Ebook: Aquinas, Aristotle, and the Promise of the Common Good

Why Aquinas? : reconsidering and reconceiving the common good -- The promise and problem of the common good : contemporary experience and classical articulation -- Why Aquinas? : centrality of the concept and focus on foundations -- An overview of the argument, by parts and chapters -- Contemporary responses to the problem of the common good : three Anglo-American theories -- Liberal deontologism : contractarian common goods in Rawls's theory of justice -- Communitarianism or civic republicanism : Sandel against common-sense "otherness" -- A third way? : Galston on the common goods of liberal pluralism -- Unearthing and appropriating Aristotle's foundations : from three Anglo-American theorists back to Thomas Aquinas -- Aristotelianism and political-philosophic foundations, old and new -- Aristotle's three political-philosophic foundations in Thomas Aquinas's thought -- The first foundation and Aquinas's Commentary : human nature as "political and social" in politics -- Reinforcing the foundations : Aquinas on the problem of political virtue and regime-centered political science -- The second foundation and Aquinas's commentary : human beings and citizens in politics -- Faults in the foundations : the uncommented politics and the problem of regime particularity -- Politics pointing beyond the polis and the politeia : Aquinas's new foundations -- Finishing the foundations and beginning to build : Aquinas on human action and excellence as social, civic, and religious community, common good, and goodness of will -- Natural sociability and the extension of the human act -- Cardinal virtues as social and civic virtues with a divine exemplar -- Remodeling the moral edifice : Aquinas and Aristotelian magnanimity -- Aristotle on magnanimity as virtue -- Aquinas's commentary on the magnanimity of the Nicomachean ethics -- The Summa theologiae on magnanimity and some "virtues of acknowledged dependence" -- Remodeling the moral edifice : Aquinas and Aristotelian legal justice -- Aristotle on legal justice -- Aquinas's commentary on legal justice in the Nicomachean ethics -- Legal justice and natural law in the Summa theologiae -- Aquinas's two pedagogies : human law and the good of moral virtue -- Aquinas's negative narrative, or how law can curb moral vice -- Beyond reform school : law's positive pedagogy of virtue according to Aquinas -- Universality and particularity, law and liberty -- Thomistic legal pedagogy and liberal-democratic polities -- Theological virtue and Thomistic political theory -- The problematic political promotion of theological virtue -- Infused moral virtue and civic legal justice -- Thomistic and Aristotelian moderation for the common good.