Two cheers for politics.(A World beyond Politics? A Defense of the Nation-State)(Book review)

A World beyond Politics? A Defense of the Nation-State, by Pierre Manent (Princeton, 228 pp., $35)

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IN this dazzling book, French political philosopher Pierre Manent tries to provide an "impartial overview of the political order--or disorder--of today's world." Few living thinkers could hope to pull off such an ambitious undertaking, but Manent is surely one. In earlier works, including An Intellectual History of Liberalism, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy, and The City of Man, this former student of Raymond Aron excavated the deep intellectual sources of modernity in the writings of Hobbes, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, Smith, and other great minds, with whom he effortlessly converses. In A World beyond Politics?--which is based on lectures delivered several years ago at Paris's prestigious Institute of Political Studies--Manent shifts his emphasis from intellectual archeology to spiritual topography: What does it mean to be a citizen of a present-day liberal democracy?

Not that Manent abandons the long view. To understand the modern liberal world, he argues, you need to see how it emerged--in the ideas of the philosophers first, then in practice--along the "theological-political vector" of Western history. To escape priestly political authority and religious warfare, liberal societies sought to disconnect religion (and even strongly held opinions of the good) from politics. Politics would no longer focus on ideal ends; these would now be considered private concerns in civil society. Instead, politics would seek 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 would arise on "low but solid ground," as the philosopher Leo Strauss famously observed.

The bourgeois order, born with the Enlightenment and the national political revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries, has offered "the most stable, therefore the most satisfying putting into practice of political liberty that humanity has ever known," Manent rightly points out. But it has faced fierce critics. Because it separates power from opinion, especially religious opinion, the liberal regime frustrates a natural instinct to see our highest ideals reflected in political life. It is, in this sense, permanently dissatisfying. It invites utopian efforts to do it in and replace it with a pure "politics of meaning." The two deadliest threats to liberal democracy--Communism and National Socialism--were monstrous, hyper-political projects of this kind, Manent says. The Islamist terrorists who struck on 9/11 represent another.

A subtler threat to liberal democracy seeks to leave politics behind entirely, to embody a universal civilization of pure rights or commerce. Manent sees this post-political trend at work in the European Union, at least in its current form. Aristotle described citizenship as an act of putting forth words and deeds in a common space. But Europeans don't know what they share, in that common space: They forge new shared institutions but leave the old national ones still in place, creating a bizarre "juxtaposition of old and new institutions" that guarantees maximum confusion and political alienation. Even the EU's territorial boundaries--essential to all forms of politics--remain blurry. Should the EU include Turkey? Russia? Where does one draw the line? Who's the boss?

Manent believes that the EU project is, in its own way, as utopian as the 20th-century totalitarianisms. To be real, democracy "needs a body, a population marked out by borders and other characteristics, namely a defined realm." The nation-state, discredited in Europe by the brutality of megalomaniacal nationalism--gave democracy a body. Europe's dream of tossing the nation on history's dust heap is understandable, given the history of the 20th century. But what "political form" takes its place? Unless the EU becomes a kind of United States of Europe, with clear territorial limits and a will to act politically--so far utterly missing except when it is thwarting the United States--its woolly, confused nature ensures collapse. The EU's anti-political drift is most evident in its hallucinatory belief that war is obsolete and that all conflict can give way to rational negotiation and consensus. The lessons of history--including Europe's own ...