Pierre Manent’s Beyond Radical Secularism, updated notes
Pierre Manent’s Beyond Secular Radicalism Preface Manent begins with a reflection on the political formation of modern France. Many of his reflections apply more broadly to Europe, and beyond that to the West, but he has in mind especially the particularity of France’s formation and current crisis...
New Manent Seminar: Beyond Radical Secularism
Message from David Alexander: I would like to propose that we read Beyond Radical Secularism by Pierre Manent and do so on the following schedule: 26OCT- parts 1-5, to pg. 28 16NOV- parts 6-10, to pg. 49 30NOV- parts 11-15, to pg. 16 14DEC- parts 16-20, to the end...
Manent, The City of Man, Ch. 4, pp. 137-155, Parts 15-23
15 Locke does not deny that man has an essence or a substance but claims, in fact, that it is unknowable. Man’s being is enclosed in the opaque tautology: “X = X.” Man is the being who defines himself by the fact of having rights, but man is...
Manent, The City of Man, Ch. 4, pp. 126-137, Parts 8 – 14
8 John Locke agrees that man is different from the animals, distinguished by his power of abstracting. It is only that we do not know what his substance is and only know that for certain that he is an animal. We assume that man is man, but that simply...
Pierre Manent’s City of Man, chapter 4, notes
Notes on Manent’s The City of Man, Chapter IV: The Hidden Man 1 Manent has described thus far the three major spheres in modern man’s self-consciousness: History, Society and Economy. Each of these has two facets, a homogenous set of facts and the science which concerns itself with these...
Pierre Manent’s City of Man, ch. 3, Notes
Notes on Manent’s The City of Man, Chapter III, “The Economic System” by David Alexander 1 Where Montesquieu cautiously established the English experience as a new authority, Adam Smith accepted it as an established authority. Smith explains economic growth in England and Scotland in his day as the result...
Pierre Manent, City of Man, chapter 2, notes
Notes on Chapter 2 of Manent’s The City of Man “All literature, all philosophy, all history abounds with incentives to noble action, incentives which would be buried in black darkness were the light of the written word not flashed upon them. How many pictures of high endeavor great authors...
Pierre Manent’s City of Man, Notes
link to:Manent’sCityofMan...
Pierre Manent’s Modern Liberty and Its Discontents, Summary
link to: NotesonManentpapers...
Introduction, Pierre Manent’s Modern Liberty and Its Discontents
Notes on the Introduction to Modern Liberty and Its Discontents by Pierre Manent by David Alexander Daniel J. Mahoney locates Pierre Manent among “neoliberal” French thinkers, non-Marxist and non-‘existentialist’ political philosophers whose genesis he locates from the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. (At one point, he remarks that...