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Intuitively, humility as a moral and political stance seems apt to counteract the most egregious injustices entailed by today’s global inequalities. Yet humility can also be viewed as keeping the poor and weak in their place, and preventing the rise to positions of authority of those best suited to govern for the good of all. Beyond that, to children of modernity, pride can seem preferable to humility for being unavoidable, more realistic, and ultimately less hypocritical political motive. In this paper I will explore some resources for rehabilitating humility as a social and political virtue offered by Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae. While early modern thinkers Spinoza and Hume had dismissed humility as a personally debilitating passion and even a social and civic vice, in Aquinas’s thought humility properly understood is theorized as a virtue that checks and guides potentially grasping and domineering passions. Humility’s most potent roots and reasons are religious, according to Aquinas, yet he also sees it as an inherently ethical virtue susceptible of appreciation and cultivation in some form by all human beings. While an initial read of Aquinas?s theory of humility might seem to support Hume?s dismissal of humility as at most a ?monkish virtue,? I argue that a more thorough and context-sensitive study reveals a cogent case for humility’s importance to citizens and statesmen in this world. Humility?s civic import according to Aquinas may be grasped by noting the case he makes for its connections to two critical social and civic virtues: first general or legal justice, justice in the service of a truly common good, and then magnanimity, the greatness of soul required to benefit others on a large scale and in very difficult tasks. It is my argument that a contemporary reappropriation of Aquinas’s case for humility stands to assist us as ethical and civic actors, both on the home-front and in the global village. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]