Highlighting the social tensions that confront the liberal
tradition, Pierre Manent draws a portrait of what we, citizens of
modern liberal democracies, have become. For Manent, a discussion
of liberalism encompasses the foundations of modern society, its
secularism, its individualism, and its conception of rights. The
frequent incapacity of the morally neutral, democratic state to
further social causes, he argues, derives from the liberal stance
that political life does not serve a higher purpose. Through
quick-moving, highly synthetic essays, he explores the development
of liberal thinking in terms of a single theme: the decline of
theological politics.
The author traces the liberal stance to Machiavelli, who, in
seeking to divorce everyday life from the pervasive influence of
the Catholic church, separated politics from all notions of a
cosmological order. What followed, as Manent demonstrates in his
analyses of Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, Guizot, and Constant, was the
evolving concept of an individual with no goals outside the
confines of the self and a state with no purpose but to prevent
individuals from dominating one another. Weighing both the positive
and negative effects of such a political arrangement, Manent raises
important questions about the fundamental political issues of the
day, among them the possibility of individual rights being
reconciled with the necessary demands of political organization,
and the desirability of a government system neutral about religion
but not about public morals.
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