lation 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 totalitarian, 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 Na