Jacques Maritain et le Committee of Catholics for Human Rights : entre antisémitisme, démocratie et droits de l'homme

Daniele Lorenzini (1)

1 LIS - Lettres, Idées, Savoirs

The aim of my paper is to outline Maritain's problematization of the relation between rights of the person and human rights - i.e. between Catholic and Liberal-Illuminist traditions - between the end of the thirties and the beginning of the forties. More precisely, I would like to show that Maritain, from a traditional perspective of defence of the rights that belong to the human being as a person (so only thanks to his spiritual and transcendent nature), reached a conscious historical and theoretical legitimation of human rights as they have been enunciated in Modern revolutionary times. That way, he put into question the official teaching of the Catholic Church. I will also show that this "evolution" cannot be understood unless we place it in the framework of Maritain's collaboration with a group of American Catholic intellectuals that founded the Committee of Catholics for Human Rights in 1939.

Domaines: Philosophie

Daniele Lorenzini. Jacques Maritain et le Committee of Catholics for Human Rights : entre antisémitisme, démocratie et droits de l'homme. Cahiers Jacques Maritain, 2012, 64, pp.2-20. ⟨hal-00932959⟩