Metamorphoses of the City On the Western Dynamic
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.
PhilosophyPoliticalPolitical ScienceWorldEuropeanHistory
RELEASED2013
PUBLISHERHarvard University Press
LENGTH384
LANGUAGEEN
Pierre Manent ( born 6 May 1949, Toulouse) is a French political scientist and academic. He teaches political philosophy at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, in the Centre de recherches politiques Raymond Aron. Every autumn, he is also a visiting teacher in Boston College at the Department of Political Science. After graduating from the École Normale Supérieure, he became assistant to Raymond Aron at the Collège de France. He was one of the founders of the quarterly *Commentaire* and remains a regular contributor. Manent is a key figure of the contemporary French political philosophy and his work has helped the rediscovery of the French liberal tradition. A eurosceptic and a classical liberal, he has been called by *The Weekly Standard* "the most profound of the Euroskeptical philosophers". **Source**: [Pierre Manent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Manent) on Wikipedia.
Metamorphoses of the City On the Western Dynamic
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.
PhilosophyPoliticalPolitical ScienceWorldEuropeanHistoryEuropeReligion
RELEASED2013
PUBLISHERHarvard University Press
LENGTH384
LANGUAGEEN
Pierre Manent ( born 6 May 1949, Toulouse) is a French political scientist and academic. He teaches political philosophy at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, in the Centre de recherches politiques Raymond Aron. Every autumn, he is also a visiting teacher in Boston College at the Department of Political Science. After graduating from the École Normale Supérieure, he became assistant to Raymond Aron at the Collège de France. He was one of the founders of the quarterly *Commentaire* and remains a regular contributor. Manent is a key figure of the contemporary French political philosophy and his work has helped the rediscovery of the French liberal tradition. A eurosceptic and a classical liberal, he has been called by *The Weekly Standard* "the most profound of the Euroskeptical philosophers". **Source**: [Pierre Manent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Manent) on Wikipedia.
