Christian Personalism and Human Rights Prior to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: A Philosophical and Theological Exploration

Abstract

The high tide of modern transnational institution-building occurred in the immediate aftermath of two profound crises: the Great Depression and World War II. No document better captures the aspirations for a post-war era of greater human welfare than the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). The UDHR elevated the rights of individual humans above the doctrine of state-sovereignty and embodied the burgeoning view that states have a responsibility to secure the welfare and rights of all persons. A “new” school of human rights historiography has shown that Christian personalists were among the few advocates of “human rights” in this period. Moreover, Jacques Maritain and Charles Malik, prominent Christian personalists, were directly involved in United Nations efforts to codify universal human rights. Yet new-school historiography has over-corrected for “classical” historiography’s penchant to rely heavily on arcane philosophical and theological developments dating centuries and even millennia into the past. New-school historiography deracinates Christian personalism form its nineteenth century forebearers: philosophical personalism, phenomenology, existentialism, and neo-classicism. It also underplays the orthogonal character of a movement that aspired to create a third way between established polarities. The very term “personalism” connotes a middle position between individualism and collectivism: individual human beings have inviolable dignity and are inherently relational. As such, the current picture of the advent of human rights discourse in the mid-twentieth century is incomplete. By connecting Christian personalism to its nineteenth-century philosophical roots and contextualizing its views of the relationship between the individual and the state in the crisis milieu of the transwar era, I fill an important gap in the history of “human rights” discourse in the buildup to the UDHR.