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.
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