Background
Mounier, Emmanuel was born in 1905 in Grenoble, France.
Mounier, Emmanuel was born in 1905 in Grenoble, France.
1924-1927, studied philosophy at Grenoble and Paris.
Mounier, who was the child of peasants, was a brilliant scholar at the Sorbonne. In 1929, when he was only twenty-four, he came under the influence of the French writer, Charles Péguy, to whom he ascribed the inspiration of the personalist movement. Peter Maurin used to say wherever he went, "There is a man in France called Emmanuel Mounier.
He wrote a book called The Personalist Manifesto.
You should read that book"
He taught at the Lycée du Parc at Lyon and at the Lycee Francais Jean Monnet at Brussels. Mounier once commented in a restrained manner, on the Pope"s "silence" concerning the persecution of the Jews by the Nazi regime.
Thus, he is cited in the bibliography on Pope Pius XII as indirectly originating the "black legend" of Pius XII.
Although Mounier was critical of the Moscow Trials of the 1930s, he has been taken to task by the historian Tony Judt, among others, for his failure to respond critically to the excesses of Stalinism in the postwar period.
Emmanuel Mounier was the chief source and leading proponent of a French philosophical movement known as personalism. He asserted that, by the first half of the twentieth century, humanity was confronted by crises in all aspects of its life, including the sterile intellectual tension between idealism and materialism, and the opposing ideologies of individualism versus collectivism and capitalism versus totalitarianism. What had permitted the widening gap between these various conflicting ideologies and had rendered their resolution impossible without a radical restructuring of personal and social life was humanity's distorted image of itself, which from the Renaissance onwards had degenerated through egocentrism to egoism. According to Mounier, the only way in which this state of crisis and impending disaster could be resisted and challenged was for human beings to recover an adequate sense of themselves as persons, with an appreciation of their inherent worth and dignity, spirituality, creativity and freedom. People are also social beings, and the ideal of social life is that of a community consisting of a network of personal relationships’ in and through which everyone can find a sense of their own worth and that of others. Mounier recognized that his views in this area bore a close resemblance to those of Martin Buber. Mounier’s personalism had a religious dimension. One of his criticisms of contemporary Western society was that the importance given to individualism had usurped the place of a true belief in God and had implied a denial of the respect due to both the natural and the social creation. His ideal for a restructured society was a radicalized Catholicism that stressed personal, social and political rights and freedoms for all, instead of the doctrinal beliefs which, he alleged, were a dominant feature of contemporary Catholicism. His personalist ideals are said by one commentator to be nothing less than a ‘search for a new Christian civilization’, and a ‘drive to resacralize the world’. Mounier offered a critique of bourgeois individualism which owed much to Marx. Whilst refusing to declare allegiance to any specific French political party during the interwar years, his sympathies lay with anti-capitalism and socialism. He issued a moral indictment of bourgeois society because, he claimed, such a society had resulted in an impoverished and soulless vision of the world, a denial of people's nghts and a refusal to recognize their need of a sense of intrinsic dignity. Individualism had also produced its own antitheses of collectivism and totalitarianism. He attributed to Marx the recognition of the alienation of human beings from their own nature and the products of their labour, and the exposure of the hitherto concealed valuesystem of bourgeois ideology. One criticism of Mounier is that, whilst he can be credited with an awareness of the ills of contemporary society, and a recommendation of how those ills were to be cured, he did not indicate by what measures the new social and personal order was to be put in place. His injunction was to remake the Renaissance', with a value-system of communistic humanitarianism, but without telllng us how to do so.