Misappropriating Maritain

...His extended considerations of economic problems are contained principally in five books: Religion and Culture (1930), Freedom in the Modern World (1933), Integral Humanism (1936), Raisons et Raisons (1939) and Reflections on America (1958), and in a manifesto called Pour le Bien Commun (1934...

...So I present my excuses [he writes] for these poorly organized notes...

...Such a regime would be animated by a spirit of fraternal cooperation rather than by divisive competition...

...MARITAIN was by profession and by inclination a speculative philosopher, a metaphysician...

...It is an axiom of the capitalist economy and mercantile civilization that one gets nothing for nothing, an axiom linked to the individualist conception of property...

...However naively Utopian some aspects of his "Society Without Money" may seem...

...In the "Society Without Money'' which Maritain envisaged in 1973, tokens would replace money...

...He is very well aware of his incompetence in economic matters...

...The co-ownership of the means of work" entails the possession not "of a thing in space but of a form of activity in time.'' Co-ownership "should serve to give a title and social guarantee to the bringing into action of that which is fundamentally and inalienably the property of the worker his personal forces, his intelligence, and his arms...

...It is clear that if, as I think, their functioning secretes poverty in and of itself, it is not by virtue of what there is in them that conforms to the nature of things, but by virtue of an organic disorder which vitiates them . . . And what is the organic disorder that vitiates these modern societies...

...it has always been human work, and it alone, which has been productive and fruitful...

...But Maritain never intended to lay out the practical workings of a "Society Without Money...

...The capitalist system, as it was organized at the time, he said, could not continue without the menace of pauperism for those who do not find a place in the directive echelons of the corporations...

...The first of these he proposes, no doubt, to dispel what some may consider an atmosphere of naive utopianism...

...In this early postscript, Maritain's explanation turns on a contrast between a theoretically faultless system, on the one hand, in which an owner's investment and profit always remained subordinate to the needs of a productive enterprise—supplying necessary equipment, raw materials, etc.—and the actual reality, on the other hand, of capitalism:' 'In the concrete, this same faultless scheme works in an absolute different fashion...

...Nor did I say, what would have been a typically Marxist assertion, that every society that accepts the principle of the private ownership of the means of production, and the legitimacy of profit on capital invested in an enterprise, necessarily . . . produces poverty in and of itself...

...solution of the tragic political, social, and economic problems that plagued the world of his adult life...

...But such a society would be the work of generations, of more than a century: "This new social and economic regime is still in a state of full becoming...

...In order to receive the basic level of income, each qualifying, individual would be required to work half time in the profession of his choice...

...Maritain gives the name "basic requirements" to the half-time manual or intellectual work, controlled by the unions and required of everyone in order to assure the basic needs of each individual and family...

...He again makes the distinction between the ideal world in which a capitalist economy need not be considered objectionable or sinful in itself, and the world of concrete reality where capitalism is a' 'vicious economy'' animated by the' 'hatred of poverty and the contempt of the poor...

...Secondly, the text shows the fundamental continuity in Maritain's thought on economic rights...

...Money is not fecund...

...This money would serve to import those products which would have to be paid for in money to the countries from which they came...

...Maritain felt that even washing millions of tokens down the drain would be preferable to running the risk of introducing into the administrative structure of the country a germ, however tiny it may be, of state totalitarianism...

...For Maritain that' 'final goal" was' 'A Society Without Money...

...He saw the social legislation, enacted through America's participatory personalist democracy, and the "humanization" of the economic system, wrested from the reluctant American capitalists by the American labor unions, as signs of the possibility of the eventual founding of an economic society that was neither capitalist nor socialist...

...It should be clear that in Maritain's ideas on economic equality and economic rights there is an unbroken continuity...

...At the same time that money would disappear in this new society, so would all taxes paid to the state...

...So that the sum in question, fixed in advance at a certain rate, can be nothing other than a deduction imposed on what is due to some other man for his work...

...This book was a kind of love-letter to the country he had come to love very deeply...

...In the remainder of his text Maritain proposes two more fundamental principles...

...There followed a lengthy exchange of letters to the editors which seemed to get nowhere...

...And the state would take no other precaution than to prevent fraud...

...It was completed on the eve of his death "at the cost of a vast and fearful effort, not only of his imagination," as he says, but also of his poor, fragile body...

...This was composed by Maritain with the collaboration of four friends and signed by fifty-two French Catholic intellectuals as a response to the February 6 street riots which showed how vulnerable France was to a fascist takeover...

...What Maritain saw in the United States at the time he wrote Reflections on America in 1958 was not the embodiment of a just, equal, and effective economic organization of society...

...22 February 1985:107 In order that the state be able to carry on necessary trade with other countries still under the regime of money, there would be a special national fund into which would go the money accumulated from the sale of absolutely all products destined for exportation...

...It cannot be interest on capital...

...He would have preferred to devote himself to a life of contemplation, which he, like Aristotle, considered the noblest of human activities...

...Citing St...

...He insisted that "the mere idea of any bond of fellowship between Christianity and such a [capitalist] society is itself the height of paradox...

...He recognized the difficulty of defining such a society, not only because its organization and practical working would be so very different from the present one, but also, and principally, because it would be bound, "as in every reform of human institutions, to a change of minds and hearts, it would imply a change in the very spirit which animates the economy and stamps it with its mark...

...the essential principles" of the existing capitalist regime...

...Finally Maritain decided to put an end to the controversy with an article later published in Raison et Raison, though not included in the English translation...

...Communism, capitalism, neither system is good...

...The immediate consequence of this reversal in values is "to give the rights of 22 February 1985: 105 dividends precedence over those of salary...

...The fact that many contemporaries, he said, are able in good faith to believe that religion and the church are in any way pledged to defend the' 'eminent dignity of capitalism'' was for Maritain a sign that good faith is not synonomous with intelligence and that the opinions of men move among shadows where things appear inverted...

...Though the realization of anything approaching Maritain's ideal of a society consonant with economic equality and the economic rights of all is a very long way off, what "might arouse the hopes of people all over the world," he says, "is an idea of the final goal toward which such a process tends...

...as well as intellectual life (free primary and secondary education, physical education included...

...however Marxist his insistence that human labor is the sole source of value...

...however tenuous, or even frivolous, his distinction between "tokens" and money...

...In the first of these works, Religion and Culture, after speaking of the superiority of the contemplative life over the active life, he insists that this hierarchy of values is completely reversed in the capitalist conception where the supremacy of the economic is based on the false and falsifying principle of the fecundity of money, "a fecundity which, like everything that transgresses the conditions laid down by nature, knows no limits" and shows "to what an extent the materialist or capitalist or Marxian conception of culture is at variance with the mind of the Common Doctor of the church...

...He gives the name "life-enhancement activities" (expansions de surcroit) to whatever activities people would undertake during the other half of the day, without any control being exercised over them by the unions...

...and to resign oneself to accept the lesser of two evils is unworthy of the human spirit...

...In this article Maritain declared: I said that modern societies secrete poverty as a normal product of their functioning...

...I did not say, what would have been a simply absurd assertion, that they have as their end to produce poverty...

...And in this spirit, which he found exemplified in one form, though in a far from perfect way, in the American labor movement, he saw the hope, not the realization, of that "radical reform" he considered necessary in society...

...After declaring that "the successive condemnations of usury by the church stand at the threshold of modern times like a burning question mark as to the lawfulness of its economy," Maritain returns to a consideration of the capitalist economy...

...He was not without a troubled conscience, he says, when he tried to present a few Commonweal: 108 practical answers to the "enormous multitude of questions [that] arise, mingle together, and jostle one another day and night in one's head...

...however much they may appear to be nothing more than the pipe dreams of an old fool, as Maritain himself put it...

...But from the point of view of social life, it is surely much worse, because of the state totalitarianism it implies and the losses of freedom it results in for the human person...

...It is particularly important that the nature of this continuity be recognized today when, by skillful selectivity in the use of quotations, especially from his Reflections on America, a procrustean effort is being made by some to pass Maritain off as the theological and philosophical champion of American "democratic capitalism...

...To prevent certain individuals from escaping their share of work while still enjoying the common basic level of income, autonomous groups to which the individuals would belong, like trade or professional unions, would determine a certain degree of diminution (humane, but serious) of the gratuities received (for example, by subtracting from the monthly quantity of tokens a certain portion of the allocations for convenience, for luxuries, or for the annual month-long vacation...

...The whole economy is regulated by the "laws and fluidity" of what should be only a "sign," namely money, "predominating over the thing, commodities useful to humanity...

...The fundamental principle he proposes so far in the text is that it is the function of society to provide each of its members with a basic level of income consonant with the economic rights and the human dignity of each individual in exchange for a reasonable amount of work, and that the source of value is the work of the person, not the capital he or she possesses...

...That is what I call the fecundity of money...

...To find this idea in Reflections on America, one would have to come to the book with very strong prejudices and wearing intellectual blinders...

...This is the particular and distinguishing characteristic of the capitalist system...

...That this promise in America, or anywhere else in the world, seemed further from realization in 1973 than it had in 1958 was very likely the reason that Maritain tried to put on paper just before he died a clearer expression of his conception of a " third way'' beyond both capitalism and socialism...

...Transportation for trips within the country would be free and at the expense of the state, just like buses and subways...

...IN WHAT IS probably his most famous book Integral Humanism (1936), Maritain turned to more practical considerations of what would replace capitalism...

...Profits cease to be the normal fruit of the undertaking fed with money, and become the normal fruit of the money fed by the undertaking...

...Capitalism has forgotten the law of common use...

...The real issue with Maritain is profit-making and who has a right to what profits...

...Maritain concludes with an apology...

...In 1956 he was invited to give the series of lectures that were later published as Reflections on America...

...The text was entitled "A Society Without Money, the Only Truly Radical Revolution...

...I spoke of modern societies, such as they exist in their concrete reality...

...In an industrial civilization based on the perfection of machinery, the rationalization of labor, and the mobilization of finance, collectivization is inevitable, whether on the part of the state or of industry itself...

...Whether in the stone age, or in the age of technocracy...

...The work of the Christian involves a "radical reform that will change...

...Provision of primordial necessities for each person ' 'is after all only the first condition of an economy which does not merit the name 'barbarous.' " In one of his magazine articles, Francois Mauriac quoted Commonweal: 106 Maritain's Integral Humanism: "As long as modern society secretes poverty as the product of its normal functioning, there can be no rest for the Christian...

...Maritain then returns to his oft repeated affirmation of the need to find a third way: From the point of view of the economic system, the Communist solution seems better than the capitalist solution...

...This should be criticized, he says, not in virtue of the Marxist theory of surplus value or the rejection in principle of the institution of private property, but rather because it is wedded to the unnatural principle of the fecundity of money...

...And yet I believe that the ideas proposed here, if taken into consideration by well-trained economists with sufficiently open minds, and elaborated by them with more precision, would no longer appear, as they well may at first glance, to be nothing more than the pipe dreams of an old fool...

...Under the rule of the law of common use, Maritain feels that' 'for what concerns the primary needs — material and spiritual — of the human being, it is fitting that one get for nothing as many things as possible...

...Trips abroad on the part of the citizens would be financed from this fund according to the nature of the trip...

...Thomas Aquinas, Maritain points out that "the use of goods individually appropriated must itself serve the common good of all...

...The fundamental mechanism retains the same configuration," but the values informing it have been reversed...

...Here Maritain speaks of the individual's obligation to make every effort to reform and to improve — and this for all the peoples of the world — the conditions of existence that are still so miserable, and the social structures that are still so unjust and cruel, all of which form that milieu v/here human life must run its course in this world...

...They are the very first steps in a process which will require at least a century for its full development...

...A CRITIC OF CAPITALISM TO THE DAY HE DIED Misappropriating Maritain BERNARD DOERING IN 1982 in a volume honoring the centenary of the birth of Jacques Maritain, there appeared, amidst memories and eulogies from all across the globe, a short text by Maritain himself that had never before been published...

...It consists in this that due to the absence of any superior ethical norm, and by virtue of the principles of economic liberalism — producing of themselves by a kind of reaction the state socialism and the economic dictatorships of our times — modern societies are animated by a spirit which makes the principal end of material riches the ceaseless movement to engender more material riches...

...This law of common use implies for Maritain an "associative" ownership of the means of production and the co-ownership of the enterprise...

...The productive undertaking, with all its human activities, is no longer "the living organism" nourished by money, but money, instead, becomes the living organism of which the actual production is only nourishment and instrument...

...What he wanted to do was enunciate certain fundamental principles for such a just and humane organization of society...

...His last statement is a natural and logical development of his original insight...

...But this milieu, he insists, is something exterior to the human person, who, even in the best of all possible worlds, would still exist in all grandeur and misery — who would not, at base, be changed one iota...

...Maritain saw America as a land of promise, of possibility, through the spirit of the people, that American penchant for grass-roots participation in the life of the city, that sense of personal involvement, "establishing itself from below upwards with the suffrage and active participation of all the interested ones at the base," as was quoted above from Integral Humanism...

...After devoting several pages to the history of usury and reviewing the teaching of the church, observed or watered-down, Maritain emphasizes that the only source of legitimate profit is human labor...

...however radically revolutionary his conception of just profits, one thing is certain: the whole thrust of his proposal is toward a just and equitable redistribution of wealth, which in his eyes can be achieved neither by Communism nor by totalitarian or democratic capitalism...

...they do have as their final end alone (and this is ambitious enough) to change totally those social structures in the midst of which more or less civilized man has lived up to the present...

...But he felt bound in conscience to turn his thought toward the BERNARD DOERING is a professor of French literature at the University of Notre Dame, and the author of Jacques Maritain and the French Catholic Intellectuals (University of Notre Dame Press, 1983...

...It was a subject which ' 'haunted'' him, as he says, all of his life from the time he first broached it in 1930, and which pursued him till his dying day...

...All citizens would be supplied enough tokens to permit all to enjoy an affluence assuring them an existence consonant with their dignity — the material life of a family (lodging, dress, food, medical care, etc...

...The world and its history move forward at one and the same time in both good and evil...

...It was the very last text he wrote, an original draft which Maritain had no time to show to anyone or to revise in any way...

...Since the state can produce in indefinite quantities all the tokens it wants, it is the state which will furnish, as an outright gift and on request, the tokens needed for these "life-enhancement activities.'' The quantity of tokens to be received — and very generously, says Maritain — by those citizens whose occupations during the time of the life-enhancement activities would not be such as to turn a profit, would be fixed by those societies and academies to which they belong...

...This quotation caught the eye of the great poet Paul Claudel and sent him into a towering rage.' 'This is specious," shouted the great poet in Le Figaro, suggesting sarcastically that the great philosopher seemed never to have heard of the Scholastic distinction between per se and per accidens...

...Three years later in his Freedom in the Modern World, Maritain turned his attention again to the economic problems of contemporary society...

...He recognized in America the incipient stages of a society based on that grass-roots participation of workers in the ownership and management of economic institutions promoted by the papal social encyclicals...

...This text is an historically important document for two reasons...

...No longer would the "fedundity of money" play a formative role in society but rather "the dignity of work and the submission of material goods to the true needs of man.'' This would require a general austerity and "the rejection of the ideal of production at any cost...

...In order for a collective form of ownership to be efficacious, he says, it is necessary that it be a personalized possession...

...My dreams of a radical revolution in no way have as their final end to 'change man...

...The same themes were found in the 1934 manifesto, Pour Le Bien Commun...

...At the end of this book Maritain adds a summary explanation of what he means by "fecundity of money," with the promise of someday writing a more complete explanation, a promise he was unable to keep until a few days before his death when he wrote "A Society Without Money...

...The price in tokens of absolutely every purchasable commodity would be fixed periodically by an agreement among unions, based on two factors: the ready availability or scarcity of the thing in question, and the number of hours needed to procure or produce it...

...Maritain then recalls and develops another principle he had enunciated so often in his previous writings: the immorality of interest...

...In short, the economic rights of people are subordinated to the rights of money...

...In the manifesto Maritain claimed that the new civilization, which would replace that of bankrupt economic liberation, would have to be one which would assure the necessities of a good life to all the members of the community...

...MARITAIN moved permanently to the United States in 1939 and, except for his regular summer visits to his homeland after the war and the years he spent in Rome as Ambassador of France to the Vatican, he remained here till 1960...

...In Maritain's view this communal organization must operate "from below upwards, according to the principles of personalist democracy, with the suffrage and active personal participation of all the interested ones at the base...

...Distribution should be exercised "not by the state, but the different organic communities, beginning with the family community, that integrate the economic structure of society...

...And this may very well be so...

...The fact that the volume of exports would have to be greater than the volume of imports would stimulate the productivity of the money-less country and would increase its cash reserves...

...First of all because it indicates the importance of the subject for Maritain himself...

...And the efforts of certain latter-day Procrusteses to lop off Maritain's thought by limiting themselves to quotes from only one of his books or to stretch those quotes out of context and out of shape to make him fit into the iron bed of American democratic capitalism can be explained only by naivete or deliberate misinterpretation...

...IT WAS THE promise of America that he admired...

...To professional economists, Maritain's "Society without Money" may sound like fantasy...

...He knew his end was near and he must have felt a particular urgency to put down in more specific detail his idea of that "third way," "beyond both capitalism and socialism," of which he had spoken so often, but only in general terms, throughout his life...

...In a society completely separated from the sovereignty of money, and finally adapted to the human dignity of all, man would keep that dignity he received from his Creator, [but] he would likewise retain all those weaknesses and miseries, often so atrocious, and those vices and that festering of moral evil to which his nature is exposed, compounded as it is of flesh and spirit...

...To think, once its fruit has been borne, that an additional sum, the fruit of the fecundity of money furnished by the investor, is due to the latter by right of interest paid on capital, is a fundamental illusion...

...Only one solution appears just and good, and that is a society without money...

...In the new personalist and communal regime, the status of the industrial economy would not suppress this collectivization but would reorganize it for the benefit of the human person...

...They could easily claim that substituting tokens for money does nothing more than create another form of money, and that making unlimited amounts of tokens available to anyone who wants them is as inflationary as printing more and more paper money, unless by some miracle the supply of goods and services increases proportionally...

...Recently this book has been mistaken as evidence of a profound change in Maritain's attitude toward a capitalist economy, as if the capitalism he discovered in America were the practical embodiment of his conception of a just and humane economic organization of society...