The Thomistic Institute Are Societies Natural? The Metaphysics of Thomistic Social Thought – Prof. Joshua Hochschild
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Oct 7, 2025 Prof. Joshua Hochschild, a philosophy expert at Mount St. Mary’s University, dives into the nature of societies through a Thomistic lens. He argues that social forms like families and states have intrinsic purposes essential to human flourishing. Hochschild contrasts organic and mechanistic views of governance, exploring how modern society often overlooks genuine community in favor of contractarian frameworks. He emphasizes the role of language in shaping justice and critiques alienating social structures. Ultimately, he calls for moral leadership to nurture communities aligned with human nature.
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Language Is Foundational To Political Life
- Aristotle and Aquinas argue that language enables shared judgments of justice, which builds political community.
- Without shared speech and concepts, people cannot form the common good or initiate new members into communal life.
Social Conditioning Demands Moral Inquiry
- Social conditioning of language increases our duty to reflect and refine our shared conceptions of justice.
- Conceptual fragmentation prevents people from experiencing themselves as community members and hides moral agency.
Lived Community Vs. Political Vocabulary
- A speaker publicly defined the common good in contractarian terms while privately describing a deeply Aristotelian communal life.
- This mismatch shows lived social intuition can contradict abstract political vocabulary.
