. In this context, as Moyn and others have demonstrated, the pre-war notes of Catholic and often also Anglican and Protestant social teaching (corporatism, personalism, dignitarianism) were by no means simply abandoned postwar, but rather qualified in a rather incoherent way, due to an equal sense that, totalitarianism being the worst danger, a modified liberal democracy might be the best bulwark against it. The “rights” were now seen in a novel fashion as protecting the dignity of the free, rational and supernaturally-oriented person, along with the traditional family, various free associations, and social and civil constitutive corporate bodies (especially in Austria and, to a degree, West Germany) not only against the overweening state, but also against untrammeled self-assertion.
Clearly then, this new view of subjective rights as deriving from human dignity, or ontological status (whereas previously “rights” and “dignity” had belonged to opposed discourses), and as generally correlated with duties, not only returns to the pre-revolutionary insertion of natural right still in a natural law context, but considerably intensifies this assertion, by virtue of a greater concern with the equity of relations. Nevertheless, when one looks at the extremely influential work of Maritain, one can see certain crucial dilutions of natural law and an illogical hybridization with foundational natural right.
This can be seen in the following respects:
- As compared with his fellow-personalist Emmanuel Mounier (who switched to the radical left after the war, having previously flirted with Vichy fascism) Maritain seems now to focus on the isolated dignity of the person, whereas the whole point of personalism is that the unique character of the individual (as compared with either the replaceable atoms of liberalism or the random private expressivism of a certain romanticism) emerges from her relational situation, which is paradoxically the very thing that renders her irreplaceable and transcendent to any collective.
- In accord with a logic we have already seen, giving primacy to the individual over the relational always encourages a drift to possessive individualism. Thus, the now-Americanizing Maritain declares that “The human person possesses rights because of the very fact that he is a person, master of himself and his acts [my italics], and who consequently is not merely a means to an end, but an end, an end who must be treated as such.” Inadvertently, through this yoking together of Locke and Kant, Maritain here confirms my argument that Kantian freedom has not escaped all notions of self-possession. For man as “pure end,” outside any sequence of process or relation or further teleology, must be simply the pure agent who by will “has things.” Only a false piety fails to see that to treat someone as an end is to, impossibly, regard their will as in all circumstances absolute, and to suppress the Christian view that a human being is by no means a kind of (after all objective!) brick wall before which one must halt in obeisance, but is rather for a final end beyond herself, both for herself with others and for the sake of the consummation of the cosmos, as St. Paul indicates.
- Here, although Maritain says that our rights are subordinate to our duty to fulfill our natural and supernatural destiny, because we must be allowed the scope to do this (an unproblematic aspect of the modern subjective emphasis), he also and incoherently adds that “The notion of right is even more profound than that of moral obligation, for God has sovereign right over creatures and has no moral obligation toward them (although he owes it to himself to give them what is required by nature).” In this way he astoundingly endorses the modern priority of law over ethics, and even its further grounding in the primacy of power, finally traceable, as for Scotus and Ockham, to the divine right of ownership that proceeds from his omniscience. This hint of voluntarism is massively qualified by the Thomistic brackets, but insufficiently, since for Aquinas there is no re