In the mid-twentieth century, a loose movement called Christian personalism arose in response to what it perceived as the extremes of totalitarian collectivism and atomizing individualism. Participants in the movement, Protestant and Catholic, argued that the human person must be understood as a relational and communal being, that one's personal fulfillment came from participating in relational social structures, that one's personality and growth were based in interacting with others in a healthy and holy way for the common good, and that ultimately community has its person-centered basis in Christ the Logos of the Universe. While personalist thinkers did not share a common political vision, they did hold that personalism had political and economic implications. Namely, to conceive of the body economic as only the market exchanges of otherwise isolated individuals was to ignore the material and cultural soil of our personhood. Likewise, to see individual persons as products of material, historical forces and thereby, subject to the all-powerful collective was to rob each one of his or her freedom expressed in community.
Individualism without some sense of how our persons are designed by God to be complementary cuts us off from the fruits of interpersonal aesthetic, ethical, and liturgical development. Collectivism without recognizing our personal free will and diverse identities robs us of the same.
Here's some brief passages from this school of thought that I think are worth pondering:
"Collectivism is no solution to the problem of modern individualism. Individualism and collectivism are two antithetical extremes which have in common only that they both leave the individual on his own. They both miss the essence of the human person who finds happiness and peace only in personal union, in common values and goals, in mutual giving and the sharing of personal values"--Walter Kasper
"[There is] an interdependence and reciprocity between the person and society: all that is accomplished in favor of the person is also a service rendered to society, and all that is done in favor of society redounds to the benefit of the person" --John Paul II
"Theological development and wholeness are found in community, not in isolation. Theological research in the spirit of communio is a search for the common truths and insights that bind me to others in Christ. The solitary thinker who follows no guidelines but his own mind, thinks himself into further isolation and loneliness. The thinker who is attuned to the Mind of Christ in the Church, is never alone. He is in communion with Christ and with the whole community of Christ's faithful who have lived in fellowship, and thought and believed in it, since apostolic times"--Cormac Burke
"Personality tends by nature to communion. . . . For the person requires membership in a society in virtue both of its dignity and its needs. . . . The common good is common because it is received in persons, each one of whom is a mirror of the whole. The end of society, therefore, is neither the individual good nor the collection of the individual goods of each of the persons who constitute it. . . . The common good of the city is neither the mere collection of private goods, nor the proper good of a whole. . . It is the good human life of the multitude, of a multitude of persons; it is their communion in good living. It is therefore common to both the whole and the parts into which it flows back and which, in turn, must benefit from it." --Jacques Maritian
"It is the sharing of a common life which constitutes individual personality. We become persons in community, in virtue of our relations to others. Human life is inherently a common life. Our ability to form individual purposes is itself a function of this common life. We do indeed enter into specific relations with our fellows in virtue of specific purposes of our own; and we must do so in order to realize, in concrete experience, the common humanity which makes us persons. . . . Community is prior to society."--John MacMurray
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