The Rights of Man and Natural Law [Paperback]

Jaques Maritain, The Rights of Man and Natural Law. Originally Published in 1943.

CONTENTS
Uploaded by Stan Faryna, "Black and Right" (Praeger Trade 1997).

I. A SOCIETY OF HUMAN PERSONS
The Human Person; The Person and Society; The Common Good; Totalitarianism and Personalism; The Movement of Persons within Social Life; Four Characteristics of a Society of Free Men; A Vitally Christian Society; The Movement of Societies within Time; The Conquest of Freedom; The Common Task; The Internal Progress of Human Life Itself.

II. THE RIGHTS OF THE PERSON
Political Humanism; Animality and Personality; Natural Law; Natural Law and Human Rights; Natural Law, Law of Nations, Positive Law; The Rights of the Human Person; The Rights of the Human Person; The Rights of the Civic Person; The Rights of the Working Person; Resume of the Rights Enumerated.

APPENDIX
International Declaration of the Rights of Man

INDEX OF NAMES

AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION
"This little book is an essay in political philosophy. Given a war wherein the destiny of civilization is at stake, and given the peace which also will have to be won after the war is won, it is very important that we have a proper and firmly established political philosophy. What I propose is intended to induce those who read these pages to clarify their ideas upon a fundamental question of political philosophy- the question of the relationship between the person and society, and the rights of the human person."

Written in the darkest hour of World War II, Jacques Maritain's "The Rights of Man and Natural Law" is a singular book - very much a book of its time and yet one that remains an essential read in the field of natural law. Even its flaws, which have become more evident over time, remain illuminating.

At the time of his death in 1973, Maritain was probably the most famous Catholic philosopher in the world. His prominence has slipped since then. Yet his impact remains: His fingerprints are all over the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Catholic Church's key encyclical on religious rights, Dignitatis Humanae. He was a key figure behind the development of Christian Democratic parties in Europe and Latin America. For these reasons as well, Maritain remains an essential read.

Maritain's natural law theory, like the rest of his moral philosophy, lies within the Aristotelian-Thomistic natural law tradition. Maritain accepted Aquinas's basic premise that there is a single natural law governing all human beings with a human nature, one "unwritten" but immanent in nature. Nonetheless, Maritain saw a need to reconcile Aquinas's natural law with some conception of human rights as they had evolved in the modern era if natural law was ever to retain its value to modern man - and to fight against the idea, rooted in the Enlightenment, especially Rousseau, of rights rooted in pure abstraction - that man should "only obey himself."

Maritain's overriding goal in "The Rights of Man and Natural Law" was to try to recover, post-Enlightenment, the ancient and medieval import and role of teleology (the classical model) in human life - that ends are what is important, not origins. To this end, Maritain tries to reclaim natural law, thrown overboard finally in the 18th century, working from a classical, particularly Thomist, foundation. Rights, however, assume a prominence they do not have in Aristotle or Aquinas - they are imported in a crucial - and problematic - way into St. Thomas's natural law framework, and this constitutes the most important consequence of Maritain's work. Maritain moves Aristotelian and classical thought from a position of indifference to forms of government to one that positively endorses democracy as the philosophically and theologically preferred form best suited to help man achieve his end; and 5) that while Maritain overturns the modernist rejection of natural law, he most emphatically retains a role for history, importing it into Thomism in a way that borrows heavily from Teilhard de Chardin, positing an evolutionary development of man and society - a consideration he would later grow skeptical about in the last years of his life.

The Rights of Man and Natural Law is divided into two main parts, between which lies an important shift, as Robert P. Kraynak has noted, in metaphysical ground toward Kantianism - one which Maritain seems hardly aware of. In the first part, Maritain gives a standard account of the human person in essentially Thomistic terms. Maritain felt this Christian image rooted in St. Paul and St. Augustine, which had reigned for a thousand years, had been torn asunder "between an utter Christian pessimism which despaired of human nature and an utter Christian optimism which counted on human endeavour more than on divine grace." It was the latter view which came to dominate in the Enlightenment, with different emphases, argued Maritain: that of Descartes, Locke, and Rousseau. The man of "Natural Religion was a Christian gentlemen who did not need grace, miracle, or revelation, and was made virtuous and just by his own good nature" - innocent as Adam before the Paul, as Maritain puts it. It was this view of man which Maritain wished to overturn in favor of the older, classically Christian understanding.

Maritain's natural law remains more convincing than his unwieldy natural rights structure; but even here his Thomism is given a (seemingly unwitting Kantian twist. In what is probably the key passage in the work, Maritain defines natural law as " an order or a disposition which human reason can discover and according to which the human will must act in order to attune itself to the necessary ends of the human being. The unwritten law, or natural law, is nothing more than that." Maritain is perhaps better known for his more famous shorthand definition of natural law: "the normalcy of functioning." This definition finesses, however, the highly original rereading of Aquinas's understanding of knowledge of the natural law that Maritain engaged in Man and the State - that such knowledge comes by inclinations, rather than reason. More provocatively, Maritain contends that natural law does not merely prescribe things to be done or not done, but also recognizes rights - rights which in fact are prior to obligations.

The failings of Maritain must be noted: 1) Construction of his first principle on mere human nature, not the natural order, resulting in an unintended Kantian species of rights which does not fit well into a traditional Christian metaphysics; 2) An overvaluation of freedom - and underestimation of the dangers it is vulnerable to; and 3) Importation of a powerful historicist conception into a Thomistic natural law framework which assumes essential immutability in human nature.

Yet for all this, "The Natural Rights of Man and Natural Law" - and Maritain's other key natural law work, "Man and the State" - still speak valuable lessons to us, often more powerfully than many more recent natural law theorists. Natural law theory is in for the long haul on attempting to determine how to find a role for human rights; and so long as this task remains, Maritain will be an essential dialogue partner for natural law.

One final caveat: The Maritain Center at Notre Dame is in the process of republishing new editions of all of Maritain's works. The Gordion Press edition here is a thin, austere release without any commentary or comprehensive index, unfortunately, but essentially the only English language one available until the Maritain Center edition is published in the next few years.

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