An Intellectual History of Liberalism

Pierre Manent, Rebecca Balinski

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780691207193
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Highlighting the social tensions that confront the liberal tradition, Pierre Manent draws a portrait of what we, citizens of modern liberal democracies, have become. For Manent, a discussion of liberalism encompasses the foundations of modern society, its secularism, its individualism, and its conception of rights. The frequent incapacity of the morally neutral, democratic state to further social causes, he argues, derives from the liberal stance that political life does not serve a higher purpose. Through quick-moving, highly synthetic essays, he explores the development of liberal thinking in terms of a single theme: the decline of theological politics.
The author traces the liberal stance to Machiavelli, who, in seeking to divorce everyday life from the pervasive influence of the Catholic church, separated politics from all notions of a cosmological order. What followed, as Manent demonstrates in his analyses of Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, Guizot, and Constant, was the evolving concept of an individual with no goals outside the confines of the self and a state with no purpose but to prevent individuals from dominating one another. Weighing both the positive and negative effects of such a political arrangement, Manent raises important questions about the fundamental political issues of the day, among them the possibility of individual rights being reconciled with the necessary demands of political organization, and the desirability of a government system neutral about religion but not about public morals.

CHAPTER I
Europe and the Theologico-Political Problem

HOW SHALL we begin? Where do we begin? The period preceding the establishment of liberal regimes is conventionally called the ancien régime—an entirely retrospective or negative designation to which another, positive or prospective one is bound to be preferable. This might be called the era of “absolute” or “national” monarchies. It is the notion of sovereignty that gives form to the latter. As it prevailed in Europe, this notion was radically new in history. To understand it, we have to understand the world from which it emerged and the world it then reorganized. In short, however intimidating the task, we must take a prospective view of European history—more precisely of the problem of European history—from the fall of the Roman Empire.

What were the political forms at men’s disposal after this event? “At their disposal” does not mean that these forms were already fully constituted; on the contrary, it was a time of general disintegration. But they were present in men’s consciousness as significant, and perhaps desirable, political possibilities.

The first form was obviously the empire, which had collapsed in the West but remained in the East. It is impossible to overemphasize just how powerful the idea of empire was in men’s minds, even long after the Roman Empire had fallen. Every king wanted to be “emperor in his kingdom.” The Holy Roman Empire died officially only in 1806, and was followed by two Napoleonic Empires, Bismarck’s Reich, and the Third Reich. Even today people still speak of the idea of the “World State.” What is the content of the idea of empire? It is the bringing together of all the known world, of the orbis terrarum, under a unique power. The idea of empire does not refer primarily to the conquering zeal of a few individuals (Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, or Napoleon). It corresponds instead to men’s unity, to the universality of human nature, which wants to be recognized and addressed by a unique power. It is a natural political idea.

The city-state was the other significant model. A city-state is potentially present from the moment a sufficient number of men are assembled in one place. Like the empire, this type of political organization enjoyed great prestige, a reflection of the Roman Republic’s glory (and also, through Rome, of the glory of Athens and Sparta). This prestige remained considerable in Europe wherever certain city-states reached a high degree of political power, economic prosperity, or intellectual eminence: the Hanseatic towns, Venice, or Florence for example. In decline after the monarchies’ triumph, it returned to nourish hopes for a new civic life, for “freedom” (though within a national framework, which changed profoundly the original idea). The idea of the city-state implies a public space where citizens deliberate on everything concerning their “common affairs.” It is the idea of man’s controlling his conditions of existence through human association. It is an eminently natural political idea.

The most striking fact about Europe’s history is that neither the city-state nor the empire, nor a combination of the two, provided the form under which Europe reconstituted its political organization. Instead, monarchy was invented.¹

The third form was the Church. To be sure, the Church cannot be placed on the same plane as the empire and the city-state. Organizing men’s social and political life is not its raison d’être. But by its very existence and distinctive vocation, it posed an immense political problem to the European peoples. This point must be stressed: the political development of Europe is understandable only as the history of answers to problems posed by the Church, which was a human association of a completely new kind. Each institutional response created in its turn new problems and called for the invention of new responses. The key to European development is what might be called, in scholarly terms, the theologico-political problem.

The Church posed two problems to the European peoples, one circumstantial, the other structural. The circumstantial problem is well known: in the general disintegration following the barbarian invasions, the Church had to take on social and political functions not carried out by civil authorities. Thus an “unnatural” amalgam of secular functions and specifically religious ones was formed. The structural problem is also well known, but it is important to formulate it precisely.

The definition that the Church gave itself embodied a contradiction. On the one hand, the good that it provided—salvation—was not of this world. “This world,” “Caesar’s world,” did not interest it. On the other hand, it had been assigned by God himself and by his Son the mission of leading men to salvation, for which the Church, by God’s grace, was the unique vehicle. Consequently it had a right or duty to oversee everything that could place this salvation in peril. But since all human actions were faced with the alternative of good and evil (except those actions considered “immaterial”), the Church had a duty to oversee all human actions. And among human actions, the most important were those carried out by rulers. Therefore, in accordance with its raison d’être, the Church had to exercise its vigilance with the keenest attention, seeing to it that rulers did not order the ruled to commit acts that endangered their salvation or allow their subjects the liberty to commit such acts. Thus the Church was led—logically and not circumstantially—to claim the supreme power, the plenitudo potestatis. The definition of this potestas varied considerably, depending on whether it was conceived of as directa or indirecta, but the political impact of its claim remained essentially the same. This claim reached its full extent with the Gregorian reform at the end of the eleventh century. At that time the ecclesia christiana was considered the only true respublica.

The remarkable contradiction embedded in the Catholic Church’s doctrine can be summarized in this way: although the Church leaves men free to organize themselves within the temporal sphere as they see fit, it simultaneously tends to impose a theocracy on them. It brings a religious constraint of a previously unheard of scope, and at the same time offers the emancipation of secular life. Unlike Judaism and Islam, the Church does not provide a law that is supposed to govern concretely all of men’s actions in the earthly city.

It might be objected that the Church of the Middle Ages always aimed at theocracy and not at the liberation of secular space. There is something to this objection. However, we must consider not only what the Church did directly, but also what it made possible through the contradiction I have indicated. The Church maintained that its control over all political regimes—monarchies, city-states, or empires—was exercised indifferently. By this very fact, it acknowledged that it did not wish to impose a particular political regime. Consequently, when the secular world later regained its strength, it had the latitude to seek the political form that could best resist the Church’s claims. In other words, the struggle against the Church’s theocratic side was made possible and in a sense authorized by the side that declared Caesar’s domain to be free.

On what political bases, then, did the secular world tend to organize itself in order to confront the Church’s claims? Let us examine the resources of the two available political forms we have mentioned.

First, the city-state. Up to the sixteenth century, city-states were prevalent in certain regions of Europe (Northern Italy, Flanders, Northern Germany). The historical reasons for this do not concern us here. What is striking is that this political form was overcome by a kind of incapacity to expand or even to endure. This fact stems, of course, from the instability specific to this form of political organization. Civil strife between factions often led to the paralysis and even self-destruction of the city-state, as the chronicles of the Greek and Italian city-states eloquently attest. To these natural reasons were added reasons related to the presence and influence of the Church. On this point two apparently contradictory remarks must be made. On the one hand, when facing the Church, the city-states were relatively weak; they found it difficult to stand up to it. On the other, they were very unfriendly to the Church, which returned the compliment.

City-states were ideologically weak: they were “particulars” facing two “universals,” the Empire and the Church. Each faction within the European city-state tended to rely on the support of one of these universals (Guelphs and Ghibellines in Florence) or to rely also on some foreign monarchy. Furthermore, the city-states had an extremely intense, indeed tumultuous, political life. The interests and passions of its citizens were naturally turned toward worldly matters. The city-state thus tended to constitute an especially closed world, one especially resistant to the Church’s influence. Finally, the natural position of its citizens was to assert their independence. On these three points, monarchy presented altogether different characteristics.

Too inimical structurally to the Church’s claims, the city-state was at the same time too weak to set up a political form capable of successfully asserting itself against the Church while acceding to certain of its demands. Florence is a good example. Perhaps it will be objected that an atypical situation prevailed in Italy, since there the pope was a temporal prince. In reality, even in Italy, the Church’s strength was essentially spiritual. The pope was never actually able to carry on a war alone; at the time of the papacy’s greatest prestige, he was unable to command adequate obedience even in Rome. Indeed, before the Reformation, he had more influence in England or Germany than in Italy.

In any case, this situation of the Italian city-states had major consequences for all of European history. The mixture of structural hostility and intrinsic weakness in the city-state’s relationship with the Church explains to a large extent why Italian city-states developed, and with such aggressiveness, the first truly secular civilization in the Christian world. The great literary assertions of the solidity, independence, and nobility of the secular world were born in Italy: those of Dante, Marsilius of Padua, Boccaccio. This Florentine tradition was then taken up, radically transformed, and made operational for the offensive against the Church launched by that great enemy of Christianity, Machiavelli.

As for the Empire, its actual performance (as distinguished from the prestige of its idea), was in a sense even more modest than that of the city-state. It was not for lack of geniuses: it suffices to mention Charlemagne or Frederick II. Besides, the intrinsic difficulty of the imperial venture in an area as geographically, ethnically, and politically divided as Europe has to be taken into account. Moreover, the place of the empire—the universal—was already occupied, preempted in a way, by the Church. Of course, the Eastern Empire in Constantinople did coexist in a potentially organic union with Christianity. But this union was realized in Constantinople, far from the radiating center of the Christian presence, the pope. Joseph de Maistre, who is particularly reliable on this subject, maintains that if the seat of the Empire was transferred to Constantinople, it was an instinctively opportune impulse: Constantine sensed that “the emperor and the pontiff could not be contained within the same enclosure.” He therefore ceded Rome to the pope.²

The great political problem in Europe was therefore the following: the nonreligious, secular, lay world had to be organized under a form that was neither city-state nor empire, a form less “particular” than the city-state and less “universal” than the empire, or whose universality would be different from that of the empire. We know that this political form was absolute or national monarchy. Before trying to describe the spiritual and political changes that made its constitution possible, I should like to say briefly why it was structurally superior to the city-state and the Empire when confronting the problem posed by the Church’s claims.

Like the emperor, and unlike the city-state, the king was able to lay claim to “divine right” in accordance with the Pauline axiom: “All power comes from God.” (The city-states did not because their magistrates, being a plurality, did not fill the first condition for being the image or lieutenant of God: unicity.)³ Yet in contrast with the emperor, the king did not in principle lay claim to universal monarchy, which limited the extent of the conflict with the Church’s universality. Moreover, political life in a kingdom was much more modest than in a city-state, leaving men freer to dedicate themselves to matters of the other world. Finally, the natural position of a monarch’s subjects was one of obedience, which suited the Church better. Because of these three features, monarchy was much more compatible with the Church than was the city-state. Simultaneously, and paradoxically, with the assertion of divine right the secular king was in principle radically independent from the Church: the king depended directly on God. The practical consequence was that kings tended to place themselves at the head of even the religious organizations of their kingdoms.

The historical fortune of monarchy in the Christian world stems in large part from the fact that this political form permitted a broad acceptance of the Church’s presence and, at the same time, possessed an extremely powerful force (the monarch by divine right) for guaranteeing the political body’s independence from the Church.

Thus European monarchy had two sides. The first, a “static” one, can be described as the union of throne and altar. The king was a good Christian and submissive son of the Church, and the Church recognized him as king by God’s grace and preached obedience to his power. The second was “dynamic”: the king tended naturally to assert the political body’s total independence from the Church and hence to claim even the religious sovereignty of his kingdom (for example, the nomination of bishops, control of religious orders, and even, in extreme cases such as England, participation in the definition of Christianity’s dogmatic content). Whereas in the Middle Ages political bodies were enveloped or incorporated by the Church, every monarchy heading toward absolutism tended to incorporate the Church within its borders. The kingdom became the supreme political body, the human association par excellence. Once this supremacy was permanently established, the kingdom became the “nation,” and its “representatives” imposed on the clergy the “civil constitution,” establishing the Church’s complete subordination to the body politic.

Thus monarchy appeared to be less a regime than a process. This explains why the great historical theories formulated in the nineteenth century readily took away its specificity, making it into a simple instrument destined to be thrown on the scrap heap once it accomplished what “history” expected from it. For Marxism, it was the instrument for passing from “feudalism” to “capitalism”; for Guizot, the instrument of “national” unification and “civilization”; for Tocqueville, it made possible the passage from “aristocracy” to “democracy.”⁴ These interpretations are of unequal worth, but they all attempted to give an intelligible content to the intuition that monarchy had set “history” in motion, the modern history of Europe, a directed, meaningful, “irresistible” history. Monarchy broke the natural rhythm of political history in Europe, and only in Europe.

The natural rhythm of a body politic can be roughly described as follows. In foreign policy, it fosters territorial expansion up to the point that this expansion threatens its defeat. In domestic policy it involves either conservatism, leading to the petrification of the regime, or a displacement traditionally described as “cyclical” among political forms, predetermined and constant in their essential characteristics: aristocracy, democracy, anarchy, despotism, monarchy. But European monarchy instead set in motion a political evolution leading to the incessant (and not at all cyclical) transformation of the internal constitution of states, one perpetually producing new political and social forms. Monarchy set history in motion, and we are still living with the consequences.

What explains the extreme originality and unequalled dynamism of European monarchy? It was the stable compromise between the religious sacred and the civic sacred, making the king the keystone of the sacred system. But in spite of all his ostentatious religious attributes, in spite of the coronation rites, sacred rituals, and occasional miracles, the king in Europe was never able to play the role that emperors played in the East. There, although the emperor might launch himself into the most extravagant conquests, he remained the great preserver of his society and its civilization. This passively sublime, or sublimely passive role, was forbidden the king in the West: there he had to act continuously, and act on his society.

What was the principle of this action? The king could not seize and retain the things most sacred to Christianity. (The figure of the king as Christ, for example, did not succeed in acquiring a lasting consistency, for obvious reasons.)⁵ Instead he naturally took on the task of forming the political body as one whole, essentially distinct from the Church. He undertook the establishment of the secular city, the civitas hominum; he made it one as he himself was one. In principle, of course, the Church left man free to organize the earthly city as he saw fit. But the king alone was capable of taking on the responsibility and effectively assuming this role left to man.

I have just tried to give a very schematic definition of the original problem of European political history. Only by looking at it does the subsequent political development become intelligible. One can present this problem in an almost mathematical form: “given the characteristics of the Catholic Church, find the political form X that makes it possible to ensure the secular world’s independence.” Since the city-state and the Empire are ruled out, that leaves monarchy. There is much less artifice than one might think in such a presentation, even if it benefits from the advantages of retrospection: this particular problem was certainly, over many centuries, the major problem faced by European peoples. In formulating it in this way, I am presupposing no particular interpretation of Christianity’s meaning, or even of man’s political condition. Moreover, by placing o...