Imperfect Garden: The Legacy of Humanism - Hardcover

Todorov, Tzvetan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691010471 ISBN 13: 9780691010472

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2002

Synopsis

Available in English for the first time, Imperfect Garden is both an approachable intellectual history and a bracing treatise on how we should understand and experience our lives. In it, one of France's most prominent intellectuals explores the foundations, limits, and possibilities of humanist thinking. Through his critical but sympathetic excavation of humanism, Tzvetan Todorov seeks an answer to modernity's fundamental challenge: how to maintain our hard-won liberty without paying too dearly in social ties, common values, and a coherent and responsible sense of self.

Todorov reads afresh the works of major humanists--primarily Montaigne, Rousseau, and Constant, but also Descartes, Montesquieu, and Toqueville. Each chapter considers humanism's approach to one major theme of human existence: liberty, social life, love, self, morality, and expression. Discussing humanism in dialogue with other systems, Todorov finds a response to the predicament of modernity that is far more instructive than any offered by conservatism, scientific determinism, existential individualism, or humanism's other contemporary competitors. Humanism suggests that we are members of an intelligent and sociable species who can act according to our will while connecting the well-being of other members with our own. It is through this understanding of free will, Todorov argues, that we can use humanism to rescue universality and reconcile human liberty with solidarity and personal integrity.

Placing the history of ideas at the service of a quest for moral and political wisdom, Todorov's compelling and no doubt controversial rethinking of humanist ideas testifies to the enduring capacity of those ideas to meditate on--and, if we are fortunate, cultivate--the imperfect garden in which we live.

About this title

Review:

Modern humanity made a deal with the devil, according to Tzvetan Todorov. We got freedom, but we also lost God and common society, and we have only a helpless and dizzying individualism to guide us. The central problem facing us now is how to survive the poison pill we swallowed when we tasted freedom. There are four basic responses, Todorov claims: conservatism, scientism, individualism, and humanism. As the reader soon learns from his characterizations, Todorov's allegiance is firmly with the humanists. Imperfect Garden takes up the standard of humanism, and Todorov situates himself alongside Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Montaigne.

For Todorov, as with the best of the humanists, life in the world is a garden that needs our tending. And though by its nature it is imperfect, at times bearing rotten and sour fruit, it can always be improved with our care, diligence, and love. Ultimately, Todorov proposes that humanism is a wager, à la Pascal: we will be no worse off for striving to mend the human condition, but we risk everything if we don't. --Eric de Place

From the Back Cover:

"Tzvetan Todorov's timely book centers on examinations of French thinkers of the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries--Montaigne, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Constant--but its importance extends well beyond these canny analyses and the particular culture they probe. Imperfect Garden is a moving defense of humanism, an eloquent articulation of its central values of freedom, responsibility, and decency. There is nothing facile about this defense: Todorov enables us to see the fragility, fault lines, and complexity of secular, democratic thought. But by the close of this richly thoughtful study, the whole project of modernity has been clarified and powerfully reaffirmed."--Stephen Greenblatt

"Imperfect Garden is a splendid defense of moderate humanism. Tzvetan Todorov carefully reads older French thinkers--Montaigne, Descartes, Montesquieu, and Rousseau--to find a solution to modernity's predicaments. While rejecting twentieth-century overconfidence in the human ability to invent its future (an overconfidence that has led to catastrophe), Todorov remains a strong defender of human autonomy, of respect for the Other, and of the universality of human values."--Thomas Pavel

About this edition

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0691010471
• ISBN 13: 9780691010472
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 264