Metamorphoses of the City: On the Western Dynamic

by Pierre Manent, Marc LePain

Overview

What is the best way to govern ourselves? The history of the West has been shaped by the struggle to answer this question, according to Pierre Manent. A major achievement by one of Europe's most influential political philosophers, Metamorphoses of the City is a sweeping interpretation of Europe's ambition since ancient times to generate ever better forms of collective self-government, and a reflection on what it means to be modern.

Manent's genealogy of the nation-state begins with the Greek city-state, the polis. With its creation, humans ceased to organize themselves solely by family and kinship systems and instead began to live politically. Eventually, as the polis exhausted its possibilities in warfare and civil strife, cities evolved into empires, epitomized by Rome, and empires in turn gave way to the universal Catholic Church and finally the nation-state. Through readings of Aristotle, Augustine, Montaigne, and others, Manent charts an intellectual history of these political forms, allowing us to see that the dynamic of competition among them is a central force in the evolution of Western civilization.

Scarred by the legacy of world wars, submerged in an increasingly technical transnational bureaucracy, indecisive in the face of proliferating crises of representative democracy, the European nation-state, Manent says, is nearing the end of its line. What new metamorphosis of the city will supplant it remains to be seen.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674072947
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	09/23/2013
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Pierre Manent is Director of Studies at L'École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Dynamic of the West 1

I The Original Experience of the City

1 What Science for the City? 17

2 The Poetic Birth of the City 29

3 The Civic Operation 63

II The Enigma of Rome

4 Rome and the Greeks 105

5 Rome as Seen by the Moderns 152

6 Cicero's Inquiry 172

III Empire, Church, Nation

7 The Critique of Paganism 213

8 The Two Cities 274

9 The Stakes of Mediation 304

Notes 329

Index 365

Editorial Reviews

The culmination of thirty years of reflection on modern politics, Metamorphoses of the City is Pierre Manent's Summa. By tracing the transformation of Western political form from the Greek city-state to the nation state, then to our increasingly post-national world, he raises profound questions about the future of self-government. A beautifully conceived and deeply unsettling book.

Mark Lilla