Recovering the Person: A Review of David Walsh’s The Priority of the Person: Political, Philosophical, and Historical Discoveries

Abstract In The Priority of the Person: Political, Philosophical, and Historical Discoveries, David Walsh attempts to showcase the discovery of the person as “the pivot around whom everything revolves”. In so doing, however, he not only rebuts the claims of traditionalists and progressive liberals that liberal democracy is either self-subverting or hopelessly incoherent, but also, the claims among many today that our being as members of a particular race, class, or gender trumps our being as persons. Accordingly, by bringing to our attention the “hidden liberal strength,” Walsh’s “personalist” project also brings to our attention the fact that, however preoccupied with the concept of ‘intersectionality’ we become, at the core of the liberal experiment lies not the recognition of the inviolability of one’s “group identity,” but rather, the recognition of “the person, each person,” as “prior to all else that is”.