The 'City of God' or the 'City of Man'? This is the choice St. Augustine offered 1500 years ago - and according to Pierre Manent the modern West has decisively and irreversibly chosen the latter. In this subtle and wide-ranging book on the Western intellectual and political condition, Manent argues that the West has rejected the laws of God and of nature in a quest for human autonomy. But in declaring ourselves free and autonomous, he contends, we have, paradoxically, lost a sense of what it means to be human. In the first part of the book, Manent explores the development of the social sciences since the seventeenth century, portraying their growth as a sign of increasing human 'self-consciousness'.But as social scientists have sought to free us from the intellectual confines of the ancient world, he writes, they have embraced modes of analysis - economic, sociological, and historical - that treat only narrow aspects of the human condition and portray individuals as helpless victims of impersonal forces. As a result, we have lost all sense of human agency and of the unified human subject at the center of intellectual study. Politics and culture have come to be seen as mere foam on the tides of historical and social necessity. In the second half of the book, titled 'Self-Affirmation', Manent examines how the West, having discovered freedom, then discovered arbitrary will and its dangers. With no shared touchstones or conceptions of virtue, for example, we have found it increasingly hard to communicate with each other.This is a striking contrast to the past, he writes, when even traditions as different as the Classical and the Christian held many of these conceptions in common. The result of these discoveries, according to Manent, is the disturbing rootlessness that characterizes our time. By gaining autonomy from external authority, we have lost a sense of what we are. In 'giving birth' to ourselves, we have abandoned that which alone can nurture and sustain us. With penetrating insight and remarkable erudition, Manent offers a profound analysis of the confusions and contradictions at the heart of the modern condition.

皮埃尔•马南是法国高等社会科学学院的研究生导师，现就职于雷蒙•阿隆政治研究中心。他曾在法兰西公学院当过雷蒙•阿隆的研究助理，参与了雷蒙•阿隆政治研究中心的创立。他在政治学方面的思考主要集中在两个方面：一个是现代政治思想起源的研究，对法国历史上一些重要的自由思想家的作品从新的角度进行了研究；其次是对现代人的研究，并着力于理解为什么在现代哲学当中，人的问题不再是人们探索的重要对象，从哲学的角度思考社会科学和政治哲学之间的关系，试图在人的经验当中突出政治生活的重要性。

闫素伟，1990年代在巴黎高等翻译学院以优异的成绩先后获得翻译学硕士和博士学位，回国后致力于法国语言和翻译的教学。教学之余先后翻译出版了一些法国哲学和历史学方面的学术著作，如艾德加•莫兰的《社会学思考》，弗朗索瓦•于连的《圣人无意》，吕西安•费弗尔的《十六世纪的无信仰问题》，伏尔泰的《哲学书简》等。