Integral humanisms: Jacques Maritain, Vladimir Soloviev, and the history of human rights

Abstract

Today both the history and philosophical grounding of human rights are matters of great controversy. One prominent figure in the debate is Samuel Moyn, professor of law and history at Harvard University. He argues that universal human rights are a relatively recent concept, dating from the 1940s and that they are, more specifically, a product of the Catholic philosophy of that era. The Catholic thinker who reinvented human rights was Jacques Maritain. He was among the founders of the French philosophical movement known as personalism, which he fashioned into his own Christian (or “integral”) humanism. By 1940, he was turning integral humanism into an explicit and robust defense of human rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights followed in 1948, and Maritain was one of its intellectual architects. Decades before Maritain, however, another tradition of Christian personalism had already developed into a theory of human rights. This tradition was Russian neo-idealism. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it combined Orthodox Christian personalism with a Kantian conception of human dignity to produce a theoretically sophisticated defense of human rights. The leading figure in this development was Russia’s greatest religious philosopher, Vladimir Soloviev. After the Russian Revolution, the intellectual legacy of Soloviev and Russian neoidealism was transmitted by Nikolai Berdiaev and the Russian philosophical emigration to interwar France, where it helped form the milieu in which Maritain’s thought took shape. Indeed, Maritain’s “integral humanism” is strikingly similar to Soloviev’s Christian humanism.