The City of Man

by Pierre Manent, Jean Bethke Elshtain (Foreword), Marc A. LePain (Translator)

The "City of God" or the "City of Man"? This is the choice St. Augustine offered 1500 years ago--and according to Pierre Manent the modern West has decisively and irreversibly chosen the latter. In this subtle and wide-ranging book on the Western intellectual and political condition, Manent argues that the West has rejected the laws of God and of nature in a quest for human autonomy. But in declaring ourselves free and autonomous, he contends, we have, paradoxically, lost a sense of what it means to be human.


In the first part of the book, Manent explores the development of the social sciences since the seventeenth century, portraying their growth as a sign of increasing human "self-consciousness." But as social scientists have sought to free us from the intellectual confines of the ancient world, he writes, they have embraced modes of analysis--economic, sociological, and historical--that treat only narrow aspects of the human condition and portray individuals as helpless victims of impersonal forces. As a result, we have lost all sense of human agency and of the unified human subject at the center of intellectual study. Politics and culture have come to be seen as mere foam on the tides of historical and social necessity.


In the second half of the book, titled "Self-Affirmation," Manent examines how the West, having discovered freedom, then discovered arbitrary will and its dangers. With no shared touchstones or conceptions of virtue, for example, we have found it increasingly hard to communicate with each other. This is a striking contrast to the past, he writes, when even traditions as different as the Classical and the Christian held many of these conceptions in common.


The result of these discoveries, according to Manent, is the disturbing rootlessness that characterizes our time. By gaining autonomy from external authority, we have lost a sense of what we are. In "giving birth" to ourselves, we have abandoned that which alone can nurture and sustain us. With penetrating insight and remarkable erudition, Manent offers a profound analysis of the confusions and contradictions at the heart of the modern condition.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, History

248 pages, Paperback

First published March 23, 1998

About the author

Pierre Manent est directeur d' etudes a l' Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociales, membre fondateur de la revue Commentaire.

Reviews

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Curious book, this. When Manent dealt with French and English thinkers, I found his interpretations enlightening. With German thinkers, there was more variation. His take on Kant's moral perspective was very interesting. On the other hand, dealing with Weber primarily from an economic perspective misses, in my opinion, Weber's primary contribution to modern Western thought, which is arguably more historical than economic.

This is not the book to read on the train to work. My copy is full of annotations, and I frequently stopped to check material I wasn't familiar with. For example, it would be over half a century since I read anything about the Peloponnesian War, and a reference to Arginusae had me trawling the web. "Chiasmus" has now been added to the list of words I know the meaning of, but am highly unlikely to use.

Manent believes "in particular possibilities of equality", and sees modern man's continued development as contingent on nature and grace, with the latter the more important of the two. It is unsurprising that a book with this title would end on an organ note in a choir loft. What the reader makes of that will be more down to the reader than to Manent.

[Franco Bernasconi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joder, esto si es filosofía

[Hussein Ebeid · Rating 3 out of 5]

سُلطة التاريخ، المجتمع، نظام الاقتصاد في تكوين الذات .
و توكيدها يتم عن طريق تحقيق الذات بالارادة و الحرية و القدرة و ينتج ذلك عن نهاية الطبيعة المحكومة من قبل القوانين الوضعيه

انتهى.

[David Tye · Rating 5 out of 5]

Indispensable for the self-understanding of modern man.

[Aaron Crofut · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has two parts, and I read the first one. Manent is interesting and erudite; he made Montesquieu interesting, which I didn't even know was legal. The shift in the meaning of "virtue" is quite important. His notes on Sociology were good and largely in line with what I've thought of the social "sciences" for some time. The last chapter of the first part, on Adam Smith, was again enlightening, especially since I have not read Smith yet.

This is not an easy read, obviously. I truly wish I had gotten to it sooner in life, but right now is just not the time. January 2021: I'm checking the news to see if riots are coming to a town near me and then trying to understand the distinction between the term "invisible hand" in Smith's two works. I just can't focus on it properly. Someday I hope I can get back to this book, but right now it feels like the RMBK Reactor User's Manual in my hands ten seconds before Chernobyl went bust. "Oh shoot, guys, can you give me a couple of hours? Based on what I'm seeing here, we might have made a serious mis*BOOM*"

[Jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a brilliant interpretation of Modernity. Manent writes with clarity and, from time to time, humor, but his reading of the transition from "ancients" to "moderns" is far more persuasive and detailed than anything I've encountered before. I detect an affinity to Leo Strauss, by way of Allan Bloom, who is THE CITY OF MAN's dedicatee, but he surpasses Strauss in his nuanced readings of Montesquieu, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant. He gets to Heidegger, and I wish he'd said more about political thought in the last century, but what this book exposes is worth digesting.

[Olaf Hottofsson · Rating 1 out of 5]

Trash