As much as I like politics, the past few years have worn me out with the same arguments playing out over and over.
When this happens, first of all, I recommend that you read Plato's Republic in order to get out of the modern mindset
entirely. But another option is to read Pierre Manent. Like Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1800s, he is a French thinker
with a profound understanding and appreciation of America's great role in political history. What is new in America
is what once was in Europe. Even the American university, with all its problems as noted by Allan Bloom, has certain
advantages over the European at this point in time. Bloom's remark to Manent about Socrates is mysterious and
fascinating.
Manent is a respected philosopher but humbly settles for being known as a political scientist or political thinker, one
who seeks to understand what is. The order of politics is the order of human life. He is inside the triangle of politics,
philosophy, and religion. Politics and religion are things we shouldn't talk about at the table, and philosophy is laughed
at as impractical! But those are eternally recurrent things. He sees Raymond Aron as staying within politics, Leo Strauss
with philosophy, and Jacques Maritain focusing on religion. Or in a different sense, Churchill can't focus on philosophy
or religion and remain Churchill; Socrates is ever the philosopher; and Thomas Aquinas, while he uses philosophy well,
is primarily a theologian because he has given his life to the Answer that precedes all questions. Manent notes that
the great philosophers of the 20th century, like Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Bergson and Husserl, had very little to say
about politics, and when they did, as in the case of Heidegger, it would be better if they didn't! So the project to
rehabilitate political thought is of great importance. The 20th century had so much politics, so much action, and yet
so little deliberation upon it because the science of deliberation, which goes back to Aristotle, has been replaced by
the science of history. It's not what is to be done but the mere study of what has been done.
Along the way Pierre has unique takes on a lot of things. He is a Catholic who appreciates the medievals but notes
that in terms of politics, the medieval era was more disorderly than the modern, the reverse of what many Catholic
medievalists would say. Machiavelli and Rousseau also have surprising roles in this exposition of the history of
political philosophy. What made the Greeks distinct? Among other things, it was the political decision not to be
governed by the tradition from their fathers, but to self govern according to rational principles. This began the movement
of Western civilization, the notion of conversion, that one can change and yet remain the same person. This moved
from the ancient pagan virtue of glory, to the Christian emphasis on subjective and objectively moral action, to the
modern Enlightenment priority of individual conscience.
Toward the end, Manent notes the tyranny of political correctness and identity politics. This postmodernism is
sometimes traced to Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, who was good to Manent but rhetorically on a different
planet, so to speak. I don't know what he thinks about President Trump, but he certainly identifies the problems that
Trump responds to. Identity politics focuses on race, gender, sexual orientation, things that are either impossible or
unlikely to change, while politics is suppose to be about action in the public domain, creating something that didn't
previously exist. And political correctness limits the terms of debate, so that the French, Dutch and Irish are unable
to determine their destiny and constrained by the terms set by the European Union. This book came out in 2015 I
believe, just in time for the responses of Brexit and the Trump campaign.
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