Autor: Manent, Pierre

Buch: An Intellectual History of Liberalism

Titel: An Intellectual History of Liberalism

Stichwort: Vorwort 2; P. Manent These; Konstruktion: Naturzustand - Staat (Sicherung d. sozialen Stabilität); Locke (Exekutive); Montesquieu (Balance d. Mächte); Rousseau (Gesellschaftsvertrag; Idee d. Autonomie); Revolution: Mittel d. Stiftung von Einheit

Kurzinhalt: Modern politics can recover a unified purpose only by revolutionizing itself, by imposing from above, but in the name of society, the unity that can free human nature from itself.

Textausschnitt: IXa Although Manent's account of liberalism is critical, I think readers will see that it is also sympathetic—not to the philosophical and ethical presuppositions of liberal politics perhaps, but to the situation, the hopes and frustrations, of those (and that includes most of us) for whom its moral interior constitutes an inescapable life-world. This combination of criticism and sympathy, skeptical about modern politics but disabused of the marxisant enthusiasms of a Sartre and impermeable to the Nietzschean paradoxes of a Foucault, provides one reason why Mark Lilla and Thomas Pavel have chosen the current book to represent what they call "New French Thought." Manent illustrates very well one direction taken by the vigorous reflection on the nature of liberal society that has developed in France since the middle of the 1970s, together with the rapprochement between French and "Anglo-Saxon" philosophy that has been interwoven with it.1 In Manent's case, the particular "Anglo-Saxon" brand of thinking that has colored his reflections most is that of Leo Strauss—not "Anglo-Saxon" at all, to be sure, but given a home in America and imported from there into France. Manent exemplifies the intellectual vitality that recent French scholars and thinkers have been able to draw from their encounters with Anglophone traditions. Readers may still recognize a certain "Frenchness" to his work in a style of presentation that gives form to analysis in deft and rapid aperçus as often as in sustained theoretical elaboration, and will perhaps even find an echo of the Sartrian image of man as "a useless passion" in the antinomies of modern politics developed in the book's last few pages. What is most characteristic of Manent's intellectual stance, however, is his attempt to draw the history of liberalism out of one original moral and intellectual choice, to discover behind particular and characteristic manifestations of modern politics the general and defining attitude that formed it in the first place and that has never ceased to shape it. (Fs)

Xa Consider, for instance, his understanding of the idea of the state of nature as providing both an image of human beings over whom no traditional claims to authority have any legitimate power, yet also a basis for setting up an incontestable obligation to political obedience. Such a notion, developed in order to combat the power of religious doctrine without undermining social stability, cuts people off from every social attachment while delivering them over to the agency—the state—that establishes social life in a form that excludes any partial or specific social good. Liberal thinkers were still wrestling with the consequences of this set of moves in the age of Benjamin Constant and Tocqueville. Or take his related argument that Lockean theory gave an opening to a strong executive power in an almost "Hobbesian" way, despite Locke's attempt to limit royal authority. This situation developed because the legislative power, theoretically supreme by virtue of its ability to represent society's various and different interest, could not embody the singlemindedness, the unity of will and action required to give practical stability to political society. Thus the strength of modern executives in England and America derives from the exigencies of modern politics, not from the survival of older monarchical assumptions. (Fs) (notabene)

Xb But it is his account of liberal theory and practice in the age of Montesquieu, Rousseau, and the French Revolution that shows the method in operation at its most stimulating and challenging. In Manent's reading, what is most significant about Montesquieu's account of the balance of power is that its implications extend from the state to society; both become realms of negative freedom where strength and weakness feed on one another. The executive and legislative powers that restrain each other in the strictly political realm are represented in the social sphere by parties to which people give allegiance, but only provisionally, since each serves the purpose of liberty only so long as it cannot achieve the domination it denies the other. The life of the state expands, but its ability to act in society contracts, and this limitation serves to make the private realms of wealth and culture more satisfying than participation in political life. But the liberty individuals find there is negative too; each must renounce over others the power he fears they may gain over himself. The inhabitants of such a society will find it alternatively liberating and constricting; their satisfactions and frustrations combine to inspire them with visions of an ideal state, but they will never be able to bring any transformative project to realization, because modern politics is designed to frustrate every such definite purpose. In the end such people find themselves divided between their political and social lives, between existence as "citizen," and as "man"—just the condition to which Rousseau will respond. (Fs) (notabene)

Xc Rousseau was not just a critic of absolutism, but equally of the society that replaced it, at once the successor of Hobbes and of Montesquieu. It was the nature of the society to which sovereign power brought social peace that troubled him so much, the society of amour-propre where people were divided within themselves by the need to be constantly comparing themselves with their fellows, able to be aware of themselves only in relation to others, but drawn outside themselves only by the promptings of egotism. In order to heal this division, Rousseau evolved a new notion of the state of nature, within which he was able to grant wholeness to individuals, but only at the price of denying them sociability. The task was to bring the two qualities together, to unify human beings with themselves, but inside the social state. Rousseau achieved this by basing the social contract on his novel notion of freedom as self-legislation, the human ability to follow laws of humanity's own making. People who lived under such self-imposed laws would recover the wholeness of their original natural lives, but only at the cost of repressing every expression of the personal interest that was revealed as their second nature within existing society. Thus political society had to put itself on a new basis by at once fulfilling nature and repressing it; it had to impose on men the unity they had willingly given up, return them to nature by denaturing them. The contradictions in these ideas are inescapable because they correspond to those of human nature, forever divided between animality and liberty. (Fs)

XIa Rousseau achieved just what liberalism had previously found impossible: justifying sovereignty on the basis of bare individual nature by his novel attribution to individuals of an innate capacity for self-legislative freedom. But the result was to make the earlier liberal notion of freedom as security pale beside this much more vital and powerful idea of autonomy. The cost of finding an innate end or good within the pure individuality on which liberalism had sought to construct a politics of neutrality was to release in society the demand that autonomy replace the narrow liberty of liberalism, and this meant a call for revolution. Modern politics can recover a unified purpose only by revolutionizing itself, by imposing from above, but in the name of society, the unity that can free human nature from itself. (Fs) (notabene)