In “Toward the Work and Toward the World: Claude Lefort’s Machiavelli,” Manent pays homage to the interpretive achievements of two of his fellow thinkers on modernity who appreciate the fundamental centrality of Machiavelli in this enterprise. Leo Strauss and Claude Lefort, in different ways, illumine Machiavelli’s “work” and the “world” he helped to articulate and to bring into being.
Manent’s appreciation, however, is not untempered by criticism. Lefort has put his finger on a basic problem in Strauss’s advocacy of classical political philosophy over and against modern thought: how does Christianity figure into the equation? And against Lefort’s alliance of political philosophy and the people or democracy, Manent invokes Aristotle’s impartial umpiring as a model of political science that retains its equilibrium vis-à-vis the elements of the city.
But Aristotle’s judicious phenomenology of politics needs to be supplemented by an awareness of the distinctively modern characteristics of the modern democratic regime. Manent suggests that Tocqueville is the single best analyst of our modern democracy in its specific traits. Manent’s consideration of modernity is thus inextricably a continuous meditation on the Tocquevillian corpus. Yet, here, too, admiration does not preclude the discovery of problems in this illuminating and essential author. Manent’s critical reflections focus on Tocqueville’s own deepest attachment, liberty. Both modern democracy itself and modern liberal theory fail to appreciate the intrinsic value and “charms” of liberty and thus undermine its exercise and prospects. Manent shares this Tocquevillian concern. But Tocqueville’s account of this higher sort of liberty convinces him less. In “Democratic Man, Aristocratic Man, and Man Simply: Some Remarks on an Equivocation in Tocqueville’s Thought,” he ventures an alternative rendering of this liberty and its appearance in democratic times. In these essays, textual exegesis serves an exact, ample understanding of ourselves and the world.