Philosophy and Economics

Maurin’s Christian social philosophy is sketched in what he called his “Easy Essays”.  These are short outlines of his thought on various topics that seek to distill the main points of his positions into small portions accessible to average people. These essays appeared in each issue of The Catholic Worker and he subsequently published them in a book entitled Catholic Radicalism: Phrased Essays for the Green Revolution (Catholic Worker Books, 1949; variously reprinted). The remarkable thing about his work is that it is both sophisticated and eminently accessible to ordinary Christians. Indeed his point is that ordinary Christianity is the solution to so many complex social and philosophical issues. 

 

PERSONALISM

Maurin said that he would accept two labels: “Catholic” and “Personalist”. To be a personalist, for Maurin, is to have an approach to life, to social theory, and to economics, that places the uniqueness of each person as a manifestation of Christ at the center. In contrast to impersonal theories of human interaction, which might make our neighbors or friends functions of psychological or statistical laws, Maurin stressed that our encounter with each person we come into contact, in that concrete moment, with should be seen as a divine gift. The poor, especially, were “ambassadors of God.” All of life is a series of encounters with Christ, in the irreducible uniqueness of each person. 

 

Social life, Maurin thought, should follow suit. In contrast to communism, laisse faire industrial capitalism, and the tendency of both to “care” for human beings by referring them to the impersonal bureaucracies of the state or professional institutions, Maurin urged Christians to start creating a society where we each take personal responsibility for our neighbors. 

 

COMMUNITARIAN

As the above implies, Maurin had absolutely no sympathy for communism. Rather he described his social and economic vision of small, locally-sustaining and semi-independent communities as communitarian. This stress on the necessity of friendship and cooperation for a properly human society flowed out of the Christian message of the Church in the Acts of the Apostles in which “there were no poor among them.” Cultivating material dependence on other people as part of the good life contrasted sharply, in Maurin’s day as well as our own, with the individualism that stressed independence and self-sufficiency.