Who Were the Sea Peoples?

"Sketched in rather broad strokes, the mechanism goes roughly as follows: the simple good regime degenerates into its vicious form, because the new generations, the king's children, for example, take their advantages for granted and give into their appetites, and thus they provoke the revolt that brings about the new simple regime that will in its turn undergo the same alteration and the same fate." -- Metamorphoses of the City , p. 180

"The biblical account of Cain and Abel is surely of great interest for us. Cain represents the ambivalence of human civilization. He is the first to ascend to a cultivated the soil, the first who is said to have become the builder of a city. He was, in short, what we would call a benefactor of humanity and to that extent the first man susceptible of being praised by men. It is he who, properly speaking, begins human history, at least the history of civilization. It is he who puts to best use, in any case to the most active use, the resources he had in hand upon leaving the garden of Eden. At the same time, of course, he represents the violence and murder that come with human civilization. "As for Abel, he was not concerned either to plant or to build. He was a shepherd who pastured small livestock. Where is Cain, farmer and builder, sought to dwell on the earth and settle it, Abel was, Augustine says... like a stranger -- a stranger to the earth, or on the earth. "S...

"The inflection or rupture between paganism and Christianity is... not in the rigorous distinction between the body and the soul -- the already ancient achievement of Greek philosophy..." -- Pierre Manent, The Metamorphoses of the City , p. 240 This historical fact, although it certainly is not a refutation of materialism, is somewhat of an embarrassment for the usual materialist etiology of ideas. The very idea of a "soul," per that materialist narrative, is some fanciful religious notion cooked up by primitive people to comfort themselves in the face of death. Once people begin to think "rationally," the obvious nonsensicalness of this concept becomes apparent. Except, historically speaking, at least in the West*, that was not how things went at all: from Persia westward to Britain, there was no indigenous religion with the idea of a soul as something sharply distinguished from the body.** Instead, this idea was developed by a lineage of thinkers wh...

"Modern republicanism makes a vigorous distinction between private or 'selfish' motives and public or 'selfless' motives of action, that is, between the motives of the individual and those of the citizen, and of course accords priority to the latter. Ancient republicanism largely ignores this distinction. If we believe the Latin historians in particular, we see that the motives we would call 'private' invade the space we call 'public.' There is a very compelling reason for this: the domain of the individual and the private has not yet been identified as a separate domain. All the human motives are at work in the city because the city is the sole locus of action -- there is no 'civil society' where individuals would 'assert their independence as they please...'" -- Pierre Manent, Metamorphoses of the City , p. 252

"what does it matter under whose rule a man lives, being so soon to die, provided that the rulers do not force him to impious and wicked acts?" (Quoted in Manent, p. 257) This would seem to offer us a criterion for when rebelling against a government is acceptable: is the government forcing you into service as a prostitute, asking you to round up a minority group for execution, or forcing you to take part in cattle raids on the neighbors in the next country? Then one may rebel. Is your complaint that the government won't let you chew khat, or won't allow publication of your political tract, or asks everyone to wear blue clothing on Tuesdays? Well then, no one may not rebel. Note: I am not here interested in debating whether Augustine's criterion is a good one. All I am saying here is, "This seems to be what Augustine thought." I am interested in studying the history of notions of proper authority and just rebellion: maybe once my study is done I wil...

"the division remains, but each of the souls two commitments being hampered in its manifestation and soon drained of its vitality, is hardly recognizable and observers can think that the division introduced by religion belongs to the past. Is important to note that the modern State represses almost equally the two divergent movements of the soul: not only does it severely circumscribe the public expression of religious convictions and affects -- religion is henceforth essentially a private thing -- but it makes in his organized to make the 'ancient freedom,' that is, the direct expression of civic commitments, impossible: citizens can act only through their representatives. The modern state bus rests on the repression, in any case the frustration, of the two most powerful human affects: on the one hand the passionate interest in this world is expressed in active participation in the common thing, and on the other the passionate interest in eternal and infinite as expresse...

"Machiavelli's boldness is such that he endeavors by every means to make motion itself appears the norm, in any case is what should be taken into account above all else. The very radical character of this thinking will prevent his being taken seriously as a philosopher: where are his 'ideas'?... "One cannot help noticing a connection between this transformation [of focusing on motion in politics] and the one that took place a century later in physics, which abandoned the notions of final cause and proper place, and took as its task the discovery of the laws of motion... It must be knowledged them that it was a political author -- Machiavelli -- who was the first place at the center of attention a motion does not tend toward any rest, a pure motion." -- Metamorphoses of the City , p. 206

I have encountered several scholars saying things like "since in Rome voting takes place beginning with the wealthiest classes and centuries, a voting majority of the people to achieve before the hunger citizens are consulted." Pierre Manent, Metamorphoses of the City , p. 198 How can this possibly matter? If one needs, say, five centuries out of nine to carry the day, how can the order of the vote matter, assuming one century's vote is not influenced by seeing the existing results? Sure, if in a vote where there are five yes's and four no's, if all four no's go first, no will have a four to nothing edge. Then the next five votes will be yes. How does voting order make a difference? Perhaps I have missed some detail of Roman holding, however, since Manent is far from the only one who I've seen make this contention.

"One could almost say, to give an idea of the impact Rome had on European intellectual life that had begun with Socratic philosophy, that for the first time history, historical knowledge, became, by its grasp of truth, the equal of philosophy." -- Pierre Manent, Metamorphoses of the City , p. 182

"Rome is exemplary -- new and exemplary --in that it shows the limits of individual virtues. According to Scipio's report, Cato explained that there was never a genius so vast that he could miss nothing, nor could all the geniuses brought together in one place at one time foresee all the contingencies without the practical experience afforded by the passage of time. "Thus one must ascribe to Cato the Elder one of the first formulations of the theory of spontaneous order and of Hayek's idea that the functioning of the social order rests on an immense amount of information that could not be mastered by any individual or group of individuals, however zealous and capable one might imagine them to be." -- Pierre Manent, The Metamorphoses of the City , p. 190 I must admit, finding Hayek popping up 190 pages into this book was as surprising as it would be to discover, say, that my landlord in Brooklyn was married to my high school prom date.

"One can see that the most delicate questions of morality, and even the most difficult questions of ontology (such as the status of individuality) are linked to the question of political form. The human as pure moral agent and the human as pure particularity, pure individuality, two phenomena that appear to us to be given, that is, as determined in themselves or by themselves, are shown to be in fact derivative phenomena, if we judge by the Roman experience." -- Pierre Manent, The Metamorphoses of the City , p. 142

"Rome is not so much a city to be compared to Athens or Sparta as the dynamic process of human consociation, a process that unceasingly pushes and in the end abolishes the limits of the city form." -- Pierre Manent, Metamorphoses of the City , p. 137 This quote comes after Manent discusses the legends of Rome's founding as a city composed of refugees and outcasts. What other polity was formed by refugees and outcasts and took on a universalizing mission?

"the inaugural act of modern political science [was] eliminating all real communities as so many insubstantial appearances, [and fixing] it's gaze on a purely abstract being, the individual out of which -- out of whose rights and power -- a political order that at last is rational can be constructed." -- Pierre Manent, Metamorphoses of the City , p. 22 The human being is conditioned by society and history. (Not to say that society and history are not conditioned by human beings.) The individual of methodological individualism is, in fact, himself a socio-historical creation, called into being by the very sciences that supposedly take him as a natural object.

"Tragedy tells what cannot be told, the passage from what precedes action to properly human action. It tells of the passage to the city, the coming to be of the city. For the city enables one to act. The city is that ordering of the human world that makes action possible and meaningful." -- Pierre Manent, Metamorphoses of the City , p. 4

"This divorce between action and word contributes to explaining the novel role of 'political correctness.' Political correctness is a particularly significant aspect of the contemporary emancipation of speech. One over longer expects that speech will be linked to a possible action; thus is taken seriously as though it was itself an action. Not being linked to a possible and plausible action that measures its purport, speech is willingly considered, if it is unpleasant, as the equivalent of the worst action unimaginable. Thus one tracks those infamous words that are designated as 'phobias' in clinical language. The progress of freedom in the West consisted of measuring words by the yardstick of visible actions. 'Political correctness' consists of measuring words by the yardstick of invisible intentions." -- Pierre Manent, Metamorphoses of the City , p. 11