Classical Natural Law
The claim that law is answerable to a moral order discoverable by reason and prior to any legislator — argued from nature and purpose by the Greeks and Romans, and given its systematic form by Aquinas.
Descends from
- Ancient Philosophy6th century BC to 5th century AD
Aristotle supplied the teleological groundwork and the Stoics the idea of a law common to all rational beings, transmitted to Rome through Cicero.
- Scholasticism12th-15th century
Aquinas's treatise on law in the Summa Theologiae is the direct source of the natural-law tradition that Vitoria, Suárez, Grotius and Pufendorf carried into modern jurisprudence.
Gave rise to
- Catholic Political ThoughtMedieval to present
Natural law is the framework Catholic social teaching reasons in, from the medieval synthesis through to the modern encyclicals.
- Natural LawAncient to present
Grotius and Pufendorf built on the scholastic account even as they detached it from theology — the categories are Aquinas's, the warrant is not.
- Political TheologyAncient to present
Claims about a moral order binding on rulers and prior to statute are the natural-law inheritance within theological politics.
Aristotle
384–322 BCE
Aristotle was the ancient Greek founder of political science, grounding politics in the conviction that humans are by nature political animals who flourish only in community
ThinkerMarcus Tullius Cicero
106–43 BCE
Marcus Tullius Cicero was a Roman statesman and defender of the Republic whose synthesis of Greek philosophy and Roman civic life became one of the most influential models of republican political thought in the West
ThinkerRichard Hooker
1554–1600
The Elizabethan divine whose Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity defended the English settlement by reason and consent, and whom Locke cites as the judicious Hooker.
ThinkerFrancisco Suárez
1548–1617
The last great scholastic, whose account of law as the command of a will, and of political power as arising in the community before it is transferred, reached Grotius and Locke.
ThinkerFrancisco de Vitoria
1483–1546
The Salamanca Dominican who denied that discovery, papal grant or unbelief gave Spain title to the Indies, and founded the modern law of nations in the process.
ThinkerJean Bodin
1530–1596
The lawyer who defined sovereignty as absolute and perpetual power over citizens, giving the modern state its central concept in the middle of a civil war.
ThinkerAverroes
1126–1198
Averroes was the Andalusian philosopher whose commentaries carried Aristotle back into the Latin West, and whose insistence that philosophy and revelation could not contradict each other set the terms of the medieval argument about reason.
ThinkerMaimonides
1138–1204
Maimonides was the Jewish philosopher and jurist whose reconciliation of Aristotle with revealed law became a model for Christian scholasticism, and whose reading shaped Spinoza, Leibniz and the 20th-century revival of political philosophy.
ThinkerJohn Calvin
1509–1564
John Calvin was the most politically consequential Protestant Reformer, whose theology of resistance, vocation, and godly civil government shaped Puritan England, colonial America, and the modern Protestant world
ThinkerThomas Aquinas
1225–1274
Thomas Aquinas was the medieval Dominican friar who synthesized Christian theology with Aristotelian philosophy and built the natural law tradition that still anchors Catholic political thought
ThinkerJohn Duns Scotus
1266–1308
The Subtle Doctor, whose insistence that the will is free even from the intellect's judgment opened the road to voluntarism in ethics, theology and law.
ThinkerBartolus of Saxoferrato
1313–1357
The greatest of the medieval Roman lawyers, who found in an imperial code the legal basis for the independence of city-republics that recognized no emperor.
ThinkerJohn of Salisbury
1120–1180
Secretary to Becket and author of the Policraticus, the first full-length work of political theory in the medieval West — and the first to justify killing a tyrant.
ThinkerMarcus Aurelius
121–180
Marcus Aurelius was Rome's Stoic philosopher-emperor, ruling the most powerful state in the world while writing a private journal on how to live well — the Meditations, among the most widely read texts in human history
ThinkerMartin Luther
1483–1546
Martin Luther was the Augustinian monk whose protest against indulgences fractured Western Christendom and whose insistence on conscience over ecclesiastical authority set the terms of political debate for centuries