The philosopher & the provocateur:

...His gestures and language were muscular and he used the vernacular of a tough street fighter...

...In 1971 he sent Maritain a copy of Rules for Radicals with the following inscription: "To my spiritual father and the man I love, from his prodigal and wayward son, Saul Alinsky...

...and, in my opinion, the quite new ways you are opening, in your final pages, about middle-class people and the possibilities they offer, have crucial importance...

...Maritain appreciated the efficacy of Alinsky's aggressive, imaginative, and humorous irreverence...

...Yet it makes me jumpy...

...I know just as well that I shall continue to feel and act as I have...

...Now, let me point out a few philosophical views with which your book had not to be explicitly concerned, and give rein to my own inveterate habits as an old grumbler...

...fan the latent hostilities to the point of overt expression," to set cities and neighborhoods on edge, to incite municipal jitters...

...I think you detest Hegel as much as I do...

...I informed the University [of Chicago] Press in no uncertain terms," he wrote to Maritain, "that I began to write this book at your personal request...

...we must first choose to exist with them and to suffer with them, to make their pain and destiny our own" ("To Exist with the People," Sept, June 12, 1937...

...this Alinsky felt could be done best by holding them up to public ridicule...

...that arrangements were made to have it translated into a number of foreign languages...

...I become violently angry when I see misery and am filled with a bitter vindictiveness towards those responsible...

...The two quickly recognized their profound intellectual affinities...

...In training his organizers Alinsky met this problem of means and ends head-on...

...First and foremost was their common personalist belief in the fundamental worth and dignity of every human being, in particular of the common people...

...But why Saul Alinksy...

...Some of the fruit ranchers in California steam around in Cadillacs and treat the Mexican-American field hands like vermin...

...A Christian revolutionary exists in history, and, though he or she may resolve to use only good means to achieve an end, he or she knows that good means must inevitably be dragged into a context where evil means predominate...

...The real question is and always has been: Does this particular end justify these particular means...

...For Alinsky, the first step to organize a community was to disorganize it, to disrupt the actual organization of power...

...From the first days of their friendship, Maritain urged Alinsky to publish an explanation of his methods of community organization, a kind of handbook for authentic revolution...

...According to P. David Finks, as the war wore down and Maritain prepared to return to France, he presssed Alinsky ever more assiduously to finish the book, for he hoped to interest Charles de Gaulle in Alinsky's methods of organizing democratically run urban organizations as a means of offsetting Communist influence...

...Each man recognized in the other a truly kindred soul...

...One commentator called him "part stuntman" whose "method depends to a great degree on the element of surprise, calculated to outrage...

...Maritain found in these the near perfect embodiment of those subsidiary, mediating structures he had called for in Integral Humanism to enable the people to work out their own destiny and help the government do what it is supposed to do...

...Maritain considered the recognition by society as a whole of the dignity of the human person in the worker and of a consciousness in the worker himself "of a personality in a state of becoming" as "the condition necessary for the future flowering of a personalist democracy...

...He lived a life of retirement and quiet contemplation, and preferred peaceful reflective conversations with a few chosen friends to the pressing, admiring crowds that filled the halls for this lectures...

...He then explains the traditional Catholic ethical distinction between the material and moral consideration of a human act...

...Alinsky shared with Maritain his ideas about the right of free association, where citizens undertake action and organize institutions to determine their own destiny through grassroots community organizations...

...if middle-class people can be organized and develop a sense of and a will for the common good-and if Saul is there to inspire them!-they are able to change the whole social scene, for the sake of freedom...

...In 1966, thirty years after Integral Humanism, Maritain published The Peasant of the Garonne...

...He loved to tweak the noses and pluck the beards of the establishment...

...Though he had the same hopes, Alinsky was more realistic...

...He disliked noisy crowds, argumentative confrontations, and violent disputation...

...And I am aware that your praise of self-contradiction has nothing to do with Hegel...

...He was a fervent convert to Catholicsm...

...THE PHILOSOPHER & THE PROVOCATEUR JACQUES MARITAIN & SAUL ALINSKY BERNARD DOERING Fifty-four years ago Jacques Maritain published Integral Humanism, his most widely read and probably most influential book...

...However great the error and evil within the people may be," he wrote, "the people remain the great granary of vital spontaneity and non-pharisaic living force...

...In a democracy which has come of age, in a society of free men, expert in the virtues of freedom and just in its fundamental structures, the work of such prophets would be integrated into the normal and regular life of the body politic and issue from the people themselves, or, as he wrote, from the free common activity of the people in their most elementary, most humble local communities...

...Alinsky recognized this as particularly the case with members of the labor unions during the 1960s and the 1970s, and he saw the necessity of including in the ranks of "the people," not only the "have-nots," but the "have-little-want-mores" as well...

...In spite of the radical differences in their personalities and educational backgrounds, Maritain, when introduced to Alinsky by George N. Shuster during Maritain's wartime exile in the U.S., was immediately attracted to this truculent genius of social reform...

...Another principle of authentic revolution that Maritain recognized in Alinsky was his firm belief in the priority of the common good...

...By choosing their leaders, at this most elementary level, through a natural and experiential process, as fellow men personally known to them and deserving of their trust in the minor affairs of the community, the people would grow more and more conscious of political realities and more ready to choose their leaders, at the level of the common good of the body politic, with true political awareness, as genuine deputies for them...

...As the years passed and as various groups of the underprivileged achieved the vindication of their rights, particularly economic rights, and moved comfortably into the lower middle class, they felt less and less their obligation to participate in the reform of the temporal order...

...Saul Alinsky, on the other hand, was an agnostic Jew for whom religion of any kind held very little importance and had little relation to the focus of his life's work: the struggle for economic and social justice...

...There are some people I not only do not love but hate with a cold fury that would stop at nothing...

...I do believe in the democratic faith,' says Alinsky...

...Since the end of politics is limited to the terrestrial common good, then such realities as power, force, coercion, distrust and suspicion, the acceptance of the lesser evil, etc., have an ethical foundation...

...Know who those bastards are...

...Before 'doing good' to them, and working for their benefit, before practicing the politics of one group or another...

...Both accepted democracy as the best form of government and spent long hours exploring the democratic dream of people working out their own destiny...

...You always have to pick the least bad...

...I do not think that people are specially just or charitable or noble because they're unemployed and live in crummy housing and see their kids without any kind of future and feel the weight of every indignity that society can throw at them, sophisticatedly or nakedly...

...Maritain insisted on the basic moral principle that the order of means must correspond to the order of ends...

...In part two of the second chapter, when speaking of the role of lay Catholics in political activity, Maritain wrote that among all his contemporaries who were still alive at the time he was writing, he recognized only two revolutionaries worthy of the name in the Western world...

...1 regard the book as history-making...

...In the same letter quoted above, Maritain gently chided Alinsky for expressions that seemed to be at variance with his practice and could give rise to misunderstandings...

...Democracy cannot do without it," Maritain wrote...

...Alinsky's principal tactic was to stir up nonviolent conflict, "to rub raw the resentment of the people of the community...

...Maritain's revolution called for a gradual but radical "transformation of the temporal order," not imposed from above, but carried out from within, from the bottom up...

...how the same act of killing can be either good or bad depending on motives and circumstances (for example, killing for revenge or killing in self-defense...

...But on the level of pure action a kind of boldness in practical self-contradiction is probably, as you suggest it, the sign of a healthy and fecund mind...

...In an article written shortly after the publication of Integral Humanism, Maritain declared that what was needed to win the working classes was not "love of benevolence" but a "love of unity,"a love born of connaturality, a love of communion and compassion in the real sense of those two words...

...He certainly considered Saul Alinksy such a prophet...

...When in 1971 Alinsky sent Maritain a copy of his Rules for Radicals, Maritain replied: A great book, admirably free, absolutely fearless, radically revolutionary...

...Alinsky recognized Maritain's uneasiness...

...but the Christian revolutionary must envisage the context so that it may have the possibility of being evil in the least possible degree...

...They were "Eduardo Frei in Chile and Saul Alinsky in America...

...I do not in any way glorify the poor...

...They 're the characters who rode West in Steinbeck's trucks, in The Grapes of Wrath...

...In Integral Humanism and in The Person and the Common Good, Maritian insisted that, though the appropriation of goods must be private, yet, "by reason of the primal destination of material goods to the human species, and of the need that each person has of these means in order to direct himself toward his final end, the use of goods individually appropriated must itself serve the common good of all...

...Too often I've seen the have-nots turn into haves and become just as crummy as the haves they used to envy...

...In Man and the State he distinguished between individual ethics and political ethics...

...Seeking one's own intellectual liberation in an infinite proliferation of antinomies is madness on the level of philosophical thought...

...The people need prophets...

...The real question has never been: Does the end justify the means...

...It was a call to radical revolution, a rousing "Christian Manifesto" that earned Maritain the title of "le chretien rouge," the Red Christian, from his Catholic critics...

...He called this existential element the prophetic factor...

...An authentic revolutionary, he said, cannot refuse to apply his or her hands to this real, concrete universe of human things and relations where sin exists and circulates...

...In the same interview for Harpers he said: I do not do what a lot of liberals and a lot of civil-rights crusaders do...

...Maritain considered the refusal to soil oneself by entering into the context of history as a mark of pharisaical purism...

...In spite of the shortcomings of the common people, Maritain considered them the best hope for the transformation of the temporal order, and for the future of democracy...

...It is not difficult to see why Maritain would choose Frei...

...Pick the target," he said, "freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it...

...Another basic element of democratic societies is that dynamic leaven or energy which fosters political movement, and which cannot be inscribed in any constitution or embodied in any institution, since it is both personal and contingent in nature, and rooted in free initiative...

...I hate people who act unjustly and cause many to suffer...

...The soul of his tactic was a healthy, vocal, and aggressive irreverence...

...In a section of Man and the State entitled "Prophetic Shock-Minorities," Maritain writes that it is not enough to define a democratic society by its legal structure...

...It is precisely at this point in Man and the State that Maritain quotes Alinsky...

...Finally, what seems to have led Maritain to characterize Saul Alinsky as an "authentic revolutionary" was Alinsky's system of community organizations and neighborhood councils...

...Alinsky defined the true radical as "that person for whom the common good is the greatest personal good...

...Alinsky professed an instinctive siding with the underdog...

...That is not good and I know it...

...ry special work of Saul Alinsky...

...Alinsky insisted on putting the French edition exclusively into Maritain's hands...

...One would be hard put to find a more exact description of the very special work of Saul Alinsky...

...Maritain was exceptional in that he seemed to identify himself completely with a class to which he did not belong...

...an irrepressible and much feared organizer of 'neighborhood communities' and an antiracist leader whose methods are as efficacious as they are unorthodox...

...he had grown up in a slum...

...In The Peasant of the Garonne he identified Alinsky as "one of my very close friends...

...What were the principles of revolution that Alinsky had already developed and applied before he met Maritain and which led Maritain to hail Alinsky as the embod-iment-even though he was not a Christian-of what Maritain called the "Christian heroism" typical of a lay saint or an "authentic revolutionary...

...Maritain remarks that there are two truths involved here: one a philosophical truth and the other a truth of human experience...

...In "Saul Alinsky and His Critics" (Christianity and Crisis, July 20,1964) Stephen Rose wrote: "Saul Alinsky believes that the hope of democracy, and of the city, lies in the rejection of the 'subnormal child' image of the poor and disinherited...

...They only get these things in the act of taking them through their own efforts...

...Though Maritain seems never to have been dissatisfied with what Alinksy did, on occasion he expressed his fear that what Alinsky said about means and ends might be subject to misinterpretation...

...It provided a basis for all his thought: philosophical, political, aesthetic, and social...

...Those in power must be made to feel uneasy, even ridiculous in the exercise of their power...

...He felt a deep and abiding anger against the exploiters of little people...

...Maritain-known to many as "gentle Jacques"-was the soul of discretion, politeness, and deference...

...Of that you have convinced me...

...At first glance, a friendship between Jacques Maritain and Saul Alinksy seems completely anomalous...

...In the Harpers interview Alinsky said that one of the many great lessons John L. Lewis had taught him was that "A man's right to a job transcends the right of private property...

...Maritain recognized that the most agonizing problem of an authentic revolutionary is the problem of means...

...Such revolutionaries must cooperate in the common task even when impure means are mingled in it by accident, which, he noted, "always happens...

...n Integral Humanism, Maritain wrote of the common people as the bearer of fresh moral reserves which assign them a mission in regard to the transformation of the temporal order...

...Maritain explained painstakingly his ideas about the distinction between the individual and the person, about the primacy of the common good and of the individual conscience in a religiously and politically pluralist democracy, about the source of authority residing in the people who accord that authority to the government which acts in their name, about the principle of subsidiarity...

...He instructed them to be comfortable and rational in dealing with irrational circumstances, and always told them: "You never have the best course of action...

...He loved crowds, the more unruly the better...

...Reveille for Radicals was reviewed so enthusiastically in the U.S...

...If not, I have nothing left to believe in.'" In an interview in Harpers Magazine (June and July, 1965), Alinsky pointed out that, "The most important lesson is that people don't get opportunity or freedom or equality or dignity as a gift or an act of charity...

...The worst anguish for the Christian," he wrote in Integral Humanism, "is precisely to know that there can be justice in employing horrible means...

...He once wrote to Maritain: I can never be anywhere near the person you are because you really love all people and understand with a great wisdom...

...It would be carried out by revolutionaries among whom "it would be vain to look for unanimous accord," but who would be in agreement on certain universal principles which are "capable of descending to concrete realizations" and on a "general plan which is truly precise and practical...

...Frei, president of Chile from 1964 to 1970, was an internationally respected representative of the Christian Democratic Movement which, after World War II, had taken much of its inspiration and theory of government from Maritain's own political writings...