A Book Review . . . An Intellectual’s Insight Into Contemporary Issues
By JUDE DOUGHERTY
Manent, Pierre. Seeing Things Politically. Translated by Ralph Hancock. South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine’s Press, 2015. xx + 215 pp.
Following a helpful introduction by Daniel J. Mahoney, this book consists mainly of a series of interviews which Manent gave to Benedicte Delorme-Montini. Those interviews range from Manent speaking of his early education in a Communist family to his comments on the current state of European culture. The questions raised by Delorme-Montini are profound and probing, forcing Manent to reveal a complicated intellectual journey from the 1970s to the present.
Manent relates that he came of age in a French, Communist, “political homogeneous milieu.” His first intellectual education included exposure to the thought of Roger Garaudy, Georges Cogniot, and Jean Kanapa. In his family circle everyone was on the political left. Still, citizens who were otherwise separated by political or religious opinion were nevertheless unified in their promotion of education and even for the content of education, that is, French, Greek, Latin, and mathematics.
It was Louis Jugnet, a teacher at the lycée at Toulouse, a Thomist, who introduced Manent to Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson and to the “immense domain of the Catholic religion and religion in general.” Prompted by his study of St. Thomas and speculative theology in general, Manent became a Catholic.
After Toulouse, Manent enrolled at École Normal Supérieure in Paris, where he sought out Raymond Aron on the advice of Louis Jugnet. Paris at that time was the domain of Jacques Derrida, Jean Paul Sartre, and Louis Althusser, and Manent encountered them all. Early on, he read with appreciation Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. At the Sorbonne, he found that the two great dissertation “industries” were Descartes and the Cartesians, on the one hand, and Kant and German idealism, on the other.
Neither proved to be of interest to him, but Aron became a lasting influence, by introducing him first to classical philosophy, and subsequently to the person of Leo Strauss. The latter’s Natural Right and History proved to be influential and confirmed the direction that Manent’s political philosophy was to take.
Fleeing modernity, Manent developed a passion for the ancients. He became convinced of the value of a historical perspective, for “[o]nly a long education of the intellect and the faculty of judgment make it possible to find one’s way with some certainty in political life.”
Dividing the course of Western civilization into three parts — pagan antiquity, Christianity, and modernity — he cites the Reformation as a pivotal movement in the history of Christianity. He claims without doubt that the Reformation was not merely a religious or spiritual movement, but “very directly and very explicitly, it was also a political movement,” in the sense that its doctrines bore implications for human association.
“The heart of the Reformation is undeniably its contestation of the mediating character of the Church.” Traditionally the Catholic Church offered itself as the necessary vehicle of salvation and as a necessary mediation between God and man. The destruction of that ecclesiastical mediation had its effects in the political order by transferring not only practical but, to a certain extent, spiritual authority to temporal rulers.
As a result of the Reformation’s emphasis on the subjective, on individual judgment, the Church lost its former authority to hold the ruler accountable.
Today, says Manent, Europe’s religion has become the “religion of humanity,” a democratic universalism that leads to nihilism. It consists in this: “Europe is nothing other, and wants to be nothing other, than pure human universality. . . . It cannot be anything definite, it wants to be nothing, an absence open in every way to the presence of the other; it wants to be nothing itself so that the other, no matter what other, can be everything that it is.”
The modern order, Manent concludes, is facing its limits. The principal one consists in the absence of an objective order capable of motivating common action. Common action cannot flow from the mere protection of individual or subjective rights. Public order, he insists, cannot be built on protecting private lives alone.
While Seeing Things Politically is primarily an intellectual autobiography, Manent in reflecting on his life also provides insight into a host of contemporary issues. He offers in passing a compelling discussion of the nature of science and scientific explanation, and the possibility of constructing a genuine political science.
These and other topics are given full examination in other of his works that are worth revisiting, including Modern Liberty and Its Discontents (1998), The City of Man (2000), and Democracy Without Nations (2007).
Speaking of the role of religion in society, Manent says, “A work that satisfactorily brings together fidelity to human experience and commitment to a religious perspective is rare.” The present work is obviously one of those rare volumes, one that I cannot recommend too highly.
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(Dr. Dougherty is dean emeritus of The School of Philosophy of The Catholic University of America.)
