Natural Law and Human Rights by Pierre Manent (review)

—The first-time reader of Manent could come to the book with a misconception based on its title, and a good deal of its argument will come as a surprise even to longtime readers of the French political philosopher. My first task, therefore, is to obviate misunderstandings and acknowledge novelties. By “natural law” Manent does not mean either Thomistic natural law or the modern (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau) replacements for it. He has a distinctive meaning, a more Aristotelian understanding. But it is not the notion of natural law that Aristotle himself discusses in the Rhetoric. Manent’s notion takes its bearings from the Stagirite’s discussion of the three objects of deliberation in book 2 of the Nicomachean Ethics, the noble, the pleasant, the useful. He has his reasons for doing so, but the reader will need to bracket other versions in order to consider them.

For longtime readers, there are at least two surprises, the first being the appeal to natural law itself. In over forty years of writing about modern political philosophy and modern politics, Manent has never (to my knowledge) discussed its modern versions as such or invoked any normative version in his own name. Explicit discussion of traditional natural law is rather recent for Manent; 2014 saw him counsel Thomists how to go about reintroducing their notion to contemporaries. (This text is included as an appendix.) Natural law appears in his own name for the first time in this book, with the Aristotelian character noted earlier. While a surprise, it does have an intrinsic connection with longstanding concerns.

The second surprise is connected with these concerns. To appreciate it, we need the backstory. Since the end of the Cold War, Manent has tracked and critiqued the systematic “depoliticization” and “denationalization” of life and thought on the European continent and the introduction of false ideas of human unity and of democracy itself. Repudiating traditional transcendent religions, elites have opted for a thoroughly secular “religion of Humanity” (the phase is from August Comte) and for a thin notion of democracy that reduces it to the rights of the individual and is divorced from any authoritative démos, understood as a collective agent of self-government. The replacement of the robust term “government” by the thin-grueled “governance” is an expression of a seismic shift on the Continent, one that is both antidemocratic and deeply antipolitical.

It is antipolitical because it runs counter to the nature of human beings as political animals and to what Manent calls “the political condition of humanity.” Not all countries are ruled by pacified humanitarian democrats, and it is foolish and dangerous to pretend so. The E.U., however, has proceeded on the assumption that such a world is imminent and normative. As for the political animal, he wants “to put speeches and actions in common” (the phrase is Aristotle’s) with his fellows in a self-governing community. The current configuration and leadership of the European Union, however, militates against this with their diktats, political correctness, and byzantine structures and ever-increasing pile of acquis communautaires.

In making this argument, Manent tracked the decline of the state as the emblem of collective identity and chief instrument of collective agency. He regularly reminded humanitarian elites of the essential services that the state provided to European humanity and to democracy, as well as the challenges of the contemporary political world for which it is an appropriate, even indispensable, instrument. For decades now, he has been “talking up” the state to those who see no use for it, unless perhaps to distribute an ever-increasing range of social rights.

His discussion of the state in Natural Law and Human Rights therefore comes as a surprise. He now presents it as a chief culprit in the depoliticization of the European political animal. More precisely, he lays to its charge the fateful “decommissioning” of the agent (the political animal...