Only when groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir tremble to make themselves known in public for fear of a confident citizenry showering them with virulent and open contempt will Australia finally have grasped that it need pay no more heed to opinion-page scolds and social engineers.
Pierre Manent must rank among our greatest living political philosophers. A professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, a one-time student of Raymond Aron, and a prolific author of books on the theme—more often than not—of what he calls “the political form,” Manent has been aptly described as a “Catholic Straussian,”[1] a designation which points to what must be about the most necessary, intriguing, and promising intellectual synthesis imaginable in our times. In facing the problems of our world—from the ongoing crisis of liberal democracy, to the threat of Islamic nihilism, and the erosion of sovereignty in an age of globalisation—it helps to have reflected on Manent’s presentation of the contemporary significance of the nation-state, in his Democracy without Nations?, or his poetic and rigorous exegesis of political forms more generally, in Metamorphoses of the City.
At first glance, Manent’s willingness to defend and honour the European nation-state in and of itself, as a civilised and liberal political form—he has written that “[t]he nation-state is to modern Europe what the city-state was to ancient Greece”[2]—should place him squarely in the camp of the Right. Yet his latest work, Beyond Radical Secularism, does not conform at all to the template popularised by right-wingers—men like Éric Zemmour, say—who denounce the dilution of French Republican culture in the wake of paramarxian politicking and heavy immigration from the Islamic world. Indeed, there is nothing Napoleonic about Manent; his works are too nuanced to please the Front National. If anything, in its pessimism, Manent’s argument in Beyond Radical Secularism comes closer to the Houellebecqian dilemma facing serious French conservatives who see that, in many cases, they may actually have more in common with traditional-minded Muslim newcomers than with the native-born chauvinists with their loud-mouthed nostalgia and militant secularism. Manent’s is a book of regimes and rapprochement.
Still, it is impossible to ignore the reality that an increasingly violent, menacing series of outbursts, perpetrated by individuals who have settled in France from predominantly Muslim nations, has marred the country’s journey towards a de facto demographic Eurabia in recent times, and Manent is nothing if not clear-eyed as to the nature of the problem confronting his country. In Beyond Radical Secularism, he makes explicit reference to the underlying politico-theological crisis:
The rights of man, as these have come to be understood throughout the course of the history of European nations, will be of little help in bringing Muslims to see their moral practices reasonably from a certain distance; as we now understand them, human rights imply the pure and simple disappearance of Islam as a form of common life. Muslims are too attached to their moral practices and to their religion to give into the temptation to become ‘modern individuals’ by disappearing as Muslims.[3]
Modernity issues its edict to all to give up their archaic attachments and embrace the “neutrality” of modern life. But this edict, as any student of the twentieth-century well knows, can just as often inspire a nihilistic response. Among Muslims, this response has come from that small minority of emasculated men who make a point of growing their beards long, reciting the Qur’an, and mixing explosives. Manent’s response to all this, however, is not to enjoin Islam to adapt, à la Ayaan Hirsi Ali. For if anything, such injunctions merely exhibit a doubling-down on the original error. Exasperated by the politics of fact-value distinctions, Manent bemoans that “when we are asked to adhere to the values of the Republic, nothing is asked of us.”[4] “The result,” in a depoliticised state, “is that everyone likes to proclaim these values, a money that may buy nothing, but at least costs nothing to print.”[5]
These empty “values” are but the common currency of centrism—in both its centre-Left and centre-Right varieties—and have no purchase on the loyalties of a political community. But what sets Manent apart from so many on the contemporary French Right is his adamant refusal to re-write his nation’s recent history or, in light of which, to play the unsuspecting victim. In reflecting upon the influx of North Africans and Middle Easterners, he dares to stress an unwelcome truth:
We did not impose conditions upon their settling here, and so they have not violated them. Having been accepted as equals, they thus have every right to think that they were accepted “as they were.” We cannot reverse this acceptance without breaking the tacit contract that has accompanied immigration over the last forty years.[6]
This is exactly what Western populations, having placidly accepted the political status quo for decades now, do not want to hear. They would prefer it if the vivid demonstrations of the incompatibility of post-Christian liberal democracy with a younger, energetic religious-group, were something utterly unforeseeable and simply perverse. But they are neither. And now the West suffers for it, unsettled and agitated by recent developments—developments which Manent is well-positioned to observe: he began writing his book in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo murders in January 2015, and published just before the bloodbath in November 2015.[7]
