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notebook on liberalism and obsolesence

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Greg Gauthier 2022-08-28 22:47:10 +01:00
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content/post/the-one,-the-many,-and-the-liberal.md
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@ -141,7 +141,7 @@ But as I said before, Gods are very jealous things. They do not tolerate plurali
> "With the triumph of rationalism and liberalism, i.e., of a philosophy of freedom which makes of each abstract individual and his opinions the source of all right and truth, *spiritual unity* has 'gone west'; we have ourselves been able to experience the benefits of this dispersion. But this individualistic liberalism was palpably a purely *negative* energy; it lived by its opposite and because of it. Once the obstacle has fallen, it lacks any support." ~ Jacques Maritain, "True Humanism", 151-152, 1938
Maritain was fretting over the fact that Liberalism appeared to him to be a reaction against something he could not quite define, and feared the collapse of Liberalism in the face of its absence. He naturally sensed the diminishing presence of The One, and intuitively understood that without the natural tension between The One and The Many, The Many would consume itself in an orgy of purposelessness.
Maritain was fretting over the fact that Liberalism appeared to him to be a reaction against something he could not quite define, and feared the collapse of Liberalism in the face of the absence of that threat. He naturally sensed the diminishing presence of The One, and intuitively understood that without the natural tension between The One and The Many, The Many would consume itself in an orgy of purposelessness.
To be sure, Maritain was a triumphal Liberal. His book is is basically posing the question: "We're winning, but then what?" If what I have been saying so far is correct, then what you've won is either the anarchy of Hobbes, in which a war of every self-styled God against every other ends in complete catastrophe; or the forced collectivization of mankind into a materialist eschatology, the likes of which Marx and others have tried to construct in place of religion. Charles Frankel puts the case in hopeful terms in 1955 for you: