Luigi Taparelli and the 19th-century neo-Thomistic 'revolution' in natural law and Catholic social sciences

The dissertation focuses on the ideas of one of the founders and principal writers of the journal, Civilta Cattolica, founded in 1850, Luigi Taparelli d'Azeglio, S.J. (1793--1862). The journal was launched under the auspices of the Jesuit order and the direct control of the pope as an intellectual counter-attack against the ideologies of liberalism and socialism as they appeared after the revolutions of 1848 in Europe and in Italy especially in the controversies surrounding the process of Italian unification.; The study will analyze the theoretical context in which Taparelli's more widely studied journalistic career needs to be read. The philosophical core of Taparelli's system was derived from St. Thomas Aquinas, whose works obtained renewed interest and study partly as a result of Taparelli's efforts in the 1820's and 1830's. Taparelli's intense engagement with the political issues at stake in Europe and in Italy make the natural law principles behind the journalistic writings impossible to appreciate without detailed knowledge of the philosophical background. Taparelli's historically conditioned conclusions were anti-liberal, anti-capitalist, and anti-state at a time when liberalism, capitalism, and statism, held up as absolute principles, were worthy of suspicion. When historical conditions shifted such that atheistic socialism revealed itself to the hierarchy as the more immediate threat to society, souls and the Church, Taparelli's rhetoric, although not his reasoning, was no longer relevant and indeed, references to his writings could only be viewed as counter-productive from their standpoint. Taparelli's indirect influence on Catholic social doctrine can be seen in Leo XIII's foundational social encyclical Rerum Novarum , and his direct influence can be identified in the encyclicals of Pius XI under the changed circumstances of the 1930's. Taparelli advanced the objective and subjective rights language of solidarity (right of association), subsidiarity (respect for the moral autonomy of different levels of association organized in the pursuit of goods of differing levels of commonality), and social justice (the concrete application of the foregoing principles to the right ordering of society as a matter of justice, prudence, and love) that have become pillars of Catholic social doctrine.