Commentary

• Aquinas: Moral, Political, and Legal Theory by John Finnis

  - John Finnis. Aquinas: Moral, Political, and Legal Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
  This launch volume in the Founders of Modern Political and Social Thought series presents a critical examination of Aquinas’s thought, combining an accessible, historically-informed account of his work with an assessment of his central ideas and… More

• “Marriage, Slavery, and Natural Rights in the Political Thought of Aquinas”

  - P. J. Cornish. "Marriage, Slavery, and Natural Rights in the Political Thought of Aquinas." The Review of Politics 60, no. 3 (1998): 545-62.
  Recent scholarship has demonstrated that the language of subjective natural rights can be found in a wide variety of medieval juristic and scholastic texts. This is part of a general trend in the study of political ideas that stresses the continuity between… More

• Liberty, Wisdom, and Grace: Thomism and Democratic Political Theory

  - John Hittinger. Liberty, Wisdom, and Grace: Thomism and Democratic Political Theory. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2002.
  Twentieth-century French philosophers Jacques Maritain and Yves R. Simon pioneered new approaches to understanding and defending political democracy in the wake of two world wars. Rather than break from a religious tradition that seemed to struggle against… More

• The Creative Retrieval of Saint Thomas Aquinas: Essays in Thomistic Philosophy, New and Old

  - W. Norris Clarke. The Creative Retrieval of Saint Thomas Aquinas: Essays in Thomistic Philosophy, New and Old. New York: Fordham University Press, 2009.
  W. Norris Clarke has chosen the fifteen essays in this collection, five of which appear here for the first time, as the most significant of the more than seventy he has written over the course of a long career. Clarke is known for his development of a… More