4

Personalism, Community, and the Origins

of Human Rights

Samuel Moyn

In the summer of 1947, the Institute for International Law reconvened after a
ten-year hiatus. For decades the self-appointed tribune of European “civiliza-
tion” and the legal conscience of humanity, the Institute now hoped to retake
its former role. Given its prominence in the rhetoric of the Allied new order
during World War II, the new concept of human rights – though interna-
tional lawyers had not even fl irted with it before – stood as the fi rst item on
their agenda.1 The atmosphere was one of bitter disappointment: Whatever
the idealism of wartime dreams, the sad but obvious fact was that when it
came time to enact a peaceful order – most flagrantly in the Dumbarton Oaks
documents, in which human rights did not even figure – a theory of sovereign
power politics ruled. As for the United Nations Charter, the great powers
had it adorned with the phrase human rights without providing either any
defi nition of its values or any institutional means for their defense.2 The inter-
national lawyers of Europe were, they believed, perhaps the last best hope for
making good on what now seemed like broken promises.
“Neither the Charter nor diplomatic wrangling is reassuring,” noted
Charles de Visscher, Belgian international lawyer and judge (1946–1952) on
the International Court of Justice who prepared the Institute’s report and
proposal on human rights, in his opening remarks. “International organiza-
tion,” he complained indignantly, “looks like a mere bureaucracy with neither

1
On the Institute from its nineteenth-century origins through this period, see most notably
Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law
(Cambridge, 2002). One émigré Russian international lawyer had proposed an international
bill of human rights in 1929, but was essentially ignored at the time. See André Mandelstam,
“La Déclaration des droits internationaux de l’homme, adoptée par l’Institut de droit inter-
national,” Revue de droit international, 5 (1930), 59–78 , and Mandelstam, Les Droits inter-
nationaux de l’homme (Paris, 1931); for comment, Dzovinar Kévonian, “Exilés politiques et
avènement du ‘droit humain’: la pensée juridique d’André Mandelstam (1869–1949),” Revue
d’histoire de la Shoah, 177–178 (January–August 2001), 245–273.
2
Cf. Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights
(Cambridge, Mass., 2005).

85
86 Samuel Moyn

direction nor soul, unable to open to humanity the horizons of a true inter-
national community.” A new international law, based on human rights and
theorized and implemented by the caste of jurists, might, however, provide the
“morally-inspired salvation” that the world clearly needed. Now comes a very
curious statement: “Since the end of the second world war, a powerful current
of ideas has arisen against the nameless abuses that we have witnessed: it is
the personalist conception of society and power. The intellectual elites of all
of the countries with liberal and democratic traditions are rallying to this con-
ception.” According to de Visscher, this “personalist conception” alone could
provide the basis of an authentic turn to human rights and guide the response
of law to Machiavellian power.3
In spite of the recent wave of studies of the origins of human rights after
World War II, one would be hard pressed to understand what this leading
international lawyer of the time was talking about. In fact, however, per-
sonalism was a principal feature of human rights consciouness of the 1940s,
especially, though not exclusively, on the European Continent. What was per-
sonalism, how was it possible to view it as the key to the turn to human
rights, and how thoroughgoing a resonance did it really have in the postwar
moment? Forgotten now, the spiritual and often explicitly religious approach
to the human person was, this essay suggests, the conceptual means through
which Continental Europe initially incorporated human rights – and, indeed,
became the homeland of the notion for several decades. Recovering the cen-
trality of personalism, however, should deeply unsettle prevailing opinion
about what the concept of human rights implied in its founding era.
This essay surveys a few of its sources, looks at the breadth of its percola-
tion (not least in legal thought), and evaluates the significance of the personal-
ist vehicle for rights in the 1940s. If this episode is missing from the emerging
understanding of human rights, it should also drive home a larger lesson about
the teleology, tunnel vision, and triumphalism that has so deeply affected cur-
rent historiography. Universalistic and formalistic languages always have a
historically specific and ideologically particular meaning, which it is the mis-
sion of historians to seek out. In early postwar Europe, human rights were
– contrary to current expectations and desires – most associated with neither
a revolutionary nor a republican heritage. For almost nobody were they the
essence of post-Holocaust wisdom, not least since the crimes of Nazi evildo-
ers were not yet understood to be primarily ones against the Jewish people.
Finally, they were not the inspiration for a new sort of private activism, which
had other and later sources.

3
“Les droits fondamentaux de l’homme, base d’une restauration du droit international,”
Annuaire de l’Institut de Droit International, 41 (1947), 1–13 (travaux préparatoires by
Charles de Visscher), 142–190 (discussion), 258–260 (declaration), at 153–154. For the text
of the declaration in English, see “Fundamental Rights of Man, as the Basis of a Restoration
of International Law,” International Law Quarterly, 2:2 (Summer 1948), 231–232. On de
Visscher, see François Rigaux, “An Exemplary Lawyer’s Life (1884–1973),” European Journal
of International Law, 11:4 (2000), 877–886.
Personalism, Community, and the Origins of Human Rights 87

Instead, human rights need to be closely linked, in their beginnings, to an

epoch-making reinvention of conservatism. This defi ning event of postwar
West European history is familiar from the more general historiography of
the period in the form of Christian Democratic hegemony, but is absent so far
from human rights history – even though this same Western Europe became
the earliest homeland of the concept. In sum, human rights came to the world
not just as part of a wartime internationalization of the American New Deal,
but also, and just as crucially, as one element of a European reinvention of its
humanism as it tried to put self-imposed disaster behind it.4 The fi rst surprise,
perhaps, is that concept of the person not only preexisted the mid-1940s, but
had originally served different forces.

“We are neither individualists nor collectivists, we are personalists!” So pro-

claimed perhaps the earliest personalist political manifesto, put out by the
rightist club Ordre Nouveau (New Order) in 1931.5 In its 1930s populariza-
tion, the person was an anti-liberal conception, and the chief task of tracing its
eligibility for its postwar role is to follow the reversal that led it to imply rather
than forbid a formalistic conception such as rights – or even a reinvention of
international law based on it.
The sources of “the person” – besides the Thomistic rendition of Jacques
Maritain, who would become the premier postwar philosopher of human rights
– were various. One important reference was the émigré Russian Orthodox
philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev, who brought to the West an old Russian tradi-
tion of religious personalism.6 Most decisive, according to the historian John
Hellman, may have been the influence of the originally Russian-Jewish con-
vert Alexandre Marc, who founded Ordre Nouveau together with the shadowy
guru Arnaud Dandieu, an atheist follower of Friedrich Nietzsche considered
the secret genius of personalism (though a mere librarian by day). In Germany,
the most prominent personalist was Max Scheler, who also exerted influence
elsewhere. Not just the cacophony of voices starting in the early 1930s but the
essential indeterminacy of the concept made personalism highly ambiguous: the
common but deeply contentious cause of Christian and para-Christian intel-
lectuals from the far right to the communitarian “left.” The thinker who was
to forge the most durable version of personalism, Maritain, could generously
acknowledge as much: “There are at least a dozen personalist doctrines, which,
at times, have nothing more in common than the term ‘person’.”7

4
In his classic 1950 indictment of European “pseudo-humanism,” Aimé Césaire could complain
that “not one established writer, not one academic, not one crusader for law and religion, not
one ‘defender of the human person,’” yet opposed colonialism in principle. Césaire, Discourse
on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York, 1972), 17.
5
See John Hellman, The Communitarian Third Way: Alexandre Marc’s Ordre Nouveau,
1930–2000 (Montreal, 2002).
6
On the larger tradition of Russian personalism, see George L. Kline, “Changing Attitudes
toward the Individual,” in Cyril Black (ed.), The Transformation of Russian Society
(Cambridge, 1960), 606–625.
7
Maritain, The Person and the Common Good, trans. John J. Fitzgerald (New York, 1947), 13.
88 Samuel Moyn

Yet the ambiguity of personalism was, in a sense, its genius; it signaled

the identity of the opposition clearly, while leaving fl exibility about what the
alternative program was. (Its ambiguity was also a minimum condition for
its eventual extrication from its typically reactionary and always illiberal
origins.) Personalism – linked quickly to spiritualism and humanism, and
not infrequently to European identity – meant a repudiation of the rival
materialisms of liberalism and communism. In the fi rst place, then, person-
alism was different than individualism, for it championed a figure who was
supposed to overcome the destitute atomism of the politics and economics
of the nineteenth century. If, however, the person provided a connection
to community that individualism ruled out, it also provided the key source
of value omitted in, and the political bulwark against, communism. Most
boldly, personalists claimed that capitalism and communism, apparently
foes, deserved each other, and canceled each other out, in their common
materialism.
The spectrum of opinion championing personalism in the inaugural years
of the early 1930s ranged from the far right to the farrago of publicists now
known as experimental “non-conformists.” The so-called Young Right (Jeune
Droite), an up-and-coming cohort of young reactionaries, self-proclaimed
“defenders of the West,” were those originally part of Maritain’s reactionary
circle when he affi liated with the royalist and anti-Semitic Action Française.
But, unlike him, they remained within the fold of the French conservative rev-
olution as Maritain cut his ties with it. “Before the tragic failure of materialist
prosperity,” one of these figures, Thierry Maulnier, wrote in 1932, “polit-
ical humanism – the just reckoning of the person, and its possibilities and
rights – would seem the sole formula… to furnish the acceptable elements of a
reconstruction.”8 A group such as Ordre Nouveau was representative of non-
conformism, a set of movements “neither right nor left” or rather both, since
many of its members thought what was true in Marxism and communism –
their opposition to bourgeois decadence and their hankering for the death of
individualism – had to be saved, so as to redirect revolution against the bour-
geoisie in a spiritualist and often explicitly Christian direction.9 These were
the early themes of personalism, then. But if the essential meaninglessness of
the person was a minimum condition for the fact that it could eventually be
extricated from its reactionary and non-conformist origins, one must at least

8
Cited in Nicolas Kessler, Histoire politique de la Jeune Droite (1929–1942): une révolution
conservatrice à la française (Paris, 2001), 208; cf. 230–233, 242–249 for more reactionary
personalism.
9
On the general scene, the classic is Jean Louis Loubet del Bayle, Les Non-conformistes des
années trente: une tentative de renouvellement de la pensée politique française (Paris, 1969).
The allegation that these circles were basically fascistic is most familiar from the controversial
works of Zeev Sternhell: Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France,
trans. David Maisel (Berkeley, 1986). For the best overview, see Robert O. Paxton, “The Church,
the Republic, and the Fascist Temptation,” in Richard J. Wolff and Jörg K. Hoensch (eds.),
Catholics, the State, and the European Radical Right, 1919–1945 (Boulder, 1986), 67–91.
Personalism, Community, and the Origins of Human Rights 89

also note that, for a time after 1934, communism tried to claim the slogan
too. In that year, Nicolai Bukharin helped transform the appeal of commu-
nism in the West when he announced that the Soviet Union would make the
realization of “the personality” for “the first time… a mass phenomenon and
not just… part of the slave-owning upper class in its various historical vari-
ants.” Such a promise profoundly affected the way ordinary people imagined
and constructed themselves; but its ramifications were also legal, as the Stalin
Constitution of 1936 – in whose drafting Bukharin played an instrumental
role – makes clear.10
Without question, however, the man who made the intellectual fortune of
personalism was Emmanuel Mounier, due to the terrific impact of his non-
conformist journal Esprit beginning in the early 1930s. Drastically expanding
the purchase of the theme of the person in his early essays, Mounier proposed
going back to where modernity started out in the Renaissance and trying
again with a genuine humanism that freed Europe of the secular and liberal
mistake of individualism. For Mounier, the challenge was to use the person to
insist on respect for self-realization that “collectivism” ruled out, while press-
ing it to imply a community that brought atomized individuals back together.
This common idea was one that Mounier developed at length, including in
his famous Manifesto in the Service of Personalism. Far from implying rights,
this central personalism of the 1930s instead sought new forms of post-liberal
politics as well as a personalist economy to go with them. “On the altar of this
sad world,” Mounier wrote in an illustrative passage, “there is but one god,
smiling and hideous: the Bourgeois”:
He has lost the true sense of being, he moves only among things, and things that are
practical and that have been denuded of their mystery. He is a man without love, a
Christian without conscience, an unbeliever without passion. He has deflected the
universe of virtues from its supposedly senseless course towards the infi nite and made
it center about a petty system of social and psychological tranquility. For him there is
only prosperity, health, common sense, balance, sweetness of life, comfort.… Next in
line among bourgeois values are human respect and protection of rights.… Law is for
him not an institution for justice, but the defence of the injustices he infl icts. Thence
comes his harsh legalism.11

Repudiating France’s then minuscule Christian Democratic party – in a noto-

rious fracas with Paul Archambault, who considered him dangerous in the
extreme – Mounier declared that “the ideology that we are combatting, and
which still poisons all democrats, even Christian democrats, is the ideology
of 89,” whose principles such as individual rights had to be “evaluated in

10
Bukharin cited in Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin
(Cambridge, Mass., 2006), 31. See also Kline, “Changing Attitudes toward the Ind i-
vidual,” 624, on the revival of nineteenth-century Russian personalism in this 1930s
moment.
11
Emmanuel Mounier, A Personalist Manifesto, trans. Monks of St. John’s Abbey (New York,
1938), 17–18.
90 Samuel Moyn

the light of our conception of man [and] of the Community that completes
him.”12
The puzzle is how the person, in spite of all these associations, would be
readied for its intellectual – and harsh legalistic! – role later; and much of the
solution to that puzzle depends on Jacques Maritain, who would, not coin-
cidentally, become the most prominent thinker of any kind across the world
to champion rights in the postwar moment. Personalism survived its original
connotations, as the communitarian third way that it promised between indi-
vidualism and communism transcended its reactionary (and occasional leftist)
connotations to be linked tightly to Cold War conservatism. Maritain’s career
provides the best guide, as a proxy for other trajectories in various places.

Ironically, the Young Right’s clearest source for claims about the relevance
of the person was that very mentor who, many years later, would make it the
foundation for human rights: Besides a few stray references, Maritain toyed
with the sociopolitical relevance of “the person” fi rst in his popular Action
Française era book Three Reformers (1925). There he argued that the catas-
trophe of modernity, due to the sensualist heresiarch Martin Luther, the solip-
sist metaphysician René Descartes, and the bourgeois reformer Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, left behind Saint Thomas’s person for the new individual. Thus,
not just generally, but in Maritain’s own case, the basic claim of the political
importance of “the person” antedated any break with the far right of his day,
rather than driving it. “Are you well-informed about the ideological adven-
ture that two pages of Three Reformers [those that originally introduced the
person/individual distinction] have allowed?” Maritain’s disciple Yves Simon
could ask him in a letter as late as 1941, when the person still remained chiefly
a reactionary conception, in spite of Maritain’s extraordinary labors by then
to make it mean something different.13
Yet Maritain had left the personalist revolution to others for a decade,
while he continued his original and enduring interests in metaphysics and
aesthetics. In the mid-1930s, this changed. As much as the negative exam-
ple of the far right, it was Mounier’s para-Catholic and this-worldly combat
for a personalist rupture – whatever that meant – that pushed Maritain to
elaborate his own politics. (Intellectually and organizationally, Maritain had
been instrumental in Mounier’s path to Esprit, but the obverse of the rela-
tionship has not been sufficiently stressed. Maritain opposed Mounier’s drifts
into apparent proximity to fascism, but would never have become a political

12
The texts are most conveniently available in René Rémond, Les crises du catholicisme en
France dans les années trente (Paris, 1996), appendix.
13
Maritain, Trois réformateurs: Luther – Descartes – Rousseau (Paris, 1925); in English, Three
Reformers: Luther – Descartes – Rousseau (New York, 1955). Simon to Maritain, September
3, 1941, Yves R. Simon Institute, Mishawaka, Indiana. He continued: “Last winter, our
seniors had a debate on the question of whether Thomistic personalism is the true interna-
tionalism. As a joke it was proclaimed that all that is idiotic is due to individualism, while all
that is beautiful stems from personalism.”
Personalism, Community, and the Origins of Human Rights 91

thinker without Mounier’s example.)14 It is also clear that, though by then

an anti-communist of quite long standing, Maritain was angered by the huge
propaganda successes of communism in the West in the mid-1930s in the cul-
tural preparation of Popular Front anti-fascism, as figures such as André Gide
and André Malraux responded to Bukharin’s new propaganda by insisting
that the Soviets might have the true recipe for the achievement of dignified
humanity.15 Yet even in his Integral Humanism (1936), in which he spelled out
his politics of personalism in most classic form, Maritain endorsed the person
without endorsing rights, which was a sign of his proximity to non-conformist
and illiberal currents in European thought.
There is no way to fathom Maritain’s conversion to rights – and that of
the whole Continent – without looking to the larger Catholic Church’s con-
version to personalism. How this happened was unexpected and dramatic,
and due above all to events in the mid-1930s that decided Pius XI to commit
the Church to anti-totalitarianism.16 The move toward the later twentieth-
century embrace of rights-talk as the essence of Christian social thought
occurred neither at a slow and steady pace nor all at once in a single transfor-
mative moment. Famously, the Church had treated the notion of rights with
vituperation for the entire modern period. It is not impossible to fi nd allu-
sions to the person and even to rights (though always those of family or labor)
before the period of reversal. Yet these usages were “neither comprehensive
nor tightly systematic.”17 The same was true of the rhetoric of new Catholic
social movements that were of such signal importance to interwar history.
The crucial leap, which has not been effectively studied, occurred when Pius
XI toward the end of his papacy began to use the terms in a more serious and
organizing way.
This remarkable turn against “statolatry” by no means compelled any
embrace of rights as an organizing doctrine, but it did involve the assertion

14
These claims are contentious in the literature, but there is no space to defend them here.
15
See Sandra Teroni and Wolfgang Klein (eds.), Pour la défense de la culture: les textes du
Congrès international des écrivains, Paris 1935 (Dijon, 2005). Thanks to Anson Rabinbach
for sharing his illuminating ongoing work on anti-fascism.
16
This section summarizes the more detailed analysis in Samuel Moyn, “Jacques Maritain: le
origini dei Diritti umani e il pensiero politico cristiano,” in Luigi Bonanate and Roberto Papini
(eds.), Dialogo interculturale e diritti umani: la Dichiarazione Universale dei Diritti Umani,
Genesi, evoluzione, e problemi odierni (1948–2008) (Bologna, 2008), 97–124. Existing
doctrinal histories of the Church and human rights have sectarian versions of the general
flaws of teleology, tunnel vision, and triumphalism in human rights history. For examples, see
Philippe de la Chappelle, La Déclaration universelle des droits de l’homme et le catholicisme,
pref. René Cassin (Paris, 1967); Jozef Punt, Die Idee der Menschenrechte: Ihre geschichtli-
che Entwicklung und ihre Rezeption durch die moderne katholische Sozialverkündigung
(Paderborn, 1987); Alexander Saberschinsky, Die Begründung universeller Menschenrechte
(Paderborn, 2002); and Thomas D. Williams, Who Is My Neighbor? Personalism and the
Foundations of Human Rights, preface by Mary Ann Glendon (Washington, D.C., 2005).
17
J. Bryan Hehir, “Religious Activism for Human Rights: A Christian Case Study,” in
John Witte, Jr., and Johan D. van der Vyver (eds.), Religious Human Rights in Global
Perspective: Religious Perspectives (The Hague, 1996), 101.
92 Samuel Moyn

of religious sovereignty over personal conscience; very often, this sovereignty

attached to the previously peripheral figure of the person. Interestingly, it was
most frequently anti-liberal premises that led to what may seem a liberalizing
outcome in this denunciation of the era’s dictators (Benito Mussolini some-
times exempted), with the modern and “secularist” separation of state from
church often presented as having allowed the menacing totalitarian hypertro-
phy of the state to occur.18 In any event, it was at this moment that Pius – who
knew Maritain well and esteemed his work – turned emphatically to person-
alism as the foundation of Church’s spiritual alternative to totalitarianism, in
1937–1938. “Man, as a person,” Pius declared, “possesses rights that he holds
from God and which must remain, with regard to the collectivity, beyond the
reach of anything that would tend to deny them, to abolish them, or to neglect
them.”19 This phraseology, from the anti-Nazi encyclical of March 1937, Mit
brennender Sorge, was matched by the anti-communist encyclical of the same
month, Divini redemptoris, the latter with greater emphasis on the right of
property in the context of a more general scheme of the rights of the person
against the totalitarian collective.20
It was thus in a moment of discovering two extreme political ideologies
that, in its view, left no room for Christianity that some insisted on sover-
eignty over the “human,” over which in turn no merely temporal politics can
claim full authority. Soon to become Pius XII, Eugenio Pacelli, in the summer
of 1937, made clear the centrality of this new figure, decrying “a vast and
dangerous conspiracy” threatening unlike any prior occasion “the inviolabil-
ity of the human person that, in his sovereign wisdom and infi nite goodness,
the Creator has honored with an incomparable dignity.” Further, Pacelli cited
the critical line from Mit brennender Sorge to make clear that this inviolable
dignity gave rise to some set of rights. Of course, personalist rights implied
moral community, not the selfish entitlements of the bankrupt nineteenth cen-
tury. All the same, “if a society adopted the pretense that it could diminish the
dignity of the human person in refusing it all or some of the rights that come
to it from God, it would miss its goal.”21
What such changes in papal political theory meant on the ground, in the
context of much other doctrine and the inherited weight of tradition, var-
ied widely – especially after Pius XII’s election a year later to face the fi nal
crisis of the 1930s and the difficult choices of the war.22 With respect to the
18
Cf. Emilio Gentile, Politics as Religion, trans. George Staunton (Princeton, 2006), 92–93,
and ch. 4.
19
Pius XI, Encyclical Letter “Mit brennender Sorge,” March 14, 1937, as translated in Georges
Passelecq and Bernard Suchecky, The Hidden Encyclical of Pius XI, trans. Steven Rendall
(New York, 1997), 105.
20
See Xavier de Montclos, “Le discours de Pie XI sur la défense des droits de la personne
humaine,” in Achille Ratti, pape Pie XI (Rome, 1996).
21
“Lettre de S. Em. le Cardinal Pacelli,” in La Personne humaine en péril (Lyon, 1937), 5–8.
22
For a variety of contemporary commentaries on the novel surge of the human person after 1936
in statements by Pius XI and XII, see The Foundations of International Order (proceedings
Personalism, Community, and the Origins of Human Rights 93

language of rights as well as in other ways, Pius XII, like any good strategist,
left his options open, encouraging some possible lines of future development
and tolerating others.23 In different national contexts, rights-talk had different
fates: The new language of the rights of the human person was not just pas-
sively received, but was creatively interpreted from place to place and moment
to moment. As Paul Hanebrink has shown in the case of Hungarian debates,
for example, what was at stake for some churchmen and Christian politi-
cians was only “the rights of (Christian) man,” chiefly the defense of the right
of conversion against racist essentialism, still in the name of a exclusionary
vision of a Christianized nation.24
But in America – before Maritain ever turned to rights – a small band of
liberal Catholics chose a different direction. In tune with his fi nal thought,
Pius XI had written barely two months before his death that “Christian
teaching alone gives full meaning to the demands of human rights and lib-
erty because it alone gives worth and dignity to human personality.” In a
pastoral letter in response to this statement in honor of the golden jubilee of
Catholic University, American bishops took the argument a (textually unwar-
ranted) step further: “His Holiness calls us to the defense of our democratic
government in a constitution that safeguards the inalienable rights of man.”25
American Catholic liberals opposing Father Charles Coughlin’s Jew baiting
founded the publication The Voice for Human Rights in 1939. Historians who
have examined the crucial early war years to trace the remarkable afflatus of
the hitherto largely unused (in English) phrase “human rights” have discov-
ered minor percolations but little else until something happened to catapult
the term into its immediate postwar career. Completely neglected among these

of the Catholic Congress on International Peace, The Hague, 1938) (Oxford, 1938); André
Saint-Denis, Pie XI contre les idoles: bolchévisme, racisme-étatisme (Paris, 1939); or Lewis
Watt, S.J., Pope Pius XII on World Order (Oxford, 1940), ch. 5, “The Dignity of the Human
Person.”
23
For a general picture of Pius’s wartime positions, see Peter C. Kent, “Toward the Reconstitution
of Christian Europe: The War Aims of the Papacy, 1938–1945,” in David B. Woolner and
Richard B. Kurial (eds.), FDR, the Vatican, and the Roman Catholic Church in America,
1933–1945 (New York, 2003).
24
Paul A. Hanebrink, In Defense of Christian Hungary: Religion, Nationalism, and
Antisemitism, 1890–1944 (Ithaca, 2006), 170–180.
25
“Pope Bids Church to Guard Man’s Rights,” New York Times, October 13, 1938; “Pastoral
Letter [of the American Catholic Hierarchy] on the Teaching of Democracy,” New York
Times, November 25, 1938. The pope made the anti-totalitarian (and anti-capitalist) con-
text of “human rights” clear once again: “The Catholic is necessarily the champion of true
human rights and the defender of true human liberties; it is in the name of God Himself
that he cries out against any civic philosophy which would degrade man to the position
of a soulless pawn in a sordid game of power and prestige, or would seek to banish him
from membership in the human family; it is in the same holy name that he opposes any
social philosophy which would regard man as a mere chattel in commercial competition
for profi t, or would set him at the throat of his fellow in a blind brutish class struggle for
existence.”
94 Samuel Moyn

percolations so far highlighted, however, is the comparatively early Catholic

articulation of the human rights idea.26
Soon European Catholics were repeating the slogan, and Maritain, on an
American sojourn when France fell but transmitting his ideas back to the
Continent throughout the war, made himself the premier interpreter of human
rights among Catholics, and indeed almost singlehandedly reinvented them
as a Christian tradition. By itself, personalism could have led Maritain, like
so many other others, into the arms of the Vichy government, whose leader,
indeed, himself proclaimed that “individualism has nothing in common
with respect for the human person” (a respect he promised his regime would
restore, along with religious civilization as a whole). Maritain’s formulae of
the “primacy of the spiritual” and “integral humanism” were even used as slo-
ganeering buzzwords by Vichyite intellectuals and youth.27 But Maritain, in
exile, opposed Vichy uncompromisingly and soon became an inspiration for
the Resistance, even if he was ambivalent about Charles de Gaulle as the Free
French leader, on the grounds that de Gaulle would not concur with his vision
of personalistic democracy. It was most clearly in early 1942 that Maritain
transformed into the philosopher of human rights that he had never been
before. In Natural Law and Human Rights, Maritain took what would be a
fateful step for postwar intellectual history as a whole, making the claim that
a revival of natural law implies a broad set of pre-political human rights.28
What would have been – and still is – curious about this claim, of course,
is that whatever their opinions of the origins of modern rights-talk, nearly
all histories of the political language concur that the rise of rights in polit-
ical theory occurred after and because of the destruction of the Thomistic
natural law tradition.29 In either a stroke of a master, or a sleight of hand, or
both, Maritain – as if the Thomistic movement had not long and unanimously

26
See esp. A. W. Brian Simpson, Human Rights and the End of Empire: Britain and the Genesis
of the European Convention (Oxford, 2001), ch. 4; also Paul Gordon Lauren, The Evolution
of International Human Rights: Visions Seen, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia, 2003), ch. 5.
27
Cited in Hellman, Emmanuel Mounier and the New Catholic Left, 1930–1950 (Toronto,
1981), 168. For personalism – including fulsome invocation of Maritain’s formulae – at Vichy,
see Hellman’s writings: “Maritain, Simon, and Vichy’s Elite Schools,” in Michael D. Torre
(ed.), Freedom in the Modern World (Notre Dame, 1989), 165–180; “Communitarians, Non-
conformists, and the Search for a ‘New Man’ in Vichy France,” in Sarah Fishman et al. (eds.),
France at War: Vichy and the Historians (Oxford, 2000), 91–106; and The Knight-Monks of
Vichy France: Uriage, 1940–1945 (Montreal, 1994).
28
The earliest publications are “The Natural Law and Human Rights” (Windsor, Ontario,
1942), an award acceptance speech dated January 18, 1942, published as a pamphlet,
and “Natural Law and Human Rights,” Dublin Review, 210 (April 1942), 116–124. The
book is Les droits de l’homme et la loi naturelle (New York, 1942), translated into many
languages.
29
For radically contrasting stories of the origins of rights that nevertheless concur on this point,
see Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago, 1953); Richard Tuck, Natural Rights
Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge, 1979); and Michel Villey, Le droit
et les droits de l’homme (Paris, 1983). In Catholicism, see the dissident view of Alasdair
MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, 1981).
Personalism, Community, and the Origins of Human Rights 95

rejected modern rights – claimed that the one implied the other and, indeed,
that only the one plausibly and palatably justified the other. Thanks to
Maritain above all, the older view that Christianity’s political and social doc-
trine could not be reformulated in terms of rights was dropped in exchange for
the claim that only the Christian vision placing them in the framework of the
common good afforded a persuasive theory of rights. By his Christmas mes-
sage of 1942, the one frequently discussed solely for its insufficient reference
to Jewish suffering, Pius too was laying out his postwar vision in terms of the
dignity of the person and human rights.30
This trajectory cemented the resonance of the dignity of the human person
as the communitarian framework for the new rights-talk. By 1942, British
Catholic Christopher Dawson (who had imported Maritain in his reaction-
ary phase to Great Britain along with Carl Schmitt in his Catholic phase)
was sounding similar themes. “We are standing against an order in which
all human rights and the human person itself are immolated on the altar of
power to the glory of the New Leviathan,” he wrote. Alluding to Franklin D.
Roosevelt’s “four freedoms,” he now explained, in spite of his formerly reac-
tionary politics,
The liberties which we demand and which humanity demands are not the right of the
strong to oppress the weak or the right of the ambitious to enrich themselves at other
men’s expense: but the elementary right which are to the human spirit what air and
light are to the body: freedom to worship God, freedom of speech, freedom from want
and freedom from fear.

All the same, he clarified that if Christianity now implied some sort of democ-
racy, it could not be a liberal kind:
It must be a social order directed to spiritual ends.… From this point of view the use of
the term “Democracy” as the defi nition of our cause is not completely satisfactory. For
Democracy has a restricted political significance which by no means covers the whole
field of values that has to be defended, and the confusion of Democracy as a general
term for our tradition of social freedom, and its more limited but more accurate politi-
cal meaning, is apt to produce misunderstanding and disagreement. For the cause that
we are defending is far more fundamental than any form of government or any politi-
cal creed. It is bound up with the whole tradition of Western and Christian culture.…
No doubt Democracy as an ideal does stand for these things and is the outcome of this
tradition. But in practice modern democratic culture often represents only a debased
and secularized version of this ideal and in many respects, as de Tocqueville saw more
than a century ago, it prepares the way for the coming of the new mass order which
achieves political form in the totalitarian State. What we are defending, in short, is
not democracy but humanity.31

30
Pius XII, “The Internal Order of States and People,” in Vincent A. Yzermans (ed.), The
Major Addresses of Pope Pius XII, 2 vols. (St. Paul, 1961). See, e.g., John A. O’Brien, “The
Pope’s Way to Peace,” International Conciliation, 44 (October 1944), 647–663 (rights of the
human person throughout). In the same papal collection, one may wish to compare the 1958
Christmas message, “The Rights of Man.”
31
Christopher Dawson, The Judgment of the Nations (New York, 1942), 185–186.
96 Samuel Moyn

Dawson’s argument made sense in light of prewar conceptions of democ-

racy, which prioritized its formalistic associations as a “bourgeois” electoral
and economic phenomenon that both far left and Christian politics were
agreed in rejecting in the name of substantive moral community. As the war
continued, however, one of Maritain’s main purposes was to lay out a new,
Christian conception of democracy that transcended these narrow limits, and
soon the Pope would agree. Democracy and humanity could coincide.
In the flow of Christian political theory in these years, in fact, the orig-
inal commitment of the non-individualist person in the non-totalitarian
community remained stable, as the overall governing framework into which
rights were introduced. In other words, the superimposition of rights on
personalism meant as much continuity as change. In an atmosphere in
which many Catholics understood the defense of the West to mean all-out
war against Bolshevism even at the price of alliance with unholy forces,
Maritain’s message was primarily directed against the European prefer-
ence for fascism as the lesser evil. “An obscure process of leniency toward
totalitarian forms that lying propaganda tries to picture as the upholders of
order,” Maritain regretted at the University of Pennsylvania bicentennial in
1940, “has thus invaded parts of the believing groups in many countries.”32
“The error of those Catholics who follow Pétain in France or Franco in
Spain,” Maritain wrote Charles de Gaulle in 1941, “is to convert Catholic
thought, through lack of social and political education, in the direction
of old paternalistic conceptions of history rejected in the meantime by the
popes and condemned by history.”33
In the process, Maritain’s attitude toward the catastrophe of modernity
softened slightly but discernibly (though it never reversed). The ambivalence
is well captured in his Fortune magazine story of 1942 in which he still
castigated modern man for “claim[ing] human rights and dignity – with-
out God, for his ideology grounded human rights and human dignity in a
godlike, infi nite autonomy of human will,” while also now referring to the
apparently alternative “concept of, and devotion to, the rights of the human
person” as “the most significant political improvement of modern times.”34
His relative move toward an affi rmation of a specific kind of state frame-
work within which alone a “new Christian order” could come about forced
Maritain to quietly but decisively drop old associations of formal liberties
and formal democracy with liberal individualism on its deathbed. He broke
largely with visions, such as either Marxism or Mounier’s personalism, that
treated formal rights and democracy as elements of a hypocritical capitalist

32
William L. Laurence, “Political Theory of Religion Is Hit,” New York Times, September 17,
1940. Though well informed, Maritain consistently presented France as captured, thus drasti-
cally understating the extent and zeal of the collaborationism of some of his countrymen.
33
Maritain to Charles de Gaulle, November 21, 1941, in Cahiers Jacques Maritain, 16–17
(April 1988), 61. By the next year he urged de Gaulle to champion a “renewed democratic
ideal” rooted in personalism. Ibid., 68.
34
Maritain, “Christian Humanism,” Fortune, April 1942.
Personalism, Community, and the Origins of Human Rights 97

sham. Formal or “bourgeois” liberties formerly condemned now had to be

resurrected as providing the legal carapace of the Christian state and even
the spiritual interstate order. Arguably, however, these innovations were
in the service of keeping personalist communitarianism the same in new
circumstances.
It is true, though, that this substantive vision now prompted a less critical
attitude toward formal guarantees and political structures or might indeed
invest them with considerable significance. One could say something similar
of Pius XII who, having adopted the rhetoric of the rights of the person, was
by the time of his 1944 Christmas message following Maritain by endorsing
democracy on condition of differentiating between its Christian communitar-
ian and reprobate secularist version.35 “Defend These Human Rights!” British
Catholic John Eppstein wrote in a 1948 pamphlet, explaining that this meant
la défense de la personne humaine fi rst discovered by Catholics in the later
1930s. (“This was somewhat different from the familiar enumeration of ‘the
Rights of Man and the Citizen’,” he explained, “since by ‘the human person’
the Christian opponents of State absolutism meant particularly man as a spiri-
tual being.”)36 The work of saving the person from its anti-democratic votaries
arguably depended on the deeper commitment to a moral and communitarian
ethos, which allowed leaving those old versions behind almost as if they had
never been. “To avoid all misunderstanding, I must add,” de Visscher, the
international lawyer, put it rather charmingly in 1947, “that the personalist
conception must be defended against some of those who claim it and who have
sometimes compromised it in the very process of advocating for it.”37

Even Mounier, who remained in France, embraced rights after a fashion – albeit
very briefly. After having flirted with identifying the National Revolution as a
personalist one – he criticized Maritain for his treasonous defense of American
democracy before being shut down by the Vichy regime – Mounier penned a dec-
laration of “the rights of persons and communities.”38 This made an important

35
See Pius XII, “True and False Democracy,” in Major Addresses. Even in America, the major
postwar Catholic thinker, Jesuit and Maritain follower John Courtney Murray, could argue
in a 1950 essay that the human rights turn showed that the modern world had fi nally imbibed
Catholicism’s message rather than vice versa: “The growing conviction of the old attempts
to solve the problem of human liberty and social order in purely secularistic, positivist terms
had created a new openness to the world of metaphysical and religious values. [The Christian
human rights idea provides] such a basis because it is metaphysical in its foundations, because
it is asserted within a religious framework, and because it is realist (not nominalist), soci-
etal (not individualist), and integrally human (not rationalist) in its outlook on man and
society.” Murray, “The Natural Law,” in Robert M. MacIver (ed.), Great Expressions of
Human Rights (New York, 1950), as reprinted in Murray, We Hold These Truths: Catholic
Refl ections on the American Proposition (New York, 1960), 320.
36
John Eppstein, Defend these Human Rights! Each Man’s Stake in the United Nations – A
Catholic View (New York, 1948), 5.
37
De Visscher, “Les droits fondamentaux de l’homme,” 158.
38
On Maritain, see Mounier, Oeuvres, 4 vols. (Paris, 1961–1963), 4:694; for the declaration,
see Mounier, “Faut-il refaire la Déclaration des droits?” ibid., 4:96–104. This document
98 Samuel Moyn

difference to his followers, many of whom essentially made Maritain’s move

to reconcile personalism with formal democracy while Mounier notoriously
moved from non-conformism to the far left in the postwar era. Mounier had, it
is clear, a far more serious impact on Belgium and France, whereas Maritain’s
message found its most significant hearing in Italy and Latin America.39 Most
important, followers of Mounier in the briefly if meteorically successful post-
war Mouvement républicain populaire were able to be more faithful than
Mounier was to his brief rights-based revision of personalism.
A good example of a Mounier disciple who played a major role in the post-
war European human rights moment – besides Charles de Visscher – was
François de Menthon, who headed the French prosecution team at Nuremberg.
In his spectacular opening address, now understandably attacked for develop-
ing the juristic novelty of “crimes against humanity” while failing to mention
which part of humanity actually suffered the crimes, Menthon identified the
German acts as “crimes against the spirit,” a clear reference to interwar and
wartime anti-materialism that contemporaries, unlike Nuremberg’s many his-
torians since, would have readily identified as such. “National Socialism,” he
thundered, “ends in the absorption of the personality of the citizen into that
of the state and in the denial of any intrinsic value to the human person.” Even
his glancing reference at the end of his address to “citizens of the occupied
countries categorized as Jews” singled out the damage done to “their per-
sonal rights and to their human dignity.”40 No one else, including Robert H.
Jackson, used similar language at the time: The originally personalist framing
of crimes against humanity, and their deep affront to the rights of the digni-
fied human person, has quite simply been missed.
As for Maritain, he continued to defend a personalistic conception of
human rights wherever he went during the years after the war: in his work
for UNESCO on the philosophical grounding of human rights, as French
Ambassador to the Holy See for a few years (where he decisively influenced
later popes who would fi nally overcome institutional resistance within the
Church to a full move to human rights language two decades later), or
Princeton University.41 But though Maritain was certainly the most prominent

was widely read in the framing process of the abortive and then the passed Fourth Republic
Declaration of Rights.
39
See esp. Paolo Pombeni, Il gruppo dossettiano e la fondazione della democrazia italiana
(1938–1948) (Bologna, 1979), and Olivier Compagnon, Jacques Maritain et l’Amérique du
Sud (Villeneuve, 2003).
40
François de Menthon, “Opening Address (January 17, 1946),” in Michael R. Marrus (ed.),
The Nuremberg War Crimes Trial 1945–46: A Documentary History (Boston, 1997), 89–94;
cf. Laurent Ducerf, François de Menthon: un Catholique au service de la République (Paris,
2006), ch. 10.
41
His UNESCO address is La Voie de la Paix: Discours prononcé à la séance inaugurale
de la IIe Conférence internationale de l’Unesco (Mexico City, 1947), in English in many
places such as “Possibilities for Co-operation in a Divided World,” in Maritain, The Range
of Reason (New York, 1952); for his UNESCO rights inquiry, see Maritain (ed.), Human
Rights: Comments and Interpretation (New York, 1949); see also Maritain, The Meaning of
Personalism, Community, and the Origins of Human Rights 99

thinker on the postwar scene to defend the new concept, it was political shifts
that made its fortune in the Western European polities that would become its
early homeland. Still, because Catholicism aspired to be and to some extent
was even then a global phenomenon, there should be no surprise in discover-
ing that the personalistic framing of the global human rights “moment” of the
era affected the language not simply inside Continental Europe but far beyond
it. This included, most obviously, the move to human rights at the level of
international organization, essentially rhetorical though it was (as European
international lawyers were not wrong to note).
Indeed, the human person became a key figure of thought at the United
Nations, thanks to Christians impressed by papal language who injected it
into founding documents. In a multiculturalist age, it is tempting to look
back at storied figures in the origins of human rights at the United Nations
and claim them for the third world and alternative values, when in fact they
themselves insisted – before the right audiences at least – that they were mak-
ing a Christian contribution.42 Charles Malik, the Lebanese Christian who
is responsible for the personalistic language of the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights proper, is a case in point. “In Christianity, the individual
human person possesses an absolute value,” Malik explained in 1951, for
instance. “The ultimate ground of all our freedom is the Christian doc-
trine of the absolute inviolability of the human person.”43 Carlos Romulo,
Philippines delegate to the United Nations and a crucial figure in the General
Assembly debates over the Universal Declaration, provides another illuminat-
ing example, as his lectures on the implicit foundation of new impulses in
public international law make plain. “Of all the acts of the United Nations,”
he argued in the period, “the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has
demonstrated most clearly the tendency… to work out a system of interna-
tional law conforming as closely as possible to natural law.… We may yet fi nd
ourselves confronted by the seeming paradox of Christianity emerging as the
only practical program for lasting peace and equitable order in our troubled
world.”44
There was, however, very little true international human rights law for
decades, and the real story of human rights in the early postwar period, with
due allowance for the importance of symbolism, is of its nationalization and
regionalization. I do not claim that the resumption of the interwar vogue
of declarations of rights in the postwar domestic constitutionalism (at least
outside the British sphere until the early 1960s policy change) reflected any

Human Rights (Waltham, 1949), and, for his own fullest views, Maritain, Man and the State
(Chicago, 1951).
42
Cf. Roland Burke, “‘The Compelling Dialogue of Freedom’: Human Rights at the Bandung
Conference,” Human Rights Quarterly, 28:4 (November 2006), 947–965.
43
Charles Malik, “The Prospect for Freedom” (address at honorary rectorial convocation,
University of Dubuque, February 19, 1951), unpaginated.
44
Carlos Romulo, “Natural Law and International Law,” University of Notre Dame Natural
Law Institute Proceedings, 3 (1949), 121, 126.
100 Samuel Moyn

personalistic consensus.45 Early steps in European unification and the – also

initially quite unimpressive – European human rights regime, however, very
much did. As Wolfram Kaiser has now shown, Christian Democracy, heg-
emonic starting in this era as the Continent restabilized, made personalist
communitarianism the fundamental ideology of its work nationally and con-
struction of Europe regionally.46 “In the inter-war period catholicism had been
closely linked to nationalism and the League of Nations had been presented
as being a dangerous centre of masonic power,” Richard Vinen observes, in
a similar vein. “After 1945, this changed. Catholic organizations were enthu-
siastic proponents of international harmony, within the western bloc at least,
and Christian Democrat parties in all European countries were so intimately
linked to European integration that some began to feel that Europe was being
built under the aegis of the ‘catholic international.’”47
It is true that personalism, in both Maritain’s and Mounier’s renditions,
could have had left-wing implications, and to some extent did, prompting an
evanescent “left Catholicism” that quickly sputtered.48 This was not, however,
because of any dispute about the role of the state in the economy: Though
Continental Europeans needed Americans in the 1940s, it was not to learn
commitment to an economic New Deal. As de Visscher argued, no one
believed that personalism implied a return to “the economic liberalism of the
eighteenth or nineteenth centuries.”49 Rather, Christians on the left and right
agreed that some management of the economy was necessary, and diverged
from there. Very quickly, as it turned out, left versions of personalism were
extinguished, and the ideology underwrote a reinvention of conservatism in
power. This “re-recasting of bourgeois Europe,” as one may call it, occurred
under the political hegemony of Christian Democracy, even if one wants to see
it as redounding to the benefit of liberal capitalism in the long run.50 It should

45
See Boris Mirkine-Guetzévitch, Les constitutions européennes (Paris, 1951), ch. 8, and, for
British developments, Charles O. H. Parkinson, Bills of Rights and Decolonization: The
Emergence of Domestic Human Rights Instruments in Britain’s Overseas Territories
(Oxford, 2007).
46
Wolfram Kaiser, Christian Democracy and the Origins of the European Union (Cambridge,
2007). See also the more affi rmative and invested views in Roberto Papini (ed.), L’apporto
del personalismo alla costruzione dell’Europa (Milan, 1981), and Philippe Chenaux, De la
chrétienté à l’Europe: les Catholiques et l’idée européenne au XXe siècle (Paris, 2007), esp.
ch. 3, “L’influence du personnalisme dans la construction de l’Europe.”
47
Richard Vinen, Bourgeois Politics in France, 1945–1951 (Cambridge, 1995), 152, footnote
omitted.
48
See Gerd-Rainer Horn and Emmanuel Gerard (eds.), Left Catholicism: Catholics and Society
in Western Europe at the Point of Liberation (Louvain, 2001), esp. Martin Conway’s synthe-
sis, “Left Catholicism in Europe in the 1940s: Elements of an Interpretation,” 270–271 and
277–278: “In comparison with the rapid growth of Christian Democracy, the Left Catholic
groups must inevitably appear as something of a historical footnote.”
49
De Visscher, “Les droits fondamentaux de l’homme,” 158.
50
The allusion is to Charles Maier’s work on Europe after World War I, which has not been
comparably repeated for the post–World War II period. As Conway puts it, “perhaps the most
durable change in European political life brought about by the war was in fact conservative
Personalism, Community, and the Origins of Human Rights 101

not be surprising, therefore, that many of the chief founders of the European
project, both in politics generally and in the tradition of European human
rights specifically, were avowed personalists (for instance, Robert Schuman,
Paul-Henri Spaak, and Pierre-Henri Teitgen).
In its regionalized domain, human rights law gained only slightly more
traction than on the global scene: The case of the European Convention of
Human Rights (1950) involved – in the early decades when there was no right
of petition and little serious activity, not least because of its derogability dur-
ing colonial emergencies – much more ideological signaling about the values
on which Western European identity depended than it did legally enforceable
guarantees. The common Christian basis for unity mattered a lot here, only
now what that meant was the centrality of the human person. The Convention
itself, given signal British participation in its origins, is not an exception to
this statement but illustrates how powerfully the revolt against materialism as
the essence of Europe resonated in these years. As the Convention’s historian
Brian Simpson has emphasized, it emerged thanks to Britain’s commitment
to “spiritual union” of Western Europeans against communism, in Ernest
Bevin’s own phrase. “In the event Bevin’s idea of a spiritual union came to be
secularized,” Simpson comments with distinct understatement, “but this was
not perhaps how it began.”51
That the incipient Cold War would soon come to be widely understood
in terms of the defense of religion and “the West” that the Church’s struggle
against communism had already been for three decades was no doubt cru-
cial in the larger postwar spiritualist consensus among Western European
liberal-conservatives.52 In this sense, not just British commitment to “spiri-
tual” values in international affairs, which had also antedated the war, could
allow new collaborations with Continental religious ideology in the post-
war years, of which the Convention is only one example.53 More generally,
there had been important Protestant defenders of third-way personalism all
along (perhaps most importantly, Swiss writer Denis de Rougemont, who had
been a non-conformist close to both Marc and Mounier before becoming a
Europeanist).54 The larger phenomenon, without which the picture would
remain incomplete, is the cross-denominational ratification of human dignity

in nature.… Catholicism in the later 1940s and 1950s … while presiding politically over the
postwar reconstruction of Western Europe, retained within it the intellectual components of
a profound critique of liberalist and individualist values which underpinned that same process
of reconstruction.” Conway, “Left Catholicism in Europe in the 1940s,” 277, 281.
51
See Simpson, Human Rights and the End of Empire, esp. 568–570 (“Saving Western
Civilization”) and 577–579 (“What Was the Spiritual Union?”) at 579.
52
Dianne Kirby, “Divinely Sanctioned: The Anglo-American Cold War Alliance and the Defence
of Western Civilization and Christianity, 1945–1948,” Journal of Contemporary History,
35:3 (2000), 385–412, and Kirby (ed.), Religion and the Cold War (New York, 2003).
53
Jeanne Morefield, Covenants without Swords: Idealist Liberalism and the Spirit of Empire
(Princeton, 2005).
54
Bruno Ackermann, Denis de Rougemont: De la personne à l’Europe (Lausanne, 2000).
102 Samuel Moyn

as part of an ecumenical reinvention of Christianity of both Catholic and

Protestant varieties. A few notes on the German case – a crucial link in the
Catholic international but with decisive Protestant participation – are useful
in this regard.
There is no reason to hypothesize the direct impact of the various thinkers
in the Francophone orbit on German developments, though the full ramifica-
tions of dissident networks across the Rhine in the interwar period are only
beginning to be reconstructed.55 Certainly, the spiritualistic consensus and
emphasis on dignitarian personalism – including sometimes human rights –
prevalent in the early years after World War II suggest German Christians
developed their own versions of the doctrines canvassed so far, based on eas-
ily available papal pronouncements. Even if it is true that they had no home-
grown Maritain, a cognate spiritualist credo came close to providing the
central ideological fulcrum of Christian Democracy in Germany, as Maria
Mitchell has shown.56 And just as in the case of the Universal Declaration
on which it drew, the Federal Republic Basic Law’s opening affi rmation of
human dignity has to be read not just retrospectively as a response to the
Nazi past but prospectively as an allusion to the kind of moral future that
would alone overcome that past. It is a mistake, in other words, to think
about the “recivilization” of West Germany in the absence of the religious
ideology that provided its justification and explained the specific, nonsecular,
moralized form it was supposed to take.57 Premier historian and Protestant
conservative Gerhard Ritter thus spoke for many when, in 1948, he rallied to
human rights, declaring that on the concept “depends nothing less than the
survival of Western culture.… Despite all that has divided us for centuries,

55
See Hans-Manfred Bock (ed.), Entre Locarno et Vichy: les relations culturelles franco-
allemandes dans les années 30 (Paris, 1993), and Thomas Keller, Deutsch-französische Dritte-
Weg-Diskurse: personalistische Intellektuellendebatte der Zwischenkriegszeit (Munich,
2001). See also Heinz Hürten, “Der Einfluß Jacques Maritains auf das politische Denken in
Deutschland,” Jahrbuch für christliche Sozialwissenschaften, 26 (1985), 25–39.
56
Many German Catholics in the emigration, such as Waldemar Gurian or Heinrich Rommen,
did not return. A parallel German story to Maritain’s creation of a nonreactionary person-
alism can be told about Dietrich von Hildebrand, a Scheler disciple who fled Germany to
Austria (where he favored “Austro-fascist” corporatism) before fleeing to France, then the
United States and taking up Maritain’s cause. See, e.g., Hildebrand, “Der Kampf um die
Person,” Die christliche Ständestaat, 6 (January 14, 1934), reprinted in Ernst Wenisch (ed.),
Memoiren und Aufsätze gegen den Nationalsozialismus 1933–1938 (Mainz, 1994), 191–197,
and “The World Crisis and the Human Personality,” Thought, 16:62 (September 1941),
457–472. However, I do not currently have evidence of parallel impact of German personalist
political theory on the postwar German scene to match the legal evidence introduced below.
57
Maria Mitchell, “Materialism and Secularism: CDU Politicians and National Socialism,
1945–49,” Journal of Modern History, 67:2 (June 1995), 278–308, and Mitchell,
“‘Antimaterialism’ in Early German Christian Democracy,” in Thomas Kselman and Joseph
A. Buttigieg (eds.), European Christian Democracy: Historical Legacies and Comparative
Perspectives (Notre Dame, 2003), 199–227; cf. Konrad Jarausch, After Hitler: Recivilizing
Germans, 1945–1995 (New York, 2006).
Personalism, Community, and the Origins of Human Rights 103

[there still exists] among the great nations of the one-time Christian West a
community of moral-religious convictions which is broad and fi rm enough
to serve as the foundation for a new solid structure of a Christian oriented
social ethics.” Everything depended on human rights – but only so long
(Ritter insisted) as they were treated as a reformulation of those ethics, and
were clearly distinguished from “the mechanical principle of equality” of
secular culture, which had given rise to atomistic capitalism and totalitarian
collectivism alike.58
The transformation of the political meaning of Christianity works far
better than the continuation of fascism proper to explain the centrality of
dignitarian rights not just in postwar politics, but also in postwar law –
most famously, of course, postwar German constitutional law.59 Catholic
jurists such as Willi Geiger and Josef Wintrich, although at times quite
compromised during the Nazi regime, could come to draw directly on new
papal traditions in the postwar years, to give a strongly communitarian
view of the Basic Law. As a judge on the Bundesverfassungsgericht, Geiger,
for instance, championed the centrality of dignitarian rights in public and
private law in the early Federal Republic, which he saw as totally differ-
ent in basis now that they had been reassigned from being Weimar-era
products of the sovereign will to being rooted in the pre-constitutional
nature of persons.60 But others found relatively independent routes to sim-
ilar conceptions. Protestant Gerhard Leibholz, an émigré in Britain dur-
ing the war (and Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s brother-in-law), early established
contact with the crucial intermediary figure between British and resist-
ing German Protestants George Bell, bishop of Chichester.61 Developing
58
Gerhard Ritter, “Ursprung und Wesen der Menschenrechte,” Historische Zeitschrift, 169:2
(August 1949), 233, 263, and Andreas Dorpalen, “Historiography as History: The Work of
Gerhard Ritter,” Journal of Modern History, 34:1 (March 1962), 10. See also Ritter, “Die
Menschenrechte und das Christentum,” Zeitwende, 21:1 (July 1949), 1–12, and my “The
First Historian of Human Rights,” American Historical Review 116:1 (February 2011).
59
Cf. James Q. Whitman, “On Nazi ‘Honour’ and the New European ‘Dignity’,” in Christian
Joerges and Navraj Singh Ghaleigh (eds.), The Darker Legacy of European Law: Perceptions
of Europe and Perspectives on a European Order in Legal Scholarship during the Era of
Fascism and National Socialism (Cambridge, 2003), 243–266.
60
See Willi Geiger, Grundrechte und Rechtsprechung (Munich, 1959), and “Die Wandlung
der Grundrechte,” in Max Imboden (ed.), Gedanke und Gestalt des demokratischen
Rechtsstaats (Vienna, 1965), 9–36. See Gerhard Leibholz et al. (eds.), Menschenwürde und
freiheitliche Rechtsordnung: Festschrift für Willi Geiger zum 65. Geburtstag (Tübingen,
1974). Also of importance was the Bavarian judge Josef Wintrich, whose personalist for-
mulae the Bundesverfassungsgericht took over; see, for example, Zur Problematik der
Grundrechte (Cologne, 1957), and Ulrich Becker, Das “Menschenbild des Grundgesetzes” in
der Rechtsprechung des Bundesverfassungsgerichts (Berlin, 1996). On Geiger under Nazism,
see Ingo Müller, Hitler’s Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich, trans. Deborah Schneider
(Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 218.
61
Bell’s postwar writing shows that Anglicans signed, if slightly less frontally, onto anti-
totalitarian Christian personalism too. Bell, “The Church in Relation to International
Affairs” (address at Chatham House), International Affairs, 25:4 (October 1949), 405–414.
104 Samuel Moyn

Protestant versions of anti-totalitarianism emphasizing spiritual freedom,

both worked together with Anglican Alec Vidler and Continental Catholic
refugees to argue for a return of natural law based on the person. “Must
not theonomic thinking demand that the State ought to abandon the idea
of being a self-contained sovereign entity with only rights of its own, and
acknowledge that it is a member of a community of nations each and all of
which are bound to serve the rights of the human person?” Leibholz asked
in 1946. In the postwar era, he returned to Germany, and as a judge on the
nation’s highest constitutional court, he tirelessly promoted the centrality
of the human personality (Persönlichkeit) as the foundation stone of dem-
ocratic order.62
The intellectual and cultural sources for such a conservative rapproche-
ment with the rights of man were not individualist in general or Kantian in
particular, certainly not in the early going. In a fi rst moment, in fact, the
dominant view was to connect the human dignity affi rmed at the outset of
the Basic Law with naturalistic premises, and indeed “the dominant Catholic
natural law teaching possessed in the fi rst postwar years such a powerful
radiance amongst constitutional experts that Protestants themselves could not
withdraw from it.”63 In a second moment, Catholic personalist and author of
the leading commentary on the Basic Law Günter Dürig moved away from
natural law to a theory of human dignity, and rights generally, as “objective
values” (here Scheler’s old critique of Kant’s putatively subjectivist procedural-
ism in the name of material values provided the main inspiration).64 In both
moments, personalist conceptions of dignity purporting to leave behind the

As he put it, “Chief among [the idolatries of the day] are the worship of power, the totalitarian
State, nationalism, racialism, the craving for riches.… Put against them the great Christian
ideas of the sovereignty and fatherhood of God, the solidarity of the human race with all its
varieties, the sacredness of the human personality.… [T]he rights of men derive directly from
their condition as children of God and not of the State” (407, 409).
62
Gerhard Leibholz, Christianity, Politics, and Power (London, 1943), and “Politics and Natural
Law,” paper delivered at the conference that led to A. R. Vidler and W. H. Whitehouse (eds.),
Natural Law: A Christian Re-consideration (London, 1946), 31–36. Both of Leibholz’s texts
and many others from his émigré years are in Leibholz, Politics and Law (Leyden, 1965), cita-
tion at 23. On the postwar career, see Manfred Wiegandt, Norm und Wirklichkeit: Gerhard
Leibholz, 1901–1982: Leben, Werk und Richteramt (Baden-Baden, 1995).
63
Frieder Günther, Denken vom Staat her: Die bundesdeutsche Staatsrechtslehre zwischen
Dezision und Integration 1949–1970 (Munich, 2004), 192, and, for the larger context of
rights, 192–196, 202–204. For the view of a contemporary, see Hans Maier, “Katholische
Sozial- und Staatslehre und neuere deutsche Staatslehre,” Archiv des öffentlichen Rechts,
93:1 (1968), 1–36.
64
Günter Dürig, “Die Menschenauffassung des Grundgesetzes,” Juristische Rundschau 7
(1952), 259–263 reprinted in Walter Schmitt Glaeser and Peter Häberle (eds.), Gesammelte
Schriften (Berlin, 1984). For his classic commentary on the Grundgesetz , Art. 1, see Dürig
and Theodor Maunz, Grundgesetz: Kommentar (Munich, 1958); cf. Ernst-Wolfgang
Böckenförde, “Die Menschenwürde war unantastbar,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,
September 9, 2003.
Personalism, Community, and the Origins of Human Rights 105

choice between individual and collective provided the dominant framework

and affected many aspects of what human rights meant within the postwar
constitutional framework.65

It may be true, then, that (as Mark Mazower has argued) there was a concep-
tual shift from group to individual in diplomatic and legal circles that set the
stage for the post–World War II human rights moment. But there was also
a shift afoot from the individual to the person, and in terms of its cultural
meaning at the time; and the embedding of its ideas in postwar European
politics, the Universal Declaration is a profoundly communitarian document
– precisely a moral repudiation of dangerous individualism, albeit one equally
intended to steer equally clear of communism.66 Indeed, in my view this is the
key to placing the document – along with the human rights idea in general –
more securely in the ambiance of the war’s aftermath, as part of the moral
reconstruction of Europe perceived to be necessary to stave off future world
crises and confl icts.
One significant irony of this history is that the availability of a now far
more familiar paradigm of the moral value of the person – one with roots in
Roman law, and embedded in Immanuel Kant’s political thought – may easily
promote oblivion of the primacy of a very different human person in the years
when the Universal Declaration was framed and the concept was embedded in
early postwar European law and common sense. Kantians were few and far
between in the 1940s. In a later era, communitarianism could come to seem
a major challenge to rights-talk, but few in that debate are even aware that
rights-talk in immediate postwar Europe did not exclude communitarianism
but instead presupposed it.67
In short, the original context of the European embrace of human rights –
in which they were linked to the conservative defense of human dignity and
attached to the figure of the human person – was in Christianity’s last golden
age on the Continent, which lasted for two decades before the shocking rever-
sal for the fortunes of religion after the mid-1960s. The “death of Christian
Europe,” as one might call it, forced – along with many other developments
– a complete reinvention of the meaning of the human rights embedded in

65
“A strong personalist and communitarian philosophy pervades this conception of the human
person,” the leading Anglophone authority on German constitutional jurisprudence confi rms.
Donald P. Kommers, The Constitutional Jurisprudence of the Federal Republic of Germany,
new ed. (Raleigh, 1997), 304.
66
Cf. Mark Mazower, “The Strange Triumph of Human Rights, 1930–1950,” Historical
Journal, 47:2 (June 2004), 379–398.
67
For graphic evidence of the sheer difficulty of defending individualism in law in the 1940s, see
Marcel Waline, L’individualisme et le droit (Paris, 1945). But, for an attempt to inject person-
alism into the hitherto powerful – and still anti-individualist – “institutionalist” movement
in legal thought by one of its leaders, cf. J. T. Delos and Bruno de Solages, Essai sur l’ordre
politique national et international (Paris, 1947), esp. 86–88.
106 Samuel Moyn

European identity both formally and really since the war.68 The only serious
thread of persistence was, ironically, in Eastern Europe, and especially in
Poland, not coincidentally the main exception to Christian collapse. There
Maritain, Mounier, and Scheler enjoyed huge discipleships, not least in the
personalism of Karol Wojtyla, eventually Pope John Paul II.69 But by the time
of the explosion of human rights in the later 1970s, when the concept gained
a currency out of all proportion to any other moment in history, Christian
personalism, while not absent, was decidedly peripheral. Human rights had
become a secular doctrine of the left; how that happened is another story.

68
This collapse, which ought to be shocking, remains essentially unexplained, but see Callum
Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularization, 1800–2000
(New York, 2001), and Mark Edward Ruff, Wayward Flock: Catholic Youth in Postwar
West Germany (Chapel Hill, 2005).
69
The literature here is large, but see Karol Wojtyla, “Thomistic Personalism” (1961), “On the
Dignity of the Human Person” (1964), and other essays in Person and Community: Selected
Essays (Catholic Thought from Lublin), trans. Theresa Sandok (New York, 1993); cf. Avery
Cardinal Dulles, “John Paul II and the Mystery of the Human Person,” America, February
2, 2004, reprinted in Dulles, Church and Society: The Laurence A. McGinley Lectures,
1988–2007 (New York, 2008), 414–429. Cf. Jens David Ohlin, “Is the Concept of the Person
Necessary for Human Rights?” Columbia Law Review, 105:1 (January 2005), 209–249.