Marsilius of Padua: The Defender of the Peace

The remaining and final task of this discourse is to infer, from what has previously been determined, the causes of tranquillity and its opposite in a city or realm. For this was the principal question according to the purpose we set ourselves from the start. And first of all we shall indicate these causes in their common nature, presupposing from Aristotle (in book V of his Politics) the individual definitions of those that arise in the usual way. Following on from there we shall offer a specific discussion of that unusual cause of discord or intranquillity in civil regimes, which we said in the proem had long disturbed – and continues increasingly to harass and disturb – the realm of Italy.

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To this end we must take up again the descriptions of tranquillity and its opposite already stated in chapter 2 of this discourse. For tranquillity was the good disposition of a city or realm, in which each of its parts is able to carry out the tasks appropriate to it according to reason and its institution. From this description the nature of tranquillity becomes clear. For when it says ‘good disposition’, this marks out its general intrinsic what-it-is. Whereas when it says that through it ‘each of the parts of the city is able to carry out the tasks appropriate to it’, this signifies its end, and this further enables us to understand its own particular what-it-is or differentia. Now since tranquillity is a kind of form or disposition of a city or realm, and is no more unitary than we argued a realm and city is (chapter 17 of this discourse, sections 11 and 12), it does not have a formal cause: for this is peculiar to composite entities. But we can grasp its active or productive cause from what was said in chapter 15 of this discourse and from the other things that necessarily accompany it in a city or realm.