What Is Unique to Western History, and What Might Be Called Its Formula?

Metamorphoses of the City is the summit and the summing-up of Pierre Manent's three decades of thinking about modern politics. Following the Western political form as it changes from the Greek city to the nation-state, and on into our increasingly post-national world, he asks searching questions about the future of self-government. A beautifully conceived, deeply unsettling book. — Mark Lilla (American political scientist, professor at Columbia University)

About the Author:

Pierre Manent (1949– ) is a central figure in contemporary French political philosophy. A graduate of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, he once worked as an assistant to Raymond Aron, and the American magazine The Weekly Standard has called him “the most profound of Europe's skeptical philosophers.”

Book Excerpt:

Introduction: The Dynamic of the West (excerpt)

We have been modern for centuries now. We are modern, and we want to be modern. This is the orientation of the whole of our Western social life. Criticism of one aspect or another of modernization keeps coming, and some of it attacks “modernity” itself; but “conservative” efforts, when they succeed, at most delay the movement, and usually end by speeding it up. And still we want to be modern. We command ourselves to be modern. Yet the fact that this will to be modern has been at work for centuries means we have not become truly modern. Several times we thought we had come near the goal, and each time we found we had lost our way, chasing a mirage: 1789, 1917, 1968, 1989 were only bewildering stages along a road whose end we do not know. The Hebrews were lucky — they wandered in the desert for only forty years. If this will, this commandment, to be modern has never stopped remaking the conditions of common life, never stopped setting off one revolution after another, and has still not been fulfilled, has still not brought us to a place where we can stop and say, “Here, at last, is what our labor was for” — if this will or commandment has never seized hold of its object, what does all of it mean? How could we have wanted something for so long, and put up with being fooled so often? Perhaps we do not know what we want?

The marks or standards of the modern may be as familiar to us as anything can be, in architecture, in art, in science, in political organization; and yet we do not know what holds these marks or standards together, or what entitles us to call all of them by the same name. We face a fact that resists interpretation. We lay a commandment on ourselves, and then ask what, in the end, it contains.

Some would rather drop the question. They believe we have left the modern behind and entered the postmodern, and that we have given up the “grand narrative” of Western progress. I do not think we have given up the grand narrative of science, or of democracy. It is true that after so many modern centuries we feel a certain fatigue, but the question itself is untouched, and its urgency does not depend on the mood of whoever asks it. The question has to be asked again and again, if we still care about understanding ourselves. And if we do not pretend to have a genuinely new answer, we should at least be ambitious enough to give the question new life.

How do we begin? When we are unclear about what a thing is, we ask when and how it began. When and how did modernity begin? What was the birth of modernity like? We are glad to ask such questions, and we have good reason to.

This is a legitimate undertaking, even a necessary one, but it raises difficulties at once. Beginnings are obscure by nature. The first shoots are hard to see, and it is easy to go wrong without noticing. So we are looking for clarity in a beginning that must be vague or uncertain. Is a given work, idea, or literary or architectural style ancient, or modern? At what moment would we start to look for the origin of modernity: the American and French Revolutions of the eighteenth century? The rise of the concepts of natural science in the seventeenth? The Reformation of the sixteenth? How would people answer? These differing guesses do not rule one another out; the ingredients of modernity surely include the Reformation, modern science, and the democratic political revolutions. But what is the link between Luther's faith and Galileo's science? Could there be some basic disposition — some bent of mind and morals — that defines modern man? Or must we accept that modern being is scattered among its elements, a patchwork held together by the magic of a single word?

Let us start from the one point in this series of difficulties that cannot be doubted. We wanted, and we still want, to be modern. We do not need to know exactly what we want in order to know that, in wanting it, we have formed a project. Modernity was in the first place a project — a collective project conceived in Europe, and first carried out in Europe, but meant from the start for all of humanity. What, though, is a project? A project is no small thing. If we can first say more precisely what it involves, we will learn something important about the modern project.

To form a great collective project meant in the end for all of humanity, what is required first is enormous conviction: confidence in the power of man himself. The strongest among us are said to rule the rest, but in fact individuals and groups with confidence in their own power are rarely met with. One striking thing about the opening of modern science was the extraordinary confidence of Bacon, or of Descartes — to name only these two — in the capacity of modern science to transform the human condition from top to bottom. One is tempted to say how blind their conviction was. Indeed, modern science had at that point borne no fruit, or almost none. The famous “miracles of science” had yet to appear. The medicine of Descartes's day was helpless against disease, and Descartes himself held an odd notion of the circulation of the blood, and yet he imagined that medicine would greatly lengthen human life.

A project assumes that we have the capacity to act, and that our actions can transform our situation or the conditions of our lives. Many analysts of modernity have pressed the second point — the modern project's ambition to transform, to make, to construct. The transformation of nature, the organization of production, the Plan, mankind producing itself, even engineers of the soul: all of this matters a great deal. But we must not pass too quickly over the first point. We have the capacity to act. A whole world is contained in that statement. Human beings have always acted in one way or another, but they have not always understood that they had the capacity to act. There is something terrible in human action. What expresses human beings also exposes them, letting them release the self — and sometimes lose it. In the first, undivided age, people gathered, fished, hunted, even went to war (itself a kind of hunt), but they acted as little as they could. They left the largest field of activity to the gods, and bound themselves with every sort of taboo, rite, and sacred commandment. That is why human action, true human action, looked at first like a crime, an offense. For Hegel, this is exactly what Greek tragedy laid bare: innocent criminal action. Tragedy showed what could not be told — the passage from what comes before action to true human action. It showed the road to the city, the coming-to-be of the city. For the city gives human beings the capacity to act. The city is the ordering of the human world that makes action possible and gives it meaning.

If we want to understand the modern project, we must understand it from the first full realization of human action — that is, the city. The Greek city was certainly not the product of a project, but it was in the city that people became able to plan, to form projects for action; it was in the city that people discovered they could govern themselves, and learned how. They discovered and learned politics, the wide world of action.

So if the mark of modernity is first of all a project of collective action, and if politics is the carrying out and the ordering of action, then the modern project must first be understood as a political project. It must be set back within the history of European and Western political development. The ambition of this book is to offer an interpretation of the political development of the West, or at least to supply some elements of one.

What is unique to Western history? What might be called its formula?

I have spoken of the modern movement, of the movement that marks modernity — a movement that has never come near its end, its resting place. Outside the West there have been great civilizations, and much has taken place in them, but those civilizations never knew movement, historical movement. They had chronicles but no history — at least not until Western oppression or invasion brought them into history. In the West there is a distinctive principle of movement, and that is its first characteristic.

The principle of Western movement is politics, and therefore the city. Western movement begins with the movement of the Greek city. Some have argued that the Greeks knew nothing of history, that they understood time only as a cycle, and that the linear time of history began with Christianity or with modern philosophy of history. This does not hold. The Greeks knew perfectly well the irreversible time of political history. Aristotle, like Tocqueville after him, could observe that democracy was the only regime still possible in his own age.

The beginning of Western movement is the movement of the Greek city: the movement of the city within and without, the movement of class struggle at home and war abroad. The city is a shaping of human life that lets the common thing, and the governing and carrying out of the common thing, appear across many cities hostile to one another and divided within. The Greek city was the first form of human life to breed political energy. It showed a strength and a quality of human energy without precedent. It finally spent that energy in the disaster of the Peloponnesian War. Broadly speaking, the history that follows looks like a continual search for a renewed political form — one that would let the city, free but hemmed in by hostility inside and out, store up its energy while escaping the city's fate.

The form that came after the city was the empire. The Western empire, unlike the empires of the East, was in some sense a continuation of the city. The Roman city showed enormous energy, breaking every limit that had confined the city, taking in ever more distant populations, until it looked ready to gather in the whole human race. The Western empire gave up the freedom of the city, but promised unity and peace. That promise was never kept, or never fully kept; yet, as with the city, part of the political and spiritual energy outlived the decline of the form itself. The idea of empire marked the West not only through the undying fame of the Roman Empire, but also through a form without any precedent whatever, one peculiar to Europe: the Catholic Church, that is, the universal Church, which set out to gather everyone into a new communion, closer than the most tightly knit city, wider than the most far-flung empire. Of all the West's political forms the Church held the most promise, because, as I have just said, it proposed a community that was city and empire at once; but it was also the most disappointing, because it never succeeded — came nowhere near succeeding — in bringing about this universal union, and it was the Church itself that had awakened the longing for such a union.

I have gone back over the history of pre-modern Europe with the speed and agility of Attila the Hun, though my plundering would make that barbarian king envious. For I have swept up the elements of a certain situation, and that situation will set the terms of our interpretation of the modern project. How should it be described? Put briefly: Europeans of that time belonged to the city, the empire, and the Church all at once, and lived under the mixed and competing authority of these three modes of human association. Cities that had survived or been revived competed with the Roman Empire, and often came to blows with it; and once the Roman Empire had become the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, city and empire together competed with the Church as well. This was a bad disorder, a conflict among authorities and among loyalties. The modern project is precisely an attempt to lead us out of that confusion — and in fact it will lead us out of it. The quarrel certainly had to do with institutions, but just as deeply, and more fundamentally, it had to do with the human type that must give human life its animating force. Who is to be imitated? Should one follow the humble, self-giving life that Jesus exemplified, or live the active and proud life of the citizen-soldiers who made Rome and were made by Rome? Among the pagans, are we to venerate Cato or Caesar? Europeans did not know which city they wanted, or were able, to live in; they did not know what kind of person they wanted, or were able, to become. I say it again: the modern project was born of this extreme predicament, and exists in order to face it.

Cover image from: Wikipedia