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The Thomist 65 (2001): 505-27 THE HUMAN PERSON AND POLITICAL LIFE1 ROBERT SOKOLOWSKI The Catholic University ofAmerica Washington, D.C. IWISH TO DISCUSS the relationship between the human person and political life. My remarks will be a venture into political philosophy. This branch of philosophy has been shortchanged in Catholic philosophy in the past century, during the Thomistic revival following the encyclical Aetemi Patris of Pope Leo XIII in 1879. In the departmental structure and the philosophical curricula that prevailed in many Catholic colleges and universities during the first two thirds of the twentieth century, political philosophy would usually be located not in philosophy departments but in political science. In seminary programs, there was effectively no political philosophy whatsoever. The philosophy manuals of the early and middle part ofthe century covered political philosophy, if they treated it at all, as a division of ethics. In the great manual written by Joseph Gredt, O.S.B., for example, entitled Elementa philosophiae Aristotelico-Thomisticae,2 one finds extensive treatments oflogic, epistemology, philosophy ofnature, philosophical psychology, metaphysics, theodicy, and ethics, but in the nearly one thousand pages of the two volumes, there are only some 1 An earlier draft of this paper was presented at a symposium that both honored Pope John Paul II and marked the university career of Jude P. Dougherty, Dean Emeritus of the School of Philosophy, The Catholic University of America. The symposium was held on November 17-18, 2000, and was sponsored by the School of Philosophy and the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center. 2JosephGredt, O.S.B., ElementaPhilosophiaeltristotelico-'Ihomisticae, 2 vols. (Freiburg: Herder, 1953). 505 506 ROBERT SOKOLOWSKI twenty pages, at the very end of the second volume, devoted to "civil society," and this brief section terminates with a two-page treatment de bello, on war. This long philosophical work, therefore, does not end peacefully, and it clearly does not offer a solution to the political problem. It is true that some of the most important twentieth-century Catholic philosophers devoted much of their work to political philosophy: Jacques Maritain wrote such books as Man and the State, The Person and the Common Good, Things that are Not Caesar's, Integral Humanism, Freedom in the Modern World (the French title was Du regime temporel et de la liberte}, and Scholasticism and Politics (Principes d'une politique humaniste}, all of which deal with politics, andYves R. Simon wrote The Philosophy of Democratic Government among other titles in political thought, but these two authors were the exception rather than the rule. At Louvain's Higher Institute for Philosophy, for example, there was no representation of political philosophy. Jacques LeClercq wrote in social ethics and social philosophy, but not in political thought as such. What was done in political philosophy added up to a relatively small achievement in this field, compared, say, with the work that was done in metaphysics, philosophy of science, ethics, and the philosophy of man. This lack of interest is rather strange, since political life originally provided the context for philosophy, in the life ofSocrates and in the writings ofboth Plato and Aristotle. The lack of concern with political philosophy should provoke our curiosity and perhaps even our wonder. At the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, a particularly impressive group of Catholic thinkers in Paris has addressed issues in political philosophy. Pierre Manent is the most conspicuous of these, but one must also mention Remi Brague, Alain Besan~on, and Terence Marshall. Their work has been influenced by Raymond Aron and Leo Strauss. We should also call to mind the work, in the United States, of Ernest Fortin, A. A. (Boston College}, James Schall, S.J. (Georgetown}, Francis Canavan, S. J. (Fordham}, and Charles N. THE HUMAN PERSON AND POLITICAL LIFE 507 R. McCoy (Catholic University), but it is interesting to note that all these persons were or are academically "housed" not in philosophy but in departments of politics, or, in the case of Fortin, in theology. There were other thinkers who approached social and political problems, such asJohn Courtney Murray, S.J., and John A. Ryan in the United States and Denis Fahey and Edward Cahill...

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