The Routledge Dictionary of Politics, Third Edition
St Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) was one of the earliest Western thinkers to merge Aristotelian philosophy into the Christian political and philosophical heritage. Aquinas was primarily a theologian, but his writings had political significance since there was no clear-cut distinction between purely theological and political writing during the Middle Ages, when the Church was a major political and social force.
Like Aristotle, Aquinas regards civil society, or the political system, as a natural part of life. For Aquinas man cannot be truly human outside some sort of ordered society, and he conceives of the family as the basic political unit. (Aristotle too starts The Politics with an analysis of the domestic economy.) But Aquinas insists that such small units can never provide an ordered and secure social framework, and therefore sees full-scale political societies built up from the family as essential. The main purpose of such societies is to provide a framework within which man can develop his reason and moral sense, and thus come to live well and, specifically, to live as a Christian.
On the all-important question of who should rule, Aquinas again follows Aristotle, arguing that though the best form of government, given the unequal reasoning powers of humans, would be a monarchy or aristocracy, these are too easily corrupted. Hence he too argues for a mixed constitution.
Aquinas’s main differences with Aristotle occur where Christian doctrines clash with pagan values. The most important area here is the definition of human nature. For Aquinas there is a crucial difference between the human nature of the Christian, influenced by baptism, and that of the pagan; and for this reason he did not expect that his political theory could be relevant to all people. Now that our culture is fully familiar with classical Greek thought, Thomism (the name for Aquinas’s doctrines) is often regarded as superfluous, although much of the political thinking of the Catholic Church even today is based on Thomist principles. Thomism, formulated at a period of increasing monarchial centralization, with its doctrine of mixed government and its stress on reason rather than authority, had a radical aspect, and this is one of the reasons why Thomism remains most influential among Catholic clergy of a radical persuasion in areas such as Latin America, where elements in the Church practise liberation theology.
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