Current problems of European democracy

Modern Age, Wntr, 2003 by Pierre Manent

It is a privilege to introduce the work of Pierre Manent to the readers of Modem Age. Manent is one of the outstanding political philosophers writing in Europe today. Born in 1949, he was educated at the Ecole Normale Superieure and for several years was an assistant to Raymond Aron at the College de France. In 1978, together with Aron and Jean-Claude Casanova, he helped found the quarterly Commentaire, a journal that has played a decisive role in challenging the Left's domination of French intellectual life. Manent is presently a professor at the Centre de recherches politiques Raymond Mon at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris.

In such books as The Births of Modern Politics (1977), Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy (1982, English trans., 1996) and An Intellectual History of Liberalism (1986,1994), Manent explored the permutations of the European liberal tradition, the place of religion in modern life, and the enduring tensions between modern conceptions of freedom and a "substantial" affirmation of the human good. His magisterial The City of Man (1994,1998) combines an incisive critique of the historicism, economism, and sociologism characteristic of modern thought with a searching exploration of the tensions between nature and grace, reason and revelation, at the heart of modern life.

The following article was originally delivered as a lecture in Warsaw in March 2002, and was published in the summer 2002 issue of Commentaire. It provocatively develops the critique of European "depoliticization" at the center of Manent's most recent work, especially his Cours familierde philosophie politique (2001). This articlewas translated for Modern Age by Daniel J. Mahoney and Paul Seaton.--M.C.H.

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IN ORDER TO ENTER INTO the large topic of contemporary European democracy, in order to give ourselves some way calmly to evaluate it at the moment of its triumph--a triumph too complete not to raise some anxiety in anyone familiar with the ordinary course of human affairs-I propose, as an initial orientation, to consider the history of democracy. More precisely, I propose to consider the chronology of its interrogations of itself, the history not of "dominant ideologies," but of "dominant questionings," if I may put it that way.

But what chronology? Does not the choice of dates presuppose an interpretation of democracy, a conception of what it is, or ought to be? That is no doubt what a rigorous epistemologist would say. I, however, will not pretend to practice a virtue that would have the inconvenience, in addition to the difficulty, of being useless and therefore prejudicial. No, let us have some confidence in the density, the weighty force, of the social atmosphere--that is, let us have confidence in the dates that the public, without receiving marching orders from anyone, has retained as significant. When they begin, the philosophers and the learned who imitate them pretend not to know anything. I propose to begin our reflection with what we all know.

1848 and 1968

It seems to me that the two dates most generally acknowledged to punctuate the development of modern European democracy are separated by more than a century: 1848 and 1968.

1848 was the year of the Communist Manifesto and of those bloody June days when the National Guard crushed the Paris workers' uprising which had been provoked by the closing of the national workshops. In short, 1848 is the inaugural explosion of the social question, the declaration of class warfare, the establishment of class struggle.

In 1968 we recall (and we can recall, because we observed--and many among us participated in) the last burst of the fire lit in 1848. Recall the Marxist consensus, the bourgeoisie once again up against the wall, their hands once again white at the factory doors, their hats doffed before the workers' caps, on their knees before them, Sartre on his barrel...and Raymond Axon cuffing the ears of the "elusive Revolution," holding before it the mirror of Flaubert's Sentimental Education.'

From 1848 to 1968. It seems to me that we have here the axial core of our modern history, when the problem of democracy was called the social question. And to be sure it was Marx who posed this question in the most ample and most radical manner.

A New Inequality of Conditions

Democracy, however, did not come to be in 1848. It was already "at the point of overflowing its banks" (as Tocqueville put it) at least from the 1820s. The greatest book ever written on democracy was published in 1835 and 1840. One axis of Democracy in America is constituted by the comparison between French democracy and American democracy, or between the French Revolution and the American Revolution. The other axis is constituted by a comparison between democracy in general and what Tocqueville calls aristocracy. With discernment, we can see this "Tocquevillean" period beginning with the American Revolution, let us say in 1776, the date of the Declaration of Independence. How can we define this period synthetically? The problem for this Tocquevillean period is not the social question but rather the actualization, the institutionalization, of the new principle of legitimacy, that of the sovereignty of the people. (And it is in the different modalities of this institutionalization that the great difference bet ween France and the United States resides, according to Tocqueville.)