Early Stirrings of Modern Liberty in the Thought of St. Thomas Aquinas

Abstract

In a 2021 contribution to Politics and Religion, Jesse Russell writes that St. Thomas Aquinas “had a decidedly illiberal view of a government.” He says that Aquinas “advocates a government in which the people are not given public liberty” and endorses skepticism toward the view that Aquinas “prepare[d] the way for the mixed monarchy of the English constitution.” But Aquinas places the rule of moral law above politics (Part 1), endorses participatory government (Part 2), prioritizes reciprocal duties rather than coerced conformity (Part 3), favors a mixed regime with democratic representation (Part 4), and sanctions resistance to tyrants (Part 5). Each of these ideas is an important component of modern understandings of freedom.

Liberal democracy as a constitutional arrangement, and its various philosophical defenses, postdate Aquinas by centuries. It would be anachronistic to cast him as their partisan. But neither was he a proto-reactionary: his political philosophy is congenial to free, limited government that belongs to the people.

Keywords: Aquinas, politics, democracy, natural law, coercion, integralism, freedom, monarchy, constitution, Summa Theologiae, theology, Catholic, De Regno, resistance, tyranny, tyrannicide, liberty, liberalism, Jesse Russell, William McCormick, Aristotle, Brian Tierney, history, consent, social unity