STATE, THE

The independent (and sovereign) political community. The term is derived from the Roman-law concept of status rei Romanae, i.e., the public law of the Roman Republic. Beginning in the 15th century (e.g., Stato di Firenze), it replaced the original terms, the Greek polis and the Latin res publica, civitas, and regnum corpus politicum (mysticum ). The state has elements of both community and association, in the sense of the distinction made by the sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies. As a political community it is included in the most comprehensive and highest society, mankind, which has its proper common good, its specific "international" law, and its historically variable forms of organization. As a body politic the state has its own supreme internal order of positive law, ordered to a distinct common good that is the ultimate authority within its order, binding a people who inhabit a defined territory. Although each state claims sovereignty and independence from other societies of the same order, states are interdependent and bound to recognize the community of nations (mankind) and its public international law, and of course the natural law, which is ultimately the foundation of the state and the critical norm for all manmade positive law. States (including vatican City, or the apostolic see) are thus primary subjects of public international law, regardless of their internal constitutions, whether unitary or federal, republican or monarchic, national or multinational (see government).

Concept

Three basic elements of the state are commonly distinguished: (1) a distinct territory with more or less strictly determined boundaries; (2) a multitude of people already individualized by language, tribal customs, religion, or other cultural forms of living together; and (3) a positive constitutional and legal order that determines, legitimizes, and limits the one political authority and the basic relations between ruler and ruled—in public law— and between the citizens—in private (civil) law—that together form the "bond of law" (vinculum juris ). Some scholars add as a qualification of the first element the wealth of the nation, i.e., its raw materials, soil fertility, climate, and all economically relevant abilities and skills of the inhabitants. The state is distinguished from the Church by a distinction of ends and means, since, in scholastic language, each is a "perfect" society possessing and controlling all the means necessary for the realization of its specific end. In relation to the many other societies creatively produced by man in the course of his intellectual, moral, socioeconomic, and cultural growth and differentiation, the state is the ordering and unifying authority, the unitas ordinis of the common good in which all individual persons and their many free associations participate and through which they enjoy legal security and self-fulfillment in the stability and tranquility, i.e., the peace, of the public order.

More than any other temporal community, the state, as the name implies, tends toward perpetuity and survival into an indefinite future. A people conscious of itself and its historical individuality often longs for political existence. As individual persons and families follow each other in an unceasing sequence, they appear to be the ever-changing matter of an enduring form. This has led more than a few thinkers to hypostatize the state, to ascribe to it not merely legal personality but physical personality and substance, as did G. W. F. hegel, R. Kjellen, A. Schäffle, and J. J. von Uexcüll, for example. But in its mode of being the state is accidental, not substantial; it does not exist independent of, outside, or above the persons who are organized within it, but wholly in them. It cannot act except through the persons who have competence, whose acts are imputed to the state; thus, although a collective criminal guilt is impossible, there may very well be a collective liability of the whole for the unjust acts of its agents. Nor is the end of the state so much its own and so independent of the ends of the persons forming it that their lives, rights, and fortunes can be unlimitedly sacrificed for its end or good. Instead, the rights of individual persons are themselves essential parts of the end of the state, which, like all societies, must ultimately serve the ends of its individual members.

State and Society. Although the formal distinction between state and society is of relatively recent date, as a practical distinction it is actually very old, since it is implicit in the traditional distinctions between public law and private or civil law, and between commutative justice, specifying relations between persons and groups of persons, and legal and distributive justice, specifying duties of citizens to political authority and duties of the authority to citizens. In all states, regardless of the form of government, the political authority monopolizes the power to enforce laws in order to establish justice, protect personal and civil rights, ensure domestic tranquility, and provide for external defense. No individual or group can take the law into its own hands. The security of the public order, the protection of rights (except in immediate selfdefense), and the enforcement of the legal order, especially the administration of criminal justice, are prerogatives of civil authority.

Since he who has power is always tempted to abuse it, this monopolized power must be limited, that is, subjected to strict procedural forms, or channeled, as it were, by a higher law. In other words, it must be exercised within constitutional limitations. Important among these are the limitations placed upon the state as the administrator of criminal justice by bills of rights and by legal principles that provide for trial by a jury of one's peers or that prohibit ex post facto legislation; arrest for crime or imposition of punishment without previous law; arrest without a warrant; or deprivation of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. Principles such as these have been included since the early Middle Ages in the many charters of rights of which the magnacarta is the prototype. These charters often guaranteed also the rights of association, of free movement, of taxation only by consent of the estates, etc. Other limitations on the state were found in the participation of the people in legislative bodies, in the widespread self-government of towns and of guilds of artisans and merchants, and in the liberties and privileges of the universities. Thus, under the protection of the public order in the West, there developed over many centuries a rich life of many groups and associations free from the arbitrary intervention of political power. After the downfall of absolutism with its petty bureaucracy and economics of mercantilism, the third estates insisted on a sphere of free economic, cultural, and academic activities of citizens that was circumscribed and protected by the formal bills of rights found in modern constitutionalism. Within this sphere citizens form by free initiative economic, social, cultural, educational, religious, or other associations characteristic of the free and pluralistic society of modern times. Their proper role is distinguished from that of the state by the principle of subsidiarity. During bellicose occupation or complete subjugation of a belligerent nation (debellatio ), society continues to exist under the protection of international law while the state is inoperative and even destroyed. For war is directed against the state and its armed forces, not against society and its institutions, the peaceful life of its families and the private life of its private persons, and their properties and rights under civil law. The real distinction between state and society, and between public and civil law, is essential for the free state as well as for the free society. Although the line of separation between the two is not rigid and defined once for all, but fluid, shifting the line radically in favor of society results in anarchy, and shifting it radically in favor of the state results in totalitarianism.

State and Nation. State and nation are not necessarily coterminous. During the 19th century the principle of national self-determination established by the french revolution became a kind of ideal of European public law. It was a consequence of the democratic movement that developed in contrast to the historic multinational state of monarchic legitimacy. The new principle led to the unification of Germany and Italy and, after 1918, to the reestablishment of the Polish state and the dissolution of the multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire. Actually, the new states in central Europe were not themselves nation-states, but contained within their borders "national" minorities that the minority treaties of 1919 (avoiding the term "national") were intended to protect. Similarly, few of the new states that have arisen as a result of the abolition of colonialism in Africa and Asia are true nationstates; because the former colonial borders were not established with respect to the older tribal territories, in most of the new states nations are still to be formed.

Historically, it is significant that the first nationstates—France, England, and Spain (even in the case of the reconquista )—resulted from the struggle against the universalism of Christendom, of the sacrum imperium and the Church universal. Kings claiming to be emperors in their territories were assisted against emperor and pope by the growing national consciousness of the ruling groups, namely, the aristocracy, clergy, universities, and jurists. The Protestant reformation strengthened this consciousness. But modern secularized nationalism is the product of the French Revolution and the democratic sovereignty of the nation.

The nation as a product of historical forces is a stable community of persons and families who have developed a common culture—a common language, literature, customs, and often a common religion—as well as a distinct feeling of belonging together and of being different from neighboring communities, a common awareness of a historical destiny, and a consensus of accepted value preferences often but not necessarily based on ethnobiological factors. All these factors need not be present together to produce the "daily plebiscite" that makes a nation. Mexico and Argentina speak the same language but are different nations. Poland and Ireland lived for generations without statehood, yet continued to exist as nations, thanks mainly to the bond of religion. The nation-state is not the only legitimate political form of an independent state. Indeed, Ignaz seipel regarded it as an inferior form because of its tendency to promote doctrinaire, quasi-religious nationalism. The best way for neighboring nations to find a home in one state without succumbing to this tendency is federation, toward which the old nations of Europe now tend; their example might well be salutary for newer nations. In the contemporary world the narrowly conceived unitary sovereign nationstate is more and more anachronistic.

The State in Catholic Thought. The state as exemplified in the Greek polis or the Roman, Egyptian, Persian, or Chinese empires is older than Christianity. When what Tacitus contemptuously called the Secta Christianorum spread from its birthplace in the Roman-occupied religio-political community of the Jews into the Helleno-Roman Empire, which was then seeking to save itself by an ideological assertion of the divinity of the emperor, the Christians were neither socially nor politically revolutionary. They accepted the empire; they prayed for the powers above them; they paid their taxes; they served in the legions. They were accused of "atheism," however, because they refused to acknowledge the national gods and the worship of the emperor, and thus they were persecuted. Already in the writings of the Church Fathers and especially in those of the apologetes, Christians began to make the political community the subject of their thinking, critically studying Greek and Stoic political philosophers and accepting what did not contradict the Gospels, the faith, and the experience of the new Ecclesia. Slowly, there developed in Christian intellectual circles a political philosophy that was to be systematically elaborated through the great scholarly effort of scholasticism in the high Middle Ages. It remains a philosophy of man that is valid for all men and not only for believers.

According to Catholic tradition, the state belongs to human culture and to the secular order. Its root is in the social nature of man. Its end is temporal felicity (happiness). Therefore it is taught by all that the essential mutual rights and duties of citizens and of political authority are independent of the state of grace. Baptism does not change these rights and duties, although it exalts them into the realm of grace by means of supernatural motives. Certainly the state cannot be a virtually omnipotent pedagogue, the only master of moral life; the contention that the state is such a master leads necessarily to a Hegelian divinization of the state and to the servitude of the Church, if not to the Church's destruction in the totalitarian state. Once this is said, however, it is to be remarked that this traditional political philosophy does not use theological method; its principles are based not on theology but on natural reason and on the great tradition of natural law. Viktor cathrein has rightly called it a natural-law political philosophy. The term "Catholic political philosophy" means only that this political philosophy, as part of the philosophia perennis, has always had a home and a refuge in the Church's intellectual institutions and in the utterances of her magisterium.

Origin

The philosophical problem of the origin of the state must be distinguished sharply from inquiries into the factual historical beginnings of individual states or from ideal constructions of how these beginnings ought to have occurred. It refers rather to the essential properties of man's nature that make life in a political community—be it ultimately even that of a world state—a necessity in the sense of Aristotle's dictum that the stateless man is either a demigod or a beast. True, history proves empirically that man has always lived in "states" and that all attempts to live in anarchy, i.e., without law and authority and motivated exclusively by mutual love, have failed. What Aristotle meant was that man is by his very nature not only a social but also a political being. Only by establishing a stable and enduring order of peaceful and protected personal life and social cooperation can he fully realize all his potentialities. He is an "incarnate person" in a "world" that he himself helps to form and shape into an ever more favorable and less unfriendly environment through the social process of progressive civilization, developing culture and technical control of the powers of "nature." Christianity did not change the fundamental requirements of this process, although it gave it a new dignity and made it the object of new motives as the field in which man in statu viatoris, participating in the "visible" sacramental order of grace, works in the world for the salvation of his immortal soul.

Family as the Basic Unit. Political theory recognized at its beginning two natural societies, the family and the state. The family is based on the bisexual nature of man as a rational being. Each individual is born into a family, needing education, protection, and bodily care; growing, maturing, founding a family, and caring and working for those who are nearest and dearest. The "natural" authority in the family from the great patriarchal forms to the modern is the parentes or one of them, truly auctores with their natural rights and duties. In the first stages of social evolution families increased to tribal multitudes that settled in particular territories. Agriculture developed as the first form of the rational, technical use of nature. The first stable and immovable homes were built, and a new form of human living together became necessary. This form was a superfamilial, sociojuridical order supplying a stable authority to judge in conflicts, to protect against breaches of the peace and violence to members or their property, and to protect against dangers from foreigners while extending hospitality to guests. In this perspective, experience itself proved the family insufficient for the full realization of man's social nature; it was in this respect imperfecta. A "more perfect union," a societas perfecta, was demanded, a social organization that in a continuous process of perfection would be able to care for and to improve the superfamilial multitude by its own means.

The Primitive State. This organization exists in the inchoate state of primitive societies. It is a necessity of human nature, but it is established through the free will of rational beings. The state is not the result of a blind biological urge, as is an animal herd. However necessary it is from the point of view of man's nature, ultimately it cannot be formed without free human acts. Aristotle found this development of the human social process only in the polis, the city-state, so that he termed "barbarians" those who were not members. Contrariwise, the theologians of the age of discovery, at least the majority, regarded the "newly discovered Indians" as states despite the primitive condition of some of them. These theologians (e.g., F. de vitoria, F. suÁrez) protested when a Sepúlveda used the Aristotelian theory of the barbarian as the natural slave of the citizen to justify enslavement of the native peoples and confiscation of their lands. As a matter of fact, primitive civilizations (considered both as early and as simple) were and are organizations of citizens. They form civil societies intellectually and morally, and with their customary law and their religious beliefs are by no means "animal-like" (see law, primitive). Fritz Kern shows that they practically "lived natural law" (Beginn der Weltegeschichte [1953]). Their religious beliefs are often monotheistic; their social life often confirms Kropotkin's thesis that mutual help and aid are anterior and superior to a ruthless "struggle for existence." Anthropologists of the 19th century, viewing them, were too much under the influence of Hegel and Charles darwin.

Concept of the State of Nature. Nor can a primitive organization be equated with the celebrated status naturalis from which it was once thought that solitary primitive man entered into the status civilis, as in the theories of Thomas hobbes, John locke, or Jean Jacques rousseau or in those of some of the Greek sophists. Actually, neither Aristotle nor any of the scholastics (except Juan de mariana) indulged in the description of a status naturalis of the individual man. They did distinguish—as do their successors—the status familialis with its specific authority from the status civilis with its different specific authority. For them the social process that produced the state was based on the rational dynamic activity of man and on his creative ability to meet new situations and to understand the necessities demanded by his nature, more than on irrational biological urges. The state was thus seen neither as merely the result of an arbitrary free contract nor as an ethically indifferent invention of the strong seeking to transform might into right and conformity into the duty of free obedience.

Theory of the Social Contract. Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, for the purposes of their characteristic political theories, postulated a social contract. For Hobbes all rights except that of self-preservation were transferred by the contract to the sovereign. Locke held that inalienable rights were retained but that their protection was guaranteed by the state. In Rousseau's theory the natural rights were transferred to the sovereign people and granted back as civil rights. The main aim of these contract theorists—even of Hobbes—was the protection of the very individualistically conceived natural rights that to them was the raison d'être of the state. Yet even they thought of this social contract not as a solemn formal agreement but as a postulate of reason accounting for the transition from the status naturalis to the status civilis.

That the rights and duties of the first natural society, the family, differ from those of the status civilis was and is the opinio communis. How the status civilis came to have moral and juridical validity therefore requires explanation. Was this an unconscious growth, or must it be assumed that the change from one form of social life into a qualitatively different one could not have occurred without the mediation of human reason directing the wills of the heads of families? If the latter, then a moral-legal form providing this mediation must be identified. Ancient writers proposed as the mediating agency the idea of a pactum, a consensual agreement or meeting of minds, enabling the realization of the higher form of social life, a good life demanded by natural human initiative and therefore by the natural law. This theory was accepted by some of the Church Fathers and by medieval thinkers and was developed especially by the great writers of the 16th to 18th centuries, as Peter Tischleder has shown. Later it was abandoned by many to avoid confusion with the theories of Hobbes and Rousseau, but it has again gained many adherents.

Unlike Rousseau, for example, scholastic theory defined the pact in terms of status. The new rights and duties of the status civilis were seen as demanded objectively by natural law. Man was not considered able arbitrarily to enter into or to avoid the pact once it was demanded by social conditions, or able to determine arbitrarily or to change the basic rights and duties imposed by the status civilis. As St. Robert bellarmine explained, the political order of legal justice, with its mutual rights and duties of governor and governed, is in its existence dependent on the free acts of consent of those uniting in the body politic; in its essence, however, that is, in its foundation and final cause and in the rights and duties that it imposes by virtue of the natural law, it is independent of human will. What obliges and empowers is not the juridical fact of consent but the natural law, which is perpetual and immutable (De Laicis ch. 2). Thus persons born after the formation of the pact also are bound by the essence and final cause of the natural law.

Theories of the Reformers. Neither quoad essentiam nor quoad existentiam is the state a consequence of sin, original or personal. Some schoolmen asked whether in the state of pure or integral nature (before the fall of man) the political community would have been necessary. They affirmed that although the coercive power of authority would not have been necessary, the directive authority to establish order would have been necessary. For the Reformers—Martin luther, John calvin, Huldrych zwingli—and for spiritualist groups such as the anabaptists, the state was a result of original sin. Their view of the latter exaggerated its destructive influence on the intellect and will of man and, in consequence, exaggerated man's necessary sinfulness (simul justus et peccator ).

Luther. If men were truly Christian and redeemed, Luther said, there would be no need for the state; but since their nature is evil, since they cannot recognize a natural law, the state is necessary as "God's stickmaster and hangman." In this view, the state and its authority and power are only instrumental causes through which God Himself maintains peace and law; they are not secondary efficient causes with their own initiative, responsibility, and relative autonomy, as in scholastic theory. The foundation and the justification of the state and its authority are found neither in God-given human nature, to be realized ever more fully through the state, nor in natural law under the aspect of the order of creation, but only in God's revealed word in the sinful world. The state is thus singly and wholly the instrument of the hidden and incomprehensible will of God in its infinity and absolute omnipotence. The state and its authority in their everchanging forms are, from man's point of view, accidental, but are nevertheless divine instruments to which is owed humble obedience. All powers are in their mere factuality God's instruments, so that this factuality itself clearly demands submission; a right to active resistance against political authority is a moot question. The one tormenting question for Luther was how man, always and from the beginning a sinner, might find the merciful God. This is not to say that Luther did not acknowledge and now and then use natural-law doctrine, but for him it had in no way the importance it still had in the political thought of william of ockham, for example.

Calvin. Calvin held a similar, theologically founded doctrine. For him the state and its authority were based on the positive will of God revealed in the Bible. His legalistic approach to the Old Testament and his predilection for the theocracy of the Book of Judges show that he regarded the Scriptures as a collection of permanently binding laws expressing the only valid absolute will of the one Sovereign, God. He could not accept human nature, including rational insight into the natural law, as in se a valid and sufficient moral basis for the state and its authority. The latter appeared rather, in whatever forms they were found to exist, as instruments of God's sovereign will. In this concept, too, the state is God's rod, and self-negation and penitence are the proper attitudes of Christians. Calvin's doctrine of the right of resistance of the "inferior magistrates" was not the medieval theory of the valentior pars of the people justifying eventual active resistance against tyrannical authority. Like Luther, Calvin made furious attacks against the Anabaptists with their spiritual individualism and anarchical millenarianism.

Post-Reformation Developments. Because the Reformers left no systematic political theory, their followers were more or less free to develop eclectic doctrines and even to radicalize the original Anabaptist tendencies. The theory of the divine right of kings, concerned principally with the origin of political authority, was definitely a "protestant" doctrine based on biblical grounds. It was too unhistorical to be acceptable to Catholic thought. The arguments for the theory, not unknown during the early medieval dispute between the emperor and the pope of the one Christendom, would have subordinated the Church universal to kings as heads of Erastian state churches. Although a similar defense of the principle of monarchy was attempted later by Joseph de maistre and Louis de bonald, its argument was much more historical and was based upon the constitution of the papal Church rather than upon the Bible.

During the enlightenment, references to the natural law in the thought of Philipp melanchthon were revived by Samuel von Pufendorf and John Wise, among others. Later, inspired by German idealism, Karl Holl (1866–1926) promoted an idealistic interpretation of Protestant political theory. Others incorporated idealism into this theory through a Christian interpretation of Hegel's philosophy. Subsequently, after a period of "secularization" that produced liberal Protestantism, the dialectical theology of Karl barth returned to the original inspirations of Luther and Calvin. But barthianism revived also the ambiguity of their theology of creation (Schöpfungsordnungen ) and of their rejection of natural law in favor of exclusively biblical argumentation.

Marxism. Marxist theory traces the origin of the state to the class struggle caused by the development of private property. This view is so in contradiction with traditional doctrine and the faith that even the few Christian writers who have accepted Karl Marx's critique of capitalism (e.g., Wilhelm Hohoff) have never accepted the typical Marxist theory of the state as a mere superstructure or the chiliastic hopes of the withering away of the state and the rise of the classless society. Although historically the state as an institution may sometimes be the prize in violent group conflicts and there may be a certain degree of class struggle, especially in laissez-faire capitalism, the Marxist view is so barren of ethical considerations as to be unacceptable on either philosophical or theological grounds.

Legal Positivism. Legal positivism, as part of a general positivist philosophy and a special scientific method, either excludes all ethical problems of the state and its authority as irrelevant for the jurist or disqualifies them as "unscientific." The state, its origin, and its authority are merely facts for the positivist. Only positive law and imperative commands issuing from the legislator, whatever his constitutional form, and enforced by the organs of the state, its police, and administrative bureaucracy are "laws." Natural law and divinely revealed biblical law are thus not "laws." They may be subjectively valid moral or religious norms, and they may be motives for the individual's external conformity to the law as the will of the sovereign. But because they imply value judgments, they are regarded as irrelevant for "science." What matters is not the ethically relevant content of the positive law but merely the form, namely, that it issue in a constitutionally correct form from the sovereign, or supreme authority, that does not recognize any superior and receives "habitual obedience" from the greatest number of citizens (obedientia facit imperantem ). Law is not reason, nor is it legitimized by its ordination to the common good; nor is obedience a virtue of free men who can render only "reasonable" obedience.

In the face of tyranny positivism is helpless with its slogan that law is law, for the tyrant "legalizes" his regime. The judge has no other criterion than this legality; he cannot find, for instance, that the law is arbitrary or commands acts that are evidently against humanity and the basic values that transcend positive law, e.g., justice. The argument that law is law actually means that might is right. But might decrees only a "must," not an "ought"; it cannot be the basis of a valid obligation. The positivist concept of law, although neat and easily identified, neglects the whole ambiance of the law, the intimate relation between the legal and the moral order, the hunger and thirst for justice in and from the law, the ethical consensus of the consciences of the citizens and its vital influence on the values to be realized by positive law. A satiated peaceful or apathetic society can afford positivism, but in times of crisis ethical values and the natural law demand recognition. Positivism, furthermore, is intimately related to the closed sovereign nation-state, in which the power element, i.e., the ability to enforce external conformity by whatever means, is superior. Thus it is basically unable to recognize international law and canon law as genuine law. (see positivism in jurispru dence.)

Form of Unity

A fundamental concept of man that affects understanding of the specific form of unity of the state is implied in the thesis that man is a sociopolitical being and that in the social process of the realization of this nature he produces an increasingly complex, gradated order of social forms for the attainment of his truly human goals. These extend to the political community and ultimately to the community of nations, or mankind, in the temporal order, with which the Church universal is coordinated. Man is an incarnate person, a master of his own acts, with an inborn initiative deriving from his intellect and will; and he is thus free and responsible to God, his Maker, and to his fellowmen. His sociality reaches into his inner life, into the center of his person, despite the "ultimate solitude" there that is open only to the Creator. A person is the highest form of being; it is as a person that man is created in the image of God. The intentional character of the acts of a person demands fulfillment by a "Thou" and an original dialogue and awareness of "we." Man is a speaking being; he has something to communicate from his more or less rich inner subjective world. Love in its various forms—from love of neighbor, friendship and comradeship, conjugal love, civic friendship, and patriotism to the highest form of selfless love (agape )—is manifested by intentional personal acts that distinguish the person from all animals. "Man has intellect and hands"; man is homo faber. Through various forms of cooperation he transforms the "natural" world, as its master and owner, into an ever more favorable material, moral, spiritual, and cultural "hominized" world.

Basic Principles. It follows as a first principle of social philosophy, coordinate with that of the sociopolitical nature of man, that all social forms exist to serve persons. They fulfill their meaning and their ends only insofar as they are means to the fuller development of persons in the production and perfection of what more pious, less materialistic eras called humanitas and humaniora and of what, in view of Christ's mission, ought to be called humanitas Christiana. There is a corresponding theological principle that supernatural grace presupposes human nature and perfects it (see grace and nature). Thus a table of objective values follows, descending from the highest values—the glory of the personal triune God and the salvation of the soul; the freedom of the person and of conscience—which are the foundation of intellectual, moral, and cultural values, down to biological, economic, and comfort values produced by common social efforts and thus by specific "functional" groups within the peace and security of the public order, the state.

Subsidiarity. A third basic principle is that of subsidiarity. According to it, the state as the public authority should leave to the individual person what the person through initiative and competence can regularly and reasonably do and perform in the private sector. Similarly, it should leave to the family and then to the many associations that persons and families produce for their improvement the functions that they can adequately serve. The state should afford to these groups legal status in private and social law, and it should protect their "selfgovernment" and provide rules to resolve conflicts of competencies and interests. This principle is directed against collectivism as well as against totalitarianism, each with its depersonalization and Vermassung.

Solidarity. A fourth principle, solidarity, follows from the sociality that has been described and affirms a fundamental mutual relationship between individual persons and the community. The first are ordered to the latter, and the latter exists only in and for the persons in mutual solidaristic obligations. The common good of a community, e.g., of the state, embraces the rights of the citizens to the extent that the wanton arbitrary deprivation of the rights of a member of a racial or religious group is a mutilation of the common good itself.

Social Justice. social justice as a fifth principle augments the three classical forms of justice, legal, distributive, and commutative. It is the dynamic element that demands a continuous effort to adapt the positive sociolegal order to ever-changing conditions of life and to the more clearly conceived ideals of justice as they grow in the community. Each age has its "social questions" through which men become aware that de facto the static positive order has become unjust, inasmuch as whole groups within the community have become its victims while others have gained unjustifiable advantages exclusively from it. In such an eventuality social justice demands that objectively unjust but legally correct rules should be changed and that a more just positive order should be established. Thus, social legislation has been employed to correct the injustice of the predominance of property rights over the personal rights of the unprotected worker selling his labor as a "commodity." All these principles are principles of the order of being and therefore ethical-legal principles governing man's social activity.

The State as a Unity of Order. Although the state may be called a communitas communitatum, its unity is not that of a biological organism or of a racially defined substantial being as in the Nazi formula of Volk-Blut-Rasse, according to which the Volk was all and the individual nothing and the so-called pure Aryan race had the right to exterminate mongrel races. Nor is the state merely the positive legal order as in the "pure" theory of law of Hans Kelsen. For the state lives in the ethical order as well as in the legal; it is a sociological form that exists in the informal consensus and in the spirit of civil friendship of the citizens as well as in positive law. The state is a unity of order, and the common good is the good and end of this order.

Catholic thinkers also, under the influence of the Pauline Corpus Christi mysticum, have often used the term "corporate," or "organic," in defining the state. Suárez, following some late medieval writers, among them Baldus de Ubaldis, Lucas de Penna, and Jean ger son, called the state a corpus politicum mysticum. The term can best be translated as moral organism, indicating that the character of the bond as well as the end of the corpus is not physical but moral. That is, it includes ethical virtues such as civic friendship, obedience, and mutual help in numerous freely formed associations and legal virtues such as the spirit of solidarity, mutual responsibility, and duty, or obligation. All these underlying virtues support the "visible" legal order, which is directed to the good common life, to the concrete realization of the common good in which all participate, and which guarantees that the persons united in it are able to reach the natural felicity that "opens" upon their supernatural end, known by God's revelation. There are thus two ordines, two mystical bodies, two supreme authorities, independent of each other yet destined to serve the same persons as citizens of the state and as members of the Church universal.

The "organic view" sees the state as a whole as a functional structure of many associations serving the varied human goals that develop with the progress of civilization, of the civitas humana. All these functional associations are protected in their initiative and self-government within the legal order; they fulfill their own particular common goods and yet in so doing serve in their diversity the common good of all as a whole. The term "organism" denotes a universitas having a telos and end in itself and being able to fulfill this telos by its own organization. It is this character that makes the state (like the Church) a perfect society.

This view is opposed to the so-called individualist-mechanist view, which holds that the state integrates exclusively the "interests" of individuals who out of regard for their interests are forced either by the sovereign (Hobbes) or by the mechanism of the competitive economic market (Adam Smith's "invisible hand") to bring into being the optimal organization of the state-society. Or the state becomes a kind of umpire of the struggle for survival charged with keeping a minimum of public peace (Herbert Spencer) or the instrument of the exploiting class in the historical process of the class struggle (Marx).

Finally, in the organic view the active element that obtains the cooperation of the members and directs it is not an external principle, e.g., the ruler. If this were the case, the forma rei publicae would be constituted by political authority alone, commanding from above, as it were, to organize the whole. The forma, the causa formalis that is at the same time the causa finalis of the state, is the political common good. Its realization is the result both of the acts of the authority and of the members' acts of assent and of faithful fulfillment of their various functions in many associations. Thus it is the common good and its realization hic et nunc that is the norm of legitimacy for the laws of the ruler as well as for the due obedience of the free citizens. It is one of the (few) principal rules of natural law that the realization of the (political) common good is to be assisted and not obstructed. This rule binds all, ruler and ruled alike. It allows no divine right of kings or transhistorical monarchical legitimacy.

The Common Good as the End of the State

If man is ontologically a social and political being, his natural potentialities, inclinations, and longings for the full realization of his God-given nature as a rational, free, self-determining, and thus responsible person can be realized only through a series of increasingly varied social forms. This culminates (in the natural order) in the state and in mankind, the highest community. The "goods," or values, to be realized by this functionally differentiated structure of social life constitute national cultures and ultimately human culture. It follows that the political community as, in a sense, the communitas communitatum must have a distinctive communal end, the common good. This is a good in which all participate, at least in principle. It is not merely the sum of the individual goods and interests of the persons that form the community. Furthermore, between the original natural societies, the family and the state and, beyond, the community of states, numerous forms of social life are products of man's unrelenting active drive toward happiness, toward a more perfect life in the civilitas humana. This is a drive for the creation, protection, and development of spiritual, moral, cultural, artistic, and material values that the bodybound spiritual being needs and desires.

The Realization of Justice and Public Peace. The life of the free, value-producing, and value-preserving persons and their many corresponding societies or groups presupposes an order of public peace and security. This is an order of positive law that rests upon the moral order of justice and is secured by the constituted organs of the political community. It guarantees and protects not only the persons but also all the free and autonomous groups within it. Thus the common good is a bonum ordinis, an order of positive law, security, protection, peace, and mutual help that approximates justice. The legal order organizes and limits public power; protects rights; enforces internal peace as constitutional law; grants persons the legal forms of private, or civil, law essential for the development of socioeconomic and cultural life; and secures and protects the network of legal relations through civil and criminal courts. Since the order of law must be protected against a foreign invader or aggressor, a common defense of the order of peace is implied. By natural reason and by the Scriptures, the jus vitae ac necis and the jus pacis et belli are given political authority in defense of the common good. It is easy to see that the preambles of constitutions provide in fact good definitions of the political common good, as does the preamble to the Constitution of the United States, setting forth as the purposes of the document, "to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare and secure the Blessings of Liberty." It is just, following Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, to say that the common good is the realization of justice and public peace in and by the positive legal order in its entirety.

The Common Good and the Person. Since the natural rights of persons and of groups of persons organized as corporate bodies are integral parts of the order of law, there is no irreconcilable conflict between the good of the person and the common good. As Suárez wrote, bonum commune consurgit ex bonis singulorum. The common good may demand the risk of life in its defense, not only out of pietas but in justice. The duty of justice is perfectly fulfilled in the supreme sacrifice. The relations between the political authority and those who owe obedience to it, including the duties of the authority to its subjects, are ruled by distributive and legal justice; and the exchange of goods and services between private persons is ruled by commutative justice. All are embraced in the justice demanded by the common good. In contradistinction to the principle of equality between persons and between goods and services exchanged, this justice takes account of standing in relative importance and closeness to the realization of the common good; thus it requires, for example, a more intense loyalty from a civil servant or a judge than from a private citizen. In the same way, a higher salary for a judge than for a janitor is justified because the profession of the judge, and consequently his or her loyalty, is nearer to and more important for the common good. This is so even in the most egalitarian society. Conversely, an income tax with a reasonable (i.e., neither confiscatory nor economically unsound) progression is justified because the security of the legal order is proportionally more important to the owners of large fortunes than to propertyless workers.

The Common Good and Free Associations. The common good and its specific form of justice, in its positive realization in history, is correlative with the structure of society. If society becomes more complex, if the differentiation of vocations and professions in economic life requires a high degree of integration because of increasing interdependence, an increase in social legislation and administrative law is demanded. This may be necessary in particular if social and economic institutions prevent the participation of a whole group or class in the fruits of the common good. Social security is a general human quest. If the social structure prevents its attainment by the working class, social legislation must guarantee it to this class in principle, because without it the active participation of persons in the cultural and public life of society would be hindered. The realization of the common good of the state thus presupposes the realization of the individual common goods of many free associations that owe their existence to the free, creative initiative of persons for whom to be active means to be, to create what is called significantly civilization, culture. These groups and corporate bodies have rights to autonomy and to self-government and development within the order of law according to the principle of subsidiarity. A free state favors them, helps them by improving the order of law, by tax exemption, etc.; for although the state is not primarily the creator of values and culture, it must further the works of persons in their free associations because they make possible and perfect the common good. In this much, the common good is inseparable from public welfare in the literal sense. All states are welfare states, but none should become an all-providing state, a state that by its administrative agencies assumes all the freely created social and cultural functions. The administered person is unfree, and the administered culture becomes sterile.

The Common Good as the First Principle of the State. The common good and its optimal realization hic et nunc is the principle that determines the legitimacy of forms of government, laws and decrees, even war. The tyrant, the illegitimate ruler, is he who injures gravely the common good, the first and foremost right of the people. Some modern philosophers identify the state itself with the positive legal order, forgetting that the state lives and acts in the more comprehensive orders of international law and natural law, and forgetting also that the state lives essentially by the sociopolitical virtues, such as patriotism, civil friendship, mutual aid, respect and love of neighbor, and willingness to subordinate private interests to the common good, since the optimal concrete realization of the common good of a state is the conditio sine qua non of the freedom, rights, and private interests of the citizens. The positive legal order can operate efficiently and with approximate justice only if these ethical virtues constantly support it. The common good is the end of these virtues, and the positive legal order lives by them. Traditionally, the end of the state, the common good, has been held to embrace justice, social welfare, and culture. This is still a good description, but one that must be enlarged and refined with changes in the political order both inside and among states.

Political Authority

Primitive peoples usually ascribe political authority to their deities just as they attribute their laws to these deities. This interpretation of authority and law recedes with the "awakening" of critical reason, which must then explain satisfactorily the problem of political authority. This is the majestas tremenda of rulers and judges in any state regardless of its form or the historical phase of development of the people whose political life form the state is. In harsh reality, the state is the armed police, the military barracks, the criminal court, or the hangman; and in all ages there have been pleas that men should live together without coercive rule, without arche, that is to say, anarchically. Humanitarian or religiously inspired love, an imputed fundamental urge toward mutual help (Kropotkin), or human altruism have been proposed as foundations for new communal movements. Yet all such experiments have failed after a period of initial enthusiasm. Certainly love is a great inspiration, but man must live—and love—in the security of legal order. This security implies that all participants in the order may rely upon it without risk and that all will conform to the order, if need be as subjects of coercive power and public punishment.

Necessity of Authority. No human community can have enduring life without law: ubi societas ibi jus, but also ubi jus ibi auctoritas. Communities less inclusive than the state must be able to rely on the possibility of an appeal to the final authority, the common legal order with ultimate power of decision. Political authority has a monopoly of coercive power, enforcing legislative enactments as a coercive executive and administrator of criminal justice and as a judicial body. It protects the mutual rights and duties of all, their lives, liberties, and properties, including the rights and duties created by free contracts, etc. The imposition of obligations and the binding of consciences has always been and is still a foremost ethical and political problem, because it is in the hands of fallible men, subject to the highest of all temptations, that of power. Those in authority and in power have the right to demand obedience, the free assent of free men; but if authority is gravely abused by the tyrant, by arbitrary and unjust laws, there is presented the severe problem not only of passive but of active resistance. Such an authority and power over equal, rational free persons (wholly different from the patria potestas ) must ultimately come from Him who is the Creator and Author of all men and Who is all-wise, all-just, and omnipotent. This has been recognized in all civilizations not expressly atheistic. Parenthetically, it explains why divine-right theories could be accepted by reasonable men.

Origin of Authority. Christian tradition has always taught that political power comes from God. He who gave man his nature and gave him reason and free will to shape his own forms of living together is the origin of political authority as He is the origin of the state. But just as the state came into existence only through the reason and will of those who first formed it and continues in existence by a daily plebiscite and indisputable moral necessity, so political authority was not given by God immediately in a concrete legitimate form. Because anarchy is an impossibility, even in the status naturae integrae, political authority was born in the same moment that the state was born. It is mediately from God; immediately its form, its constitution, is determined by men who as free persons may never owe "blind" obedience to any human authority. In constituting political authority, men must order its competencies, form, etc., to the common good, which is the only source of the legitimacy of political authority and of all its acts.

What eventually came to be called the constituent power rested originally with the people who constituted themselves as the state. No individual could by any particular gift of character or wisdom have a "natural" inborn right to political authority; the only means by which this authority might be conferred was a pact, a consensus of fellowmen. Naturally, once an individual or a "collegium" of elders, a "senate," was established to rule, all owed obedience to laws and commands, so long as these served the common good, the realization of which is the categorical duty of rulers and ruled alike. In the writings of the Church Fathers, the schoolmen, and theologians before the French Revolution two pacts were distinguished: the pact of union, by which the state came into existence as a direct democracy, and the pact of subjection, by which a particular form of government (regime) was established by the original holder of political authority, the people themselves. In consequence, all rulers distinct from the whole people hold their authority by positive law. There is neither a divine right of monarchy nor a natural right of democracy. Forms of government are historical forms, to be judged according to the service they render for the realization of the common good of a people in a given stage of development.

All forms of government are limited thus by natural law (and divine law) and by the natural rights of persons that are indelibly part of the essential content of the common good. Furthermore, the constituent power is returned to the people in a justifiable revolution or in the event of collapse of the public order. An illegitimate ruler is legitimized, not by prescription, but by the consensus of the people who sanction his regime because and insofar as he actually serves the common good. Thus it is evident that the concrete actual realization of the common good is the objective principle of legitimacy, not only tradition or majority opinion, which is all too often manufactured.

"Indifference" of the Church to Forms of Government

The "partner" of the Church universal is historically and in principle not so much the abstract state as the pluralism of concrete states, each having its historical form, development, and constitutional law. To speak of eras of absolute monarchies or of aristocratic feudalism, for example, is to refer to historical tendencies, to Weberian "ideal-types," rather than to concrete forms that were everywhere identical. Although the democratic principle of legitimacy has become dominant (see the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, art. 18–21), so that even totalitarian states must formally proclaim it, the concrete forms of government not only vary but vary considerably. The Church universal, called to teach and baptize all nations through the history of civilization, is only by historical accident, not by nature, Occidental. The Church can and must accommodate its religious activity as mater et magistra to various cultures, civilizations, and political forms. In all these the Church must claim its liberty (Ut [ecclesia ] tibi serviat secure libertate ). Political forms that leave to the Church universal this field of secured liberty are indifferent to the Church. The field is greater in a "neutral" democracy than in an antireligious "laicist" democracy or in an absolutist (e.g., Gallican) regime. Totalitarian states guarantee no such field constitutionally, and in them the Church becomes the suffering underground Church of Silence.

Supernatural Vocation of the Church. The Church always opposes a fanatic devaluation of the world as essentially sinful, as the realm of the Prince of Darkness. It opposes as well its own definite identification with historically specific forms of political life, born out of the freedom of man to organize his political and social life in independence. Admittedly, on certain occasions such an identification has been avoided only at the last moment. Ruling classes have often tried to identify their transitory interests with the Church in order to gain perpetuity for themselves, and churchmen have often been deceived or have succumbed to temptations of power. But a full identification has always been avoided, else the Church would have disappeared with past forms. Her indifference to legitimate political forms has its ultimate reason in her supernatural vocation.

This indifference of the Church universal to forms of government, as long as and insofar as they respect the libertas ecclesiae that permits the Church to fulfill her supernatural end through the millennia and within the various civilizations and cultures, does not absolve the Christian theorist from studying the profound and universal trends found in these civilizations. The present era is witness to the slow and difficult growth of a world civilization toward political forms that are called democratic. These embody the demands for the self-determination of mature nations that need neither temporal nor ecclesiastical guardians. Even the "new" nations demand effective bills of rights, representation based on universal suffrage, equality before the law, and democratic legitimacy (consent of the ruled). The latter demand is generally accepted in theory even by totalitarian regimes, and the others have been enunciated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and acknowledged in the 1944 Christmas message of Pius XII and in an encyclical of John XXIII, pacem in terris.

The Church and Democracy. The "new" democratic trends at least imply a new relationship between state and Church as compared with older forms of union with all their dangers of gallicanism and jurisdictionalism in relation to the freedom of the Church. The modern trend has been toward the free Church in the free state, toward freedom of religion in constitutional law, and toward a friendly form of "separation" in societies that have become or are becoming religiously and culturally pluralistic. Throughout the 19th century the basic issue was subordinated to others that were less important, e.g., the challenge to the temporal power of the papacy, once a protection of the libertas ecclesiae, as a result of the demand for Italian national union on a semidemocratic basis. During the great controversy over the reform of laissez-faire capitalism and the demands of workers for equal rights as citizens, workers apostatized in great numbers wherever the older "union of throne and altar" still existed or was held as the ideal. Catholic social movements could not help but become "liberal" and "democratic" as they freed themselves from the tutelage of paternalistic employers, princes, and parish priests. Until the dispute over integralism, priests continued to hold to the fiction of a Christian, i.e., Catholic society, although the "real" society as distinguished from the "legal" was threatened by the progressive mass apostasy of intellectuals and workers. Also, post-Reformation ecclesiology had stressed the institutional and juridical aspect of the monarchical papal Church so that "democratic" thinkers were suspect as antiecclesiastical. This occurred despite the fact that state and Church do not and cannot have univocally the same constitutional principles and despite what Joseph de Maistre and other conservative thinkers sought to prove.

The 19th century was thus an era of fictional identifications, at least in Europe. In the name of liberty, doctrinaire liberal democrats repudiated the Church and the faith; and in the name of faith and the union of throne and altar, Catholic Christians repudiated liberal democratic demands for social justice and political reform. The Body of Christ was torn apart; on the "left" was His justice, on the "right" was His truth. But truth without justice too easily becomes tyranny; and justice without truth, anarchy. Since 1914 these false identifications have more and more disappeared. The once-repudiated demands of Liberal Catholics and of the "democratic" Catholic social movements have become the program of Christian democracy, with the consent of the overwhelming majority, even of conservatives, and with the approval of the popes of the 20th century (except, perhaps, St. Pius X).

Bibliography: thomas aquinas, Selected Political Writings, ed. a. p. d'entrÈves, tr. j. g. dawson (Oxford 1948). j. f. cronin, Catholic Social Principles (Milwaukee 1950). j. eppstein, The Catholic Tradition of the Law of Nations (London 1935). j. maritain, Man and the State (Chicago 1951). j. messner, Social Ethics: Natural Law in the Modern World, tr. j. j. doherty (new ed. St. Louis 1964). a. j. osgniach, The Christian State (Milwaukee 1943). Philosophy of the State (American Catholic Philosophical Association. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting 15; 1939). Philosophy and Order (ibid. 17; 1941). f. j. powers, comp. and ed., Papal Pronouncements on the Political Order (Westminster, Md. 1952). h. a. rommen, The Natural Law, tr. t. p. hanley (St. Louis 1948); The State in Catholic Thought (St. Louis 1945). y. simon, Philosophy of Democratic Government (Chicago 1951).

[h. a. rommen]