I became aware of the attacks in Paris and Beirut as I took Twitter breaks from reading Samuel Moyn’s Christian Human Rights (for a fine review read John McGreevy in Commonweal), so I am responding to these events against the background of reading about Jacques Maritain’s efforts to figure out the political implications of Christian discipleship in the 20th century.
The personalist political philosophy of which Maritain became the leading proponent attaches, as Moyn summarizes it, “supreme ethical significance to human beings agonizingly caught between individualist atomism without community and ‘totalitarian’ statehood without freedom.” “I have come to believe that if the world should triumph over the errors and evils oppressing it to-day and should contrive to establish the rule of a civilization, new and more consonant with human dignity,” writes Maritain in 1939 (against anti-Semitism), then “solutions at once pluralist and personalist … would have to prevail generally in such a régime.”
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