Pierre Manent Investigates Europe's Democracy Crisis

With the annus mirabilis of 1989 and the collapse of Soviet Communism, fundamental questions of political and cultural existence emerged in Europe, questions addressed by the public, politicians, and intellectuals alike. The former Warsaw Pact nations had to ask themselves: We wish to be democratic, but what does that mean and entail?  Do we wish to follow the example and lead of Western democracies or forge our own distinctive versions? What indeed is democracy? In a similar vein, they also asked about the nature of civil society, that precious domain of social life repressed by totalitarianism. Rebuilding it involved asking prior questions: what exactly is civil society, and how does it serve free men and women?

Both sides of Europe, Central and Western, asked about the status of the nation-state in the aborning order. The formerly subjugated countries relished their newfound freedom and independence and sought to reinvigorate both, while countries in Western Europe were about the work of constructing a united Europe, a Europe in which sovereignty would be pooled, and nations knit together in a way that guaranteed peace. How did these two impulses – vigorous national existence and sovereignty and a greater Europe - go together? Did they?

Finally, a series of fundamental questions arose about this context. Now that the artificial division of Europe had ended, what would a new Europe, a reunited Europe, look like and entail? On what bases would it be built? What was Europe?

To their credit, many European intellectuals made signal contributions to these discussions and debates. I would highlight the French thinkers Rémi Brague and Chantal Delsol, the Bavarian theologian and church leader, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, and then Benedict XVI. While they differed in certain respects, they all worked in the register of “culture” and as historians and diagnosticians of European culture. Here, however, I will highlight the contributions of the French Catholic political philosopher, Pierre Manent.

Setting the Stage

In 1993, he produced three texts that limned the new geopolitical situation and introduced its dramatis personae. The first was simply entitled Christianity and Democracy, but continued with a complex subtitle: Some Remarks on the Political History of Religion, or the Religious History of Modern Politics. In it, he summarized two decades of study of the European “theologico-political problem,” updating it to “The Present Situation” in which victorious modern democracy confronted a much domesticated Catholic church, one that had largely eschewed its claims to plenitude potestatis over the temporal realm. In this new situation, while being politically subordinate to victorious democracy, the Church had what Manent called a “dialectical” or intellectual advantage: it said something substantial about what it is to be human. Perhaps democratic individuals and peoples, experiencing the limits of articulating themselves simply in terms of rights and freedoms, might turn to the Church to hear a more substantial teaching about the nature, vocation, and destiny of the human person. Perhaps.

The second text bore the title Democracy as [a] Regime and as [a] Religion. One was struck by the last phrase: a democratic religion? A religion of democracy? Its last line concluded with an enigmatic question: “Is modern democracy perhaps the finally-found form of the religion of Humanity?” A new figure on the scene was thus indicated: an ersatz Humanitarian religion, one closely connected with modern democracy.

Finally, in that same year, Manent gave a lecture in Munich. Germany was then beginning the fraught process of reunification. What better gift could be brought to Germany from France than the thought of the quintessential Frenchman, Charles de Gaulle, about the nature of the nation? De Gaulle, the great French statesman who, along with Konrad Adenauer, had started the process of European unification after WWII by creating the Benelux Coal and Steel Community, knew intimately the challenge of keeping together a nation riven by major divisions and disagreements. Manent accordingly spoke to his German hosts on “De Gaulle’s Destiny: The Modern Nation as Object of Thought and Action”.

With this last talk, the broad outlines of the geopolitical situation were sketched. At its center was victorious democracy, having defeated the second of its major ideological and totalitarian enemies of the twentieth century. The other important communities on the scene, the Church and the nation, had to orient themselves and find their place vis-à-vis this newly hegemonic political ideal. And lurking somewhere in the vicinity was the specter of an ersatz humanitarian religion, a religion that consisted in the apotheosis of Humanity, construed as self-sufficient, as the sovereign association, and containing within itself all the resources it needed for its perfect unification and harmonious coexistence.

Then followed decades of tracking the course of events, the debates and decisions that moved things in a particular direction. Manent produced an ever-flowing stream of work in this regard: in 1996, writing in an interrogatory vein of the prospect or project of “Democracy without Nations?”; in 2000, warning about “The Humanitarian Temptation”; in 2001, conducting an extensive political philosophical survey and analysis of the contemporary western scene, Cours familier de philosophie politique (in English translation: A World without Politics?: A Defense of the Nation-State), in which a new form of democratic humanitarianism was at work producing a new “empire” in Europe;  in 2004 speaking on “The Autumn of Nations?”, in which he critiqued EU “gigantism” and what he called “democratic angelicism,” i. e., a form of democracy that sought to eschew the messy contingencies of political bodily existence (i. e., circumscription in defined territory and population); in 2005 writing a small book on La raison des nations (the reason or rationale for nations) (in English translation: Democracy without Nations: The Fate of Self-Government in Europe); and so forth.  

Hegemonic Humanitarian Democracy

At this point, I will state in the most straightforward and lapidary way what Manent observed and analyzed politically from 1989 till today. In so doing, I will have to omit any number of features of the ongoing situation that Manent highlighted, including Europe’s widespread failure to reflect on the communist episode and draw from it appropriate lessons, its failure to provide for its defense, its version of political correctness, the decline of the representative mechanism in individual countries, and, more positively, a substantial teaching about the nation as a political form. As I mentioned earlier, the central feature of the post-Communist scene was the “victory of democracy.” In what followed, Manent saw (proponents of) a hegemonic understanding of “Democracy” that bid fair to rule over and rework every element of social, national, and European life. He was among the first to see the widespread elite effort to create and recreate everything after the image and likeness of a distinct understanding or Idea of Democracy, which I label “DemocracyTMH”.  

This was an Idea of Democracy that was at once hugely inflated and terribly reduced. It was inflated as the sole norm of social existence and as the criterion and aim of all “political” (sic) action. All of politics and social life were tendentially reduced to the Rule of rights and subject to the Question: Are they warranted by rights and consonant with democratic “values” as defined by their elite proponents? It was reduced because the original idea of modern democracy included two components: the rights of the individual and the rights, duties, and contributions of the citizen to the self-government of a distinct community. In other words, modern democracy presupposed a démos that was authoritative, which exercised kratos, while also being held to respect individual rights. It was a compound. The new notion of democracy made it simple, the ever-expanding rights of the individual, and extended it to all of Humanity. (Hence the “H” in my acronym above.)

In modern circumstances, the démos was the nation. Thanks to a particular reading of modern and twentieth century history (in which WWI, WWII, and the Holocaust loomed large), the nation was doubly dismissed as a self-absorbed “particular” that didn’t play nice with others, that ran counter to the true human and “Democratic” vocation of communing with universal humanity, and as a historically passé form of political existence. “Progress” equaled progress in DemocracyTMH.

For decades, European politics took place within the Horizon, and under the sign of “the Idea of Democracy,” and constructing a truly Democratic Europe became the lodestar and touchstone of Progress. The Idea of Democracy was used to deconstruct national bodies and sovereignties, and to build a new “Democratic-Humanitarian” Europe of open borders and the embrace of “the Other,” while delegitimating any assertion of the Old Adam of “xenophobic nationalism.” This was the great gigantomachia of Europe: proponents of the old nations and an earlier understanding of democracy battling advocates of a humanitarian Democracy of quasi-religious character and zeal (with its own inquisitions and designation of heretics). For the longest time, the elites who advocated this totalizing, indeed totalitarian, understanding of DemocracyTMH were in the saddle. Things began to change a bit before 2016 with elections in Italy and Spain and the Brexit campaign. Nowadays, the battle is full-on. Most recently, there have been serious set-backs in Romania, France, the UK, and Germany.

Europe’s Origins, Nature, and Vocation

While tracking Europe’s ongoing present, Manent simultaneously conducted a philosophical anamnesis of Europe’s history to situate present-day debates and developments in a deeper context. In these inquiries, he went back to Europe's origins and saw and presented Europe as precisely that portion of humanity that had faced a distinctive political and spiritual task, responses to which created Europe and Europeans and gave them both a nature and a vocation. Three texts especially developed this line of analysis.

In 1987, in a chapter of An Intellectual History of Liberalism entitled “Europe and the Theologico-Political Problem” (which he further specified as “our theologico-political problem” as Europeans, to distinguish it from Leo Strauss’s notion of the theologico-political problem of western civilization), Manent returned to the princes and peoples in the western half of the Roman empire after its collapse. They faced a distinctive task and challenge: how to rebuild their political life in the midst of the rubble of Rome, but in a situation with a unique institution, the Catholic church, which claimed to speak in God’s Name? What political association or organization was best in these specific circumstances? Should it be ancient models, the city or the empire, or some new political form that would exercise their creativity? In this way, the dual nature of these protagonists of history, as political animals and imagines dei, was Manent’s starting point for understanding Europe. Europe was a vocation addressed by nature and supernature to a portion of humanity at a particular juncture in history.

Subsequent study and reflection deepened these initial observations and articulations. Important new ones occurred in 2010 and 2015. In 2010, he very lapidarily summarized the earlier thought. At first referring to the political animal, he spoke of the “universal human need for order or for good government,” then added that

this universal human need for order or for good government expressed itself in Europe in a context defined by two specific conditions. The first is obviously the pagan political experience of civic life and of the difficulty or the the impossibility of recovering civic life once it has been lost, that is, the “Ciceronian” experience. The second is the Christian proposition of a human community at once more extensive and [tighter or more intimate] than any political community, a proposition that necessarily put in question the legitimacy of the two great pagan forms, the city and the empire.  In Europe, the human desire to be well-governed is sharpened and complicated by this double condition.

The nation-state was Europe’s eventual answer to this set of questions.  It was a uniquely European invention, adding to the finite inventory of political forms. Along with the late Roger Scruton, Manent has been the most penetrating philosophical analyst and defender of the European nation in the face of the hyperbolic and heavy-handed “DemocracyTMH” sketched above. Mentioned earlier, Democracy without Nations? is a good place to begin to understand his thinking on this important topic.

In 2015, Manent conducted that rarity, the civic deliberation of a political philosopher, in a book entitled Situation de France (in English: Beyond Radical Secularism).The issue at hand was how to incorporate Muslim communities into the French body-politic? What kind of political whole could they form? During its course, Manent was once again led to articulate the nature of Europe. A somewhat lengthy quote builds on previous discussions:

From the time the inhabitants of our continent received the Christian proposition and began to pay attention to it, they found themselves confronted with a two-fold task: they had to govern themselves, and they had to respond to the Christian proposition of a “new life,” henceforth accessible to every person of good will, which consisted in participation in the very life of God in Three Persons. Both halves of this task were characterized by a high degree of indeterminacy. The task of self-government was made uncertain not only by the question of regime (monarchical, aristocratic or republican), but also by that of the political form (city, empire, or an unprecedented form to be invented). The task of responding to the Christian proposition did not come down to a choice between acceptance and refusal, since the countless heresies combatted by the Church represented so many ways of half-accepting or refusing the proposition. Given the great political as well as religious indeterminacy, so much greater was the breadth of indeterminacy that affected the articulation of the two, the difficulty of conjoining the religious and the political determination. …. Never was history more open, and Europeans have already been mistaken several times in declaring it over and done. This was, then, the starting point and the principle of European history: to govern oneself in a certain relation to the Christian proposition.

In several writings, but especially in his magisterial Metamorphoses of the City in 2010, Manent laid out the eventful path that Europeans had taken till today. It ended with the contemporary effort to eradicate Christianity from official Europe, to eschew any number of the requirements of genuine political existence, and to extend the democratic-humanitarian empire ever further.

Pascal to the Rescue

The elite-promoted democratic-humanitarian hegemony attacks both the political animal and the imago dei. Following the lead of Charles Péguy, Manent believes that today, the two stand or fall together. His work critiquing the democratic religion of Humanity is intended to liberate both the believer and the political agent, while his many studies of the essentials of politics, including more recently human agency, are designed to guide the reawakened political animal in his fellow Europeans. Many today are asserting their rights and claims in this regard against their doubling-down “superiors.” One can only wish them well. As I said earlier, recent setbacks indicate how fraught and widespread the battle is.

More recently, Manent has turned to the other component, the imago dei, and sought to repropose what he calls “the Christian proposition” to his compatriots. He did so in a most intriguing way, by way of an exposition of a thinker who was among the first to experience and confront modern atheism and indifference: Blaise Pascal. In a study of Pascal’s thought that appeared in 2022 and will appear in English translation next month from the University of Notre Dame Press. Manent employs Pascal to make the meaning and urgency of the Christian proposal of a God-who-is-a-friend-of-humanity intelligible, inviting, and appropriately demanding. The work’s generally positive reception in France and elsewhere in Europe, and many invitations to discuss its contents, indicate that it struck a nerve, or addressed a felt need. Perhaps the European soul is more alive than officially secular Europe would have us think.

Paul Seaton, an independent scholar, is the translator of The Religion of Humanity (St. Augustine Press) and the author of Public Philosophy and Patriotism: Essays on the Declaration and Us (St. Augustine Press).