Towards a personalist republicanism: personhood and citizenship in Ricoeur.

Although personalism has an important influence on European society, it is often regarded as dead and gone in philosophical circles. This tension makes Paul Ricoeur an interesting interlocutor, insofar as he was considered to be a representative of personalism in his younger years, but later offered fatal criticisms to the original formulations of the theory. Hence, my research question is as follows: to what extent does Ricoeur’s thought continue to be influenced by personalism, such that an exploration of his thought can help instigate a personalist perspective within contemporary political philosophy?

Answering this question requires a four-step process. In the first step, I address the political philosophy of personalists such as Maritain, Mounier and Landsberg. The political thought of each of these thinkers depends on three central ideas: (1) the idea of a personalist democracy, i.e. an ethical vision of democracy as a political system that aims to provide a framework for enabling every human being to fully develop as a person, (2) distrust towards power, and (3) a plea for the responsibility of every citizen to pursue vigilant and active citizenship, based on an awareness of both the ethical task of political institutions as well as the perversion of power.

In the second step, I investigate the young Ricoeur’s involvement in the personalist movement. I show that political ethics was at the heart of his personalist essays and that he was especially concerned with the problem of the so-called “political paradox”, which states that politics implies both great promise and great risk. Ricoeur connected this paradox to every citizen’s responsibility to vigilantly and actively use his/her freedom of contestation and participation in the political domain. In this way, Ricoeur developed his own unique interpretation of the core ideas of the political theory of personalism.

In the third step, I refute the common belief that Ricoeur abandoned personalism at the end of the 1960’s. I argue that he responds to his own criticisms of early personalism in his later work. Ricoeur’s late philosophy retained the core ideas of personalism, but in a such a way that accommodated his prior criticisms. I refer specifically to his book entitled Soi-même comme un autre (1990), where the idea of personhood remains central, but in a more modest way; that is, in the sense that his hermeneutical phenomenology uncovers structures of personhood that support a personalist ethics.

In the fourth and final step, I bring the same continuity to the fore on the level of political philosophy. I show how Ricoeur’s late hermeneutical phenomenology provides him with a framework for elaborating the political paradox and the person’s responsibility as a citizen. I address the question of how this position points to the possibility of introducing a personalist perspective into contemporary political philosophy, specifically with respect to Ricoeur’s position in relation to Anglo-American political philosophy. I argue that Ricoeur’s political philosophy addresses the fundamental criteria of contemporary republicanism, while the personalist emphasis in his thought avoids the pitfalls of mainstream republicanism.

There are three benefits to this research. First, insofar as Ricoeur’s hermeneutical phenomenology shows that there are still viable means to elaborate the core ideas of personalism, it clarifies the status of personalism in contemporary philosophy. Second, it shows that a personalist kind of republicanism can provide valuable input in the contemporary philosophical debate on the nature of citizenship. Finally, the most tangible result of this research is to provide a deeper understanding of Ricoeur’s oeuvre, insofar as I show that personalism is an important and above all underestimated perspective that is essential for understanding all of his work.