Abstract

This volume is the third in a new series which makes available the writings of the new French liberals, of whom Pierre Manent represents a leading figure. These thinkers come to grips with modern liberal democracy, not in order to replace it, but in order to understand its origins, its history, its internal tendencies, its strengths, its pitfalls. This is a refreshing movement, insofar as it attempts to understand philosophically the modern political situation without either dismissing it in the light of some utopia or criticizing it by a contrast to some idealized historical condition like the city-state. In this volume Manent proposes to clarify liberalism, the dominate understanding of the political in our time, but he does so in terms of liberalism's own history, that is, as the product of several great political thinkers' reactions to one another and to political and social changes in Europe and America. Accordingly, each chapter of the book treats a major thinker from Machiavelli through Tocqueville.