Perspectives on Political Science

Volume 45, Issue 2, 2016

https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/ktw9D6rUi6M3tBJap7wD/full

Seeing Things Politically, Interviews with Bénédicte Delorme-Montini

by Pierre Manent, translated by Ralph C. Hancock, South Bend, IN: St. Augustine Press, pp. 215, $30, ISBN: 978-1587318139, Publication Date: 2015

The Synoptic Citizen: Pierre Manent's Political Science

The entirety of Pierre Manent's oeuvre exemplifies and defends the notion of “seeing things politically.” From his earliest work, Naissances de la politique moderne: Machiavel, Hobbes, Rousseau (1977), to his latest, Situation de la France (2015), Manent's incisive exegesis of texts and penetrating reflections on events offer profound insight into Western political development as a whole, as well as an understanding of our present situation. Throughout his numerous works it has always been Manent's view that “the political order is what truly gives human life its form” and that “the political order is the heart of the human world.” Simply speaking, Manent argues it is a fact that man is a political animal, and human life therefore “takes shape and presents itself first in political life.”

This is denied by many today, of course, who disdain simplicity in aspiring for sophistication. Yet, rather than convincingly dispute the fact, sophisticates obscure or ignore it. Manent's politically minded works, however, constantly prompt readers to ask themselves whether it is not the case that human beings deeply desire to be governed—or to govern themselves—well, and if they have not been motivated, in varying circumstances, to order their lives in common on this basis. For Manent “[t]he springs of human things are ultimately motives, and these motives must be recognizable and intelligible for human beings.” By deeming patent motives and fundamental facts of human nature to be simple-minded, the sophisticated rarely provide anything but the most superficial commentary on things political. Consequently, they have little wisdom on offer to assist their fellow citizens. “If you gather what the greatest philosophers of the century wrote about politics,” Manent observes, “it is truly disappointing!” In contrast, Manent's work begins and builds on the fact of man's political nature, with a belief that regaining “confidence in political knowledge” is not only necessary, but possible. It is necessary because the decline of political philosophy corresponds to the disorder of political life, and it is possible because previous periods successfully provided tools for understanding politics that helped guide human activity.

In our modern democracies of today it is of course possible to see political things, whether by this we mean representative bodies or the other institutions of our political system that are observable in operation. We are likewise familiar with seeing things politicized, in the sense that a given issue becomes a matter of partisan contestation, or that matters of life ordinarily outside the realm of the political become enlisted in vociferous partisan dispute. A typical response to politicization in complex modern societies, especially when compounded by the unprecedented expansion of the private sphere in liberal democracies, is for individual citizens to altogether disregard politics and leave political things to the so-called ‘experts.’ Thus, as Manent underlines, “We tend to oscillate between underestimating and overestimating…the place of politics among human things.” Genuinely seeing things politically therefore requires a proper estimation of politics, which is to situate it accordingly in relation to other human things.

Seeing things politically requires neither technical tools nor specialized language—least of all an advanced methodology or grand theory. Furthermore, to see things politically no great creativity or extraordinary imagination is necessary. Instead, one must begin by first looking at political phenomena with the simple ambition to understand what is, rather than as so many of Manent's contemporaries (particularly those of “the left”) have preferred, namely, “to imagine a society that is not.” In short, Manent's general disposition is that of the thoughtful citizen, “drawn toward a subject rather than guided by a discipline.” This does not mean that books and study are not essential to seeing. Textual exegesis has marked Manent's work from the beginning. But it has been at the service of seeing. Manent's tremendous erudition thus manifests itself, not in seeing differently than the parties, but in seeing further (to adopt Tocqueville's apt phrase).

This broad or synoptic gaze is directed toward the establishment of a “science of human things,” in the sense of a “unified science,” which stands athwart today's widespread opinion denying any such confidence in human reason by presuming there are only a variety of “perspectives.” Thus, seeing things politically is to consider human things according to the forms and order in which they emerge. It eventually requires a view of the entirety of the western political dynamic. The ambition of Manent's work is nothing short of laying out “our whole history starting from our political nature.” He strives to do so in a manner that is not only scientific but also accessible, which is to say in the ordinary language of human life as lived. As he underlines: “It ought to be possible to recount the political history of humanity, if not to children, at least to plain citizens.” Political scientists and citizens alike will find Manent's work—with its thoughtful confidence and confident thought—refreshing and encouraging.

The series of interviews—or, better to say, the conversation—with Manent that constitute Seeing Things Politically reveal many things in a personal way equally inviting to those familiar with Manent's works and to those discovering his thought for the first time. All are introduced to some of the sources of Manent's confidence and the thinkers that have guided him over the course of his intellectual project, as well as to an array of ideological deformations, the “nihilism lite,” and varieties of extremist thought he has avoided with their help. “Encounters,” Manent notes, “are always personal.” He relates experiencing communism through his father, and Christianity through his lycée teacher, the Thomist Louis Jugnet. Manent's early communist milieu introduced him to the passions and partisanship of politics, until he eventually became a passionate anti-communist himself. To this day he accepts “political partisanship with considerable equanimity.” As for Christianity, Jugnet's example was profound, for he awoke in Manent a deep desire to know, not least by demonstrating that religion itself has “content that can be learned, that can be known,” and is not reducible to “a subjective feeling” or “a value.” In discovering the intellectual dimensions of religion—Jugnet had religion appearing “as the dramatic deployment on a large screen of the problems that philosophy had brought to light”—Manent was simultaneously drawn to genuine philosophical inquiry and to a conversion to the Catholic faith.

Amidst his early years of reading widely, but experiencing a good deal of “dissatisfaction” and “drifting” at the école Normale Superieure, Manent recalls his first encounter with Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism. Despite what he now finds problematic in Arendt's thought, it exemplified “a powerful way of articulating the century's political experience in connection with some analytical concepts, with some criteria that would make it possible to impose some order on the century's experience.” However, it was Manent's encounter with Raymond Aron that was of the greatest importance, for as he states: “the return to the things themselves, or the beginnings of a move toward political philosophy, is closely tied to my relationship with Aron.” And in the case of Aron, “the personal factor [was] decisive.” Manent paints a picture of a remarkable man, regarding him as a figure in the likeness of Cicero—“a man of the public square, who speaks with authority and competence and eloquence on public affairs.” It was Aron who turned Manent “definitively towards political things as the site where human life finds its proper tension and reveals its stakes.”

Having been so drawn, Manent nevertheless experienced a further tension: he felt the need to seek “a criterion for politics, a reference beyond politics that might supply a criterion for politics.” Insofar as Aron experienced no comparable need of transcendence—no desire for a Platonic “measure,” as it were—he generously suggested that Manent turn to the works of Leo Strauss. In Strauss Manent encountered the thinker who has had “the greatest influence” on him regarding speculative thought, and the author with whom he has “debated most intensely.” His previous simultaneous discovery of philosophy and religion in Thomism was called into question by Strauss's thought. Strauss famously argued any proposed synthesis between the two “risks losing what is most essential in each of the elements,” as each is a self-sufficient way unto itself.

While Manent finds Strauss's description of the philosopher as an apparently superhuman type to be implausible (and both Plato and Strauss might agree), Manent's continued engagement with Strauss's works (as well as his encounter with one of Strauss's most famous students, Allan Bloom) refined his effort to understand what he calls “the three great poles” of human life—philosophy, politics, and religion—in relation to one another. Ever triangulating by questioning each from the perspective of the others—by only temporarily resting in either philosophy, politics, or religion—Manent's work holds the elements together, while bringing each into greater relief. Put otherwise, insofar as each of these “human attitudes” requires complete devotion, Manent's serious attention to all three, with an intellectually graceful movement between and among them, allows him to operate with what he calls “a fragile equilibrium” or “a productive disequilibrium.” Nor is this just a matter of the soul of an individual thinker, the triangulation allows him to investigate how “these three dimensions are articulated throughout Western history” and thereby constitute the Western dynamic.

In Thinking Politically, Manent offers helpful reflections on his project of recounting Western political development through what he calls “a history of political forms,” the most comprehensive account of which can be found in his work, Metamorphoses of the City: On the Western Dynamic (originally published in French in 2010, the same year as the French version of Seeing Things Politically). Reiterating the importance of simplicity, he says he began with “very simple facts available in any elementary history book.” Two main forms of human association, namely, the city and the empire, constituted the ancient Greco–Roman world. And yet, after the fall of Rome, despite the persistence of certain empires and some flourishing cities of note, neither the city nor the empire gave Europe its form, its characteristic mode of political association. Instead, a third form, the nation, emerged. Manent's account asks why and how it was so. This leads him to examine its matrix, the Roman political experience, with rare philosophical subtlety, as well as to probe the “European theological-political problem” in very concrete terms—that is, just how the “Christian proposition,” with its novel understanding of human association in the form of the Church, impacted the reestablishment of European political order.

Manent's compelling account of the nation throughout his works is also a contemporary defense of this modern political form; the history Manent traces inevitably becomes an apology (in the original sense of the word), insofar as he demonstrates the importance of forming and maintaining a concrete common order for human flourishing and action. The nation was one such form, the modern analogue to the ancient polis. If it is to be scrapped, if it is to be wisely jettisoned, it must be replaced by something that respects the political nature of man and the political condition of humanity, as well as the essential requirements of political community. The latter include some definite circumscription of “the body” of the community, its territory and population, and shared understandings (and instruments) of justice and self-rule.

Consequently, Manent critiques contemporary European elites for being “on vacation,” with their disregard of political necessity, their commitment to “the religion of humanity,” and their reliance on American military protection. The moralistic vision of creating a unified, post-national continent has lulled Europeans into forgetting the political condition of humanity. Given that “there is no future for Europe in European projects as now constituted,” political recollection and reconstruction is imperative. What is needed, however, is not necessarily forthcoming.

In light of present circumstances, Manent conceives of three “great possibilities” for Europe. The first, and also the least likely, is the actual production of a new political form. The unlikelihood of such a “heroic” act of founding is due to the absence of any evident person, country, or institution that is up to the task. The second possible scenario is that Europeans sink into a greater state of inertia, as they ultimately “drink the last drop from the narcotic cup of moralizing.” Acting as vanguards of “humanity,” they are likely to be overcome by the actions of those nations who neither share in the faith of a “religion of humanity,” nor are much impressed by European proselytizing. External pressures, some of which are already imposing themselves on Europe, may evoke “survival reactions,” although the form and degree of survival is anything but self-evident. The final possibility Manent foresees is that “the old nations and the old religion” become resources anew, which would require giving them new life. The outstanding question is how to do so, at which point Manent defers to Machiavelli's lesson that “necessity is a great teacher.” That said, Manent's own work is a non-Machiavellian effort to contribute to just such a European political renewal.

Seeing Things Politically and the entire body of Manent's thought are not only relevant to Europeans, because his gaze and concerns are directed at the West more generally. He offers thoughtful meditations on the distinctiveness of the West, not least with his suggestion that the “dynamic of the West” rests in its repeated efforts to marry the universality of truth with the particularity of community—to manifest the fullness of the human soul giving due regard to all of the three great human attitudes of philosophy, politics, and religion. The West has demonstrated great confidence of soul in the past, and Manent evocatively recalls numerous instances and orientations of the soul's movement, perhaps the greatest of which has been in its discovered capacity for “conversion”—not just religious but philosophic, as the Platonic discussion of metanoia in the Republic indicates. In reading these conversations with Manent, and in learning to see things as they have been and are —in seeing things politically—American and European readers will be prompted to look at the past and present of the West with clearer vision, as well as with a soul full of wonder at this fascinating history, and gratitude to the elegant French guide who articulates it so directly and profoundly.