A nice piece by Paul Seaton on the political thinker, Pierre Manent, published over at Public Discourse. Seaton summarizes some of Manent’s key themes over the years.
Here are a few lines from one of my own favorite of Manent’s books, Metamorphoses of the City: On the Western Dynamic (2013, English edition), a highly Augustinian political philosophical account, which has influenced my views on the concepts and concerns of “establishment” and “free exercise” in law and religion:
In any case we cannot avoid asking the following question: what for us Moderns is the association, the framework, and instrument of what operation, in which the earlier divisions of humanity are overcome? The answer that comes naturally to mind is obviously that this association is humanity itself, which is more universal than the universal Church. But what does the human association or humanity as an association mean? Whom does it encompass? Everybody, of course. But what does everybody mean? Everybody living? But by what right are those who are dead cut off from humanity? By what right are the unborn cut off from humanity? And of the living, are not most in effect invisible to us? In short, humanity as universal association is in one sense just as invisible as the invisible Church. We do not know how to determine the form and the limits of this association. Whence of course the vast career open to the makers of humanity, to those who believe themselves capable of determining who truly belongs to humanity and this who is outside the pale of humanity… (298-99)
