Threads in Liberal Historiography

One of the most edifying and enjoyable aspects of being part of a large community of extended comrades who think about law -- something, I like to imagine, like the legal equivalent of the Republic of Letters that Anthony Grafton describes so beautifully in this book -- is that when a person whom one admires recommends a good read, there is actually world enough and time to follow through.  I try to keep a list of personal contacts with these kinds of recommendations, and even though I don't get to many, at least I can keep track of the things that I'm missing.

Some months ago, I was fortunate to have Patrick Brennan make such a recommendation to me, one which I've only just gotten around to reading: Pierre Manent's Intellectual History of Liberalism.  I am not a professional political theorist, but as a highly interested amateur, I've enjoyed this slim and readable book immensely.  More than that, I was struck by the connections in emphasis and orientation between Manent's account and Mark Lilla's The Stillborn God.  After the jump, some quick reflections on common themes.

First, there is Manent's point of departure -- what he calls "the theologico-political problem," which amounts to the historically peculiar fact that in the European West, the Church had taken on the social and political authority that was not undertaken by secular powers and that the Church felt an obligation to supervise all human activity with an eye to salvation in the next world.  Here is Manent (5):

The remarkable contradiction embedded in the Catholic Church's doctrine can be summarized in this way: although the Church leaves men free to organize themselves within the temporal sphere as they see fit, it simultaneously tends to impose a theocracy on them.  It brings a religious constraint of a previously unheard of scope, and at the same time offers the emancipation of secular life.

What's most remarkable about this statement to me is not so much the insights -- which, as Manent acknowledges, are not new with him.  Instead, it is the grace of expression (here and elsewhere -- the translation is quite good) and the very similar "problem of political theology" that one finds anchoring Lilla's book.  It is not the weakness of the Church as political force which gave rise to the secularizing rescue efforts of writers like Machiavelli and Hobbes; rather, liberalism was born as a full frontal assault on the Church as a kind of political rival.  Much of this is echoed in Lilla.

The connections continue.  For Manent, the liberal tradition is not grounded in Locke (as is perhaps most common), but instead in Machiavelli first and then, most importantly, in Hobbes -- as self-consciously organized efforts to confront the Church's claims to political authority.  Here it seemed to me that there were threads connecting to Quentin Skinner's work (particularly in the emphasis of the Italian city state) as a challenge to the Church's political claims.  Again, the emphasis on Hobbes is exactly of a piece with Lilla's showcasing of Hobbes center-stage in what he calls (in SG) "the great separation" -- the moment when the Church's claims to political authority were dealt a killing stroke.

There is also the powerful sense in both Manent and Lilla of the contingency of this history -- that there was nothing at all inevitable or necessary in the development of Western liberalism, and that there is no reason to suppose that other societies, with other histories, will necessarily follow the same path, in the same way, or with the same results. 

And there are other non-substantive connections, one of which is that Lilla was one of the first to bring writers like Manent (a representative, back in the '90s, of "New French Thought" -- "new," in that it post-dates authors like Derrida, of whom Lilla is no fan (see his book on intellectuals in politics)) to English-speaking audiences. 

For commenters, I want to emphasize that all of these positions are not my own views.  They are descriptions of the thematic and historiographic connections that I see between these two writers.  I would be grateful for your thoughts about the accuracy or persuasiveness of those connections, more so than the persuasiveness of the underlying views (about which, in any event, commenters will surely know more than I).

And, of course, my thanks to Patrick, for bringing the book to my attention.