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Pierre Manent Between Nature and History Ralph C. Hancock Pierre Manent (b. 1949) has been praised very plausibly as the greatest living political philosopher. Raised in a committed communist family, he converted to Catholic Christianity in his youth. In his intellectual formation he benefited richly from the French national educational meritocracy and from that system’s then still robust commitment to classical educational ideals. Raymond Aron, perhaps the greatest social scientist of his century (though shamefully almost ignored in the contemporary academy), late in his remarkable career hired the young Manent as his assistant. Manent credits Aron with saving him from the fashionable contempt of intellectuals for politics (including, especially, those intellectuals who fancy themselves politically “engagés”) and showing him the high price in study and reflection that must be paid for real political knowledge. It was Aron who referred Manent to the writings of Leo Strauss. In a poignant passage of his memoir-interview, Manent recalls that it was Aron himself who, in a way, redirected Manent’s inquiries toward Strauss. Manent explains that he longed for some intellectual measure beyond politics that Aron, a perfect gentleman apparently perfectly at home in a world without a transcendent measure, could not supply. Recognizing his assistant’s irrepressible interest in the transcendent dimension of political questions, and having not the slightest taste for cultivating disciples, “Aron,” Manent says, “led me to Strauss knowing that to go towards Strauss was to distance myself from him [Aron].” This is not at all to say that Manent in any way left behind Aron’s remarkable political discernment and judgment, or for that matter, that he was to find in Strauss’s 6 120 R alp h C . Ha ncock works fully satisfactory guidance in his quest for a “measure” of political judgment. On the contrary, the Parisian author, while acknowledging a great debt of gratitude to the great German émigré, is also quite capable (which for some reason is rare among American “Straussians”) of criticizing him both candidly and trenchantly. One notable point of difference between Manent and Strauss concerns precisely the question that will concern us here—of the status of Christianity in the interpretation of modernity, as we shall see. Christianity and Modernity The question of the relation between Christianity and the modern project is by no means narrowly historical or hermeneutical, since it bears on the very coherence andlegitimacyofthemodernprojectandthusontheideasandidealsthatframeour perceptions and deliberations and profoundly condition our lives. If modernity in some way derives from and depends upon Christianity and does not know it, then it risks being blind to its own deepest motives. Likewise, if profoundly Christian assumptions or motives issue into the modern project in ways that Christians ignore, then Christians are subject to a blindness that mirrors that of (other) moderns. Even if he has not simply dismissed it, Pierre Manent has been careful to keep his distance from the argument that modernity was somehow generated by Christianity , or from Christianity, the notion that modern ideas or ideals are Christian commitments in “secularized” form. This is an argument that has been favored, in one form or another, by authors ranging from Hegel and Constant in the aftermath of the French Revolution to Marcel Gauchet and Charles Taylor in our own time. But one has only to mention the name of Friedrich Nietzsche to be reminded that the secularization theory has by no means always been understood to be favorable to the honor of modern “rationalism” and its associated moral horizon. Hans Blumenberg thought it necessary to refute the secularization thesis in order to defend The Legitimacy of the Modern Age.1 Indeed it is far from obvious how a Christian pedigree can be good news for a modernity that understands itself as the emancipation of humanity from any authority supposed to be above or beyond it. To be sure, Manent by no means denies that Christianity is involved in the genesis of modernity. Indeed, one might say, the whole point of his most important philosophical book The City of Man is to uncover the Christian factor in this genesis, or more precisely, to “interpret the movement of modernity, the condition of modern humanity, according to a triangulation that takes equally seriously the ancient, the modern, and the Christian poles.” It is “by taking seriously the Christian pole” that Manent proposes to “escape the alternative of Straussian ‘naturalism’ and Heideggerian ‘historicism’.”2 The Christian pole is involved not only negatively or polemi- [18.223.108.186] Project MUSE (2024...

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