Are Societies Natural? The Metaphysics of Thomistic Social Thought – Prof. Joshua Hochschild

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Religion &Amp; Spirituality, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 7 October 2025

⏱️ 50 minutes

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Summary

Prof. Joshua Hochschild examines whether societies are natural by tracing the Aristotelian and Thomistic understanding of social forms, arguing that certain social bodies like families and states have intrinsic natures and purposes that fulfill the social aspect of human flourishing.

This lecture was given on May 31st, 2025, at Mount Saint Mary College.

For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.

About the Speakers:

Joshua Hochschild is Professor of Philosophy at Mount St. Mary’s University, where he also served six years as the inaugural Dean of the College of Liberal Arts. His primary research is in medieval logic, metaphysics, and ethics, with broad interest in liberal education and the continuing relevance of the Catholic intellectual tradition. He is the author of The Semantics of Analogy: Rereading Cajetan’s De Nominum Analogia (2010), translator of Claude Panaccio’s Mental Language: From Plato to William of Ockham (2017), and co-author of A Mind at Peace: Reclaiming an Ordered Soul in the Age of Distraction (2017). His writing has appeared in First Things, Commonweal, Modern Age and the Wall Street Journal. For 2020-21 he served as President of the American Catholic Philosophical Association.

Keywords: Alasdair MacIntyre, Aristotelianism, Catholic Social Teaching, Civil Society, Common Good, Community, Corporate Personality, Moral Agency, Politics, Subsidiarity

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tumistic Institute podcast. Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square. The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Tumistic Institute chapters around the world. To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at
0:21.7	Thomisticinstitute.org. In the first chapter of his treatise on politics, Aristotle traces a
0:28.3	connection between our nature as rational creatures and our nature as political creatures.
0:33.7	The crucial link is in the phenomenon of language.
0:38.3	Speech, he says, indicates what is useful or harmful, and so also what is just or unjust.
0:44.3	For strictly speaking, it belongs to human beings alone, in contrast with other animals, to perceive good and evil, just and unjust, and the like.
0:56.0	And communicating these perceptions produces households and political communities.
1:03.0	Aquinas, commenting on this passage, expands on the role of language in building community.
1:10.0	Human speech, he says, signifies useful and harmful
1:13.3	things, and so just and unjust things, since justice and injustice consist of persons being
1:19.6	treated justly or unjustly regarding useful and harmful things. And so, speech is proper to human
1:27.1	beings, since it is proper to them in contrast with other
1:29.9	animals to have knowledge of good and evil, just and unjust, and the like, which speech
1:34.8	can signify.
1:37.7	Nature gives speech to human beings, and speech is directed to human beings communicating with one another regarding the useful
1:46.5	and the harmful, the just and the unjust, and the like. Therefore, this is still Aquinas,
1:54.3	since nature does nothing in vain, human beings by nature, communicate with one another about
2:00.5	these things. But communication about
2:03.2	these things produces the household and the political community. Therefore, he concludes,
2:09.1	human beings are, by nature, domestic, and political animals. For both Aristotle and Aquinas, meaningful speech not only expresses common ideas about
2:21.3	justice, it is the means by which we form those common ideas and make them practically
2:26.0	effective in common life. We might think it is obvious that having a language in common is the
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