Yves Simon

Yves R. Simon (1903–1961) was a French-born Catholic philosopher whose mid-century work in political philosophy gave the Thomist tradition its principal twentieth-century defence of democratic government. Trained under Jacques Maritain, Simon emigrated to the United States in 1938 and held appointments at Notre Dame (1938–1948) and the University of Chicago Committee on Social Thought (1948 until his death in 1961).

Simon’s project was to show that the older Thomist account of political authority, as a service of the common good, did not require an authoritarian or monarchical regime form. The argument was a deliberate response to the mid-century European Catholic tendency to treat democracy as either a foreign Anglo-Saxon imposition or a doctrinally suspect concession to liberalism.

Key Takeaways

• French Catholic philosopher, student of Jacques Maritain, who developed a Thomist defence of democratic political order in Philosophy of Democratic Government (1951).
• Argued that authority in democratic regimes is not opposed to authority as such, but is its proper modern form; rejected both authoritarian Catholic politics and procedural liberalism.
• Long-time professor at Notre Dame and the University of Chicago; foundational figure for the Notre Dame Thomist tradition.

History And Context

Simon was born in Cherbourg, took his doctorate at the Institut Catholique de Paris in 1934, and worked closely with Jacques Maritain through the 1930s. The 1938 move to Notre Dame was decisive: he never returned to France except for visits. The 1948 move to Chicago placed him in the milieu — Mortimer Adler, Robert Maynard Hutchins, Richard McKeon — that was attempting to refound American higher education on the great-books tradition.

The intellectual setting matters. Continental Catholic political thought in the 1930s was divided between Action Française integralism on the right and Christian-democratic engagement on the left. Maritain’s Christianisme et démocratie (1943) and Man and the State (1951) had begun the Thomist case for democracy as a legitimate regime form. Simon’s Philosophy of Democratic Government (1951), the Walgreen Lectures at Chicago, was the first systematic Thomist defence of democratic institutions on philosophical rather than merely prudential grounds.

His other principal works — Nature and Functions of Authority (1940), A General Theory of Authority (1962, posthumous), The Tradition of Natural Law (1965, posthumous) — developed the underlying account of authority and natural law on which the democratic argument rests.

The Conservative Position

Simon’s distinctive claim is that authority is necessary not because human beings are wicked but because rational coordination of free agents toward a common end requires a deciding voice. The deficiency theory of authority — that authority exists only because of human imperfection and would vanish in a perfect society — is rejected. Authority is constitutive of any cooperative human action; political authority is its specific form in the political community.

From this premise the democratic argument follows. Different regime forms are different ways of organising the necessary authority of the common good. Monarchy concentrates it in a single person; aristocracy in a class; democracy distributes its exercise among the citizens. None of these is intrinsically illegitimate; the choice among them is governed by the conditions under which a particular community can best secure the common good. Simon’s case is that under modern conditions — mass literacy, dispersed economic power, the absence of a stable hereditary class — democratic government is not merely a tolerable concession but the regime best fitted to the present condition of advanced societies.

The argument is conservative in three ways. First, it treats authority as constitutive rather than necessary-evil. Second, it grounds democratic government not in individual autonomy but in the common good, which yields a substantively richer account of public reasoning than procedural liberalism. Third, it treats natural law as the standard against which the exercise of democratic authority is to be judged, with the implication that majority decisions can be wrong on substantive grounds.

Differing Positions

Simon’s mid-century interlocutors split on his arguments. Christian Democratic thinkers in Europe (Étienne Gilson, Maritain) accepted the framework but disagreed on specifics. Catholic integralists (the Action Française tradition before its 1926 condemnation, and the post-war Lefebvrist current) rejected the democratic argument as a capitulation to liberalism. American Thomists (Russell Hittinger, Ralph McInerny in his political writings) have generally drawn on Simon’s account of authority while diverging on application.

Procedural liberals (the John Rawls tradition) treat Simon’s substantive common-good standard as illicitly importing comprehensive doctrines into political reasoning; Simon’s defenders reply that procedural liberalism’s neutrality is itself a comprehensive doctrine that has merely declined to acknowledge itself as such.

His influence on the Notre Dame and CUA Thomist traditions is durable. The current generation — Russell Hittinger, V. Bradley Lewis, Robert P. George at Princeton — works in a recognisably Simonian register. He is less drawn upon by integralist currents (Adrian Vermeule, Patrick Deneen) which treat his democratic argument as conceding too much.

References

1. Yves R. Simon, Philosophy of Democratic Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), chs. 1, 3, 5.
2. Yves R. Simon, A General Theory of Authority (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1962), chs. 1, 4.
3. Yves R. Simon, The Tradition of Natural Law: A Philosopher’s Reflections (New York: Fordham University Press, 1965).
4. Anthony O. Simon, ed., Acquaintance with the Absolute: The Philosophical Achievement of Yves R. Simon (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), introduction and chs. 1, 5.