Table Of ContentMONTAIGNE
CATHOLIC IDEAS FOR A SECULAR WORLD
O. Carter Snead, series editor
Under the sponsorship of the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at the University
of Notre Dame, the purpose of this interdisciplinary series is to feature authors from
around the world who will expand the influence of Catholic thought on the most import-
ant conversations in academia and the public square. The series is “Catholic” in the sense
that the books will emphasize and engage the enduring themes of human dignity and
flourishing, the common good, truth, beauty, justice, and freedom in ways that reflect
and deepen principles affirmed by the Catholic Church for millennia. It is not limited to
Catholic authors or even works that explicitly take Catholic principles as a point of
departure. Its books are intended to demonstrate the diversity and enhance the relevance
of these enduring themes and principles in numerous subjects, ranging from the arts and
humanities to the sciences.
M O N TA I G N E
Life without Law
*
PIER R E M A NEN T
Translated by Paul Seaton
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
undpress.nd.edu
Copyright © 2020 by the University of Notre Dame
Original French edition, Montaigne: La vie san loi.
© Flammarion, Paris, 2014.
Translated from the original French text by Paul Seaton.
All Rights Reserved
Published in the United States of America
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020940880
ISBN: 978-0-268-10781-9 (Hardback)
ISBN: 978-0-268-10784-0 (WebPDF)
ISBN: 978-0-268-10783-3 (Epub)
This e-Book was converted from the original
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Contents
Translator’s Foreword vii
Introduction: The Word and the Promise 1
PART 1 THE WAR OF HUMAN BEINGS
1 To Save One’s Life 11
2 To Compare Oneself 31
PART 2 THE POWERS OF THE WORD
3 From Rhetoric to Literature 71
4 The Word and Death 97
PART 3 THE MYSTERIES OF CUSTOM
5 A New World 117
6 Commanded Reason 129
7 Three Conditions of Human Beings 145
P ART 4 LIFE WITHOUT LAW
8 Governed Human Beings 161
9 Nature and Truth 181
Notes 217
Index 241
Translator’s Foreword
The eager reader can go directly to Manent’s own text. In this foreword I
place it in two relevant Manentian contexts; then I indicate something of
what awaits the reader. The contexts are Manent’s own oeuvre and his devel-
oping understanding of modernity’s origins. What awaits is an explication de
texte by a master reader.
*
In Montaigne: Life without Law, Pierre Manent (1949–) is at the top of his
game; truth be told, he’s been there for some time now. Long ago he did the
homework, an intensive study of the classics of political philosophy and social
theory. A close apprenticeship with Raymond Aron (1905–83) and private
reading of Leo Strauss (1899–1973) completed his first formation. Then he
struck out on his own.
Toward the end of the Cold War, he noted a worrisome “depoliticization”
and attendant “denationalization” of life and thought in Western Europe. In
the decades that followed, he tracked and criticized this attitude as it engaged
in its defining project, “the construction of Europe.” He became one of the
European Union’s best-known critics. In doing so, he went to the fundamen-
tals. Its guiding “Idea of Humanity”—as “virtually integrated,” with “no signifi-
cant collective differences”—is patently false and politically debilitating, while
its byzantine structures and bureaucratic rules resemble a return of enlight-
ened despotism.1 At the same time, and positively, he became a defender of
the nation-state.2 Manent did all this from a distinctive point of view, that of
political philosophy.
vii
viii Translator’s Foreword
As the reference to the old-fashioned term “political philosophy” may sug-
gest, going back as it does to Plato and Aristotle, contemporary concerns were
always situated in broader contexts and pursued with an eye to the deepest
issues. Tocqueville, an early guide, famously considered European man under
two vastly different orders, aristocracy and democracy. Manent followed that
expansive lead in an early book, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy
(1982). Eventually, the context encompassed the entirety of the Western po-
litical and spiritual adventure, and among the regularly treated issues was that
of the human soul. One was reminded of Plato’s Republic, with its dual focus
on soul types and regime types.
At first, Manent tended to proceed by discrete comparisons and contrasts
of ancient and modern arrangements and thoughts, but eventually he put it all
together in the magisterial Metamorphoses of the City: On the Dynamism of
Western Civilization (2010). This book was the fruit of a course he regularly
gave at L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris on
“political forms.” The ancient Greek city had known a variety of regimes, as
had the modern nation. But neither the city nor the nation was a regime, and
each was different from the other. Regime analysis, therefore, the focus and
forte of classical thought, had to be supplemented by a new science of political
forms. Manent went about the task of producing one, and he found that the
Sonderweg, the special path, of the West could be rendered intelligible as a se-
ries of distinct forms of human association.
These were the city, the empire, and the nation, with the Christian church,
yet another form of authoritative human association, enriching and compli-
cating matters. The political forms were so many efforts on the part of the
Western political animal to fulfill his nature after the limits of previous forms
had shown themselves, while the Christian church was found to provide the
most satisfying response to the human desire for access to the transcendent
divine. Its founder, the God-man, squared the circle of infinite distance re-
spected and bridged.
However, even this enormously wide-ranging investigation was not the
only thing that occupied Manent and his teaching at the time. He also taught
courses on “the modern soul,” in which Montaigne, Pascal, and Rousseau and
their archetypical explorations of the human condition and the modern situ-
ation were compared and contrasted. In a nice counterpoint to the moderns,
he also conducted an ongoing seminar on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
during the period.
Translator’s Foreword ix
It was very much in an Aristotelian spirit that he wrote Beyond Radical
Secu larism, published in France in 2015.3 In it, the French Catholic philoso-
pher explicitly adopted the perspective of the public-spirited citizen, asking,
What needs to be done, what can be done, in order to bring unincorporated
Muslim communities into the national community? What followed was a sus-
tained and candid “deliberation,” richly informed by French history, political
phi loso phy, and discreet Christian faith. In it, all parties were included, all
were addressed, all were challenged. Here, as was classically the case, delibera-
tion was an attempt to articulate a possible action in view of a common, or
shared, good; it was a logos that addressed and sought to knit together the
parts of a community in just such a common endeavor.4
Bookending it, as it were, were two books, including the one before you.
There are many important points of contact between the two.5 Montaigne: La
vie sans loi appeared in 2014, and La loi naturelle et les droits de l’homme, origi-
nally given as the prestigious Étienne Gilson lectures at L’Institut Catholique
de Paris in 2017, appeared in published form in 2018.6 One notes that “law”
(loi) is found in both titles, although it is paired and contrasted with two other
items: with “life” (la vie) by Montaigne, with “human rights” (les droits de
l’homme), according to the Zeitgeist. Montaigne attempted to articulate a satis-
fying human life totally apart from “law,” whether natural or divine, whereas in
later modern thought, a new teaching of natural rights broke with traditional
natural law, and the older concept was reworked accordingly. Eventually,
rights were emancipated even from this altered shell.
Traditional natural law is thus something of a ghostly middle term span-
ning the works, conspicuous by its absence in Montaigne and among “us”
(nous)—us who are partisans of rights and who want law—all law, any law—
to serve rights and us. Modern thought, thus construed, was the critical en-
deavor to replace old authorities and establish new ones. We are this effort’s
heirs, often unwittingly. Both investigations by Manent therefore promised
increased self-knowledge, by way of a reconsideration of founding fathers and
founding thoughts.
Not visible in the titles is that Manent is willing to let the scorned authori-
ties have their say as well. In his rendering, however, these authorities are any-
thing but hoary or hidebound. His Aristotle is as fresh and contemporary as
human nature itself, his Pascal and Augustine remarkably relevant interlocu-
tors. These are not Homer’s bloodless shades, or relics of a superseded past.
Aristotle in particular provides a robust conception of reason, what Manent
