Early stirrings of modern liberty in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas

IF 1.3 1区哲学 Q2 POLITICAL SCIENCE

Politics and Religion Pub Date : 2023-06-27 DOI:10.1017/s1755048323000159

Matthew P. Cavedon

引用次数: 0

Abstract

Abstract In a 2021 contribution to Politics and Religion , Jesse Russell wrote that St. Thomas Aquinas “had a decidedly illiberal view of a government.” He says Aquinas “advocates a government in which the people are not given public liberty” and did not “prepare the way for the mixed monarchy of the English constitution.” But Aquinas places the rule of moral law above politics, endorses participatory government, prioritizes reciprocal duties rather than coerced conformity, favors a mixed regime with democratic representation, and sanctions resistance to tyrants. Each idea 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.

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圣托马斯·阿奎那思想中现代自由的早期萌芽

杰西·罗素在2021年为《政治与宗教》撰写的一篇文章中写道，圣托马斯·阿奎那“对政府的看法显然是狭隘的”。他说，阿奎那“提倡一个人民没有公共自由的政府”，并没有“为英国宪法的混合君主制铺平道路”。但阿奎那将道德法则置于政治之上，支持参与式政府，优先考虑互惠义务而不是强迫服从，赞成民主代表制的混合政权，并制裁对暴君的抵抗。每一种观念都是现代对自由理解的重要组成部分。自由民主作为一种宪政安排，以及它的各种哲学辩护，比阿奎那晚了几个世纪。把他当作他们的党徒是不合时宜的。但他也不是一个典型的反动派:他的政治哲学与属于人民的自由、有限的政府是一致的。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Politics and Religion Multiple-

CiteScore

3.00

自引率

13.30%

发文量

审稿时长

8 weeks

期刊介绍： Politics and Religion is an international journal publishing high quality peer-reviewed research on the multifaceted relationship between religion and politics around the world. The scope of published work is intentionally broad and we invite innovative work from all methodological approaches in the major subfields of political science, including international relations, American politics, comparative politics, and political theory, that seeks to improve our understanding of religion’s role in some aspect of world politics. The Editors invite normative and empirical investigations of the public representation of religion, the religious and political institutions that shape religious presence in the public square, and the role of religion in shaping citizenship, broadly considered, as well as pieces that attempt to advance our methodological tools for examining religious influence in political life.