Jacques Maritain, Modernity, and Common Goods (Part 2)
Jacques Maritain (1882-1973)
The political importance of Maritain is that he made what he took to be a Thomistic case both for the modern state as an institution through whose structures and procedures the common good of political society can be realized and for a conception of human rights which assimilates a Thomistic understanding of what justice requires to a modern liberal democratic understanding of human rights. If Maritain’s projects were successful, then the doubts that I have suggested about what I take to be problematic in the most influential versions of Catholic social teaching are unjustified. It will be my claim that they do not succeed. Maritain’s political thought developed through three stages. In the first which lasted from just before the First World War until 1926 the chief influence on Maritain was that of Charles Maurras. In the second which lasted from around 1931 perhaps until the Second World War the chief influence was that of Emmanuel Mounier. The third period from 1944 to 1952 is one in which political activity as French ambassador to the Vatican and as president of the French delegation to UNESCO was accompanied and followed by the publication of the two books which define Maritain’s mature political thought, The Person and the Common Good (1947) and Man and the State (1951). In all three periods Maritain’s primary work and achievement was as a Thomistic philosopher, in dialogue and controversy with other Thomists and nothing that I say about his political arguments and stances should be read as incompatible with admiration for his philosophical achievements.
Maritain, Maurras, Mounier, and the United Nations
Charles Maurras (1868–1952) was the most gifted enemy from the right of French republicanism and democracy. As such he would in any case have had a sympathetic hearing from those considerable sections of the conservative French Catholic bourgeoisie, who until the First World War had never fully accepted the Third Republic and who rejected Catholic social teaching. But Maurras’s positive doctrines also attracted them. For he and the extreme right-wing movement that he cofounded, L’Action Française, wished to restore in large measure the Catholic France of the past, putting primary and secondary education under the control of the Catholic Church. Why so? Not at all because he was a Catholic. Maurras was by conviction a Comtean positivist, an atheist, who as a Comtean believed that ordinary people, being less than rational, needed the guidance and the motivation of religious belief, so that they might understand themselves as inhabiting a social and political order in which it was right and natural that they should be ruled from above. On Maurras’s view what the French needed were those Catholic beliefs and practices through which the traditions of the French prerepublican past had been transmitted.
At the core of Maurras’s politics was his conviction that the common good of the French could not be achieved in a republic in which the different political parties represented different and rival sectional interests and nobody represented the common good. A restoration of the French monarchy was required in which the care of the common good would be the responsibility of the monarch and his advisers. Maritain for a time endorsed Maurras’s critique of the politics and the political parties of the Third Republic and, although he was never persuaded by Maurras’s monarchism, he agreed that the central problem of French politics was that of how the common good was to be identified and achieved. That concern remained with him after he broke with Maurras and L’Action Française in 1926, a result of its condemnation by Pius XI, and in a remarkably short space of time moved from being a Catholic of the more or less extreme Right to being at least in conversation with the Catholic Left. The new influence on his thinking was that of Emmanuel Mounier.
Mounier, a student of Bergson’s student Jacques Chevalier, had been open to a wide range of influences, both Catholic and other, and had in consequence become persuaded that all the major political movements of the twentieth century misconceived human nature in their theory and deformed human beings in their practice. The concept that had eluded them was that of the human person as one whose spiritual and moral possibilities can only be realized through certain kinds of social relationship, among which the relationships of family life, of the workplace as a place of meaningful work, of friendship, and of a political community that shares this recognition of family, of work, and of friendship are of the first importance. It was in these terms that Mounier framed his criticisms not only of fascism and communism, but also of the politics of bourgeois individualism. In 1934 he published his Manifeste au service du personnalisme. By this time Maritain had already separated himself from Mounier’s politics. But the concept of the person was from then on central to his thinking.
It is worth noting that in his political writings Maritain never acknowledged his debts to either Maurras or Mounier, although here is not the place to ask why. But his conceptions both of the common good and of the person had in fact been detached from the theoretical and practical contexts in which he had first encountered them and therefore had to find a place within a new framework, a framework that also had to accommodate the lessons that Maritain took himself to have learned from his political and other experiences between 1940 and 1950. In 1940, when France was defeated, the Maritains were in the United States and Maritain remained there until late in 1944, when, as I noticed earlier, De Gaulle’s provisional government appointed him ambassador to the Vatican. It was through his subsequent work for France in UNESCO that he played a small part in formulating and became committed to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in December 1948. So to the concepts of the common good and of the person there was added that of a universal human right. Add to this that Maritain took no part in the conflicts in postwar France over the form that the Fourth Republic should take, conflicts in which rival conceptions of and attitudes towards the common good were at stake, but in practice identified himself, although not uncritically, with American democracy. In 1948 the Maritains left France and Maritain took up an appointment at Princeton in the Fall of that year.
The problem had thus been set for Maritain: How can the concepts of a person, of the common good, and of a universal human right be understood within the framework of Maritain’s Thomistic philosophy, so that they can inform the political practice of a modern liberal democratic state, such as the United States?
The Person and the Common Good
In 1947 Maritain put together some of his lectures and essays from 1939 onwards and published them in English translation as The Person and the Common Good. Four theses are central to Maritain’s overall argument. The first contrasts the individuality of a human being with her or his personality: “In each of us, individuality, being that which excludes from oneself all that other men are, could be described as the narrowness of the ego, forever threatened and forever eager to grasp for itself.” Personality “signifies interiority to self.” It is that in us which “requires the communications of knowledge and love.” A second thesis relates the vocation of persons to goods that transcend the common good of political society. Each person is directed towards a final good that belongs to the order of eternal goods and the service of the common good must not interfere with, but contribute to the attainment of that final good. Yet persons, because of their concern for others, must be concerned with the common good of political society which includes “roads, ports, schools, etc.,” fiscal health and military power, “just laws, good customs and wise institutions,” the nation’s cultural heritage and the integration of virtues, liberty, material prosperity, and “friendship, happiness, virtue and heroism in the individual lives of its members.”
A third thesis concerns the relationship of the concept of a person to that of the common good: “There is a correlation between this notion of the person as a social unit and the notion of the common good as the end of the social whole. They imply one another.” Neither has priority over the other and neither can be fully spelled out without reference to the other. The common good is common because it is a good communicated to and received by persons. Fourthly and finally Maritain draws political conclusions. Bourgeois liberalism must be rejected because it conceives of all goods as goods of individuals and so misconceives the common good as a sum of individual goods. Communism in reacting against bourgeois individualism subordinates the individual to society and the state, so that once again the common good is misunderstood. Authoritarian dictatorships suppose that society can be organized for its good from above and so do not recognize the part that persons must play in achieving their own individual and common goods. So we should reject these three types of regime. What is it that we should strive for instead? Maritain’s answer is set out in Man and the State.
Man, the State, and the Common Good
The lectures which were published as Man and the State were delivered at the University of Chicago in 1949. He had already settled in Princeton, where he would live until 1960. The political institutions that he presupposes in his lectures are those of American constitutional democracy and the questions that he frames concern how those institutions must be structured and understood, if the political common good and a proper respect for persons is to be achieved. Maritain seems to have been anxious to secure as much common ground with his Chicago audience as possible and, although he presents his views as Thomistic, he generally argues from what he takes to be widely shared premises. I shall focus on what he says about the political common good and on what he says about rights.
A people compose a body politic and the common good of a body politic “demands a network of authority and power” and therefore “a special agency endowed with uppermost power, for the sake of justice and law. The State is that uppermost political agency,” a means to the body politic’s ends. The common good is characterized using exactly the same words that were used in The Person and the Common Good. The common good will be realized only in political societies in which moral constraints are imposed on the choice of political means (chapter III) and it is only in democracies that the right moral constraints will be imposed. The state is in permanent danger of violating those constraints and no institutional protection will always be effective. But politics is a rough business in which coercive force has a necessary place and, just as Machiavellianism is a vice, so is the “fear of soiling ourselves” by dealing with the harsher political realities. The citizenry must be united in their allegiance to democracy and the range of permitted political disagreements must be consistent with this underlying agreement. The educational system will be designed to produce belief in democratic principles. For every one of these theses Maritain has arguments and a fair treatment of Man and the State would require us to engage with these arguments and with his always interesting discussions of a number of topics that I have left unmentioned. Moreover it would be quite wrong to present Maritain as wholly uncritical of the workings of American democracy. His friendship with Saul Alinsky is strong evidence to the contrary. But Maritain invites criticism as much for what he left unsaid as for his theses and arguments. So let me draw attention to what went unsaid in three major areas.
The first is the relationship between the contemporary state and the market economy. In the sixty years since Maritain wrote that relationship has become increasingly complex at both national and international levels. But even so it is notable that Maritain devotes only two pages to the place of social and economic issues in politics, where he briefly summarizes Catholic social teaching. About the following two questions, for example, he has nothing to say: Is the distribution of economic power in modern liberal democracies such as to exclude the relatively powerless from participating in setting the agendas for political discussion and from getting a hearing for any view that is unacceptable to the relatively powerful? And is the distribution of educational resources in some of those democracies such that many of the children of the economically less well off fail to receive the kind of education needed for effective participation in political debate?
A second area where he has nothing to say is that which concerns the centralization of power, authority, and political debate in the modern state and the relationship of grass roots political discussion and activity to the achievement of the political common good. Maritain never asks what kind of institutions are needed at local, regional, and national levels, if there is to be ongoing debate at local levels which is a genuine expression of the concerns and claims of plain persons and if the conclusions of those debates are to have an effective influence at regional and national levels. Thirdly, he does not reckon with anything like the range of different and incompatible moral and religious outlooks that are found within many modern states and so never asks whether a modern liberal democracy can have enough of a common moral and political mind for government to function as the kind of educator in the virtues that Aristotle and Aquinas described. It was in part because Maritain provided no answers to these questions that he also failed to address five issues that are crucial for any attempt to translate Aristotle’s and Aquinas’s account of the political common good into contemporary terms.
First, the most obvious differences between modern states and the kinds of political society that Aristotle and Aquinas had in mind are differences in size and scale. Moreover those societies in various parts of the modern world in which some degree of regard for the common good has been embodied—the kinds of cooperative enterprise to which I have referred in earlier papers—have all been relatively small scale. Add to that the contentions by anthropologists about the numerical limits on our abilities to keep track of and give weight in our own reasoning to the intentions and actions of others (R. I. M. Dunbar for one view, H. Russell Bernard and Peter Killworth for another) and the evidence provided by Elinor Ostrom that prudent cooperative use of shared resources for the common good, in which everyone participates, has to be small scale and it becomes close to incontrovertible that societies on the scale of most contemporary nation states cannot have a politics informed by any strong Aristotelian or Thomistic conception of the common good.
The politics of the common good is then primarily a politics of local community. For such a politics a second type of issue arises, that of the relationship between the common goods of families and households and the common good of the political society. Questions of employment and wages, of housing, of schools, and of transport and communications are of key importance for both and so is that of how these questions are to be dealt with justly, effectively, and in a way that preserves the independence and decision-making powers of families. So the question of what the well-being of families in contemporary societies is is a crucial political question. Any systematic attempt to answer it makes it impossible to avoid engaging with a third issue.
Maritain’s characterizations of the common good are highly general and, given his purposes, understandably so. But those purposes distance him from the local and particular realities of politics. The problem for those committed to a politics of the common good is that of how to translate those generalities into concrete and particular terms, so that a set of goals are identified, the achievement of which would constitute the achievement of their common good by this or that particular community with its particular resources in its particular circumstances. To identify those goals would be to provide a set of major premises for the shared political reasoning of the members of that political society. A precondition for them to arrive at such an identification is that they are able to agree—an agreement characteristically expressed in their everyday practice rather than in theorizing—in a rough and ready way on their rank ordering of goods. And their agreement must extend further, if they are to reason together not only about ends, but also about means. For, if they are to arrive at conclusions about what actions to take in order to achieve the proximate ends of the common good, they will have to agree in their understanding of what law and justice require, since it is only through relationships governed by the precepts of the natural law and informed by justice that common goods can be achieved.
Such agreements are necessary, but not sufficient for those engaging in the kind of shared political reasoning needed to inform activity aimed at the common good. They also need to have shared in an education concerning the history, geography, social structure, and political economy of their own and other societies, so that they know how to make relevant and accurate judgments about the situation in which they find themselves, about what has to be changed in that situation, and about the alternative ways in which such change can be achieved. For, unless everyone from every sector of the political society has shared in such an education, there will be those who will be excluded from or disabled in political enquiry, debate, and decision making. A fourth set of issues therefore for anyone committed to a politics of the common good concerns how such an education, education that is a preparation for engaging in practical reasoning, is to be provided for every citizen.
To pursue any or all of these issues is to take us in a direction very different from that taken by Maritain. Just how different becomes even clearer, if we turn to questions concerning rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. In order to approach those questions I need first to consider some different kinds of reason for acting in this or that particular way, reasons that may be advanced as a sufficient justification for so acting. [to be continued…]
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from Alasdair MacIntyre on Practical Philosophy, ed. Kelvin Knight and Peter Wicks (University of Notre Dame Press, 2026). It is part of an ongoing collaboration with the University of Notre Dame Press. You can read other excerpts from this collaboration here. All rights reserved.
