Two Anxieties about Rights: Joan Lockwood O’Donovan and Pierre Manent on Liberalism and the Political

This article examines the relationship between the work of Anglican political theologian Joan Lockwood O’Donovan and French Catholic political philosopher Pierre Manent, focusing on their respective rights-critical narratives of modern political liberalism. While both thinkers fault the natural rights tradition for relying on a false anthropology, they draw different conclusions about the relationship of natural rights to the political. O’Donovan sees the theory of natural rights as a case of over-politicization, of subjugating natural and redeemed sociality to the alien juridical logic of postlapsarian earthly politics. Manent, by contrast, sees in the theory of natural rights a de-politicization of erstwhile political relationships and an eclipse of the human qua citizen (i.e., political animal). O’Donovan represents an Augustinian anxiety over rights, and Manent an Aristotelian one. Though evidently opposed, I consider if and how these two approaches might converge. The crux of the inquiry turns on how one specifies the nature of the political. Manent regards political action as human action at its highest pitch. O’Donovan, by contrast, sees it as essentially derivative, reactive, and concealing as much as disclosing. Where Manent centers the political act, O’Donovan centers the doxological act. The question of which has primacy represents a fundamental decision for any political theology seeking to think beyond the limits of liberalism.