In light of Liberty Fund’s republication of Jacques Maritain’s Scholasticism and Politics, I discuss with Russell Hittinger Maritain’s defense of liberty from his perspective of integral humanism. The idea forms the core of the text, which also provides a method for imagining an innovative response to soft-despotism.

According to Liberty Fund’s description, the book is a

a collection of nine lectures Maritain delivered at the University of Chicago in 1938. While the lectures address a variety of diverse topics, they explore three broad topics: 1) the nature of modern culture, its relationship to Christianity, and the origins of the crisis which has engulfed it; 2) the true nature and authentic foundations of human freedom and dignity and the threats posed to them by the various materialist and naturalistic philosophies that dominate the modern cultural scene; and 3) the principles that provide the authentic foundation of a social order in accord with human dignity. 

Enjoy!