ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how natural law philosophy came into the midst of the city. By the human city mean political community, that special unity-of-order organized by the rule of law and devoted to the most general and excellent virtue, which Thomas Aquinas called 'legal justice'. It explains chiefly interested in a particular historical moment, namely the legal and political renaissance of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when the subject of natural law began to receive the serious attention of philosophers, theologians and jurisprudents. The rise of natural law thinking coincided with the recovery of ancient scientific and legal texts. In other words, natural law is not a piece of merely private moral information which has to go in search of warrants of authority before it can enter the human city. Perhaps certain constituent elements of Thomas's natural law doctrine can be disaggregated, and thus made suitable for a model of public reason that is concerned merely with justice as fairness.
