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The term ‘Thomism’ may be understood in two
senses. In one it refers to the ‘school of Thomas Aquinas’, an unbroken
tradition since 1274 in which people study, teach and promote the thought of
Aquinas. In the other sense it seeks to identify the doctrines that distinguish
adherents of this school. These distinctive doctrines are, in the first place,
metaphysical and theological, rather than political, although it can be argued
that a distinctive political philosophy emerges from the application of Thomist
doctrines to questions of government.
Here ‘Thomism’ is treated in both senses.
In the first it requires identifying the important personalities and
significant events in the history of the school of Thomas Aquinas. In the
second it means considering the philosophical and theological teachings of
Aquinas that are relevant to political philosophy, in particular his
understandings of natural law, of the distinction between nature and grace, of
the human person, and of that in which human flourishing consists.
A School in History
Early
followers
Aquinas did not gather a group of disciples
to promote his thought and it is clear that he never intended to found a
‘school’. His secretaries and pupils finished some of the works left incomplete
at his death. Reginald of Piperno wrote the remainder of the Summa theologiae using earlier writings
of Aquinas and edited some of his Scripture commentaries. Two of Aquinas’s main
political works were incomplete and their subsequent editions much interfered
with, his commentary on Aristotle’s Politics
was finished by Peter of Auvergne, and his De
regno ad regem Cypri (On Government
to the King of Cyprus, also known as De
regimine principum) by Ptolemy of Lucca.
Although Aquinas nowhere presents a
complete political philosophy, some distinctions introduced by him begin to be
used with effect in early 14th century treatises on government. The
distinction between Church and state, for example, is placed on a new footing
on the basis of Aquinas’s distinction between grace and nature, as is also a
distinction between royal (regimen regale)
and political government (regimen
politicum), something he learns from Aristotle. Royal government belongs
with what Walter Ullmann calls the ‘descending’ theory of government
(sovereignty from above), whereas political government opens the door for the
‘ascending’ theory (sovereignty from below). There is a practical political
wisdom in Aquinas’s preference for a monarchy ruling in collaboration with an
aristocracy chosen by the people. His familiarity with the practical realities
came through his family’s involvement in the struggles between Pope and
Emperor, as well as through his contacts with those directly involved in
government both ecclesiastical and secular. Nor should the particular form of
government enjoyed by the Dominicans be overlooked: many, though by no means
all, Thomists have been Dominicans, members of the same Order as Aquinas, and
so sharing his experience of its democratic, representative and capitular form
of government.
Dante Alighieri may be regarded as an early
follower. Although Aquinas was not canonized until 1323, Dante’s Paradiso, written two years earlier,
already places Aquinas in a privileged place in heaven. Likewise Dante’s work
on government, De monarchia, has been
described as Thomism in practice. The idea of state sovereignty begins to take
hold in Dante, in other writings of the period, and in the Papal decree Pastoralis cura of 1313. To what extent
Aquinas and his followers reflect movements inspired from elsewhere and to what
extent they contributed to instigating or strengthening those movements is a
matter for debate.
One of the early Thomist to write on royal
and papal power was John of Paris (John Quidort) who drew Thomist principles to
their logical conclusion, arguing for the autonomy of the state as a natural
political community in which the king is chosen by the will of the people. John
was suspected of heresy on other matters though died before action could be
taken against him.
Renaissance
and Early Modern Thomists
A school of Thomists in northern Italy
before the Reformation shared the general interest of Thomists elsewhere in the
central concerns of Aquinas’s philosophy and theology, but some of them were
particularly interested in the practical and moral aspects of his thought. This
no doubt reflects also the particular political constitutions and concerns of
the city-states from which they came. Aquinas’s acceptance of Aristotle meant a
theory was available for what was already observed in practice in many places.
From the perspective of moral and political philosophy the most important of
these early renaissance Thomists is Saint Antoninus, archbishop of Florence,
who wrote much on questions of justice, law and economics.
Although their own form of government was
democratic and based on representative chapters of friars, Dominicans tended to
support the supremacy of the Pope against conciliarist ideas. At the same time
Thomists made very important contributions to the development of international
law in the 16th century. Francisco de Vitoria and his colleagues at
Salamanca, supported by Cajetan, especially when he was Master of the Order in
Rome, rejected the idea that the Emperor or even the Pope had a universal right
to wage war and appropriate the goods of other political communities. They
replaced the medieval notion of a universal jurisdiction of the Church with
natural law as a universal lex gentium
(‘law of nations’). Vitoria spoke of a global commonwealth or respublica which could enact the law of
nations. The customs, treaties and agreements that make up this law are binding
on individuals and come close to what natural law requires. In fact natural law
had developed in relation to, and informed by, such ideas of a lex gentium. Though they continued to
think of a state properly speaking as something less than a world community,
their thought defended the rights of Muslim and pagan states, for example,
against unjust aggression on the part of Christian states.
Domingo de Soto is another key figure among
the Salamancan Thomists. His work On
Justice and Right was the most often printed and widely distributed book of
legal and political theology in the 16th century. He said that he
could not see where Spain’s ‘right’ to its colonies in the new world came from.
He developed Vitoria’s notion of natural right adding to it a notion of
personal liberty. The question of balancing individual rights and liberties
with the requirements of the common good moved to the centre of political
philosophy. Early modern Thomism is marked by a tension between the priority to
be given to the common good (a prioritization that makes politics the highest
practical science) and the fact that each individual exists not purely for the
political community but for his own sake (propter
seipsum, the anti-totalitarian principle). The latter side of this tension
is seen for example in the rejection by all Thomist theologians of the use of
force in the process of evangelisation: to enforce conversion to Christianity,
Soto says, would be ‘against the natural right of freedom’.
Under the influence of Aquinas’s
appropriation of Aristotle’s thought, these 16th century Thomists
replaced another medieval political conception – rule by persons with a divine
mandate – with a modern one – an international rule of law based on the natural
law to which all human beings have access and which recognizes individual human
beings as bearers of rights and duties. It may seem paradoxical that this
understanding which undoes all theocracy is itself theologically founded, based
ultimately on the conviction that every human being is created in the image and
likeness of God. Although they move beyond Aquinas, their work is based on the
principles of his political thought. They developed what they had received
particularly 1) in speaking of subjective rights or freedoms complementary to
objective right, and 2) in giving a universal scope to notions of right and
liberty which apply to everyone ‘by nature’ (see Roger Ruston).
The humanizing influence of Aquinas’s
thought is seen in another important Thomist of this period, Cardinal Thomas de
Vio, known as Cajetan. His views on slavery stand out as enlightened for his
time. In response to Spanish actions in the New World he said that what was
going on amounted to robbery on a grand scale. The lords of these new lands, in
place before the Europeans arrived, and although they are unbelievers, are
lawful lords, he said. Slavery is the continuous affliction on a living human
being of personal violence and the enslavement of the people of the new world
is unjust and immoral.
Another key figure of the period is
Bartolomé de las Casas, conquistador turned Dominican friar and later Bishop of
Chiapas in Mexico. With the support of Cajetan and others his agitation and writings
eventually gained the response of Pope Paul III’s encyclical Sublimis Deus (1537), one of the
milestone statements in the process of weakening the acceptance of slavery by
Christian rulers. Not that it brought disagreement to an end: even in 1550 and
1551 de las Casas was obliged to debate with the Jesuit Sepulveda on the
question of the full humanity, and therefore of the rights and liberties, of
the native peoples of the Americas.
Thomism
in Decline
Although Aquinas continued to be recognized
as an important figure, later thinkers, even while regarding themselves as
‘Thomist’, departed significantly from some of the characteristic principles of
his thought. Thus Francisco Suarez, an original thinker in the philosophy of
law, developed it in an unThomistic direction, locating the essence of law in
the legislator’s will rather than in an ordinance of reason. Two difficulties
explain this move, one the fact that intellect and will are both involved in
the explanation of law and their relationship can be taken in different ways,
the other the fact that Aquinas’s account of natural law leaves the origin of
obligation unclear. The post-Reformation period wanted clearer answers to
questions about will and obligation and Suarez’s account of natural law can be
understood as an admirable attempt to provide such answers. However he concedes
so much to new ideas – developing a modern understanding of freedom as ‘active
indifference’, for example – as to make his fidelity to Thomism questionable.
Protestant thinkers struggled with the same
questions. ‘Keeping God in’ seemed now to require a voluntaristic understanding
of natural law so that when Hugo Grotius came to reject such an understanding
of law he felt able to take a further step and regard natural law as something
self-standing, having its meaning and force ‘even if there is not God’. But the
question of obligation remained unanswered, a gap Kant sought to fill with his
categorical imperative.
Richard Hooker is the most important of the
‘Anglican Thomists’. In his Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity he acknowledges his debt to medieval political
philosophy, accepts Thomist ideas of natural law and of power deriving from the
community, and adapts the notion of universal harmony to the nation-state. John
Locke acknowledges Hooker’s work in his Second
Treatise on Civil Government although on natural law Locke is more
influenced by Pufendorf.
Locke set limits to the claims of absolute
monarchy and showed that government is responsible to the people it governed.
This is what Aquinas taught also though Locke’s basis for it was different.
Beginning with the idea that every ‘man’ (the term is deliberate here) is
endowed with the inalienable rights of life, liberty and estate, the function
of government became for Locke that of giving effect to and preserving these
rights. In practice the focus moved to property, which then came to be regarded
as an absolute right and the basis for other civil rights (so only men of
property were entitled to representation in parliament). Lockean government
moved in the direction of an oligarchy of the propertied classes. Aquinas
warned about the possibility of any form of constitution becoming tyrannical,
including the aristocracy that becomes oligarchic, as well as offering a more
profound reflection on the basis of the right to private property, a right that
for him is relative and not absolute.
The differences that had by now emerged
between Aquinas’s presentation of natural law and those found in modern
political philosophy are connected with voluntarism, with the idea of a ‘state
of nature’ prior to the political order, and with an understanding of law as
setting limits to conflict rather than explaining the positive contribution of
the human creature within a theological, cosmic harmony. Thomist ideas carried
little weight in this new perspective, the highest good is no longer a matter
of concern, the common good is simply the sum of individual interests rather
than a qualitatively different good, and the human group is inherently problematic
rather than naturally collaborative. In modernity, then, the distinction
Aquinas made between the natural and supernatural orders becomes a full-blown
separation and even opposition between a ‘sacred’ and a ‘secular’ order, the
implications of which continue to be worked out in contemporary political
struggles and philosophy.
The Irish political philosopher Edmund
Burke is another example of an Anglican whose political philosophy may well
have been informed by Aquinas’s thought, by however circuitous a route (he
would have known Hooker at least). Burke appeals to principles that are
obviously congenial to the thought of Aquinas, notably in impeaching Warren
Hastings (for his treatment of Indians) ‘in the name and by virtue of those
eternal laws of justice which he has violated’ and ‘in the name of human nature
itself, which he has cruelly outraged, injured, and oppressed’.
Thomism
after the French Revolution
There is a revival of Thomism from 1879
with the publication of Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris, which argued that a return to scholasticism, in
particular to the thought of Aquinas, was the best response to 19th century philosophical difficulties about faith and reason. This ‘Leonine
Thomism’ as it is sometimes called reached its fullest development by the
middle of the 20th century
The French philosopher Jacques Maritain is
the most important Thomist political philosopher of this revival. In fact it
was politics that led to conflict with his mentor, Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange.
Maritain wrote in many areas of Thomistic philosophy, particularly epistemology
and metaphysics but with important ventures into the philosophy of education
and political philosophy. Garrigou-Lagrange taught in the areas of metaphysics,
dogmatic theology and spirituality and his extensive account of Thomism the Dictionnaire de théologie catholique has
nothing to say about political philosophy. In the 1920s Garrigou-Lagrange
organised ‘Thomistic circles’ that were attended by the young Maritain. They
collaborated with other French medievalists, philosophers and theologians in
the development of new approaches to Aquinas but fell out over the Spanish
Civil War and Vichy. It shows at least this much, that Aquinas’s political
philosophy, schematic as it is, is not one that falls on either side of the
‘right-wing’ / ‘left-wing’ divide in modern politics but is concerned with more
fundamental questions that inform political practice leaning in either
direction.
Maritain advocated what he called an ‘open
Thomism’ which would be conservative and yet progressive, faithful to the
teaching of Aquinas and yet capable of assimilating the insights of modern
philosophy and science. He was convinced that in Thomism were to be found the
principles for a realistic and existentialist metaphysics which alone, he
believed, could provide the basis of a political and ethical philosophy that
would do justice to the dignity of the human being and his relationship with
God. Maritain sought then to present a philosophy of being, of society and of
politics that would be open also to the gospel’s message of love.
His many works in political philosophy
include True Humanism, Man and the State, Freedom in the Modern World, Christianity
and Democracy, Moral Philosophy,
and The Rights of Man and Natural Law.
He developed a Christian social philosophy of what he called ‘integral
humanism’, a valuing of the human person that was also theological, that called
for a brotherhood of all peoples, and that respected human dignity and rights.
In the ideological turmoil of the 20th century Maritain said that a
new Christendom could only be established by a humanism that was heroic. He is
without doubt a democrat and he re-defines the basic political concepts of
Thomism – the body politic, the state, the people, and sovereignty – so as to
make them serviceable for the defence of democracy. Freedom becomes a central
concept in Maritain’s political philosophy.
Yves Simon is another important twentieth
century political philosopher who, with Maritain, sought to move the axis of Thomist
social and political theory towards liberal democracy (John P.Hittinger). Simon
sees in Aquinas’s view that law is properly enacted only by one who has care of
a whole community the seed of the ‘transfer’ or ‘transmission’ theory of power,
explicitly proposed by the Jesuit Thomists Suarez and Robert Bellarmine. This
theory regards government as legitimately established through a transmission
whereby the people transfer power to the rulers and this provides the basis for
democratic authority.
Maritain’s ‘personalist democracy’ was
criticized by Aurel Kolnai whose alternative political philosophy, ‘metaphysics
of political conservatism’, also appeals to Aquinas and to the importance for
him, as for all medieval thinkers, of the notions of hierarchy, privilege
(grace) and liberty. Kolnai’s work is in response to any tendency to regard
political life as capable of concerning itself with the fullness of human
flourishing. The higher realms of human experience in art, philosophy and
spirituality reach far beyond the concerns of politics, he says.
Maritain was the first Thomist to
contribute significantly to thinking about questions of authority and freedom
in the context of modern ‘pluralistic’ societies. A fundamental question is
whether the modern nation-state coincides, and to what extent, with what
Aristotle and so Aquinas meant by the state. The Catholic philosopher and
theologian Robert Sokolowski thinks that these two conceptions of the state are
irreconcilable, the modern Hobbesian Leviathan
being, appropriately, a totalitarian monster where Aristotle’s polis is a humane community of persons
in which reason can be exercised, prudence decide that forms and constitutions
are required as circumstances change, and prepolitical communities (or civil
society) be respected.
Sokolowski makes no mention of Aquinas and
argues that political philosophy has been short-changed by Leonine Thomism.
Maritain and Simon stand out as exceptions, he says, in a school for which
political philosophy practically disappeared, with just a few questions such as
just war and capital punishment being treated, and then as part of ethics
rather than in a political philosophy as such. As a philosopher Sokolowski is a
phenomenologist rather than a Thomist but his work is interesting in showing
how a Catholic understanding of the (Aristotelian) state, critical of the
Hobbesian alternative and dependent on the crucial notion of the person, can be
developed without any Thomist mediation.
To be noted also is the extensive
involvement of Dominicans in issues of social justice. Dominique Pire won the
Nobel Peace Prize in 1958 for his work on behalf of displaced persons after
World War II and he is just the most distinguished of a large group of thinkers
and activists from many parts of the world, all of them educated in the school
of Aquinas. Francesco Compagnoni and Helen Alford have edited a substantial but
by no means comprehensive record of Dominican involvement in such work.
Distinctive Doctrines
Distinctive doctrines of Thomism are, in the
first place, philosophical, even metaphysical, to do with understandings of
being and of the knowledge of being. Thomism is a moderate realism with a
common sense confidence in the ability of human beings to come to know their
world and appreciate to some extent how they ought to live if they are to
flourish within it. The natural philosophy, metaphysics and moral philosophy
that characterize Thomism are closely dependent on Aristotle. Thomists have
always regarded themselves as Aristotelians, keeping abreast of expanding
knowledge of Artistotle’s philosophy even when it came to be seen that
Aquinas’s knowledge of it was limited. One of the significant movements in
Thomism through the twentieth century has been a fresh realization of Aquinas’s
indebtedness to Neoplatonism for important aspects of his philosophical
theology.
In the early twentieth century the Roman
Catholic Church identified twenty-four theses in Thomistic philosophy that were
to be subscribed to by all Catholics as essential foundations for the
theological teachings of the Church. This was a controversial position, even
within the Church, and did not last long. Other attempts to identify the
doctrines of Thomism have been made but it is striking that political doctrines
tend not to feature in these lists. That of James A.Weisheipl is an exception.
Beginning with the distinction between nature and the supernatural he lists ten
principles of ‘Thomistic Philosophy’ and ten of ‘Thomistic Theology’. The sixth
philosophical principle reads:
By nature man (sic) has the right to cooperate with
other men in society in the pursuit of personal happiness in the common good;
this pursuit of happiness is guided by conscience, laws both natural and
positive, and virtues both private and public.
Thomistic doctrines that are most important
from the point of view of political philosophy, then, are natural law, the
distinction between nature and the supernatural, happiness, the virtues, and
the notion of person.
Natural
Law
For Aquinas natural law is the human being’s
participation in the eternal law. Such participation is intelligent and
responsible, making the human being a participant in providence and not simply
a passive object of it. All law is an ordinance of reason enacted by one who
has responsibility for a community and made known to that community. The right
to legislate positively that belongs to those who have such responsibility is
part of natural law even if the natural law does not determine in advance the
particular ways in which such laws should be enacted nor what their specific
content should be. The state, and so political authority, is natural for
Aquinas as it was for Aristotle. There is no ‘state of nature’ that precedes
the political community. Natural law establishes the need for certain elements
and values - e.g. possession of property by citizens, government in some form –
but there is still room for contractual agreement about the ways in which these
elements and values are to be pursued within a particular community. Thomist
understandings of natural law bring together many strands of earlier
philosophical thought, Roman jurisprudence and canon law. Such strands of
thought also included important considerations of notions such as ‘right’,
‘person’ and ‘sovereignty’.
Nature
and the Supernatural
Although the order of grace transcends the
order of nature it does not replace that order but perfects and fulfills it,
bringing nature to a fulfillment beyond its inherent capacities but still in
the direction of its natural inclinations to happiness. The most important
implication of this for political philosophy was a clearer distinction between
‘sacred’ and ‘secular’. Thus the person under grace is more than the natural
human being. This has two important consequences. The human being who is a subject
in the Church is at the same time a citizen in the State: there is autonomy of
the natural created order within the overall economy of grace. Thus Aquinas
acknowledges that there is true virtue among pagans (Summa theologiae I.II 65,2). But he believes also that true human
fulfillment is found only in the order of grace so that the human person is
always more than the citizen.
The state is a relatively ultimate end in
the line of the natural human instinct towards community. It is concerned with
‘the highest good’ Aristotle says, and Aquinas follows him in this. While it is
not the absolutely ultimate end – which is eternal life with God, or the
society of the heavenly kingdom – at the same time how can it be disentangled
altogether from human seeking of that ultimate end? The state is not just for
the management of evil tendencies but also for the promotion of good ones, for
the encouragement of virtue.
This distinction of the good citizen and
the good human being thus sets the scene for modern times. Some fear that
Aquinas’s distinction contained the seeds of a disjunction between the natural
and the supernatural that led eventually to secularization, the cutting of any
link between nature and God. Aquinas himself did not do this, nor would his followers
want to. It happens rather with Marsilius of Padua in the early 14th century with whom the link between nature and God becomes a matter of faith.
Aquinas’ understanding of natural law remained essentially theological and in
this he belongs more straightforwardly than does Marsilius to the traditions
coming down from the ancient Greeks and Romans.
Happiness
and the Virtues
For Aquinas full human flourishing requires
the body, not just the physical body but also the body politic of a human
community. The human being does not flourish alone. Such a life would be
beastly says Aristotle, though for Aquinas it is perhaps divine in the case of
some unusual saints. It is for the wellbeing of our beatitude (our complete
happiness) that we are bodily, Aquinas says, and our flourishing is enhanced by
the companionship of friends. Life in community requires the development of
dispositions or virtues if it is to be established and sustained. As the human
being needs to be temperate and confident if he or she is to be mature in
personal affairs, so he or she must develop especially the virtues of justice
and prudence in order to participate effectively in political life, the pursuit
of common goods.
The
Notion of Person
One of the central questions raised by
Thomism is whether the notion of ‘person’ presupposes a theological
understanding of human nature and destiny. Theological controversies in the
early centuries of Christianity helped to refine the meaning of ‘person’ and
‘humanity’. These notions are central in Maritain’s political philosophy, which
is an important influence on the Roman Catholic Church’s acceptance of the
language of ‘human rights’. Recent popes have been happy to use this
terminology, beginning with John XXIII in his encyclical Pacem in terris (1963). Paul VI was also significantly influenced
by Maritain’s work and made his notion of ‘integral humanism’ central to the
encyclical Populorum progressio
(1967). John Paul II’s social encyclicals likewise emphasize the dignity of the
human person and the centrality of human rights. Although he pursued doctoral
studies with Garrigou-Lagrange in Rome and was much influenced by Maritain,
John Paul II was not simply a Thomist. His thinking about political questions
is significantly shaped also by his lived experience of Marxist-Leninism as
well as by Max Scheler’s theory of value.
Contemporary Thomism
Contemporary debates appeal to Aquinas from
different perspectives. Some have sought to show that his political views are
compatible with forms of liberal democracy, and that his understanding of
natural law is not so dependent on theological beliefs that liberal critics
must reject it out of hand. On the other side are efforts to show that Aquinas
is misinterpreted if he is interpreted as liberal or as liberal-compatible,
arguing instead that his political views support just the kind of radical
critique of which liberal democracy stands in need, and that his
(theological-philosophical) understanding of natural law offers one of the few
credible alternatives to the dominant philosophy of culture. Thomists of
various shades are important contributors to contemporary debates about the
meaning and purposes of education, for example, as well as participating in
debates about war, bioethics and environmental ethics.
In the work of American students of Aquinas
such as Robert P.George and Peter Augustine Lawler, of Germain Grisez, Ralph
McInerny and Jean Porter, and of non-Americans influential on the American
scene such as John Finnis and Alasdair MacIntyre, is to be found a range of
interpretations of natural law, a variety of uses of Thomist ideas, and telling
contributions to contemporary political, social and cultural debates. John
Courtney Murray believed American Thomism’s most important contribution was to
defend a realist epistemology, to ground the genuine human goods to which
people aspire and to order freedom so that those goods might be affirmed as
genuine. Thomism’s strength continues to be in affirming the naturalness of
social and political life while underlining that the secular is not ultimate
for human beings. On the one hand emphasizing the importance of reason and
freedom, Thomist approaches seek to ensure that the state does not become
totalitarian (which can happen in religious, sacred dress also of course). The
tension between freedom and truth, identified so clearly by John Paul II in Veritatis splendor (1993), has its roots
not in 1960s libertarianism but much earlier, in the developments from
Marsilius of Padua to Thomas Hobbes and beyond to the French Revolution, a
tension that has grown ever stronger between a voluntarist idea of law as will
and natural law as an intellectualist idea. So Thomism, in Mark Guerra’s words,
can praise the virtues of liberal democracy while moderating its dehumanizing excesses.
Readings
- Cessario, Romanus (2003) A Short History of Thomism Washington, D.C: The Catholic University of America Press
- Compagnoni, Francesco and Alford, Helen (2007) Preaching Justice: Dominican Contributions to Social Justice in the Twentieth Century Dublin: Dominican Publications
- Garrigou-Lagrange, Reginald (1946) ‘Thomisme’ in Dictionnaire de théologie catholique 15.1, 823-1023 Paris: Librairie Letouzey et Ané
- Hittinger, John P. (2002) Liberty, Wisdom and Grace: Thomism and Democratic Political Theory Lanham, MD: Lexington Books
- MacIntyre, Alasdair (1990) Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry London: Duckworth
- MacIntyre, Alasdair (1999) Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues London: Duckworth
- Rowland, Tracey (2003) Culture and the Thomist Tradition: After Vatican II London and New York: Routledge
- Ruston, Roger (2004) Human Rights and the Image of God London: SCM Press
- Schneewind, J.B. (1998) The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
- Sokolowski, Robert (2001) ‘The Human Person and Political Life’ The Thomist 65 (2001) 505-17
- Ullmann, Walter (1965) A History of Political Thought: The Middle Ages Harmondsworth: Penguin
- Weisheipl, J.A. (1967) ‘Thomism’, in New Catholic Encyclopedia Volume 14 pages 126-135, McGraw-Hill Book Company: New York
