Taller de Comunicación Escrita
Nov 2025 · ensayo · filosofía política · derechos humanos
The final assignment for the course was an essay on a topic of my own choosing. I picked Jacques Maritain, pushed there by the classes of Álvaro Perpere, my politics professor. What the essay sets out to do is study Maritain's philosophical work, and how his conversion to Catholicism and his renewal of Thomism — built around natural law and the jus gentium — became foundational to the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Maritain (1882–1973) was one of the most influential French philosophers of the twentieth century. He studied letters and natural sciences at the Sorbonne in a climate of scientism, and in June 1906, after a deep philosophical and religious crisis, he converted to Catholicism. From then on his life's work was a "Christian metaphysics" — a philosophy of intelligence and of existing — meant to hold faith and reason together, and to conceive of the human being as a spiritual person whose freedom comes not from a social contract but from a rational condition inscribed in human nature itself.
That is the thread the essay follows: natural law as a moral order written into the structure of human nature, and the jus gentium — the body of Roman law governing life between peoples — as its historical, practical form. When Maritain was called to the UNESCO commissions after the Second World War, that framework let him translate the ontological core of the person — "do good and avoid evil" — into juridical language that countries sharing almost no philosophical premises could sign. Hence his line: we agree on the rights, provided no one asks us why. From there the argument runs straight to the Preamble and Article 1 of the Declaration.
The original paper is below, in Spanish, exactly as I handed it in and as the course marked it.
Referencias del ensayo
- Ballor, J. J., & Dimsdale, T. (2023, 8 de diciembre). Christian contributions to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Law & Liberty.
- Fernández, T. y Tamaro, E. (2004). Biografía de Jacques Maritain. Editorial Biografías y Vidas.
- Maritain, J. (1942/2001). Les droits de l'homme et la loi naturelle. Editions de la Maison Française.
- Zanotti, G. J. (2012). Jacques Maritain: su pensamiento político y su relevancia actual. Revista de Instituciones, Ideas y Mercados, Nº 57.