It is not Unjust that the King be Deposed
A reader with the sapient sure-to-win name of Sophia’s Favorite remarks:
“This country owes far more to medieval common law, though it expresses it in then-current terms, many of them also used by liberals, than to “classical” liberalism…”
Interesting. You are the only person other than me I have ever heard say this.
Perhaps fancifully, I think one can interpret the Founding Fathers as attempting to erect a secular version of the Medieval social order, complete with local fealties, a non absolute monarch as cheif executive, and a senate or moot of barons, except without a Catholic Church to act as a federal source of unity between local sovereigns.
A secular version of a Church will allow new members, if they convert and are baptized into the mysteries of the Consistution, and will have the zeal of crusaders.
Trying to create a Catholic social order without catholicism, however, leads to difficulties eventually. What a secular federalism will not have is a common moral vision among the several states, or a system of welfare and education run by monks and nuns.
This weakness can be exploited, and was. A secular version (or, rather, perversion of that) of the feminine, educational, and welfare side of the Church will grow up like a parasite.
And so the socialists like Dewey convinced the hapless Americans to saddle us with a public school system, and the Dems like LBJ, eager to herd the Negroes back onto the plantation, saddled us with a welfare state.
The idea that the so called Enlightenment was, by and large, a repackaging of the logical ideas first elucidated by the logical men of the logic-loving so called Middle Ages, also has more merit than a student indoctrinated in a modern school might credit. For one thing, the moderns do not tend to read their ancestors, or to know from what axioms their conclusions some.
Mr. Favorite goes on, in another comment, to quote the Angelic Doctor:
“If to provide itself with a king belongs to the right of a given multitude, it is not unjust that the king be deposed or have his power restricted by that same multitude if, becoming a tyrant, he abuses the royal power. It must not be thought that such a multitude is acting unfaithfully in deposing the tyrant, even though it had previously subjected itself to him in perpetuity, because he himself has deserved that the covenant with his subjects should not be kept, since, in ruling the multitude, he did not act faithfully as the office of a king demands.”
—Thomas Aquinas, On Kingship, 7.49
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
