litarian, is both defensible and accurate. My overall, long-term analysis of rights in this series tends to confirm it, and it is being returned to by Christians in contemporary Europe. This return is immediately allowing a small (but perhaps promising) resurgence of their political influence, despite their apparently declining numbers and in the face of general secular apathy and ideological exhaustion.
EDITORIAL STATEMENT: This is the fifth installment of a six-part series by John Milbank on natural law and natural right. The installments will be collected here as they are published.
Featured Image: Eleanor Roosevelt and United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Spanish text, November 1949; Source: Wikimedia Commons, PD.
 Jacques Maritain, The Rights of Man and the Natural Law, published together with Christianity and Democracy, trans. Doris C. Amos (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2011) and see Samuel Moyn, “Personalism, Community and the Origins of Human Rights,” in Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, ed. Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (Cambridge: CUP, 2011), 85-106.
 One can nevertheless criticise personalism for retaining an overly Cartesian and Kantian division between persons and things and accordingly failing to see both the pre-personal in things and the thingly mediation between persons, that also ensures that relations already assume a certain ‘organic’ closure, even if they help to constitute this. Thus the relationality of people does not totally cancel out the way in which they also constitute parts of a bodily whole—social “participation” properly concerns both aspects. This was better understood, within Christian thought, by Russian sophiology and especially by Sergei Bulgakov, who deploys his notion of sophianic mediation in part as a critique of the over-spiritualism of the personalists. See: John Milbank, “Sophiology and Theurgy: The New Theological Horizon” in Radical Orthodoxy and Eastern Orthodoxy ed Adrian Pabst (Basingstoke: Ashgate, 2009), 45-85.
 Maritain, The Rights of Man and the Natural Law, 106.
 The Rights of Man and the Natural Law, 107.
 The Rights of Man and the Natural Law, 116.
 It is well documented that 1945 was the last great Anglican settlement in the UK, newly requiring Christian religious instruction in schools along with an initially mutualist conception for the welfare state. The ground for this settlement was largely prepared by Christian thinkers before and during the war. Despite the Labour implementation, it enjoyed for this reason a huge consensus and led to a brief period combining both continued social deference and relative economic equality. That we now have the dire opposite combination (crass style and unfair substance) was due, it would seem, first to unthinking satire, directed often against the wrong targets, then a tedious and unattractive form of self-indulgence and finally and most decisively the essentially secular axe wielded by Mrs Thatcher’s provincial and yet province-hating ressentiment. Yet even before that, and perhaps more crucially than one might imagine, poor-quality Christian thinkers like Denis Munby had started to assault the “Christendom legacy” of V.C. Demant, T.S. Eliot and many others in the name of a sanguine confidence about the compatibility of secular values with Christian values – a confidence now seen to be so clearly misplaced.
 See, for example in the case of the UK, Blue Labour: Forging a New Politics ed. Ian Geary and Adrian Pabst (London: IB Tauris, 2015). But there are strong examples of this also in Italy and other Continental countries. There are in addition secular convergencies towards a similar political direction, as with Michéa and the work of Alain Caillé’s M.A.U.S.S. group in France.