Jacques Maritain and the Democratic Project of the American Founding

Abstract

Attacks on liberalism and liberal democracy are seemingly legion in the present day, with these attacks often culminating in condemnation of the American Founding. As a leading proponent of the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas in the twentieth century, Jacques Maritain’s approach of combining the Scholastic tradition with modern advances in political philosophy provides a good evaluation of democracy in modern Catholic thought. If applied to the Founding, Maritain’s political philosophy could shed some light on whether the American project, in its origins, is incompatible with Catholic thought on liberal democracy.