If Aquinas's case for a moderate yet ennobling legal pedagogy of ethical virtue is judged persuasive, we may nonetheless be troubled by the case Aquinas appears to mount in the ST for the political enforcement of the religious, supernatural, or specifically Christian virtues of faith, hope, and charity. These three theological virtues are linked in Aquinas's schema to a number of infused moral virtues, which unlike their natural counterparts are not acquired by dint of moral training and habituation, but are rather gratuitous gifts from God allowing a person to orient all of his or her actions and attitudes toward friendship and union with God, towards membership in God's household and good citizenship in the heavenly City (cf. ST I–II 63, 4).

This book began, appropriately enough in view of its topic, in the form of a “disputed question”: what benefit can contemporary political theory gain from engaging Aquinas's ethical and political thought, most specifically his concept of the common good (bonum commune)? From this “focal question,” again appropriately enough, a number of related queries arose, sometimes from the author herself and sometimes from her colleagues: Why should a book on the political common good focus more centrally on Aquinas than on Aristotle, Aquinas's mentor after all, and the founder in Politics III of common good–centered political theory? How does Aquinas navigate a key problem that seems intrinsic to the very concept of the common good, namely, how to give priority to the common good in social and civic life without undercutting or alienating the goods of individual persons? What for Aquinas is the nexus point of personal and civic flourishing, and how can locating and understanding that link alleviate the tension between personal and communal happiness? Finally, what about the religious or theological nature of most of Aquinas's works? Doesn't that limit their theoretical significance and restrict their credibility for most scholars today? Doesn't Aquinas's theological emphasis imply that only a closed community of Christian or even Catholic believers can identify with his thought, especially when it deviates from Aristotle's hard-headed philosophic reasoning? And if this is so, aren't we better off accepting a potentially less complete but nonetheless more tenable account of personal and common goods?

In the previous chapter we saw Aquinas unearth in his Commentary and appropriate in his ST Aristotle's first political-philosophic foundation in Politics I: the relative yet real naturalness of civic life for human beings, and the close link between this naturalness and that proper to the virtues, about which more will be said in the last part of this chapter. In this chapter I explore another political-philosophic foundation common to both Aristotle and Aquinas, and from that vantage point begin to question the absolute affinity between Aquinas's and Aristotle's foundations for political theory. My analysis focuses first on Aquinas's more ambivalent response to Aristotle's second civic foundation in the distinct natures and requisites of political regimes and their corresponding versions of political virtue. I argue that as a consequence of finding faults in Aristotle's second foundation, Aquinas defers or declines to comment on Aristotle's science of the absolutely best regime – the Philosopher's third political-philosophic foundation in Politics VII and VIII. Instead, Aquinas sets out to reinforce an Aristotelian grounding for politics with a new ethical foundation of his own: his theory of natural law and the human inclination toward moral virtue.

The argument of this chapter commences with what I have termed Aristotle's second foundation: the centrality of regime particularity, citizenship, and civic virtue to politics and political science, as elaborated in Book III of the Politics and the corresponding sections of Aquinas's Commentary.

Contemporary political philosophy has not overlooked the problem of the common good; indeed, scholars of political thought and normative theory have recently reviewed the question of the common good from a variety of vantage points. Anglo-American (or broadly “analytic”) political thought is no exception. Not surprisingly, given the contours of the current Anglo-American world, some prominent representatives of this tradition of inquiry are sensitive to the desirability of balancing (or completing, or replacing) rights-based theoretical and civic discourse with a deeper appreciation of shared goals and goods, including goods of character. Against the backdrop of the previous chapter's explication of the promise and problem of the common good, this chapter surveys the approaches to the common good found in seminal works by three prominent Anglo-American theorists: John Rawls, Michael Sandel, and William Galston.

I will argue that Rawls's academic blockbuster A Theory of Justice (TJ: 1971; rev. ed. 1999), philosophically more important and engaging, in my view, than Rawls's later writings postdating his pragmatic or “political” turn (see Rawls 1985, 1993), accords an unusually significant place for a liberal theory to the concept of the common good. I paint in broad strokes Rawls's deontological contractarian theory of the common good, one paradoxically built on a strong recognition of the radical separateness of desires and ends pursued by diverse human beings, as Rawls presents it in Part Three of TJ.

Thus far in Part II we have seen Aquinas follow or rather precede the three Anglo-American theorists of Part I, in learning from Aristotle's ethics and political theory and especially from the Philosopher's political-philosophic foundations. In Chapter 3 we observed Aquinas unearthing and appropriating Aristotle's argument for the naturalness of social and political life for human beings, an argument that seems in turn to entail the conclusion that humans by nature seek to participate in the common good of a just social order and a flourishing civic community, although any particular political community has only a relatively natural status vis-à-vis its members. In Chapter 4 we saw Aquinas comment on Aristotle's second foundation, the argument in Book III of the Politics supporting the centrality to political theory of regimes, citizenship, and civic virtue.

In framing our original plan of this work, we adopted a number of guidelines which formed our prospectus for the contributors and which, by and large, still lend direction to and map the limits of this volume. We were determined in the space available to provide as comprehensive a treatment as possible of eighteenth-century political thought in the diverse historical contexts of the period, instead of a series of essays on our subject’s acknowledged masters. We wished to give due weight to the polemical character of eighteenth-century disputations and to the circumstances surrounding the composition of the works at issue, rather than to subsume their differences of principle or perspective in separate chapters manifesting the internal logic of each author’s career. We accordingly aimed for a largely thematic framework in preference to an interconnected collection of intellectual biographies. In addition to focusing on the seminal writings of the vanguard of the eighteenth-century’s republic of letters, we also wished to address the texts ofrelatively minor figures who often couched their contributions to both national and international debates in locally specific contexts and idioms. We sought to survey not only the towering treatises of the age of Enlightenment but also a large number of its disparate pièces fugitives, in part because we thought it necessary to fill in the valleys from which the peaks arose, but more generally because, in our judgement, some of the most centrally recurrent topics of eighteenth-century political thought were pursued in works that were perhaps of greater historical than philosophical significance.

An older historiography of the Enlightenment took the defence or rejection of Christian belief as its starting point and, dividing the world into ‘believers’ and ‘unbelievers’, regarded political thought as derivative of these groupings. Unbelief unleashed a ‘liberal’ assault on monarchy and social hierarchy, while belief came to the defence of these institutions, resulting in ‘conservative’ political thought (see, for example, Martin 1962). This model does justice to something that was incontestably new in the eighteenth century: namely, the emergence of emancipated, secular thought. Yet it is not without its limitations, chief among them being its underestimation of the ‘enlightenment’ of, and dissent within, ‘believing’ communities. Accordingly, this chapter explores the political ramifications of the divisions between ‘orthodox’ and ‘heterodox’ within eighteenth-century Europe’s believing communities. It asks to what extent the religious and theological differences separating Jesuits from Jansenists, orthodox Lutherans or Calvinists from Pietists, and High Church Anglicans from English Dissenters took the form of differing political visions, not only about the church but also about state and society. In so doing, it broaches the relationship between divergent religious sensibilities and differing kinds of political thought. The heart of the most ‘irreligious’ of Europe’s Enlightenments, France, should provide the acid test of any religiously oriented construal of eighteenth-century political thought. France, therefore, must be this European grand tour’s first and longest stop.

Although they were preceded by several decades of political contestation, the debates of the French Revolution can reasonably be said to have begun on 5 July 1788, when Louis XVI agreed to summon the Estates General after a lapse of almost two centuries. Declaring the royal archives inadequate to determine how that body had once been convened, the king invited his subjects to investigate the precedents for calling an assembly that would be ‘truly national, both in its composition and in its results’ (Baker 1987b, pp. 143–5). This was a remarkable pronouncement in what was still thought to be an absolute monarchy, since it invited public enquiry not only into the entire history of the realm but also the ultimate definition of the ‘truly national’. No earlier constitutional crisis in France had unleashed a response comparable in force and magnitude to the torrent of political argument that was now to sweep the country.

Competing discourses of the Old Regime

Participants in this debate could draw upon a variety of discourses forged in the course of several decades of political contestation. A discourse of justice drew on the conceptual resources of a French constitutional tradition dramatically revived and reworked by defenders of the parlementsin opposition to the royal ‘despotism’ which was increasingly their target after 1750. Juxtaposing the lawful (justice) with the arbitrary (will), it upheld the principles of a society comprised of orders and Estates, governed according to regular legal forms, secured by magistrates exercising their functions of judicial review and registration of laws in the parlements.

Scepticism, Judaism, and the natural history of religion

Philosophical scepticism, the questioning of the adequacy of evidence to justify any view or belief, and the questioning of the criteria for deciding intellectual issues in any domain whatsoever, reached its high point in modern philosophy during the eighteenth century. At the beginning of the century the complete edition of Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique (1702) appeared, raising sceptical problems about matters in philosophy, theology, science, and history, and providing what Voltaire called ‘the arsenal of the Enlightenment’. Bishop Pierre Daniel Huet’s Traité philosophique de la faiblesse de l’esprit humain(Treatise on the Weakness of the Human Mind), a forceful presentation of Pyrrhonism, written at the end of the seventeenth century but published posthumously in 1723, became a sensation (Popkin 1993, p. 139). The Traité appeared twice in English, and in Italian, Latin, and German in short order. In 1718 the most scholarly edition of the writing of Sextus Empiricus was published by J. A. Fabricius, with the Greek text and Latin translations. This was soon followed by two printings of a French translation of Sextus’s Hypotyposes (Outlines of Pyrrhonism), and David Hume carried the sceptical analysis of human reasoning to its highest point in his Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40). A mitigated form of scepticism was developed by many French Enlightenment thinkers, culminating in the radical scepticism of Jean-Pierre Brissot and Condorcet in the last quarter of the century.

The American Revolution transformed thinking about politics. Its significance goes beyond the creation of the United States of America. ‘The independence of America, considered merely as a separation from England, would have been a matter of little importance’, wrote Thomas Paine in 1791, ‘had it not been accompanied by a revolution in the principles and practice of government’ (Paine 1989, p. 152). The era of the Revolution was undoubtedly momentously creative in its political thought, but the contributions were collective, not individual; they were the products not of closet philosophising but of contentious political debate. The Revolution spawned no great theorists of the stature of Hobbes, Locke, or Montesquieu; no Rousseau, not even a Burlamaqui or a Pufendorf. The revolutionary leaders were widely read and thoughtful men, but they were not philosophers, and they did not work out their theories in the quiet of a study (though some like James Madison tried to do so). They were experienced, pragmatic political leaders who competed for power, lost and won elections, served in colonial and state legislatures and in the national congress, became governors, judges, even presidents. Yet they were also intensely interested in ideas and concerned with making theoretical sense of what they were doing. Because they were so intimately involved in politics, much of their thinking was polemical and of the moment. They usually had to extemporise in the heat and urgency of debate. Most of their many political writings took the form of pamphlets and newspaper essays, and only occasionally large treatises, such as John Adams’s sprawling Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States (1787–8).

The historical background

At the heart of social contract theory is the idea that political legitimacy, political authority, and political obligation are derived from the consent of the governed, and are the artificial product of the voluntary agreement of free and equal moral agents. On this view, legitimacy and duty depend on a concatenation of voluntary individual acts, and not on ‘natural’ political authority, patriarchy, theocracy, divine right, necessity, custom, convenience, or psychological compulsion. Michael Oakeshott was thus right to call contractarianism a doctrine of ‘will and artifice’ (1975a, p. 7).

While traces of contract theory can be found in ancient and medieval thought, and while the doctrine has recently been revived by John Rawls, it is generally agreed that the golden age of social contract theory was the period 1650–1800, beginning with Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) and ending with Kant’s Rechtslehre (Metaphysics of Morals, 1797;Rawls 1972, pp. 11–13; Riley 1982, 1983). For at least the following century it was eclipsed by utilitarianism, Hegelianism, and Marxism. But between the mid-seventeenth and the early nineteenth centuries consent emerged as the leading doctrine of political legitimacy. Hobbes urges in chapter 42 of Leviathan that ‘the right of all sovereigns is derived originally from the consent of every one of those that are to be governed’, and in chapter 40 he insists that human wills ‘make the essence of all covenants’ (Hobbes 1991, pp. 395, 323). Locke in the second of his Two Treatises of Government argues that ‘voluntary agreement gives … political power to governors’ (TTG, ii, §173, p. 383).

Rousseau

A Protestant among Catholics, a proud citizen of the tiny republic of Geneva among cosmopolitan fellow travellers of monarchical imperialism, a critic of modernity at its most fashionable eighteenth-century shrine, Rousseau was spiritually estranged from the intellectual circles in Paris to which he had previously been drawn when, in 1750, he won the prize offered by the Academy of Dijon by responding in the negative to its question, ‘Has the restoration of the arts and sciences contributed to the purification of morals?’ With the publication of this work, his First Discourse, he immediately became a celebrity and thereby launched his literary career as chief critic of the age of Enlightenment. When, in 1755, in addressing the same academy’s question, for another prize competition, on ‘What is the origin of inequality among men, and is it authorised by natural law?’, he condemned both the loss of innocence and lack of virtue prevalent in refined society. Private property, he asserted in his Second Discourse, was the principal source of that form of unnatural inequality which gives rise to governments, rulers, and violence.

Rousseau here, as well as in his Essay on the Origin of Languages largely drafted some years later (and first published posthumously in 1781), sketches a theory of historical development according to which mankind must originally have lived in a purely animal and unsociable state of nature, driven by hunger and sexual appetite alone. In that condition man’s only inclinations would have been self-love and compassion, Rousseau argues, but as the human race multiplied, this simple form of life would have disappeared.