democratic propensity toward disassociation, radical individualism, and reliance on the impersonal power of a central government that alone claims to speak for the “general will.” Nor should conservatives forget that American religion is already an at least partially democratized religion, as Manent brilliantly shows in his analysis of the transformation of Puritan America into liberal America.24
Despite the brilliance of its analysis, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy is marked by a perhaps excessive note of pathos and a tendency to underestimate liberal democracy’s own internal resources. These internal resources are more evident when one analyzes modern democracy through the lenses of Aristotelian regime analysis rather than by accepting its own grandiose claims at face value. Despite his adamant opposition to all forms of modern progressivism, Manent is sometimes insufficiently skeptical of modernity’s claims that it has succeeded in remaking the fundaments of human and political life. Despite the desire of its architects to found a new order of human things and not another regime in the age-old cycle of political forms, modern democracy nonetheless retains some of the characteristics of a political order and hence fails in its efforts to transcend the natural order altogether. I do not think that Pierre Manent would finally disagree with this formulation. My reservations, then, have more to do with rhetorical emphasis than with the substance of the matter. And as we shall see when we analyze Manent’s The City of Man, one of the great strengths of his approach is precisely the way in which it combines a trenchant critique of historicism with a refusal to succumb to an over simplified and dogmatic antihistoricism. It does so, in part, because it recognizes that democratic man has complex and somewhat attenuated relations with man tout court. (We will return to this theme, which is at the heart of all of Manent’s work, later in the essay.)
Despite a tendency to overstate the formal or abstract character of modern freedom, Manent surely recognizes that it is not only political liberty and the inherited moral capital of the premodern era that serve to “humanize” modern and democratic life. Manent does not deny that liberal democratic modernity has its own strengths and its own not inconsiderable resources that serve to maintain a respect for the “natural order of things” (although he emphasizes this more in his politically oriented essays than in the more theoretical The City of Man, which emphasizes the remarkable audacity and “unnaturalness” of the modern project). The self-interest and emphasis on economic utility that are the motives, the fuel, and the justification for the abstraction called the market are not merely abstractions. Interest and utility are rooted in the natural world, even if the homo economicus of capitalist theory is a product of the civil society created by the liberal separation of power and opinion. “Invoking interest, liberals founded their construction on a possibly abstract principle.... [They have] some illusions about the lucidity of the man who ‘searches for his interest,’ but they designate a powerful and universal resort of human action.”25 As important, a market order with its appeal to the free, self-interested activities of economic man replaced an economic and social order of arbitrary command that too often oppressed and offered little opportunity to the poor—that is, to the vast majority of human beings throughout history. The market, then, for all its narrowing of the human soul to a realm of utility, remains, however problematically, a human order rooted both in nature and justice. The same cannot be said about the socialist effort to restore the order of command in a “democratic” manner so that real as opposed to merely formal freedom can be established. To put it in a nutshell, liberal capitalism is not an “ideology” in the sense that Marxist socialism is with its dream of a different logic of history, society, and economy.26
Manent writes respectfully about the “Lockean circle of utility and representation.”27 In a “Lockean” regime, there is an absence of fanaticism, of an effort to remake or transform the essentials of human nature. In such a regime, political representation is an instrument aimed at guaranteeing the rights of citizens. These rights serve not only to attenuate the power but also to defend and sometimes embody the spiritual and material contents of life. Real human needs and activities, especially commercial ones, are protected and represented in a representative commercial regime. “The act of representation finds its motives in the ordinary life of each person within civil society.”28 By representing civil society, the political life of a liberal regime represents more than abstract, autonomous individuals. It represents real human needs and activities; it represents the life embodied in the “commerce” and “culture” of civil society.
Manent, accordingly, has a very rich appreciation of what some scholars have termed commercial republicanism. He is a great admirer of both the prudent constitutionalism and the commercialism of thinkers such as Montesquieu, Benjamin Constant, and Frédéric Bastiat.29 He readily accepts the argument of Montesquieu that commerce can have a softening and humanizing effect on political life and human mores and tastes. He appreciates the necessity and the brilliance of the constitutionalist construction of the separation of powers formulated by Montesquieu in the eleventh and nineteenth books of The Spirit of the Laws and is sympathetic to the Constantian and Tocquevillian criticism of the tyrannical propensities of an unmitigated popular sovereignty.30 He has also written that as radically a “democratic” thinker as Thomas Paine was saved from Jacobin fanaticism because he had an appreciation for commercial utility and because he refused the ideological “suspension” of natural sentiments,31 Manent, then, is genuinely appreciative of the “humanity” and “decency” of the liberal regime.
But he also learned from Tocqueville, among others, that humanity, decency, and “softness” are not the only or highest human virtues. He believes that humanitarianism can undermine liberty itself by weakening the civic and “severe” virtues (e.g., the capacity for political deliberation, the willingness to punish criminals, and the ability to recognize and if need be fight enemies), thereby undermining what he calls, in a particularly felicitous phrase, the “instinct of political existence” itself.32
The very real virtues of liberalism are, simultaneously and paradoxically, its very real vices. The humanitarianism of modern liberals can degenerate into relativism and a universalized despotism of soft, enervated souls, whose chief manifestation is the democratic despotism outlined by Tocqueville. Manent, I believe, can be characterized as what he himself has termed a “sad liberal.”33 He appreciates the pacification of religious and civic strife that liberalism has achieved; is appreciative of its civic and political liberties and the unprecedented prosperity it makes possible; is aware of its decency and humanity yet profoundly alert to the ways in which the unqualified victory of its principle threatens the liberty and dignity of human beings. Apolitical individualism, moral relativism, a failure to recognize the existence of foreign enemies as well as the intrinsic wickedness of totalitarianism, and the lack of spiritual independence and pride culminate in the “tyranny of public opinion” and are all effects of the public soullessness that was deliberately constructed by the philosophical legislators of the bourgeois liberal order.34
Manent has analyzed at length and with subtlety the ways in which modern totalitarianism is a form of representative, or democratic, politics wherein the party and the party-state through the intermediary of the nation or revolution claim to democratically represent the true sources of authenticity or legitimacy. But he understands the ways in which totalitarian “representation” also entails a decisive and unparalleled break with the principles and mores of European civilization (see “Totalitarianism and the Problem of Political Representation”). While rejecting a “Constantian” view—so attractive to progressive-minded intellectuals and social scientists—that reduces totalitarianism to an atavism or anachronism of a premodern past, Manent also appreciates the chasm, the gap of principle and practice, that separates liberal and totalitarian modernity. For this reason, he criticizes the partisans of liberal capitalism, such as Hayek, for too closely identifying the providential or tutelary state (which is the product of the expansion of the welfare and administrative responsibilities of the modern state) with the totalitarian party-states of the twentieth century. (As his essay “Liberalism and Conservatism: The Transatlantic Misunderstanding” makes clear, he also believes that the welfare state, kept prudently within the bounds of a social market economy, can remind citizens of commercial societies that there are other human motives than those of individual freedom and subjectivity that need to be socially recognized in a decent society. The welfare state, as long as it does not aim to institute a restrictive system of command, can be a political “instrument of self-obligation,” a reminder that our freedom operates within a context of mutual obligations that are not reducible to market or contractual relations.) Regardless, any simple identification of totalitarian and tutelary “despotism” ignores the ideological and revolutionary character of twentieth-century communist and national socialist totalitarianism. Manent writes in his commentary on Les Libéraux:
These new totalitarian regimes do not situate themselves any more, at least the Russian and German ones, in the prolongation, even the extreme prolongation, of this or that trait of European politics that liberals had the habit of denouncing (protectionism, collectivism, etc.). They mark the rupture of the tradition of civilization. However, the liberals ... accustomed to seeing man under the traits of homo economicus, or of the law-abiding citizen, risk being, more than the conservative or socialist, helpless before the new figures which are the militant of the totalitarian party, the functionary of the secret police, the ideologue.35
Manent notes one of the most disturbing political phenomena of the twentieth century: the inability of most liberals to understand and appreciate the singularity, the civilizational “rupture” that totalitarianism entails. Either many liberals succumbed to radicalism by emphasizing and admiring the rational and progressive features of communist societies, or they underestimated the sheer surreality and suffocating absurdity of communist practice. There were, of course, notable and noble exceptions.
One such exception was Manent’s teacher and colleague (on the review Commentaire) Raymond Aron. Manent has written several fine appreciations of Aron’s work that center around three central points of Aron’s philosophical reflection: his critique of Marxism and historicism, his unfailing grasp of and opposition to totalitarianism, and his political and nondoctrinaire liberalism.36 Manent’s portrait of Aron emphasizes that while accepting the principles of the liberal and modern worlds, Aron incarnated the premodern virtues of prudence and political reason. At the theoretical level, he formulated a philosophy of “politics and history” that attempted to liberate citizens and statesmen from the yoke of necessity or the tyranny of systemic theoretical determinism. Aron worked to demystify the power of Marxist historicism. In doing so, he wished to restore the political world of choice and responsibility to citizens and statesmen.
Manent admires the greatness of the Aronian enterprise, a greatness easy to misunderstand now that “the power of the fascination of communism has dissipated.”37 Manent’s beautiful description of the grounds of the Aronian opposition to the “lie” at the core of Marxist-Leninist ideology deserves to be quoted at length. It reveals the ways in which the communists’ efforts to restore the connection between power and opinion entail a perversion and destruction of civic and human life, precisely because the claims of communism are not rooted in concrete human life but are ideological and mendacious abstractions. Manent lucidly summarizes the Aronian critique of Marxist-Leninism:
The idea comes to the service of power, power to the service of the idea, in a new relationship which defines communism: the men who have taken power in 1917 are not men who have taken power, they are “representatives” of the Russian proletariat, avant-garde of the world proletariat, itself the avant-garde of humanity upon the march; the measures that they decide are not good or bad political, social or economic measures: they “construct socialism” ... “produce a new man.” It is these word games—word games with such murderous consequences—that Aron has always refused to enter. He has always refused to communism the privilege of human “extraterritoriality” that it has consistently claimed for itself.38
Above all, Manent admires Aron because he is the model of the man of political reason. He refused to acquiesce in the ideological distortion of reality. He knew that liberalism had enemies and that the liberal regime had to be protected against both its immoderate friends and its ideological enemies. Aron knew that the progress associated with liberal institutions and practices would not put an end to the need for political judgment or civic virtue. Aron was a political scientist who equitably judged the human world, upholding liberal principles but refusing to neatly fit human and social needs and passions into some doctrinal straitjacket. Aron’s political science was characterized by a taste for human things, by a sense of the “amplitude and diversity of the human world.”39 Manent’s measured defense of the welfare state and his reservations about the doctrinaire tendencies of Hayekian liberalism owe much to Aron. At the theoretical level, Manent’s philosophical analysis in The City of Man of the coexistence of modern individualism with the enduring political nature of man builds on Aron’s emphasis on the interpenetration of process (the new transforming features of modern life such as technology, industrialism and democratic individualism) and drama (the persistence of politics and the continuing need for prudence in the new modern context). In The City of Man, Manent develops, at the level of the history of political thought, an important theme of Aron’s political sociology (see especially the essay “Raymond Aron and the Analysis of Modern Society” in part six of this book). Yet their philosophical standpoints, as well as their evaluations of liberal democracy, are, in some important respects, quite distinct. Aron was a conservative-minded liberal while Manent is a conservative who opposes any “reactionary” rejection of modern democracy. The practical conclusions of the conservative liberal and the liberal conservative are often indistinguishable, but in their deepest bearings they belong to distinct, if overlapping, spiritual families.
Aron remained more sanguine than Manent about the prospects for liberal democracy in part because he believed that it had relatively healthy and durable moral foundations. Hence their somewhat different evaluations of the danger posed by Tocqueville’s “democratic despotism.” (See the opening essay “The Truth, Perhaps.” But it is also worth noting that Aron moved closer to Manent’s position in one of his final works, In Defense of Decadent Europe.40) But despite these differences, the liberal Aron was, for Manent, in some important sense, a premodern orator and educator. Through his scholarship and journalism, he helped preserve the political contents of the moral life. The personal and intellectual influence of Aron on Manent should not be underestimated.
The classical character of the work of another “model” and inspiration for Manent, the political philosopher Leo Strauss, is much more explicit. Manent appreciates much better than the fevered critics of “Straussianism” that Strauss, the partisan of classical political philosophy, is a friend of liberal democracy. This is because Manent recognizes the classical distinction between theory and practice: in the classical understanding, theoretical radicality can and ought to coexist with practical sobriety.
Manent is a believing Catholic. But he has learned from Strauss, the Hellenic Jew, that the investigation of the complex relationship between liberal “rationality,” the Christian religion “with its relation of affinity to and opposition to liberalism,” and the “order of human things,” the “natural order,” must be based on political philosophy and natural reason. 41 He understands the danger of a “political theology” that obscures the natural world and exaggerates the political wisdom to be discerned from Scripture or strictly theological reflection. Manent, in the spirit of Thomas Aquinas, is open to philosophers who study nature from a non-theological perspective, such as Aristotle, Montesquieu, Aron, and Strauss. This is also why Manent places so much emphasis on recognizing and respecting the moral, as opposed to the simply religious, contents of life. Only by recognizing the natural world—the world inhabited by faith, philosophy, family, politics, statesmanship, and art—can the tensions and ambiguities, the demands and conflicts of human life be recognized in their density and amplitude. (The essays on Charles Péguy and Aurel Kolnai in this volume illustrate Manent’s sympathy for Catholic thinkers who appreciate the created dignity of a common world rooted in the givenness of reality, thinkers who welcomed the “carnal” or temporal foundations of Christian faith.) Finally, Manent agrees with Strauss and Bloom that a nonhistoricist political philosophy and liberal education provide the best and most immediate access to such a restoration of the natural world.
However, a subtle difference exists between Manent and Strauss, a difference that qualifies Manent’s “Straussianism.” Strauss appears to be a Platonic rationalist, an exegete and philosopher whose works aim at a nonhistoricized view of the fundamental alternatives of politics and philosophy, philosophy and revelation. But Strauss is less interested, finally, in rehabilitating the moral contents of life (although he wishes to recover the presedimented and preideological political world) than he is in showing the superiority and superior rationality of the Socratic way of life within that world. Manent is a partisan of the natural world in all its complexity; Strauss is ultimately a partisan of the possibility of philosophy, of the life of rationality.
Manent follows Strauss in rejecting “the history of being”—to the extent that human beings remain human their future, like their present and past, will be a political one (see the essay “On Historical Causality”). He knows that the beginning of all sensible political reflection is the commonsense notion that a “human nature” is available to reason and experience. But Manent’s awareness of the modern modification or transformation of human beings, what he calls the modern difference, leads him to question Strauss’s recourse to the sempiternity of “nature” and the “permanent human questions.”42 Strauss himself recognizes that modernity has the character of a self-radicalizing project and that this project obfuscates the original Greek understanding of the relationship between nature and convention. Manent believes that Strauss does not draw the necessary conclusion: “There is something unnatural about this movement away from nature described so well by Strauss.”
In The City of Man Manent investigates the question of man in relation to this modern difference. In doing so, he aimed to interpret “the modern movement, the condition of modern man, in accordance with a triangularization which takes seriously the ancient, modern and Christian poles” of Western experience. “And it is by taking seriously the Christian pole” that he is “able to escape from the alternatives of Straussian ‘naturalism’ and Heideggerian ‘historicism,’ while preserving the phenomena of nature and history” (for the previous quotation, see “On Historical Causality”). In The City of Man, Manent presents a penetrating and faithful phenomenology of modern consciousness in order to address the question of man in light of the modern modification or transformation of human beings. He grapples with the fundamental theoretical and practical dilemma confronting any effort to make sense of modern consciousness. Modern man remains a man, he retains some real relationship to man tout court (“simply”). Yet, his nature appears to be suspended in some kind of unexplainable limbo or located at least in part in an unavailable and definitively historical past.
Modern man then lives under the power or illusion of history. He experiences historical consciousness; he believes himself above all to be a historical being; he feels and is dominated by the sentiment of historicity. The modern difference is then essentially tied to a new “authority of history”—an authority that remains virtually unchallenged in all the theoretical and political camps of modern life.43 Manent’s book is accordingly a profound, historical, and philosophical investigation and reflection on the modern difference, on the origin, foundation, and work of that new authority, history, and the way in which it transforms, deforms, and coexists with the old human nature, with the substance, motives, and ends of human beings.
As we have suggested, Manent takes up and renews the problem of nature and history, of natural right and history, and in doing so he builds on the pioneering researches of Strauss. Drawing widely on Strauss’s analyses of the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns, Manent delineates as fairly and accurately as possible a phenomenology of the modern difference. And, like Strauss, he recognizes the centrality of the theological-political problem to any adequate comprehension of the human situation. He treats the theological-political problem in a manner that is indebted to but finally diverges from Strauss’s approach, however. He is more attuned to and sympathetic to the Christian accounts of nature, creation, and law and to the place of Rome and all that it represents in the premodern presentation of and contestation about the human things. Strauss attributed the vitality of Western civilization to the fundamental and irresolvable tension between Athens and Jerusalem.44 For Manent, in contrast, the invigorating moral and political tension that defines and sustains the vitality of the West is the conflict between humility and magnanimity—between the heroes of Plutarch and the Imitatio Christi heralded by Thomas à Kempis, between greatness of soul and humility before that which is divinely responsible for every human excellence. According to Manent, the city of man—the city of “history,” the “atheistic city”—is an effort to put an end to the tension and dialectic between greatness and humility, to literally “flee” any rigorous demands of a natural or created order, to flee the motives or contents of our nature.
Manent is, as I have argued, less a partisan of philosophy than of the moral phenomena or moral contents that the city of man ignores, transforms, and relegates to the private, idiosyncratic realm of civil society. But he recognizes that the democratic revolution (the revolution described in different but complementary ways by Hegel and Tocqueville), the revolution that emancipates the human will (Hegel) or the sovereignty of man over himself (what Tocqueville calls “popular sovereignty”), does endlessly transform human beings. It gives man a history. Man becomes modern man, democratic man.
The sentiment of the modern difference, of democratic or modern man as the reflection of a “new humanity,” must be confronted with the utmost seriousness if one is to do justice to the phenomena. And Manent is, above all, interested in being scrupulously attentive to the phenomena as they come to sight in all their complexity and imprecision. A genuine science of man and society must do justice to the democratic revolution, to the seemingly endless transformation of human life under the aegis and empire of the human will. Modernity understands itself as the emancipation or triumph of the will, of its liberation from the framework of human ends, substance, or finality.45 And yet Manent believes that a genuine phenomenology of modern consciousness must recognize what Horace recognized, that nature despite the most powerful efforts of the human will always returns, and what the French Catholic poet-philosopher Charles Péguy articulated with characteristic beauty: “Homère est nouveau ce matin, et rien n‘est peut-être aussi vieux que le journal d’aujourd’hui.” (“Homer is new this morning and nothing is perhaps as old as today’s newspaper.”) A true science of man must give “voice to the sentiment of our shared nature across the modern difference” (see “The Truth, Perhaps”). How can we moderns remain faithful to the claims of human universality? How can we sustain our very humanity while remaining faithful to the modern difference, a difference that threatens to erode or overcome that very universality? Manent’s book, his penetrating researches and analyses, culminates in this paradoxical and arresting claim: the modern experience and sentiment of history, the work of human sovereignty, of the emancipated will, is very real indeed, but the moral authority of history is a “bombastic illusion,” in fact, “the most bombastic illusion that has ever enslaved the thinking species.”46
Can an illusion be productive of so many results? The city of man, the atheistic city, is derived from an illusion, but it is the illusion on which modern man has made or constructed himself. It is a “sincere feeling” that defines the consciousness of modern times.47 Yet it is a sentiment that can finally provide man only with a negative and ultimately self-refuting criterion: we must flee the law we are given by nature or God for a law that we have made for ourselves. And in the name of history modern man perpetually flees the law that he has made for himself, for law and tradition risk becoming a new kind of servitude, a new kind of limit. Modern man must flee every heteronomy, every authority, every claim of phusis and nomos: under the protective dispensation of history he must become the maker of himself. Under the authority of history, in this new city of man, “the nature of man is his principal enemy.” 48 To become truly human, to be free or autonomous, modern man risks his very humanity.
Manent shows the artificial or constructed and therewith distorting character of the modern consciousness of the self. It is impossible completely or successfully to flee our nature and the dialectic of nature and law that is constitutive of our humanity and human dignity, but the effort to do so creates a new world, the modern world, which is neither Christian nor Greek, where neither magnanimity nor humility rules.
In the first part of his book, entitled “The Consciousness of the Self,” Manent investigates the three pillars of modern consciousness: “The Authority of History,” “The Sociological Viewpoint,” and “The Economic System.”49 To comprehend clearly each of these massive shapers and determinants of the modern self-understanding, Manent turns to the origins of these new perspectives in the serious thought of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. He does so not only because the origins of phenomena help reveal their nature but also because these approaches, which form the modern consciousness of the self, approaches that we take for granted, which seem as natural as the morning sun, were the deliberate products of thought. Modern consciousness, then, is not the result of an inexorable process of history or a mysterious dispensation of fate. Rather, it is the free creation of a human project, the result of a new empire governing the souls of men.
The City of Man is remarkably successful in its efforts to show the inadequacy of either naturalism’s or historicism’s efforts to account for the meaning of the modern difference. It corrects Strauss by showing that this question cannot be considered without the most attentive consideration of Christianity’s role in generating a distinctively modern consciousness that challenges the claims of both nature and grace. It develops Strauss’s own insight about the character of modernity as a project and refuses an antihistoricism that claims against the evidence, that all fundamental human and political problems were known to the Greek philosophers because they had discovered the problem of nature in its essentials. But the book is less successful in integrating the modern difference with the enduring features of the human condition: Manent emphasizes the relentless dynamic of the modern flight from the conflicting claims of nature and grace, of magnamity and humility, but he does not adequately explain how man’s continuing character as a political animal, who lives in communities where men “put in common actions and reasons,” affects the outcome of that effort. Is the consciousness of modern men shaped simply by modern thought, or do powerful strands of classical and Christian thought, and perhaps more important, of spontaneous human nature, work to humanize and naturalize the inhumanly abstract modern enterprise?
As I suggested earlier in this essay, I do not believe that Manent would fundamentally object to these objections. But it is in his occasional essays (many of which are collected in this volume) where Manent is addressing such theoretical-practical questions as the place of religion in modern life, the experience of totalitarianism, the role of love and friendship in contemporary life, and the future of the nation-state, that he most successfully integrates his Aristotelian (and commonsensical) affirmation of the permanently political character of human life and his recognition of the “mutated” character (to borrow Raymond Aron’s term) of modernity. This is not surprising: the interpenetration of the old and the new and the simply human is most fully grasped through concrete phenomenological analysis. Perhaps The City of Man succeeds in highlighting the problem of the modern difference more than the coexistence and interpenetration of modern man and man tout court because it is phenomenological at a certain level of abstraction—it takes its bearings primarily from the effects of modern theory on the human soul.
Manent’s analysis of the modern difference is never a merely theoretical or abstract concern. It is rooted in a concern for the human order of things, for the sustenance of the greatness inherent in the moral contents of life. This is what animates Manent’s “practical” political commitment. For twelve years, Manent was coeditor of the neoliberal (Americans would say neoconservative) review Commentaire founded by Aron in 1978. His historical studies and scholarship, as well as his occasional pieces in Commentaire, can be associated with the liberal revival (in both politics and political theory) that has taken place in France since the mid-1970s. The antitotalitarian liberalism of Commentaire has less in common with the liberalism of Hayek than with the sensibility of Aron—a liberalism grounded far less in economic theory than in an appreciation of the prudential and political reflection of Montesquieu, Constant, and Tocqueville and in a taste for and defense of the moral and political prerequisites of the liberal order. The regular presence of Bloom’s work in Commentaire revealed the affinity of its editors for a liberalism that is based on something much firmer than academic theorizing about reciprocity and rights and the merely formal requirements of a democratic order (Manent was, in fact, the French translator of Bloom’s Love and Friendship; see “Recovering Human Attachments: An Introduction to Allan Bloom’s Love and Friendship”). In France, it seems that reflections about the integrity of the human soul or the humanly and socially debilitating consequences of value and cultural relativisms are not automatically dismissed as elitist and antidemocratic. A “libéralisme triste” inspired by Tocqueville can accommodate the “Straussian” enterprise with its critically sympathetic engagement of Lockean life and politics in a way that an American liberalism obsessed with rights and the “maximization of equality” apparently cannot.
Manent rarely writes specifically about contemporary politics. But in two essays contained in this volume—“On Modern Individualism” and “Democracy without Nations?”—and in several “Letters from Paris” published in the London-based journal Government and Opposition, Manent has made clear both his approval of the contemporary European and French liberal revival and his opposition to a technocratic economism that promotes the dissolution of France and Europe into a homogeneous administrative state, a “Europe-Behemoth” where national variety and sovereignty are slowly eroded.50 A touch of “Gaullism” is apparent in Manent’s voice: a simultaneous recognition that modern societies are no longer capable of true greatness and that they need to be reminded of the possibilities for national self-respect and the analogues of national grandeur that are possible even in the era of world economic “interdependence” and European integration.
Today, modern civic societies are self-absorbed. They wish to contemplate themselves; they desire to escape arduous political existence. Manent is not a utopian. He does not wish society to aspire to more greatness than it can sustain. He recognizes that “acknowledgement of the exigencies of the world market and the acceptance of European obligations” constitute the “alpha and omega”51 of contemporary European politics.
But the partisans of the contemporary European project do not sufficiently appreciate that the political community in the form of the nation-state is the framework within which democracy operates. The nation-state may be in some important respects antiquated, but in that case it needs to be succeeded by a new political framework that fulfills the indispensable political function of “putting something or having something in common,” first of all “a certain territory and a certain population.” But the construction of the emerging European “community” is torn between two rival notions of the future, one aiming at the “depoliticization of the life of peoples—that is, the increasingly methodical reduction of their collective existence to the activities of ‘civil society’ and the mechanisms of ‘civilization’”—and the other supporting “the construction of a new political body, a great enormous European nation.” Manent believes that the “political vacuity” of the new Europe is revealed by its refusal to define its boundaries and by its desire for “indefinite expansion.” This refusal to define itself territorially goes hand to hand with its inability to act forcefully—that is, politically—in the world. Europeans believe that “passionate attachment to place” is folly, and they were impotent, even incredulous, when faced by the ferocious interplay of such attachments in the form of the war in the former Yugoslavia. Europeans hide behind an “unreal communication that pretends to be real, as if the unity of humankind had already been realized through such superficial ties.” The reconciliation of France and Germany in the 1950s and 1960s, in contrast, reveals that a “tradition of common European action” based upon the political cooperation of nations is a living possibility rooted in the concrete experience of European peoples. But the larger political purposes of the nation-state need to be cultivated by statesmen who know that the common ties of citizenship are based on something more substantial than commercial ties (which, after all, are subpolitical and transnational) and such vagaries as “cultural identity” and “communication.” (The quotations in this paragraph are all drawn from “Democracy without Nations?”)
In words clearly aimed at the technocratic-administrative vision of European unity promoted by the most vociferous of contemporary Europeanists, Manent reminds us that the malaise of contemporary French and European society has its roots precisely in the failure of the European political class to nurture the sentiment of national political existence. He writes:
They [the market and European integration] are certainly the alpha and the omega. But one must be able to repeat the rest of the alphabet: every political community, France, as well as Britain and Germany, wants its own existence to be recognized. One is not doing one’s duty as a French, British or German politician when one uses one’s credit exclusively to announce to the electors that they are destined to be dissolved in the world economy or in a Europe-Behemoth and that, in addition, they must rejoice at this destiny.
Nations, no more than individuals, want to die. They are, however, ready to recognize the inevitability of their fate if those who lead them know how to speak of the nobility of the ultimate sacrifice and the hope of a later renaissance. De Gaulle was the last statesman who knew how to speak of France to France.52
Manent is an admirer of de Gaulle’s statesmanship, especially his intransigent and magnanimous defense of national sovereignty and liberty in June 1940 and his “founding” of a self-respecting presidential Republic after 1958. De Gaulle’s “mission” to both France and the democratic world was to sustain a sense of national and personal honor in an era when human grandeur was threatened by both totalitarian fanaticism and the erosion of political life and of moral seriousness in democratic societies (see the essay “De Gaulle as Hero”).
On the political level, de Gaulle was a statesman who powerfully illustrated the efficacy of forceful political action but who self-consciously rejected the radical voluntarism of modern political thought. Despite a certain romantic bravado, he was fundamentally classical and believed that “self-affirmation and the affirmation of the nation—two affirmations equally imperative with [him]—are not separable from the recognition of an ‘order of things’ or from a ’nature of things’ which is objective and which obliges men in the two senses of the verb, oblige.”53
De Gaulle embodied the greatness of political existence. He challenged a tendency of modern societies to degenerate into civic decadence or to succumb to economic preoccupations. Today, his vision of a “Europe des patries” stands as a permanent challenge and alternative to the reigning vision of European integration.
Besides his penetrating investigation into the character of our liberal and modern destiny, in addition to his clear, insightful, and often original historical studies, Manent’s work contains a respectful challenge to the complacency of liberal theory and society. Refusing to flatter liberalism, he attempts to humanize it, to remind it of the “better angels of its nature.” He reminds contemporary liberals that the statesmanlike prudence of Aron, the spiritual profundity of Tocqueville, and the patriotic nobility of de Gaulle all coexisted with and enriched the democratic legitimacy that defines the modern era. He reminds us that we need not accept the soulless character of the public square as either our own personal destiny or the eternal fate of modern society. Despite the “irresistibility” of the democratic revolution, the human order of things persists.
Parts of this introduction originally appeared in somewhat different form in Perspectives on Political Science (Fall 1992) and The Public Interest (Summer 1996). They are used here with permission.
For a representative sample of Manent’s work see, in addition to the essays in this volume, Naissances de la politique moderne: Machiavel, Hobbes, Rousseau (Paris: Payot, 1977); Tocqueville et la nature de la democratie (Paris: Fayard, 1993, previous editions from Paris: Commentaire-Julliard, 1982), translated as Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996); Les Libéraux, volumes 1 and 2 with a preface, “Situation du libéralisme,” and short essays and commentaries on liberal thinkers from Milton to Jouvenel (Paris: Hachette, 1986): Histoire intellectuelle du libéralisme: Dix Leçons (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1987), translated as An Intellectual History of Liberalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). See also the essays by Manent in New French Thought: Political Philosophy, ed. Mark Lilla (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 123— 33, 178—85.
See Manent’s penetrating introductory essay, “Notre Destin Libéral,” to the French translation of Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss et la notion de politique: Un Dialogue entre absents (Paris: Commentaire—Julliard, 1990), 7—12.
Pierre Manent, La Cite de l’homme (Paris: Fayard, 1994), translated as The City of Man, with a foreword by Jean Bethke Elshstain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, 3—12, especially 10—12.
See Manent, “Situation du libéralisme,” in Les Libereaux, 11—16, especially 31—35.
See Manent, “Situation du libéralisme,” 13.
Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, 10—19.
Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, 15—17.
Manent, The City of Man, chapter 1, especially 47—49, and 203—5.
Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, 19.
Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, 19.
Manent presented this argument in a “Post Scriptum à Propos de Deux Révolutions,” delivered at a colloquium on the French Revolution sponsored by the Olin Program for the Study of Constitutional Government at Harvard University in April 1989. It appears as a “Postscript Concerning the Two Revolutions” appended to his article “The French Revolution and French and English Liberalism” in The Legacy of the French Revolution, Ralph C. Hancock and L. Gary Lambert eds. (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), 70—75.
Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, book 19, chapter 27. See Manent’s remarks in An Intellectual History of Liberalism, 63—64.
See Manent’s “Preface to the 1993 French Edition” in Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy, xi—xiv.
Manent, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy, 132.
Manent, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy, 12, 124.
Manent, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy, 126.
Manent, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy, 79.
Manent, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy, Chapter 5, 47—52, and An Intellectual History of Liberalism, 111.
Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, 112.
Manent, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy, 69—76.
Manent, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy, 130.
Manent, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy, 129.
Manent, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy, 93—96.
Manent, “Situation du libéralisme,” 1:20.
Manent, “Situation du libéralisme,” 20—24.
Manent, “Postscript Concerning the Two Revolutions” in The Legacy of the French Revolution, 75.
Manent, “Postscript Concerning the Two Revolutions” in The Legacy of the French Revolution, 75.
See his comments in Les Libéraux on Montesquieu (1:218—22, 248, 266— 69), on Constant (2:66—72, 94—96), and on Bastiat (2:226—27,261).
Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, 53—64, 84—87.
Manent, The Legacy of the French Revolution, 70—71.
Manent, “Situation du libéralisme,” 40.
Manent, Les Libéraux, 2:379—80.
Manent, Les Libéraux, 2:379—82 and “Situation du libéralisme,” 39—49.
Manent, Les Libéraux, 2:381—82.
See Manent’s essay “Raymond Aron éducateur,” Commentaire (February 28—29, 1985): 155—68. The essay appeared in English in European Liberty (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983), 1—23 and in In Defense of Political Reason, ed. Daniel J. Mahoney (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994), 1—23. See also the notices in Les Libéraux 2: 424—25, 447—48, 466—67.
Manent, Les Libéraux, 2:447—48.
Manent, Les Libéraux, 2:447—48.
Manent, Les Libéraux, 2:467.
See Raymond Aron, In Defense of Decadent Europe, with a New Introduction by Daniel J. Mahoney and Brian C. Anderson (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1996).
Manent, “Notre destin libéral,” 11—12. See also his critique of de Maistre’s “providentialism” in his introduction to Joseph de Maistre, Considéra-tions sur la France (Brussels: Complexe, 1988), vii—xviii.
On the Straussian interpretation of the Platonic “ideas” as “permanent human questions” see especially Thomas L. Pangle’s provocative introduction to Leo Strauss, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 1—26.
Manent, The City of Man, 11—49.
See, in particular, Strauss’s essay “Jerusalem and Athens” in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, 147—73, and “Progress or Return” in An Introduction to Political Philosophy: Ten Essays by Leo Strauss, ed. Hilail Gilden (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 249—30.
Manent, The City of Man, chapter 5, “The Triumph of the Will,” 156— 83.
Manent, The City of Man, 205.
Manent, The City of Man, 205.
Manent, The City of Man, 204.
Manent, The City of Man, 11—108. The second part, “The Self-Affirmation of Modern Man,” consists of three chapters entitled “The Hidden Man,” “The Triumph of the Will,” and “The End of Nature” that trace modern philosophy’s “desubstantialization” of human beings, or the displacement of the idea of human nature by a self made or affirmed through a self-conscious “flight” from the demands of nature and grace.
Manent, “Letter from Paris,” Government and Opposition (Summer 1990):317—20.
Manent, “Letter from Paris,” Government and Opposition (Summer 1990):319.
Manent, “Letter from Paris,” Government and Opposition (Summer 1990):319.
Pierre Manent, “Foreword” to Daniel J. Mahoney, De Gaulle: Statesmanship, Grandeur and Modern Democracy (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1996), xii—x. This quotation is drawn from viii.