Abstract

This dissertation---"Personalistic Liberalism: The Ethical and Political Thought of Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II"---grows out of a longstanding appreciation of modern Catholic social thought and was written with a few purposes in mind. First, I wanted to offer a more systematic account of John Paul's ethics, paying particular attention to its philosophical and theological foundations. Second, I sought to explicate the theoretical relationship between John Paul's ethical and social theories. Third, I wanted to bring John Paul's social thought into conversation with some important strands of contemporary political theory, particularly those deliberating the nature and legitimacy of classical liberalism. ;To these ends, I structured the dissertation as follows. After an introduction, the next chapter contextualizes modern Catholic social thought, explaining how the shift to a nuanced endorsement of liberal economic and political thought was initiated by the pragmatic economic and cultural analyses of nineteenth century social and liberal Catholics. The next two chapters investigate one fruit of the subsequent re-examination of the relationship of Catholicism to modernity: John Paul's qualified acceptance of liberalism for non-circumstantial, ethical reasons appropriated from within the tradition. While the third chapter details the phenomenological, Thomistic, and theological bases of his ethical premises; the next chapter examines the relationship of these premises to the various aspects of his political/social theory, particularly his theories of human rights and the complementary roles of the state and civil society in securing these rights. The following two chapters are a dialogue between this analysis of John Paul's social thought and influential political theorists. In the fifth chapter, the dialogue is between John Paul and four Catholic interlocutors: theoconservatives, liberation theologians, U.S. National Conference of Catholic Bishops, and British distributists. The final chapter brings John Paul and Catholic social thought into conversation with communitarian critics of liberalism, and evaluates the relationship of recent thought on civil society and federalism to the principle of subsidiarity