Abstract

The purpose of this study is to expose John Duns Scotus’s grounding of the origin and the nature of the political, i.e., of political realities or common political entities. The overall background for this account is Scotus’s general doctrine of natural law and positive law, which is first of all a moral theory, and at any rate is a presupposition for giving some normative justification – and legitimation – to political reality. This background – specially its normative validity – is better explained through an account of the concepts of potentia ordinata and potentia absoluta, in particular when related to God as a legislator. More narrowly, both the origin and the nature of the political relate to the fact of a voluntary consensus for chosing a common authority – an authority beyond the limits of family and natural law strictly speaking – which has the responsibility of reasonably legislating for the benefit of everybody, hence for the common good. A legitimate civil authority has, thus, the taks of preserving and respecting, by means of some measure of consonantia, natural law, although its very establishment and every civil legislation belongs to the realm of positive law. After explaining how the political depends on a voluntary consensus and why its positive law-based reality does not strictly follow from any account of human nature and tendencies, neither from any account of natural law, I make the attempt of discussing in which sense Scotus’s view of the political commits him to a kind of contractualism.