Precisiones sobre la interpretación nominalista de la Civitas en Marsilio de Padua

Abstract

The efforts to show the influence of the philosophy nominalist on Marsiglio of Padua's political theory haven't been successful. Other trends ofthought and philosophical schools, as the heterodox aristotelism, the medieval corporativism, even the organic idea of society are more present at the Defensor pacis, thought and written some years before Marsiglio became fellow of Ockham at the Court of the German King Ludwig IV of Bavaria. The paper examines some texts on which the nominalist understanding ofMarsilio's thought has been founded. It comes to the conclusion that Marsilio doesn't explain a theory of civitas, based on a nominalist idea of society. In his struggle against plenitudo potestatis of Papacy, Marsilio builds a civitas, in which there's no place for any priestly power different from the secular one. The result is that ther'are two different kinds of society: Ockham's kind, dualist; Marsilio's, much more monolithic, without granting to individual dtizens or to the parts of civitas any competence to operate autonomously.