This chapter focuses on Maritain’s analysis of the ontological and epistemological foundations of human rights, and his wider hope for ‘practical agreement’ on the content of those rights. On the ontological front, I argue that such agreement is not forthcoming on the basis of natural teleology or eternal law. Neither of these secures assent across the world’s major religious or philosophical traditions. On the epistemological front, neither rationalism nor naturalism holds great promise. While Maritain upholds the naturalist alternative, his efforts devolve into a performative contradiction. For he hopes to rest agreement about human rights on ‘natural inclinations’, which, at the same time, he confines to the realm of the non-conceptual, non-rational and pre-conscious. This constitutes a markedly weak, even incoherent basis for agreement. The stage is set, therefore, for ‘new’ natural law theory, which proposes a non-ontological, purely rationalist foundation. I conclude that this too is an unpromising basis for agreement on rights. Instead, we need a new approach, one that privileges the deliverances of the social sciences and does not strive for universal consensus.

This chapter examines Maritain’s notion of practical consensus amongst diverse views and backgrounds. For the Universal Declaration, this was built around a specific text setting forth rights dishonoured during war. Post-war conditions provided a stimulus for agreement amongst States. The chapter considers the prospects for consensus when moving beyond the mere enumeration of human rights, to their application in contemporary times, confronted with diverse philosophical views about their foundations. Reflecting on Maritain’s economic thought, I argue that those prospects are hampered given economic instrumentalisation and injustice from global capitalist structures. Moreover, efforts to reach political consensus on a regular basis are confronted with power in politics, which tempts some actors to go for broke, gain full control, and avoid compromise. Maritain realised that progress in protecting human rights would be replete with backward steps and new starts. Nevertheless, his hope was that the practically-embodied consensus embodied in the Universal Declaration would develop through progress in a common ethical life, despite divergence in theoretical explanations of that life.

The period between the French Revolution and the mid-twentieth century was a period of significant upheaval for Catholicism and in its interpretation of its role in relationship to the growth of nationalism, human rights and international relations. Chapter 1 examines how the Church developed Catholic social and political thought through human rights ideas. Catholicism gradually responded to the emergence of rights-based language, which it initially rejected, and only later engaged in active participation. Section 1.2 appraises in what manner the Catholic Church had available a long cosmopolitan tradition of reflection on the natural law, and this tradition in particular became a resource to a changing political landscape. Section 1.3 appraises the Catholics resolution of the tensions in rights language through the development of the philosophy of Personalism, and a reassessment of democracy as a foundation of cosmopolitan political life. This chapter concludes in Section 1.4 by presenting where those ideas were reaffirmed in later papal declarations and encyclicals.

By the end of the nineteenth century Catholicism had become a peripheral player in the international arena. This would change in the twentieth century as Catholicism would re-emerge as a formative participant in the creation of the Human Rights movement. To examine this question, Chapter 3 seeks to comprehend in what manner Catholicism began moving from the periphery to the centre of international law. The narrative begins to distinguish how Catholicism began drawing upon its own understanding of the natural law and the formation of the state, and explores in what manner the Catholic Church would shape democratic constitutions and international law across Europe. The Catholic Church’s engagement with the construction of human rights became a cosmopolitan vehicle to participation in the international legal system, which mapped out in a number of ways. This chapter concludes by ascertaining how this latter engagement provided the Catholic Church with theoretical underpinnings to further shape the direction of human rights, in its negotiation and engagement with a globalised world. It reveals how Catholic cosmopolitanism was understood as the political form of sovereignty.

Sixteenth-century jurist, Thomas More, developed the distinction between a Christian utopia and the political autonomy of the state. Chapter 4 recognises religion’s role in contributing to cosmopolitan ethical principles to guide political power, without becoming a justification for a political theology of the state. Section 4.1 proceeds with More’s emphasis of a common humanism that brought accommodation between temporal and spiritual sovereignty. Section 4.2 ascertains in what manner the Second Vatican Council recognised that not alone freedom but the search for the truth is central to political democracy and an open public sphere. Catholic theorists recognise a prisca theologia or a semblance of the natural law, and thereby advance in what way the expression of the political form the state takes as a basis for a common cosmopolitan humanism. Section 4.3 details Maritain’s proposed model of Church and state, and delineates Maritain’s theory of secular democratic faith, as a bridging of Catholicism with liberal democracy and human rights. This chapter concludes by enquiring if a secular democratic faith in democracy and human rights is possible today.