Status Updates From Modern Liberty and Its Disc...

"....(The first liberals) believed they were freeing Europe from the fanaticism of 'pious cruelty.'...Manent has argued that liberalism has fundamentally failed to understand itself." -Daniel Mahoney explaining Pierre Manent's thought in the introduction to Modern Liberty and Its Discontents by Pierre Manent (pg. 7).

"...They, of course, go far beyond modern liberalism in their effort to forge human ties that have no natural or traditional supports. They aim to destroy or replace prosaic bourgeois society, but at the same time they reveal the impossibility of the project for a freedom divorced from or all natural or social determination. The totalitarianisms thus embody the self-destruction of Machiavellian modernity.."

Manent "The totalitarianism of the twentieth century, Nazism and communism, are simultaneously reactions against and intensifications of modern individualism. Despite their repeated claims to be harbingers of a new kind of community and a new kind of individual both were 'actually unprecedentedly virulent promoters of ... the absence of the of the natural human bond' ('On Modern Individualism')..."