A Christian proposal from the inter-war period: Emmanuel Mounier's Révolution personnaliste et communautaire (1935)

Abstract

Emmanuel Mounier (1905-1950) is one of the more important representatives of Catholic thought in the era between the two World Wars. Before the cultural crisis of the western world, Mounier proposed a personalist and communitarian revolution which the human person and his dignity at the center. He considered the capitalist bourgeois society an established disorder which needed breaking. Mournier was particularly worried by the false identification of Christianity with the bourgeois mentality, and with conviction sought to reveal the great chasm between Christian obligation and the primacy of the wealth. Towards this end, he developed an intellectual proposal which prepared, in part, the fundamentals of some of the Second Vatican Council’s declarations. His audacious positions, and in particular his invitation to dialogue with Marxism, were little understood during his life. In proper context, one can today enjoy a more objective reading of his work Personalist and Communitarian Revolution.