New Volume on CDK

A new volume on the work of Charles De Koninck ...https://t.co/PXJslMCWO7

— The Charles De Koninck Project (@The_CDK_Project) August 11, 2023

Fr. Aquinas Guilbeau on CDK and the Personalists

In this discussion of Yves Simon's General Theory of Authority, @FrAquinasOP touches on the dispute between Maritain and De Koninck on the person and the common goodhttps://t.co/5LiUKDGKsG

— Catholic Culture Podcasts (@CatholicPods) November 18, 2020

CDK on Christ the King

Christ the King https://t.co/iLB6hNkOgz

— The Josias (@josias_rex) November 22, 2020

CDK on the Family

Thrilled to have my essay published by @Athwart_Mag! In it, I discuss the family’s intimate link to the common good of politica communities. I examine Charles De Koninck’s of the common good and his two antecedents, Aristotle and St. Augustine.https://t.co/gSG2k6HWoJ

— Anthony Daoud (@AnthonyDaoud6) August 12, 2020

Eternal Memory

André Clément, requiescat in pace ... https://t.co/TFTclEOm7t

— The Charles De Koninck Project (@The_CDK_Project) May 16, 2020

L'Homme Nouveau: Adieu à André Clément, premier doyen de l’IPC: l'héritage de Charles De Koninck maintenu et transmis

Fr. Aquinas Guilbeau, O.P.: "Friendship and the Common Good"

Here is the video:

Fr. Aquinas Guilbeau, O.P.: "Friendship and the Common Good"

Thomistic Institute:

To be live-streamed tomorrow at 5:00 PM EST>

Misunderstanding Secular Europe

That rare moment when De Koninck agrees with the reds. pic.twitter.com/6KUAgZKggo

— Pater Edmund (@sancrucensis) April 26, 2020

The important consideration being that "plures hominum sequuntur passiones"; not that the plures will actually use this right to contradiction, but in that they will, through negligence and indifference for the common good, allow those who do contradict, to seize power. Ex.g.: several European countries today.

An Aristotelian would agree that "absolute democracy" is a bad regime; after all it was Aristotle, following Plato, who distinguished between good and bad regimes. But what of politeia, the "republic"? I cannot see that De Koninck would deny that the possibility of a good form of government by many exists. Aristotle would probably be inclined to there is no "absolute" politeia, whether with respect to the number (rule by all, regardless of qualification) or with respect to what they can legislate.

More on the Common Good

Me: “Authority is held in trust for and exercised on behalf of the community ... not for the benefit of individuals taken one by one.”

Patheos blogger, just making stuff up: Vermeule argues for aggregative utilitarianism! https://t.co/GYBvijIsMd

— Adrian Vermeule (@Vermeullarmine) April 25, 2020

“A society constituted by persons who love their private good above the common good, or who identify the common good with the private good, is a society not of free men, but of tyrants.” — @ccpecknold

Exactly. A host of mini-tyrants is still a tyranny. https://t.co/Vq3Zwe2hs6

— Sohrab Ahmari (@SohrabAhmari) April 25, 2020

Renewed Attention to the CDK-Maritain Debate

First Things: False Notions of the Common Good by C. C. Pecknold

Thus De Koninck’s most powerful claim is that human dignity can only be truly defended by embracing the primacy of the common good “expressly ordered to God.” Without an “explicit and public ordination” to God, our debates about the common will devolve into mere debates between tyrants, and “society degenerates into a state which is frozen and closed in upon itself.” 

But what does an explicit ordination to God require? Not necessarily a version of the Catholic state as the integralists would advocate. Not necessarily the state at all.

A Defense of Integralism

Church Life: Integralism and the Logic of the Cross by Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist

Too much favoring of monarchy and the mixed regime that has monarchy at its center? The essay doesn't touch upon what qualifications are necessary for the one to rule, and what is to be done for the unjust ruler.

Let's See if We Can Find the Paper

Post by The Charles De Koninck Project.

Two on the Common Good

Historical Papers 2006: Canadian Society of Church History: "Charles De Koninck at the Crossroads of Catholic Moral Thought: The “Common Good” Controversy and its Echoes in the Americas" by Christian Roy


Analyse & Kritik 3
"MacIntyre, Thomism and the Contemporary Common Good" by Thomas Osborne

Now uploaded and available at Friburg: Susan Waldstein, Mercy and Self-Gift: Exploring the Intrinsic Connections Between Charles De Koninck’s Evolutionary Biology and his Theological Principles (PDF, 2.8mb)

Some Familiar Names

TAC: Alumni Launch “The Charles De Koninck Project”

Ed Feser: The Charles De Koninck Project - the website.

Culture Wars: The Sad Story of Thomism in America

Florian Michel, La pensée catholique en Amérique du Nord: Réseaux intellectuels et échanges culturels entre l'Europe, le Canada et les Etats-Unis (Desclée de Brouwer Paris, 2010).

Reviewed by Joseph Filipowicz

The book itself might be worth reading; the review is ok, though it does not talk much about De Koninck. But at the end the reviewer slips into the a rather extreme "traditionalism" in how he views the American founding:

And what is the response of the other Catholic leaders? It is to continue the project of Maritain, with the Hispanics of the 2010s playing the role that the Polish played in the 1930s-1970s. We are told that there are two traditions present in the United States, that of the Protestant Puritans and that of the Catholic Hispanics. Both of the traditions are good leading to the highest development of democratic freedom, and, in the end, the tradition of democratic freedom stems from the same font, the wisdom of Aquinas. Once both of them figure this out, American will become good and whole again. 

This position, which descends from the thought of Maritain, should now be seen for what it truly is, namely, preposterous. The Protestant Puritans were radicals who were rebelling against a group of rebels that were rebelling against the Catholic Faith. The American Founding Fathers were a new set of rebels who had descended from the Puritan rebels. The American Protestants and Jewish elites that came together to form higher Judeo-Protestant American Culture at the end of the 20th Century were together forming a new form of subversive and revolutionary culture. The likes of Dewey, Wirth, Blanshard, and their leftist and neoconservative progeny do not see any possibility of compromise with Catholic culture unless the Catholics are willing to change their system of morals so that they would embrace birth control, war, individualism, capitalism or any other of the modern materialist ideologies stemming from the 18th Century.

I do think Maritain may have been too optimistic and misjudged how reconcilable liberalism and "modern liberal democracy" are with Catholicism. Part of this is probably due to erroneous assumptions concerning the modern nation-state and whether it is at the proper scale to bring about the common good, even if we abstract from historical considerations about how it came to be and the forces that were at work. He probably accepted the Yankee narrative and its understanding of the Constitution, too.

More from James Chastek on De Koninck

What insight could Dekoninck give into being as opposed to the most indefinite concept?

James Chastek offers a tentative critique of De Koninck regarding metaphysics.

This article by Thomas Osborne is available online: MacIntyre, Thomism, and the Common Good.