Reviewed by: The Forgotten Radical Peter Maurin: Easy Essays from the Catholic Worker ed. by Lincoln Rice William J. Collinge The Forgotten Radical Peter Maurin: Easy Essays from the Catholic Worker. Edited by Lincoln Rice. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. 864 pp. $34.95. This past summer, David Brooks, dissatisfied with the socially atomizing effects of liberalism and the overemphasis on group identity in today’s politics, called in the The New York Times for a revival of personalism, which stresses individual dignity and responsibility but holds that persons flourish only in community. Lincoln Rice, a member of the Milwaukee Catholic Worker who teaches theology at Marquette University, has now advanced such a revival with the first complete edition of the writings of Peter Maurin (1877–1949), the man most responsible for introducing French personalism into the United States. Rice calls Maurin the “forgotten radical.” He is not really forgotten, but his life and thought are nearly always presented as a component of a story in which Dorothy Day is the central character. Day credited him with co-founding the Catholic Worker movement, and without Day, Maurin’s thought would indeed have been forgotten. On the other hand, without Maurin there would have been no Catholic Worker, and Day would be forgotten or remembered for something else. Maurin wrote “Easy Essays” (a name suggested by Day’s brother John). An essay, usually half a page to a page long in Rice’s volume, consists of “stanzas,” each composed of a sentence divided into units of sense, arranged on the page like lines of poetry. They are not poems, but Maurin uses some poetic devices, such as repetition, wordplay, and occasionally something like rhyme. A famous stanza, encapsulating a core idea of Maurin, is: [End Page 79] The world would bebetter off if people triedto become better. Essays were published together in “arrangements,” grouped by theme. Individuating the essays would tax even the talents of John Duns Scotus, but Rice has done as well as anyone could do. Maurin often reshuffled essays into different arrangements, with small and large verbal changes, inserting and deleting stanzas, moving stanzas from one essay to another. After a very helpful introduction, Rice devotes the main part of the book to reproducing in chronological order all the essays Maurin published in the Catholic Worker newspaper from its founding in 1933 until he stopped writing in 1942 (plus one from 1945). Rice carefully notes each time, and with what variations, if any, an essay was published. He identifies 482 distinct essays and also includes the few of Maurin’s writings in the Worker that were not classified as Easy Essays. The second main section of Rice’s book comprises of eighty-seven essays not published in Maurin’s lifetime. Some were published in the Worker or elsewhere after Maurin’s death, but most are published for the first time, retrieved from the Catholic Worker archives at Marquette with the help of indefatigable archivist Phil Runkel. Appendices reproduce several interviews with Maurin published in the Worker, and a list of books recommended by Maurin. A “Biographical Glossary” identifies all persons mentioned in Maurin’s essays, from Shakespeare to the most obscure (Suzanne Michel?), and often comments on (and occasionally corrects) Maurin’s use of their work. The book concludes with detailed indexes of essays and of names and themes. Maurin calls himself a personalist, often cites Emmanuel Mounier and the Esprit school favorably, and instigated the first translation of Mounier’s work in the United States (he shows no awareness of other schools of personalism, including the American school associated with Borden Parker Bowne). He was, however, more of an eclectic thinker than a disciple of Mounier or anyone else. Influences include the social encyclicals of Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI, the Distributism of Gilbert K. Chesterton and others, the anarchism of Peter Kropotkin, and a romanticized medievalism typical of many Catholic thinkers of his time. He opposed the New Deal and can seem like a libertarian in his disparagement of government solutions to social problems. Yet he rejected the “rugged individualism” of American libertarianism, contrasting it with a “gentle personalism,” which emphasized community...
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Feb 9, 2021
Jan Svennevig 
Open Access
