Scholasticism & Politics

By Jacques Maritain | Introduction by James V. Schall, SJ | Afterword by Waldemar Gurian Scholasticism and Politics, originally a series of lectures given at the beginning of World War II, is renowned philosopher Jacques Maritain’s description of the relation of Christian revelation to human political life. Maritain asserts that social order should be distinguished by a convivium among the citizens, resting on a degree of consensus regarding the nature and purpose of society but allowing variance in the means of embracing the former and accomplishing the latter. As Fr. James V. Schall, S.J., notes in the Introduction: “To reread these lectures some eighty years after their subsequent publication is to measure how much the world has changed since then. At the same time, the basic intellectual tools to understand man’s ultimate destiny and the place of politics in that destiny remain pretty much the same, however seldom we hear them spelled out as we do here.” Jacques Maritain (1882–1973