The Politics of Personalism

The Politics of Personalism by Jonathan Sozek B.A., Sarah Lawrence College, 2003 M.A., McGill University, 2006 B.A., Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 2009 M.A., Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 2010 DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Religious Studies at Brown University Providence, Rhode Island May 2016 i © 2016 by Jonathan Sozek ii This dissertation by Jonathan Sozek is accepted in its present form by the Department of Religious Studies as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Date______________ _______________________________ Thomas A. Lewis, Advisor Recommended to the Graduate Council Date______________ _______________________________ Mark S. Cladis, Reader Date______________ _______________________________ Stephen S. Bush, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date______________ _______________________________ Peter M. Weber, Dean of the Graduate School iii CURRICULUM VITAE Jonathan Sozek was born in Schenectady, New York on June 5, 1981. He attended Sarah Lawrence College (B.A., Liberal Arts, 2003) and McGill University (M.A., Honours, Re- ligious Studies, 2006), after which he served for three years as Director of Religious Edu- cation and Youth Ministry at a Catholic parish in upstate New York. From 2008-10, he studied at the Institute of Philosophy at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, where he completed B.A. and M.A. degrees (2009, 2010), both summa cum laude. In the fall of 2010, he began his studies at Brown University. He has taught at Brown and Albertus Magnus College in New Haven, CT and presented at conferences in the United States, Canada, Ireland, the UK, and Belgium. He has published papers on Islamism and the con- cept of myth and is a member of the American Academy of Religion and the International Thomas Merton Society. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Our need for community becomes vividly apparent in the writing of a dissertation. Completing this study has been possible thanks to the camaraderie, support, and encouragement of many others – advisors, colleagues, friends, and family. I am most especially grateful to Thomas A. Lewis, my primary advisor, for his insight, guidance, support, and trust. Thank you. Mark Cladis and Stephen Bush have been invaluable mentors as well, and our conversations about the project have formed and in- formed it in numerous ways. The work is indeed very much a product of its place, the Department of Religious Studies at Brown, and every member of this community of con- versation and learning has contributed to its spirit and substance. The Department’s faculty have been for me models of the practical life of the mind, and I am especially grateful to those with whom I have had the opportunity to work: Susan Harvey, Nancy Khalek, Paul Nahme, Janine Sawada, Daniel Vaca, and Andre Willis. I am grateful as well to my colleagues in the Religion and Critical Thought program, especially those who have been my constant companions, and friends, for many years: Anna Bialek, Niki Clements, Nicholas Friesner, Alexis Glenn, Caroline Kory, David Lê, and Megan McBride. The department’s staff, Nicole Vadnais and Tina Creamer, in a real way make all its work possible, and have been for me an indispensable help on many occasions. Outside of the department, I wish also to acknowledge the role that Charles Larmore and Gerhard Richter have played in my intellectual development during my time at Brown. To them too I shall always be grateful. Many others have also aided in the completion of this project, almost certainly more than they know. I cannot thank them all here, though I wish I could. I am especially grateful to Dick Bidwell, for our many discussions over books and mint tea and for sharing with me his love for Hopkins; to Daniel Burnfin, Lauren Frank, and Zvonka Jelenc, dear friends from afar; to my backyard neighbors on Arnold Street, Daria Dziedzic, Stephen Olsen, and David Wilson, for our conversations over the fence and under the trees and for making life here so rich; to my roommates in the time I was writing this study, Jennie Ikuta and Josef Platzer, for their solidarity, inspiration, and tolerance; to Linda Dunleavy in Brown’s Dean of the College Office and Janet Peters in the Writing Center, for all our work together and for their friendship; to Wayne Byun, for being a companion in the love of philosophy; to Jeffrey Neilson, for our discussions of things Catholic, poetic, and personal; to Rachel Gostenhofer, for walking this academic path with me, step-by-step; to Louis Rothschild for reminding me to live, amidst all my philosophy; to Kik Williams, for all our chats in her garden and for being the best neighbor one could wish for; and to the community in Mon- roe, Michigan, who helped me in a time of need. In a special way I want to thank Svetlana Tcareva, whose support has made this study possible. My parents, John and Yvonne, have been a constant source of love, support, and encouragement. I am deeply grateful to them, now as at all times. I am also grateful to my uncle Jim, for our talks on matters biblical, and my uncle Tom, for being a friend to me in Providence. My grandmother, Mary, has made a home in Rhode Island for more than ninety years. I am grateful to her for all that she does and has done, as well as to my grandparents who are no longer living – Stanley, Ed, and Bernice – whose lives well-lived made it possible for me to be at Brown and write this study. To them, to all those here named, and to those not named but remembered, I am grateful. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction Persons and Personal Life 1 Approach, Sources, and Method 4 Chapter Synopses 8 PART ONE Chapter One: Toward an Ethos of Respect for Persons Introduction 16 Persons, Thick and Thin 18 The Principle of Respect for Persons 24 An Ethos of Critical Responsiveness 35 Conclusion 45 Chapter Two: The Personalist Idea Introduction 48 A History of Personalism 52 a. Early Forms of Personalism 53 b. Personalist Idealism 59 c. Personalist Realism 60 Thomistic Personalism 64 Personalist Communitarianism 68 d. Conclusion 73 The Personalist Idea 74 a. Active Love 76 b. A Way of Seeing 83 c. Encountering the Other 90 Conclusion 96 vi PART TWO Chapter Three: From Purity to Engagement Introduction 100 Roots of Mounier's Personalism 104 a. Early Influences: Péguy, Maritain, Berdyaev 106 b. Toward Personalism: Mounier and Marc 113 A Personalism of Purity 119 a. Individual, Person, and Community 121 b. Break with the "Established Disorder" 127 c. The Dark Night of Vichy 131 A Personalism of Engagement 134 a. “Personnalisme catholique” (1940) 137 b. Qu’est-ce que personnalisme? (1947) 144 c. Le personnalisme (1949) 150 Conclusion 153 Chapter Four: A Revolution of the Heart Introduction 155 Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day 157 Catholic Worker Personalism 165 a. Dostoevsky and Berdyaev 167 b. Appropriating Mounier’s Personalism 170 c. Personalism as “the Liberty of Christ” 179 d. A Return to the Sources 187 Conclusion 189 Chapter Five: Rethinking the Personalist Idea Introduction 193 Paul Ricoeur 194 a. Institutions and Community 200 b. Persons and Otherness 205 Charles Taylor 209 a. Relation to Mounier 211 vii b. Three Concerns 218 Values 220 Secularity 224 Love 229 Language, Love, and Justice 236 Conclusion 241 Conclusion Introduction 243 Statement of Findings 243 An Ethos of Respect for Persons 248 Pope Francis and Personalism 253 Further Research 257 Bibliography 261 viii INTRODUCTION Persons and personal life What could be more familiar than the idea of the person? In a certain way, this is a thoroughly everyday idea; a well-worn piece of furniture in our human world. We habitu- ally speak of ourselves and of others as persons, and the question of what we mean by this rarely arises in the course of our daily activities. Yet the idea of the person plays a role in our culture vastly out of proportion with this paucity of reflection. We take it for granted because it is pervasive. On the one hand, it is a thoroughly public and universal idea: mod- ern systems of law, ethics, and politics are hard to imagine without it. Yet also, it is deeply private and particular, even intimate. What is closer to me or more wholly my own than my person? In both of these senses, public and private, universal and particular, one might well call the person the axis on which our human world turns. It is not simply “important,” in the sense of playing an indispensable role in our daily lives – though it is, and it does – but appears as a condition of the possibility of law, ethics, politics, and private life them- selves, and even the reason why these endeavors exist. Despite its familiarity, the idea of ourselves as persons seems to point radically beyond our everyday lives, our material context, and even time itself, with important con- sequences. In one respect this is profoundly empowering, for it suggests that we human beings are not finally bound by the contexts and structures and processes in which we find ourselves enmeshed. We are free, not determined. As Kant maintained in his account of 1 the dynamical sublime,1 we can act, as persons, in a way that swings free of these contexts and structures and processes, for good or for ill; we can cut through the myths and ideolo- gies of our times; we can bring radical newness into our world, or shatter that world. Such is the human drama, the drama of freedom and bondage, good and evil.

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