Emmanuel Mounier 1905 – 1950

Emmanuel Mounier was a French Catholic philosopher and the founder of the personalist movement and its journal Esprit, founded in 1932. Drawing on Bergson, Maritain, and the Christian existentialism of Marcel, he articulated a third way between liberal individualism and totalitarian collectivism that took the unique person, irreducible to economic or political function, as the center of philosophical and political reflection. His Personalism, A Personalist Manifesto, and Be Not Afraid shaped Catholic social thought in the mid twentieth century and contributed to the resistance milieu under the Vichy regime. His influence carried into Latin American liberation thought and into postwar Christian democracy.