Since Dorothy Day recently showed up in GD, I thought I'd post this.
http://celebrationpublications.org/node/3016In 1932, when itinerant French thinker Peter Maurin first met Dorothy Day, journalist, single mother, former communist and recent convert to Catholicism, it would have been impossible to predict the far-reaching impact of their collaboration in what became the Catholic Worker movement.
Maurin, already in his 50s, was by all accounts a quixotic, nonstop apostle of his own version of Personalism, a post-World War I form of humanism. Personalism, the brainchild of French writer Immanuel Mounier, was a small boat launched into the swells and tides of capitalism and communism, then competing to fulfill history with their variant forms of social and economic utopia. Personalism focused not on some broader program of evolutionary progress toward higher and higher levels of material satisfaction and cultural development, but on the transformation of the individual human person.
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Maurin’s Christian Personalism emphasized the assent of each person to the mystery of love as the organizing principle of all created life. The absolute value of each person transcended both history and all its systems, and respect for the individual was the standard that judged their validity. In the 1930s, worldwide depression had created systemic unemployment and dislocation for millions of workers and their dependents, exposing the failure of capitalism. Communist manipulation of the masses and the failure of collectivist economic models showed thin promise of real liberation or authentic community.
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The Peter Maurin who walked into 35-year-old Dorothy Day’s Fifteenth Street New York tenement was a one-person revolution, and Day became the vehicle of his indefatigable vision of personal transformation that then leads to a renewed social order. Hindsight might say that Maurin and Day were in the right place at the right time to capture the multiple currents of thought and action in that critical era. These currents were already creating an early seismic shift in Catholic thought that would 30 years later produce Vatican II: A liturgical renewal that recovered the primitive church from suffocating layers of historical accretion; a lay revival to full, conscious, active participation in the mission of the church, an invitation to a simpler and more radical reading of the New Testament that led to a deeper commitment to serve the poor, oppose racism and all forms of violence, especially war.
= new reply since forum marked as read
But here's an overview of the philosophy of personalism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personalism
Personalism exists in many different versions, and this makes it somewhat difficult to define as a philosophical and theological movement. Many philosophical schools have at their core one particular thinker or even one central work which serves as a canonical touchstone. Personalism is a more diffused and eclectic movement and has no such universal reference point. It is, in point of fact, more proper to speak of many personalisms than one personalism. In 1947 Jacques Maritain could write that there are at least 'a dozen personalist doctrines, which at times have nothing more in common than the word ‘person.’ Moreover, because of their emphasis on the subjectivity of the person and their ties to phenomenology and existentialism, some dominant forms of personalism have not lent themselves to systematic treatises.It is perhaps more proper to speak of personalism as a 'current' or a broader 'worldview, since it represents more than one school or one doctrine while at the same time the most important forms of personalism do display some central and essential commonalities. Most important of the latter is the general affirmation of the centrality of the person for philosophical thought. Personalism posits ultimate reality and value in personhood — human as well as (at least for most personalists) divine. It emphasizes the significance, uniqueness and inviolability of the person, as well as the person's essentially relational or communitarian dimension. The title 'personalism' can therefore legitimately be applied to any school of thought that focuses on the reality of persons and their unique status among beings in general, and personalists normally acknowledge the indirect contributions of a wide range of thinkers throughout the history of philosophy who did not regard themselves as personalists. Personalists believe that the human person should be the ontological and epistemological starting point of philosophical reflection. They are concerned to investigate the experience, the status, and the dignity of the human being as person, and regard this as the starting-point for all subsequent philosophical analysis" [Williams, 2009].
I know it sounds wonky, but Kant was originally involved in the development of personalism, so what can you expect? 
