David Walsh, The Priority of the Person: Political, Philosophical and Historical Discoveries

In his latest book, The Priority of the Person: Political, Philosophical and Historical Discoveries, David Walsh offers a collection of essays that flesh out his personalist vision.1 Separated into three parts, “The Political Discovery,” “The Philosophical Discovery,” and “The Historical Discovery,” the book celebrates what Walsh views as the greatest modern insight, the priority of the person, from a variety of angles. The result is a thoughtful and original series of mediations on the theme, and a welcome invitation to share in Walsh’s wonder at the phenomenon of personhood. Though wide-ranging in topic, the central message of these essays is that persons are always beyond what can be written about them on the page. In his introductory chapter, Walsh argues that the priority of the person is a distinctly modern idea, discovered thanks to the turn toward the subject. Though he notes that the concept itself originated with the Greek prosōpon, and was taken up into Christianity for theological purposes, Walsh argues that it was not until the modern era that the move establishing the priority of the person was made. This was the break with the previously “instinctive subordination of the individual to the whole,” which he associates with liberalism, a political phenomenon founded on the conviction that the individual cannot be so subordinated (p. 3). Giving a historical overview of the political philosophers who paved the way for its emergence, Walsh shows how their endeavors were held back by their conception of human beings as individuals, a thin idea that failed to account for the relationality of personhood. Indeed, even today, Walsh argues, a philosophy of the person has yet to be fully worked out. Calling for such an eventuality, he spends the rest of the book fleshing out a history of why it has yet to be achieved. In section one, which follows the introductory chapter, Walsh zeroes in on the political discovery of the priority of the person. In arguing that the political discovery preceded the philosophical one, Walsh follows Hegel’s famous Owl of Minerva adage, suggesting that philosophy is always a reflection upon practices already in place. For Walsh, liberal democracy not only has a practical priority, but it also works better in practice than theory; indeed, he argues, liberal theorists still cannot account for the personhood they instinctively seek to protect. Ultimately, liberalism is noteworthy for its fundamental intuition, which is in accord with the true nature of the person. Indeed, for this reason, Walsh considers the emergence of liberalism in history to be almost fated, going so far as to suggest that democracy is prior to history. Because I found this claim especially puzzling, I will try to unpack its logic. Walsh, as I have said, argues that liberalism is a great achievement because it is rooted in a true conviction about the person. This, I think, is why he argues that “... so long as the democratic impulse lives within a single individual it has achieved its reality” (p. 72). Reflecting on liberalism, then, his interest seems less in the nitty-gritty of a given regime’s functionality and more on the emergence of a form of government which is consonant with the dignity of the person. For Walsh, it is very important that human beings are able to engage in self-governance because it allows them to take on the responsibility toward which personhood is intrinsically oriented. Viewed from this perspective, all other forms of government emerge as infantilizing. Strikingly, Walsh suggests that political life is erected upon the possibility of self-gift, the same possibility that makes personhood so special. By endowing citizens with the responsibility of self-rule, then, liberal regimes get at this fundamental meaning of political life in a new way. This is not to say that liberal regimes are models of self-donation, but they are uniquely conditioned by the possibility of self-donation. This, I think, is what Walsh means when he writes that “success is irrelevant, for it has already been