Daniel J. Mahoney

Liberty, Equality, Nobility: Kolnai, Tocqueville, and the Moral Foundations of Democracy

he Hungarian-born moral and political philosopher Aurel Kolnai (1900-1973) was among the T twentieth century’s most philosophically minded conservative critics of “progressive democracy.” I In his writings in political philosophy, he was an independent, even idiosyncratic thinker, indebted most especially to the broad spirit of classical and medieval thought and to the phenomenological school’s desire to “let the phenomena speak,” to recover the “sovereignty of the object.” He particularly identified with “conservative-liberal” thinkers such as Burke and Tocqueville (and a host of lesser known nineteenth and twentieth century critics of mass society), who recognized the ultimate dependence of modern liberty on premodern traditions and supports. In his Politicul Memoirs ( 1 955) he states that these conservativeliberal thinkers helped him arrive at the “insight that, if the technical elaboration of the Rechtsstaat-constitutional government and society regulated by law-had been largely a work of Liberals, its historical basis and spiritual presuppositions were eminently Conservative: tied, that is, to a habit of stable civilization and an intrinsic concept of moderate and plural authority” (PM, 210).’ Kolnai’s occasionally intemperate polemics against progressive democracy sometimes convey the impression of a cranky, backward-looking thinker, an aristocratic liberal who saw democracy as the deadly enemy of liberty properly understood. But this is far from the case. In the spirit o f the best conservative-liberal thought, Kolnai defended “the constitutional design of public power, the validity of the universal moral Law, the protection of general human and civic rights, and the plane of Christian equality among men” (PL, 49). Kolnai, to be sure, fiercely denounced a “‘common man’ conception of democracy”* that reduced the inherent plurality of individual and collective life to an understanding of man as “nothing but man,” “unencumbered by culture and possessions” and “unfettered by dogma, tradition, and presupposition” (CRE, 142). As John Hittinger has noted, Kolnai was a critic avant la lettre of contemporary liberalism’s celebration of the unencumbered self.3 Kolnai believed that such a reduction of man to the lowest common denominator of “pure humanity” undermined the dignity and individuali ty of all men, including the “nobleness” inherent in the ordinary human being as such. The “common man” conceptiori of democracy was incipiently totalitarian because it presupposed a unitary and “arbitrary human will,” a “prideful identitarianism” which was coextensive with the “self-sovereignty” of man (PL, 44). Kolnai believed that true liberty was inseparable from privilege. This language hardly reassures dogmatic democrats, but it is not evidence of antiliberal or antidemocratic intent on Kolnai’s part. He never defended the right of an aristocracy or oligarchy to rule by nature or independently of the just claims of ordinary citizens. Instead, he enviDunieE J. Muhoney is an associate professor at Assumption College in Worcestel; Massachusetts. His most recent book is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent From Ideology.

Communion and Consent: Pierre Manent on the Wellsprings of Western Liberty

Abstract This article explores the intellectual itinerary of the contemporary French political philosopher Pierre Manent. In particular, it highlights his efforts to do justice to the three great “poles” of human existence: philosophy, politics, and religion. Manent is shown to be a philosophically minded Christian, one who thinks politically and who rejects the temptation to “despise the temporal order.” Manents reservations about the European project in its present form are shown to be rooted in a understanding of politics that emphasizes the need to weave together “communion” and “consent” if Europeans are to avoid administrative despotism and those postpolitical fantasies that prevent them from thinking and acting politically. The article ends with a reflection on Manents impressive history of “political forms” in the Western world.

On Human Nature: by Roger Scruton, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 151 pp. ISBN: 978–0691168753. Publication Date: 2017

The question of what human nature is appears as one of the major riddles of human history. And while in some ways we now know much more about its qualities than people have known at any time previously, we nevertheless seem not so far removed from those citizens of Thebe that could not answer the riddle of the Sphinx. All announcements that this discovery or that, most lately predominantly in the area of the so-called life sciences, would spell the end of the age-old secret of our own being have proved premature. Indeed, most recently, as if in mockery of some scientists’ enthusiasm, the debate has turned into various alleys that could not be more diverse, even contradictory. Thus the metaphor of a battlefield, which I employ in the title to this communication, might be criticised not only for its perhaps overly bellicose overtones, but for a substantial imprecision. In many ways today’s controversy about human nature is not fought on one ‘battlefield’, it is spread out over various discourses which often seem all but unconnected. The late surge of neo-naturalism, which has come with the ascent of neuroscience and the life sciences in general, coincided with the rise of historical anthropology which, in spite of its name, comes along in many ways as fundamental criticism of all traditional anthropologies including, but not limited to, theological anthropology. While some scientists, who often argue as self-appointed philosophers of science, declare that human nature is all in our genes or in our brain cells, cultural studies inform us that human nature does not exist except as a historical or social

Friendship and the Solitude of Greatness: The Case of Charles de Gaulle

ABSTRACT The French statesman Charles de Gaulle was, and remains, something of an enigma. A genuinely great man, at first glance, he seems to tower above mere humanity. In studying de Gaulles biographies and writings, the statesman and military man eclipses the human being without leaving his human bearing wholly behind. De Gaulle himself emphasized the solitude and sadness that accompanied the burden of human greatness. Yet de Gaulle, the self-described “man of character,” “the born protector,” was also a loving husband, a not terribly demanding or severe father, a faithful Christian, and a French patriot. There were profound limits to his solitude and self-sufficiency. His austere magnanimity coincided with moderation, even benevolence. He loved his country, strove for greatness, and sacrificed something of his private happiness for the public good. He was a complex man and soul, and perhaps a conflicted one.

Defending the West in All Its Amplitude: The Liberal Conservative Vision of Roger Scruton

ABSTRACT This article explores the mixture of conservatism and liberalism that informs Roger Scrutons political and philosophical reflection. It highlights his response to the “culture of repudiation,” his resistance to totalitarianism, his defense of national loyalty (as opposed to ideological nationalism), his conservative-minded environmentalism, and his defense of order—and government—against libertarian and leftist assaults on legitimate authority. In particular, it explores a fruitful tension in Scrutons thought between a robust acknowledgment of the Christian features of Western civilization (a civilization that is unthinkable without a Christian emphasis on confession and forgiveness) and Scrutons forthright defense of the secular state against Islamist fanaticism. The article also explores affinities and differences between Scrutons understanding of the Wests conjugation of Christianity and secularism and Pierre Manents critique of radical secularism. The article concludes with reflections on Scrutons judicious melding of truth and liberty, and philosophy and Christianity.

A Liberal and a Classic: Pierre Manent's Neo-Aristotelian Reading of Raymond Aron

ABSTRACT The contemporary French political philosopher Pierre Manent is, by his own account, deeply influenced by the Christian tradition, by Leo Strauss, and by his teacher Raymond Aron. This article explores Manents indebtedness to Raymond Aron (1905–1983), one of the great political thinkers of the twentieth century. In a series of writings about Aron over the past thirty-five years, Manent presents a public man who spoke with “authority and competence of the things of the city, whose eloquence was able to instruct the public as it retained the ear of princes, of whom the sovereign reason seized, in each situation, the essential.” Manent has thought long and hard about Arons lucid and courageous opposition to totalitarianism, his defense of human liberty and political reason, and his affinities with the prudence and sobriety of the first great political scientist, Aristotle. Manents Aron is a liberal classic more than a classical liberal. His defense of modern liberty never forgot that even a free society must cultivate virtue and respect for the common good. This article shows the affinities between the later Aron in particular and Manents own political writings. Manents own turn to the chose publique owes much to Aristotle as indirectly mediated by Aron.

The Totalitarian Negation of Man: Raymond Aron on Ideology and Totalitarianism

Raymond Aron’s life and political reflection was coextensive with the totalitarian epoch that emerged with the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 and came to an end with the implosion of the Soviet Union in the years immediately following his death in 1983. He did a great deal to educate western public opinion about the nature of totalitarianism, but he did not live to see the final defeat of the regime based upon the ideological Lie. His was a posthumous victory.

Review Article: Pierre Manent on the Fate of Democracy in Europe

With the publication of this compact yet eloquent book, the French political philosopher Pierre Manent has become a voice to be reckoned with in the present-day French and European civic conversation. This high-minded reflection on what Montesquieu called ‘the present configuration of things’ is the furthest thing from a ‘political intervention’ or the kind of all-too-predictable sermonizing that we have come to expect from activist intellectuals. It is a work of political philosophy that remains clearly focused on what Manent perceives to be the growing threat to democratic self-government in our time. With verve and a uniquely Gallic gift for the penetrating aperçu, Manent takes aim at the reduction of the political problem to a single desideratum: the maximization of individual and ‘social’ rights at the expense of the self-government of citizens and communities. This displacement of genuine politics by what Manent calls ‘pure democracy’ has created a situation that increasingly eludes the established categories of traditional political philosophy. Faced with the dangerous erosion of the European nation, of the political form responsible for the remarkable ‘inventiveness’ of European peoples, one has no choice but to philosophize on one’s own, to make one’s way amidst the new world of ‘humanitarian democracy’. We are in need of the contemporary equivalent of that ‘new political science for a world itself quite new’ so memorably evoked by Tocqueville in his ‘Author’s Introduction’ to Democracy in America in 1835. I do not mean to suggest that La raison des nations in and of itself provides such a political science. For all its virtues, it is too brief and unsystematic a work to provide a comprehensive response to the challenges posed by humanitarian democracy. But like its magisterial predecessor Cours familier de philosophie politique (2001), now available in English-translation as A World Beyond Politics? A Defense of the Nation-State,1 this work allows us to make sense of the profound metamorphosis undergone by European democracy over the last half-century. Manent describes a Europe separated from its own history by what he evocatively calls ‘the iron curtain of the years 1914–1945’. Europeans now only see in their long national histories a ‘culpable history’ culminating ‘in the mud of the Éparges at Verdun and the approach-ramp at Auschwitz’. The debilitating passivity of

“In the Truth of Our Political Nature”: Pierre Manent's Defense of Political Reason in Cours familier de philosophie politique

A political form, a political regime is a certain way-certainly always partial, and always repressive in some measure, hut a certain way of holding together the different aspects of human life. The political allows the different experiences to communicate with each other, and it obliges them to communicate, in each case according to the form and regime. This is why I said that the political was the great mediation of mediations: it precludes any experience from claiming absolute validity, i t prevents it from saturating the social field and individual consciousness, it requires it to coexist and communicate with the other experiences. In this sense politics is the guardian of the wealth and complexity of human life. (Cours,familier de philosophie politique, 334-35) torians-the most cited authors in the text are Rousse:ui, Marx, Tocqueville, Raymond Aron, and Claude Lefort. As ii result, the book is the furthest thing from doctrinaire: Manent shows an admirable willingness to learn from all the parties. Those diverse authors are Manent’s interlocutors. and in every case, interpretation is linked to the common task of illuminating the dilemmas of democratic modernity. But along the way the book provides an invaluable introduction to political philosophy, even as it keeps its focus steadily on the political world that political philosophy sets out to illuminate. All of Pierre Manent’s writings are a reflection on motlern humanity’s “liberal destiny.” It is our fate to live in a world framed and transformed by the presuppositions of modern liberty. Modern liberty posits a new human world built on the foundation of individual consent, a world o f free and equal individuals who affirm their collective sovereignty and individual rights. In important respects, this new world emancipates human beings from old constraints and injustices, even from the idea of an order of command. But at the same time it separates humans, undermining institutions and attachments that gave stability and meaning to human life. In Manent’s view, advanced liberal societies increasingly resemble a civilized version of the “state of nature” of free and equal individuals posited by the early modern political philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. The theoretical doctrines of revolutionary philosophers have to a remarkable extent become the lived reality of our age. All the old ties-family, religion, and nation-once deemed natural are increasingly attenuated and eroded. They are seen as restraints on freedom rather than its essential preconditions. They lack ultimate legitimacy in a world whose twin lodestars are the rights of the individual and the categorical imperative of sympathetic identification with suffering “humanity.” But Manent’s analysis is in no way reactionary. He places no hopes in a he French political philosopher Pierre Manent describes his latest book, Coursfamilier de philosophie politique, as a “tableuu raisorznk du monde actuel“--“an analytic overview of the contemporary world” (see the avant-propos to the book).’ The book is a reworking of twenty-two leclures originally delivered at the Institute of Political Studies (Stirnces Po) in Paris on the “Great Stakes” of modern politics. The gracefully crafted lectures provide nothing less than a comprehensive analysis of the political condition of modern nian. In them, Manent treats the full range of political phenomena: the dynamics of liberal society, debates about equality, the place of religion in officially secular societies, Europe and future of the nation, the wars of the twentieth century, political economy, the nature of democratic individualism, the family and feminism, and the quesl ion of totalitarianism. There is, however, nothing superficia1 or summary about the discussions. The book displays an unforced mastery of the theory and practice of politics, commenting with equal penetration on the texts of Aristotle o r the limits of “humanitarian intervention” in Kosovo. One of‘ the great charms of the book, as Paul Thibaud has suggested, is Manent’s masterly use of the “art of citalion.”? His guides to the study of politics include an impressive range of philosophers, social theorists, and his-

Renewing the Political Perspective: Reflections on James Ceaser, Political Science, and Liberal Democracy

ames W. Ceaser has established himself as one of America’s most distinguished political scientists-and its most intelligent articulator of the enterprise that he calls “traditional political science.” Ceaser is an unabashed partisan of the view that human beings are political animals whose thought and action are shaped, in the most immediate and decisive ways, by the political order or regime. In his two most recent books, Liberul Democracy und Political Science ( 1990) and Reconstructing America The Symbol ojAmerica in Modern Thought (1997),’ Ceaser provides the most thoroughgoing contemporary defense of the political perspective against its reduction to the subpolitical (e.g., social, biological, or economic determinants) or its elevation to the suprapolitical (the unfolding of “Being” or the historical process). Along the way, he chastises academic political scientists for losing a sense of the dignity of their own vocation, for forgetting that political science is much more than a merely academic discipline. In its original and most capacious sense, political science is that enterprise by which human beings become conscious of their status as political beings. Political science is then crucial for human self-understanding. In Ceaser’s presentation, traditional political science attempts to come to terms with the historical conditions or context within which political choice unfolds, provides an analysis of general regime types and of what maintains or undermines them, and aids citizens and statesmen in reflecting on what maintains or undermines any specific