Many Catholics discussing the proper use of political power in relation to the common good overlook fundamental problems concerning political power itself: what power is, how it works, the forms power can take under which circumstances, how the reality of power relates to the reality of the social order in which it operates, and so on. These fundamental questions about power are at the heart of classical political theory. Plato and Aristotle address the problem of power by focusing on the intrinsic relationship between the moral composition of the people and type of regime; and subsequently, that relationship was to be a central feature of pre-modern, classical political thought. It is this relationship that I would like to focus on in the present essay.

Within the classical reading, any given positive regime comes to be and is sustained only within a social regime, a way that the people are.¹ As Plato asserted, “there must be as many

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