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.
