The City of Man

Mr. Gray is Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics.

The City of Man, by Pierre Manent, translated by Marc A. LePain, with an introduction by Jean Bethke Elshtain (Princeton, 225 pp., $28.95)

PIERRE Manent's The City of Man is nothing less than a diagnosis of the modern condition. Subtly written and containing passages of deep learning, it presents a powerful challenge to the modern world's image of itself.

Like many others, Manent identifies modernity with a rejection of the authority of the past. Early modern thinkers such as Hobbes and Locke marked their break with classical civilization by repudiating the understanding of the good life that was taken for granted by Plato and Aristotle. They sought to overturn the authority of tradition by appealing directly to reason and nature. Thinkers from Montesquieu and Hume to this day have done the same. But in Manent's view these modern thinkers have not replaced the authority of tradition by a rational appeal to nature. They have done away with the very idea of nature. For at the heart of the modern view of things, as Manent understands it, is the denial that man has a nature.

When modern thinkers rejected the past, he argues, it was not for the sake of nature but merely for the sake of the new. French Enlightenment thinkers embraced the novel regime they thought they perceived in England -- a regime not of virtue as the ancients had understood it, but of commerce and liberty. Montesquieu developed an entire political theory to justify this modern regime. But the rational foundation which Enlightenment thinkers imagined they had found for commercial society was not really available to them. By rejecting the ancient idea of nature, modern thinkers left themselves with no account of man in terms of which history could be judged. How can English liberty be the best regime if there are no universal standards by which different regimes can be assessed?

Enlightenment thinkers needed to have things both ways. They had to reject classical conceptions of vice, virtue, and human nature in order to defend commercial society; but they needed a similar conception of man if they were to show that such a society was best. As Manent puts it, in a characteristically gnomic and provocative statement, "Without being able to give a rational account of what satisfies it, Enlightenment reason believes more things than it actually understands." The effect of Enlightenment thought has not been to enthrone Nature; it has been to sanctify the New. Indeed, Manent hints, that may have been its real intent.

Most historians will find these claims implausible. After all, the writings of the founders of modern political thought abound with references to nature -- not least human nature. Both Hobbes and Locke invoke the nature of man as the final secular support for their political philosophies. The idea that man is no more than the sum of his history and social relationships, which is fashionable today among postmodernists, was unknown to them. Indeed, as Manent recognizes, Hobbes and Locke were able to claim universal authority for their political beliefs precisely because they thought they were entailed by a true view of human nature.

But Manent does not write here merely as a historian. Instead he is offering the reader an arresting narrative model of the rise and development of modern philosophy, in which the incoherences of early modern thought lead on to ever more extreme positions. So it was --Manent seems to believe -- that Hobbes's account of men's appetite for power over one another led on to Nietzsche's nihilistic doctrine of the will-to-power. In this example, as in some others, Manent's account is reminiscent of the story of modern Western philosophy that is told in the writings of Leo Strauss. (The City of Man is dedicated to the memory of Allan Bloom.)

The proper way to judge a narrative is by its plausibility. Judged by this standard The City of Man is unconvincing. It presents European intellectual history as a single story line, in which the ideas that dominate the modern age are inexorable developments of a few simple, misguided thoughts that were conceived at the beginning of that age. But that is a fanciful tale which leaves out all the accidents and vicissitudes that have brought us to where we are. Manent himself insists that chance events have a pivotal role in history, which is why history can never be understood in terms of universal, "scientific" laws. Thus he writes of the Battle of Britain that "If . . . one attributes the English resistance of 1940 to the great soul of Churchill, one at the same time attributes it to chance; it was by a great 'chance' that such a man as Churchill found himself at that very moment in a situation to take action."

Manent's critique of modern thought is pungent and often memorably aphoristic. The City of Man is written with a grace and verve that is uncommon in academic philosophy. But much of the argument is presented in the form of enigmatic and hyperbolic assertions. In reality, the world today is not the conclusion of an argument set out in early modern times but rather the fortuitous result of a miscellany of causes. Curiously, for all his animus against everything modern, Manent seems bewitched by one of the modern world's most besetting illusions -- its unshakable conviction of its own inevitability.

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