Saul Alinsky and Jacques Maritain: A Spiritual Paternity
I thought that I would add a bit to David’s great post on the influence of Saul Alinsky on the CCHD. The whole question opens up profound problems in regard to the history of the conciliar Church in the U.S., for Alinsky’s radicalism is very closely insinuated in the Church of that time and place. But the question is much larger than that, for Alinsky’s radicalism was favored by one of the great heroes of modern Catholic thought: Jacques Maritain.
It is particularly troubling to consider the spiritual sympathy between Alinsky, a Jewish agnostic/atheist, who was a vulgar ruffian and an agitator of the lowest sort, with Maritain, whom many have assumed to have been a personal bastion of orthodoxy and a lock-step Thomist (do you have an excuse for this, Ralph McInerny?). Maritain was, of course, a close friend and confidant of Garrigou-Lagrange, whom Lefebvrists to this day revere and honor as the one and only twentieth century Catholic theologian worth his salt, and a Catholic philosopher whose idea of a fully Christian, political humanism — an “integral humanism,” as he called it — had a profound effect on the post-conciliar papacy. Indeed, in Caritas in Veritate, Pope Benedict XVI makes copious use of this expression, which was greatly favored by Paul VI, and which derives ultimately from the pen of Maritain. Maritain is also a favorite, it should be pointed out, of the so-called “neo-conservative” Catholics Michael Novak and George Weigel.
It is instructive to recount a pertinent section from Jean-Luc Barre’s biography of Jacques and Raissa Maritain: Beggars for Heaven, which was a best-seller in France (it went through several printings in the mid ’90s) and which was translated into English by Bernard E. Doering, who himself wrote a book on the close relationship of Maritain with Alinsky entitled The Philosopher and the Provocateur.
Barre points out that Maritain was among the first continental Catholics to express an appreciation for the idea of democratic America, including its principled separation of Church and State, and it is in the context of this love for the “American idea” that Maritain’s relationship with Alinsky is perhaps best understood.
Maritain considered Alinsky to be one of his closest friends, “an indomitable and dreaded organizer of ‘People’s Organizations’ and an anti-racist leader whose methods are as efficacious as they are unorthodox” (quoted from Maritain by Barre on p. 402).
Maritain had met Alinsky during the Second World War and was immediately taken with his “savvy” work in the cause of economic and social justice. Barre describes their mutual sympathy as founded on a profound “shared taste for subversion and irreverence…and a similar confidence in the people” (403). It should be remembered that, on the one hand, Maritain was greatly distrusted by many Church hierarchs prior to the council as a “Marxist.” Indeed, in visiting America, he could find little support among the hiearchy, and in the universities he could find even less support among the authorities, because there was, even in those days, a global antipathy to Thomism. This made him, in Barre’s words, a “desparado,” and a kindred spirit to Alinsky. On the other hand, Maritain was himself, like Alinsky, committed to what he took to be the “democratic ideal” that everyone should be free to question and challenge authority. How interesting, then, that Maritain, who had one great friend in the hierarchy in Garrigou-Lagrange, should play a role in the banishment of “la nouvelle theologie” prior to the council.
And did Saul Alinsky ever look up to Maritain! This is, I suppose, a reminder of the attractive character that the life of grace imparts to the human soul, an attractiveness so compelling that even hardened atheists recognize its appeal. In saying this, I should point out that I would not in any way, in recounting this story, wish to impugn Maritain’s holiness. At any rate, Alinsky was, to quote Barre, a “personage who was known for being aggresive and rude [but] was nothing but modesty and deference toward the intellectual who had come from France and of whom he asked one day, with unexpected timidity, for a signature on a photograph of Maritain” (403).
Indeed, Alinsky loved Maritain as a father. He told Maritain, in seeking to explain his desire for Maritain’s autograph, that he was not prone to idol worship: “…[but] what I am trying to say is that a picture of you with some personal statement on it would be one of my most cherished possessions. There I have said it” (403). Alinsky even dedicated his now-infamous Rules for Radicals to Maritain, with the inscription: “To my spiritual father and the man I love, from his prodigal and wayward son” (403).
Maritain seems to have seen in Alinsky’s work the possibility of imprinting the Christian ideal on movements for social justice and of shaping the creative energy of contemporary history. In a point of particular sympathy, Maritain saw in Alinsky’s community organizations the advent of “mediating structures” between the individual and the State that could buffer the individual from domination by the State.
But herein lies the troubling question of Maritain’s Catholic alliance with Alinsky, which would serve as a model for the post-conciliar Church in the U.S. and which should call the whole socio-political strategy of the post-conciliar Church in America into question. How could Maritain not have seen that Alinsky’s community organizations, his “buffers,” were in fact ordered to becoming functionaries of the State, its repressive arms of authority? Like all American agitators whose work operates in the trajectory of Marx’s nihilism, Alinsky awaited the day when a fully socialist political power would reign in the nation’s capitol. That day has now come, of course, as Saul Alinsky’s spiritual grandchild, and his heir to control of the community organizations in Chicago, Barack Hussein Obama, has now ascended to the presidency of the United States. Community organizations and “buffers,” such as SEIU, have now become potential instruments of governmental coercion.
Maritain could not see that Alinsky’s “community organizations” were always meant to be substitute churches which were ordered by their very essence to the derogation of the proper authority of the most important of the natural and supernatural mediating societies, namely, the natural family and the Catholic Church. Maritain could only see in Alinsky’s work the coming-into-being of new guilds, along the lines of the medieval guilds, that could put a check on the greed and radical individualism that underlies so much of the practice of free market capitalism. He thought that these organizations could embody the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, so that the grave social injustices of capitalism could be held in control without tyranical federal intervention. But he failed to realize that these organizations were in fact meant by Alinsky to be stepping-stones to the advent of, and eventual workers for, a centralized power structure that would coercively bring about his dreary, ugly, a-religious concept of social justice. Maritain seems to have failed, in other words, to recognize that it is perilous indeed to make common cause with those who have rejected the religious essence of man. Social justice without a truly Christian, religious foundation is a perversion of social justice.
And Maritain’s naivete in this regard is nothing if not representative of the attitude of most of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in the post-conciliar age. Perhaps the pre-conciliar hierarchy exercised prudence in keeping its distance from Maritain’s social “do-goodism,” which eventually would aid and abet those forces in society that seek the destruction of the natural family and of the authority and freedom of the Church.
So, what are we to make of this alliance between Maritain and Alinsky? In whose service was it formed?
I would like to end this brief post with a further question and a thought: If Barack Obama is Alinsky’s spiritual grandchild, does that make him in some twisted sense Maritain’s spiritual great-grandchild? The Catholic inspiration of history is so subtle that it often eludes our grasp, and sometimes, upon grasping its influence, we might very well think it better to have remained ignorant of it!
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Thank you. I never knew of this relationship.
Comment by IA_ — December 1, 2009 @ 3:42 PM
To put it in plain English, you’ve got Alkinsky fundamentally wrong. I suggest you read “Let Them Call Me Rebel.”
Comment by Sanford Horwitt — December 1, 2009 @ 4:26 PM
Well, Mr. Horwitt, I’d have to know some specifics of what you’re talking about. I have his relationship with Maritain fundamentally right, I know that much is a fact. And, in spite of his denials of being a communist (after all, it would not be practical or prudent to affirm that one is a communist in an American context), it is nevertheless true that Alinsky threw in with the cultural revolutionaries of the 60s and did what he could to further their cause: which included the sorts of power politics and the development of replacement-mediating structures that I’ve described in this post. And, furthermore, he was supportive of the attempts of the cultural revolutionaries in the ’60s to gain control in Washington and to use his organizations and his “rules for radicals” to achieve their ends.
The evidence, in other words, points to the fact that he was not the empty ideological slate that he often publicly claimed to have been. He was eminently pragmatic, and he clearly realized that it would further his ambitions for political change in America to deny any ideological affiliation. Americans are, after all, suckers for the idea that someone is an ideological blank slate. That’s why they voted for Barack Obama.
Other than that, I don’t know what you could be referring to that is “fundamentally wrong,” because these are the only issues that I’ve addressed in this post.
Comment by Hierothee — December 1, 2009 @ 5:00 PM
Ity might be of interest to those who read this site that the Maritain Institute (Istituto Internazionale Jacques Maritain
Via Torino, 125/A 00184 Roma) will in the not to distant future, I’m told, be publishing the correspondence between my father and M. Maritain.
Secondly, let me correct the record regarding my father’s religious affiliation. For those of you who have some knowledge of him, you will/should know that he never, ever joined any group political or otherwise. However, when he was asked to identify himself, he would always say – and I heard it more then once – “I am a jew.”
Thirdly, I agree with Sandy, read “Let Them Call Me Rebel” for a clearer insight into just who my father was.
Comment by Dave Alinsky — December 1, 2009 @ 5:01 PM
Thanks for the insight. The first thing that came to my mind is that like everything else in this world, mediating structures such as what you’ve described, are only right or wrong depending on how it helps or hurts man’s integrity. At the end of the day, it is the Battle of Principalities, rearing its head in another yet extensive way. Maritain’s vision can still see the light of day if Christians and their allies are able to wrestle this tool back from the other side.
Comment by MIKE DJ — December 1, 2009 @ 8:07 PM
Dear Mr. Alinsky,
Thank you for commenting on our little site. It would certainly be worthwhile in the present political context to learn more directly about your father. And, given his association with Maritain, it is an intrinsically interesting topic for scholarly consideration for Catholic theologians and historians. These must be interesting times for you, given that your father’s name is so omnipresent these days in connection with Barack Obama. Glenn Beck, just to point out one example, mentions his name every five minutes or so.
However, in the end, I don’t see how your father’s work could not be seen as problematic from a strictly Catholic perspective, and it should certainly give a Catholic theologian (and we’re Catholic theologians on this blog) pause to consider how naturally Maritain took a shining to your father’s work and persona. Maritain was himself quite embittered after the Second Vatican Council (see his “The Peasant of the Garonne”). He was afraid that the Church had come to worship at the altars of false, purely worldly deities and that, among other things, social action had overtaken the primacy of prayer. He lamented the lack of reflectiveness that had overcome the Christian spirit, the giving over to passions, and to power seeking, and the quest for social change for change’s sake. All of these excesses are anti-thetical to the Christian faith. And, yet, was he sufficiently critical of these excesses in the social reformers whose work he so favored prior to the council? Could he see his own hand in tilting the balance in this way?
Your father was not a Catholic, but he will be for a long time linked to these questions due to his connection to Maritain and the favoring of the post-conciliar Church in America to working with organizations that he founded. Only now is the hierarchy beginning to take a decisive turn away from this alliance.
Comment by Hierothee — December 2, 2009 @ 12:40 AM
Please, just read “Let The Call Me Rebel,” and then you’ll see why Maritain thought Alinsky was one of the great men of the 20th century. You’ll also discover that Alinsky was an insightful critic of the so-called 60s revolutionaries, not their spirtual father. If you cannot get the basic historical record right, then why bother sharing your thoughts with others?
Comment by Sanford Horwitt — December 3, 2009 @ 8:54 AM
Dear Mr. Horwitt,
I do not mean to cause offense, but your biography has been widely criticized for being notoriously uncritical of Alinsky, though people on the cultural left tend to take a shining to it. On the other hand, the other side has tended to accuse it of being more a hagiography than a biography, and I have no interest in reading a hagiography of a community agitator. I only read hagiographies of legitimate, canonized saints. But, either way, it is unnecessary to have read your book in order to make the points that I have made.
As for your point about the cultural revolutionaries of the ’60s, Alinsky’s sympathetic connections to them are well established, quite independently of your monograph, whatever criticisms he may have had of them. His desire to infiltrate churches with his ideology of power revolution, thereby changing the character of churches (which is my main concern in this post) and stripping them of their proper spiritual authority (whether intentionally or not), is quite present in his own writings. His writings are more important historically than your tendentious selection of them in painting a biographical portrait of the man. All historians employ a hermeneutic of selection that is necessarily tendentious, so I obviously don’t mean this point as a personal criticism of you.
Frankly, J. Edgar Hoover’s assessments of the nefarious tactics of Alinsky’s front organizations are likely historically valid, because they cohere with Alinsky’s own writings. But, then, we don’t even really need to rely on those for the historical record. All we really need to do is look at the state of the community organizations that Alinsky founded, or that were inspired by his influence, as they exist in the present day. Because a tree grows according to the form with which it was imprinted as a seedling. I suppose that an ACORN metaphor would have been appropriate here.
All of these organizations nowadays are forces that exist in opposition to the moral authority of the Church in regard to marriage and the family, and eugenics, and abortion, etc. The Church’s teachings in this regard are presumed to be hopelessly bourgeois. Alinsky’s whole career was dedicated to a nihilistic pulverization of the bourgeois social order. This comes directly out of his writings and is embodied in the Chicago community organizations. You may try to deny this in your book, but Alinsky’s hatred of the bourgeois social order is an essential aspect of his own words.
So, your (presumably) glowing portrait of Alinsky is hardly necessary to have read in order to have commented on the troubling nature of his alliance with Maritain and the intrinsically troubling nature of his mediating organizations. In the same way, it would be unnecessary to read Russian, period-piece hagiographies of Vladimir Lenin in order to raise the troubling specter of the love affair that so many western journalists had with his mass murdering Russian revolution.
And, frankly, Maritain is my main concern, not Alinsky. Maritain was problematic for many reasons, from a theological standpoint, and not only for his alliance with Alinsky. I won’t bore you with that except to reiterate what I implied in my post: that he had an unseemly authoritarian streak. Perhaps this is why he liked Alinsky so much? Ironically, for a man who prided himself on orthodoxy, those whom he would like to have seen banished from the theological establishment in the Church were able to make a plausible case against his own incipient, a-trinitarian paganism.
But I commend your supreme confidence in your own work, such that you hold it to be essential reading for anyone who would dare to comment on the troubling nature of the Maritain-Alinsky alliance. You must have been raised in the self-esteem era.
Comment by Hierothee — December 3, 2009 @ 1:39 PM
Mr.Horwitt and Mr. Alinsky Jr: perhapas you haven’ realized that you are arguing with the same kind of people that spread calumny after calumny against Maritain while he was still alive. You won’t go very far with them. They can’t even get their facts right. The following quote from the initial entry is pure phantasy: “How interesting, then, that Maritain, who had one great friend in the hierarchy in Garrigou-Lagrange, should play a role in the banishment of “la nouvelle theologie” prior to the council”. Many years before the Council Fr. Garrigou had actually become Maritain’s “great enemy” in the hierarchy (this will please the lefevbrians and ss, no doubt). If only they had taken the trouble to read the whole of Barre`s book instead of only browsing to confirm their own prejudices about Maritain and Alinsky! Well then_ they might have enlightened themselves; they might have discovered a mirror image of their own criticisms. No wonder Maritain prefered-just like his master Jesus of Nazareth, whom he loved and served with all his mind and all his heart- to walk along with “marginal” and “heretics” (such as Alinsky) rather than with those who call themselves doctors of the law.
As you well know Mr. Horwitt: let them call me (things worse than rebel)…but I should suffer the misery of devils were I to make…
Thanks to everybody involved in this blogg for the opportunity to remember this things.
Comment by Rafael Landerreche — December 6, 2009 @ 6:24 PM
No one seems to be talking about the possibility that Maritain was attempting to convert Alinsky. Has anyone read Doering’s THE PHILOSOPHER AND THE PROVOCATEUR which notes this as a fact? Does it need to be pointed out that Marxists and radicals often (ignorantly or maliciously) clothe their rhetoric in Catholic terminology?
And the Jesus who walked with “Marginal and heretics rather than with those who call themselves doctors of the law” specifically instructed his Apostles to be like “scribes instructed in the Kingdom of Heaven,” and insisted that if believers hear not the Church, “let them be to you as gentile” (Matt 13:52 & 18:17).
Perhaps I’m placing myself in a dangerous position here. I know almost nothing of Alinsky and only slightly more of Maritain, or of the relation between them. But what I’ve been able to garner on the internet leads me to wonder if this post and its comments aren’t all a bit reactionary, and this from different ideological positions.
Concerning the comment of Mister Landerreche: He writes: The following quote from the initial entry is pure phantasy: “How interesting, then, that Maritain, who had one great friend in the hierarchy in Garrigou-Lagrange, should play a role in the banishment of “la nouvelle theologie” prior to the council”. Many years before the Council Fr. Garrigou had actually become Maritain’s “great enemy” in the hierarchy (this will please the lefevbrians and ss, no doubt).
Yes, LaGrange and Maritain were close before Vat II, but it is also clear that they broke before the Council. But wasn’t the “interesting” thing Hierothee referred too the fact that Maritain became more authoritarian than LaGrange? after the break: Maritain was problematic for many reasons, from a theological standpoint, and not only for his alliance with Alinsky. I won’t bore you with that except to reiterate what I implied in my post: that he had an unseemly authoritarian streak. Perhaps this is why he liked Alinsky so much? Ironically, for a man who prided himself on orthodoxy, those whom he would like to have seen banished from the theological establishment in the Church were able to make a plausible case against his own incipient, a-trinitarian paganism
Comment by Dim Bulb — December 8, 2009 @ 1:11 AM
Rafael,
I am well aware of Maritain’s split with Garrigou-Lagrange over political issues, and I have read, though several years ago, admittedly, the whole of the biography of Jacques and Raissa. But thanks for playing!
Maritain stirred up a lot of bad blood in his commitment to Lagrangian Thomism, which he never renounced. I am not suggesting that he should have renounced it, but it nevertheless put him in a position of hard conflict. Thus, some French theologians were prone to nod their heads in grinning approval when Edith Stein, in doing a study of Thomas’s “De Veritate,” could say of Maritain’s Thomism that it was “little Thomist and little orthodox.” And some of these same French theologians, who were defenders of a truly sacred liturgy and of Humanae Vitae, and all of the other benchmarks of orthodoxy, were only too happy to accuse Maritain’s “Peasant of the Garonne” of being syncretisic. Were they right? I don’t know, but the desire of these theologians to see his work in this light points to a climate of distrust that Maritain must have helped to foster.
And given the current political context in the U.S., and given the way the Church in the U.S. capitulated after the council in common work with so many of the radical organizations who undermine the natural family and the religious freedom and authority of the Church, Maritain’s apparent naivete in regard to Alinsky remains a problematic issue. The whole point of my original post is that Maritain personally embodies and typifies a questionable post-conciliar socio-political strategy. How could they not see what was going on?
As it turns out, in the current health care debate, the Catholic bishops are having to fight tooth and nail against the ideology of the same sorts of organizations who exist as branches on the Alinskian tree. Is it not plausible to assume that there is a fundamental rot at the very root system of this tree? Many on the New Left, the cultural revolutionaries whom I mentioned in a previous comment, who have forsaken their once proud home, have noted that Alinsky’s main criticism of them was that they were too open and honest about their desire to destroy the bourgeois social order. That is not, I should point out, a fundamental goal of Catholic social doctrine. It is just nihilism.
Comment by hierothee — December 9, 2009 @ 4:30 AM