As I was reading my monthly Bible—guess what that is—I came across an enthusiastic review of a book, written by a French political philosopher, Pierre Manent, entitled Metamorphoses of the City. I rushed to buy a copy.
The book purports to be an account of the evolution of European political systems from the days of Homer to our present time. An exciting challenge, but the result is rather paradoxical. The author is basically an historian of philosophy and offers, most of the time, a rather clear though often disputable presentation of a succession of political doctrines in lieu of political systems. However, they are rather loosely related, and the further one reads, the more nagging the simple question becomes: What does the author want to prove, or even to say? What issue is he tackling? What general idea runs through the book? One feels very much as if one is reading Leo Strauss: The more one understands every word or chapter—even if to disagree—the hazier the rationale for the succession of notions. The contrast is striking between the fuzziness of the general purpose and the utter precision and almost picky erudition of the comments on each author. What is interesting when describing an evolution is to understand why one stage leads to another, which is precisely what the reader is hard put to assess in this particular case. The author himself ascribes the birth of each following stage simply to the (unexplained) decay of the previous one.
It must be added that the reader gets no help from the rather prejudiced ideas presented in many chapters. For the sake of brevity I shall pinpoint only a few significant ones. The usual liberal hailing of Athenian democracy under Pericles (the author’s constant reference) just as usually ignores the fact that only the tributes paid at that time by Athens’ so-called allies allowed a lull in the otherwise constant fighting between the richer and the poorer. To see the Roman caesars’ power as an anticipation of that wielded by Machiavelli’s prince presupposes that the former could take the same cynical view of their own power as the latter did. Thereupon, to claim that Christianity had no political ideas—i.e., notably to suppose that Saint Augustine preached an exclusive concern for the Great Beyond, and therefore practically to overlook the Middle Ages in the history of Europe’s political systems, as the author does—I cannot but find simply preposterous, unless one considers the ubiquity and endurance of Christian kingdoms for almost a millennium to be a negligible fact. To see the condottiere as fathering the contractual peacemaking chief constable that is Hobbes’s sovereign is a play on words. And can it be reasonably said that Rousseau’s hidden intention, while building his theory of democracy, was to allow the domination of the rich over the poor? The concluding 50 pages are still more puzzling. All of a sudden we learn that history is only intelligible as a “progress towards the universal” in which Judaism, Christianity, and Greek philosophy (a clearly Straussian trinity) play a definite but unsatisfactory role, because none achieves a truly “universal universality.” Which leads to praising Kant for his seeking such universality, but also to criticizing him for his lack of “universalizing operation,” whatever that means. The book ends by deploring the absence of “mediation” without bothering to define between whom (the author mentions pell-mell mediation between mankind and God, men and men, individuals and mankind, body and mind), even though the development of nations, deemed to be a side effect of Lutheranism, seems to represent such mediation. All the same, nations being apparently unable to overcome their nationalism, we are now stuck with an idolatry of mankind, which the author thinks partly justifiable in view of the Shoah, but which eventually “offer no resources for mediation.”
At this point the average reader is bound to try to take stock of what he has read. Personally, all this fogginess set aside, I cannot bring myself to believe it possible to write almost 500 pages without having at least some semblance of an idea in mind. So, while confessing my inability to fly in such rarified atmospheres, I shall venture an hypothesis about the meaning of the whole endeavor, which could be taken as bearing a sort of involuntary lesson.
Indeed—but again this may be my mistaken reconstruction—it is just possible that at the back of the author’s mind lie two notions, both smacking of orthodox classical liberalism in their optimistic pessimism, or their pessimistic optimism. The first is that men are animals whose nature is to govern themselves. (“The only possible cause of the course of human history is man himself trying to order his own humanity by being his own master.”) But the second and correlated notion could be that, in the process of governing themselves, man, or rather each man, is facing the temptation of being more self-centered than other-oriented, or in the author’s terms, more selfish than virtuous; more self-serving than civic-minded. Then the author could appear to look for some sort of universal recipe for bad men to be good citizens. For him Pericles’ Athens obviously represents a model, which unfortunately has been lost: In his eyes, Athenian democracy represents a miracle that never occurred again. This would explain why Rome is an enigma. (Why should citizens be true to a city that no longer exists?) Or why Catholicism is basically useless, since the city Catholics want to live in is not the terrestrial one. Or why the institution of the modern state suddenly sprouted, because a new caesar became necessary to overcome constant strife among individuals. Or why the nations appeared as a motivation to a loyalty that the state was unable to breed. And finally why, nationalism being a danger, some tried to turn mankind into a city for all men, but unfortunately a city without appeal for the modern individual, so that the author seems left waiting for a messiah to appear.
Now, if that is what he means, and it is no figment of my obsession with clear and distinct ideas, the entire book, unbeknownst to its author, actually bears a simple lesson. For its material could be used to prove that, contrary to the author’s seldom explicit but obviously firm convictions, men are not creatures able to govern themselves without some help from outside, meaning from above, and that whenever they managed to set up some more or less sustainable city, it was because they believed in something other than themselves. Beyond their obvious shortcomings, Athens or even Rome more or less endured because (though the author does not recognize it) they had religious, though pagan, beliefs, while the Christian kingdoms (which the author ignores) managed, again despite their defects, to last through centuries because, from kings to commoners, they held a common trust in the Christian God. On the contrary, as soon as the West began to be more and more populated with individuals whose only belief was in themselves, to the point of deeming themselves able to be their only legitimate masters, the West actually started dying as a body of societies whose members could be, whatever else, at least civic minded—civi-lized.
But this is obviously a lesson the author is utterly resistant to drawing, since, as a true liberal, he is looking for an oxymoron—in this instance a human reason for men to behave as men should but don’t, for individualistic individuals to transcend their individualism, and in a word for man to be a god to man—very much in the manner of Tocqueville hailing democracy after showing how unviable the system is.
I end up thinking that all in all Pierre Manent is a sort of unfaithful heir to Leo Strauss and Raymond Aron. He inherited from the former both his almost exclusive interest in the history of philosophy and his Pythic way of using it deviously to suggest a concealed lesson. (Strauss was concerned with the means for certain minorities to secure power.) But Manent does not entertain any equivalent creed, since to him Christianity, or any religious belief for that matter, seems to belong in a Lockean manner to the private realm, and does not tie in with any particular political dogma. And, to his other mentor, Aron, he owes his being an ingrained classical liberal (which Strauss was not), though a liberal who seems more or less confusedly doubtful about the ultimate virtues of liberalism—which probably puts him at odds with Aron, but also puts him in a bind. It is obvious that he is neither conservative (all in all, he takes the only plausible political system for us to be representative democracy as understood in Paris or Washington) nor an orthodox Catholic (unless on a private level as per the liberal dogma). Would it be that he belongs to that most common species of Catholic, those who are afraid of their own faith, and to that rather exotic species of liberal, those who have become more or less apprehensive about the seaworthiness of their craft, but keep riding it?
In any case, I cannot resist asking a quite simple question: If Manent realizes what’s nagging him, why doesn’t he state it clearly? And if he doesn’t, why the heck does he write 500 pages about it? But it is true that it does not always pay to be clear: Among today’s intelligentsia, those who claim the emperor has no clothes are regarded as idiots.
[Metamorphoses of the City, by Pierre Manent (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) 384 pp., $39.95]
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