in these doctrines, just as she tardily contributed to them at the
dose of the XVIII century through the works of Beccaria and Filangeri.

While therefore in other countries such as France, England, Germany,
and Holland, the general tradition in the social and political
sciences worked in behalf of anti-state individualism, and therefore
of liberal and democratic doctrines, Italy, on the other hand, clung
to the powerful legacy of its past in virtue of which she proclaims
the rights of the state, the preeminence of its authority, and the
superiority of its ends. The very fact that the Italian political
doctrine in the Middle Ages linked itself with the great political
writers of antiquity, Plato and Aristotle, who in a different manner
but with an equal firmness advocated a strong state and the
subordination of individuals to it, is a sufficient index of the
orientation of political philosophy in Italy. We all know how thorough
and crushing the authority of Aristotle was in the Middle Ages. But
for Aristotle the spiritual cement of the state is "virtue" not
absolute virtue but political virtue, which is social devotion. His
state is made up solely of its citizens, the citizens being either
those who defend it with their arms or who govern it as magistrates.
All others who provide it with the materials and services it needs are
not citizens. They become such only in the corrupt forms of certain
democracies. Society is therefore divided into two classes, the free
men or citizens who give their time to noble and virtuous occupations
and who profess their subjection to the state, and the laborers and
slaves who work for the maintenance of the former. No man in this
scheme is his own master. The slaves belong to the freemen, and the
freemen belong to the state.

It was therefore natural that St. Thomas Aquinas the greatest