Just a Social Animal?

Pierre Manent began his Foreword to Émile Perreau-Saussine’s award-winning critical study of Alasdair MacIntyre, originally published in French in 2005 and recently translated and published in English, with the ringing words, “Liberalism, that’s the enemy!” He went on to make clear that this was not his own view, but his observation of a widespread opinion that cast its shadow over liberal democracy in the West. There was a paradox here: having defeated its two great twentieth-century totalitarian opponents, and thus in many ways freed from political challenge, the liberal West nonetheless harbored within itself radical critics of the left and the right. Perceptive and pertinent in 2005, the observation has only grown in truth since then.