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Jacques Maritain: The Philosopher in Society. By James V. Schall. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998. 233p. $58.00 cloth, $22.95 paper.
This study of the political and social thought of Jacques Maritain, the influential French Thomist philosopher, appears in the Twentieth Century Political Thinkers series, which so far includes studies of Raymond Aron, Martin Buber, and John Dewey. Maritain certainly merits inclusion, given the influence of his political writings in the United States, Europe, and Latin America, as well as their substantive importance in grounding democracy and human rights in neo-Thomist philosophy.
Born into a French Protestant family, Maritain met Raissa Oumancoff, of Russian Jewish extraction, at the Sorbonne. Under the influence of Leon Bloy, the two were converted to Catholicism in 1906 and experienced what one might also describe as a conversion to Thomism in 1910. Already recognized as an important writer on metaphysics, Maritain began to write on political philosophy in the 1920s, following the Vatican condemnation of Action Francaise, the extreme Right nationalist movement with which he had initially sympathized. In the 1930s he developed a political philosophy that he called integral humanism in opposition to both individualistic liberalism and collectivist socialism, describing it as personalist, communitarian, and pluralist.
Maritain lectured regularly at Chicago and Columbia, which he was doing when France fell, and he remained in New York throughout the war. He worked for the Free French and wrote widely distributed books on the natural law basis of human rights and on the link between Christianity and democracy. After World War II, he served as French ambassador to the Vatican, consultant on the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and from 1948 to 1952 professor at...