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June 29, 2007
In his review of Pierre Manent's A World Beyond Politics: A Defense of the Nation-State in Prospect Eric Kaufman say that Manent locates the pluralism of liberal democracy in the separation of church and state, and, within the latter, the seperation of powers between executive, judiciary, legislature, and other political institutions.This pluralism helps to contain truth and community but represses the desire for wholenss that has inspired various forms of utopian politics.
Manent's text is based on lectures delivered several years ago at Paris's Institute of Political Studies. He is concerned with the question: What does it mean to be a citizen of a present-day liberal democracy?
Kaufman indicates the Manent's understaqnding of the modern liberal world, its "theological-political vector" of Western history, in a few words. He says:
Contemporary liberalism now seeks to overcome the "separations" of democratic pluralism by denuding the political container in which its principles reside, so as to realize a society governed purely by law. This consigns politics to a fading role in a Kantian ethical sphere based on submission to a universal laws of human rights. Law replaces politics and judicial specialists elbow aside the demos, its politicians and even national constitutions.
Thus we have post-political utopia driven by commerce, human rights upheld by judges, and amorality that connects humans together as individuals and not as citizens. Manent sees this post-political trend at work in the European Union.
Manent argues that both democracy and the nation-state are under threat--from apolitical tendencies such as the cult of international commerce and attempts to replace democratic decisions with judicial procedures.
Politics longer focus on good ends as these are now considered private concerns in civil society. Instead, politics seeks to secure the best conditions to meet needs and protect rights. Men could thus busy themselves making some cash, cultivating their property, and pursuing happiness as they saw it instead of butchering one another over clashing conceptions of the good. Liberal modernity arises on "low but solid ground," as the philosopher Leo Strauss famously observed.
Consequently, the process of individualization intensifies, and thus the authority of the communities of different orders in which human beings hitherto found the meaning of their life--the nation, the family, the church--declines more and more each day,
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But doesn't increasing individualism and apoliticalness mean that virtue, rather than being embodied in top-down groups like the church or state, is now becoming one of individual moral expression? Surely that was the goal of bodies like the church anyway?