Maritain Not Martian
I’m reading this article, Maritain the Martian by Randall Smith.
Jacques Maritain was one of the most prolific and influential Catholic writers of the twentieth century and one of the best-known intellectuals of his time. Maritain was devoted to the thought of Thomas Aquinas but always with an eye to bringing Thomas’s insights into dialogue with the intellectual currents in modern philosophy, politics, and social thought (something Leo XIII had requested in his encyclical on Aquinas, Aeterni Patris).
So why, when I type “Maritain” into my computer, Smith asks, does my spell checker repeatedly “correct” it to “martian”? “Then again, given the current disregard of his thought, he might as well be a Martian.”
This is unfortunate. As is this:
"Send an article based on the work of Maritain, Pieper, or Yves Simon to a journal today, even one at a Catholic university, and you will hear, “We prefer to appeal to a broader audience,” even though those men wrote for a broad audience."
Jacques Maritain is the bee’s knees and the cat's whiskers rolled into one. The neglect into which his work has fallen makes me, ever the contrarian with respect to intellectual trends and fashions, want to write a book on the man and his thought. His view isn’t quite mine. He argues for the classical liberal separation of state and civil society and I argue against it. Whilst this separation has the merit of delimiting politics, avoiding the totalitarian encroachment of ‘the political’ over areas of personal choice, responsibility, and lifestyle – a good thing – it does lock politics up in the attic, the demoralized, neutralized abstract sphere of the state, depoliticizing areas of common concern in wider society, particularly economics. Maritain is good on ethics, principles, the sociology of personality and community. Reading his work makes it clear that solidarity and the solidarity structures a viable society at peace with itself, or as near to peace as a society that respects the differences of its members can get, requires more than unity around material and sectional interest.
This is a point that I make not to repudiate but to enrich and strengthen Marx’s critique of class division and class society. To his credit, Marx is seeking to achieve the classless society, a society that no longer divides individuals by way of economic relations, from a location within class society. Marx understood that to oppose class society required taking a position for and against prevailing class positions. Marx understood the importance of class politics in a way that many choose not to understand. There are many who share Marx’s distaste of class, considering not merely class society to be divisive, but a class perspective and politics, too. Such people miss the nuances of Marx’s thought. Marx does not make class and his support for the working class an end in itself. On the contrary, Marx’s class politics is inherently self-transcending, seeking to put an end to the class designation. Critics hold that all such class politics merely reproduces itself. They lack Marx’s dialectical understanding, either through lack of sophistication or because they believe it to be a mere sophistic sleight of hand. Marx’s challenge remains – how to mobilize sufficient numbers and engage in an effective social and political practice from within class society to put an end to class society. Those who seek the classless by classless appeals to humanity in general are making an appeal to the very social identity that may be the end in view, but which nowhere exists and stands in need of creation. On such reasoning, there is as much reason to appeal to a merchant banker for support as there is to an industrial worker, an American CEO as a farm labourer in India. Reason is universal after all.
The real deficiency in Marx lies not here in class politics, but in creating solidarity structures and mutual support networks beyond class identity and economic interest. Marx was right to criticize the atomism, estrangement, and division of modern bourgeois relations and how these undermined community. Marx’s critique is pertinent to a whole range of issues concerning social identity, a sense of belonging, meaning, community, and his analysis of class and class division is central to that dislocation and disease. His mistake was to rest communal restoration upon the most ephemeral, transitory, and sectional of all ties, economics and material interest. That deficiency isn’t fatal, mind, since Marx’s viewpoint can be enriched by the development of the social impulses and moral values that inhere in it. Indeed, throughout history, Marxism has appealed to many less by its economic analysis and philosophical quality than by the way it offers belonging, membership, and identity within a coherent moral perspective. My argument is that that perspective is deficient in a social and moral infrastructure in Marx; it is implicit and needs to be make explicit. Doing that requires drawing on resources which transcend the class perspective, whether we look at Kropotkin and communitarian anarchism, Burke, Tocqueville and intermediary associations or, indeed, Jacques Maritain and the Catholic tradition on a solidarity that possesses a social and moral quality and depth beyond economics, sectional interest, and class.
In arguing for the cogency of Marx’s critique over the years, I was always aware of Marx’s omissions, biases, and blind-spots. They are significant and have potentially disastrous social and institutional consequences. I have noted Marx’s hostility to what he referred disparagingly as Hegel’s medievalism. In the Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State, Marx accuses Hegel of offering a mediaeval solution to a modern problem of division. Marx here misses the extent to which Hegel, beyond whatever we may call social institutions (estates etc), sought to restore and sustain the investment of civic institutions with a self-governing, self-policing, self-maintaining force. I see Marx as also attempting that very thing. Hegel articulated this modern polis democracy in terms of the rational reconstruction of the institutions of the free society; Marx’s presentation of the same principles was incredibly sketchy, and would have been almost non-existent had it not been for the way the Paris Commune inspired him to write further on commune democracy.
Hegel had a far more rich, nuanced, and detailed version of society as being multi-layered and based on an interimbrication of communities and institutions than Marx did. Marx, of course, avoided writing blueprints, for very good reasons. Such blueprints deny the agency of individuals in time and place and freeze a vision before it has even had time to grow. If I had to distinguish Marx and Hegel here, I would argue that Hegel was about reconciliation and the rational articulation of the institutions of the free society, whereas Marx was about the critique of prevailing institutions and relations. Marx, I argue, is right about class division and his class analysis of society is also the correct one, if we are serious about putting an end to class division rather than merely pay lip service to that end. There is nothing more likely to reproduce a class society than a classless appeal and politics within a society of class division. An equal appeal to a humanity situated within asymmetrical relations of power will never succeed to uproot class. But in saying that Marx was right here, it is necessary to make it clear that Marx’s class understanding is a) much more sophisticated than people, adherents and opponents, realize; and b) is deficient in being tied to economics, lacking in the social and moral qualities of real solidarity.
Robert Nisbet is a conservative critic of Marx who corrects Marx’s economistic conceptions to restore the missing elements. In The Quest for Community Nisbet argues that Marx “was not wrong in seizing upon the reality of conflict;” indeed, “Marx was profoundly right in stressing the centrality of conflict in institutional change.” Marx was right, too, to make “class conflict the central fact in historical interpretation.” I cite Nisbet on this because he was both a conservative seeking to restore central conservative themes of community, authority, status, meaning, and community, and a profound critic of Marx as a totalitarian thinker whose solutions would suffocate individual liberty through bureaucratic political encroachment. Nisbet the conservative is very far from being a Marxist, then. But he understands something that the ‘third way’ communitarians of the present – and past – ages fail to understand – Marx was right about the reality of class division and class conflict and that class needs to be confronted and uprooted rather than evaded. Marx was right on class, argues Nisbet, “and it is not wholly his fault if followers as well as enemies have chosen to interpret this conflict in the picturesque terms of the barricades.” That’s a view of class that puts very many people off. People are conflict averse and find division distasteful. So they reject these things. And they throw the baby out with the bathwater. They don’t like the issues Marx raises, they don’t like his subject of analysis. They don’t like to confront issues of power, control, authority, and resources either. Neither do the rich and powerful. Concealment by the powerful and evasion by the powerless combine to preserve asymmetrical power relations from challenge, contestation, and alteration. It’s all very unpleasant and causes upset. So the conflict averse seek a workaround upon which all can agree. It’s the harmony of interests approach which, however much the end in view is the one we seek – and is the Holy Grail of politics that humans have sought through history – does not exist in prevailing class society. So long as we practise a politics that presumes such harmony, we will be complicit in preserving division and reinforcing the ideological view that the interests of the ruling class are the general interest of society.
That said, Marx’s singular focus on economics serves to debilitate his view of community and harmony. As Nisbet concludes:
“Where Marx was grievously in error was in singling out the ill-defined category of class—the institution in capitalist society with the least possible claim to being regarded as a significant structure of personal allegiance and functions—and in investing conflict with an ideological essence that must make it culminate in a new Golden Age of tranquillity. He was wrong in overlooking the far more momentous conflicts in social history between such institutions as kinship, religion, gild, and State.” (Nisbet 1990 ch 4).
He was wrong, grievously wrong, in denigrating Hegel’s supposed ‘medievalism.’ Marx was right to eschew past solutions to present problems. Marx’s merit is to reject nostalgia. But so too did Hegel. In that denigration, Marx revealed that he was insufficiently alive to the requirements of a viable social order, in terms of establishing the conditions of solidarity and mutual aid.
So that’s one reason I read Jacques Maritain.
There's a comment from Maritain in a letter to Claudel which is striking a chord with me at the moment:
“How painful it is to think about the current state of the world and about the great challenges that face the Church, and to see that the massive work of spiritual regeneration that you speak of so eloquently has scarcely begun. I deeply regret my own inadequacy in this struggle. My head is full of Bloy’s great comment: ‘As an obedient Catholic I am in impatient communion with all the rebels of the earth’”.
I do believe that the social transformation the world requires needs to be set within a deeper spiritual regeneration; I'm not too obedient when it comes to orthodoxy (a Quaker among the Catholics, I do love the sound, vision, and ceremony, the integral sensual and cerebral experience, but tend to go with the inner light, like my man Winstanley from Wigan); I've always been in communion with the rebels of the Earth, or have sought communion; I love the word communion, the unity, the reunion, the overcoming of isolation and desolation too often wrought by society; I like continuity, too, and those who keep the traditions; I like an enabling tradition, custom, habit; my patience with the rebels is often stretched to breaking point, and I'm keeping my head down until the current requirement to take or reject sides dies down. Friends want me to declare one way or another, join the shouting over against each other; I believe Alasdair MacIntyre shows the roots of this endless yes/no; I seek to overcome those roots by restoring the social and moral conditions of doing politics well; I seek to restore a common language; I seek consensual devotion to common ends; I daresay my failure to join in and shout for the team will identify me as being against them. I reject this logic, it's the same as the 1930s when those who were not for Stalin were denigrated as 'objective fascists.' Hate that twisted reasoning. That's the road by which a fetishistic adherence to symbols comes to distort and pervert principles in a contrary practice. I remain committed to the constitution of an authentic public realm. I support a politics that uses means that are consistent with that end.
The comments in this article ring true. A few years ago I submitted a Thomist critique of Kant to the Harvard Divinity School. I was asked to submit something, so I took the opportunity to write on Aquinas. I thought that that would be the kind of thing a Divinity school would have been interested in. Instead I found that they wanted some variant of the fashionable nonsense that I had seen rot the political and philosophical traditions I valued most.
I wrote on St Thomas Aquinas anyway. He's a brilliant and endlessly surprising thinker. And I think what I wrote was pretty damned good. (That said, I need to re-write bits. In constantly arguing about grounding in ontological nature I turn Aquinas into something he wasn't - an ethical naturalist. That reading is consistent with the quasi-scientific ethical naturalism of contemporary neo-Aristotelianism, which in my view is not true to Aristotle and the cosmic dimensions of his thought at all. God requires no such proof of grounding, least of all by reason. That error was a remnant of my old philosophical commitments, which were very good as far as they went. You have to go further, though. Blaise Pascal understood this: “The last function of reason is to recognize that there are an infinity of things which surpass it.” (Pascal).
I wonder if I should write on Maritain? Or Pascal? I hatch writing plots whenever I take a little breather. (I'm waiting for my deliveries listening to Bruce Springsteen sing "Moonlight Motel." I'm pondering the world out there in the dark, new world in the morning).
Maritain is good, though. He is a big, if almost totally concealed, influence on my political philosophical position (concealed because he is a liberal critic of Rousseau, Kant, and Marx, whom I rate highly - I have an eclectic melange of influences). Maritain was a Thomist, and I am sure he has influenced Alasdair MacIntyre profoundly:
"In political and social thought, no Christian has ever written a more profound defense of the democratic idea and its component parts, such as the dignity of the person; the sharp distinction between society and the state; the role of practical wisdom; the common good; the transcendent anchoring of human rights; transcendent judgment upon societies; and the interplay of goodness and evil in human individuals and institutions. Indeed, in the thrust that this body of thought gave to Christian Democratic parties after World War II, Maritain gained the right to be thought of as one of the architects of Christian Democracy both in Europe and Latin America.
Nonetheless, it is perhaps in his profound grasp of the metaphysics of the philosophia perennis that one must seek the roots of Maritains achievement."
So when I write on class … I write in protest at class division, seeking the classless society. I see class as an attempt to ground unity and community in the most ephemeral, transitory and sectional of ties. I seek to free individuals from the class designation, to look to personality and community beyond such divisions the way that Maritain did.