Pierre Manent is director of studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and coeditor
of the journal La Pensée politique.
Review
"Pierre Manent has the lively and free step of a man who has chosen the society of great minds. After so
many books that make the reader consider the great authors in the context of an inventory of their neuroses or
an account of their property, it is good to encounter a work where the content of the thoughts is more important
than the conditions of their production."
--Mona Ozouf, Le Nouvel observateur
"Manent has written a concise and graceful essay on the history of liberal thought. . . . This book makes
clear that even the most emphatically political liberalisms always involve more than opinions about forms of government.
Liberalism, as he reconstructs it, is an elaborate edifice of beliefs, practices and institutions. To neglect any
one of these elements is, in Manent's account, to endanger the whole."
--Peter Berkowitz, The Boston Book Review
"This book is situated in what can be seen as the most important cultural current of the end of the twentieth
century, that is to say the systematic reevaluation of modernity. . . . Pierre Manent explains to us with remarkable
clarity and conciseness that our comprehension of modern politics must be replaced in the frame of religious dilemmas
from which it has emerged."
--Jean Marejko, L'Impact
"Manent's striking claim is that to make sense of liberalism as a form of life one must see it in the light
of the spirit that animates it, and that that animating spirit comes into sharpest focus in the writings of the
great European political theorists. . . . He has written a concise and graceful essay on the history of liberal
thought."
--The Boston Book Review
"Manent's whirlwind tour through the major works of modern political philosophy attempts to answer the
question, Where are we heading?" . . . Manent's approach . . . exhibits a profundity not often encountered
in contemporary AngloAmerican political philosophy. . . . [his] book can be placed proudly next to the classic
works of two of his teachers: Raymond Aron and Leo Strauss."
--Crisis
"He has not offered us one of those academic tomes that seem more concerned with scoring points against
rivals in the academy than with the material itself. Instead, Manent has, in 10 pointed lessons," taken up
the central questions animating some of the major works of modernity. . . . Manent's work is filled with remarkable
insights into the nature of liberalism."
--Adam Wolfson, The Public Interest
Submitted by the Publisher, April, 2002
Summary
Highlighting the social tensions that confront the liberal tradition, Pierre Manent draws a portrait of what
we, citizens of modern liberal democracies, have become. For Manent, a discussion of liberalism encompasses the
foundations of modern society, its secularism, its individualism, and its conception of rights. The frequent incapacity
of the morally neutral, democratic state to further social causes, he argues, derives from the liberal stance that
political life does not serve a higher purpose. Through quickmoving, highly synthetic essays, he explores the development
of liberal thinking in terms of a single theme: the decline of theological politics. The author traces the liberal
stance to Machiavelli, who, in seeking to divorce everyday life from the pervasive influence of the Catholic church,
separated politics from all notions of a cosmological order. What followed, as Manent demonstrates in his analyses
of Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, Guizot, and Constant, was the evolving concept of an individual with no goals outside
the confines of the self and a state with no purpose but to prevent individuals from dominating one another. Weighing
both the positive and negative effects of such a political arrangement, Manent raises important questions about
the fundamental political issues of the day, among them the possibility of individual rights being reconciled with
the necessary demands of political organization, and the desirability of a government system neutral about religion
but not about public morals.
Table of Contents
Foreword
Preface
Ch. I Europe and the Theologico-Political Problem
Ch. II Machiavelli and the Fecundity of Evil
Ch. III Hobbes and the New Political Art
Ch. IV Locke, Labor, and Property
Ch. V Montesquieu and the Separation of Powers
Ch. VI Rousseau, Critic of Liberalism
Ch. VII Liberalism after the French Revolution
Ch. VIII Benjamin Constant and the Liberalism of Opposition
Ch. IX Francois Guizot: The Liberalism of Government
Ch. X Tocqueville: Liberalism Confronts Democracy
