Abstract: This talk will look at how Jacques Maritain's life and thought influenced Léopold Senghor and Julius Nyerere—two of the three most important African political thinkers of the twentieth century—in order to explore how concepts Maritain wrote about, such as personalism, integral humanism, and the genuine political notion of the state, influenced African postcolonial thought, particularly the phenomenon of African Socialism. More broadly we will examine how mid-century Catholic ideas impacted African and global audiences.
Speaker Bio: Ethan Sanders is a 2026-2027 Maritain Research Grant awardee and Chair and Professor of History at Regis University in Denver, Colorado. He completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge in global intellectual history with a focus on Africa. His first book, Building the African Nation (Cambridge, 2025), explored the growth of "African" identity and pan-Africanism in East Africa, and his second book project, Julius Nyerere: Africa's Global Visionary of the Twentieth Century (under contract with Yale) is a religious and intellectual biography of Julius Nyerere through a global lens.
The event is co-sponsored by the Global Catholic Research Initiative.
Originally published at maritain.nd.edu.