Christian political philosophy has two masters and four basic principles. Hippo and Aquino claim its two masters: Ss. Augustine and Thomas. They, in turn, can lay claim to teaching four basic Christian principles of politics and political rule:

• First, politics and political rule is natural and good.
• Second, sin vitiates our nature and therefore makes politics and political rule difficult.
• Third, the purpose of politics and political rule is to make human beings better.
• Fourth, politics and political rule is a limited means.

Five hundred years ago, political thinking began abandoning the Third Principle, viz., that politics is supposed to make human beings better. Modern politics and political philosophers now abandon most, if not all, of these principles. Christians should not. Or if they do, Christians should at least be aware that they are rejecting the wisdom of Augustine and Thomas. Ideally, they would know why they reject the basic principles of Christian political philosophy. But let me simply clarify that these four basic principles are foundational aspects of a coherent, consistent, continuous body of political-philosophical thought.

The aforementioned basic principles are contained primarily in two large texts: Augustine’s City of God and Thomas’s Summa Theologiae—at least its so-called “Treatise on Law,” ST I-II qq. 90-108. Augustine writes primarily for Rome’s public men, Christian and pagan, who are versed in the philosophers of Late Antiquity. Thomas clarifies his teaching.

If Augustine needs clarifying, it is because he paints an unflattering picture of political history. His rhetorical purpose is to show that Christian political wisdom has something new and true to teach the world, and to completely undermine the statesmen, philosophers, and historians who point to a simpler golden age where Roman mores were uncorrupted. Political history is painted with the broad brush of the “City of Man” and the “earthly city.” These names even mis-specify human politics too narrowly: while Adam and Eve are its revolutionary liberators and Cain is its founding father, Satan is its influential political theorist. The ancient empires worship various fallen angels. Rome, consecrated to them by Numa Pompilius, is no exception. Human politics is and always will be a beachhead for the City of Hell, and a communion of sinners that is a dark counterfeit of the communion of saints.

Since he paints the Second Principle, viz., that sin vitiates human nature and makes politics difficult, so vividly, Augustine is often said to reject the First Principle, viz., that politics is natural and good. Three proof-texts often surface to demonstrate that Augustine thinks politics properly speaking—and not just politics ‘as we know it’—is the result of sin and evil. Two are in Book 4: Augustine approves of the pirate who dares to tell Alexander, ‘justice removed, what is a kingdom but a large band of robbers’; and Augustine says if men were peaceful and just, ‘there would be as many kingdoms among nations as houses in a large city.’ The supposed linchpin, often cited, is in Book 19, where God gives Adam dominion only over the lower animals.

The first two proof-texts are easily dealt with. First, by insisting that kingdoms require real justice, Augustine is preparing his critique of Scipio’s definition of the commonwealth in Cicero’s Republic, which requires only an agreement vis-à-vis what is just. Augustine will argue that Christians can pierce the veils of glory and lust for power, see clearly what is truly just, and rule commonwealths where true justice is loved. In ST I-II q. 90, Thomas will later call this, following Aristotle’s direction—but daring to tread where Aristotle does not ultimately go—the ‘common good’ towards which our natural reason can guide the lawmaker. Politics is natural in the sense that the virtues are natural. Second, Augustine does not say that every household would be a kingdom, but that a sinless world would not have great empires but thousands of small kingdoms. This is reaffirmed in On the Free Choice of the Will where Augustine argues that, were all men just and peaceful, they could trust one another to choose their own leaders. Rulers should make human beings better so that they are worthy of democracy, like the Israelites who, as Thomas reminds us in ST I-II q.105, democratically chose the seventy-two elders ‘from among the people’ in the ‘mixed regime’ of Moses.

In ST I-II q. 96, Thomas clarifies that being ‘subject to law,’ can mean being subject to coercion or ruled by a higher law. We might understand the ‘dominion’ Augustine discusses in The City of God, Book 19, in this light. God does not intend anyone to be subject to coercive domination, since he intends everyone to be subject to the higher law. Neither Augustine nor Thomas think that coercive rule in the usual sense of the master-slave relationship is natural, although rational political rule is.

Like Augustine, Thomas is well aware that human beings universally suffer the effects of sin, and are born with concupiscible and irascible aspects. There may be entire societies that are disordered, Thomas concedes in ST I-II q. 94, like the Gauls whom Caesar claimed approved of theft. But this is not what Thomas means by nature, or the natural law that he writes in ST I-II q. 90 that is inextinguishable in us.

Both the First and the Second Principle are now clearer. In a world of perfect, ‘unfallen’ human beings, government would be rationally oriented towards the common good. The sinless would have the natural law in their hearts. Sin is the source of all political problems.

Now let us turn to what Thomas says the purpose of law is in ST I-II q. 92, viz., ‘to make men good.’ This is the promise that Augustine sees in the Christian statesman; Book 11 underlines the difference between the rational values of things and their use-value. The Christian statesman is able to see that the slave has an inestimably higher value in the eyes of God—in the rational order of the cosmos—than a jewel, even if the jewel has a higher price, use-value, and is coveted more than the slave. To become good, for Augustine, is to be converted away from the lust for mastery and the desire for glory—which can only inspire counterfeit virtues—and to see things as they really are. Pride makes us objectify persons and objects according to our own purposes for them; humility allows us to see things as they really are in their nature, according to God’s purpose. Human nature is such that God created the race through a single individual, Augustine argues in Book 12, so it would be obvious that we are made to live in gregarious concord with one another, not as slaves to our lust. To the extent that the City of God is ascendant in human affairs, the cities of the world will be ruled by the one source of lasting peace.

Of course, the wounds of sin cannot be healed completely by politics. We also learn in Book 11 that the two cities will be admixed forever in this present world. Thomas turns to Augustine’s On the Free Choice of the Will to puts a sharper point on the limits of political rule in ST I-II q. 96, where he proposes that human beings can only be led gradually to virtue. The law can lead human beings to every virtue, but cannot ordain all the acts of the virtues. This is not simply for practical reasons, either; one can be a tyrant not only by commanding one’s subjects do to evil, but by overstepping the limits of one’s authority. Human law, Thomas argues in ST I-II q. 98, is ordered towards making human beings better so that there can be temporal peace. To imagine that laws can lead human beings to the end of their eternal happiness is to attempt to do with coercive power what can only be done with grace. As Thomas remarks, importantly, on another occasion:

Man is not ordained to the body politic, according to all that he is and has; and so it does not follow that every action of his acquires merit or demerit in relation to the body politic. But all that man is, and can, and has, must be referred to God: and therefore every action of man, whether good or bad, acquires merit or demerit in the sight of God, as far as the action itself is concerned. (ST I-IIae, q.21 a.3 ad3)

Both the Third and Fourth Principles are now clearer. A politics of the common good consists in making each member of the political community more virtuous. However, both the means by which and the ends for which the political ruler can promote the common good are limited.

Christian political philosophy is more focused on the common good than the kind of regimes that should be devised; thus, Thomas wrote a commentary on the first three books of Aristotle’s Politics but not the last five. Two important exceptions come to mind. First, the theology of human nature and the Fall provide Augustine and Thomas additional arguments against slave-mastery as a legitimate mode of political rule, beyond any of those found in Aristotle. Second, Augustine and Thomas seem to think that the more the common good is achieved, the more fitted citizens will be for ruling and being ruled in turn democratically, in the context of a mixed regime with aristocratic and kingly elements.

How we think about politics today is complicated by the rush to consider the proper spheres of Church and family, as the exigencies of our time require. The four basic principles simplify the Christian political philosophy of the proper sphere of the “state,” or the temporal power, so that we neither exaggerate nor denigrate the sphere in which it ought to operate.

Liberal thought, now in its second ascendancy, is originally premised on a rejection of the Third Principle, viz. that politics ought to make men better. Liberals suspect that this premise leads to irreconcilable conflicts, and makes violence inevitable. Christians traditionally suspect the opposite: if we do not aspire together to our better natures, we allow men to be wolves.

The Catholic Church has no magisterial teaching about the “best regime.” On the contrary, the Church teaches that she does not favor one form of government or political system over another, and expects Catholics in different times and places to have different opinions on the matter.[1] The peaks of Catholic political philosophy scarcely go further. St. Augustine argues for a constitution in a well-ordered society that is at least somewhat democratic: if citizens value the common good above their own, then they ought to create their own governing officials.[2] St. Thomas Aquinas offers a kind of Aristotelian praise for Moses’ mixed regime, a monarchy with democratic and aristocratic aspects.[3] But that’s about it. These venerable Doctors of the Church largely leave the question of the best regime aside, focusing instead upon how Christians might prudentially serve the common good in a variety of regimes.

Though the Magisterium contains little abstract theorizing about the best regime, the Church clearly instructs Catholics about the proper end of politics (the common good), the proper basis of all legitimate authority (God),[4] and the rights of the Church. On the lattermost topic, when the Church envisions those Church-State relations that properly respect her rights as a perfect society, she establishes certain parameters for acceptable political regimes.[5] Dignitatis Humanae is a famously extensive example, since it extrapolates from the civil liberty of baptized Christians to worship freely, and claims that the Church supports only those regimes that allow freedom of conscience to all. Whereas the Church once licensed Christian states to assist in wielding its coercive authority over the baptized, Dignitatis Humanae signals a general policy change that Church will no longer delegate its coercive power.[6] The rights of the Church to punish the baptized are consistent with longstanding magisterial teachings about the divine origins of Church and State authority.[7] Since Pope Gelasius I in the fifth century, the Church has taught that God has ordained a dyarchy with power and authority over human affairs: the Church’s sacred authority and temporal rulers’ royal power.[8] Immortale Dei (1885), the most important political encyclical of Leo XIII’s great clarification of Catholic social teaching, reaffirms that, “The Almighty… has given the charge of the human race to two powers, the ecclesiastical and the civil, the one being set over divine, and the other over human, things.” This arrangement, Leo XIII writes, “is the Christian organization of civil society; not rashly of fancifully shaped out, but educed from the highest and truest principles, confirmed by natural reason itself.”[9] Should the two come into conflict, Leo XIII teaches that, regarding whatever belongs to the “salvation of souls” and the “worship of God,” the Church holds sway. Ideally, however, Church-State relations will be characterized by greater concord and official coöperation.

Immortale Dei offers not a description of the best regime, but a doctrine of the Church’s rights, on the one hand, and the rights of governments on the other. As Pius XI forcefully reminds in Quas Primas (1925), which inaugurated the Feast of Christ the King, the Church retains authority and a suspended power over “civil affairs,” since the salvation of souls is not merely private and individual, but also has public and social. Because Christ did not deign to exercise his kingly authority in a direct sense, it is proper for the Church to respect the powers of the State.[10] However, political regimes of all kinds ought to acknowledge God as the source of their authority as a minimum, or else they forfeit “very basis of that authority.”[11] However, neither Immortale Dei nor Quas Primas make the legitimacy of the State contingent upon its acknowledgement of God as the source of all legitimate power. Christians are directly commanded in Scripture to obey their rulers.[12] Immortale Dei simply points out the absurdity, from the Church’s view, that some governments explicitly deny this true source of their authority.

Church teaching about acceptable political regimes is most specific when the Church pronounces upon proper Church-State relations. For example, the Church has no definitive teaching regarding monarchy, empire, or republic as the best institutional framework to pursue the common good.[13] Leo XIII does rank better and worse situations for the Church vis-à-vis the State. But these specific teachings on Church-State regimes must not be taken out of context. Leo XIII also taught Catholics that they had good prudential reasons to support political regimes with inferior Church-State regimes. This is one legacy of ralliement, Leo XIII’s attempt throughout the 1890s to get French Catholics to support and participate in the political institution of the Third Republic.

Four discrete kinds of Church-State situations appear in the Leonine encyclicals. Of the first rank are those states where Christian virtue is diffused through laws, institutions, and mores, and governs the relations of civil society.[14] Here, both Church and State come to an explicit and mutually beneficial arrangement to govern society by Christian principles. The State submits to Church teaching about the end of politics, and the Church may license some of its coercive authority over the baptized to the State. Immortale Dei suggests that this optimal arrangement was generally in force before the sixteenth century, that is, before the age of the “Reformation.”[15] Diuturnum Iliud (1881) offers the “wonderful manner” in which the Holy Roman Empire was consecreated as an example.[16] In the twentieth century, those who argued for a return to this optimal arrangement, in which the State explicitly acknowledges the social kingship of Christ within its sphere, became known as “integralists.”[17]

Aside from integral coöperation, three suboptimal forms of Church-State relations exist, which Leo XIII describes in a letter to the French bishops and laity, Au milieu des sollicitudes (1893). First, a State might neglect to explicitly acknowledge the dignity of the Church, without formally separating Church and State. This was the situation of the Third Republic until 1905. In this situation, Leo XIII urged the Catholic people of France make laws democratically to serve the common good, in accordance with the teachings of the Church.  Abandoning integralism puts the Church, Leo XIII thinks, in a “precarious position.”[18] However, he reasons, the justness or unjustness of laws will be determined not by Church-State relations, but by the principles in the minds of legislators.[19] Therefore, even a secular State that explicitly separates Church and State might still produce good laws. The secular State commits at least one of two errors: it either denies that God is the source of its authority, or denies that the Church has the authority to make pronouncements about God and the scope of its authority. The tragic “absurdity” of secularism violates Church teaching about the origin of authority, and comes when “the State, by missing in this connection the principal object of its institution, finally becomes false to itself by denying that which is the reason of its own existence.”[20] But this does not mean that Catholics must reject secularism at all costs. To the contrary, Leo XIII writes, even in secular states, if by a “fortunate inconsistency, the legislator is inspired by Christian principles,” the advantages “render worthy of toleration a situation which, practically, might be worse.”[21] The United States is likely in background of the pope’s thinking about avowedly secular states in which the Church has not come to ruin. Longinqua (1895) mentions the “great Washington,” and his “well-known friendship” with Bishop John Carroll as a kind of shaky substitute for religion as a support for a State’s moral legitimacy.[22] As he was trying to rally French Catholics behind the Third Republic, Leo XIII also acknowledged that the Church was beginning to flourish in secular America.

A fourth kind of situation, unfortunately most familiar to the Church in all ages, is persecution. Even as he reassures American Catholics that their regime has yielded some salutary results, Leo XIII argued that those who argue for the separation of Church and State in France seek to destroy the Church and return France to paganism.[23] And even as he advocates ralliement, encouraging French Catholics to participate in democratic politics, Leo XIII forbade Italians to do the same. In 1882 and 1886, the papacy reaffirmed that the non expedit of Pius IX was still in force: so long as the Kingdom of Italy militarily occupied the Papal States, Italian Catholics must not vote in parliamentary elections and stand for office. If Leo XIII were interested in the best regime, these case-by-case policies would seem wildly inconsistent. However, Au milieu des sollicitudes makes clear that what is salient are the Church’s teachings about its relations to the State. Legal separation would constitute persecution in a Catholic country like France (and, indeed, soon would under the Comes Law of 1905), but not in the United States. The Italian parliament represented an illegitimate persecution in a way that the French parliament, in the eyes of the pope, did not.

Already in the nineteenth century, ultramontane Catholics in the French Third Republic regarded integralist monarchy as a “best regime,” and became obsessed with the goal of restoring the Count of Chambord (or failing him, Philippe d’Orléans, the soldier and historian of the American Civil War) to the throne of France. At the time the Third Republic was bitterly divided between the republicans and a largely rural, Catholic royalist opposition. Republicans gained the upper hand after the constitutional crisis of 1877, and the 1879 resignation of Patrice de MacMahon from the presidency would allow the republicans to pursue anti-clerical policies. In 1882, the Third Republic had secularized public education, and Jules Ferry replaced the parochial school with “l’école républicaine” (later regretting his hardline stance). Politically defeated in a rapidly transforming country, many French Catholics placed their hope in legitimism and the restoration of the French monarchy, and refused to participate in the Third Republic.

Though Leo XIII may have agreed with the Catholic legitimists in the abstract, he warned against putting these abstractions about the best regime above the end of politics: “By giving one’s self up to abstractions, one could at length conclude which is the best of these forms [empire, republic, and monarchy], considered in themselves; and in all truth it may be affirmed that each of them is good provided it lead straight to its end – that is to say, to the common good for which social authority is constituted; and finally, it may be added that, from a relative point of view, such and such a form of government may be preferable because of being better adapted to the character and customs of such and such a nation.”[24] From this vantage, it is worth considering that the tears shed by the Holy Father for the Louis XVI a century earlier is far from the language of abstract preference.[25] As Tocqueville had already concluded about Louis Veuillot during the Second Republic, French Catholics were drawn to extreme legitimism and ultramontanism based on abstract political principles.[26] Leo XIII does not condemn these principles per se, but teaches that questions of regime must be subordinated to serving the common good.

As Roberto de Mattei points out, the Third Republic would indeed strip the Church of all public recognition in 1905, and establish the principle of state secularism—laïcité.[27] Akin to the Mexican Constitution of 1857 and the Spanish Constitution of 1931, the Comes Law represents a high-water mark of anti-clerical policy in France. In Vehementer Nos (1906), Pius X described the law as a calamity and a disaster. Church buildings and property were confiscated by the state. Priests and religious would even be conscripted by the state during wartime. Ralliement had failed, and Pius X changed course.

Even so, reading Au milieu des sollicitudes is interesting, since Leo XIII shows how the Church thinks about political matters through the lens of the Church’s rights, the proper origins of state authority, and the ends of politics rather than ‘the best regime.’ In the context of Immortale Dei and Longinqua, we see the Church counsel different political postures in different times and places. Prudence regulates which postures Catholics should adopt, as Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., has noted in his recent treatment of ralliement.[28] However, what must be clarified is that these political postures correspond to Church-State situations rather than regimes. Ralliement is only incidentally “republican,” just as integralism is not synonymous with “monarchy” or any other regime. Where integralism—defined as a Church-State situation, not as a regime type—is too remote a goal, ralliement or even devoting one’s political activities to a secular order may be prudent. In other times, particularly times of persecution, in which aiding a regime is likely to cause scandal among Christians, noncooperation is appropriate. We also see that there is a danger of inflexibility vis-à-vis this or that political regime.

American Catholics may take a series of relevant lessons from ralliement. As Patrick Deneen notes, accomodationists in the tradition of John Courtney Murray and their “radical Catholic” critics are increasingly debating the status of Catholics vis-à-vis the American liberal democratic regime.[29] (Both sides of the debate, in my view, are too quick to equate the American regime with liberal democracy.)[30] In any case, radical Catholics in the United States should not hypostatize impracticable “more Catholic” best regime, whether monarchy or socialist utopia, and reject mainstream politics in its name. Strategic withdrawal along the lines of the so-called Benedict Option is appropriate only if the prospect of those “fortunate inconsistencies”—successful legislators with Christian principles—is now not only unreliable, but even implausible.

There are also lessons for accomodationists. First, they ought to accept that Church-State relations in the United States are not now, and have never been, optimal. They should act less surprised and indignant that the State affords no special recognition for the Church (for example) to run hospitals faithful to the Church’s teaching about healthy and dignified human personhood (versus that of the American Medical Association). Much less should they make fatuous appeals to neutral standards of “religious liberty.” Second, accomodationists should remember that times change and forms of civil power are mutable, less important than considerations about the common good.[31] Just because our constitutional order provided a framework for a Christian people to serve the common good in the past (sometimes) does not mean that it will continue to do so in the future. Many accomodationists will go further than Leo XIII, and argue with Tocqueville that the secular state was a positive boon for Catholicism during the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries.[32] It would be hard to make those arguments today, however. In the long run the liberal state has devoured the exogenous religious foundations that once supported and moderated its excesses, and replaced them with its own “self-radicalizing” principles.[33] Accomodationists can no longer keep their head in the sand and regard Tocqueville’s conformist despotism and excessive democratic individualism as a danger somewhere in the distant future. It is already well upon us, in ways Tocqueville and even Paul VI could hardly fathom, and yet more exorbitances are imminent.

Of course, some will think that Dignitatis Humanae represents a doctrinal change that allows us to treat some paragraphs of Leo XIII as dead letter. (This is a serious error, but one too complex to set straight.) Since the ideal integral coöperation of Church and State are breezily called “peculiar circumstances” in Dignitatis Humanae, some have even read the declaration as an endorsement of separation of Church and State.[34] Even if the Church no longer licenses her coercive authority to states as a matter of general policy, however, there is no need to read Dignitatis Humanae as a rejection of the Church’s ancient teaching about proper Church-State relations, the divine source of legitimate authority, and the proper end of politics. Neither popes nor councils are infallible when they give their prudential judgments about what will come to pass in the nations’ political futures. If the Second Vatican Council changed the Church’s policy about the most prudent posture to take vis-à-vis the secular liberal republic, to a general disaster, then the lessons of Leo XIII and ralliement offer some consolation—she has bet on the wrong horse before.

Notes

[1] e.g., Gaudium et Spes [1965] §42; Immortale Dei [1885] §48; Diuturnum Iliud [1881] §7.

[2] De Libero Arbitrio I.6.14.

[3] ST I-II q. 105, a1.

[4] On the Church’s political-theological basis of civil authority and its difference from modern political-philosophical arguments, see Felix de St. Vincent, “Dubium: When Is Any Government Legitimate?” The Josias (2015). No. 7.

[5] See Immortale Dei [1885] §35; Quanta Cura [1864] “Syllabus” XIX.

[6] Thomas Pink, “Conscience and Coercion,” First Things (2012): 45-51.

[7] See Diuturnum Iliud [1881] §§4-8.

[8] See Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist, “Integralism and Gelasian Dyarchy,” The Josias (2016).

[9] Immortale Dei [1885] §§13-16.

[10] Quas Primas [1925] §17.

[11] Quas Primas [1925] §§17-19; cf. Quod Apostolici Muneris [1878] §2.

[12] Quas Primas [1925] §19; Immortale Dei [1885] §5.

[13] Au milieu des sollicitudes [1892] §14.

[14] Immortale Dei [1885] §21.

[15] Immortale Dei [1885] §23.

[16] Diuturnum Iliud [1881] §21.

[17] Gabriel Sanchez, “Catholic Integralism and the Social Kingship of Christ,” The Josias (2015).

[18] Au milieu des sollicitudes [1892] §29.

[19] Au milieu des sollicitudes [1892] §22.

[20] Immortale Dei [1885] §28.

[21] Au milieu des sollicitudes [1892] §28.

[22] Longinqua Oceani [1895], §4.

[23] Au milieu des sollicitudes [1892] §29.

[24] Au milieu des sollicitudes [1892] §14.

[25] Quare Lacrymae [1793], trans. Coëmgenus, The Josias (2015).

[26] Alexis de Tocqueville to Edouard de Tocqueville, 6 Dec 1843, Oeuvres Complètes, XIV: 237.

[27] Roberto de Mattei, “The Ralliement of Leo XIII: A Pastoral Experience That Moved Away from Doctrine,” Rorate Caeli (2015).

[28] Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., “Catholic Action and Ralliement,” The Josias (2017). See also P.J. Smith, “Ralliement and the Common Good,” Semiduplex (2017). Smith poignantly investigates Leo XIII’s follow-up apostolic letter to Au milieu des sollicitudes, Notre consolation. In my view he exaggerates, however, when he seems by naming all Church-State situations that depart from integralism become, ipso facto, tyrannical regimes.

[29] Patrick Deneen, “A Catholic Showdown Worth Watching,” The American Conservative (2014).

[30] Felix de St. Vincent, “In Dread of Modernity: Republican Liberty and the Common Good in the American Tradition,” The Josias (2015).

[31] Immortale Dei [1885] §17.

[32] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2 vols., trans. James T. Schleifer, ed. Eduardo Nolla (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2012), I:480.

[33] Petrus Hispanus, “The Primary Political Question: A Response to Milco on Liberalism,” The Josias (2016).

[34] Dignitatis Humanae [1965] §6.

The revolutions of the 18^th century appealed to ancient as well as to modern authorities. As I have argued elsewhere, the American Revolution appealed to ancient republican notions of the rule of law and the advantages of a mixed regime, and to medieval English conceptions of cosmic order being embodied in the ancient laws which had held since ‘time out of mind.’ But, as Charles Taylor argues, these ancient conceptions were to a large extent ‘colonized‘ and taken over by modern, Enlightenment ones which took over much of the form of the more ancient ideas, but without the substance of cosmic order and the primacy of the common good: « The American Revolution is in a sense the watershed. It was undertaken in a backward-looking spirit, in the sense that the colonists were fighting for their established rights as Englishmen. Moreover they were fighting under their established colonial legislatures, associated in a Congress. But out of the whole process emerges the crucial fiction of “we, the people”, into whose mouth the declaration of the new constitution is placed. »[1] Several articles here on The Josias have examined the defects of liberal, Enlightenment political philosophy. But perhaps it would be possible for Americans to revive the ancient republican element in their founding, and thus find a form of politics that would be at once autochthonously American and truly ordered to the common good. This is the position argued in Felix de St. Vincent’s first essay for The Josias. We are pleased to publish it for its lucid exploration of the transmission of the ancient republican tradition in England and America, and its eminently practical suggestions for political action today. I myself disagree with a number of Felix de St. Vincent’s points including his reading of St. Thomas Aquinas on sovereignty, his account of the relative importance of ancient republican and modern liberal ideals in the American founding, and the ideal relative weight of the different elements in a mixed constitution for promoting the common good (he thinks the republican form per se preferable to the monarchical). But I agree with on the most important principles, especially the primacy of the common good, and am very pleased to be able to present his thought provoking essay to the public. — Pater Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist.

Are American democracy and Catholicism compatible? Are liberal democracy and Catholicism compatible? The first question was asked by John Courtney Murray in We Hold These Truths (1960).[2] More recently, Patrick Deneen proposed that the debate was about liberal democracy, slightly reframing the debate between Murray’s compatibilism and its “radical Catholic” critics.[3] Insofar as this debate is about Catholic teaching, the two questions appear the same.

American democracy and liberal democracy are, oftentimes, taken to be synonymous. There is little danger in the generalization that when American politics and liberalism are wed, John Locke most often presides over the ceremony. In his influential book The Liberal Tradition in America (1955), Louis Hartz proposed that the “Lockian creed” of natural law and natural right was basically uncontested in the United States because Americans never had to contend with the legacy of feudalism.[4] Although Fr. Murray claims that the American founding is “more, much more” than an echo of John Locke, the American Republic was nonetheless providentially conceived in an era of classical liberalism “when the tradition of natural law and natural rights was still vigorous.”[5] Were the Founders providentially modern, as Hartz claims, or providentially premodern, as Murray suggests? This shade of difference between Hartz and Murray is the outline of a scholarly debate among those who defend the Lockean Founding. [6]

“Radical Catholics” seem all too willing to accept the narrative, so common in the 1950s and 1960s, that America is an entirely modern and liberal state. For instance, Christopher Ferrara’s 2012 tome Liberty, the God That Failed, argues that far from revivifying classical republicanism, the American founding in fact sundered the ancient alliance of throne and altar by idolizing liberty and adopting the framework of classical liberalism.[7]

But what if American democracy is not synonymous with liberal democracy after all? If this is the case, one might argue Catholicism is not compatible with liberal democracy but nonetheless compatible with American democracy. This distinction requires a different interpretation of the founding as the product of a republican tradition, rather than liberalism. And in fact, it turns out that the overly simplistic “Lockean Founding” paradigm of the 1950s and 1960s is widely challenged.

Accounts of the Founders’ republicanism became prominent in the 1970s and 1980s in the work of Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, J.G.A. Pocock, John Patrick Diggins and others. Bailyn’s 1967 study The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, which analyzed the pamphlets of the American Revolution, showed how popular critiques of “corruption,” “slavery,” and “conspiracy” echoed English republican figures like Algernon Sidney.[8] Pocock goes further to dispel the “myth of John Locke” as the progenitor of a liberal American revolution. Pocock is worth quoting at length

It is notorious that American culture is haunted by myths, many of which arise out of the attempt to escape history and then regenerate it. The conventional wisdom among scholars who have studied their growth has been that the Puritan covenant was reborn in the Lockean contract, so that Locke has been elevated to the station of a patron saint of American values and the quarrel with history has been seen in terms of a constant attempt to escape into the wilderness and repeat a Lockean experiment in the foundation of a natural society. The interpretation put forward here stresses Machiavelli at the expense of Locke; it suggests that the republic—a concept derived from Renaissance humanism—was the true heir of the covenant and the dread of corruption the true heir of the jeremiad. It suggests that the foundation of America was seen, and states, as taking place at a Machiavellian—even a Rousseauian—moment, at which the fragility of the experiment, and the ambiguity of the republic’s position in secular time, was more vividly appreciated than it could have been from a Lockean perspective.[9]

Or, as Pocock more succinctly put the matter in an 1972 essay: “America was founded in the dread of modernity.”[10]

American Catholics, in other words, need not confess to being strangers in a strange land of bourgeois liberal democracy and values alien to the common good. In Diturnum Iliud (1881), Leo XIII affirms an openness to all forms of government that tend towards justice and the common good:

there is no reason why the Church should not approve of the chief power being held by one man or by more, provided only it be just, and that it tend to the common advantage. Wherefore, so long as justice be respected, the people are not hindered from choosing for themselves that form of government which suits best either their own disposition, or the institutions and customs of their ancestors.[11]

There are good reasons identified by Charles de Koninck and others why liberal government, based on its foundational principles, cannot in the last analysis tend towards the common good. (Any tendency towards the common good, in this analysis, would be the result of fortunate circumstances and not the design of government, which one finds in Thomas Piketty’s argument about Western liberal democracies’ good fortune in the twentieth century.) But it is not clear that America’s founding principles amount to unadulterated Lockean liberalism. For Americans, there are indeed institutions and customs of our ancestors that can tend towards the common good.

Whether or not it is historically accurate that our American ancestors are the intellectual descendants of a republican bloodline (Bolingbroke, Harrington, Sidney, Sallust, and Livy), it is at least arguable that they were, and it is certainly true that republicanism is a minor tradition in American political history. I am less concerned with the facts of intellectual history than the normative implications of an American Republic constituting itself within modern American liberal democracy—the example of Abraham Lincoln is instructive, once one understands the deep affinities between Lockean liberalism and slavery. A republic would be a more capacious home for faithful American Catholics.

In this brief essay, I argue that republican political theory, sometimes called “neo-Roman” or “classical republican,” is the best vehicle to promote the politics of the common good. Although I do not aim to critique “radical Catholics,” this diffuse array of thinking seems to lacka constructive, workable political vision that can be presented to the American people as a planfor a common future. (With the despair only Twitter can sink into your bones, Rod Dreher and others propose a program of withdrawal into intentional communities—the “Benedict Option”.) American grown-ups reluctant to shirk the democracy entrusted to us by our forebears should search for a practicable political vision, even if the task is intellectually arduous. Rather than lining up for and against the oversimplified high-school presentation of the Lockean-liberal Founding (or for and against a book John Courtney Murray wrote a half-century ago), American Catholics should align themselves with the alternative tradition of American Republicanism.

Republicanism, Liberty, and Sovereignty

Liberty predates liberalism. The republican definition of liberty is more radically expansive than we are accustomed to; it insists that one be safeguarded against potential interference in certain domains. This is freedom as non-domination, rather than freedom as non-interference. Philip Pettit explains this older republican definition of freedom that pertained before the nineteenth-century:

To be a liber—a freeman, in the established English translation—as distinct from a slave was to be secure against any master in the domain of basic liberties; it was to be safeguarded against the dominatio or domination of others in the exercise of discretion within that sphere. The thing that gave you such security—the thing that gave you freedom as non-domination—was having the status of a civis or citizen, someone adequately and equally guarded by the law.[12]

This is ancient republican theory of freedom, “republican” in contradistinction to the classic liberal or libertarian perspective of freedom as non-interference that befitted the industrializing world of commerce.

Liberalism, as opposed to republicanism, holds that one is free until interfered with. Interference with one’s freedom is either a legal restriction or an illegal violation of one’s rights. The liberal citizen is free until he comes in contact with the law. The republican citizen, on the other hand, free because of the law. To explain this somewhat startling reversal, one must understand the Roman legal concept of obnoxius.

Obnoxius is a term of Roman political thought that describes those who are perpetually liable to harm or permanent potential subjects of punishment. Seneca describes slavery, for example, as the condition in which “corpora obnoxia sunt et adscripta dominis.”[13] Livy defines a civitas libera as one in which “imperiaque legume potentiora quam hominium.”[14] Therefore a free polity is one that is neither dominated by another polity nor dominated by a controlling faction. Republican citizenship ensures one is not in an obnoxious condition. Libertas is defined by Livy as the condition “quae suis stat viribus, non ex alieno arbitrio pendet.”[15]

A different concept of liberty distinguishes republicanism from liberalism. Going forward, we follow the lead of Philip Pettit more than any other modern expositor of republicanism. For it is Pettit who defines republicanism via this central concept of freedom as non-domination, rather than a politics of virtue or a critique of sovereign kingship.[16]

In England, republicanism was revived during the Interregnum period. Republican writers like James Harrington, John Milton, and Marchamont Nedham eventually became critics of Cromwell’s Protectorate, mimicking Sallust’s criticisms of Sulla.[17] The link to the Americans was Bolingbroke, who revived the arguments of Harrington and Algernon Sidney in the 1730s to critique the government of Sir Robert Walpole. The American colonists were versed in Bolingbroke.

By the eighteenth-century republican sentiment already had an antique feel, and emerged (with Bolingbroke) in harangues against corruption. Quentin Skinner explains, “The virtues of the independent country gentleman began to look irrelevant and even inimical to a polite and commercial age.”[18] Republicanism was revived by an indignant “squirearchy” (a term and a sentiment that migrates to Virginia) in their invectives against the “obnoxious” flatterers at Court (hence the migration of the modern meaning of “obnoxious”). In this context, republicanism was ripe for the picking, even if Bolingbroke and others expropriated it opportunistically. The seventeenth-century republican James Harrington, after all, “first stated in English terms the theses that only the armed freeholder was capable of independence and virtue, that such a proprietor required a republic in which to be independent and virtuous.”[19] In contrast to the rabidly anti-Catholic Puritans of the seventeenth century, however, Bolingbroke had the good sense to be a Jacobite.

These neo-romans were not necessarily enemies of monarchy in principle, but they did not believe that the people alienated their sovereignty by investing it in the body of the king. The late medieval postglossator Bartolus broke with Thomas Aquinas’s concept of sovereignty. Aquinas had argued that popular consent legitimates governments, but instituting government means alienating sovereignty in a ruler. Later writers like Marsilius of Padua suggest that it is Bartolus, not Thomas, who is in line with Aristotle’s thinking on sovereignty.[20] The work of these late medieval Italians paved the way for the republicanism of the Italian Renaissance.

Is it true that Aristotle’s political philosophy tends towards the republican theory of popular sovereignty, rather than the monarchist sovereign to whom the people (or God) transfers authority? For Thomas Hobbes, the question is moot, since Hobbes took Aristotle’s ‘government of laws, not men’ to be the evacuation of a meaningful concept of sovereignty.[21] If we follow Hobbes, there is no concept of sovereignty in Aristotle, and so Aquinas and Bartolus simply innovate in different directions. But, pace Hobbes, there does seem to be a concept of sovereignty implicit in Book III of the Politics, where Aristotle argues that “a constitution is the ordering of the state in respect of its various offices, and especially the office that is sovereign over all matters [Κύριος πάντων].”[22] When Aristotle refers to Κύριος (‘in charge’) over all matters, it seems to approximate what we mean by sovereignty. Furthermore, Arsitotle claims that the body of citizens or the civic body [πολίτευμα]—those made citizens by the constitution [πολιτεία]—which is “everywhere sovereign [Κύριος] over the state.”[23] Those made citizens, for Aristotle, are those who exercise the deliberative offices, a more restrictive definition of citizenship or the ‘civic body’ than we are accustomed to.[24] Sovereignty is identified with the deliberative office; in a monarchy, only the king holds sovereign power. In regimes where deliberative offices are divided, the lawmaking office with sovereignty over the law seems to be most important for Aristotle. Who holds this power is famously determined by the lawgiver [νομοθέτης].[25] So, in fact, Aristotle does have a notion of sovereignty, but it does not determine the form of government or constitution of the polity.

Aristotle offers some leeway for the optimal regime type, as does Divinum Illiud. The American Catholic political thoerist Orestes Brownson, from whom we shall hear more later, defines republicanism by its theory of sovereignty: “under it power is never an estate, never the private property of a the ruler, but, in whose hand soever vested, is held as a trust to be exercised for the public good.”[26] Republicans and monarchists may debate about who should hold sovereignty, and how. (Liberalism, so goes the main opinion in the wake of A. John Simmons, is unable to ground sovereignty in consent theory, since tacit and hypothetical “consent” accounts can confer nothing like an actual promise.[27] But the logical steps from liberalism to philosophical anarchism are the subject of another discussion.) I will turn to this debate now, which I propose that Catholics, should they be of an open-minded Aristotelian mind on the question, adjudicate based on a teleology of the common good.

We have framed a question with which to proceed: which view of sovereignty, republic or monarchy, is more felicitous to promote the common good?

Republicanism, the Common Good, and the Politics of Virtue

In De Regno, Thomas Aquinas determines that monarchy is preferable because of absolute values: unity, stability, and its imitation of nature. The last two points are intuitive; for the imitation of nature, he proposes the beehive and the kingship of God as examples: “Est etiam apibus unus rex, et in toto universo unus Deus factor omnium et rector.”[28] And yet Thomas recognizes that dissatisfaction with monarchy comes from the possible danger of tyranny, citing Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae which celebrates Rome’s aristocratic revolution against the Tarquin yoke. Thomas proposes a tradeoff where under monarchy citizens are sluggish to work for the common good, but without a monarchy each citizen understands the common good to be her own to interpret:

Plerumque namque contingit, ut homines sub rege viventes, segnius ad bonum commune nitantur, utpote aestimantes id quod ad commune bonum impendunt non sibi ipsis conferre sed alteri, sub cuius potestate vident esse bona communia. Cum vero bonum commune non vident esse in potestate unius, non attendunt ad bonum commune quasi ad id quod est alterius, sed quilibet attendit ad illud quasi suum.[29]

Thomas points out that monarchies tend to avoid dissension and are more stable, while various forms of polyarchy are also susceptible to tyranny. The modern experience should make us reflect seriously on Thomas’s concern that democracies have as many selfish conceptions of the common good as they do citizens.

The evils of disunity, disorder, and tyranny are foremost in Thomas’s mind, and indeed these appear to be the gravest harms to befall a polity. But Thomas’s assertion that monarchies are more stable than ‘polyarchies’ and less likely to devolve into tyrannies—“Nam fere omnium multorum regimen est in tyrannidem terminatum”[30]—may puzzle modern readers familiar with the tumultuous history of short-lived dictatorships compared to stable Western democracies with their mixed constitutions and robust middle classes (Aristotle would have approved of these two elements). But surely monarchies might also adopt mixed constitutions, while vigorous republics have been known to unite around conceptions of virtue. The republic, in fact, may be seen as another ancient remedy (more viable than monarchy) to alleviate the ills of relativistic modern democracies.

If we move beyond his argument about order, Thomas brings second-order concerns about promoting virtue in the members of a community. The promotion of virtue is secondary, and Thomas recognizes the impossibility of using human law to repress all vice; Alasdair MacIntyre shows how Thomas’s exposition of the natural law is thus opposed to the centralizing power of Louis IX.[31] Of the three duties of a king, Thomas argues, the most important is to instill virtue in his subjects: “quod quidem studium in tria dividitur, ut primo quidem in subiecta multitudine bonam vitam instituat.”[32] But Thomas does not compare the efficacy of monarchy versus republic on this score. Is monarchy a better form of government than republic to promote civic virtue? I doubt this is the case. At this point, I will turn to ancient and modern republicans’ concern with the potential tyranny present in monarchy and how it perverts a politics of virtue and the common good.

For all the difficulties of interpreting it, Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) gains a prophetic aura when one reads Raphael Hythlodaeus’s lament that courtiers and advisors must ingratiate themselves to glory-obsessed kings. Consigned to be flatterers, those in high positions of government cannot speak for the common good: “Nisi quod absurdissimus quibusque dictis assentiuntur & supparasitantur eorum, quos ut maxime apud principe gratiae, student assentatione demereri sibe.”[33] The advisor to a king is obnoxious.

In his Discourses on Livy (1517/1531), Machiavelli proposes that the greatness of Rome is due to the Romans’ liberation from kings: “The reason is easy to understand, for it is not the pursuit of the individual good but of the common good that makes cities great, and it is beyond doubt that the common good is never considered except in republics.”[34] Machiavelli echoes Sallust, who explains the difficulties of being a good man in a kingdom: “Nam regibus boni quam mali suspectiores sunt semperque eis aliena virtus formidulosa est.”[35] When Machiavelli turns to Sallust, he finds an argument about the virtue of citizens; when Thomas turns to Bellum Catilinae, as we have seen, he finds an argument about the overall prosperity of Rome. Republics leave one freer to consider the common good, and stake this legitimacy on this freedom.

More, Machiavelli, and Sallust (many more Renaissance humanists and Romans could be adduced to their number) demonstrate that republicanism is at least a potentially superior regime than monarchy for promoting civic virtue. Extending the sovereign deliberative office to the body of citizens can potentially have the effect of instilling virtues, should they have a right conception of virtue. But the warnings of Thomas still ring clear; freedom to consider the common good can easily degenerate into the license to interpret it for oneself. Then again, Alasdair MacIntyre may well be correct that the loss of virtue in our modern republic is the legacy of Enlightenment liberalism, rather than a problem with republics per se.[36] This is why we must turn to briefly consider a familiar aspect of republicanism, sometimes called “civic humanism”—the politics of virtue.

Freedom to consider the common good becomes the justification of republican legitimacy, made in so many polemical Revolution-era pamphlets against obnoxious “slavery,” “corruption,” and “conspiracy.” This is why republicanism always carries strong undertones of civic humanism and a politics of virtue; virtue is integral to the legitimacy of the republic.

Virtus describes a public act—Hannah Arendt underlines the necessary publicness[37]—that secures some benefit for the republic by one’s own courage, valor, or magnanimity. In Rome it was associated with military service and the cursus honorum, though Cicero mentions women that display virtus (despite the gendered implications of the term) in their domestic life. Although the term is closely related to an aristocratic nobility, Cicero and Sallust in particular were concerned with defending the applicability of virtus (even the greater value and urgency of virtus) to the life of the novus homo.

Christianity is sometimes construed as inimical to republican virtue. Hannah Arendt quotes Tertullian to this effect: “nec ulla magis res aliena quam publica.”[38] Indeed, Jesus teaches a code of morality that can be fulfilled privately; you are to do good works secretly “that your Father who sees in secret” will reward you for (Matthew 6:4-18). But any student of politics—Thomas included—recognized political virtues. Orestes Brownson glosses the point, “France owes infinitely less to St. Louis [Louis IX] than to Louis XI, Richelieu, and Napoleon, who, though no saints, were statesmen.”[39]

In America, there is precedent for incorporating virtue into a Christian republicanism, and also for Christian republicanism to dethrone a politics of competing interests. John Patrick Diggins shows how Hermann Melville and especially Abraham Lincoln, versed in the language of good versus evil, appealed to the Founding and the Declaration of Independence as religious text. (Indeed, Jacques Derrida has argued that the circular logic of the document, wherein the people’s representatives “sign the people into existence,” depends on God’s countersignature for authorization.)[40] Lincoln consecrates an American Republic based on a revolution older than the constitutional compact, “carrying on the classical tradition inaugurated by Machiavelli” while also fusing what Machiavelli had sundered: political virtù and moral virtue.[41]

At the time of Lincoln and Melville, Orestes Brownson, the sadly neglected American Catholic political theorist of the nineteenth century, points towards the ancient republicanism of virtue that predates the “modern infidel school.”[42] His own turn away from “liberal Catholicism” in 1874, and towards a more robust Catholic public discourse of virtue, should point towards Catholic republicanism. Of course, in Brownson’s time, it was mostly Protestants arguing that American democracy and Catholicism were incompatible. Catholics have only more recently jumped on that bandwagon in earnest. But it is unclear that these American “radical Catholics” have understood how their country was founded ‘in the dread of modernity.’

Brownson echoes Aristotle in passages of The American Republic (1865) that the constitution must fit the body politic like “your shoes to your feet.”[43] Human beings have dominion over creation, but not license to dominate other human beings, Brownson reasons, so the “only form or system that is necessarily illegal is the despotic.”[44] Brownson cautions his readers against ideological politics:

Religious propagandism is a right and a duty, because religion is catholic, and of universal obligation; and so is the jus gentium of the Romans, which is the only application to individuals and nations of the great principles of natural justice; bot no political propagandism is ever allowable, because no one form of government is catholic in its nature, or of universal obligation.[45]

Brownson indicts the Jacobins and English liberals (“since 1688”) of this kind of political propagandism. They threaten a core tenet of republicanism, denying the existence of a sovereign people—“Cicero, and St. Augustine after him, understood the people as the republic, organized in reference to the common or public good.”[46] We have the sovereign authority, and some of us undoubtedly the duty, to seek political solutions for the common good. The generation of Melville, Lincoln, and Brownson shows that “Church and state, as governments, are separate in deed, but the principles on which the state is founded have their origin and ground in the spiritual order,” a fact that unites the political and religious destiny of the people.[47]

Catholic Americans are well placed to articulate this politics of the common good at a time when the “myth of liberalism” has co-opted the American Founding as an expression of individualism and Enlightenment premises. God has graced Americans with a relatively orderly and bountiful republic, a powerful republic with deep resources for its own renewal. A dose of Aristotelian pragmatism—a healthier variety of the stuff Americans imbibe overmuch—should cure American Catholics of fantastic political theories long since confined to the past. But that does not mean we need to read our political heritage through the overly simplistic lens of Lockean natural-rights liberalism.

Today, the Catholic republican may have something to say about the obnoxious power of moneyed interests, corporate lobbyists, media gatekeepers, special interests, entrenched bureaucracies, etc. The Catholic republican may have something to say about pluralism. Hardworking American families, out of charity that sometimes seems misguided, tolerate an awful lot of shenanigans by those who presume to flaunt our republican values, even as they drive our roads, attend our schools, and sleep peacefully defended by our servicemen. And if he is called a socialist, the Catholic republican may have something to say about the billy club of “anticommunism,” which has twisted the very meaning of the American Republic and hammered it into a brittle mold of Enlightenment rationalism and atomistic individualism. It is time the Republic was reforged to dispel all of this obnoxiousness.

NOTES

[1] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2007), p. 208.

[2] John Courtney Murray, We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1988).

[3] Patrick J. Deneen, “A Catholic Showdown Worth Watching,” The American Conservative, February 6, 2014. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/a-catholic-showdown-worth-watching/

[4] Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1955).

[5] Murray, We Hold These Truths, 11 and 47.

[6] Are the Founders innovators of a basically new, modern natural rights liberalism (as Michael Zuckert claims), or do they preserve and continue an English Whig tradition and, further back, perhaps even traditions of late modern constitutionalism or the federal theology of the Reformed tradition? See Michael Zuckert, Natural Rights and the New Republicanism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).

[7] Christopher Ferrara, Liberty, the God that Failed (Tacoma, WA: Angelico Press, 2012).

[8] Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967).

[9] J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 545. See also, “The Myth of John Locke and the Obsession with Liberalism,” in John Locke, eds. J. G. A. Pocock and Richard Ashcraft, (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clarke Memorial Library, University of California, 1980).

[10] J. G. A. Pocock, “Virtue and Commerce in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 3 (1972): 119-34.

[11] http://w2.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_09051897_divinum-illud-munus.html

[12] Philip Pettit, Just Freedom (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Co, 2014), 4.

[13] Seneca, Moral Essays, ed. by John Basore, 3 vols., (London: Hememann and Putnam’s, Loeb’s Classical Library, 1928-35), Vol. III, 164.

[14] Livy, Livy, Books I and II, ed. B. O. Foster (Cambridge, MA: Loeb’s Classical Library, 1919), 2. 1. 1, 218. See also C. Wirzubski, Libertas as a Political Idea at Rome During the Late Republic and Early Principate (Cambridge University Press, 1960), 9.

[15] Livy, Livy, Books XXV-XXXVIII, ed. Evan T. Sage (Cambridge, MA: Loeb’s Classical Library, 1935), 35. 32. 11, 94.

[16] Philip Pettit, Just Freedom (W. W. Norton, 2014).

[17] Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 64-67.

[18] Ibid., 97.

[19] J. G. A. Pocock, Introduction to Political Works of Harrington (Cambridge University Press, 1977), 145.

[20] Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. I (Cambridge University Press, 1978), 63-4.

[21] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. A. R. Waller (Cambridge University Press, 1904), 506.

[22] Aristotle, Politics, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Unversity Press, 1944), 1277 b 9-10.

[23] Ibid., 1278 b 10.

[24] Ibid., 1275 b 8-10.

[25] Ibid., 1273 b 32-3.

[26] Orestes Brownson, The American Republic (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2003), 103.

[27] A. John Simmons, Moral Principles and Political Obligations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979).

[28] Thomas Aquinas, De Regno, ed. Joseph Kenny, O.P. (Toronto: The Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1949), 3.19.

[29] Ibid., 5.31.

[30] Ibid., 6. 39.

[31] Alasdair MacIntyre, “Natural Law as Subversive: The Case of Aquinas,” Ethics and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 47.

[32] Thomas Aquinas, De Regno, 16.117

[33] Thomas More, Utopia in The Complete Works of Thomas More, vol. IV, ed. Edward Hurtz, S.J. and J. H. Hexter (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965), 56.

[34] Niccolò Machiavelli, Il principe e Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio, ed. Sergio Betelli (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1960). Quoted in Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism, 62.

[35] Sallust, Bellum Catilinae in Sallust, ed. John C. Rolfe (London: Loeb’s Classical Library, 1931), 7.2, 12.

[36] Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981).

[37] Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1963), 79.; Hannah Arednt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 49.

[38] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 74.

[39] Orestes Brownson, The American Republic, 113.

[40] Jacques Derrida, “Declarations of Independence,” trans. Tom Keenan and Tom Pepper, in New Political Science (1986), 7-15.

[41] John Patrick Diggins, The Lost Soul of American Politics (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 326.

[42] Orestes Brownson, “Native Americanism,” in Brownson’s Works, ed. Henry F. Brownson, 20 vols. (Detroit: Thorndike Nourse, 1882-87), 10:17–37.

[43] Orestes Brownson, The American Republic, 120.

[44] Ibid., 118.

[45] Ibid., 120.

[46] Ibid., 122.

[47] Ibid., 257.