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This article presents the development of Jacques Maritain’s writings on natural law, the ius gentium or common law of civilizations, and natural rights, and their bearing on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in December 1948.
Jacques Maritain (1882–1973) is widely recognized as one of the most important authors writing on human rights in the twentieth century. Samuel Moyn calls him “the premier philosophical defender of human rights in the postwar decade” (Moyn 2010, pos. 608). Download chapter PDF.
The chapter shows that Maritain’s philosophical foundation of the universality of human rights is not based on a ‘metaphysics’ of the human person as much as it offers a biopolitical account of rights and adopts ideas of governmentality that parallel emerging neoliberal critiques of sovereignty.
An author of more than 60 books, he helped to revive Thomas Aquinas for modern times, and was influential in the development and drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Pope Paul VI presented his "Message to Men of Thought and of Science" at the close of Vatican II to Maritain, his long-time friend and mentor.
Dec 5, 1997 · Indeed, Maritain held that certain basic natural rights can be recognised by all, without there having to be agreement on their foundation and, as an illustration of this, he pointed to the general agreement on those rights found in the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Sep 5, 2018 · Jacques Maritain, the Catholic philosopher and publicist, was the highest profile thinker to defend the concept of human rights in the immediate postwar period, the era of their framing in the Universal Declaration and embedding in
Mar 5, 2015 · As such, Maritain the metaphysician (and theologian) is inseparable from Maritain the political watchdog – and even agent, since he was one of the indirect architects of the 1948 Charter of the United Nations on account of his membership of a UNESCO enquiry commission on human rights.
