Autor: Manent, Pierre

Buch: An Intellectual History of Liberalism

Titel: An Intellectual History of Liberalism

Stichwort: Vorwort 1; P. Manent: These über Liberalismus (Versuch der Befreiung aus d. Klammer d. Kirche); politisches Leben: kein höhere Zweck mehr

Kurzinhalt: Such an orientation toward politics derived law from the needs of a human nature deprived of any positive qualities that might give it a larger purpose; at the same time it exalted the state as the only means that could assure the survival and ...

Textausschnitt: Foreword

VIIa READERS picking up a book that offers an account of the history of liberal thought in just ten short chapters may suppose they are in the presence of a kind of primer, a handy introduction that puts complexity aside until later—if later ever comes. In several ways Pierre Manent's work will seem to satisfy such expectations. It is written in simple, direct language; it bears no heavy weight of footnotes or scholarly apparatus; and it moves gracefully from one highpoint to another, along the way bravely providing concise summaries of complex subjects—for example, the history of relations between Church and state over several centuries of European history—in a few smooth and unblinking paragraphs. Those who do not know the subject well will come away from reading the book having encountered much of the basic substance of political thinking between Machiavelli in the sixteenth century and Tocqueville in the nineteenth. (Fs)

VIIb Its resemblance to a primary textbook ends there, however. Behind a facade of simplicity, Manent has constructed a sophisticated, pointed, argumentative, sometimes brilliant and often controversial account of the nature of modern political life, considered from the point of view of the assumptions and presuppositions that shape and inspire it. Although he approaches liberalism as a body of political theory or reflection, through the eight thinkers to whom major chapters are dedicated, the author's real quarry is not political thought but political life, and the liberalism he has in his sights is not one particular and delimited attitude toward modern politics but the world of assumptions and experiences within which we all move and act. The "intellectual history of liberalism" recounted here is, as he says, a "scale model" of the political history of Europe, and the story of past theorists becomes—to recall a phrase from a well-known French thinker of a very different stamp—a "history of the present." (Fs) (notabene)

VIIc Manent's project, then, is to discover the outlines of present political life within the lineaments of past political thought; his way of finding the link between those two levels may also surprise American and English readers. As good pragmatists or utilitarians—when we are not more-or-less-good Marxists—we may assume that ideas exist in service of real, practical conditions and interests, and that a history of theory becomes a history of events and institutions when it sees through the ideas to the more substantial and material situations out of which they arise. Here things take place quite differently. Pierre Manent believes that the content of modern liberalism derives from a fundamental orientation toward politics chosen by early-modern Europeans in order to free themselves from the intellectual and spiritual influence of the Catholic Church; that adopting this orientation required the theoretical materials provided by the founders of liberalism—in his account, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke; that the later evolution of liberal theory and practice can be understood as the working-out of the consequences of this original choice; and that the political frustrations of our own day still derive from the powerful dilemmas created when our progenitors took up this liberal stance three or four centuries ago. (Fs)

VIIIa The stance in question is a negative one, the denial that political life serves a higher purpose: we moderns, though still in our way the political animals Aristotle long ago defined us to be, do not enter into relations with others in order to realize some good or end inherent in human nature. Classical thinkers assumed that human beings—like every form of existence ranged within the organized cosmos—possessed such goods or ends and that every particular political arrangement or action could be judged according to how well it corresponded to them. This was one feature of classical theory that recommended it to Christians and, notably, to many scholastic thinkers and that made the medieval and Renaissance rediscovery of the classical heritage an insufficient basis for setting politics on purely secular foundations, since any admission that a higher end existed could be seized on by the Church as a license to judge secular life by religious standards. Hence the radical rupture constituted by Machiavelli's uncompromising location of politics within a sphere from which all moral judgment was excluded, and later by Hobbes's justification of sovereignty by way of an image of human beings as naturally drawn to others only in order to achieve domination over them. Machiavelli and Hobbes set the terms for the modern definition of the subject and object of political action as the pure, bare individual of the state of nature, void of any goal outside the narrow confines of the self. (Fs) (notabene)

VIIIb Such an orientation toward politics derived law from the needs of a human nature deprived of any positive qualities that might give it a larger purpose; at the same time it exalted the state as the only means that could assure the survival and existence of the morally impoverished individuals its orientation presupposed. The "rights" it might attribute to these individuals could never succeed in rooting the justification of state power in the needs of human nature, because the state had always to be conceived and legitimated as the organ that prevented any particular purpose from realizing itself in social life. (Rousseau would proffer a particularly ingenious solution to this dilemma, but he only succeeded in shifting the ground on which it had to be confronted.) Liberal politics thus vacillates between exalting the state and defending against it, while simultaneously alternating between idealized and demonized visions of society and human nature. Law and nature, politics and society, shift back and forth between a phase in which each looks to the other to furnish what it itself lacks, and an opposing moment wherein each devotes its resources to restraining the power of the other. "State" and "civil society" have each had their moments of unchecked independence, sometimes with destructive and tragic results, but in the end the suppressed pole has always reemerged to contest the temporary domination of its simultaneously desired and suspected partner. Thus do we live still with the consequences of the original choice that established individuals as the only basis of social and political life, still turning in the empty space our forefathers hollowed out for us as if centuries later—Manent concludes—"nothing had happened." (Fs)