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 relation of God to creatures whatsoever outside his understanding of the ways in which they participate in him. Thus, if the latter is indeed entirely ethical in terms of God’s consistency with himself, there is no external remainder in which God “has no moral obligation towards creatures,” whereas for Maritain, within this remainder, an apparently pure power/possession logic is in operation—to undergird an inconsistent suggestion of the ultimate basing of human rights on self and private property ownership.
- The right to associate would seem to enjoy, for Maritain (as with Althusius, as we saw), too much priority over the group rights of associations themselves.
- Finally, the tendency of Maritain now to assert the unqualified universality of rights is neither (as again we have seen) realistic, nor in accord with the natural law primacy of justice as distribution, always prudentially adaptable as to circumstance.
Therefore, while, as Moyn argues, the initial postwar political settlement, especially in continental Europe, but also in Britain, albeit eventually under the auspices of the Labour party, was conservatively Christian, one can also contend that the excessive compromise with liberal democracy encouraged a rapid drift towards a more capitalist economy, whose consumerism in turn unleashed the cultural liberalism of the 1960’s, which, against its own naïve initial intentions finally gave moral license to the yet-more unbridled capitalism (requiring of course further central bureaucratic control) of our own times. Moyn mainly retains the dispassion of a historian but at times, perhaps, some disdain for the various “third ways” creeps into his tone, in a way that appears to assume the modern ultimacy of the left-right distinction inherited from the French revolutionary aftermath. But, to the contrary, one might suggest that the Christian (and sometimes Jewish or Islamic) diagnosis of the essentially shared premises of cultural and economic liberalism, along with the hidden collusion of liberalism with the tota