The Risk of Order
Recently, when I taught Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on Law to my freshmen, I asked them what they made of his twofold claim that law serves the common good and that this common good consists in “universal happiness.” Is that how you tend to think of law, I asked, does it exist to make us happy? Most shook their heads. I agreed. When I asked what the end of law might be instead, I got a consistent answer: a mix of “safety” and “security.” Even when students seemed to begin to take a different route—peace was thrown out, for instance—we seemed to wind back up, there, in the quiet kingdom of security. This peace was only the absence of turbulence.
