Ann Hartle: What Happened to Civility: The Promise of Civility and Failure of Montaigne’s Modern Project. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022.
Looking at what Montaigne famously called “the human condition” as it is now, Ann Hartle finds the “post-modern, post-Christian Western world” characterized both by “unprecedented personal freedom,” which the philosopher would have liked, and “deep cultural division,” which he saw in the world of his own time and sought to remedy. This suggests that the establishment of personal freedom does not guarantee civil peace. And in fact, “with the deepening of cultural differences, civility has deteriorated alarmingly.” Montaigne means civility to be “the social bond that makes it possible for individuals to live in peace in the political and social structures of the modern Western world,” although the idea and practice itself “goes back as far as ancient Rome.” Why has it “disappeared” from so much of our public and private life?
At one point, it appeared. Civility as a constellation of virtues, including “promise keeping, generosity, compassion forgiveness, trust, toleration, openness, sincerity, self-disclosure, and similar qualities,” amounts to a set of social virtues—as in the phrase, ‘civil society.’ Civil society exists under the carapace of the modern, centralized state; ‘liberal’ states protect civil society and its virtues, often held to derive from the rights of individuals (as members of that society and/or as natural persons), whereas ‘totalitarian’ states attempt to extend their rule into every aspect of civil society—often at the expense of civility and indeed the lives of individuals, no longer citizens but subjects. This is why the decline of civility in the modern world, under the modern state, worries people, even as the roughened edges of what remains of civil-social life disturbs them.
“How and when does this modern notion of civility come on the scene?” Hartle traces its origin to the Reformation, which “destroyed the unity of Christendom, rejecting the authority of Scripture alone,” although it received its first articulation in the Essays of Michel de Montaigne, no Protestant and indeed no Christian. Montaigne picks up the pieces, as it were, of shattered Christendom, fashioning a “new order,” a “transformation of and alternative to both classical and Christian types,” that is, the two elements of Thomist Christianity, traditional Roman Catholicism. Montaigne proposes himself “as an example or type of a new moral character,” an example that evidently proved “an attractive possibility to his contemporaries.” This possibility entailed a turning away from the aristocratic standard of honor, of publicly recognized military and political virtue, along with a turn toward the substitution of compassion for Christian agape. He urges his contemporaries, especially his fellow gentlemen, towards a way of life that esteems and guards privacy, protecting individuals from intrusive question of religious faith from religio-political authorities and protecting what had been Christendom from wars sparked by the ambitions of honor-loving aristocrats. It is noteworthy that three centuries after Montaigne, Chateaubriand and Tocqueville would still be addressing the question, ‘What shall we do with the titled aristocrats?’ That is because Montaigne’s project is a solution to one problem (religio-political strife) that brings another problem with it: civil societies guarantee a form of liberty or freedom that “comes from doing away with the orientation to the divine that is essential to the tradition” from which Montaigne has composed his ‘construct.’ “Civility is built on the ruins of the very civilization that alone can give it life.”
Following the tripartite definition of a “project” seen in Rémi Brague’s The Kingdom of Man, Hartle orders her book into three sets of chapters. The modern project implies a “new beginning,” a rejection of the past; “the idea of the autonomy of the acting subject,” now severed or freed from the tradition; and a pathway designed to assure the project’s future completion. The tradition Montaigne aims to replace, which the “violent civil and religious conflict” of his time had called into question, was “the direction of human being to the divine,” a direction only a few can achieve fully. As a consequence, those with the leisure to direct themselves toward religious meditation and action, philosophic contemplation, and political rule will require political communities in which the many engage in “servile occupations” that support the way of life of the few. “Montaigne wants to replace that foundation with a philosophical foundation for equality and freedom,” which will require “the transformation of philosophy itself” as “his first and most fundamental task.” What Montaigne calls “detachment” of himself from himself, from the “natural man,” this act of “reflection” or “philosophical self-consciousness,” bring a denial that nature has a purpose, a telos. The philosopher, now a detached observer, must now exercise “judgment,” no longer the comparison of himself to a natural standard, which Montaigne denies, but to form the set of “accidents” that has been called “nature” into a shape serving an end “determined by the human will.” This is what Machiavelli had called the mastery of Fortuna, what Bacon would soon be calling the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate. Montaigne’s “New Adam, then, is not the created being who stands in wondering contemplation of the world and its Creator, but the judge who orders all things in accordance with his will.” In this new order, “the good” becomes “value,” that is, “the good in relation to man.” “All things are now revalued according to the standard of man as man, not according to the standard of the tradition, nature, and the divine.” In the present, Montaigne’s new beginning issues in what was later called liberalism, a society in which “the individual is free to seek the satisfaction of his particularity,” a society that functions in accordance with the new beginning that denies any common good inherent in nature. If, as Montaigne writes, “the greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself,” then this knowledge, once achieved, will undergird civility, a smiling acceptance of one’s fellow self-belonging, equal individuals. The “greatness” of aristocrats “has been transformed from the public display of noble deeds to the hiddenness of self-possession.” For its part, “civility replaces the social bond of the tradition in the absence of the possibility of moral community.” Civility makes possible the enactment of a central liberal political principle, “equality under the law.” This is the pathway toward the fully civil society, in which what Montaigne calls the “sociable wisdom” of the new philosophers, of whom Montaigne is the first.
Accordingly, Hartle begins with the philosophic, religious, and social-political condition of pre-Reformation Europe, with its “interweaving of the sacred and the social” forming “a very strong social bond” seen in “the divine liturgy, in the celebration of the Eucharist, where the loftiest theologian was at one with the last educated laborer.” This is why Tocqueville could say that democracy—defined as social equality—became widespread only with the advent of Christianity. To be sure, well-defined social hierarchy remained; the theologian would return to his study, to his life of theorizing, the laborer to the scaffolding, to his life of practice. But each was equal before God, and that was the important thing. It was the important thing because Thomism, combining Christian faith with Aristotelian philosophy, understood the purpose of human life as the perfection of human nature, a perfection which each person would strive for, within his place in the social hierarchy. “The worth of [human] activities does not depend upon human choice but on their intrinsic worth within the natural order.” Because the capacity to reason distinguishes human beings from other animals, the life of reason, the theoretical life, fulfils the potentialities of human nature most completely. “Philosophy is free because it is useless,” unlike the many practical arts; “that is, it serves no end outside itself.” Pace, Karl Marx: “The philosopher does not want to change the world but simply to understand it in its first causes.” “Leisure is the receptive attitude of the mind toward being, and contemplation is the act in which the world is brought into the mind: the mind becomes what it knows.” Because God is the first of all causes, theology is the queen of the sciences, of the philosophic ways of knowing. Even the pre-Christian Aristotle “held that philosophy, the highest human activity, is in some sense divine.” Religious tradition “does not limit or restrict philosophical questioning” but rather “preserves wonder and mystery, for it hands down a truth that is not limited by the human mind,” recognizing “the mysterious character of the world.”
Thomist Christianity adds the theological virtues—faith, hope, and charity—to the moral virtues—courage, moderation, prudence, and justice. In ethical life, again as seen both in Aristotle and the Bible, all of the virtues “benefit the city as a whole,” not only the virtuous individual; noble rather than servile, they register human beings as bodies and souls together, neither simply animalistic nor purely divine. “The classical philosopher sees himself within the cosmos and within the city.” As a human being, as a rational animal, he depends upon the “continuity between the human senses,” which we share with animals, and “the knowledge that the philosopher seeks.” As for the citizens who are not philosophers, “the coherence of the political community depends upon the recognition of what is higher and better than the political struggle over rule; that is, it depends upon religion and philosophy.”
Montaigne, following Machiavelli, demurs. “He sees the tradition as the mask covering over a much different reality, the mastery of the weak by the strong,” as “the idea of the common good” amounts only to what he calls a “pretext of reason” to ‘justify’ “the dominion of masters over slaves.” Also with Machiavelli, he charges that philosophy and religion alike are powerless to prevent this exploitation. “Modern philosophy is ashamed of the weakness of premodern philosophy, dismissing the leisure it commends as mere idleness, the topic of one of Montaigne’s essays. “Montaigne makes leisure appear frivolous and vain,” mere “play.” Leisured men don’t really contemplate the divine; they only amuse themselves with imponderables, doing nothing to bring the justice they tout into the world as it exists. “When Montaigne retires to his study to write his essays, he makes a new world. He overcomes the foundational distinction between actions that are ends in themselves and actions that produce effects by transforming the philosophic act itself into the act of philosophical invention that brings the new world into being.” He anticipates Marx, aiming “to change the world, to master nature, not simply to know it,” by “becom[ing] free in a radically new way,” detached from nature and tradition” by means of “self-consciousness”—a notion not to be found in premodern or ‘ancient’ philosophy. Self-consciousness brings us to see “that we are Christians because we happen to have been born in a country where Christianity was in practice” and that the conscience (the Christian predecessor of consciousness) amounts only to the rule of local customs over our souls. In his essay, “Of Custom,” Montaigne announces his disgust at the flimsy foundation of custom. The title Montaigne chooses for his book is exact: rather than bowing to custom, the philosopher must “essay himself,” rid himself of “this violent prejudice of custom,” tearing away “this mask” in order to restore himself to “a much surer status,” the acknowledgment of himself as himself, cleansed of the spiritual tattoos inked onto his mind by philosophic and religious doctrine. “Reflection is always the mind returning to itself.” In observing the “wanderings” and “flutterings” of his own mind, Montaigne sees that it must be “brought under control” by deliberately forgetting what it has been taught by tradition and what nature itself has imposed upon it. He begins to engage in a new form of knowledge, “a new science, the science of the subject.” The subject he sees in this act of detachment is puny, in need of reordering not of conformity to the inadequate natural order. “When the mind forgets itself as formed by the tradition, it becomes conscious of itself as the origin of philosophy, its own act.” It frees itself, “generates itself” as a phenomenon separate from nature: this is the philosopher’s freedom, “his own act, the act of becoming self-conscious.” The philosopher thus astonishes himself; astonishment at this act of self-generation, this freedom from nature and God, replaces the traditional philosophers’ wonder at nature and God. Having ‘made’ himself, he has no reason to wonder, inasmuch as “we do not wonder at what [we] produce,” having produced it ourselves; we are instead astonished that we didn’t set out to do any such thing. Montaigne is “an unpremeditated and accidental philosopher, the man who happens to be the philosopher, in whom and through whom philosophy becomes conscious of itself.”
No longer will human beings find equality in their equality before God, which is an equality whereby “we are all slaves,” slaves to tradition, powerless. “Reflection originates in dissatisfaction and shame over our powerlessness: reflection is rebellion against God’s omnipotence, and this rebellion is human freedom,” the “original sin” whereby “the natural human self can be annihilated, not by divine grace but by the human will.” “Montaigne is the new Adam, the first man, the new man, not created by God, but brought into being by his own power.” This, Hartle observes, is the origin of “the so-called mind-body problem of modern philosophy.” Aristotle finds the origin of human knowledge in the senses, “proceed[ing] through memory and experience to the arts and finally the sciences”; “the soul is the ‘form’ of the body and is not separable from the body.” Not so for Montaigne, whose radical detachment of the mind, tasked with observing nature, primarily human nature, rejects the idea that the philosopher “remains a participant in nature,” philosophy being “the highest perfection and fulfilment of human nature,” ” a participation in the divine activity of thought thinking thought.” By separating “the philosopher from the natural man,” Montaigne no longer participates, “as the philosopher, in the natural hierarchy” but denies such a hierarchy, judging it a pernicious myth. “The philosopher, removed from the hierarchy, stands before the pieces, which are now in no essential order,” malleable, ready for reordering in accordance with “the choices of the human will.” As for Machiavelli, “the freedom of the philosopher [is] to impose a new order upon human beings and the human world,” standing “in a relationship to nature of mastery and judgment, not of participation and contemplation.” This “makes modern science possible.” The modern scientific experiment is itself an ‘essay’—an attempt, a project, a trial, a test. The modern mind no longer measures itself by being but subjects being to itself, “to the human will.” “Judgment looks at the contents of the mind in light of what it wants,” and it wants “not man as he is but a new man,” a man who replaces God as the lord of nature, having freed himself from the illusion of natural ends, freed to bring “the new out of the mind itself.” In the words of Machiavelli, this is the ‘effectual’ truth.” [1] With modern philosophy in hand, man need no longer be ashamed of himself before God, nature, or himself. “Man is no longer the being who stands in wonder and awe before the created world and its Creator. He is now the self-creating being who, standing in astonishment of what he himself brings into being, declares it to be good.”
With “the replacement of contemplation by judgment,” natural, divinely ordained hierarchy disappears, since “ranking now comes from man himself.” “Values are relative to the human will; the good ‘in itself’ is not.” This begs the obvious question: “How does he know what the good of man is without an ‘external’ standard, without the standard of something higher than man?” How do men know “how to enjoy our own being rightly”? The answer is that Montaigne “can claim that his judgments are true because he has no self-esteem” while he nonetheless loves himself. By self-esteem he means “the desire to rise above the human,” as seen in the Homeric phrase, “godlike Achilles” and in the Biblical teaching that the perfect Man is actually God. Self-esteem is what causes the traditional distinctions between theory and practice, leisurely rule and servile work, master and slave, the saved and the damned—distinctions that lead to war. By abandoning the self-esteem of previous philosophers, Montaigne can no longer justly be accused of self-interest, by others or by himself. He is perfectly “willing to appear weak and common,” even though he is neither. The high subjects itself “to the low, the strong to the weak,” in an “overturning of the Aristotelian order.” The new civic order, held together by civility, imitates the old order by “setting up a nonhuman authority to which all can submit on equal terms,” but it departs from that order by its origin in human beings. The rule of reason, representative government, the rule of law, freedom of the individual “to pursue the good as he sees fit”: all these are human artifacts that prevent one set of humans to master another. This form of rule is human but impersonal, whereas the old form of rule claimed to be inhuman, originating in God and nature, but was in fact both human and personal, tyrannical. There was no consent of the governed, only the false consent of those duped by the smarter and the stronger. Hence (and here Hartle cites Benjamin Constant on the difference between ancient and modern politics), “the principle of ancient constitutions is the regime,” whereas “the principle of modern constitution is representation,” which is “the separation of rule from human beings.” “There is no place for honor or glory in simply doing the will of others”; ergo, “the principle of representation takes the honor out of rule,” deflating the claim to rule by honor-loving aristocrats.
Hartle is skeptical. “The price of this freedom is the submission of all to the absolute power of the new monstrous and unnatural master,” the modern state, which Nietzsche calls a “cold monster.” The state wields “absolute power,” at best permitting civil society its realm of freedom, of privacy, the way of life Montaigne portrays in the Essays as his own way of life. In civil society, men pursue what they all have in common, not the ‘high’ aims of aristocrats but the ‘low’ aims of workers. Philosophers conceal their own decidedly ‘high’ activities behind the privacy granted to all individuals in civil society. In his relations with his fellow citizens, the new, Montaignian philosopher is Mr. Nice Guy. [2] Civil society may be “the association of equals” but it is not by that token a community—an association of persons gathered under ruling persons, a ruling person, much less a ruling Person. In his self-love, absent of self-esteem, Montaigne models the life of an independent man. There is no personal rule and there is no overarching common good. Montaigne urges, “Let each one seek the good in his particularity.” Much of his particular good will be ‘in common’ in the sense that everyone needs to survive physically, and everyone wants to enjoy ‘personal freedom.’ Otherwise, you are free to live happily on your own, belonging to yourself—not to God, not to the polis.
“Civility is the way in which individuals who belong to themselves conduct themselves toward each other in civil society.” Hartle identifies “authenticity” as the current-day term for self-ownership. In exchange for preserving his authenticity, for the freedom to make himself “to be what he wants to be,” “his own project,” each member of civil society enables all others to preserve theirs by speaking and acting civilly towards them. No quest for “recognition or honor from those among whom he lives” occurs because none is needed or wanted. Hegel understands this, calling “the right of subjective freedom” the “pivotal and focal point in the difference between antiquity and the modern age.” He ascribes the origin of this right to Christianity, although Montaigne obviously disagrees, ascribing it rather to himself, with a nod to Machiavelli. As for an actual Christian, one recalls Paul the Apostle: “For none of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself. For if we live, we live to the Lord, an if we die, we die to the Lord. So then whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s (Romans 14:7-8).
On the contrary, saith Montaigne: “There is no one who, if he listens to himself, does not discover in himself a form all his own, a master form” (“Of Repentance”). This precludes evangelizing in the Christian manner. “Because I feel myself tied down to one form, I do not oblige everybody to espouse it, as all others do” (“Of Cato the Younger”). In so saying, Hartle remarks, “Montaigne has freed himself from the common error of presumption,” judging “each man as he is in himself, not by the common measure of form and final cause.” While the ancients said, “Strength rejoices in the challenge,” members of Montaigne’s civil society find their principal virtue in le règlement, which Hartle translates as moderation but which has a strong suggestion of lawfulness, consistent with Montaigne’s valorization of the rule of law. Although the man with a “self-ordered soul” may appear weak “because there is no struggle or difficulty in his actions,” he has a hidden strength, an inner strength that comes from having identified and followed his own natural form. He naturally feels passions but he governs them readily by identifying them at their beginning, when “all things are weak,” gives vent to them, blows off their still-unimpressive steam, and diverts any vicious passion into some other, milder, passion; he thus needs no rational mastery over them, no self-rule in the classical sense, because he has dealt with them as soon as they appear. That is, Montaigne’s civility ‘goes all the way down’ to the management of the soul. Civility is much more effective than the attempt to reform, the attempt to “correct the world’s moeurs by new opinions,” as the Protestants were doing, an approach that “reform[s] the superficial vices” while leaving “the essential ones” intact. “Authenticity means just being what you are, not what you should be” according to someone else’s opinion. Discovering the possibility of living authentically was difficult; Montaigne himself needed to clear his soul of centuries of what he took to be intellectual and moral slag. Once discovered and suggested to others, authenticity becomes much easier—indeed, life becomes a matter of “Montaigne’s famous nonchalance.”
“The Essays are the first act of self-conscious civility,” which “is the bond among those who do not need each other for the good life.” Taking “the fragments of the shattered world of classical-Christian civilization” and giving them “a coherent philosophical foundation,” Montaigne carefully uses materials that are “already familiar” to his readers in order not to argue for this new way of life but to provide what a later writer would call a sentimental education “at the deepest level of unreflect moeurs.” “Civility is the moral character that keeps society depoliticized,” that limits politics, the realm Montaigne, agreeing with Machiavelli, takes to be a struggle for mastery in which opinions are deployed as weapons against the weak-minded. The tutor of the young gentleman will “form the will of his pupil to be a very loyal, very affectionate, and very courageous servant of his prince, but not to attach himself to that prince by private obligation, an attachment that impairs one’s freedom.” Like Montaigne, he will be a mediator, trusted by all factions even if (necessarily) attached to one of them. “Montaigne does not allow his entire will to be possessed and commanded by his service to his prince: he is a man of integrity, and he belongs to himself.” While Machiavelli recommends eliminating ‘the great’ violently, leaving no one between prince and people, Montesquieu would eliminate them nonviolently or, more precisely, not exactly eliminate them but transform them into persons who no longer aspire to greatness, to mastery. As for the people, they will be freed by “freeing the realm of work and labor from its hiddenness and shame and freeing the worker and the laborer from his subjection to the requirements of the common good within the hierarchical structure of the tradition, so that each is free to pursue the go in his own way,” albeit under the impersonal “new master,” the state. Civil society will be free because free from political struggle, “the conflict between masters and slaves, strong and weak.” The social bond is no longer a shared purpose but loyalty to one another, under law, a law crucially supplemented by civility, which “covers interactions where the law does not reach.”
And what of those who are neither princes, gentleman-aristocrats, nor ‘of the people’? What of the philosophers? “Philosophy is barely visible in the Essays.” (What current-day professor of philosophy would recognize Montaigne as a philosopher?) “Philosophy must be hidden as merely unpremeditated and accidental, as sociable wisdom, because nothing can appear to be higher than the prince and because the philosopher must participate in society as an equal.” Not Aristotle’s serious leisure accompanied by prudent political counsel but “play,” the “play of possibility, the freedom of the mind to bring the new out of the old” animates him. Playfulness or sociable wisdom, the mask of civility, disguises “the philosopher’s natural superiority.” Nothing must jar with the civility of civil society, lest “the natural conflict between masters and slaves” recur.
Montaigne’s project enjoyed considerable success, although not nearly as much as he and his fellow ‘liberals’ would have liked. Increasingly, civil societies in even the liberalized modern states have repoliticized. Liberalism’s old enemies—monarchism, church establishment, titled aristocracy—have declined, only to be replaced by ‘ideologies’—communism, fascism, progressivism. “Ideology is an attempt to reconstitute a coherent whole to replace the tradition in which man is ordered to the divine”—typically called ‘ideals.’ “Ideals are not naturally given ends.” Rather, “ideals are creations of philosophy” (and that’s being kind). Without “natural limits,” they lend themselves to “becoming and change,” to what one ideologue called “perpetual revolution.” In the United States, presidential candidates have even campaigned on the one-word slogan, “Change,” without bothering to specify what change they had in mind, aside from replacing the incumbent with themselves. Ideology is ‘totalizing’: it “radiates into every sphere of life…replac[ing] religion and rul[ing] over philosophy and even family life.” Ideologues enact restrictions on political speech, lest someone else get a word in edgewise. They also police speech in the classroom and throughout university campuses; “there is perhaps no other institution that has become more thoroughly politicized than the university.” This defeats the “defining purpose” of the university: “to pursue truth,” whether or not that pursuit, or the truths discovered offend someone. “Current intellectual trends would have us believe that there is no such thing as truth and that ‘everything is political’—the political being defined as the exercise of the will to power.
Clearly, Montaigne would want to short-circuit any such thing, just as he would stifle unwholesome passions in their cradle. But he does define politics as the exercise of the will to power, and that is the source of the problem. Whereas Aristotle defines politics as ruling and being ruled in turn, reciprocity in rule; whereas the medieval universities instantiated the balance between faith and reason, Church and state, Montaigne precludes that dimension of what Hartle has called “the tradition.” He depends on civility to pervade, and to continue to pervade, social life, including education.
Hartle argues that as “a human philosophical invention,” civility only conceals the will to power. Not only modern politics but modern civil society is saturated by the will to power, the ambition to master nature, “the mastery that belongs to God alone.” This is why “civility has to fail.” It “originates in the destruction of the very conditions that make it possible,” or, more exactly, it erodes the shards of tradition Montaigne put together to make it. “The suppression of honor and religion results in the disappearance of any public acknowledgement of the necessity of the higher things.” If my “natural form” happens to be that of a tyrant, and I can find a sufficient number of followers whose “natural forms” happen to be slavish, I can invent an ideology to justify my ambition to seize power.
As a faithful Roman Catholic, Hartle blames the Reformation and the early modern philosophers for the rejection of tradition, for failing to foresee that their projects would end in the eventual rejection of Protestantism and early modern philosophy, too. She remains aware that the tradition had its own problems: “It might be objected that religion is not the social bond that remains above politics but rather the cause of political conflict,” inasmuch as Machiavellianism and Protestantism both reacted against serious deficiencies within Christendom. To this, she replies that the Church was, and is, already “a multicultural society and arguably the only possible multicultural society” because (unlike Islam or the secular ideologies) it was founded as a movement of evangelism, not enforced domination. She concedes that Thomism, blending as it does Christianity with Aristotelianism, could no longer persuade even the devoutly Christian Pascal, who “broke with the Aristotelian hold on metaphysics, science, and politics” as firmly as Montaigne and Descartes. “Pascal’s view of politics is indebted not to Aristotle or Aquinas but to Saint Augustine.”
But is Augustinian political thought adequate? To be sure, it clearly distinguishes the City of God from the City of Man. But does it give an adequate account of the City of Man?
As Pierre Manent sees, “Pascal sees clearly the social, emotional, and intellectual constituents of the modern revolution being put in place.” Unlike Montaigne, he finds a place for Christian guidance in modern life, distinguishing between those Christians “who aim to make the political laws as conformed as possible to the teachings of Christianity as they understand them” and those “who leave the political order free to organize itself according to its nature, and honor it as such, instead of disdaining it.” But Pascal shares with Montaigne (and Augustine) “a conception of law and of custom that regards human beings as commanded or governed, and not as commanding or governing.” In their corrupted, postlapsarian nature, human beings “want to govern,” driven by libido dominandi, with the few and the many striving to defeat one another. With Montaigne, he considers the arguments each side makes in its own favor to be mere rationalizations. Thus “the human legislator is incapable of reaching the root of injustice”—original sin, seen especially in “self-love”—and “human laws cannot do more, as it were, than scratch the surface of our injustice.” Pascal concurs with Aristotle’s call for a ‘mixed regime,’ one that balances the wealthy few and the many poor, but he denies that either side has any reasonable claim to rule, whereas Aristotle affirms that both sides do. “From a certain date,” Manent observes, “Europeans abandoned every idea of a universal criterion of human actions, of a natural law or natural justice capable of guiding the legislator.,” holding human reason “incapable of discerning the human good, the good that counts for man a man.” [3] Neither Montaigne nor Pascal can give much assistance, there.
Notes
- See “Machiavelli’s ‘Effectual Truth'” on this website under the category, “Philosophers.”
- See “Mr. Nice Guy” on this website under the category, “Philosophers.”
- Pierre Manent: Life Without Law. Paul Seaton translation. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020, pp.166-175, 234 n.15.
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