Weithman, P.J. “Augustine and Aquinas on Original Sin and the Function of Political Authority.” Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol. 30 (1992), pp. 353-76.
Excerpt:
“THE REDISCOVERY OF Aristotelian moral thought in the thirteenth century influenced medieval political theory profoundly. Recovery of Aristotle’s Politics,’ for example, made available to political theorists of the period analyses of political institutions that differed significantly from those they found in Patristic sources. Differences between Aristotle’s views and those of Augustine were especially striking. Thomas Aquinas was one of the first and most influential of the thirteenth-century Aristotelians. Charting the medieval assimilation of Aristotelian political ideas and the rejection of Augustinian politics therefore requires an adequate account of Aquinas’s own political thought and of his departures from political Augustinianism.””