THE THEMATIC CONTRADICTION IN THOMAS AQUINAS' CONCEPTION OF THE STATE: AN AFRICAN (NIGERIAN) PERSPECTIVE (original) (raw)
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In this article I aim to describe some paradoxes concerning the need to seek a foundation of political and legal order. In particular, I try to analyze, from a historical and conceptual point of view, the role of the pre-political State in the Hobbes’s philosophy; the abstractness of the idea of sovereignty as sum of individual wills and as source of norm; the distinction between violence and force, legal and illegal, etc. I explain that some items, conceptions and “key words” (semantic) of political philosophy in modern era are linked to a particular social structure based on a secularization of pre-modern ideas and systems thanks to whom the social order could be represented. KEY-WORDS: Sovereignty; Common good; Representation; State.
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In this paper I have presented the political thoughts of three prominent thinkers, St. Augus- tine, al-Farabi and St. Thomas Aquinas, who span a period from late Antiquity to the High Middle Ages. A close reading of their statements concerning the origin, the nature and the administration of the state reveals that all three authors regard human sociality and the ne- cessity of its organization in political entities not as a direct outflow of human nature or as the result of a direct divine command, but as a result of human rationality, including the human ability to recognize that man as a material and finite being has needs that are met only by cooperation. In contrast, however, to the rationalist political theories of classical Antiquity, laid down in the work of Plato, Aristotle and Cicero, all three authors presented here consider human sociality and political organization not only as the best way to achieve a good mundane life, but also as a constitutive part of the virtue of the faithful man. All three agree that the state is not only an instrument for the protection of the citizen from external and internal foes and a framework in which individuals can attain their personal happiness, but that the state is the natural environment for establishing the divine justice and the right form of worshipping the true God.
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In this article I will analyze the central categories of Thomas Aquinas's social thought, such as a people (populus), multitude (multitudo), and Commonwealth (respublica). The next article (Part 2) will contain an investigation of the categories of a community (communitas), communication , and society (societas). I stress the immediate readiness of the question in existing Thomistic literature. Despite the active investigations of Aquinas's political theory, the social theory remains almost forgotten. The works of Ignatius Th. Eschmann, Yves Congar, and Jeremy Catto represent some exclusions from this assertion, but not one of them has paid enough attention to the terminological peculiarities of Thomistic thought. Between the main results of this work, it is worth to focus on the next aspects of the dissipation of the people's concept, its equalization with the multitude, and the break of the connection between the notions of a people and a Commonwealth. The populus in Thomas's theory loses its political nature ascribed to it by Cicero and Augustin. Having lost its subjectivity, the People convert into an organized multitude united by common territory and the same mode of everyday life. Aquinas ignores the creation of the Commonwealth by the People and establishes a connection of another type between these concepts. According to him, the People is a kind of Aristotelian " materia, " while the Commonwealth is the " form. " In compliance with the precedential assertion, the Respublica becomes eternal and unchangeable, where only the content—i.e., the People or the multitude—can change. In effect, Aquinas formulates the concept of the proto-State here.