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Lamont's argument can be reduced to several connected claims: The Vatican II religious-liberty dispute was framed by two competing theories of rights. Lamont says the progressives treated religious liberty as a natural subjective right arising from the individual's nature, while the conservatives rejected the idea of any right to practice a false religion because they identified justice with morality. Lamont thinks both sides inherited problematic conceptual assumptions. His broader "ressourcement" argument is that nominalist and Baroque-Scholastic developments distorted Thomistic understandings of freedom, conscience, faith, and authority. He calls the resulting synthesis the "Counter-Reformation system."

ttps://isidore.co/misc/Res%20pro%20Deo/Journals/The%20Thomist%20(1941-2024)/OCR-layer-only-PDFs/2009_Volume73_Number2.pdf   This work, the life work of a great scholar, 107 emerges vindicated from its defence, but it is not the only important contribution made by Villey to the question of subjective rights. In addition to this work, there is also an insight that Villey the Christian and Catholic drew from it. This is the insight that natural subjective rights are an idol; and that they are connected to another idolatry, that of the self.  We can conclude this discussion of objective and subjective rights by briefly indicating the light it casts on the flaws of the conflicting positions in the debate over Dignitatis humanae at the Second Vatican Council. The progressives believed that religious liberty was a natural subjective right flowing from the nature of the individual human. The conservatives believed that it could not be a right of any kind, because it would be a right t...
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Eric Voegelin accounts for this criticism, offering a third explanation for Locke’s writing style in a letter to Strauss: “The Locke piece interested me greatly. With regard to the general thesis – that Locke does not return to Hooker, but develops Hobbes further – I can on the basis of my own analyses heartily agree. The famous conflicts in Locke in fact do not exist. The Second Treatise does not base the theory of the right constitutional order upon some natural law but on a psychology of desire.”[i] Voegelin disagreed, however, with Strauss’s proposition that Locke’s philosophy was articulated in the manner it was as a consequence of caution: “In the case of Locke, you wish to enrich your observations about the concealment of the actually intended theory on the part of the philosopher behind harmless-looking formulas. But is this case not after all different from that in your excellent studies, for example, on Arabic philosophers? In the one case, which I would call the legitimate one, a philosopher tries to hide his philosophizing against disturbance by the unqualified; in the other, in the case of Locke, a nonphilosopher, a political ideologue, tries to hide his dirty tricks against the attentiveness of the qualified. Isn’t that, which might appear as camouflage of a philosopher, the bad conscience of ‘modern’ man, who doesn’t quite dare to say outright what he intends to do, and thus therefore hides his nihilism, not only from others but also from himself, through the rich use of a conventional vocabulary.”[ii]

https://voegelinview.com/voegelin-on-john-locke/#_edn7 Voegelin on John Locke November 2, 2021 Scott Robinson Articles , Philosophy Articles , Philosophy Reviews , Reviews , Voegelin (reviews) , Voegelin Articles Voegelin and Pneumopathology While Strauss’s and Macpherson’s arguments are both coherent and plausible, neither offers a deep or fully acceptable account of Locke’s moral priorities. Caution driven concealment explains little more than that the political circumstances affecting Locke were dangerous. Social assumptions explain the social circumstances during Locke’s lifetime. These explanations account for the issues with which Locke deals in his works – things like resistance, prerogative, and property rights – and why Locke chose to deal with these issues in a recondite manner, but they do not explain the character of a man that advocates Locke’s positions. Both Macpherson and Strauss, to some extent, excuse Locke’s writing style because of the circumstances entailing Locke’...
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AI Mode Conversation: why did Voegelin see locke as the worst villain of modernity why did Voegelin see locke as the worst villain of modernity The philosopher Eric Voegelin viewed John Locke as a central figure in the spiritual and intellectual decline of the West. Rather than seeing him as the rational architect of civilized liberty, Voegelin classified Locke as an ideological non-philosopher whose works suffered from a deep-seated spiritual disorder. Voegelin’s harsh critique of Locke focuses on several key arguments: 1. "Pneumopathology" and the Psychology of Desire Voegelin did not consider Locke to be a true philosopher—which he defined as someone motivated by a love of being and the divine ground of order. Instead, in his private correspondence with Leo Strauss, Voegelin diagnosed Locke with pneumopathology (a sickness of the spirit). • Voegelin argued that Locke's Second Treatise was fundamentally built on a "psychology of desire" rather than objective moral truth. • Instead of orienting human existence toward higher transcendent or spiritual goods, Locke shifted the human focus to amor sui (self-love) and the acquisition of material goods. 2. The Reduction of Reality to Economics According to Voegelin, one of Locke's greatest disservices to modernity was the severe simplification of human nature, shrinking it down to "possessive individualism". • Locke prioritized economic calculation, transactions, and property rights above the soul's relationship to divine reality. • Voegelin wrote that in Locke's thought, "the grim madness of Puritan acquisitiveness runs amuck," meaning that the pursuit of material accumulation was decoupled from any genuine spiritual or social restraint. 3. The Destruction of Public Moral Order Voegelin argued that Locke effectively gutted the traditional pillars that sustain a healthy civilization. • In Locke’s worldview, the elements of a moral public order rooted in biblical and classical traditions disappeared. • By reducing religion to an entirely privatized opinion and church membership to a voluntary transaction, Locke transformed individuals into isolated, self-interested units. He replaced a communal, binding way of life with a world based strictly on contract and self-preservation. 4. Ideological Sloganeering and the "Shallow" Citizen Unlike Leo Strauss, who argued that Locke carefully hid his more radical, Hobbesian views behind harmless, traditional language to avoid persecution, Voegelin believed Locke's contradictions were simply the result of sloppy thinking and an "easygoing philosophical habit." Voegelin believed that Locke’s reliance on superficial, harmless-sounding political formulas created an intellectual environment where citizens act as ideological "slogan chanters" rather than deep, responsible thinkers. By designing a political theory meant to encourage resistance and protect property without demanding robust philosophical or spiritual maturity, Locke paved the way for the fragmented, hyper-individualistic, and unstable political climate of modern liberal societies. AI can make mistakes, so double-check responses what did he exactly call locke and in what book Eric Voegelin’s most severe and precise insults directed at John Locke were not published in a standard monograph, but were famously written in a private letter to political philosopher Leo Strauss dated December 4, 1950. In this exchange, responding to Strauss's own research on the Enlightenment, Voegelin explicitly called Locke: • "A nonphilosopher" • "A political ideologue" • An "ideological constructor, who brutally destroys every philosophical problem in order to justify the political status quo." He additionally accused Locke of trying to "hide his dirty tricks" and using his writing to cloak an underlying "nihilism."

  AI Mode Conversation: why did Voegelin see locke as the worst villain of modernity why did Voegelin see locke as the worst villain of modernity The philosopher Eric Voegelin viewed John Locke as a central figure in the spiritual and intellectual decline of the West . Rather than seeing him as the rational architect of civilized liberty, Voegelin classified Locke as an ideological non-philosopher whose works suffered from a deep-seated spiritual disorder. [ 1 , 2 ] Voegelin’s harsh critique of Locke focuses on several key arguments: 1. "Pneumopathology" and the Psychology of Desire Voegelin did not consider Locke to be a true philosopher—which he defined as someone motivated by a love of being and the divine ground of order. Instead, in his private correspondence with Leo Strauss, Voegelin diagnosed Locke with pneumopathology (a sickness of the spirit). [ 1 , 2 ] Voegelin argued that Locke's Second Treatise was fundamentally built on a "psychology of desire...
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