(Princeton, £22.95)
Most modern liberals take it for granted that progress means transcending the nation state. In his new book, Pierre Manent tries to understand today's impatient cosmopolitanism in the light of western political philosophy. Along the way, he elaborates a full-bodied cultural criticism of what Daniel Bell termed the "antinomian" ethos of modern man: our unwillingness to accept limits on our freedom to remake our authentic, absolute self. In the same way as cultural traditions mediate and constrain the self, the nation state frustrates our desire to achieve a perfect public self based purely on universal law. Individualism and universalism are two sides of the same worldview, chafing against the mediations of particular communities. Hence the dreams of today's western political elites incline towards cosmopolitanism—as Manent says, "Americans, through the extension to the whole world of the US's writ, Europeans, through the extension beyond Europe's borders of Brussels' 'mechanisms and values.'" Indeed, both Europe and America are characterised by an inability to place limits—cultural, geographic or political—on their respective liberal visions. The flipside of this is a failure to accept national particularity and a consequent cosmopolitan overreach by liberal-democratic proselytisers, who burnish their "culture-free" credentials in an attempt to convince sceptics outside the west. This results in both resentment by non-western peoples and an alienated western mass public, which cannot connect to the faceless supranational constitutions, judges, bureaucrats, quangos and NGOs of the emerging "post-political" order.
Aspects of this line of criticism can be found in communitarian writings, such as those of Charles Taylor, who insists that we can only realise ourselves by interacting with others and making commitments to particular communities. Likewise, liberal nationalist political theorists, like Yael Tamir or David Miller, defend nations against cosmopolitan critics such as Jeremy Waldron. However, what is distinctive in Manent is the way he links cultural criticism of the unbounded self with a political assault on limitless cosmopolitanism. In so doing, his work marks a new twist in the evolution of the postwar "New York intellectual" tradition, represented by Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer and others.
Though Manent has always worked exclusively in French, is a committed Catholic and emerged from the Parisian cultural milieu of 1968, his mentor was the counter-revolutionary social thinker Raymond Aron. Aron's youthful Jewish socialism, postwar anticommunist liberalism and post-1968 cultural criticism mirrors that of the New York tradition. Indeed, there were so many links between Aron and these Jewish Americans—through the journal Commentary and Aron's French counterpart Commentaire, for example—that Bell considers Aron an integral part of the New York movement. Manent emerged as an Aron supporter against Sartre and the student revolutionaries of '68, and his subsequent work has concentrated on what he considers the poverty of modern liberalism.
So far, so good: one can easily spot the connection between the critique of cultural individualism espoused by Bell, or more recently by Allan Bloom, and Manent (though Bell, strangely, is not referenced in the book). Yet most of the New York intellectuals focused on ethics and religion, calling for some kind of return to faith. To be sure, Manent supports this, lamenting ethics' escape from its sacred canopy. But there the analogy ends, for—with the exception of Glazer—few neoconservatives had much to say about the nation. Indeed, it is Bell who coined the phrase, "The nation has become too small for the big problems of life and too big for the small."
Manent's own account begins by locating the pluralism of liberal democracy in the separation of church and state, and, within the latter, the separation of powers between executive, judiciary, legislature and other political institutions. This pluralism helps to contain conflict, but represses questions about truth and community, and awakens a desire for wholeness that has inspired various species of utopian politics. Communism and fascism both attempted to overcome social pluralism, but failed, leaving liberal democracy the victor. Contemporary liberalism now seeks to overcome the "separations" of democratic pluralism by denuding the political container in which its principles reside, so as to realise a society governed purely by law. This consigns politics to a fading role in a Kantian ethical sphere based on submission to a universal law of human rights. Law replaces politics, and juridical specialists elbow aside the demos, its politicians and even national constitutions. This vision, claims Manent, is legitimated by an appeal to compassion, which is a sentiment rooted not in a higher ideal like God or truth, but in the base material sentiment of the avoidance of suffering. Manent draws on Rousseau to argue that an ethics of compassion is based on a desire to avoid physical pain. Our moral connections to others are made through imagining our own sensory displeasure rather than by contemplating a higher rational or spiritual ideal.
The subject of the nation is sometimes lost in such a capacious discussion, but it is always in the background. Manent traces the rise of the nation as a political form closely linked to liberal democracy. Empires give freedom only to the ruler, but democratic city-states spread this freedom to a wider strata of non-slave male citizens. Nations give it to all their citizens, and the discourse of international human rights seeks to universalise this freedom. Manent, however, cautions that throughout mankind's political development, ethical projects have always been located in political communities, and have never had a free-standing, cosmopolitan character. In Europe, by contrast, there is a very modern aspiration to escape political embodiment, and to speak only of European values without defining the boundaries of the political body that will bear them.
The three engines of the emerging post-political utopia are commerce, rights and morality. The faith in commerce as an incubator of "gentle mores" can be traced to Montesquieu and St Simon, who hoped that it would end conflict. Rights are rooted in the Kantian discourse of universal human rights, upheld by activist judges who legitimate their decisions by appealing to international norms and codes. In turn, morality comes to be emancipated from particular social frameworks to connect humans together as individuals rather than national citizens.
This book will stand as a unique contribution to conservative political thought, with its potent combination of cultural, ethical and political criticism. But Manent is less strong when he strays from political theory. His discussion of the nation, for example, fails to address the vast post-1990 literature on liberal nationalism and multiculturalism. After all, communitarian writers also oppose Sartrean individualism, but seek instead to resurrect the "mediations" of minority ethnic groups and nations against the claims of universalist liberals. How does Manent square his opposition to cosmopolitanism with his critique of multiculturalism? How does one support French state nationalism on one hand and oppose Corsican nationalism or Algerian identity politics on the other?
Manent's picture of the premodern political order also seems out of touch with contemporary scholarship. The nation state in Europe largely emerged in the teeth of strong Catholic-universalist opposition. The progenitors of nationalism were secular liberals while the defenders of the old order (with Manent's favoured mediations of church, manners and hierarchy) were anti-nationalists whose dreams of the Roman empire and the universal church gave birth to the European idea he detests. Too often in this book, one gets the impression that modern universalism is a flight from the premodern when it may, in fact, be a return. Finally, the book fails to match its criticisms with a clear statement of the alternative. How should the nation state be defended against the supranational, and how should it reconnect with the yearnings, imaginings and deeds of past generations?
A good book generates many questions, and none of this one's shortcomings detract from its powerful argument that the universalist hopes of western political elites are on a collision course with the popular desire for moorings in place and time.
