 Government is properly speaking “political” when the supreme person or body “has power which is limited [potestas coarctata or limitata] by certain laws of the state”: Pol. I.1.5. Such rulers govern in accordance with the laws concerning the establishment of their office, their appointment and their responsibilities. When power is, by contrast, “plenary”, the government is said to be “regal” in kind. But even regal government, in its proper forms, is the government of free and equal people who have in some sense (never made quite clear by Aquinas) the “right to resist [ius repugnandi]” the ruler(s). Even regal rulers are subject to the directive force of the laws, though there is no-one who has the legal authority to coerce them.