Natural Law and Human Rights

Toward a Recovery of Practical Reason

by Pierre Manent

Translated by Ralph C. Hancock

Foreword by Daniel J. Mahoney

Series: Catholic Ideas for a Secular World

176 pages, 5.50 x 8.50 in

Paperback

Published: February 2021

ISBN 9780268107222

$25.00

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Published: February 2020

ISBN 9780268107215

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ebook

Published: February 2020

ISBN 9780268107239

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“In Natural Law and Human Rights, the French philosopher Pierre Manent provides a searching critique of the doctrines, policies, and practices of ‘human rights’ prevailing today. To interpret or replace them, he proposes the original natural law that is always available to anyone who ponders the basic human experiences. That law, knowable and accessible in our time, is our guide to live for the best.” —Harvey C. Mansfield, Kenan Professor of Government, Harvard University; Senior Fellow, the Hoover Institution, Stanford University

“Pierre Manent’s book is a compact feast. Once properly digested, his thesis is original and electrifying.” —Patrick Deneen, author of Why Liberalism Failed

“Pierre Manent takes on the now-daring task of rehabilitating classical natural law and does so with what might be described as Gallic verve.” —Will Morrisey, author of The Dilemma of Progressivism

“Why is the 'critique of modernity' such a ubiquitous genre? . . . Natural Law and Human Rights, the new book by formidable French political theorist Pierre Manent, provides another framework for understanding the proliferation of these critiques of modernity.” —The Hedgehog Review

"This is a bold book, and Patrick Deneen’s back-cover blurb of this book as a 'compact feast' may undersell it. This book is a treasure chest, for in a little more than 100 pages Manent lavishly offers gems of insight. His greatest jewel of wisdom is that modern man cannot win his fight against the natural law, for it is still part of him, deny it though he may." —The Federalist

“Manent’s prescient critique of human rights may be the best tool at our disposal to interpret the weaknesses that COVID-19 has revealed. The modern politics of human rights is too individualistic, too theoretical, and too technical, Manent warns, all faults that poison our ability to deliberate the natural ends of man and make a real choices, take real actions.” —The American Mind

“It takes a bold man to offer public criticism of the idea of ‘human rights.’ . . . The western world is blessed to have such a man—bold, profound, and prudent—in Pierre Manent. All of these virtues are displayed in his excellent new book, Natural Law and Human Rights. . . . The book is rich in insight, the fruit of Manent’s decades of deep meditation on the history of political philosophy and on the intellectual, moral, and political predicament of the modern world.” —Public Discourse

“[Manent] details the need for our discourse on human rights to be reintegrated into what he calls an ‘archic’ understanding of human and political existence. Only by seeing rights as rooted in duties and by seeing them in light of the the natural moral law can we be both intellectually sound in our practical reasoning and well-grounded in our claims about human rights.” —International Philosophical Quarterly

“In a remarkable book titled Natural Law and Human Rights: Toward a Recovery of Practical Reason, Manent responds to Montaigne’s challenge. Here Manent persuasively defends the enduring relevance of the old cardinal virtues—courage, justice, prudence, and moderation—and of a conception of non-arbitrary conscience that can provide practical reason with rich moral content.” —The New Criterion

"Manent helps us to see the deep chasm that lies between the modern human rights worldview and that of natural law." —The New Bioethics

As we observe human beings who obey the rule of their culture, even the most absurd or shocking in our view, we understand that they are not free and that there is no law valid for all human beings, a law that they would be free to obey or to disobey. We understand at the same time that we can and we must practically order collective life not according to a natural law, which does not exist or in any case has no power, but by taking as our foundation a freedom to which all human beings are entitled and of which they are capable once we have renounced imposing some law on them, once we have resolved to concern ourselves exclusively with their “rights.”

This division of the mind between human rights that we must put into effect and the diverse cultures that we are obliged to declare equal entails uncertainty and finally a weakness of judgment. Caught between the diversity without rule of cultures on the one hand, and, on the other, the lawless freedom of human rights, we no longer have a solid basis for exercising practical judgment. The arrangement that brings together the affirmation of the equality of human rights and the affirmation of the equality of “cultures” or ways of life throws the faculty of judgment into an insurmountable perplexity that tends to paralyze collective action.

Thus laws that are exotic or barbarous and our limitless freedom come together on this point: the former implicitly refute and the latter explicitly rejects the idea of a natural law, that is, the idea of freedom under law – under a law not made by freedom but that finds its support and its reason in human nature. The argument that the philosophy of human rights is constituted in opposition to the idea of a natural law, and particularly in opposition to the way this idea developed in a Christian context, finds sufficient proof in the philosophical construction that was the basis and the matrix of the doctrine of the rights of man, that is, the notion of the state of nature. The Christian or biblical idea of humanity as beginning under the law and, whether obedient or disobedient, as remaining under the law, is replaced by that of a humanity that begins in a freedom that ignores all law and that, once forced by necessity to give itself laws, will do so only under the condition and with the intention of preserving its freedom whole without law: the modern citizen, by putting himself under the law that it has produced, means to remain, according to the formula of Rousseau’s Social Contract, “just as free as before.” In other words, the law henceforth has validity or legitimacy only if it aims to guarantee human rights and limits itself to this purpose.

One might argue that, although the philosophy of human rights was elaborated and refined in a Christian context in opposition to the philosophy or doctrine of natural law nourished in this context, these conditions surrounding its production, which it is easy to show from the history of philosophy were intensely polemical, take nothing from the intrinsic legitimacy of this philosophy. The idea of an original condition of freedom and equality in which the rights of man are rooted seems at first to offer enough consistency and meaning, enough clarity and motivation, for the citizen to be able and even obliged to forget the history of philosophy. No doubt the idea of human rights speaks to us directly and powerfully enough that we do not feel the need to inquire concerning its genesis. Still, even if we consider the notion of the state of nature to be scaffolding that is no longer needed once the edifice of rights has been constructed, a little attention to the stones of this edifice will force us to admit that we cannot speak of human rights without referring implicitly but directly and concretely to “nature.” And however repugnant we may find it to consider that “nature” in any sense plays a role in the principles by which we organize the human world, we must concede that the modern doctrine of rights depends upon a specific understanding of the human being that is nothing if not “natural.” The doctrine of human rights derives from a “right” that is nothing if not “natural.”