ABSTRACT
One of the most significant yet fraught challenges faced by Western social and political thought generally pertains to the origins and development of human association and government. The many and diverse solutions offered to this perennial quandary depend heavily upon the normative principles one adopts, such as the relation of the individual to the community and the value of freedom in contrast to the authority of government. Why do human beings associate? Can mankind thrive without some form of political organization? Are some constitutions or institutions more consonant with human nature than others? Is human fulfillment a collective or a private good? In no epoch of Western civilization from classical Greece up to the twenty-first century have these sorts of questions lacked for multiple and often incommensurable replies. This was true as much for the Latin Middle Ages as for any other historical period. Medieval Europe was rife with thinkers who sought to identify answers to the fundamental questions about the communal existence of humanity, often with highly differing results. This is not to suggest, however, that medieval social and political theorists worked in an intellectual vacuum to resolve the basic dilemmas that they confronted. Rather, they enjoyed access to and drew upon several preceding attempts to articulate the basic issues surrounding society and politics, in particular the models afforded by St Augustine, Aristotle, and Cicero. The present chapter will first briefly survey the central doctrines of these three paradigmatic figures and then consider how they helped to inform a variety of theoretical arguments about the origins of social relations and political organizations that were on display between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. The core concern is therefore with the theoretical underpinning of the human community, at the time necessarily and essentially a Christian community, rather than with the validation of differing types of rule and the intricacies of religious justifications for particular types of rule and political formations, let alone the fraught relationship between temporal and ecclesiastical spheres.
