Theological critiques of human rights theory: The contributions of Jacques Maritain and Gustavo Gutierrez

In 1948, theologians worked alongside political scientists to draft the United Nation's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In the forty years since then, a series of theologians and political scientists have argued that "universal rights" as defined by the United Nations are tied to an individualism that is irrelevant to non-Western cultures and is increasingly implausible in the modern West. These critiques challenge us to develop a rights theory that stresses membership in community and that links rights to obligations. In this dissertation, I explore the resources in Maritain and Gutierrez's theologies for developing such a theory.; I begin by describing the rights agenda of the United Nations and by reviewing sociological and theological objections to this agenda. I then argue that Maritain develops a rights theory that embraces the concerns raised by these critiques. Maritain achieves this by basing rights on principles of personalism, common good, and sovereignty of God. These principles replace the atomistic individual with a person who is a social and spiritual being. They also ground rights in an ontology that transcends political and economic systems. In Chapter VI, I describe Gustavo Gutierrez's proposal for a liberationist project that defines itself against Maritain's vision. Gutierrez exposes the ways in which the common good can mask class conflict and how the notion of God's sovereignty can lead to a spiritualism that ignores material conditions. He proposes instead a liberating praxis for and of the poor.; In my final two chapters, I argue that Maritain and Gutierrez present us with a reformulation of rights theory that corrects the most serious defects in liberalism. They present us with a theory of individual rights that is grounded theologically and linked to an ethic of virtue. They present a theory of economic rights in which property rights are limited by communitarian obligations. They both seek a new social order in which the poor enjoy more meaningful participation. These principles have become normative for Roman Catholic social teachings since Vatican II.