Compared with Edmund Burke’s unsourced Thomism (see: previous instalment in this series) concerning natural law, Jacques Maritain’s version, from the mid 20th century, was far less authentic. Contrary to his unhelpfully ecumenical proclamations after World War II, the metaphysical and theological foundation of natural law, so well sustained by Burke, is not a matter of indifference with respect to the content and understanding of rights. For without it the social will not tend to be seen as original and constitutive, and accordingly rights will be embraced on an assumption of ontological violence, which can only be channelled and newly wielded in all its arbitrariness, if the absoluteness of right is itself, paradoxically, to be upheld. For this reason all rights-based or rights-preponderant theories are pessimistic views which limit the scope of justice and in the case of the former, as with Hobbes (who remains always the arch-theorist of right, as Strauss correctly discerned), of its ultimate non-reality, save for the dismal notion that it is the established ruling fiction of God himself.
For this reason, Maritain’s overly cavalier assumption that all can concur as to the content of rights while disagreeing as to their grounding turns out to betoken a blurring of the true foundations of natural law, as Michel Villey perceived. But the situation here is highly complex, in a way that Samuel Moyn has now best brought to view. On the one hand, certainly, the post WWII global political settlement, which Maritain helped to forge more than one might think (as Moyn has now shown), was conservative in the sense that it backed away from either liberal foundational rights or revolutionary foundational rights through fear of both communism and liberalism. The political settlement feared liberalism's excessive individualism, which tended to lead both by reaction and also by continuation—in terms of the liberal alliance between the monadic individual and the strong central state, as has been described—towards totalitarianism. 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 