1/29/2014 Marc F.

Plattner - Book Review: Two Views of Liberalism (Reviews of: John Gray, Enlightenment' s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern
http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.libraries.uc.edu/journals/journal_of_democracy/v007/7.4br_gray.html 1/5
Copyright 1996 National Endowment for Democracy and the Johns Hopkins University
Press. All rights reserved.
Journal of Democracy 7.4 (1996) 169-173
Book Reviews
Two Views of Liberalism
Marc F. Plattner
Enlightenment's Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age . By John
Gray. Routledge, 1995. 203 pp.
An Intellectual History of Liberalism. By Pierre Manent. Translated by Rebecca Balinski.
Princeton University Press, 1994. 128 pp. Originally published in French in 1987.
For liberal democracy, this is the best of times and the worst of times. Its "ideological hegemony," as
reflected both in authoritative international agreements and in the number and power of the regimes
that fly its banner, is greater than it ever has been. At the same time, even the most established
democracies appear to be afflicted by a profound political malaise. And in the realm of serious
thought, as reflected in the work of those with a claim to the title of philosopher, the status of liberal
democracy has perhaps never been more precarious. Such, at any rate, is the impression conveyed
by these books by two of Western Europe's leading younger political theorists, John Gray of Britain
and Pierre Manent of France.
Both authors have devoted much of their scholarly careers to an exploration of the liberal tradition.
Manent is the editor of Les libraux and the author of Tocqueville et la nature de la dmocratie.
Gray, the author of Liberalisms: Essays in Political Philosophy, Post-liberalism: Studies in
Political Thought, and Beyond the New Right: Markets, Government and the Common
Environment, informs us in the preface that his current book completes "a decade's thinking about
liberalism, its grounds, scope and limits" (p. vii).
Both these authors see their inquiries into the liberal tradition as [End Page 169] being inquiries into
the nature of modernity itself. For Manent, "for almost three centuries this political doctrine constituted
the principal current of modern politics in Europe and the West" (p. xv). For Gray, liberalism is at the
core of "the Enlightenment project" that has shaped all of modern Western thought, including that of
conservative thinkers who viewed themselves as opponents of the Enlightenment. Gray proclaims
from the outset his view that this project "was self-undermining and is now exhausted" (p. viii).
Manent, who also speaks of the democratic, or liberal, or modern "project," leaves the reader with
little doubt that he too sees it as radically problematic.
1/29/2014 Marc F. Plattner - Book Review: Two Views of Liberalism (Reviews of: John Gray, Enlightenment' s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern
http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.libraries.uc.edu/journals/journal_of_democracy/v007/7.4br_gray.html 2/5
Beyond these important areas of agreement, however, these two books are utterly unlike each other
in almost every respect. Although each consists of ten chapters, Gray's draws mostly on previously
published essays that fit together uneasily, and sometimes even seem to be in mutual contradiction.
Manent's volume, by contrast, is a seamless whole that develops a unified analysis. Manent's
approach is quiet and reflective, while Gray's is lively and noisily polemical. Having begun as a liberal,
Gray informs us that he subsequently moved on to a historicist postliberalism, then toward traditional
conservatism, and now to a "strong value-pluralism" that does not "privilege"--indeed, seems to
denigrate--liberal or Western "values." There is no sign that Manent's thinking has undergone any such
dramatic shifts. One gets the impression that it is precisely his dissatisfactions with liberalism that have
led him to reflect upon it so determinedly and to seek to understand the nature of the dilemmas in
which modernity has become embroiled.
Enlightenment's Wake opens with two essays that attack the "new liberalism," by which Gray means
the Anglo-American academic political philosophy of the past two decades whose central figure is
John Rawls. Gray's assessment of this school is extremely harsh. He writes of its "political nullity and
intellectual sterility"; its "degenerate research program"; and the "absurdity" of a philosophy that
pursues practical political agreement but is "elaborated at a vast distance from political life in the real
world" and derives from the "unexamined intuitions of the U.S. academic nomenklatura."
Yet Gray's whole approach remains profoundly influenced by recent Anglo-American academic
philosophy. Most of his references are to this literature (until his concluding essay, where Nietzsche
and Heidegger suddenly burst upon the scene). More important, he conceives philosophical argument
as a war of positions--a kind of chess match, where various "moves" are tried out, some arguments
"defeat" others, and the players frequently change their minds about the positions they wish to defend
in subsequent games. Moreover, he seems to regard the waning of the "ephemeral hegemony" of
Rawlsian liberalism in contemporary political philosophy as an event of world-historical importance.
According to Gray, "The core project of the Enlightenment was the [End Page 170] displacement of
local, customary or traditional moralities, and of all forms of transcendental faith, by a critical or
rational morality, which was projected as the basis of a universal civilization" (p. 123). Gray also
looks beyond the eclipse of Rawls to the political world for evidence of the "world-historical failure"
of this project. He finds it in "the collapse and ruin, in the late twentieth century, of the secular,
rationalist and universalist political movements, liberal as well as Marxist, that that project spawned,
and the dominance in political life of ethnic, nationalist and fundamentalist forces" (p. 65). This is
surely an idiosyncratic reading of contemporary history, one that not only ignores the remarkable
spread of liberal democratic regimes and aspirations over the past two decades, but vastly overrates
the ascendancy of particularism (and neglects the fact that nationalism itself is a specifically modern
phenomenon). Gray cites various countries in East Asia, including China, as hopeful examples of
successful non-Western and nonliberal societies based on indigenous cultures, but he greatly
underestimates the degree to which these countries have been influenced by international (mostly
Western-dominated) culture. For better or worse, we are surely closer to a global civilization than
ever before.
Be that as it may, Gray indicates that his "strong value-pluralism" derives from the insight that
philosophy is unable to resolve the "most radical form of value conflict," that between "whole ways of
life, each with their characteristic, and often exclusionary excellences, virtues and goods" (p. 141). In
1/29/2014 Marc F. Plattner - Book Review: Two Views of Liberalism (Reviews of: John Gray, Enlightenment' s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern
http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.libraries.uc.edu/journals/journal_of_democracy/v007/7.4br_gray.html 3/5

short, there is no rational basis on which one can adjudicate the claims of regimes animated by such
diverse worldviews as Hinduism, Islam, Confucianism, and liberalism. This may remind some readers
of Samuel Huntington's theory of the clash of civilizations, but Gray is at pains to disassociate himself
from Huntington's emphasis on cultural difference as a source of war. For Gray, the conception of
international relations entailed by the value-pluralist view is "a peaceful modus vivendi among very
different regimes" (p. 128).
Gray notes that setting peace as the goal of politics reflects a Hobbesian perspective, but this does
not seem to trouble him. It should. For elsewhere he plausibly states that precisely Thomas Hobbes is
"the progenitor of the modern liberal intellectual tradition," a tradition that, according to Gray, "runs
aground, along with the rest of the Enlightenment project, on the reef of value-pluralism" (pp. 66-67).
But if the value-pluralist approach demands "not rational choice but radical choice among
incommensurables," why should it follow Hobbes in making peace the supreme political goal? After
all, a particular civilization may place a very high value on martial glory or may believe that its survival
demands a resort to war. Gray does not even raise the question of why peace is choice-worthy, much
less offer an answer. One can only conclude that his own thought still remains within the confines of
the much maligned Enlightenment project. [End Page 171]
As its title suggests, An Intellectual History of Liberalism is structured as a study in the history of
political thought, with most of its chapters devoted to individual thinkers from Machiavelli to
Tocqueville. Yet Manent's book is of far more than academic interest, for it is animated by the
conviction that "political thought and political life are, in modern times, intimately linked" (p. xv). He
argues that liberal ideas, in particular that of "the individual," have played a central role in guiding the
development of modern politics; only by inquiring into the origins and content of such ideas, therefore,
can one properly understand both the history and the present condition of the modern West.
What is perhaps most distinctive about Manent's interpretation is his view that liberalism was
decisively shaped by a fundamental hostility to Christianity (and especially to the Catholic Church).
He thus rejects the view common among intellectual historians that modernity can be understood as a
process of "secularization" of Christian values. For Manent, opposition to Christianity and its political
influence was at the very center of the thought not only of Machiavelli but also of Hobbes, whose
doctrine of the state of nature became the matrix from which all subsequent liberal thought developed.
It is to Hobbes that Manent devotes the longest and most penetrating chapter in his book. Though a
notorious champion of absolutism, Hobbes first set forth the fundamental elements of liberal thought:
the primacy of the right of the individual over any conception of the good; the natural equality of all
human beings; the artificial character of the political order (and the consequent distinction between
civil society and the state); the view that all legitimate political power must be "representative" (i.e.,
based on the consent of the people); and what Manent terms "the liberal interpretation of the law,"
which leaves its subjects free to do whatever the law does not explicitly forbid. These principles
derive from Hobbes's creation of the individual in the state of nature, which Manent argues had as its
raison d'tre the search for a starting point for political thought prior to the claims of religion. And
while the state-of-nature doctrine eventually fell into desuetude after the intellectual battle against the
Church was won, the principles and ways of thinking to which it gave rise continue to shape all of
modern politics.

1/29/2014 Marc F. Plattner - Book Review: Two Views of Liberalism (Reviews of: John Gray, Enlightenment' s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern
http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.libraries.uc.edu/journals/journal_of_democracy/v007/7.4br_gray.html 4/5
It is impossible in a brief review to recapitulate the substance of Manent's subtle and often compelling
analysis of the subsequent development of liberalism and the problems that still beset it: the anti-
absolutist modifications of Hobbes's teaching by Locke and Montesquieu; the "ultimate expression
and perplexity" of modern political thought in Rousseau; the cataclysmic impact of the French
Revolution, "a political change of unheard-of scope, yet having no stable political effects"; and the
evolution of post-Revolutionary liberalism in the thought of Constant, Guizot, and Tocqueville.
Though the issues that Manent addresses resonate across all liberal [End Page 172] societies, his
epigrammatic style and the focus of the latter part of his book are unmistakably French. The English-
speaking reader is likely to learn a great deal from Manent's treatment of the French Revolution and
the thought of Constant and Guizot; some marvelous passages quoted from the latter two thinkers
indicate that they have some claim to be included in such a study. At the same time, however, it must
be noted that nineteenth-century liberal thought followed a rather different path in the Anglo-Saxon
world. Moreover, Manent's chapter on Locke, whose influence was far greater in England and
America than on the Continent, is perhaps the least satisfactory in this volume.
In a very brief and cryptic conclusion, Manent discusses the contradictions of the "modern project"
that continue to afflict liberal societies today. The primary locus of these contradictions, he suggests, is
within modern man himself: divided between the private (nature) and the political (sovereignty), he
searches for an elusive unity that he can never achieve. The most visible manifestation of this split is
the division between society and the state, an essential feature of liberal regimes but also the source of
recurring discontent.
Manent offers no recipe for overcoming these contradictions. Indeed, he affirms that the two principal
efforts to do so in our own century, nazism and communism, have destroyed the hope that either "the
nation" or "the revolution" can resolve the insoluble. This no doubt helps explain why Manent, despite
his critical theoretical stance, displays such a sympathetic understanding of the liberal tradition and
why he is frequently grouped among France's new liberals. His aim is not to transcend liberalism by
overcoming its contradictions; it is to inquire whether those insoluble contradictions, rather than being
simply inherent in the human situation, might flow from certain philosophical choices made in the
seventeenth century that have shaped the modern world. Ultimately, Manent, though he puts forward
no alternative program or "position," calls into question the modern liberal project even more radically
than does Gray.
We return, then, to the paradox with which we began. At a time when liberal democracy enjoys an
almost unparalleled political supremacy, with its ideological rivals discredited or on the defensive, it
seems nonetheless to be increasingly unsure of itself. Dissatisfaction is evident not only among
electorates and journalists, but among serious thinkers as well. Of course, one may regard popular
discontent as little more than the usual grumbling, and the discontent of the philosophers is hardly
novel. Still, the combination of the two is a sign that the present hegemony of liberal democracy is not
likely to be unchallenged for very long.
Marc F. Plattner is coeditor of the Journal of Democracy and codirector of the International
Forum for Democratic Studies.
1/29/2014 Marc F. Plattner - Book Review: Two Views of Liberalism (Reviews of: John Gray, Enlightenment' s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern
http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.libraries.uc.edu/journals/journal_of_democracy/v007/7.4br_gray.html 5/5
.