the New Pantagruel

Reason, McDonald’s, and Being, from Equality by Default: An Essay on Modernity as Confinement

by Philippe Bénéton

Translated by Ralph Hancock
Hardcover
ISBN/SKU 1932236325
ISI Books, 2004

This excerpt is the eighth chapter of Philippe Bénéton’s Equality by Default: An Essay on Modernity as Confinement, which has been translated by Ralph Hancock and is newly available this year from ISI Books in their Crosscurrents series. Crosscurrents “makes available in English, usually for the first time, new translations of both classic and contemporary works by authors working within, or with crucial importance for, the conservative, religious, and humanist intellectual traditions.” Other books in the series include Icarus Fallen, by Chantal Delsol, translated by Robin Dick (from which a selection appeared in the last issue of The New Pantagruel), and Critics of the Enlightenment, edited and translated by Christopher O. Blum. Forthcoming titles include Russia in Collapse, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, translated by Olga Cooke, The Unlearned Lessons of the Twentieth Century, by Chantal Delsol, translated by Robin Dick, and Tradition, by Josef Pieper, translated by E. Christian Kopff.

Bénéton, a prominent French religious conservative and Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of Rennes, 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. Equality by default, Bénéton writes, “is founded on an idea of man which breaks with all the humanism of the West. Man is pure indetermination, autonomy without a compass, liberty without a vocation, he is what he makes of himself.”

“This is an essay on the modern world, a world that has now reached the condition of late modernity. My purpose is less to describe this world than to attempt, by climbing on the shoulders of giants of thought, to make visible what is going on in this world and what the results have been.”

—from the author’s preface

“Bénéton’s vision is sobering, to say the least, darker on balance than Tocqueville’s (which was already darker, more foreboding than is commonly appreciated), but somehow not a vision of despair. Tocqueville averted fruitless reaction before the leveling advance of democracy by straining to judge the new world from the standpoint of a God beyond all aristocratic prejudices, thus finding a way to accept and thereby to channel the democratic transformation of politics and society. Bénéton’s situation is of course different: he addresses a world in which this democratic and individualistic transformation of life has already proceeded far beyond the point Tocqueville provided for (if not beyond what he had the power to foresee). In our time, the option of sanctioning or sanctifying this transformation in order to moderate it is no longer viable. There is no longer any alternative to exhibiting in broad daylight the hollowness of pure, formal democracy, to plainly stating the dependence of democracy on understandings of human dignity that cannot be extracted from the pure form of democracy.”

—from the translator’s preface

hroughout the history of modern reason its status has undergone important changes. Once it was master, now it is only the servant or the master-servant. At its birth modern reason trumpeted the empire of reason, the reign of “Enlightenment,” while discrediting its opponent by presenting it as the camp of prejudice, convention, and the principle of authority. If these formulations were polemical and overstated, they nevertheless expressed a real break. Of course modern thought did not discover or rediscover reason, but it emancipated it (in a subjectivist sense), and it conferred upon it a dominant and exclusive authority (to the detriment of revelation and tradition), and, finally, it turned it in a new direction. Classical Christian reason was essentially concerned with personal life: reason was supposed to allow each person to master his or her passions and to lead a life in accordance with the nature of a rational animal. Modernity sought to transform reason’s perspective; modern reason would focus first on the exterior world; it proposed to change the fate of mankind through the conquest of nature and the mastery of society. The work undertaken by Bacon, Descartes, and Hobbes issued in this revolutionary proposition: to transform the world we must rethink it. Reason was opening up a new era of the human condition.

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