Temperance

By: Marcel De Corte, Inez Fitzgerald Storck (Translator)

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Paperback | 6 February 2026

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120 Pages

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20.32 x 13.34 x 0.71

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Temperance has faded from modern consciousness as a virtue, relegated, when it is mentioned at all, to moderation in food and drink or abstention from alcohol. The Belgian philosopher Marcel De Corte here reveals its whole content, basing his analysis on Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. Temperance intervenes in all the ends of human life, and nearly every virtue has need of it in order to be practiced. Without it, we become unbalanced, lose our self-possession, and are deprived of our truly human character, descending to the level of beasts. Bereft of temperance, individuals become not only debauched in body, but given over to inordinate desires of the mind, such as anger, envy, or even a disordered curiosity. Pride takes over, obliterating humility. De Corte issues a prophetic call for the reform of persons, and thus of society, through embracing the virtue of temperance, including its inclusion in catechetics and homilies. Otherwise, our "dis-society" will continue on its downward trajectory.

Industry Reviews

"One of the greatest contemporary Catholic philosophers, an intellectual concerned with politics and attentive to the unique reality of persons and things, humble before what is objective and thus opened to the truth." -Danilo Castellano, Italian philosopher and author whose works include L'aristotelismo cristiano di Marcel de Corte

"One of the greatest twentieth-century masters of the counterrevolution." -Juan Vallet de Goytisolo, Spanish jurist and philosopher, author, among other works, of Ideologa, praxis y mito de la tecnocracia

"For centuries, since the moral insights of Plato and Aristotle, the virtues were considered as the heart of morality. It is this which Marcel De Corte, with so many lively and interesting comments on contemporary society, brings to life in this series of books." -Thomas Storck, author, editor and translator, most recently author of Economics: An Alternative Introduction (XIII Books)

"Marcel De Corte, of an unsurpassed intellectual mettle, professed philosophical realism which is in perfect accord with his anti-modernism." -Miguel Ayuso, Professor of Political Science at the Comillas Pontifical University, Madrid, and author of books on social and political topics, most recently, of El pueblo contra el Estado?

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