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Soc (2014) 51:588592DOI 10.1007/s12115-014-9828-4
BOOK REVIEW
Pierre Manent, Metamorphoses of the City: On the Western Dynamic
trans. Marc LePain. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. 384 pp. $39.95. ISBN 978-067407294-7
Collin May
Published online: 19 August 2014# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014
Is it possible for the totality of humanity to govern itself in freedom? In his most recent work to be translated into English Metamorphoses of the City: On the Western Dynamic noted French political thinker, Pierre Manent, tackles this imposing question head on. In doing so, he delivers one of the most intellectually diverse, penetrating and original analyses of the form of western civilization available today. At the same time, he addresses a theme that is both highly pertinent but oddly neglected by his contemporaries. The neglect of the question derives, it seems, from the likelihood that so many of us, especially in the western world, have few doubts as to the answer. We believe, and even insist, that humanity can attain to unity and that the function of that unity is to ensure that the dignity and rights of each individual, whether on his own or as a possessor of this or that identity, are enacted through the untrammelled realization and acceptance of each persons particular propensities. This is, simultaneously, the embodiment of our global morality and the impetus for our morally indifferent science.
The evidence for this dogma is found in our strident conviction that no particular or substantive difference should separate any human from the immediate recognition of ones humanity by his or her fellow human beings. In one fell stroke we render our differences fundamentally irrelevant as they are now without authority to govern human relations, while at the same time liberating these toothless tigers to be feted as individual markers of the very dignity our supine differences represent. This is our contemporary dilemma as Manent sees it: our speech is full of a humanity that, as the immediate relation of each human to every other by the means of the
celebration of difference, eviscerates human action precisely by its uncompromising denial of any compelling authority to those lived differences. As unified humanity, we despise and extol our differences with equal fervor and frustration. Something is lacking...