The contemporary French political philosopher Pierre Manent is widely acknowledged as a thinker of the first rank, one whose approach to the study of human affairs renews political philosophy’s original ambition to provide a truly “architectonic” or comprehensive grasp of the human world. Manent’s concerns are the age-old ones of the city and the soul. He approaches them through the study of the great texts of political philosophy and political history and through a patient “phenomenological” description of human motives (the useful, the pleasant, and the noble), as well as the virtues and vices of men. His weekly seminar from 1992 to 2014 at the Amphithéâtre Furet at the Écoles des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris drew many long-term auditors and allowed him to explore authors and themes that would later greatly enrich his works. His writings are marked by a high-minded sobriety equidistant from facile relativism and strident ideological claims. Those who count him as a friend also know him to be a thoughtful, witty, kind, and affable human being.

Always attentive to the “theologico-political problem” as it came to the forefront in the Western world, Manent’s thought operates in a self-described “triangle” of “politics, philosophy, and religion” duly cognizant of the requirements and demands of each “pole” without giving his “complete” or exclusive “devotion” to any of them. He is thus the furthest thing from what Max Weber strikingly called a “specialist without spirit” or, even more, the activist intellectuals who revolt against them in recklessly passionate and ideological ways.

As Joseph R. Wood argues in his thoughtful and gracefully written new book, The Political Philosophy of Pierre Manent: Political Form and Human Action, Manent’s work provides invaluable “aid in restoring a proper grasp of the complementarity of reason and faith, philosophy and religion in their proper domains, and their relationship to political events, preserving the genuine freedom of human action,” while acknowledging all the tensions that persist among these competing goods and approaches. For the most part, Wood gives a faithful and discerning account of Manent’s thought and intellectual itinerary, although not without some mistakes and lacunae along the way.

Manent’s Intellectual Itinerary

Wood gets the big picture right and conveys it with admirable clarity. This includes Manent’s turn from a youthful communism (he was born into a Communist family after World War II) to the Catholic faith (moved more by “speculative theology” than pious sentiment, and by his abiding conviction that Christianity “knows the truth about man”); his transformative encounter with the French political thinker Raymond Aron, who brilliantly and bravely stood up to the totalitarian temptation to which his youthful friend Jean-Paul Sartre had succumbed, and who recovered a politics of humane prudence and serious and sober scholarship in a Parisian intellectual world drunk with ideology; his encounter with the larger-than-life Allan Bloom and the writings of Leo Strauss, who introduced him to classical wisdom, without converting him to a too austere conception of the “philosopher” as a being so “above the fray” that he risks leaving human attachments, morality, and politics behind.

Wood also does justice to the richness of Manent’s most memorable books including An Intellectual History of Liberalism (1987), The City of Man (1994), A World Beyond Politics? (2001), and especially a book that has a claim to be Manent’s magnum opus, Metamorphoses of the City: On the Western Dynamic (2010). The first of these four books shows both how abstract and yet consequential the modern political project has been: In order to escape from the hectoring or debilitating “superintendence” of a Christian dispensation that claimed to embody the “supreme good” and thus stand in judgment of the natural, or “temporal,” order, the liberal, secular state separated “power” and “opinion” in a truly unnatural manner. Modern liberals and proto-liberals (such as Machiavelli) took their bearings, not from the Good, but from “the flight from evil” or even “the fecundity of evil,” and thus decisively separated statecraft from soulcraft. They did so in a way that eventually paved the way for the passivity, moral listlessness, and degrading materialism (and self-enclosed individualism) that Alexis de Tocqueville would so lament in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Saving Liberalism From Itself

As Manent illustrates, Tocqueville sought to find broadly liberal ways to save human beings from a civilized “state of nature” in which individuals would become dangerously estranged from the “art of association” and the “moral contents of life.” The Frenchman sought to instruct the people of this democratic age that “the spirit of liberty” and “the spirit of religion” could be “harmonized” once again, without undermining the salutary effects of church-state separation. As Manent puts it in his 2007 book, Democracy Without Nations, “If the separation of church and state is precious as a rule of our actions, it becomes ruinous if we make it the rule of our thought. Politics and religion are never entirely separate or separable. One cannot understand either, therefore, unless one takes them together.” Manent recommends a delicate melding of a secular state (which within limits is good for both religion and politics) with a renewed appreciation of the multiple ways in which “human prudence and divine Providence” collaborate in the souls of men.

Manent thus sees beyond the dichotomy between demi-theocratic integralism and an extreme secularism that aims to radicalize and “complete” the original liberal separation of power and opinion, church and state, and religion and politics, as he interchangeably calls them. Taken to its logical extreme, the “neutral and agnostic state” risks becoming nihilistic and coercive, suffocating the deepest needs of the human soul. As Manent suggests in the newly published English-language edition of Challenging Modern Atheism and Indifference: Pascal’s Defense of the Christian Proposition (published by the University of Notre Dame Press with a “Foreword” by yours truly), the much vaunted liberal “neutrality” has in recent times transmogrified into an illiberal attack on “the idea of the good” as it manifests itself in civil society and ordinary life itself. Moral claims and political opinions that appeal to “nature” or “tradition” are just too close to religious claims to be tolerated by the guardians of ideological correctness.

Today, liberalism can only be saved from itself by a refusal to separate liberty from truth, and human rights from the claims of the soul. Like his friend, the Harvard political theorist Harvey C. Mansfield, but with more self-conscious religious intent, Manent wants to recover a reinvigorated liberalism with true openness to the soul. Tocqueville remains a crucial figure in that regard for both Mansfield and Manent.

Wood ably treats The City of Man, a work of impressive learning and insight that reveals the hollowness behind modernity’s cherished substitutes for human nature and commanding Law: the “Authority of History,” social science determinism, and a homo oeconomicus who knows utility, scarcity and abundance, and various triflings conjured by the imagination, but not the good for human beings. In it, Manent brilliantly demonstrates that, severed from classical magnanimity and Christian humility and their energizing dialectical relation, modern man incessantly seeks new (often spurious) rights to assert, but has little or nothing to say about the one who bears those rights. He is a self-proclaimed Giant sleepwalking in the dark, with “the triumph of the will” at his core becoming increasingly evident. Philosophical modernity appears to be built on a castle of sand.

Manent himself, however, never despairs, because he believes that human beings are and continue to be political animals and moral agents endowed by nature and God with free will and grace. Wood ably shows how in the Metamorphoses of the City, Manent’s “science of human affairs” illumines the “finite number” of political forms, starting with the synoptic or surveyable city and the empire which aspires to universality and is in radical tension with “the ruling and being ruled in turn” which defines politics both normatively and concretely. Along the way, Wood shows how Manent brilliantly discusses Homer and the “poetic origins” of the city; Aristotle on democracy and monarchy; the sempiternal problem of “the one, the few and the many” in politics; Caesar, Cicero, and Rome’s singular transformation from one political form (a republican city) to another (the imperium Romanum).

Nor is this narrative merely descriptive. Along the way, Manent challenges Leo Strauss’s claim that Greek political science, the science of the city, can fully account for the metamorphosis of Rome from one form to another. He persuasively argues, rather, that Greek political philosophy must be supplemented by the insights and accounts provided by later political historians, philosophers, and political actors. Greek wisdom does not exhaust wisdom tout court, even if Manent firmly rejects a historicist account of political things.

From the City to the Nation and Beyond

Wood devotes many pages to Manent’s rich and penetrating account of the ways Augustine of Hippo’s City of God illuminates the Church as a transpolitical “political form,” a City whose beginning and end is in eternity, but which acts in the world, and whose commanding presence in it eventually led to the modernist revolt against both the classical city and the Christian church. Wood may exaggerate Augustine’s overall influence on Manent (the neo-Augustinian Pascal seems to play a more decisive role in Manent’s later work) and missteps when he attributes a “philosophy of history” to both Augustine and Manent, as opposed (in Augustine’s case) to a theological perspective on the human adventure. There is a difference between philosophy and theology, and that difference is of crucial importance.

Wood fully appreciates that for Manent, the fourth political form, the nation, is the European invention that allows “civilization and liberty” to coexist, and that enabled a form of self-government to flourish in the modern world. It is not simply the modern post-Westphalian nation-state, since it has roots in a Christian world trying to find a via media between the “autarchic” city and an empire inclined to a universal imperium that risked challenging the spiritual authority of the Church.

As Wood shows, the nation as theorized by Manent already took visible form in the Christian centuries, and became fully self-conscious in the works of the national poets that were “Jean Racine in seventeenth-century France and William Shakespeare in Elizabethan England.” At times, Wood conflates the national form that first arose in the late Middle Ages with the modern nation-state of Hobbesian origin, a political form/regime that points in a diametrically different direction. Moreover, Wood could have said more about Manent’s semi-regular public interventions on behalf of the national form against the encroachments of the Europe Behemoth, and the post-political temptation that has been coextensive with the European project since the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, if not before.

Natural Law and Practical Reason

Wood is rightly sensitive to the central place that the moral and civic agent plays in Pierre Manent’s rich and varied conception of human and political life, as the subtitle of his book attests. But Wood missed an opportunity to deepen his (and our) appreciation of the Manentian understanding of the intimate connection between natural law, practical reason, and reasonable choice by devoting only a page or two to a treatment of Manent’s Natural Law and Human Rights. While that book does indeed return to what Wood calls Manent’s “previous work on man as exclusively a ‘bearer of rights,’ representation, the modern project’s attempts to escape the command of nature and law, and the anti-natural character of the modern state,” it breaks new ground well worth pursuing. The failure to pursue that new ground weakens Wood’s account of “Manent’s political philosophy” by not adequately investigating one of its culminating themes.

Without in any way rejecting a metaphysical approach to these questions, Manent engages natural law from the perspective of what “reflective choice” requires from the moral and civic agent faced with the perennial and inescapable human question of “What to do?” In this important work, Manent clears away the modern theoretical obstacles to renewed confidence in free will, as well as reflective choice and deliberation, and takes aim at the sophistic modern claim that human beings “create their own values” ungrounded in anything but willful self-assertion. He restores the essential connection between the non-arbitrary exercise of human conscience (which is never merely “subjective”) and phronesis as understood by Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas (which is never merely “circumstantial”).

With ample justification, Manent argues that the practical world, a world that requires reflective choice and deliberation on the part of citizens and moral agents, “is never given over to the essentially arbitrary commands of gods or of human beings.” Manent continues, “The human agent cannot engage in action without entering into its reasons.” Drawing on earlier work, Manent thoughtfully connects human action and the natural law to three great human motives: the pleasant, the useful, and the honorable (or the just and noble), and to the fixed and enduring human ends that are the cardinal virtues of old: courage, justice, temperance, and prudence. Manent confidently affirms that “the very notion of natural law presupposes or implies that we have the ability to judge human conduct according to criteria that are clear, stable, and largely if not universally shared,” and he proceeds to show how, in their different ways, Islamist terrorism, Communist totalitarianism, and euthanasia all run roughshod over the natural law. Manent does not allow ill-founded abstractions such as “the naturalistic fallacy” or the “fact-value distinction” to get in the way of moral judgment rooted in “a valid rule of human action.” Without such judgment, it is impossible to do justice to the human motives that rightly define the good for human beings. 

Christianity and Politics

Wood rightly suggests that as Manent’s work has become more “prescriptive,” his writing has also become “more openly Christian.” Manent’s Montaigne: Life Without Law already presupposes the aforementioned mix of nature and law, and the same confidence in the Primacy of the Good that is more openly stated in works to come. In Beyond Radical Secularism, he rejects French laïcité in religion not as a political arrangement, but as a substitute for a searching engagement with the life of the soul and the call to mind and spirit that comes from on “High.” Without opposing the liberal secular state per se, Manent reminds the French that they remain “a nation of a Christian mark.” He elegantly and wisely instructs the French on how to renew “the starting point and the principle of European history: to govern oneself in a certain relation to the Christian proposition.” This need not entail the jettisoning of the secular state but only of radical, dogmatic, and illiberal secularism.

In an era of secularist complacency and of increasingly vociferous anti-Christian prejudice, Manent reminds his European readers, far too convinced as many of them are of the essential “culpability” of the West for crimes real or imagined, that the truly monstrous crimes of the twentieth century were committed by totalitarian regimes and ideologies that had declared war on the Covenant with God and the elementary requirements of the moral law. European self-loathing is just another form of nihilism and a potential source of new and terrible crimes.

Yet, as Wood shows, Manent has never denied that Christianity is prone to what we might call a significant political deficit, a certain suspicion of the “confidence in one’s own forces,” the temptation toward “self-sufficiency,” that goes hand in hand with robust republican political life. The Catholic Church, for example, while firmly (and admirably) rejecting the idolatry and murderous cruelty of the totalitarian state, has sometimes displayed a weakness toward clerical politics (think Ireland, Quebec, Portugal, and Austria earlier in the twentieth century) and an undue suspicion of self-government in its various forms. In an age prone to passivity, moral indifference, and humanitarian platitudes, Manent prefers that the Catholic Church would show more respect for “virile virtues in citizens,” something that secular humanitarians disdain even more.

Yet, on the spiritual or theological plane, as his aforementioned book on Pascal and the Christian Proposition shows, he fully appreciates that human nature has been deeply wounded by original sin, a mysterious if eminently empirical claim. Humanitarians and liberationists falsely think they can “change the world” without changing themselves, and all this without help from the grace of God. Manent greatly admires Aristotle much as Pascal profoundly admired the Stoic moralist Epictetus, who as Pascal put it, “understood so well the duty of mankind” while falling “prey to the sin of presumption about what we are able to do” merely on our own. These tensions and paradoxes serve to invigorate Manent’s work.

We are thus reminded once again of the Manentian “triangle” of politics, philosophy, and religion, and the different presuppositions and loyalties required by devotion to each of these three great poles of human existence. Manent’s devotion to these poles is never half-hearted, and his Christian affirmation is robust and sincere. But tensions persist because reality is itself tension-ridden. Manent therefore remains “half-Thomist and half-Straussian” (although less the latter as the decades have passed), a Christian Aristotelian who is also devoted to Pascal, a critic of modernity who is also a friend of freedom and self-government, one who knows that “to love democracy well, it is necessary to love it moderately” (to cite the conclusion of his magisterial Tocqueville and The Nature of Democracy), not least because “progressive democracy” is but several steps away from totalitarian democracy.

Manent combines Gallic and Gaullist pride in his country with respect for America, and a profound commitment to the “national form” wherever it is found, as the essential home for self-government in the modern world. He remains one of the most profound theorists of the “putting of reasons and actions in common” that is politics and a critic of the thousand ways in which modern men (led by intellectuals and activists) evade political responsibility and even political life itself. There is much life, vigor, and wisdom to be discerned in the Manentian “triangle,” a true feast to savor for all serious students of what Aristotle called the “science of human affairs.”