Maritain: The Rights of the Person

“EVERY human person has the right to make his own decisions with regard to his personal destiny, whether it be a question of choosing one’s work, of marrying the man or woman of one’s choice, or of pursuing a religious vocation. In the case of extreme peril and for the safety of the community, the State can forcibly requisition the services of each of us and demand that each risk his life in a just war; it can also deprive criminals of certain of their rights (or rather sanction the fact that they themselves forfeited them); for example, men judged unworthy of exercising parental authority. But the State becomes iniquitous and tyrannical if it claims to base the functioning of civil life on forced labor, or if it tries to violate the rights of the family in order to become master of men’s souls. For just as man is constituted a person, made for God and for a life superior to time, before being constituted a part of the political community, so too man is constituted a part of family society before being constituted a part of political society. The end for which the family exists is to produce and bring up human persons and prepare them to fulfill their total destiny. And if the State too has an educative function, if education is not outside its sphere, this function is to help the family fulfill its mission and to complement this mission, not to efface in the child his vocation as a human person and replace it by that of a living tool and material for the State. 

To sum up, the fundamental rights, like the right to existence and life; the right to personal freedom or to conduct one’s own life as master of oneself and of one’s acts, responsible for them before God and the law of the community; the right to the pursuit of the perfection of moral and rational life;* the right to keeps one’s body whole; the right to private ownership of material goods, which is the safeguard of the liberties of the individual; the right to marry according to one’s choice and to raise a family which will be assured of the liberties due it; the right of association, the respect for human dignity in each individual, whether or not he represents an economic value for society—all these rights are rooted in the vocation of the person (a spiritual and free agent) to the order of absolute values and a destiny superior to time. The French Declaration of the Rights of Man framed these rights in the altogether rationalist point of view of the Enlightenment and the Encyclopedists and to that extent enveloped them in ambiguity. The American Declaration of Independence, however marked by the influence of Locke and “natural religion”, adhered more closely to the originally Christian character of human rights.

~Jacques Maritain: Christianity and Democracy & The Rights of Man and Natural Law. 


* In this above all consists the pursuit of happiness: the pursuit of happiness here on earth in the pursuit, not of material advantages, but of moral righteousness, of the strength and perfection of the soul, with the material and social conditions thereby implied.

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