Maritain and America

A few years ago, Paul Sigmund, a distinguished professor of political science at Princeton and an expert on the thought of Jacques Maritain, asked whether people would still be reading Maritain in a hundred years. He answered yes, though with the qualification that people would likely be reading Maritain to learn of his historical role in the transformation of Catholic sociopolitical thought and activity in the twentieth century, not because of the persuasiveness of his arguments. Many of the authors of Maritain and America find Maritain persuasive on many points. The fifteen chapters of this book, which is the sixteenth edited volume published by the American Maritain Association, are of notably uneven quality (in terms both of technical proficiency and of genre) but reflect some of the stunning breadth of Maritain's range of vision. Only a fraction of the book's chapters concern America or anything approaching issues of “church and state” as those concepts are commonly used today, but all of the chapters are likely to be of interest to those interested in Maritain or, what is more, what interested Maritain.

Political science · Politics · Reading (process) · Sociology · State (computer science) · Theology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Classics · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies