In the opening respondeo of his “Question on War” (Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 40, a. 1) Thomas Aquinas famously writes that a war will be just only when it is conducted under the authority of a prince, for a just cause, and with an upright intention. In what follows I examine the first of these three conditions.
Reichberg, Gregory M. (2012) Legitimate Authority: Aquinas’s First Requirement of a Just War, The Thomist 76 (3): 337–369.
