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The concept of political theology was the subject of important controversies in European, and especially German, philosophy, social science and jurisprudence in the twentieth century. After the First World War, a debate took place between the jurist Carl Schmitt, an influential right-wing critic of parliamentary democracy in the Weimar Republic, and the theologian Erik Peterson. Another debate was occasioned by a new, leftist political interpretation of biblical texts in the years after 1960. In that context, ‘political theology’ designates philosophical positions influenced by neo-Marxist philosophies, such as the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. The earlier controversy between Schmitt and Peterson played a role in this later debate as well. Johann Baptist Metz is probably the most important representative of political theology in the later controversy.

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Translated from the German by John D. CochraneAristotle earns the distinction of having put forward the first comprehensive philosophical theory of justice. After the end of the antique world, St. Thomas Aquinas was the first philosopher and theologian to return to Aristotle's theory of the just. Not only did he do so with the requisite systematic precision; he also developed a new philosophical interpretation of justice. In the present article I shall outline, with the brevity expected of me here, the fundamentals of Aristotle's theory of justice. This will be followed by a summary of the core aspects of Aquinas's notion of justice, whose grounding in normative reason will be identified in Aquinas's treatise on law and political theory, and explicated accordingly. I.Aristotle's theory of justice had its precursors; there were interpretations of the just in Greek literature, rhetoric, and politics, as well as philosophy, to which Aristotle also makes explicit reference on a number of occasions. Aristotle, however, is the first to formulate a comprehensive theory of justice. To understand Aristotle's theory, we must turn to Book 5 of the Nicomachean Ethics. 1 Here, Aristotle first distinguishes between a type of justice that he interprets as "complete" and at the same time as "complete virtue" or "virtue entire," and a type of justice which is to be understood as "part of virtue."