Cavedon on Early Stirrings of Modern Liberty in the Thought of St. Thomas Aquinas @EmoryLaw @LawandReligion

Matthew Cavedon, Emory University, Center for the Study of Law and Religion, has published Early Stirrings of Modern Liberty in the Thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. The CSLR Research Paper No. is forthcoming. Here is the abstract.

In a 2021 contribution to Politics and Religion, Jesse Russell writes that St. Thomas Aquinas “had a decidedly illiberal view of a government.” He says that Aquinas “advocates a government in which the people are not given public liberty” and endorses skepticism toward the view that Aquinas “prepare[d] the way for the mixed monarchy of the English constitution.” But Aquinas identified consent as the foundation of political society, approved of democratic selection of public authorities, deemed “the best” type of government to feature popular representation, and warned that “a scheme should be carefully worked out which would prevent” the rise of tyranny. He was no proto-reactionary. The great modern rapprochement between Thomism and liberal democracy was borne of ideas that stirred in Aquinas’s own writings eight centuries ago.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.