Manent and the Politics of the Common Good

Pierre Manent’s (2015) Beyond Radical Secularism: How France the Christian West Should Respond to the Islamic Challenge (translated by Ralph Hancock) is [recall this post] structured around a two-fold contrast between a good and bad providentialism (e.g. p. 111-112), which is quite explicit (see below), and a contrast between a good and a bad republicanism.

First, the bad (or artificial) providentialism is liberal in character: it is associated with globalization, open borders, and markets. (It is a peculiar fact that many informed commentators mistakenly think of Manent as a classical liberal.) Manent treats the bad providentialism of “globalization or free exchange,” as a species of “rootlessness” (p. 112)

I want to quote a paragraph that supports these claims, but I do so also to open up discussion of some of Manent’s other commitments:

If we do not give up on life, we must act. In order to act, we must have confidence in the possibility of the good. Why forbid ourselves out of conscience to follow this confidence all the way? It seems to me, in any case, that if we do not succeed in turning once more with confidence towards the possibility of the Good, or at least in tracing this movement of the heart, we will not recover the desire to govern ourselves and the confidence in our own powers that alone can nourish this desire. The idea of acting for the common good has lost its meaning for us. We do whatever it is we do, not because it is useful, honest or noble, but because it is necessary, because we cannot do otherwise. In the name of a global marketplace, we have constructed a system of action that can best be described as an artificial Providence: at once the only thing we can do and the best that we can do is to respond with docility to the indications of the global marketplace, each indication having the superhuman force and authority of the Whole on its side. My how we love this providence! How docile we are when its hand comes down on us! And how the wise and powerful know to interpret its dictates! Never have there been so few arguments against divine Providence, since we have organized ourselves in order to have less and less need of free will, in order to have less and less need to carry out a complete action, that is, one oriented by the idea of a good desirable in itself, since we no longer want to act except as driven by necessity. We will not be able to re-open the domain of action if we do not dissipate the prestige of this false providence, if we do not recover a reflection on the political order as the framework and the product of choice for the common good, if we do not rediscover the desire and hope of the Covenant.—pp. 71-72 [emphasis in original

Now, Manent is not interested in providing an evaluation of the “arguments against divine providence.” (I return to the significance of this at the end.) Rather, what he takes for granted is that the false providence of globalization and open borders prevents a political order that acts as a framework and the effect of choice for the common good. The true providence at least allows “confidence” in the “possibility” of the good, including the common good.

Second, the bad republicanism is also liberal in character: “When we proclaim the attachment of all to the values of the Republic, this must in truth be understood as proposing values without a Republic or values of a Republic without any common good.” (p. 96) For the bad republicanism displaces the nation and instead focuses on rights of men or human rights as distinct of rights of citizens who in the good republicanism use the state as a powerful tool to create the common good. I quote a key passage:

I have emphasized repeatedly - and this in a way constitutes the main critical proposition of this essay - that our political regime has progressively brought about its own paralysis by the ever narrower and more unilateral way it has understood its principles. The rights of man have been separated radically from the rights of the citizen and, instead of freeing members of society in order to make them capable and desirous of participating in what is common, they are now supposed to suffice to themselves, and public institutions are nothing more than their docile instrument. We are probably the first, and we will surely remain the only, people under the good providence. (p. 85)

The good republicanism creates the conditions for a common life, and with such a common life the state as a powerful instrument as representative of the nation that pursues a common good is possible again. For Manent, a common good “implies belonging, common education, loyalty and devotion what is common” (p. 96) As Manent puts it, we need to “succeed in reviving representation, the consciousness and the will of a common life, the feeling that it is desirable to participate in a form of life.” (p. 80; see also p.25: the claim to represent the national community brings with it the authority to determine common goals and to focus social and political energy.)

While Manent invites his reader to welcome an anti-liberal national project with the blessing of providence, Manent himself does not offer a program of collective action in light of the good. He claims “only a legislator or a prophet, or a prophet legislator, would dare propose a definite re-ordering.” (p. 113)

But for Manent the circumstances of France are ripe for the arrival of such a legislator. And that’s because on Manent’s interpretation, France has returned to an existential stage of its existence. And this existential moment is not defined by the “simple problem of equality of rights,” (p. 78, but rather allows for the “decisive question” which is “the form of common life.” (p. 78)

He repeatedly asserts that “war against us has been declared and is happening.” (pp. 33) We are the “object of enmity,” (p. 34; see also p. 6, p. 42 and p. 78 inter alia) And so Manent, in response, opts for what he calls a “defensive war” (p. 34) one that will lead to a new form of national life for France in which new friendships are possible: “There is indeed a life in common or a civic friendship to work out with our Muslim fellow citizens, as with all the others; but we will have to build community and friendship on other bases than those of the secular Republic, or at least the dominant and as it were scholastic interpretation of that Republic.” (p. 38)

So much by way of summary of Manent. There is in Manent, thus, quite a bit of overlap with what is now studied as integralism. But in contrast to modern integralists (like, say, Tom Pink or

Adrian Vermeule

), Manent’s refounded republicanism of the French nation with (to use a phrase Manent repeatedly invokes) a “Christian mark” (that has bonds of friendship with Jews and Muslims) is not in the business of witnessing truth. So, in the new republic he envisions, the state will aim for the common good, but truth is still private a matter. For, in Manent there seems to be an unacknowledged or residue Kantianism such that metaphysical truths are, by and large, unavailable, but an ethical life is possible within the nation. For he envisions the new the covenant to be one “between communion and freedom.” (p. 65)