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.

皮埃爾•馬南是法國高等社會科學學院的研究生導師，現就職於雷濛•阿隆政治研究中心。他曾在法蘭西公學院當過雷濛•阿隆的研究助理，參與瞭雷濛•阿隆政治研究中心的創立。他在政治學方麵的思考主要集中在兩個方麵：一個是現代政治思想起源的研究，對法國曆史上一些重要的自由思想傢的作品從新的角度進行瞭研究；其次是對現代人的研究，並著力於理解為什麼在現代哲學當中，人的問題不再是人們探索的重要對象，從哲學的角度思考社會科學和政治哲學之間的關係，試圖在人的經驗當中突齣政治生活的重要性。

閆素偉，1990年代在巴黎高等翻譯學院以優異的成績先後獲得翻譯學碩士和博士學位，迴國後緻力於法國語言和翻譯的教學。教學之餘先後翻譯齣版瞭一些法國哲學和曆史學方麵的學術著作，如艾德加•莫蘭的《社會學思考》，弗朗索瓦•於連的《聖人無意》，呂西安•費弗爾的《十六世紀的無信仰問題》，伏爾泰的《哲學書簡》等。