Globalization and Liberalism: Montesquieu, Tocqueville, and Manent by Trevor Shelley

Author:Trevor Shelley [Shelley, Trevor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, European, Globalization, History & Theory, Comparative Politics, Political Science, World, Political
ISBN: 9780268107314
Google: 7XHnDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 52052747
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
Published: 2020-04-30T00:00:00+00:00

AN IMPORTANT INTERMEDIARY TERM: THE SCIENCE OF ROME

There is something “enigmatic” about Rome, partly because of its difference from Greek political experience, but it has uniqueness beyond the Greek comparison. Indeed, the central section of Manent’s book engaging the question of les métamorphoses de la cité is titled “The Enigma of Rome.” This section is further divided into three sections: “Rome and the Greeks,” “Rome under the Gaze of the Moderns,” and “The Study [L’enquête] of Cicero.” While forming the bulk of Manent’s science of Rome in the text, it is not isolated to this part, for the third division of the work, titled “Empire, Church, Nation,” devotes two of three of its sections to an interpretation and discussion of St. Augustine, particularly his Civitas Dei. A science of Rome consists in examining Rome from the point of view of its three primary forms—the group of which Manent refers to as “the Roman series”—namely, the city, the empire, and the church. I discuss the first two of these here, reserving discussion of the church as a political form for the following chapter, where the theologico-political problem is engaged in greater detail.

Manent addresses the question of why Rome took such a different course from Athens even though both began similarly as cities, and so how it came to be that a city could give rise to an empire from within—how “the city itself could give birth to the empire, the city itself that experienced such an extension, which made this nearly unbelievable effort unto itself to transform itself from a small city into a global empire.”43 He traces the causes and consequences, or the human motivations and effects related to such an extraordinary event, revealing the political meaning of such an occurrence and its effect on human life. In his discussion he reveals how “the most delicate questions of morality, and even the most difficult question of ontology (such as the status of individuality) find themselves related to the question of political form.”44 If historians face the question—in terms of comparing Athens and Rome and Rome’s transition itself—political scientists, he argues, rarely engage the problem systematically.45 Thus, a “comparative political physics” is in order.46

One finds many of the same elements in the political history of both Athens and Rome, the numerical division between the few and the many and their associated dissensions, as well as the notable personages who led either of the parties as all bearing special importance—these being the primary sources of regime change. However, the class war developed differently in the two instances. Manent recounts that the spring of political development in Athens was in the fact that the power of the people grew due to a succession of eminent men, from Solon to Pericles, who took the side of the people, meeting their demands and guiding them. This succession of brilliant and aristocratic leaders drove the growing power of the people in Athens. In contrast, Manent argues, in Rome, the peoples’ demands were controlled, and thereby used, diverted, and hindered, by an aristocratic body, namely, the Senate.

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