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The poverty of liberalism

June
2007 | 135 » Reviews » The
poverty of liberalism Buy
Issue

The individualism and
universalism of western political elites are on a collision course
with the popular desire for moorings in time and place. The nation
state cannot be replaced by global norms

Eric Kaufmann

Eric Kaufmann is a lecturer in politics and sociology at Birkbeck
College

A world
beyond politics: a defense of the nation-state, by Pierre
Manent
(Princeton, £22.95)

Most modern liberals
take it for granted that progress means transcending the nation
state. In his new book, Pierre Manent tries to understand today's
impatient cosmopolitanism in the light of western political
philosophy. Along the way, he elaborates a full-bodied cultural
criticism of what Daniel Bell termed the "antinomian" ethos of
modern man: our unwillingness to accept limits on our freedom to
remake our authentic, absolute self. In the same way as cultural
traditions mediate and constrain the self, the nation state
frustrates our desire to achieve a perfect public self based purely
on universal law. Individualism and universalism are two sides of
the same worldview, chafing against the mediations of particular
communities. Hence the dreams of today's western political elites
incline towards cosmopolitanism—as Manent says, "Americans, through
the extension to the whole world of the US's writ, Europeans,
through the extension beyond Europe's borders of Brussels'
'mechanisms and values.'" Indeed, both Europe and America are
characterised by an inability to
place...

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Related Subjects

Global
political order (61),  Intellectuals
and ideas (36),  and Political
theory (91).

Global
political order,  Intellectuals
and ideas,  and Political
theory.

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