Pierre Manent: Beyond Radical Secularism

Pierre Manent
Wikipedia

Over at GoV, the cultural critic Thomas F. Bertonneau reviews the English edition of Pierre Manent's book, Beyond Radical Secularism -- How France and the Christian West Should Respond to the Islamic Challenge. Here is the opening paragraph of Bertonneau's review:

Pierre Manent (born 1949), a former student of Raymond Aron's who currently holds a professorship in political philosophy at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, has over the years written a dozen books devoted to the discussion of the liberal-modern dispensation — its origins, its basic assumptions, and its limitations. Unsurprising in a student of Aron's, Manent is moderately right-leaning, at least in a contemporary French context, in that he defends classical liberalism, disparages the authoritarian liberalism that has replaced it, advocates for the legitimacy of the nation-state, and turns his considerable skepticism on the European Union. Like a number of his contemporaries on the French Nouveau Droit, Manent insists that by the compelling force of their history and culture, France and its European sister nations are Christian nations and that they derive the fundamental decency of their political arrangements at least in part from a specifically Christian view of man and the world. In his expository style, Manent qualifies as quintessentially French: He argues his theses with thoroughness and subtlety and eschews any rhetoric of provocation. His prose gives an impression of coolness, calmness, and steadiness, qualities that incline a reader to concede the argument, if only while he is reading it.

The review is long, but worth reading, and Manent looks to be one for the reading list.