Thomas Aquinas on the Ontology of the Political Community

Aquinas never discusses the ontology of those entities that we today consider signifcant for social ontology. On some occasions, however, he addresses the mereological question of the relation between social aggregates and the individuals that compose them, and these places are signifcant for bringing to light what Aquinas had to say, if anything, about social ontology. In this contributio I prove that Aquinas’s analysis of social aggregates is essentially metaphysical and that, in the end, it leads him to assign a place to such aggregates within Aristotelian ontology. Nevertheless, cognitive and linguistic considerations, which concern what we can call collective intentionality and the constitutive role of some speech acts, play some role in Aquinas's explanation of the nature and origin of social aggregates. Aquinas’s view of social ontology lies between reductionism and realism with respect to the question of the nature of social aggregates, and between naturalism and constructionism with respect to the question of their origin.