https://cjd.org/1999/08/01/emmanuel-mounier-personalism-and-the-catholic-worker-movement/
Mounier’s blueprint for a personalist economy asks everyone to lay aside greed and materialism. It is in harmony with the Beatitudes: “On the plane of individual ethics we believe that a certain kind of poverty is the ideal economic rule of personal life. But by poverty in this sense we do not mean an indiscreet asceticism or a shameful miserliness. We refer rather to a contempt for the material attachments that enslave, a desire for simplicity, a state of adaptability and freedom, which does not exclude magnificence or generosity, nor even some striving for riches, providing such endeavors are not avaricious.” (The Personalist Manifesto, p. 192).
Mounier felt that the biggest problem of modern capitalism has been proclaiming the primacy of economics over history, over the life of the people, over community, over living out one’s faith and one’s values.
He wrote that the system of factories “is based on contempt, conscious or implicit, of the laborer.” He reminded us how this was expressed by one businessman, Taylor: “We don’t ask you to think. There are others who have been paid to do that.” The economics of the business world “tries completely to ignore the person and to organize itself for a single quantitative and impersonal goal: profit.” (The Personalist Manifesto, p. 177)
According to Mounier, “profit recognizes no human criterion and no limits. If it does accept a criterion, it is that of the bourgeois values of comfort, social consideration and display and remains indifferent equally to economic well-being as such and to the good of the person it contacts.” (Manifesto, p. 180) Mounier echoed the teachings of the popes on the primacy of labor over capital. He emphasized that profits do not have rights, but workers do. For Mounier the priority of profit flawed the capitalist system, since in it the person is subordinated to consumption, consumption in turn is subordinated to production and production to speculative profit.
Mounier, who had published a book on the thought of Charles Péguy, affirmed that the crisis of the twentieth century was both economic and spiritual. He not only adopted Péguy’s famous phrase: “The revolution will be moral, or there will be no revolution,” but defined it more closely: “The moral revolution will be economic or there will be no revolution. The economic revolution will be moral or nothing.” (Emmanuel Mounier,Qu’est-ce que le personnalisme? Editions du Seuil, 1946 and Be Not Afraid, p. 115) What a prophetic condemnation of today’s global market, its exploitation of workers at slave wages and its imposition of harsh economic measures throughout the “Second” and “Third” worlds by wealthy nations.
In his study of Emmanuel Mounier, James Hanink distinguishes the greatness of his personalism. Contrasting Mounier to Descartes, Hanink points out the basic difference. Instead of Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am,” Mounier has it, “I love, therefore I am.” (James Hanink, unpublished manuscript)
Mounier emphasized engagement in the world for the Christian, action, not isolation; he always spoke of communitarian personalism as opposed to individualism. He made it clear that a Christian had a responsibility to act in the world, going so far as to say that, “A tree that is afraid to bear fruit is a sick tree.”
This engagement in the world makes life unpredictable. Mounier reminded his readers that “Availability is as essential as loyalty, the test of history as much as intellectual analysis.” Anyone who has ever been a Catholic Worker or worked in service of the poor knows how demanding availability can be.
Mounier wrote about sin in this perspective, emphasizing that it was not just an individual affair, but included taking personal responsibility: “Modern narcissism has reduced sin to an individual pre-occupation. It has placed the stress on the tarnishing of one’s image of oneself…, which disguises its basic perspectives, revolt against God and desertion from one’s post. But the parable of the talents is the very kernel of the Gospels. That talent was not given to you to be polished and re-polished but to be turned into two talents” (Be Not Afraid, p. 132).
William Miller describes personalism as central to Catholic Worker thought and action: “The theme of the personalist idea held commonly by Mounier, Maritain, and the Catholic Worker, was that the primacy of Christian love should be brought from its position of limbo where human affairs are concerned and infused into the process of history (Miller, A Harsh and Dreadful Love, Image Books, 1974, p. 21).