POLITICAL THOUGHT OF FRANCISCO SUÁREZ: The Theological, Philosophical, and Legal Foundations of Political Authority An Essay

The author remarks are recapitulating the salient issues of Suárez’s political thought as we have recorded its aspects in the pages of this essay.The author pays particular attention to the ensuing topics. Why society? Why political society? Why a theologian’s interest in the law? The ius gentium. Suárez and the American Revolution.
The present monograph brings to a close the study in three separate essays of an equal number of significant issues in the history of European political thought in the early modern period. In the first, natural law as the artificer of the State, my Acerca del iusnaturalismo y el Estado del Barroco (Madrid, 2023) examines the process whereby several distinguished authors attempt (a) to account for the origin and nature of the State of the Baroque on the basis of a lex naturalis/ius naturale—all standing on the rocky foundation of a philosophy of order (Suárez) or a philosophy of chaos (Hobbes)—in turn understood as issuing from the Reason or Will divines (Suárez and Hobbes, respectively), and (b) to interpret the institution that embodies the notion of politically-organized society as best personified in “constitutional” (Suárez) or absolute (Hobbes) terms; with Pufendorf essaying an attempt at smoothing the rough edges of the latter’s version of things. In the second—the subject of Three Moments in the History. In short, fraud and deceit must ever be controlled by the strictest necessity and never be construed as an habitual political expedient. This is how Pedro de Ribadeneyra, a Jesuit of the Spanish Province who at one time was thought to be a part of the cabal that had so distracted the Society’s General, advised the prince practicing a cristiana razón de Estado to rule in a political world devoid of morality.