Please don't speak ill of the dead

It is true, as Michael Moreland mentions, that Martha Nussbaum has taken to complimenting Jacques Maritain as the first "political liberal," by which she means that he was Rawlsian before Rawls himself invented "a theory of justice."  My own attempt to come to the late Maritain's defense is here.  Nussbaum's spirited reply to my attempt to situate Maritain at an appropriate distance from the principle of the priority of the right over the good can be found at 54 Villanova Law Review 696-99 (2009).  I confess that I do think there is *something* to Nussbaum's claim (which probably goes to some aspects of Maritain's political philosophy that don't in the end stand up to proper scrutiny), but I consider it demonstrable that Maritain intended to deny and did deny the legitimacy of the basic political strategy that Rawls (and others) would later pursue.  The author of the following passage is not Rawlsian at heart:  "I distrust any easy and comfortable friendship between believers of all denominations.  I mean a friendship that is not accompanied, as it were, by a kind of compunction or soul's sorrow; just as I distrust any universalism which claims to unite in one and the same service of God, and in one and the same transcendental piety -- as in some World's Fair Temple -- all forms of belief and all forms of worship."  (Maritain, On the Use of Philosophy, 38).  To be sure, the later Maritain did deny that the civil ruling authority could properly privilege the place of the Catholic Church in the state (pace Ottaviani!), but he certainly never limited the aims of law to what would pass the test of the two basic principles of justice. In relevant respects, Maritain's account of the natural law as the source and limit of the positive law is quite traditional, which assures that he is no political liberal.