Customer Reviews

The City of Man

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The first amazon.com review here offered by a reader from Dallas, Texas, strikes me as slightly misleading. "Good fascists," Christian monks, and heroic military invention make no appearance in Pierre Manent's THE CITY OF MAN. They are, rather, that particular reader's context for understanding what Manent is writing about: namely, Montesquieu and the career of liberal political theory and its social-scientific offspring in the past several centuries.

Manent's project is to try to understand "modern man." But to do so confronts us immediately with a riddle. To understand modern man, we would seem first to need to understand man's NATURE; but then, if man has a nature, HISTORY should not matter, and there could be no deep difference between modern man and ancient man. Yet we intuitively know that there is a very real modern "difference." "Modern man" seems to be both a natural being and an historical being. How can we understand this paradox?

In pursuing this question with formidable dialectical subtlety, Manent has opened genuinely new ground in political philosophy -- or at least retrieved a possibility which has been eclipsed for several centuries. Manent has learned much from Leo Strauss, and it is perhaps readers of Strauss who will find this book most extraordinary. For Manent in effect takes issue with a central tenet of Strauss's political philosophy: the alternatives we face are NOT exhausted by those offered by "ancients" and "moderns." For such a structuring of the history of political philosophy fails to do justice to what is unique in Christianity.

Manent's singular contribution, then, is to recover the genuinely philosophical implications of Grace.

Pretty dense philosophical reading, but if you have the endurance to get through it, Manent is very insightful. He really does great job challenging the tenants of modernity, but leaves us questioning what can take their place.

Manent has produced a work of genius. And America is the place he describes: where man can be "free" without any conception of what he really is or what he is for, and thus without any conception what freedom really is.

Most world religions have not recognized what we call "progress" as a major category. Long before Christian monks unleashed science through their formulation of the scientific method, high cultures were being annihilated by a seemingly willful ignoring of the military importance of innovation. The "good Fascists" Evola and Guenon,while showing the inevitable decline of all civilizations with the underclass demolishing everything man-conceived in the final phase, they seem to "heroically" rise above mentioning the importance of delaying "kali yuga" by cranking up the power of military innovation. Guenon makes no mention of it, and Evola briefly mentions it with no conclusions. But it does appear to me human "progress is an illusion, and material progress is utterly superficial, if it weren't so dangerous, without human progress. CITY OF MAN shows a particularly precipitous discontinuity in the slope of human regress when Montesquieu irresponsibly, even mischievously blurs the connotations of classical and Christian "virtue" and recasts the word in egalitarian terms. He meretriciously appeals to Nietzsche's ressentiment in this last phase, not of Christian/Judeo/Islam Civilization, but this last phase of civilizational Christianity/Judaism/Islam. This will-to-nihilism, the morbid end of will-to-power, was taken up by Rousseau, as Manent points out, and we know the trail of mischief-makers since. We laugh at all forms of the Sacred, but strangely no one laughs when the word "rights" is spoken, neither the speaker nor the listener. Yet the enterprise of Hobbes, his right to life and the more important right to