Has the world outgrown politics? The conviction that it has, according to the French political philosopher Pierre Manent, is what animates sophisticated European thought today. The self-understandings of the creature, the parent, and, above all, the citizen have increasingly been displaced by that of the individual. And what an individual is is determined by the individual, and whatever he or she decides for him- or herself is dignified and deserves our respect. The idea of dignity is being liberated from any particular human content, from any particular conception of human goodness or morality. That means, among other things, that the idea of human rights has been liberated from any conception of civic or national obligation. So the idea of compulsory national military service is an affront to the individual's dignity, and in the name of human dignity the Europeans increasingly seem even to believe that they can unilaterally become pro-choice on war.

Not only has irksome and hazardous military duty become optional, but so too have the individual's ties to family and church. Religion, to the extent that it exists at all, has been redefined not as the loving duty of a creature to his or her Creator but as a kind of therapy for those still able to be lonely. The understanding of universal freedom of the human individual is increasingly unconditioned by any particular human limitation. European individuals increasingly seek to experience their freedom as liberation from embodiment. The nation-state is a political body, shaped by both a particular piece of territory and some common conception of purpose. It is necessarily particular or parochial, and it is based on the distinction between one's fellow citizens and all human beings. The political community—from the Greek polis to the modern nation-state—has been based on the premise that there are limits to the human powers of knowing and loving. And the individual, of course, seems to be located in a body that shapes and limits his or her possibilities. A man is not free to be a woman, and an individual cannot choose whether or not to be born or die. But to be an individual is to refuse to accept the goodness or permanence of any limits to choice or consent, any barriers to defining one's own identity. The pure autonomy that the individual seeks is possible only if he or she sees nothing good or necessary connected with embodiment.

Individuals, as individuals, are neither male nor female, and now both Europeans and Americans increasingly believe that it is essential to our dignity to say that marriage, in truth, can be between any two individuals, or not defined by either heterosexuality or having children. Manent is to be praised for his manly and nuanced combination of a defense of gay rights and opposition to same-sex marriage as fatally destructive of an indispensable social institution. But nobody today really believes European individuals are going to listen to him.

For them, marriage is whatever two or more individuals define it to be, and so they can choose to liberate their union altogether from reproduction or even bodily passions. We must free the individual from all dogmas about natural limits to human powers. For that reason, individuals welcome the separation of sex from reproduction that began with the contraceptive revolution and that is on the way to being perfected by biotechnology. If the biotechnological promise, in effect, to transform reproduction into manufacturing becomes real, then human sexuality can be freed from the passionate deformation that comes by connecting it with birth and death, and women—liberated from every feature of the necessity of childbearing—can finally become individuals identical to men.

Amazing is the extent to which Europeans use contraception to exercise real control over their bodies. They have shown that they have won a great victory over nature by being able freely to enjoy one another's bodies without being stuck with producing more bodies. But surely, European individuals delude themselves if they believe that they have freed themselves from the necessity of having babies; their birth dearth, as Manent explains, is just beginning to have devastating social and political consequences. Individuals experience themselves as so liberated from love for their families and countries that they do not do what is required to provide for their futures. For the isolated individual, the whole universe disappears with one's own biological demise. What individuals really do is detach sex from the various social forms of human love; their denial of the body, ironically, reduces what people do to the mechanical motion of two (or more or less) bodies.

Manent also shows us that the liberation of the sovereign, dignified individual from all allegedly oppressive social or political ties is, at best, ambiguous progress for those genuinely concerned with the future of democracy. Democracy, individuals believe, is good only insofar as it protects their individual rights or autonomy, and one of their rights is freedom from the constraints of political life. From this view, the overcoming of the idea of national sovereignty—the deconstruction of the nation-state—is Europe's victory over the final obstacle to the free flourishing of a democracy composed of equally sovereign individuals.

Democracy, however, is also self-government of a particular people; that requires, of course, the effective participation of active citizens in a common political life. And from this view, the replacement of the nation with the European Union is a movement from democratic political life to dominance by an oligarchic, bureaucratic machine imposing meddlesome policies alien to the lives of the particular peoples that compose that union. The real promise of Europe is to indefinitely increase the individual's opportunities by depriving the individual, for his or her own good, of the power that comes from democratic citizenship. The inability of Europe to define itself as a political community—to limit and direct itself both with a particular extent of territory and a common conception of moral purpose—is really its participation in the individual's quest to liberate himself (or, better, itself) from “the sad necessity of having a body” (p. 68).

This postpolitical tendency, Manent adds, is becoming universal. One piece of evidence seen, of course, in our country, is the global transfer of power from democratic legislatures to relatively unaccountable judiciaries. Courts throughout the world are increasingly less concerned with local laws, customs, and traditions in rendering judgments. Instead, they attempt to rule directly with universal human rights—the rights of individuals—in mind. They attempt to grasp those rights without any political mediation, or freed from the constraints of national constitutions or accepted views of the limits and direction human beings are given by nature or society. If nothing else, Manent should alert Americans to the stakes really involved in resisting the judicial activism of our time.

Manent's book, as a whole, is a profound reflection on Alexis de Tocqueville's observation that democracy, without artful direction, moves in the direction of individualism, or a world full of apathetic, contentless human lives guided by the mistaken judgment that love and its attendant obligations are more trouble than they are worth. Not only is the book informed by the whole tradition of political philosophy and a firm grasp of European history, but its author is also distinguished by his accurate and amusing attention to the features that distinguish contemporary culture from all its predecessors. Manent may be the best student of political philosophy alive, and this is probably his most penetrating, wonderful, and accessible book. A World Beyond Politics? certainly deserves to be the most influential political analysis written in this century so far.