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AbstractThis article examines whether Aquinas's political science is philosophy or theology, a question that arises from his understanding of happiness. If the supernatural vision of God constitutes perfect beatitude or the ultimate end, then how can an account of imperfect happiness—political virtue—be given without reference to it and hence without appeal to revealed theology? I argue that Aquinas provides a strictly philosophical account of imperfect happiness by showing that, among temporal goods, virtue most fully instantiates general attributes of beatitude such as self-sufficiency and continuity, even though it does not perfectly instantiate them. This way of demonstrating the superiority of virtue to other temporal goods requires no appeal to supernatural beatitude, and thus political science, which takes this imperfect happiness as its first principle, is philosophy.

Cover -- Half-title -- Reviews -- Title page -- Copyright information -- Dedication -- Table of contents -- First Prologue: Horizons of Political Reflection -- Second Prologue: Freud, Weber, and Political Philosophy -- 1 Hannah Arendt: The Performativity of Politics -- Endowing Life with Splendor -- Labor, Work, and Action -- 2 Michael Oakeshott: Life's Adventure -- 3 Leo Strauss: The Politics of Philosophy -- What Defines Straussianism -- Philosophers and Non-Philosophers -- Natural Right -- Gold Souls -- 4 Karl Löwith: In Awe of the Cosmos -- 5 Excursus on Nature and History in the Strauss-Löwith Correspondence -- 6 Eric Voegelin: Modernity's Vortex -- 7 Simone Weil: The Politics of the Soul -- 8 Hans-Georg Gadamer: Philosophy without Hubris -- 9 Jürgen Habermas: Politics as Rational Discourse -- 10 Michel Foucault's Carceral Society -- 11 Alasdair MacIntyre: Fragmentation and Wholeness -- 12 Short Excursus on the Rise and Decline of Communitarianism as a Political Philosophy -- 13 John Rawls and the Death of Political Philosophy -- 14 Richard Rorty: Knocking Philosophy off Its Pedestal, or the Death of Political Philosophy Postmodernized -- Epilogue: On Not Throwing in the Towel -- Index.

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