America, Meet Maritain

Hats off to the New Republic, for providing this review of two recent books about, among other things, Jacques Maritain.  (I was particularly intrigued by the discussion of Maritain's friendship with the poet, Charles Peguy):

Jacques Maritain was an extremely complex and contradictory personality, a man with a disarming charm who always seemed to embody a somewhat subversive version of whatever cause he was espousing. A resolute partisan of the ideas of Thomas Aquinas, he refused to confine them to the past and used them to defend the most extreme experiments of modern art. When he taught in the United States, he was considered to be a "Catholic Marxist." And he was perhaps the only important French intellectual since Tocqueville who ever wrote anything positive about the United States--in Reflections on America, published in 1958--without overlooking its problems and its deficiencies. The issue that preoccupied him throughout his life, the relation of religion, culture and politics, has recently taken on a new acuity, particularly in the United States, and thus history has given a renewed relevance to the flood of writings with which he analyzed this question from every conceivable point of view.

Also, I'm read last night an essay by Russell Hittinger about Maritain's Man and the State (1951).  Hittinger writes:

Maritain argued that the political "madness" of twentieth-century Europe can be traced to the fact that modern democracies had never truly renounced the idea of "substantialism"--the "myth that the state is the people personified. . . .  For Maritain, [this] generated [this] result:  a conception of the state regarded not as a relatively higher power within a network of authorities constituting a body politic, but rather as a separate and transcendent power entitled to act on the body politic.

There's a lot more.  The essay is available in Hittinger's book, The First Grace, and is well worth reading.