HoP 454 - By Appointment Only - Political Philosophy in the Second Scholastic
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I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, by appointment only, Political Philosophy in the Second Scholastic. I closed the last episode by saying that there's a close connection between the Iberian Scholastic's theories of law and economics and their political philosophy.

That connection lies especially in the concept of dominium, which modern day scholars usually don't translate, perhaps because the cognate English word dominion and the literal translation lordship would both be too narrow in meaning. For the scholastics, you have dominium over something and are the dominus over it if it is lawfully under your control.

Thus, according to Molina, humans even have natural dominium over their own actions, though it is God who is the dominus of human bodies, which is why suicide is sinful. Once private property is introduced into human affairs, under the law of nations, people can have dominium over other things, namely whatever they legally own.

This is very close to, if not the same as, saying that people have a right to use the things they own. This is why I can't show up at your house without your permission, start eating your food and sleeping in your bed. When Goldilocks did that to the three bears, she was infringing on their rights because they had dominium over the house, the bowls of porridge, and the beds. Or at least she would have been if they weren't bears. Molina tells us that animals have no rights because having rights and dominium presupposes being able to use reason.

Molina defines a right as a capacity to do something, obtain something, or demand it, and relates this to the concept of ownership as follows. When we say that someone has a right to something, we do not mean that anything is owed to him, but that he has a power over it, and it would cause him injury to contravene that power.

Notice that he here defines rights positively, not negatively. In other words, a right is directed at something particular that is under your control. It isn't that by default you have a right to do or use whatever the law does not forbid. Molina's definition also suggests another close connection between dominium and power, since if you have a right to something, or dominium over it, then it is under your power. This brings us to what we're interested in for today's episode, namely political power.

In this context, translating dominium as lordship or dominion seems more natural. Like dominium over one's possessions, political dominion is not simply part of the natural law. All governments of whatever form exist only because humans have decided to set them up. Even if humans are, as Aristotle said, political animals and have a natural tendency to form into political communities.

Much as they decided to allow certain people to own certain things, they decided to appoint certain people to exercise authority over them. Also, as with private property, this is an artificial measure we need because of humans' fall from grace. Perfectly good people would not need laws, but would spontaneously do the right thing. Given that we are far from perfectly good, state authority is created to ensure that the common welfare is promoted insofar as is possible.

Just like anything else introduced through human law, political authority must never conflict with a natural law. But that leaves plenty of scope for different forms of government. Vitoria observes that a constitution does not need to be perfect in order to be legitimate. Unsurprisingly, the Iberian scholastics living under the kings and queens of Spain and Portugal praised monarchy as the most perfect form of rulership. But the Commonwealth can also decide to be ruled by an oligarchy or to rule itself as a democracy.

What counts is the consent of the people to a government, not the type of government they consent to. Whatever the constitutional mechanisms, the goal is always the same: people subject themselves to state power because it is rational to do so. Here we come back to another connection I've pointed out before, between the Scholastics' political theory and their theory of causes.

As you might remember, just two episodes ago, I finished off by saying that the creation of states is in a sense natural, because we have a "natural desire" to pursue the common good as a final end, final ends being one of the four types of cause in Aristotelianism. But in another sense, the state is artificial. It is brought into being through a rational process, whereby humans discern that they will be better off living under a government than living outside of all political organization.

This sounds a lot like Thomas Hobbes, who, not much later, will famously say that people submit to a sovereign to escape from the state of nature. It seems clear that the scholastics' theory did pave the way for Hobbes, but their way of understanding the situation is quite a bit more optimistic. It's not that there was a war of all against all going on, and to put an end to it, people accepted political rule out of pragmatic self-interest.

On the Hobbesian account, political life is the lesser of two evils. Accepting subjugation means that human lives are not quite as nasty, brutish, and short as they would be in the state of nature. For the Iberian scholastics, by contrast, humans are creatures who naturally want to form communities together, and see to it that those communities flourish. Political life is the rational expression of that aspiration and the means of its fulfillment.

We can see this in its most basic form by considering what the scholastics have to say about another kind of social alliance, one that involves substantially fewer people: marriage. Following Aristotle, the schoolmen saw this as being in a sense political, and even as involving relations of justice. Marriage goes right back to the first humans, Adam and Eve. Their conjugal union came before their fall from grace, showing that even without sin, humans would still pursue some form of community with one another.

The two spouses offer each other mutual aid and are seen as partners. This core idea means that scholastic treatises on the topic, like those by Vittoria, Tomás Sánchez, and Pedro Ledesma, give women a surprisingly equal status within marriage, even if they less surprisingly also think that wives should obey their husbands. For Ledesma, marriage is a perfect society, created and sustained through voluntary cooperation.

Along similar lines, Molina said that it is shameful if a husband has to resort to punishment to get his wife to do as he wishes. It's noteworthy that community is more central to this understanding of marriage than procreation. Of course, the scholastics do think that reproduction and child-rearing are important functions of marriage, but Sánchez explicitly says that a husband and wife may, without sin, have sex simply out of desire, and without intending to have children. Otherwise, why would we let infertile people get married?

Perhaps even more surprising is that for Sanchez, marriage is not by nature permanent. He knows that outside Christianity, divorce is common, so clearly it is not part of the natural law, or law of nations, that the marriage bond should be unbreakable. The fact that it is so in the Christian faith is simply an imitation of Christ's unbreakable bond to the church. In other words, the whole "until death do us part" thing is purely theological and has no basis in natural reason.

Thanks to romantic comedies, if not personal experience, we're all pretty familiar with the way that two people enter into the marriage bond. Two people fall in love, go out to dinner, one of them hides an engagement ring in the dessert, the other one swallows it by mistake, and so on. How, though, do we enter bonds of political union in the broader sense? Well, it depends which scholastic we ask. But since he's so frightfully clever, let's ask Francisco Suarez.

Last time, we saw him emphasizing that legal obligations can only arise through a voluntary act of will by a legislator, and that applies here too. Even if human reason is involved in grasping the need for a state to secure general welfare, there still needs to be a voluntary decision on the part of the people to bring the state into being. By entering into a political arrangement, the people create an order and unity amongst themselves that was previously absent.

In fact, it is only after this decision is made that we can speak of a "commonwealth" as opposed to a mere agglomeration of individuals, or rather of families, since by marrying and having children, people had already fashioned smaller units of social order before they created the state. This sort of theory is often described by philosophers as positing a "social contract" between the people who agree to submit to rule by a government.

As in other versions of that theory, Suarez gestures towards a supposed moment apparently shrouded in the mists of the distant past when a decision was in fact taken to unite into a commonwealth. This may seem rather fanciful, especially when it is invoked to justify the existence not of something as specific as, say, the Spanish monarchy, but the maximally general law of nations which prevails over the entire world.

As we saw last time, this early version of international law, too, was justified in terms of consent. But it's hard to imagine how all humans could have reached even a tacit agreement about anything, at least before the dawn of modern communications technology. Not that this technology has helped us to agree with each other now, either. I mean, it's not as if messengers were sent across the globe on horseback to check that everyone was happy to start letting people own private property.

Some philosophers of this period did try to put some historical meat on the bones of their contract theories. We saw this with François Haughtmann, whose Franco-Gallia looked back to Carolingian times to justify the constraints he wanted to place on the French monarchy. But when it comes to Suárez, a more abstract question comes to the fore. Let's just assume that people really did form themselves into a commonwealth and subordinate themselves to a system of rule. Where did they get the authority to do this?

It looks like there's a chicken and egg problem here. The community needs to have the authority, power, or right to make itself into a unified commonwealth, but it is only once it is a unified commonwealth that it can possess and exercise such power. Vittoria and Molina seem to say that humans just naturally have authority over themselves, more specifically over their own bodies and their liberty. They are created by God already having this power and are then able to transfer this power to the ruler.

This relates to something else we discussed last time. According to Vittoria and Molina, slavery is unnatural, or as we saw Molina putting it, "by natural right all are born free". It's then up to humans to decide what to do with that freedom, which is why one can, in extreme circumstances, sell oneself into slavery, and have that sale be legally binding.

It's also why under normal circumstances people may appoint a power to rule over them politically, not as a master over slaves, but as a leader over a commonwealth whose good is the leader's uppermost objective. Suarez seems to be torn between this sort of idea and the idea that political rule can only be instituted through an act of voluntary choice.

In favor of the idea that humans have authority over themselves from their very creation, he points out that the people must have a power in the first place before they can grant it to a king or other authority. After all, you can't give what you don't have. On the other hand, as we've already seen, he puts a lot of emphasis on the idea that the political commonwealth only comes into being through a contract among people who are going to be members of the commonwealth.

He solves this problem by suggesting that authority resides in the people originally, as if in the roots. But that God also needs to play a role. Divine action, in cooperation with the decision being made by the people, is needed to transform a group of individuals into a proper political union. I can't help noticing that this looks a lot like the Catholic position on grace, where good acts likewise result from a cooperation between God and human agents.

But another scholastic, Juan de Salas, did not find the solution so graceful. He thought that, faced with this chicken and egg problem, Suarez had resorted to pulling a rabbit out of a hat. If the people taken as individuals don't have sufficient authority to come together to form a commonwealth, then God must be adding the needed authority. But surely this undermines the voluntary and contractual nature of political rule, exactly what Suarez was trying to establish.

Salas argued that, to the contrary, the power of authority does reside naturally in humans. God is only involved insofar as he is the one who created human nature. If we were to imagine humans existing without God in the picture, then such humans could still appoint legitimate rulers for themselves. Another interpretation of Suarez's position, though, would help him avoid the charges made by Salas. On this reading, voluntary acts of consent just are capable of pulling rabbits out of hats or, if you prefer, making chickens without eggs.

We see this with the example of promising, or taking oaths. To take an oath is to create a new obligation that did not exist before. If I freely undertake to cook Goldilocks some porridge tomorrow morning so she doesn't have to go breaking into houses to have breakfast, then she can hold me to that promise. Similarly, when the people come together to form a commonwealth, they are creating the power to govern themselves, which they can then hand over to a sovereign, or retain for themselves if they choose a democratic form of government.

Actually, we can say that for Suárez, all political authority is originally democratic, because the first thing the people do is constitute themselves as a body with the right to self-govern. Ideally though, they will not remain a democracy, but decide to appoint a monarch. Because this is how monarchies first arise, the community is never under the obligation to accept tyrannical rule.

It would never be rational to enter into a contract that allowed for abusive treatment, so we can assume that people have never consented to such an arrangement. While Suarez's theory does anticipate Hobbes and other social contract theorists in the early modern period, it is also recognizably a product of its time. In fact, it's recognizably the product of a Jesuit. Suarez and his colleagues produced political theories that conceived the state as a much larger version of the society of Jesus.

You become a Jesuit by making a voluntary choice to join the Order, which is much like entering the social contract, since in so doing you submit to an authoritative hierarchy. Striving for the good of all, and ultimately, the glory of God, individual members humbly agreed to carry out whatever task their leaders assigned to them. In other ways, too, the consent theory was apt to be embraced by Catholic intellectuals,

This may surprise, because we've previously seen Protestants like Ockman pushing the idea that rulers need consent from their subjects in order to justify resistance to tyrannical rule, by which they meant tyranny exercised by Catholic monarchs. But as so often, this was a game both sides could play. Suarez may have devised his political philosophy in part to undermine Protestant claims that their own rulers were sent by God to defend and propagate the Reformation.

And, Catholics had an excellent reason to insist that secular rulers were not appointed by God but by the will of the people, namely that this would be a clear difference between those secular rulers and the Pope, who does wield his power by divine dispensation. Here then we're seeing, not for the first time, how the religious disputes of the 16th century encourage significant intellectual breakthroughs and the emergence of ideas that are often wrongly supposed to have emerged only a century or so later.

It may not be the last time we see that happen either, but we are slowly starting to edge towards the end of the current series. There are still a few figures I want to cover from Spain in this period. For one thing, having devoted so much attention to Shakespeare when covering Britain, it seems only fair to spend at least one episode on the greatest figure of Iberian literature in this period, Cervantes.

But first, I think it would not be quixotic to delve yet further into the thought of Francisco Suárez, perhaps the most impressive scholastic thinker we've covered since the medieval giants like Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham.

Appropriately enough, for this purpose I am turning to an interview guest we last heard from back when I was covering those medieval figures, Tom Pink, who will be joining us next time for an interview that Goldilocks would enjoy, because it will consider Suarez's views on just rights. That's here on History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.