Pierre Manent: Seeing Things Politically: Interviews with Bénédicte Delorme-Montini. Translated by Ralph Hancock. South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2015.
Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 42, Number 2, Winter 2016. Republished with permission.
At the end of his essay, “Progress or Return?” Leo Strauss writes, “No one can be both a philosopher and a theologian, nor, for that matter some possibility which transcends the conflict between philosophy and theology, or pretends to be a synthesis of both. But every one of us can and ought to be either one or the other, the philosopher open to the challenge of theology or the theologian open to the challenge of philosophy,” [1] In this series of interview, Pierre Manent comes before us as a thinker who does attempt to hold these rival ways of life in balance within himself, yet without attempting the “synthesis” Strauss criticizes.
As Daniel J. Mahoney observes in his excellent introduction, Manent describes his life’s intention as the desire to understand “what is” (1). To this Socratic ambition he adds the distinctive Socratic turn: “the political order is what truly gives human life its form”(2). But, contra current fashion, not everything is political. The political is the starting point for philosophizing, not its animating principle. To conceive of politics as merely the quest for and exercise of ‘power,’ and then to conceive of Being itself as will to power, turned twentieth-century politics toward unprecedented forms of tyranny. At least one of the century’s greatest philosophers, Heidegger, went along for that disastrous ride. Manent recalls how France emerged from an earlier exercise of political terror (generated by the Jacobin “murder machine,” as Chateaubriand called it) “with the capacity for a marvelous literature, a splendid poetry, and for the analysis of modern society and of modern politics characterized by a precision an elegance and the scope that we have admired since the rediscovery of Benjamin Constant Guizot, and Tocqueville” (7). As the politically monarchic, socially aristocratic Ancien Régime declined, this “liberal political science of democratic society” gave the French both political and intellectual breathing space. Politically, it showed how democratic societies might defend natural rights, including the rights to liberty, under the conditions of modern social egalitarianism and statism. Intellectually, these new societies worked toward a possible settlement of the theological-political controversies that had raced Europe throughout the early centuries of modernity. Such a recovery from the worse-than-Jacobin tyrannies of the past century can occur, Manent hopes, if the politics of the ancients, rooted in the compact, highly “politicized” society seen in the polis and the politics of the moderns, rooted in the expansive society seen in the state, can both be understood, can be brought together, “in a histoire raisonné based upon this single hypothesis: man is a political animal. To lay out our whole history starting from our political nature that is what I would like to show and to make comprehensible” (9). Such a nonhistoricist history would overcome the implausible, not-really-rational, unrealistic historical narratives that have prevailed in the past two centuries.
If Socratic philosophy is a way of life, then it makes sense to give an account of the life of the one who philosophizes. Manent’s interviewer thus begins by eliciting an account of Manent’s life as a thinker. Karl Marx was the tutelary deity of the Manent household when Manent began to think of political things during the American occupation of France at the end of the Second World War. “One hardly met anyone of the right” in his “homogeneous milieu” (16). This changed at the lycée, that well-established republican institution in which French youth came together not as Communists or Catholics, democrats or monarchists, but as citizens—young citizens who, moreover, shared the arduous experience of really learning French, Latin, Greek, and mathematics, “the four dragons that had to be conquered” (17). In particular, “the French language was the bond that held together all the subjects”; even the math teacher’s classes “were always French classes,” exercises in the precise use of words, not only of numbers (18).
It was at the lycée that Manent encountered the dialectical contradiction to his father’s Marxism in the person of Louis Jugnet, a Thomist in the line of Jacques Maritain and Étienne Gilson. “The first thing he taught me is that there is much to be known in the subject of religion” (20). “My approach to religion was through speculative theology, and not through piety” (21). Manent counts himself fortunate for having encountered, early in life, teachers who recognized his intellectual needs and proclivities and put them ahead of indoctrination. Crucially, it was the Catholic Jugnet who guided Manent to the Jewish Raymond Aron, and thereby to a conception of the political, understood as a realm of thought related to but independent of philosophy and religion. Manent found the Sorbonne itself to be a place where a politics of the radical Left existed side-by-side with philosophic studies of Descartes, Kant, and Hegel, among others; only in Aron’s classes could he “find a way to unite my intellectual and my political interests” (25), which by now included (thanks to Juget) a serious interest in religion dismissed by his classmates. “The more the academic philosophy became mechanical, technical, and systematic, the more political passions fermented, became focused, and heated up beneath the surface. They exploded in 1968” (26). The explosion never singed Manent, who found himself “indifferent” to the intellectual and political fashions of the period (29). To put it in American terms, he was the kid who heard the Rolling Stones but found that he preferred Sinatra.
Given his theological interests, “I was looking for a reference point beyond politics,” but Aron, “the perfect gentleman,” “experienced no need of transcendence” (39). Perceiving the needs of the young person before him, Aron pointed Manent to Strauss—specifically, to Natural Right and History. The rediscovery of classical natural right seen there convinced Manent of the freedom of the human mind—its essential freedom from its own social setting. Strauss’s recovery in modernity of “the ancients” showed Manent that human beings are not “socially determined” beings, slaves to the thoughts and passions of their own time and place. Strauss also showed Manent that the Thomist tradition that he’d encountered with Jugnet inclined to depreciate politics; its treatment of Aristotle confined itself to the Nicomachean Ethics and Book I of the Politics. Such an approach scants Aristotle’s distinctive contribution to the study of politics, his classification of political societies in terms of their regimes. Reading Strauss enabled Manent to connect his moral concerns with his intention to understand politics—to connect Jugnet and Aron.
Manent nonetheless did not follow Strauss all the way, did not become a ‘Straussian.’ “I have never really succeeded in making sense” of Strauss’s portrait of “the philosopher” (49), which Manent takes to mean a human being whose intellectual ascent raises him above human society itself, one whose noetic perception of the Good replaces the interest in the human things—to politics understood as the quest for justice. To Strauss’s Platonic Socrates, political life is the philosopher’s gateway to this otherworldly way of life, a gateway to be left behind. Manent wants to linger at the gateway. But unlike the moderns, Manent doesn’t deny the existence of the transcendent, the existence of the Good. He affirms that “there are…’higher things’ than man” (50). However, he finds “more humanity” in “the religious person.” Although does not explain why this is so, it may be because the religious person (or perhaps the religious person centered in Biblical revelation rather than, say, Buddhist meditation) understands human persons in light of the divine Person—that is, in terms of a love of God that equally commands love of neighbor. But Manent himself leaves this uncertain.
In his conversations with Strauss’s most famous student (and ardent Francophile) Allan Bloom, Manent confirmed his sense that the philosopher as Strauss conceives him finally does not love family or country so much as nature. Still, Bloom showed that the philosopher loves human nature, seeking philosophic friends—chatting with Manent’s young daughters, for example, to find out if they were souls “capable of philosophy” (56), capable of someday joining Bloom in the philosophic quest. At least physically, Socrates did linger at the gateway; Socratic self-knowledge in this sociable understanding the philosophic way of life, the philosophic regime, amounts not to knowledge of the self as an “incommunicable or incomparable particularity” but as “discerning how human motives, the motives common to all human beings, are configured in one’s own soul” and then putting that soul in such order as to “hold oneself in the world” in such a way as to discard the false signals every society sends to those who live within it and to fulfill human nature, the nature that (in Aristotle’s phrase) “wants to know”—to know what is (58-59).
And so, Manent tells his interlocutor, “I am in a triangle: politics, philosophy, religion. I have never been able to settle one of those poles”—Aron, Strauss, or Jugnet (and behind him Maritain and Aquinas). “There are thus three human attitudes, each of which claims a complete devotion that I cannot or will not grant to any of them because the two others also appeal to me” (59-60). In this he finds himself to be quite French: “one thing that distinguishes France is that there are among us quite a number of individuals who have produced considerable work that cannot be classified according to the standard academic categories” (68).
In the book’s central section, Manent outlines the substance of his histoire raisonné. In doing so, he clarifies a distinction many political scientists (even those schooled by the writings of Plato and Aristotle) often miss: the distinction between two ways of classifying political communities, namely, regimes and what Manent calls political orders. The classic texts elaborate the first classification. The second was known to ‘the ancients’ but not formally analyzed by the Greeks; it is a classification based upon the size of a political community combined with its degree of governmental centralization. In antiquity, the polis was small but centralized. Benjamin Constant’s well-known definition of “the liberty of the ancients,” which consisted of direct citizen participation in governing activities, derives from the obvious fact that in a small place there’s no easy way to escape political authority. To be free in a small community is to share in its governance. Ancient empires, by contrast, were huge but decentralized, often consisting of a sort of protection racket: I have conquered you but I will let you live if you guarantee to pay tribute to me and remain a loyal ally; otherwise, you may govern yourselves with your own customs and laws so long as they interfere in now way with my interests. A polis or an empire might have any of the several regimes, but is not itself defined solely by its regime.
Manent focuses on two major transformations of these political orders. The first kind consisted of the transition from polis to empire, effected in Greece by Alexander and then in Rome by ambitious citizens of Rome itself. Both left the technological underpinning of existing regimes more or less as they had been. The second transformation consisted of the Machiavellian reconstitution of the feudal order which Manent regards as mostly inchoate, as much a disorder as an order) into the modern state, a new political order much bigger than a polis but much more centralized than any ancient empire. Under the guiding spirit of Machiavelli, “Europeans decided to do something new, something absolutely unprecedented, which appeared as the modern, which they called modern and by which the distinguished themselves or separated themselves form everything previous”—”an enterprise that progressively rose in power before winning over all of Europe and finally the whole world” (86). This transformation did challenge the theological underpinnings of existing regimes and of the existing political demi-order. Hegel and his epigones have told this story before, but in writing history as a reflection of human nature, indeed of man as a political animal, Manent rejects the historicists’ claim that human nature is rather an instantiation of ‘History’—whether that be understood as the self-unfolding of the Absolute Spirit or the materialist dialectics of class or of race. For Manent as for Strauss, man is emphatically not a historical being at his core; a genuine history of human beings must take account of that.
Under conditions of modern statism, human beings have vindicated their political nature by demanding their rights—rights tied “to the individual human being.” By nature, man is a rights-bearing animal and the modern state should be designed to secure those rights. That is, “the very notion of right presupposes society and relation because the very definition of right is to organize society and the relations among its members” in a certain way. Rights as “we moderns” conceive them inhere in each of us but we need political society, including the formidable and potentially overbearing modern state, for their security. “That is a problem, isn’t it?” (90-91).
This leads Manent to Tocqueville, who addressed this problem in the most cogent way seen in Europe Unlike Aron (and, it should be added, unlike almost all American scholars) Manent sees that Democracy in America is first and foremost what its title says it is: a book about democracy—defined as a pervasive social egalitarianism or absence of aristocracy—as it existed in American when Tocqueville saw it, and not primarily a book about America. America matters to Tocqueville because it is as democratic in its social structure as Europe and the rest of the world is fast becoming. It is what our contemporaries in academia call a case study. But it’s democracy that he wants to understand, and how Americans have governed themselves under democratic conditions.
In focusing on Tocqueville’s interest in democracy Manent initially mistakes Tocqueville for a historicist, saying that he resembles Marx and Nietzsche in their historical determinism even as he differs from them in his description of what the laws of history are and what they will produce at “the end of history” (98). But under the salutary prodding of his interlocutor, he soon recalls that even under the leveling conditions of democracy “the aristocratic parts of the soul”—by which he means the spirited part, the part that demands its rights, fights for them, sometimes to the point of regretting that we have only one life to give to our country—will not suffer “complete disappearance” (103). And of course Tocqueville himself explicitly denies that he regards the dystopian vision of a human herd ruled by mild despots as something inevitable, averring that he has written his book precisely in order to resist such an outcome. Manent actually continues Tocqueville’s task, very much against historical determinists: “the problem I face is… to hold together Tocqueville’s analysis of democracy’s power to carry us toward ever greater equality, and the recognition of the eternal play between the few and the many” (105).
The ancient political orders, polis and empire, developed as it were naturally or spontaneously, “in the absence of any prior idea or conception,” such as Machiavelli’s asserted uncovering of “the effectual truth” of human life against the Platonic ideas and Aristotelian teleology. The ancient political orders predated philosophy; the modern state came out of a set of philosophic claims. (Insofar as rulers of the modern state have failed to understand religion insofar as they allow themselves to be animated by what Strauss calls antitheological ire, they reflect philosophic doctrines that mismanage their relation to religion.) As the modern philosophic project was elaborated, the language of modern science attempted to capture “the effectual truth” with language unmoored from “the ordinary language of political life” (110)—again a point first given careful attention by Strauss. Manent says that as a result of this increasingly abstract, modern-scientific (and therefore) un-commonsensical account of politics, “most of the knowledge that society has had of itself [in modernity] has come through literature. It suffices to mention Balzac” (111). But with the continued augmentation of the modern state and the pervasiveness of its technocratic language within common speech, “confidence in the power of meaningful speech in literary speech, has largely dissipated, and such speech has almost entirely ceased to be a political institution, at least in France, at least since the beginning of the 1960s” (111). Politics, the life of citizens ruling one another, declines in in the face of administrative rule, a form of rule that lacks the reciprocity, the character of ruling and being ruled, seen in political life rightly understood.
To understand the transition from one political order to another, Manent returns to two periods when this happened namely, the transition of Rome from a polis to an empire and then to the transition of Europe from the feudal demi-order to the modern state. He regards Cicero as the much-neglected thinker who attempted to understand Rome’s transition and to guide it. “Cicero was truly the first to confront the political problem of the West, that of the viability of the city, that of the ‘exit’ from the city, and that of the passage from the city to another political form” (112). Having learned regime theory from the Greeks, knowing from it that Rome’s republican regime suited it so long as it remained a polis but came under increasing strain as the city acquired an empire, Cicero tried to preserve political (and thus fully human) life in this new circumstance, one that “was no longer essentially civic” (112). First, he “defined the magistrate as one who ‘bore the public person,'” although “the notion of a public person was unknown in the Greek city”; second, “he defined the function of the political order as that of protecting property”; and finally he “insist[ed] on the individual form of each person, on his particularity, distinguishing between the common nature of humanity and the nature proper to a person and inviting each person to follow, not only nature in general (as prescribed by classical Greek philosophy), but especially his nature” (113). The first of these steps relocates political life primarily in the ruling offices; the second and third steps tend toward protecting citizens who are no longer fully citizens under conditions of political giantism.
Manent regards Cicero’s attempt as indispensable but insufficient because it could not preserve “what Machiavelli will call the vivere civile or the vivere politico” (114). Cicero “gathered most intelligently and wisely all the usable elements of the pagan political tradition and transformed them, but still without being able to give them an operational form” (114). For centuries to come, this was the best philosophers and theologians could do. The political order—whether the Roman empire or the later, smaller entities resulting from its dissolution—became increasingly indeterminate, as did the regimes associated with those successive orders. We’ve given this post-Roman demi-order the name ‘feudalism.’ In effect, Manent shows the need for the establishment of Machiavelli’s state but finds that it need not result in the bifurcation of loyalties resulting from dual allegiance to the City of God and the City of Man but rather in the imperial project of Rome, which began before Christianity appeared. This account of political history follows from Manent’s underlying claim: “The cause of history is humanity’s political nature” (116). The centuries-long “Ciceronian moment”—from Julius Caesar to Machiavelli from ‘Rome’ to ‘Florence’—amounted to an arduous quest to satisfy “the need or desire of human beings to be governed and, preferably to be well-governed or not too badly governed” (116). The moderns “sought and found order”; only once that had been found, in the modern state, could the regime question then be seriously addressed (118). For more or less opposite theological reasons, Machiavelli in philosophy and the Reformation in theology both sought in the modern state a protective shield against feudal civil disorder and its weakness in war. Both of these anti-feudal stances require nations to got with states—Machiavelli, with his famous call for the rise of Italy, the Lutherans with their pan-Germanism, both against the church which aspired to Catholicism, universalism.
Under the aegis of the state, social activity accelerated. Weber was mistaken: It wasn’t Protestantism and its ‘ethic’ that spawned capitalism but statism that protected Protestantism and fostered capitalism, the goose that laid golden eggs for the state, provided that the state protected the acquisitive and individualistic social activity that the Catholic Church had bridled. “As you see,” Manet tells his interviewer, “I am careful to proceed in such a way that historical causality is always tied to non-historical causality, that is to say, to something that simply belongs to the human condition” (124). European republicanism moved from a nostalgia for Cato the Younger, whose suicide marked the death of the republicanism of the polis, to the friendship of Montaigne and La Boétie, an embryonic civil-social association that affirms “virile human nature”—a republicanism consistent with individualism, a “regime of self-affirmation for human beings” (127). “It is impossible not to encounter the limits of political judgment when one political form transforms into another, when a regime that was good but corrupt gives place to one that is not as good but in a way necessary, and when the very principles of human order have become uncertain”; “the radical character of the modern enterprise was, in part, the price that finally had to be paid to leave behind [the] alienating legacy” of Rome—alienating because it required one to choose between Cato’s republican suicide and the self-deification of Caesarism (129).
That enterprise now may have reached its limits, in which case we are in for another “Ciceronian moment.” In Europe and, increasingly, around the world, the characteristic modern identity, citizenship in a nation, has weakened: One might now conceive of oneself as “at once Breton, French, European, and a citizen of the world” (146). “American protection and dominance” have made this possible, up until now, but not good or sustainable. Europeans prefer not to admit that ‘globalization’ needs to rest on some foundation, which turns out to be Westernization, which turns out to be unpalatable to, for example, Chinese and Muslim people. Because “humanity does not constitute a political body”—being “incapable of self-government”—and because “the religion of humanity” or secular humanism which accompanies globalization doesn’t command the elementary characteristic of any religion (the ability to bind souls to one another by a set of enforceable laws), “the European area will soon be the space of powerful recompositions of common life, and we do not know what form these recompositions will take” (147). “We are talking about something deeper than a revolution, because a revolution involves only a change of regime” (147); Manent hopes for a political form that draws from “the old nation and the old religion” (148), but he does not try to “play Cicero”—to suggest what that form might be. Such fashionable proposals as democratization and globalization he judges too nearly empty of content to be of much real use, although they have preoccupied academic discussants: “I do not know whether what Marx called ‘the world becoming philosophical’ has been good for the world, but there is no doubt that it has not been good for philosophy” (154). The ‘postmodern’ philosophies or ideologies that have superseded Marxism offer only “identity politics” without a firm identity; they will lose steam as we succumb to a “bad mixture of sentimental humanitarianism and unchained competition” (159).
In order to begin to draw upon the old nations and the old religion, Manent seeks to define the old religion by distinguishing it from the new one, the religion of humanity. That is, he returns to what Strauss calls the theological-political question. He remarks the difference between compassion and charity. Compassion consists of identifying oneself “with the suffering other” and (perhaps discreetly) sighing in relief that one is not the sufferer (160). Compassion amounts to the sentimental side of egalitarianism or the belief that we are all the same. “Charity is altogether different,” “a virtue that man cannot acquire or produce by his own strength” (161). “Charity is the love of God, the love by which God loves mankind and, first of all, the love by which God loves himself in the Trinitarian communion”; “something is charitable if it partakes, by God’s grace, in God’s love” (161). It is inegalitarian, an expression of condescension in the old, laudatory sense of the term, a sense that has disappeared precisely as egalitarianism has advanced. Jane Austen could still say “condescending” in a laudatory tone, but for us it is an affront. “Charity has nothing to do with the return to the self that belongs to the very life of the feeling of sameness because charity involves neither identification with the suffering other nor the satisfied and pleasant feeling of not suffering oneself” (161). Christians love God and love their neighbor “as the image of God,” inasmuch as “only God is truly loveable” (161). Humanitarianism (to say nothing of romanticism) does not apply. Mother Teresa wants not only to save your body but also and preeminently wants to become the human agent of the divine love that will save your soul, if you will let it.
For this reason Manent doubts that Tocqueville is correct to ascribe the beginning of modern democracy or egalitarianism to Christianity. “I have never yet found anything in the Gospels that resembles democratic equality or the principles of the philosophy of human rights” (164). “The very meaning of Christian equality resides in God and relates to the other world, and the very meaning of democratic equality relates to this world!” he exclaims. To ‘secularize’ Christianity is to de-Christianize it, inasmuch as the very notion of a Christ, a Savior, implies a radically superior Being. (To be fair to Tocqueville, this may be what he meant to convey in describing Christianity as a precious legacy of the aristocracy; after all, a divine revelation that includes the idea of the equality of all men under God is both ‘aristocratic’—or perhaps monarchic—in origin, even as it posits equality among human beings.) In any event, Manent observes that the centuries in which Christianity provided Europeans with their spiritual orientation “accommodated themselves very well to immense differences of rank and of fortune,” reinforced as they were by the Pauline injunction to obey the powers that be. It was the Enlightenment that pushed Europeans to democratize their societies.
And yet, as before, Manent relents, noticing that Christianity did prepare European souls for the seeds of egalitarianism in two ways. Although it did not at first “demand the abolition of slavery,” Christianity did undermine “the spirit of pagan warfare,” specifically the practice of “massacring the men and… reducing the women and children to slavery” (165). Christianity diminished the supply of slaves and thus served egalitarianism. More significantly, Christianity equalizes “access to truth” by teaching a truth that is “absolutely the same for the shepherd and the theologian” (167).
Christianity also induced Europeans to understand liberty in a new way by giving it a new (so to speak) ontological dimension, namely, free will. “One might even say that the notion of free will is, at bottom a Christian notion”—the “series of free responses that each individual addresses to the divine initiative” (168). Conscience, “an eternal capacity of judgment” (168), differs from (for example) Antigone’s love of family and provides a strong moral foundation for resistance to the encroachments of political authority upon the integrity of the person. But conscience as conceived by Christians isn’t a natural or human right, as the moderns say. Conscience is the self-alignment of the human soul toward God’s will. But a right derives “from man’s simple humanity and not from his final purpose in God” (170). For the early moderns, a right was natural, not fundamentally covenantal. It was Calvinism, not Roman Catholicism or Lutheranism, that associated conscience “with modern freedom and with confidence in one’s own strength” (171). It was Calvinism that combined freedom of conscience and modern freedom with respect for the rule of law. In so describing the theological-political strengths of the West, Manent also shows how he began his journey in a Marxist family and, after encountering Catholicism in Jugnet, political prudence in Aron, and political philosophy in Strauss and Bloom, he has come in the end to an appreciation of the Huguenots.
Nor does his political incorrectness end there. Manent does not hesitate to ascribe “a certain superiority” to the West over other civilizations. “Our civilization’s exploration of human possibilities is more complete than in other civilizations,” although this strength “obviously does not exempt us from the vices, defects, and weaknesses associated with the human condition” and also “exposes us to certain risks to which other civilizations are not exposed or are less exposed” (172). The aspiration to break with customs, with the law of ancestors, makes the West at once more likely to discover nature and at the same time assume the risky responsibility of mastering it. And if “the Greeks are the first to expose their nakedness and… take pride in it, in this capacity to show one’s nakedness” or nature, the Israelites upheld another kind of universalism, the universalism of a people who acted under the command to be a light for the nations (174-175). Taken together, Athens and Jerusalem both exhibit the capacity to acknowledge the universal without erasing or attempting to erase the particular, the political, the city. If man’s nature is political, and if God’s laws themselves imply a political regime, then human beings are not doomed to lives of tribal warfare on one hand or of a weak and unsustainable humanitarianism on the other.
“I believe this confidence in the strength of the soul is the great power of the West, the pagan West as well as the Christian West. Of course, the soul’s philosophic adventure and the religious adventure are quite distinct, but the human source is the same” (184). “In this sense, Christian-democratic America sums up and recapitulates these transformations of the soul that gave the soul this confidence in its own strength” (186). But the European Union, by contrast, “is not political; it does not mediate [between universal and particular]; it blends in its own eyes with humanity as it moves toward unification” (187). Except that the expected historical movement or progress isn’t really there, and can never be, given the political nature of human beings.
Although Manent does not attempt to envision a new political order for Europe, the book ends with his account of the kind of political science that might enable Europeans to frame one. It is Aristotelian. Contemporary political science suffers from two principal flaws: it “is not really political, but rather social”—reducing political life to sub-political components—and it is animated by a “philosophy that is not really practical, that is, that does not quite know what to do with the question, ‘what is to be done?'” (197). (A question, it should be noted, Manent learned during his Marxist upbringing: Lenin raised it, and, whatever one may think of him, he did raise a perfectly sensible question.) But Aristotle’s purpose “is to clarify the deliberations of citizens, no matter the city to which they belong, in order to improve their political regime, whatever the type of regime” (198). This is “a science of action in general,” “capable of determining what concrete action the acting human being should produce, and therefore a general action or an action in conformity with some general rule, but a determinate action appropriate to the characteristics of the agent and the circumstances of the action” (199). By sundering ‘facts’ from ‘values,’ deliberation from purpose, modern social science has rendered human life incoherent, insofar as human beings take such science as authoritative.
Having praised Christianity for its discovery of the conscience and of a certain kind of human equality, Manent proceeds to criticize it for “endanger[ing] the political framework of human life by requiring human beings to love their enemies” (205). This disruption of the natural understanding of politics disrupted the philosophic understanding of human action by pointing the intellect toward unmediated or apolitical ‘humanity’ and also by so altering the intellect’s sense of human events that it comes to think of itself as historical the intellect BC and AD, as it were. That is, the notion of God’s providential intervention into the flow of human events outside the framework of a particular political regime, Israel, takes a step toward the familiar historicisms of modernity. These tend to undermine the freedoms of the ancients, the Christians, and the moderns. It is therefore in some respects just as well that the modern West now meet resistance, inasmuch as resistance calls forth the ‘ancient’ virtues of courage, justice, moderation, and wisdom that modern social science neglects but that remain necessary to fulfilling human nature.
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