The late Emile Perreau-Saussine’s Catholicism and Democracy is a remarkably effective historical study of the complex interrelationships among various theories of church–state relations—both Catholic and secular—that developed in France from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries. The author compellingly demonstrates that these developments contributed significantly to the church’s reconsideration of its own historical stance on the relative merits of limited constitutional government and religious freedom. He also engages in profoundly enlightening reflections on the religious and political significance of the Second Vatican Council’s effort to effect a rapprochement between the developing Catholic view of the dignity of the human person and the practices of liberal democratic societies.

At the very beginning of the book, Perreau-Saussine contends that his primary goal is to show “how the Catholic Church has responded to two contradictory yet complementary challenges” within democratic societies: the liberal Protestant tendency toward the privatization of religion and the pantheistic elevation of “the people” to the status of virtual godhood (p. 1). More significantly, he argues that when placed within their proper historical context, both the First and Second Vatican Councils can be understood as serving the complementary goals of 1) preserving the spiritual and moral independence of the church from politicization, and 2) developing a truly Catholic view of limited constitutional government, and, ultimately, religious freedom. He believes that the post–Vatican II trend among Catholics toward “a real traditionalism in faith and morals, as well as by a political conservatism” (p. 138) represents a synthetic development of the First Council’s acknowledgment that “Catholics had to look to Rome for the religious authority that could no longer be found within the framework of the nation” (p. 140) and the Second Council’s commitment to a religiously informed and publicly responsible view of Catholic laicity (pp. 141–46).

These observations are placed within the context of a trenchant analysis and critique of France’s various experiments in monarchic, aristocratic, and democratic governance. For those who might adopt the view that the American experiment in self-government provided the architectonic example of the historical effort to secure religious liberty, Perreau-Saussine’s study of the more volatile French experiments is a revelation. He demonstrates convincingly that the political conflict between Gallicanism (of the royalist, revolutionary, and Napoleonic varieties) and Ultramontanism forced the Catholic Church to reconsider its historical stance toward liberal democracy.

For Perreau-Saussine, the prerevolutionary Gallican confessionalist state (as defended by theorists such as Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet) was almost as much a threat to the church’s spiritual and moral integrity as the more openly hostile postrevolutionary regime. But he also acknowledges the weaknesses of reactionary Ultramontanism (as represented by Joseph de Maistre) in its preference for the modes and orders of the Ancien Regime and its principled hostility to any rapprochement with even the constitutional practices (if not the underlying premises) of liberal modernity. He endorses the liberalism of Tocqueville, which recognizes the public importance of religiosity while opposing an established state church, and the Catholicism of Charles Péguy, which “emphasizes the [eternal] meaningfulness of the temporal condition” and the relative autonomy of politics in the economy of social life (pp. 103–8).

The work, originally published in France in 2011, displays a remarkable level of prescience on where possible fault lines might develop for anyone attempting to effect a full rapprochement between the Catholic and liberal intellectual traditions. For example, the liberal tradition tends to emphasize the notion of negative liberty—freedom from the coercive power of the state—while smuggling a highly individualistic notion of personal autonomy into its defense of freedom. The Catholic Church, however, “did not [in Dignitatis Humanae] repudiate its traditional teaching: The freedom to choose between good and evil (liberum arbitrium, or negative liberty) was subordinate to the freedom to do good (libertas, or positive freedom), that is, the proper use of free will” (p. 128).

This conflict between the Catholic and individualistic notion of freedom, the author contends, is precisely what has compelled the church to reaffirm its teleological understanding of the human good against more statist forms of individualism. This fault line, he believes, will be widened as the liberal democratic state makes more exhaustive claims on behalf of the autonomous self. Perreau-Saussine asks whether “liberal democracy [can] compel the Catholic Church to be silent or to change its moral teaching” (p. 136). He also contends that “the notion of non-discrimination (originally envisaged in terms of race)” is “undertaking a radical transformation of society by means of law” (p. 136). The properly secular state is becoming a secularist state and attempting to remake society in its image.

For the most part, Perreau-Saussine successfully distinguishes between what must, at certain critical junctures, be seen as two rival traditions (i.e., Catholicism and liberalism) of philosophical inquiry, however much a modus vivendi might be established in practice. But at some points, his primarily historical analysis of the complex interplay between them threatens to minimize an important conceptual distinction between Catholic personalism and liberal individualism. For example, the author contends that “in bourgeois democracies, the issue today is no longer between liberal and illiberal regimes. It is more a matter of which liberal regime is truly liberal. In the sphere of politics, given the choice between liberalism and totalitarianism, the church is firmly on the side of liberalism” (p. 134). While it is most certainly true that the church has committed itself to what might be called “the liberal tradition of politics,” that is, the rule of law, limited constitutional government, human rights, and religious freedom, its understanding of what those terms mean is distinctively Catholic and personalist, not individualistic. The firmness of its commitment to liberalism is entirely contingent upon liberalism’s remaining committed to political constitutionalism, a commitment rendered problematic by the liberal intellectual tradition’s underlying philosophical nominalism and voluntarist social ontology.

At times, Perreau-Saussine attempts to distinguish this undesirable social ontology from the (liberal) political constitutionalism he favors by defining liberalism in political terms alone. Thus, limited constitutional government and religious freedom become essential characteristics of the liberal tradition, while the voluntarist social ontology that underlies it becomes a disposable distortion of that tradition. “The laicist tradition,” for example, “is not really liberal” because it places too much confidence in the state as “a force for emancipation . . . from the tyranny of outmoded intermediate institutions, in particular from religious bodies” (p. 88). However, some critics of the liberal intellectual tradition, such as John Hallowell and Francis Canavan, have argued that the liberal intellectual tradition is by no means intrinsically supportive of limited constitutional government and intermediate institutions. This is so because of its essential philosophical and methodological individualism. On this view, laicism is not merely an unintended distortion of the liberal tradition but a working out of its philosophical premises. In other words, the liberal intellectual tradition arguably contains within itself the seeds for the destruction of the political values it originally held.

However much one might quibble with Perreau-Saussine’s effort to separate political liberalism from some of its more problematic underlying premises, his essay still stands as an invaluable study of the sometimes tumultuous relationship between Catholicism and democracy in the modern world. It is all too unfortunate that, as Alasdair MacIntyre says in his foreword to the volume, we “shall never learn what he would have had to say” to critics of this important book (p. ix).