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One highlight from last week's Conference on Catholic Legal Thought was the conversation about Bill Cavanaugh's Theopolitical Imagination.  There were some productive points of tension and clarity, particularly between Cavanaugh's Augustinian and Patrick Brennan's Thomistic leanings, with some healthy skepticism from Cavanaugh toward the political work of John Courtney Murray, and a robust defense of Murray by Brennan and others, including Villanova's Michael Moreland.  One refrain shared by everyone was the woeful state of Catholic political theory.  Cavanaugh views the state as a product of our imagination, which was not a popular opinion in this group.  Echoing Augustine, he believes that the state is temporarily necessary for the restraint of vice, unlike Thomas, who believed that the state is part of the natural order.  One realization for me is that I need to read de Lubac, who looms large in Cavanaugh's political theory.  Hopefully this conversation will continue to unfold, and will be joined by more Catholic legal scholars, over the coming years.

UPDATE: If the state is part of the natural order, does that mean that a post-state world is contrary to the natural order, or does "the state" in Thomas's writing simply signify the temporal authority, a role that could be filled by an international organization or global authority?  Consider this reflection from Brian Tamanaha:

Whether in the name of some ideology, or some image of national purity or dominance, or in the name of religion, or simply to plunder, states have time and again massacred their own people, or conscripted their own people and flung them at others to kill and be killed. The number of human lives extinguished by states, and in the name of states, well exceeds a hundred million.

Learn this history and you will see the price patriotism exacts. For many reasons, I feel fortunate to have been born in the United States, but I don’t love my country. It has no love for any of us. A cold, manipulative, object of affection, the state fans patriotism, then asks those who love it deeply to prove their love by dying or sacrificing their limbs for it.

It will not happen in my lifetime, but I look forward to the day when states are no more. As difficult as it is to imagine what a political future without states might look like, the state system is a relatively recent innovation in human history and there is no reason to think we will be burdened with states forever.

Is such a wish inherently contrary to a Catholic view of the world?