Natural Law and Human Rights by Pierre Manent (review)

Paul Seaton

The Review of Metaphysics, Volume 74, Number 2 (Issue No. 294), December
2020, pp. 395-397 (Review)

Published by The Philosophy Education Society, Inc.

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/774881

[ Access provided at 7 Feb 2022 15:40 GMT from Depaul University ]

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criterion of human action, natural law, or concept of justice capable of

guiding the legislator. Pascal asks, “Is human reason incapable of
discerning an objective human good that people could agree upon?” The
question remains.
Montaigne: Life Without Law may have been written primarily with
professional philosophers in mind, but in spite of its at times demanding
character, it is accessible to the informed layman. Manent is not writing in
a vacuum; his Montaigne offers many lessons for our troubled present.—
Jude P. Dougherty, The Catholic University of America

MANENT, Pierre. Natural Law and Human Rights. Translated by Ralph C.

Hancock, with an Introduction by Daniel J. Mahoney. South Bend, Ind.:
University of Notre Dame Press, 2020. xxvi + 130 pp. Cloth, $29.00—The
first-time reader of Manent could come to the book with a misconception
based on its title, and a good deal of its argument will come as a surprise
even to longtime readers of the French political philosopher. My first task,
therefore, is to obviate misunderstandings and acknowledge novelties. By
“natural law” Manent does not mean either Thomistic natural law or the
modern (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau) replacements for it. He has a
distinctive meaning, a more Aristotelian understanding. But it is not the
notion of natural law that Aristotle himself discusses in the Rhetoric.
Manent’s notion takes its bearings from the Stagirite’s discussion of the
three objects of deliberation in book 2 of the Nicomachean Ethics, the
noble, the pleasant, the useful. He has his reasons for doing so, but the
reader will need to bracket other versions in order to consider them.
For longtime readers, there are at least two surprises, the first being the
appeal to natural law itself. In over forty years of writing about modern
political philosophy and modern politics, Manent has never (to my
knowledge) discussed its modern versions as such or invoked any
normative version in his own name. Explicit discussion of traditional
natural law is rather recent for Manent; 2014 saw him counsel Thomists
how to go about reintroducing their notion to contemporaries. (This text
is included as an appendix.) Natural law appears in his own name for the
first time in this book, with the Aristotelian character noted earlier. While
a surprise, it does have an intrinsic connection with longstanding
concerns.
The second surprise is connected with these concerns. To appreciate it,
we need the backstory. Since the end of the Cold War, Manent has tracked
and critiqued the systematic “depoliticization” and “denationalization” of
life and thought on the European continent and the introduction of false
ideas of human unity and of democracy itself. Repudiating traditional
transcendent religions, elites have opted for a thoroughly secular “religion
of Humanity” (the phase is from August Comte) and for a thin notion of
democracy that reduces it to the rights of the individual and is divorced
396 ELIZABETH C. SHAW AND STAFF

from any authoritative démos, understood as a collective agent of self-

government. The replacement of the robust term “government” by the
thin-grueled “governance” is an expression of a seismic shift on the
Continent, one that is both antidemocratic and deeply antipolitical.
It is antipolitical because it runs counter to the nature of human beings
as political animals and to what Manent calls “the political condition of
humanity.” Not all countries are ruled by pacified humanitarian
democrats, and it is foolish and dangerous to pretend so. The E.U.,
however, has proceeded on the assumption that such a world is imminent
and normative. As for the political animal, he wants “to put speeches and
actions in common” (the phrase is Aristotle’s) with his fellows in a self-
governing community. The current configuration and leadership of the
European Union, however, militates against this with their diktats,
political correctness, and byzantine structures and ever-increasing pile of
acquis communautaires.
In making this argument, Manent tracked the decline of the state as the
emblem of collective identity and chief instrument of collective agency.
He regularly reminded humanitarian elites of the essential services that
the state provided to European humanity and to democracy, as well as the
challenges of the contemporary political world for which it is an
appropriate, even indispensable, instrument. For decades now, he has
been “talking up” the state to those who see no use for it, unless perhaps
to distribute an ever-increasing range of social rights.
His discussion of the state in Natural Law and Human Rights therefore
comes as a surprise. He now presents it as a chief culprit in the
depoliticization of the European political animal. More precisely, he lays
to its charge the fateful “decommissioning” of the agent (the political
animal’s broader sibling). Hobbes helps him make this case, as he was “the
philosophical architect of the modern state.” Theoretically, the notion of
a fundamental condition (“the state of nature”) in which human beings are
authorityless and lawless liberates humans from essential components of
their nature, precisely those that traditional and Manentian natural law
recognize and wish to bring again to consciousness and authority.
Practically, the state transformed the setting of human action and
reoriented the aim of action. It did so primarily by presenting moral and
political life as matters of the exercise and protection of rights. Today the
“moral end,” rights, has overtaken the means or instrument, the state, and
contemporary Europe is dominated by a hegemonic “philosophy of
rights.”
Chapter 1 of Natural Law and Human Rights is a radical critique of this
hegemony, while the rest of the book attempts to bring to light “the human
world” as the site of human agency and the ongoing “product” of human
actions, with their own logic and ends distinct from those of rights. If the
hegemon learns a lesson of humility and allows others to occupy the
democratic throne from time to time, democracy itself will be enhanced,
not lessened, because the individual with rights will be joined with the
citizen and the agent in taking decisions for institutions and the common
SUMMARIES AND COMMENTS 397

life. Be that as it may, both sorts of readers, first-time and longtime, will
be intrigued by Manent’s critique of human rights as the prime or sole
criterion of political activity and, more positively, by the sketch he
provides of the elements and structure of practical reasoning, of which
natural law is an essential component.—Paul Seaton, St. Mary’s Seminary
& University

McCOY, Marina Berzins. Image and Argument in Plato’s Republic. Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2020. viii + 355 pp. Cloth, $95.00—This
major study of the Republic combines traditional and original approaches
to illuminate how the dialogue teaches, how it argues, and generally how
it philosophizes. The book covers the entirety of Plato’s Republic (with
emphasis on the earlier sections), finding throughout how Plato’s
characters reason by means of images and how Plato’s readers might do
the same.
An introduction and nine chapters develop the book’s themes and
apply its techniques. Chapter 1, really a methodological introduction,
revisits the old question: Given Plato’s critique of imagery and literary
devices, how should a reader respond to his image-laden writing? But
McCoy seeks to go beyond the standard responses to this question, which
confine Platonic “imagery” to passages formally framed as stories or
announced to be figurative. Myths and anecdotes alone will not do justice
to the way that image-thinking pervades this philosophizing. For McCoy,
image includes the paradigmatic case, the illustrative example, and the
analogy. These are implicated in the Republic’s thinking, too; so image-
thinking encompasses much more of the Republic than treatments of the
old question have assumed.
Images in poetry do stifle philosophizing. The difference in Platonic
imagery, according to McCoy, consists in its inspiring the reader to pursue
images actively and tangle with them in pursuit of philosophical
understanding, rather than to absorb them passively.
In book 1, the significant images are “paradigms” of justice that guide
the thinking of Socrates’ interlocutors. Socrates brings the interlocutors
to reexamine these imaginatively effective sets of assumptions, then
works with Glaucon and Adeimantus to go beyond such paradigmatic
images.
Another species of image guides the positive view that Socrates
develops in response to Glaucon and Adeimantus. The analogy between
city and soul, underappreciated as image and as example of how to think
with images, enmeshes the philosophical reader in meditation on the soul,
how it can be known, and how far a city might resemble a soul. McCoy
joins those interpreters who deny the literal tripartition of the soul in
order to highlight the way in which this analogical argument too amounts
to active image-thinking.