Paul Seaton

Liberation from the Weberian Iron Cage: Pierre Manent on Max Weber

(2002). Liberation from the Weberian Iron Cage: Pierre Manent on Max Weber. Perspectives on Political Science: Vol. 31, No. 3, pp. 165-172.

Reading Tocqueville Today

ocqueville’s star shines brightly over France and America, and that is a good thing. Such an opening sentence emulates Tocqueville. It begins with a perceptive observation, which then is complemented by an authoritative judgment. The latter is eminently plausible but elusively does not reveal its grounds. All in all, readers are instructed and their intereist is piqued. In the case of Tocqueville, the reader is in the hdnds of a master thinker, writer, and pedagogue. As evidence for my opening observation, I could note the many fine scholars and political scientists (latu senso) on both *ides of the Atlantic who expressly acknowledge debts to Tocqueville. In France one could begin with the late Franpis Furet, then add Claude Lefort, Pierre Manent, Philigpe BCnCton, and Marcel Gauchet; in America three of the hqtst political theorists/political scientists we have, all well known analysts of American politics in general and electibns in particular, Harvey Mansfield, Wilson Carey

A Review of “The Line Through the Heart: Natural Law as Fact, Theory, and Sign of Contradiction”

Dr. Jay Budziszewski is a longtime professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He has dual appointments in the departments of government and philosophy. A number of years ago (1995–1996), he made a splash with three articles in the journal First Things critiquing communitarianism, conservatism, and liberalism. More than dissatisfaction with contemporary political options was expressed—an independent moral-political perspective declared itself. For starters, he is something of an Aristotelian in that he connects ethics and politics in his thinking (cf. Nichomachean Ethics X, 9). He maintains that the study of our common life, of law and public authority, ought to be conceived and practiced as a branch of ethics, not in terms of the methodologically preshaped objects of value-free social science. Moreover, he is very much a teleological ethician. He thus also distinguishes himself from those contemporary legal and political theorists who make rather abstract moral theory central to their thought. He has more substantive content to his thought and is less enamored of contemporary progressive notions of equality and freedom than they. But he is more than an Aristotelian, as a glance at the titles of his books would indicate: The Resurrection of Nature: Political Theory and the Human Character (1986), The Nearest Coast of Darkness: A Vindication of the Politics of Virtues (1988), True Tolerance: Liberalism and the Necessity of Judgment (1992), Written on the Heart: The Case for Natural Law (1997), The Revenge of Conscience: Politics and the Fall of Man (1999), and What We Can’t Know: A Guide (2003). Aristotle’s moral psychology did not speak of the human heart—that term has a biblical provenance. And one has to work hard, and in the end without great success, to discern a notion of conscience in his ethical writings. Nor did he confront the issues—monotheistic biblical religion, religious pluralism, religiously motivated civil strife—that cluster around tolerance and that helped lead to modern liberalism. And, finally, for good reasons Thomas Aquinas, not Aristotle, is the classical figure in the tradition of natural law thinking. As Leo Strauss pointed out, natural law significantly ups the ante in terms of moral, metaphysical, and cognitive demands from Aristotelian natural right. These increments start with God as creator and legislator and work their way down to the constitution of human nature. And in an even more robust version, one that has emerged recently in the literature, natural law involves the God of revelation and redemption, expressly hearkens to the deliverances of faith, and factors in human experiences such as remorse, repentance, and conversion, which are often thought to be reserved for religion and theology. As one could surmise from the title of one of his books, “written on the heart” (cf. Romans I, 19–20), and the subtitle of another, “the fall of man,” Budziszewski is a Christian and his natural law thought is expressly Christian. Since he is a Catholic Christian, nature and reason receive distinct recognition and consideration. But they are not deemed autonomous. Given all of this, his work can be fruitfully compared with other contemporary Catholic natural law scholars such as Christopher Wolfe (Natural Law Liberalism) and Russell Hittinger (The First Grace: Rediscovering the Natural Law). Like them, he maintains that nature and creation must be thought together, as well as reason and faith. Like them, he believes that a full theoretical account of the moral order requires the theoretician to recognize and synthesize a good number of elements: the person and human nature; the right and the good; conscience, with its moral imperatives and obligations, together with human freedom and prudential flexibility; and much more. Like them, he believes that genuinely liberal political order must recognize substantive grounds and ends of human liberty and not rest content with mere formal procedures and ever-expanding abstractions such as autonomy. Similarly, he maintains that natural law thinking regularly needs to be “refreshed” as it encounters new evidence and confronts new challenges. Today, this means engaging the findings and claims of scientific naturalism and the views of advanced and advancing, or progressive, liberalism. In turning to these two culturally salient instances he joins with a number of thinkers, including Pierre Manent and Pope Benedict XVI, who recognize modern science and liberty as the twin lodestars of contemporary Western secular culture. More expansively, for Budziszewski it is science practiced as technology with few limits (whether ethical or metaphysical) and science as a dogmatically held worldview that are the first objects of his concern and critique. His natural law ethics and theistic thought must confront them. Contemporary scientific, or scientistic, strictures about what constitutes “reasonable” or “rational” must be exposed as unreasonable and arbitrary and the notion of ‘the natural’ must be expanded. Similarly, but in a contrary direction, his naturally and theologically grounded ethics must parry and, as it were, pare back the hyperextended conceptions of human liberty and equality proposed by many liberals. In no way, though, is he an antitechnology, anti-science Luddite, nor is he against human liberty or even rights. He forthrightly affirms “that proper toleration and respect for the dignity of conscience are duties of natural law” (xvi). He is acutely aware that his

A Review of “The Difference God Makes: A Catholic Vision of Faith, Communion, and Culture”: George, Francis Cardinal, O. M. I. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company

employed the story of Thetis’s artful appeal to Zeus for a favor. He owed her, but she pretended otherwise, thus currying divine favor. Perhaps, Holloway lacks the awareness of Aristotelian irony that Mary Nichols exhibited here. This attention to the human soul in its fullness and to human nature in its complexity is expanded upon, and complicated by, the Christian modifications of magnanimity discussed by Holloway himself, Deutsch in his essay on Aquinas, and Fornieri in his essay on Lincoln. As analyzed by Aquinas, Christian humility is not a negation of human greatness. Thomas himself said that a humility that cannot coexist with greatness, whether within oneself or in another, is not true humility. Fornieri explains: “Magnanimity considers the person’s worthiness of honor in comparison to the deficiency of others. Humility considers the agent’s own deficiency in comparison to the perfection of God.” These two dispositions incorporate a Christian emphasis upon human equality that does not deny greatness, although it complicates it. Greatness is real, it is a real gift to a few, but it remains a gift and one that is founded upon a fundamental human dependency and equality. As the Thomistic teaching indicates, classical Christianity was open to instruction from pagan sources. It also can supply what classical thought itself called for. Christian egalitarianism, Deutsch argues, can provide an important motive for the psychological tempering that Cicero called for under the rubric of “duty” (officium). It keeps the great within the bonds of the human community, it requires them to see their inferiors as fellows. The influences of nature and grace go both ways, though. Fornieri’s description of Lincoln’s genuine “humility” and its Christian source is evidence of the leavening character of Christian belief, even upon those who do not share it. It also can have a critical edge. Fornieri’s account of Christian magnanimity explicitly presents a rebuttal to Harvey C. Mansfield’s “otherwise excellent and important study” of manliness, because it cannot account for Lincoln’s harmonious embodiment of greatness and humility, which he nicely styles “Biblical Magnanimity.” One of the main achievements of this book is to elucidate this last concept, to show that it is a paradoxical formulation but not an oxymoron. This collection quite incisively addresses a wide range of thinkers and issues central to magnanimous statesmanship. The stimulating conflicts and coherence of these essays—the historical framework formed by unresolved tensions in ancient, Christian, and modern thought—require, while rewarding, the thoughtful engagement of the reader. These tensions, however, are not merely “historical,” they resonate within our own souls and illumine our own democratic life. To make sense of this is a chief task of political and philosophical reflection, especially within democratic circumstances. We too—as democratic citizens, potential democratic statesmen, and students of the human—have a great deal to learn from these studies of the great-souled man, not only about what to look for in an excellent other, but also about our own ambitions and perennial limitations.

17.79 cloth ISBN: 13:978-0-8245-2582-8 Publication Date: 2009

tively of factions and praised civic friendship, Montesquieu, in a Machiavellian vein, spoke positively of parties. He was nonplussed before the animosity and rivalry characterizing them, because they help keep each other’s potentially tyrannical projects in check. In keeping with this modern emphasis, the constitution of liberty can also be called a system, and Manent more than once refers to “Montesquieu’s system of liberty.” He considers both its “statics and dynamics,” as well as various “mechanisms” structuring its movements. The statics include liberal society’s fundamental “division” into an independent civil society and its governing instrument, representative government, as well as the “separation or distribution” of governing powers with their respective “competences.”4 Its dynamics include the “double interplay” (double jeu) of various attachments, interests, and sentiments that help shape the souls and lives of the members of this unique social-political whole. The liberal citizen often is both a member of a particular partisan grouping within civil society—one seeking to have its views enacted into law and imposed on the whole of society—and someone attached to the vibrant freedom of civil society operating independently of government. The strength of his attachments, together with his sentiments and even his actions, oscillates between these disparate commitments, depending on circumstance and judgment. Nor is it otherwise with his attitudes toward the state. He regularly feels both truly represented by government, by the powers that be, and alienated from, even threatened by, the same. The permutations in this area are many, but the basic options are inscribed in his position vis-à-vis government as the great set of instrumentalities that can be wielded by him or by his opponents, that can please him or displease him. The English order is therefore rather novel, requiring new designations and analysis. Above all, it is unique because it is expressly aimed and marvelously arranged to protect and promote liberty, even “extreme liberty” (which Mon-

Fortunate Powerlessness: Pierre Manent on Montesquieu's Constitutional System of Modern Liberty

Political Philosophy and the God of Abraham, Thomas L. Pangle, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003, pp. 263 In the beginning was Leo Strauss with his trailblazing Platonizing exegeses of Genesis, “On the Interpretation of Genesis” and “Jerusalem and Athens.” Strauss begat many strong and independent minds who commented on the text. Hillel Fradkin and Robert Sacks were two of the earliest, as was Leon Kass. Kass recently published a hefty commentary on the entirety of Genesis, The Beginning of Wisdom (New York: Free press, 2003).