Pierre Manent's Observations

Does he grasp the nature of the cultural revolution? Does the desire for respectability prevent him for saying anything more detailed?

What effect do you think American identity politics will have on France and other European nations, their political and academic discourse, and their own sense of identity? https://t.co/1KucZADIlx

— Public Discourse (@PublicDiscourse) June 13, 2021

English Translation of Le Figaro Interview with Pierre Manent

First Things: Time to Wake Up by Pierre Manent

Pierre Manent: While waiting for things to unfold we note the return of the least likeable features of our State. In the name of a health emergency, a state of emergency has in fact been established. In the name of this emergency, the most primitive and brutal of measures has been taken: general confinement under police surveillance. The speed, the comprehensiveness, and even the eagerness with which the repressive apparatus was set in motion painfully contrast with the delays, the lack of preparation, and the indecisiveness of our policies of sanitation, whether concerning masks, tests, or potential treatments. Innocent or benign missteps are punished with exorbitant fines. We are forbidden from leaving our residences without passports, but the reestablishment of national borders is still considered a mortal sin. I do not believe the crisis is rehabilitating that State. 

As for the nation, it has been abandoned, discredited, and delegitimized for two generations—just as any thought for industrial policy has been abandoned, discredited, and delegitimized. We have renounced the very idea of national independence. Oh, to be nothing more than a soft and pliant node of specialized expertise in the great network of global trade! And above all, the flux must never slow down! Are we discovering that we are dependent on China for almost everything we need? But we have organized ourselves in order to be dependent! We have willed it! Do you believe that, when we emerge weakened by the economic destruction brought about by the health crisis, there will be many who will be willing to reverse the course that we have been following for forty years?

Maybe Too Intellectual

and too accepting of the modern nation-state?

First Things: The Tragedy of the Republic by Pierre Manent
The decay of political culture in the West

Claude Polin Reviews Manent's Metamorphoses of the City

Insecure Liberalism

Plus: What Do We Do After Liberalism? by Rod Dreher

Pierre Manent on Modernity

But does he satisfactorily explain what separates "Modern" from pre-Modern? He does give a (Straussian?) explanation of the Modern project with Machiavelli as one of the central actors, but I'm not buying it.

Pierre Manent, City, Empire, Church, Nation
How the West created modernity
(via FT)

There is something terrible in human action: what makes us human is also what exposes us, takes us out of ourselves, and sometimes causes us to lose ourselves. In the beginning, human beings gathered, fished, hunted, or even made war, which is a kind of hunting; but they acted as little as possible, leaving much to the gods and tying themselves down with prohibitions, rites, and sacred restraints. Historically, properly human action first appears as crime or transgression. This, according to Hegel, is what Greek tragedy brings to light: innocently criminal action. Tragedy recounts the passage from what precedes action to properly human action.

Say what? Is that a true presentation of what "primitive" cultures believed about human action? Sounds like someone's setting up human action to be some sort of liberation from superstition disguised as divinely-imposed restraint. I hear a serpent calling.

Manent explains that the Modernity is a political project of collective action, in which "democracy" holds a central place. The roots of the project can be found in ancient Greece. The city was insufficient by itself to secure internal and external peace and so what was needed was empire. And then the Church appears.

Not only did the imperial idea mark the West through the enduring prestige of the Roman Empire; the idea was reborn in a new form, one that was, again, particular to Europe. This was the Catholic or universal Church, which aimed to reunite all mankind in a new communion, closer than that of the most enclosed city and more extensive than that of the vastest empire. Of all the political forms of the West, the Church extended the greatest promises, since it proposed this community, at once city and empire; but it was also the most disappointing, since it failed to bring about the universal association for which it had awakened a desire.

Though I have just surveyed the history of premodern Europe with the speed and delicacy of Attila the Hun, I have gathered the elements of the situation that will allow me to elaborate the modern project.

Europeans were divided among the city, the empire, and the Church. They lived under these mixed and competing authorities, these three modes of human association. The cities that survived or were reborn were in competition with—indeed, often at war with—the Roman Empire (now known as the Holy Roman Empire, in what is today Germany); and the Church was in competition with the cities and the empire, which, in turn, were in competition with it. The disorder was dreadful, a conflict of authorities and of loyalty. It was this confusion that the modern project wanted to allow us to escape—and in this, it succeeded.

As a result, not only were there competing authorities but competing identities as well:

The conflicts had to do with institutions but also, more profoundly, with the human type that would inspire European life. Whom to imitate? Did one have to follow the life of humble sacrifice for which Christ provided the model? Or was it better to lead the proud, active life of the warrior-citizen, a life for which Rome had provided the framework and of which Rome was the product par excellence? Should Europeans, surveying the ancient world, admire Cato or Caesar? Europeans no longer knew which city they wanted, or were able, to inhabit; thus they did not know what kind of human being they wanted, or were able, to be. It was in this radical perplexity, and in order to come to terms with it, that the modern project was born.

Competing authorities and authoritative texts lead to a disconnect between speech and action. Which texts were to determine action? The Reformation was one answer to this question. Machievelli gave another, directed especially at the tension between Christianity and the way men actually were.

Now, the greatest distance between speech and action is introduced by the Christian Word, which requires men to love what they naturally hate (their enemies) and to hate what they naturally love (themselves). The modern political project, which Machiavelli was the first to formulate, was therefore a response—it began as a response, in any case—to the “Christian situation,” one marked by competition among authorities, disorder of references, anarchy of words, and, above all, the demoralizing contrast between what men said and what they did.

Isn't that a erroneous account of Christian charity? (Or, more accurately, of the emotion of hate, which is not opposed to charity or rational love?) But this false account may be needed by Manent to make his point.

The problem of the Christian age was solved, therefore, by the sovereign state and by representative government—that is, by our political regime considered as a whole. My object here is not to describe the mechanisms or, for that matter, to sketch the history of the representative regime. Still, one point must be emphasized. The decisive factor in the reconciliation between speech and action is the formation of a common speech by the elaboration, perfection, and diffusion of a national language. Luther’s Reformation was a spiritual upheaval, but it was also inseparably a political revolution and a national insurrection. Too often forgotten is that even before the modern state was consolidated and became capable of authorizing or prohibiting effectively, the nation had emerged in Europe as the setting for the appropriation of the Christian Word, which the universal Church had proved incapable of teaching effectively. Each European nation chose the Christian confession under which it wished to live and essentially imposed it, after many attempts, on its “sovereign.” Europe assumed its classic form with the “confessional nation,” soon to be crowned by its absolute sovereign, who would later bring about its “secularization”; and this was the form in which it succeeded in organizing itself in the most stable and durable manner. From then on, it was in the framework of a national civic conversation that Europeans sought to link their speech with their actions and their actions with their speech. The national form preceded and conditioned representative government.

Having rejected the authority of the Church and weakened it, the elites controlled the modern nation-state. Can we really say that we have had "representative" government in the West, rather than rule by a few, regardless of the general population's approval of them through the fiction of voting? Manent may just be giving his analysis, rather than approving the modern nation-state as a solution, but he is missing something in his account of the rise of the modern nation-state, and how its development necessarily violates the human scale. Without this, he can pretend that the modern nation-states are democratic, but they really aren't. They are governed for the benefit of the few.

The divorce between action and speech helps explain the new role of political correctness. Because speech is no longer tied to a possible and plausible action against which we might measure it, many take speech as seriously as if it were itself an action and consider speech they do not like equivalent to the worst possible action. Offending forms of speech are tracked down and labeled, in the language of pathologists, “phobias.” The progress of freedom in the West once consisted of measuring speech by the standard of visible actions; political correctness consists of measuring speech by the standard of invisible intentions.

Bad psychology as philosophy? A simplistic thesis to explain the evolution of Western polities; the need to match words to action. (Straussian emphasis on texts or their understanding of logos/logoi?) The changes were not due to the need for man to resolve tensions within himself in his beliefs, but rather it is the story of the struggle of power after the fall of Adam and Eve, with some unique Western features.

Russell Hittinger reviews Pierre Manent's A World Beyond Politics

Dissecting a Democratic Illusion
Russell Hittinger (from IR 41:2, Fall 2006) - 03/11/11

A World Beyond Politics? A Defense of the Nation-State by Pierre
Manent. Trans. Marc LePain. Princeton University Press, 2006.

A World beyond Politics? A Defense of the Nation-State
(Also from PUP: An Intellectual History of Liberalism)