Modernity, Common Goods, and Jacques Maritain (Part 1)
The first parts of this paper are elementary expositions of positions that will be presupposed or alluded to in the arguments of later sections that concern Maritain’s thought. The reader is asked not to feel insulted by being subjected to these initial, all too familiar accounts. This paper is designed to define issues and to set an agenda rather than as a defense of the positions that I take.
Some Aristotelian Thoughts
Aristotle uses the expression “common good” rarely. But later conceptions of the common good owe a great deal to two of his central claims: that there is such a thing as the good of the political society, the polis, which is prior to and not reducible to the goods of individuals (NE I, 1094b7–10), and that individuals can only function well as human beings through membership of and participation in the life of the polis (Politics I, 1253a18–28). They achieve their individual goods, which are other than and more than their goods qua citizens, only through having lived the life of and achieved the good of a citizen. To excel in exercising the faculty of guiding a city (politikē dunamis) requires high virtue, unsurprisingly since the good at which its exercise aims is the achievement of justice, which is for the common advantage (Politics III,1282b14–18). The rule of law is necessary, but not sufficient for the achievement of justice, which requires just legislators and administrators.
The aim of good legislators is to educate citizens into the exercise of the virtues (NE II,1103b2–6), those excellences without which they will be unable to achieve either their own goods or the common good of the political society. Here we have to be careful to avoid the moralistic flavor which the word “virtue” and its cognates have acquired in modern English. Virtues, aretai, are just those qualities that enable one to live well as a human being. A good regime is one that has regard to, that aims to achieve the common good, to koinon agathon (Politics III,1284b3–7). Such a regime excludes (i) tyranny; (ii) rule by this or that section of the community in its own interest; (iii) rule that presupposes that the relationships and aims of political societies are either those of a military order, as at Sparta (Politics II, 1269a29–1271b19), or of a commercial enterprise (Politics III,1280a34 1280b11); and (iv) rule by the kind of democrat who believes that to be free is to do whatever one wants (Politics V,1310a 31–32).
Aristotle himself of course believed that participation in political society thus conceived was possible only for male Greeks and not for those of them who were productive workers, whether slave or free. But, as A.W.H. Adkins argued, these exclusions are incompatible with Aristotle’s central claims about the ergon and the aretē of human beings and they result in the incoherence of what he says about women and about natural slaves. The project therefore of a political Aristotelianism without Aristotle’s exclusions is a possible one. This is one of Aquinas’s projects.
Aquinas’ Conception of Common Goods
What I present as Aquinas’s theses and arguments are his mature positions, as set out in the Summa Theologiae. These are in important respects different from and constitute a rejection of the political views advanced in the De Regimine Principum.
Human beings, as Aquinas understands them, are parts of a number of wholes: of the household and family, of political society, of the universe. The good of a whole is the end of each of its parts and each individual qua family member, qua member of political society, qua being with this specific nature achieves her or his good only in and through achieving these various ends as well as her or his individual ultimate end which is more and other than these (Summa Theologiae IIa-IIae q. 47 a. 10, q. 58 a. 9). Angels too (Quaestiones disputatae de spiritualibus creaturis, a. 8), indeed members of every species, are by their natures directed towards the end of the universe in being directed towards their own good. There is therefore a common good of political society (Summa Contra Gentiles III, 80) and the common good of the household and family is such that, insofar as it is achieved, it contributes to the common good of political society (Summa Theologiae q. 90 a. 3).
The precepts of law are directed to the common good and therefore also to the common happiness or beatitude (90 a. 2). The precepts of the natural law, like the precepts of law in general, are precepts of reason (90 a. 1), which is to say both that one cannot fully understand them without also understanding that one has good reason to obey them and that, insofar as we are rational, we can distinguish between precepts that deserve our obedience just because obedience to them conduces to the achievement of our common good and precepts presented to us by the powerful under the guise of law, which in fact lack the force and authority of law. The good at which law aims is, as both Aristotle and scripture have said, justice (96, a. 4; IIa-IIae 57 a. 12, q. 58) and more widely a civic education into the virtues (Ia-IIae 92, art.1). So to have a care for the common good of family and household or of political society is to have a care for both a just ordering of those institutions, in which each individual receives her or his due, and for the justice of transactions between individuals and between individuals and institutions. If we ask “Why should we be just?”, the short answer is that it is only in and through just relationships that we are able to achieve not only the common goods of family and household, of political society, and of other forms of association, but also our own individual goods. Yet here it is important to understand that, in order to achieve my own individual good I have to become just, that is I have to learn to care for the common good for its own sake and not because, through caring for it, I achieve my own individual good.
Just positive laws are framed to meet the needs, among them the changing needs, of the whole community over time. They may not therefore always capture what is needed in particular cases in exceptional circumstances (96, art.1). And, while the aim of legislators in framing laws is to prescribe a way of life in which education into the virtues takes place, the laws themselves should not be aimed at prohibiting every moral evil, since the effect of such laws is apt to be to make human beings less and not more virtuous, which would be contrary to the common good. The precepts of positive law that have been framed in accordance with the natural law are of two kinds, those that hold for all societies in all times and places and those that are framed with an eye to the particular circumstances of this or that time and place (100, art.8). Precepts that do not accord with the natural law do not command our obedience as rational agents. It may on occasion be prudent to obey them, but it is not unjust to disobey and justice and reason sometimes require us to disobey.
The rule of a tyrant is “wholly corrupt” (95, art.4) and incompatible with the rule of law. Aquinas follows Aristotle in holding that there are various forms of legitimate government. And he follows both Aristotle and scripture in holding that the best form of government is a “benign mixture” of kingship, aristocracy, and democracy, democracy because it belongs to the people to elect the rulers (IIa-IIae 105, art.1). For “to order something to the common good is the business of the whole community or of someone acting on behalf of the whole community” (Ia-IIae 90, art.3). And law can be made only by the whole community or by someone authorized by the whole community.
In the thirteenth century—and not only then—Aquinas in advancing such views was a political eccentric. The political background that he took for granted was one of various political forms—kingdoms, city states, feudal lordships, diocesan administrations, monastic houses—and of contested jurisdictions: the king’s laws against local customary law, the king’s courts against the courts of rival feudal landowners, the authority of bishops against that of the superiors of religious orders, the claims of city councils against the claims of local landowners, of civil law against canon law, of pope against Holy Roman Emperor. What an understanding of the different kinds of law provides are resources for judging between rival claimants to authority over one. In particular the precepts of the natural law and of justice rightly conceived provide standards for evaluating political claims advanced both by secular rulers and by church authorities. And just as we can appeal against the decrees of secular rulers to church authorities, so we can in many areas appeal against both to the verdict of practical reason.
The Modern State
A first difficulty in being a political Thomist in the modern world is that in our world competing authorities and disputed jurisdictions are rare and exceptional. Between the thirteenth and the seventeenth century there emerges a type of state in which power and authority are centralized, in which the state claims and often moves close to achieving a monopoly in the use of violence, and in which the state recognizes no possibility of an appeal from the verdicts of its highest organs. There is a single system of law enforced within the well-defined boundaries of each state. The state determines who is subject to its authority and it requires loyalty from its subjects. The state has an exclusive right to tax and characteristically controls a central bank. It functions through hierarchically structured administrative bureaucracies. It is essential to the modern state that religion has a subordinate place in the lives of its subjects, that there is no appeal beyond the state to the church.
It has been up to the state to decide how far the state’s powers should extend. And states have generally made provision for education and welfare, have regulated and sometimes provided health services, while regulating transport, communications, and financial institutions and controlling travel across frontiers. States conduct censuses, register births, marriages, and deaths, and retain the right, even when they do not exercise it, to conscript its subjects for military service. States conduct covert operations. Politicians who on being elected to public office say that they will shrink the powers of the state and cut its expenditures characteristically enlarge those powers and increase those expenditures. A recurrent problem for those who by authority of the state wield the power of the state is how to justify that authority and their uses of that power.
The most compelling and influential solution to that problem has four parts. First is the claim that the authority and power of the state are justified by the benefits conferred by the state, sometimes in the Hobbesian form of a contrast between the law and order of states and the horrors of statelessness, sometimes in advanced societies by cataloguing the resources that the state makes available to its subjects. Secondly, it is claimed that the relationship between the state and its subjects is contractual. Once again there is a Hobbesian version according to which consent to the terms of that contract is implicit and a less startling version according to which subjects give their consent to the authority and power of the state by participating in the democratic processes through which governments are elected. This latter claim is sometimes presented in conjunction with a third and stronger form of justification, according to which the authority and power of democratic governments give expression to the political choices of the electorate voiced through voting. It is by voting as they do that plain persons authorize the actions of government and of the apparatus of the state more generally.
What then of states where either there is not universal adult suffrage or where conditions for genuinely free elections, including the rule of law and freedom of expression, do not exist? Individuals in such states have been denied rights that belong to them as individuals, independently of and prior to the enactments of positive law, such rights as the natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness of the American Declaration of Independence or the Rights of Man catalogued by Saint-Just for the Jacobins. And states which have recognized such rights are taken to be legitimated in part at least by that recognition.
Finally the problem of the relationship of the state to its subjects takes on a new complexity when it is not just the state but the-state-and the-market, the state as a locus of both political and economic power that those subjects confront.
The Social Teaching of the Catholic Church
The modern social teaching of the Catholic Church as explicit doctrine dates from the encyclical letter Rerum Novarum of Pope Leo XIII in 1892, modern in that it addressed peculiarly modern issues of the poverty of wage earners and of the unemployed in industrial societies, but not only modern, since it presupposes both Aquinas’s conception of justice and the precepts of scripture. It is important that what Leo XIII presented as authoritative teaching already informed the practice of bishops and priests in some parts of the world. Cardinal Manning, for example, had given unstinted support to the dockers’ strike of 1889, joining with such working class leaders as Tom Mann. That strike was the single most important episode in the growth of trade unionism in England among unskilled and semi-skilled workers and support for independent and militant trade unions was a crucial aspect of Catholic social teaching. But, since working men and women have a right to work and to work that should be meaningful, the goals which they should set themselves extend beyond trade union activity. What trade unions must strive for is a just wage, a wage that can support a flourishing family life, good hours of work and safe conditions of work, and just provision for health and old age. And plain people should be active participants in the politics designed to achieve these aims.
What are at stake in achieving or failing to achieve these are the common goods of at least three forms of association, those of families, those of workplaces, and those of political societies. The principle of subsidiarity enjoins that societies should be so organized that families are able, so far as possible, to provide for themselves, and, where they are not able to provide for themselves, local authorities should make the necessary provision. Only insofar as they are inadequate should central government function as the provider of last resort, which often enough it has to do. Notably required is the protection, nurture, and education of children from conception until entry into the adult world. (Hence the peculiar scandal of crimes of child abuse!)
As Catholic social teaching has been presented by national conferences of Catholic Bishops in the last half century three problems have become evident. First it is uniformly taken for granted that the structures and procedures of the modern state in its liberal democratic forms are such that through them the common good of political society can be achieved. The tension between the need to identify and to achieve common goods through active participation by plain persons in local grass roots politics and the imposition upon local societies of the party politics of national government is very occasionally noticed, but nothing beyond this. The fact that the modern democratic system requires that the vast majority of citizens should be politically passive, except at elections when the only choices that they are allowed to make are between alternatives selected for them by political elites goes unnoticed. The bishops have in general regressed from the distributist positions of G.K. Chesterton, who understood the evils of great concentrations of either political or economic power in the modern state.
Secondly, for understandable reasons the bishops have often for a time focused almost exclusively on this or that particular issue in this or that particular political situation. And for equally understandable reasons they have often presented Catholic social teaching on such particular issues detached from its philosophical and theological presuppositions, hoping thereby not to endanger political cooperation with those who do not share those presuppositions. The problem is that some of the central contentions of Catholic moral and social teaching are only fully intelligible in the light of those presuppositions. So the prohibition of abortion is an integral part of a larger conception of families and children detached from which it is bound to appear less intelligible than it is. So the hospitable concern for immigrants, including illegal immigrants, is grounded in a conception of the part that hospitality to strangers plays in the achievement of our common good, detached from which it must appear as arbitrary benevolence. The effect of this detachment is even more obvious, when we consider another notable aspect of the bishops’ recent teaching.
Among the many things that justice requires, on a Catholic and on a Thomist view, is that various individuals and groups should be accorded certain rights, most often through the enactments of positive law. The justification for recognizing those rights is that without such recognition just relationships and the common good cannot be achieved and that it is only through striving to achieve these that we can each of us achieve our own individual goods. On a distinctively modern conception of natural or human rights however the reason for recognizing many rights is that individuals already have rights just in virtue of being human individuals, a claim supported by a number of arguments all of which are contestable, indeed on my own view unsound. It is not just that the adherents of these two views differ in their accounts of how claims to rights are to be justified. They also differ in their catalogue of fundamental rights.
When however the bishops detach their teaching about rights from its theological and philosophical presuppositions, they tend to assimilate their view of rights to modern liberal views of human rights and often take themselves to have thereby discovered common ground for political and economic action. So there is now a shared rhetoric of human rights so influential that the present United Kingdom Home Secretary has made it one of the defining characteristics of terrorists, that they do not believe in human rights. Someone should introduce her to Jeremy Bentham.
Present day Catholic social teaching therefore is problematic in three respects: in its failure to put the powers of the modern state in question, in its treatment of single issue politics, and in its capitulation to the rhetoric of human rights. We might note in passing that their recurrent condemnations of the sometimes naïve Neo-Marxism of liberation theology, like their predecessors’ condemnations of atheistic communism, justified as both sets of condemnations have been, have prevented the Vatican’s theologians from learning from Marxism what they badly needed and need to learn. We should also note that Catholic social teaching as communicated through both the theory and the practice of the Catholic Worker movement is often free from the defects of the bishops’ presentations.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from Alasdair MacIntyre on Practical Philosophy, ed. Kelvin Knight and Peter Wicks (University of Notre Dame Press, 2026). It is part of an ongoing collaboration with the University of Notre Dame Press. You can read other excerpts from this collaboration here. All rights reserved.
