A01=Pierre Manent
Allan Bloom
Antinomy
Appearance and Reality
Author_Pierre Manent
Brute fact
Carl Schmitt
Category=JHBA
Category=QDHR
Category=QDTS
Category=QRM
City-state
Cogito ergo sum
Commercialism
Consciousness
Contemporary society
Critique
Definition of man
Despotism
Determination
Divine law
Emile Durkheim
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Existentialism
First principle
God
Good and evil
Gresham's law
Homo economicus
Human Action
Individualism
Iron cage
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Karl Marx
Last man
Materialism
Modern philosophy
Montesquieu
Moral absolutism
Morality
Multitude
Nomos (sociology)
Ontology
Opportunism
Phenomenon
Philosopher
Philosophy
Political Man
Political philosophy
Politics
Profession
Public expenditure
Puritans
Radical evil
Raymond Aron
Reactionary
Reason
Religion
Reprobation
Right to property
Science of man
Self-consciousness
Sociology
Sovereignty
State of nature
Substance theory
Superiority (short story)
Tautology (rhetoric)
The Philosopher
The Spirit of the Laws
The Wealth of Nations
Theory of Forms
Thomas Hobbes
Thomism
Thought
Usury
Utilitarianism
Product details
- ISBN 9780691050256
- Weight: 369g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 07 May 2000
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
Pierre Manent is Directeur d'études at l'Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. He was formerly an assistant to Raymond Aron at the College de France and managing editor of Commentaire.
