Bücher der Reihe Catholic Ideas for a Secular World

In Montaigne: Life without Law, originally published in French in 2014 and now translated for the first time into English by Paul Seaton, Pierre Manent provides a careful reading of Montaigne's three-volume work Essays. Although Montaigne's writings resist easy analysis, Manent finds in them a subtle unity, and demonstrates the philosophical depth of Montaigne's reflections and the distinctive, even radical, character of his central ideas. To show Montaigne's unique contribution to modern philosophy, Manent compares his work to other modern thinkers, including Machiavelli, Hobbes, Pascal, and Rousseau. What does human life look like without the imposing presence of the state? asks Manent. In raising this question about Montaigne's Essays, Manent poses a question of great relevance to our contemporary situation. He argues that Montaigne's philosophical reflections focused on what he famously called la condition humaine, the human condition. Manent tracks Montaigne's development of this fundamental concept, focusing especially on his reworking of pagan and Christian understandings of virtue and pleasure, disputation and death. Bringing new form and content together, a new form of thinking and living is presented by Montaigne's Essays, a new model of a thoughtful life from one of the unsung founders of modernity.Throughout, Manent suggests alternatives and criticisms, some by way of contrasts with other thinkers, some in his own name. This is philosophical engagement at a very high level. In showing the unity of Montaigne's work, Manent's study will appeal especially to students and scholars of political theory, the history of modern philosophy, modern literature, and the origins of modernity.

As a cure for modernity's individualism, Remi Brague urges a return to medieval thinking to illustrate why humanity and civilizations are goods worth promoting and preserving.

Pierre Manent is one of France's leading political philosophers. This first English translation of his profound and strikingly original book La loi naturelle et les droits de l'homme is a reflection on the central question of the Western political tradition.

Was humanity created, or do humans create themselves? In this English translation of Le Regne de l'homme, Brague argues that with the dawn of the Enlightenment, Western societies rejected the transcendence of the past and looked instead to the progress fostered by the early modern present and the future.

It is commonly observed that behind many of the political and cultural issues that we face today lies an impoverished conception of freedom. Freedom from Reality presents a critique of the deceptive and ultimately self-subverting character of the modern notion of freedom, retrieving an alternative view through a new interpretation of the ancient tradition.

In 2005, Father Julian Carron became the leader of the global ecclesial movement Communion and Liberation, following the death of the movement's founder, Father Luigi Giussani. Disarming Beauty is the English translation of an engaging and thought-provoking collection of essays by one of the principal Catholic leaders and intellectuals in the world today.

Working from within the contours of Christian faith, this book examines the relation between two ways of forming families - through nature (by procreation) and through history (by adoption). Gilbert Meilaender takes up a range of issues raised by the practice of adoption, always seeking to do justice to both nature and history in the formation of families.

Political theorist Jean Bethke Elshtain brings Augustine's thought into the contemporary political arena and the result is a book about one of the world's most complex thinkers.

Jean Bethke Elshtain is the first attempt to evaluate Elshtain's entire published body of work and to give shape to a wide-ranging scholarly career.