Available in English for the first time, Imperfect Garden is both
an approachable intellectual history and a bracing treatise on how
we should understand and experience our lives. In it, one of
France's most prominent intellectuals explores the foundations,
limits, and possibilities of humanist thinking. Through his
critical but sympathetic excavation of humanism, Tzvetan Todorov
seeks an answer to modernity's fundamental challenge: how to
maintain our hard-won liberty without paying too dearly in social
ties, common values, and a coherent and responsible sense of self.
Todorov reads afresh the works of major humanists--primarily
Montaigne, Rousseau, and Constant, but also Descartes, Montesquieu,
and Toqueville. Each chapter considers humanism's approach to one
major theme of human existence: liberty, social life, love, self,
morality, and expression. Discussing humanism in dialogue with
other systems, Todorov finds a response to the predicament of
modernity that is far more instructive than any offered by
conservatism, scientific determinism, existential individualism, or
humanism's other contemporary competitors. Humanism suggests that
we are members of an intelligent and sociable species who can act
according to our will while connecting the well-being of other
members with our own. It is through this understanding of free
will, Todorov argues, that we can use humanism to rescue
universality and reconcile human liberty with solidarity and
personal integrity. Placing the history of ideas at the service of
a quest for moral and political wisdom, Todorov's compelling and no
doubt controversial rethinking of humanist ideas testifies to the
enduring capacity of those ideas to meditate on--and, if we are
fortunate, cultivate--the imperfect garden in which we live.
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