Books
Calvin and the Foundations of Modern Politics (2011)
This work reopens the question of the relation of the Protestant Reformation to the emergence of a distinctively modern view of political activity. Providing a highly original reading of John Calvin's major work and an examination of some key interpretations of Calvinism, Ralph C. Hancock argues that Calvin should be considered a founder of modern civilization along with such "secular" thinkers as Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Descartes.
According to Hancock, however, leading interpretations assume a dichotomy between the "worldly" and the "religious" which a close reading of Calvin's writings does not sustain. Hancock provides an illuminating commentary on Calvin's four-volume Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559), addressing both Calvin's political and ethical argument and the theological foundations of this argument. In Hancock's view, Calvin radically distinguishes between the religious and the secular in order to bind them together in a summons to worldly activity for the preservation of the species and the glory of God. The author thus uncovers the theological basis of Calvinism's historical activism and demonstrates the complex unity of Calvin's practical teaching and his theology. Hancock concludes by speculating on the implications of his findings for interpretations of the modern political theory of Strauss, Voeglin, and Blumenberg.
The Responsibility of Reason (2011)
Can we run our lives and govern our societies by reason? The question provoked Socrates to redirect philosophic inquiry in a political direction, and it has remained fundamental to Western thought. Martin Heidegger explored this problem in his profound critique of the Western metaphysical tradition, and Leo Strauss responded to Heidegger with an attempt to recover the classical idea of the rule of reason. In The Responsibility of Reason, Ralph C. Hancock undertakes no less than to answer the Heideggerian challenge. Offering trenchant and original interpretations of Aristotle, Heidegger, Strauss, and Alexis de Tocqueville, he argues that Tocqueville saw the essential more clearly than apparently deeper philosophers. Hancock addresses political theorists on the question of the grounding of liberalism, and, at the same time, philosophers on the most basic questions of the meaning and limits of reason. Moreover, he shows how these questions are, for us, inseparable.
Just and Holy Principles:
Latter-Day Readings on America and the Constitution
Latter-Day Saint leaders past and present share their views regarding the founding of the United States of America. Text often used in Brigham Young University's American Heritage class.
The Legacy of the French Revolution
This collection of essays by prominent American and French scholars explores the political, cultural, and social implications of the most fundamentally formative modern event, the French Revolution. The contributors contend that the vocabulary and spirit of the French Revolution has exercised greater influence on the modern world than the more moderate and by all appearances more successful American Revolution. The Legacy of the French Revolution delineates the distinctive characters of the American and French revolutions and analyzes the different variants of democratic political traditions that have evolved from this seminal event. This book will be of particular interest to political theorists, political historians, and students of democratic theory.
America, the West, and Liberal Education
More than a decade ago, Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind raised the philosophical stakes of the debate concerning the proper role of the study of the great books in higher education. Bloom's argument for the Western tradition employed both the rhetoric of knowledge for its own sake, and that of the broadly political uses of education. But the question of the precise relationship between the intellectual and the moral-political ends of liberal education was not Bloom's theme; though he clearly opposed the political radicalization of the curriculum espoused by many who styled themselves post modernists, he may not have adequately addressed their contention that all education is deeply political. The essays in America, the West and Liberal Education attempt to advance our understanding of the proper purposes of liberal education in America by exploring the relationship between the free pursuit of truth and the practical ends embedded in a particular tradition or political community.
Beyond Radical Secularism:
How France and the Christian West Should Respond to the Islamic Challenge
Responding to the brutal terror attacks in France in January 2015, Pierre Manent has written a learned, passionate essay that reflects broadly and deeply on the political and religious situation of France and Europe. He freely acknowledges that the West is at war with fanatics who despise liberal and Christian civilization. That war must be conducted with prudent tough-mindedness. At the same time, serious thought must be given to the Islamic question at home and abroad. Concentrating on the French situation, Manent suggests that French Muslims are not entering an "empty" nation, defined by radical secularism and human rights alone. France has a secular state, as do all the nations of the contemporary West. That is a heritage to be cherished. But the Islamic question will not be "solved" by transforming Muslims into modern secularists devoid of all religious sensibility. It must be remembered that France is also nation of a "Christian mark" with a strong Jewish presence, both of which enrich its spiritual and political life. Manent proposes a "social contract" with France's Muslims that is at once firm and welcoming. Rejecting radical secularism, the effort by certain "laicists" to completely secularize European society, to create a society without religion, Manent calls for a defensive policy that will allow Muslims to keep their mores, save the integral veil and polygamy. In exchange, they must accept the fact that they live in a society of a Christian mark and they must stop hiding behind charges of Islamophobia. In liberal and Christian Europe, there must be total freedom of criticism, including criticism of the Islamic religion.
A Century of Horrors:
Communism, Nazism, and the Uniqueness of the Shoah
The twentieth century bears the indelible imprint of both communism and Nazism. Today, it sometimes seems as if the former is all but forgotten, at least among Western elites, while our cultural memory of the latter is an inextinguishable fire. This inequality is surprising and calls out for explanation, a task the French political thinker Alain Besançon attempts here in a wise and elegant meditation.
In examining the horror and destruction caused by both of these terrible ideologies, Besançon finds that recourse to theology is necessary if we are to achieve even feeble illumination. He also explains why, even with the full knowledge of the extent of communism’s crimes, the uniqueness of the Shoah ought to be accepted without reservation.
Translated by Ralph C. Hancock and Nathanial H. Hancock
An Optimist's Diary
A Philosophical Economist Observes Our World
"One of the most probing and honest minds among commentators on the politics, economy and social concerns of our time. Sorman's writing invariably cast(s) a constructive glance at the world at the start of the 21st century"
-Thomas Bishop
Guy Sorman, as translated by Alexis Cornel
Seeing Things Politically
These autobiographical and philosophical essays, in the form of expertly probing interviews, provide a superb introduction to the work of one of the most significant contemporary political philosophers and a marvelously readable perspective on the French intellectual and political arenas from the 1970s to the present. Those already familiar with Manent's work will find an indispensable reflection on his transition from the critique of modernity brilliantly represented in his earlier books (most notably Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy and The City of Man), a critique at once original and significantly indebted to Leo Strauss, toward a perspective that emerges in his recent The Metamorphoses of the City, a monumental and profoundly original study that endeavors to situate modernity within the original Greek founding of the act of politics.
Equality by Default:
An Essay on Modernity as Confinement
For most of our contemporaries, to speak of modernity is to think immediately of liberty, equality, and democracy—and to assume that all is well. But things are not so simple. For while the culture of modernity has spread gradually throughout the West for roughly two hundred years, it accelerated in the 1960s in such a way as to undergo a subtle transformation. Hence the paradox of the world we live in: by all appearances the "rights of man" have emerged triumphant, yet at the same time they have been emptied of substance because of their radicalization. Modern man thus finds himself isolated and ensnared. By right, his autonomy should strengthen him; but in fact, he has been dispossessed of himself. The great artifice of our time is to give conformism the mask of liberty.
Philippe Bénéton, a prominent French religious conservative, has long meditated on Tocqueville, and Equality by Default is Tocquevillian in that it does not offer a partisan polemic, but rather paints a picture of contemporary life—a picture that is also a guide for discernment for those who have a difficult time "seeing" contemporary liberalism for what it is. Artfully translated by Ralph Hancock, Equality by Default offers a unique and strikingly insightful account of the late-modern mind.
Economics Does Not Lie:
A Defense of the Free Market in a Time of Crisis
In the 20th century, privatization and market capitalism have reconstructed Eastern Europe and lifted 800 million people - in China, Brazil, and India - out of poverty. In Economics Does Not Lie, noted French journalist Guy Sorman reveals that behind this unprecedented growth is not only the collapse of state socialism but also a scientific revolution in economics - one that is as of yet dimly understood by the public but increasingly embraced by policymakers around the globe.
Guy Sorman's excellent work on the free market, translated into English by Alexis Cornel (Ralph Hancock's occasional pseudonym for translations).