Marcus Tullius Cicero and the Harmony Between Politics and Philosophy
The long and distinguished career of the famous Roman statesman, philosopher, and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero illuminates many important lessons about the interaction between philosophical speculation and political practice. As a leading statesman of the Roman Republic, Cicero endeavored to convince his fellow citizens of the lingering importance of the ancient traditions, customs, and ideals that sustained their cherished institutions. “Before our time,” he averred, “custom itself supplied superior men, and excellent men retained that old custom and the ancestors’ institutions.”[1] Mourning the loss of this noble, civic spirit in his own time, Cicero asked: “What remains of the ancient customs… upon which the Roman ‘thing’ stands?”[2] Yet, his impassioned effort to stave off the decay of the Roman Republic fell on deaf ears. He was assassinated by a political triumvirate and the institutions he swore to defend were soon decimated by a monarchical Empire.
Alluding to Cicero’s apparent failure to save the Roman Republic, some critics have chided him for standing in the face of historical progress and have even suggested that his political philosophy offers virtually nothing of value to readers today. Among his most prominent critics was the premier theorist of German idealism: Georg W.F. Hegel. Hegel charged that Cicero possessed a “remarkable hallucination” in believing that he could rescue a deteriorating republic and thwart Caesar’s glorious “political revolution.”[3] For Hegel, Cicero’s gravest error was his conviction that political philosophy should attempt to discover the truth about permanent political principles. “True law,” Cicero averred, “is of correct reason congruent with nature, spread among all persons, constant, everlasting.”[4] In contrast, Hegel—a historicist par excellence—denied the importance of the eternal truth questions posed by political philosophers throughout the centuries: “Every one is a son of his time,” he maintained in his Preface to the Philosophy of Right, so it is therefore “foolish to fancy that any philosophy can transcend its present world.”[5] Hegel and other critics would jettison Cicero from the canon of the Western tradition and emphasize more revolutionary figures in his place.
Hegel’s critique of Cicero as a misguided reactionary who deserves no respect cannot be substantiated. In fact, the statesman posed a vast assortment of powerful questions which continue to resonate centuries after his death. Though he revisits central questions earlier raised by Plato and Aristotle, he cannot be understood as a figure wholly derivative and devoid of any original insights. Cicero’s novelty rested in his capacity to unite political wisdom with political practice. As a statesman, Cicero faced the gravest of practical political issues in the deterioration of his beloved republic. As a philosopher, he confronted the rising influence of the anti-political philosophy of Epicureanism, which flippantly ignored and even decried the claims made by political life on the individual. Cicero elevated the concerns of the political to a position of prominence in his philosophical thought in order to restore the civic spiritedness that all republics depend upon to survive. Nevertheless, Cicero had no interest in banishing philosophy from politics altogether. To save politics from the malevolent philosophy of Epicureanism, Cicero proposed a union of the political and the philosophic in service of the common good.
The Threat of Epicureanism
The philosophy of Epicureanism looms large in all of Cicero’s great works of moral and political philosophy. So large, in fact, that it is impossible to conceive of the statesman’s goal of uniting philosophy and politics without first recognizing the corrosive ideas espoused by the Epicureans. Perceiving of human nature in exclusively materialistic terms, the Epicureans argued that the highest good for man is simply to “live pleasantly” and insisted that pain is his “highest evil.”[6] To be sure, the Epicureans rejected the crass hedonism characteristic of the Cyrenaics, who reveled in obscene and vulgar self-indulgence.[7] The Epicurean would not—for instance—sanction any notion of “vomiting at the table and then having to be carried home from the party, only to return still queasy the next day.”[8] Instead, the Epicureans believed that real pleasure involved moderation, limitation, and refinement. “We do not simply pursue the sort of pleasure which stirs our nature with its sweetness and produces agreeable sensations in us,” the Epicureans declared.[9] Rather, “the pleasure we deem greatest is that which is felt when all pain is removed.”[10] Indeed, they contended that it would be the height of folly for someone to pleasure himself in the short-term if it would subtract from his pleasure in the long term by causing an untimely death.
Epicureanism is unique among the influential Greek philosophical schools due to its repudiation of classical virtue ethics. Philosophies as distinct as Platonism, Aristotelianism and Stoicism all posited that virtue is a good in and of itself, even apart from considerations of utility. This view found classic expression in the words of Socrates, who averred in his last apology that “from virtue comes money and all of the other good things for human beings, both privately and publicly.”[11] Inverting this formulation, the Epicureans posited that virtue is purely instrumental to the aim of pleasure. “Virtue ought to be cultivated,” an Epicurean would maintain, “because it could prove to be useful”—not because it is objectively righteous or morally correct.[12] While they grant that the cardinal virtues of courage, wisdom, temperance, and justice are important, they insist that this is only because they provide some benefit to people and contribute to their pleasure.[13] “Those exquisitely beautiful virtues of yours,” an Epicurean inquired, “who would deem them praiseworthy or desirable if they did not result in pleasure?”[14] Consequentially, the virtues are erected upon a foundation of self-interested calculation rather than upon permanent moral obligations.
The Epicurean disregard for virtue ethics has its roots in their fundamentally atomistic and materialistic conception of reality. The very notion of a telos, an end for which all things must aim, presupposes that the universe was intelligently designed and coherently ordered. To the Epicurean, however, such a presumption is nonsensical. The world is the product of chance—not design. Epicurus, Cicero observed, “discusses matter,” but completely neglects “the power or efficient cause,” because in his schema, matter in motion is all that exists.[15] “The whole of being,” Epicurus claimed, “consists of bodies and space… Beyond bodies and space there is nothing which by mental apprehension or on its analogy we can conceive to exist.”[16] Atoms “swerving without a cause” constitute the foundation for human existence—not God.[17] Indeed, Epicurus assailed the notion of creation itself, writing that “nothing comes into being out of what is non-existent.”[18] With materialism firmly entrenched as the Epicurean guiding principle, the philosophy dismisses any notion of an incorporeal soul or an afterlife. “Those who call the soul incorporeal speak foolishly,” Epicurus chided.[19] As such, it is folly to presume that each person’s soul will live on after death. “When death comes,” Epicurus maintained, “we no longer exist.”[20] To the extent that people have a “soul” at all, it is completely material and subordinate to the concerns of the body.
Having utterly banished the notion of an immaterial soul from their philosophy, the Epicureans dramatically lowered their expectations for political life. Plato once defined politics as “the art whose business it is to care for souls.”[21] The Epicureans dispense with that belief altogether. Instead, they suggest that politics should not attempt to cultivate citizens of virtue but should instead be reticent about the possibilities of political life. Humans in the Epicurean schema are motivated by passions, particularly their aversion to pain, fear of death, and love for the pleasurable. Defining the good life not as a life of virtue but as a life that is “without fear, care, torment, or danger,” the Epicureans insisted that politics would be fulfilling its purpose if it simply minimized pain and made it possible for citizens to pursue their pleasures without harming others.[22] The polis should not try to elevate the souls of its citizens because such a feat would be impossible. Even supposedly good-souled men of virtue are only so outwardly because they fear the consequences that would come if they harmed others.[23] Given the chance, this same person—if he was suffering through a shipwreck—would dislodge a weaker man from a plank by force to save his own life, so long as there were no witnesses.[24] Politics must take its moorings not from what men can become through religious training or moral education, but from what people already are by nature: creatures dominated by self-interested passions.
As it is force and fear—not friendship or affection between the citizens—that serves as the Epicurean foundation for politics, they insisted that political life is fundamentally unnatural and even undesirable. Admonishing that “we must free ourselves from the prison of affairs and politics,” Epicurus asserted that man’s natural condition is a state of freedom.[25] Given the chance, individuals would relish the opportunity to swindle or abuse others for their own advantage. Yet, a state of perfect freedom would pose problems for each individual’s own pleasure, since it would also allow others to do them harm. To respond to this dilemma, individuals compact together and form a political society in what Thomas Hobbes, that latter day Epicurean, later referred to as the social contract. “When one fears another, both one man to another and one order [of men] to another, then because no one is sure of himself, a compact… is made between the people and the powerful.”[26] Individual autonomy from political society—not individual participation in political society—anchors the Epicurean conception of freedom. Politics, like justice itself, is wholly artificial and represents the product “not of nature or will but weakness.”[27] The life of the citizen active in the affairs of his republic constitutes not a happy life for the Epicurean, but an abdication of true happiness because it distracts people from the life of moderated pleasure-seeking.
The Epicurean assault on the intrinsic goodness of political life does not necessarily indicate that they embrace the philosophic life without reservation. Indeed, they undermine that as well in deeply important respects. Wisdom does not consist of knowledge of truth and knowledge is not valuable for its own sake. In fact, philosophic wisdom for the Epicurean amounts to little more than a self-interested calculation about how to attain the greatest amount of bodily pleasure in any given circumstance.[28] Thus, like the other virtues, Epicureans subordinated wisdom to the concerns of the body. “It is wisdom alone,” an Epicurean argued, “which drives misery from our hearts; wisdom alone which stops us trembling with fear.”[29] Knowledge, in their formulation, should strive to attain a more pleasurable life in the present, not to rigorously pursue truth even at the cost of severe suffering. Scientific inquiry—long associated with the belief that truth is fundamentally valuable and worthwhile for its own sake—becomes for the Epicurean simply another method of conquering nature. “Science,” they exhorted, should be valued “not as an art in itself but because it brings us good health.”[30] Though the Epicureans reserved a place for inquiry as a tool to moderate desires and live more pleasantly, they nonetheless undermined true philosophy by making its value wholly contingent upon bodily pleasures.
Cicero’s Defense of the Political Life
The relevance of Epicureanism to Cicero’s political philosophy cannot be acknowledged too emphatically. Within his most expressly political works, On the Republic and On the Laws, Cicero implicitly or explicitly critiques Epicureanism constantly. The reason is clear: Epicureanism, if accepted, would profoundly endanger Cicero’s larger effort to unite politics and philosophy. With its doctrine of man as primarily egotistic and individualistic, it denied the justice of political life and suggested that participation in the political process is an affront to nature. Cicero lamented that politics, in the Epicurean view, converts the city into something resting upon force and terror, not right and justice.[31] His thorough repudiation of the philosophy culminated in his conclusion to On the Republic, in which he maintained that the Epicureans who have “given themselves to the pleasures of the body have offered themselves as servants… and they have violated the laws of gods and human beings because of the impulse of lusts obeying pleasures.”[32] Preferring what is pleasurable to what is just, Epicureans are not free at all—they are in fact slaves to injustice. They desecrate the universal moral law given by the divinity to all mankind as well as the political laws instituted by men in society. So dangerous does Cicero perceive the Epicureans to be to meaningful political life that he proposes that they be banished from the dialogue about the nature of the best regime in The Laws.[33]
With the shadow of Epicureanism looming in the background, Cicero begins On the Republic with an impassioned defense of the political life. He maintained that the apolitical life—far from being the pleasurable existence promised by the Epicureans—is, in truth, an affront to human nature. “Nature has given to the human race,” Cicero remarked, “such a necessity for virtue and such a love of defending the common safety that this force will overcome all allurements of pleasure and leisure.”[34] While recognizing that pleasure may indeed be the priority for certain debased individuals, Cicero insisted that such an attitude betrays the political obligations that all good people should appreciate. He exhorted citizens that the “fatherland has neither given us birth nor educated us according to law without expecting some nourishment, so to speak, from us.”[35] Should a citizen abandon his public duties and live the life of an isolated hermit, he would endanger the well-being of the city that—at its best—nourishes and encourages such high-goods as piety, religion, and virtue. Chiding philosophers such as the Epicureans for their misguided conviction that only “worthless men” participate in politics, Cicero instead proposed that the life of the politically active citizen constitutes a happy life, perhaps even the highest life.[36] “There is nothing in which human virtue more nearly approaches the majesty of the gods,” he averred, “than either founding new cities or preserving ones that are already founded.”[37]
Cicero elevated the political life above the life of the apolitical, autonomous individual because he believed that virtue is the end that all cities should strive for. Virtue is not, as the Epicureans suggested, purely instrumental to the larger goal of individual pleasure. Instead, Cicero proposed that “virtue is nothing other than nature fully developed and taken all the way to its highest point.”[38] Nature equips man with the capacity for virtue, so morality is not at all an artificial hindrance to man’s natural freedom. In fact, Cicero explained that “of all things involved in the debate of educated men, surely nothing is preferable to the plain understanding that we have been born for justice and that right has been established not by opinion but by nature.”[39] It is the just life of virtue that represents man’s highest and most natural condition, not the life of the individual pleasure-seeker who uses force and fraud to dominate his fellow men.
Yet, Cicero’s conception of virtue challenged not only the Epicureans but also those political moralists, such as the Stoics, who were so infatuated with virtue that they downplayed their political obligations. Cicero challenged them by teaching that virtue is not an insight to be perceived but never acted upon: “Truly it is not enough to have virtue,” he delineated, “unless you use it.”[40] Political life offers the arena in which citizens can apply the virtues that they have been instilled with and serve their neighbors.
With virtue established as Cicero’s primary telos for political life, he moved to explain the political conditions necessary to cultivate man’s moral nature. Politics, Cicero mentioned, is an “art that makes us useful to the city” and serves as the “most splendid service of wisdom and the greatest proof or duty of virtue.”[41] In contrast to the Epicureans, who perceived politics as an enterprise essentially built upon the amoral foundation of mathematical, self-interested calculation, Cicero believed that political life is intimately connected to morality. He defined a republic as a “‘thing’ of a people,” but also explained that a republic is not just any “assemblage of human beings herded together in whatever way,” as it would be if the Epicureans were correct that political life had no high-purpose.[42] Instead, it is an “assemblage of a multitude united in agreement about right and in the sharing of advantage.”[43] Citizens must be able to deliberate with each other about the best method of promoting the common good, so they must share a common moral foundation. Cicero’s desired political atmosphere, in this way, completely repudiated the hostile, belligerent, and egoistic politics defended by the Epicureans. Due to their commitment to radical individualism, Cicero charged that the Epicureans failed to acknowledge man’s social character. It is “not so much weakness,” he observed, “as a certain natural herding” that serves as the “first cause of [political] assembling.”[44] Cicero embraced politics as a natural element of the human condition that offers citizens the chance to refine their character and cultivate their virtue.
Cicero defended political life not only because it protected the conditions needed to cultivate virtue, but also because it allowed for friendship to characterize relations within the city. Though the Epicureans ostensibly claimed to value friendship, in truth, they undermined it by suggesting that it was impossible for any citizen to care about others as much as they cared about themselves.[45] Against this view, Cicero admonished that citizens can and should measure the well-being of their city by something far greater than personal advantage: “He who will do nothing for another person’s sake and will measure everything by his own convenience,” Cicero exhorted, will be willing to murder or plunder so long as he had no fear of legal repercussions.[46] Meaningful political life should elevate citizens above base self-interest and teach them to fulfill their duties not because it is the expedient thing to do, but because it is the right thing to do. Citizens possess a share in political rule with their neighbors, and thus must endear them with profound affection. As Cicero explained, “if friendship should be cultivated for itself, human fellowship, equality and justice should also be desired for themselves.”[47] Cicero rejected the notion that terror, fear, and force defined politics. In the most just city, he alleged, wrongdoing would not even need to be punished by fine or by penalty.[48] The damage done to the conscience of the criminal, who has betrayed the trust of his fellow citizens, would be enough to deter the perpetrator. Cicero suggested that a community defined by harmony, love and affection between friends united in a common social aim—virtue—represents political life at its finest.
Cicero on the Philosopher in the City
At first glance, Cicero’s impassioned plea for the political life appears to be in tension with his interest in the philosophic life. The philosopher pursues objective truth that is universally applicable, which contrasts with the political life’s more parochial interest in particular communities. The habits, customs, and character of a city cannot be neglected by statesmen when making political considerations. Conversely, the philosopher who explores the question of perfect justice abstracts so much from the particular context that he often makes the perfect the enemy of the good. As a result, the city may consider the philosopher to be, as Adeimantus observed in Plato’s Republic, “quite queer” and even “completely vicious.”[49] Cicero was aware of the tension between philosophy and politics suggested by Plato, and it is this fact that causes him to distance himself from his predecessor in important respects. “That leading man,” Cicero maintained, constructed a “splendid” city in speech, but it was ultimately one that was “inappropriate for human life and customs.”[50] Indeed, he strikingly mused that he was “not content with the writings that the highest and wisest men of Greece have left us” concerning the relationship between politics and philosophy.[51] Cicero, in contrast to Plato, downplays the tension between politics and philosophy. Nor did Cicero believe with the Epicureans that philosophy is purely about material considerations. In fact, he offered great praise for the pursuit of philosophy and sought to steer it in the direction of refining and improving the life of the political community.
At the opening of On the Republic, Cicero appeared to break radically with those thinkers who celebrated the contemplative life of philosophical speculation. Alluding to Aristotle’s claim that “happiness resides in leisure,” Cicero instead argued that the political community has not “supplied a safe refuge for our leisure and a tranquil place for quiet merely to serve our convenience.”[52] Indeed, he even predicted that man’s natural predilection for political life will eventually “overcome all allurements of pleasure and leisure.”[53] As politics makes important demands on all of its citizens, Cicero feared the tendency of philosophers to retreat to pure speculation and abscond their civic duties. It is not enough for philosophers to speculate about perfect moral actions without ever participating in politics, because virtue “depends wholly upon its use.”[54] Yet, despite his strong criticism of speculative philosophers at the opening of the Republic, he is not prepared to dispense with philosophy and leisure altogether. While recounting the history of the Roman Republic, he praised King Numa Pompilius for introducing leisure into the city and for shifting the republic’s focus away from pure earthly glory.[55] At the opening of the Laws, he further contended that leisure can advance the happiness of the city by providing citizens with the time to write histories and thus giving them the ability to grow in knowledge of truth.[56] It is not leisure and philosophy per se that invoked Cicero’s ire; instead, it was the kind of philosophy that is utterly apathetic about political affairs.
Though Cicero suggested that purely speculative philosophy should be supplanted with political philosophy, his convictions did not at all resemble the intellectual nihilism of the Epicureans, who connected wisdom with self-aggrandizement. Cicero may have emphasized the necessity of political life, but that never caused him to deny that the pursuit of truth was innately valuable. An Academic Skeptic, he admitted to “discussing opposite sides” of any given issue because he believed that “truth is most easily discovered in that way.”[57] His skepticism caused him to reject only the possibility of absolute certainty—not the intrinsic goodness of pursuing truth itself. He emphatically denied the philosophical dogmatism characteristic of the Epicureans, who “want no one other than their own man [Epicurus] to be praised.”[58] Humans are fallible, Cicero recognized, so it is spurious to believe that any one philosopher or school will have a monopoly on truth. The task of the philosopher is not to cling to abstract dogmas while disregarding all counter evidence. Instead, it is to refine his comprehension of the truth in dialogue with fellow citizens. Cicero refined Plato’s teaching by positing that, since the city makes it possible to pursue truth with fellow citizens, philosophical and political obligations are not necessarily opposed.
Cicero’s commitment to philosophy was moored in his conviction that man’s capacity for reason separated him from every other animal and linked him to his divine creator. He resented the Epicurean tendency to demote man to the level of other animals by denying the existence of the incorporeal soul and by subordinating reason to bodily concerns. In opposition to this teaching, Cicero wrote that what “we call a human being has been begotten by the supreme god in a certain splendid condition.”[59] Alone among the animals, man “has a share in reason and reflection, in which all the others have no part.”[60] God “begot and adorned the human being” with numerous qualities that other creatures lack, including not only reason but also sense-perception and moral awareness.[61] Additionally, man possesses the “divine gift” of a soul, one that “has been implanted by god” so that people can be connected to the Creator and possess an awareness of his divine moral principles.[62] “Out of so many species,” Cicero proclaimed, “there is no animal besides the human being that has any notion of god.”[63] Indeed, “the same virtue is in human being and god,” so man is obliged by nature to cultivate his virtue “to its highest point.”[64] True philosophy rejects the Epicurean notion that man is another animal, driven purely by an instinctual desire to satisfy his appetite, and instead recognizes that man was uniquely designed by a divine creator to live virtuously and to pursue truth.
Cicero’s belief that true philosophy pursues unchanging moral standards culminates in his famous conception of the natural law. In On the Republic, he defined the natural law as “correct reason congruent with nature, spread among all persons, constant, everlasting.”[65] Due to the eternal character of the natural law, it is folly for the Epicureans to insist that morality is an artificial construction made by men to advance their self-interest. In fact, Cicero stated that the natural law “was born before any law was written for generations in common or before a city was established at all.”[66] It was devised by a single god, the “common teacher and general” of “all persons” who exists eternally and transcends each individual nation.[67] It maintains a universal character and can never be “entirely repealed” even in the event that a corrupt legislature should seek to circumvent its force with unjust laws.[68] The very existence of a universal, unchanging natural law makes possible Cicero’s striking declaration at the onset of On the Laws that he intends to lay down “laws not to the Roman people but to all good and steady peoples.”[69] The natural law is the “profoundest philosophy” because it imposes moral obligations upon all individuals everywhere at every time period, thus anticipating and rejecting later conceptions of cultural relativism.[70]
Prospects for Philosophic Politics
Cicero’s recognition that philosophers should strive after everlasting, universal principles at first appears to contradict his effusive praise for the political life. After all, the notion of an unchanging, universal natural law that equips individuals with obligations not only to fellow citizens, but to all people, superficially resembles a form of radical cosmopolitanism that distracts citizens from focusing on their immediate city. Cicero alluded to this when he spoke of the wise philosopher who “has recognized that he is not surrounded by the walls of some place but is a citizen of the whole universe as if it were one city.”[71] His praise for the pursuit of philosophy and his teaching on the natural law, however, should not be construed as cosmopolitan or apolitical. Though the philosopher’s goal of pursuing eternal truth is universal in scope, Cicero clearly nudged thinkers to serve their immediate political societies. Philosophers can serve their fellow citizens by acting as “teachers of truth and virtue” who direct people towards their moral duties.[72] As “the knowledge of living correctly makes persons better,” it stands to follow that dispersing that knowledge through instruction is an important part of any good city.[73] For this reason, Cicero refers to wisdom as the “mother of all good things” and argues that nothing is “more illustrious,” or “preferable” to its pursuit.[74]
Philosophy, at its best, is imminently political in that it reveals that human nature is fixed and teaches that every citizen possesses important moral duties to others. As moral obligations derived from the natural law are permanent fixtures of the human experience, Cicero concluded that immoral citizens are “defying human nature,” and will “suffer the greatest penalties by this very fact, even if he escapes other things that are thought to be punishments.”[75] Human beings are composed not only of passions, but also of reason, and so the task of both philosophers and politicians is to account for man’s different motivations with the intention of directing them towards virtue. Such a task, however, will not necessarily be simple: “There is such corruption from bad habit,” Cicero lamented, “that it is as if the sparks given by nature are extinguished by the corruption.”[76] Though all people have access to the natural law and possess an obligation to obey it, any true unity of politics and philosophy must take into account the limits of human nature—especially its propensity to fall into corrupt habits—even while endeavoring to elevate the people to live up to the standard of perfect virtue.
The moral dimension of human nature leads Cicero to acknowledge that the laws and institutions are secondary to virtue within a republican government. While the Epicureans had essentially identified justice with human laws, Cicero feared that legislation would not always reflect the perfect justice of the natural law. “Truly the most foolish thing,” he averred, “is to think that everything is just that has been approved in the institutions or laws of peoples.”[77] Such an attitude fails to recognize the injustice of laws crafted by tyrannical people. “If the Thirty at Athens had wanted to impose laws, or if all Athenians delighted in tyrannous laws,” he observed, “surely those laws should not be held to be just for that reason.”[78] For Cicero, the civil law should be guided by the moral authority of the natural law. When he explained that citizens should be frightened more by the very idea of doing something wrong than they are by the laws themselves, he alluded to this vital aspect of political life.[79] Political institutions should reflect morality even though they cannot create it. Testifying to this fundamental difference between a good regime and a bad regime, he noted that while a just republic was “nourished by words and arts” that cultivated moral habits, a deficient one sought only to govern using only “institutions and laws.”[80] Cicero hoped to see the practical institutions within his political context reflect the unchanging moral principles revealed through philosophical inquiry.
Cicero was animated by the conviction that philosophic wisdom can meet political practice in the form of statesmanship. This explains how he could, in one instance, refer to wisdom as the most “preferable” pursuit even while he could also suggest that the life of the politically-engaged citizen approaches “the majesty of the gods.”[81] Indeed, Cicero maintained that the magistrate who is both “highly educated” and “very involved in the republic” constituted his ideal statesman.[82] Combining wisdom with practice, the statesman takes his bearings both from the moral requirements of the natural law—revealed through the pursuit of philosophy—as well as the practical necessities of his given political context. The great statesman needs to “see not only what [is] best but also what [is] necessary.”[83]
The political actions of statesmen, for Cicero, cannot be reduced to simply “deciding who gets what, when and how” as more recent political theorists have suggested.[84] Instead, politics is elevated in its purpose and possesses profound moral responsibilities. Statesmen must be moral not only in their official actions but in their private lives. Should they be “regularly stained by desires and vices,” they will serve as a bad example to their citizens and make it more likely that they will succumb to moral corruption.[85] “Although it is a very bad thing in itself [for the leading men to do wrong],” Cicero contended, it is not so bad “as it is that very many imitators of the leading men emerge.”[86] In a sense, the philosopher statesman acts as the first moral educator in his political society—making better people out of his citizens even while he attempts to fulfill the practical obligations of his office.
Though Cicero placed the philosopher statesman as his ideal political man, he nonetheless rejected an otherworldly utopianism that invested all authority in a single magistrate. Reticent about human nature, he believed that while a pure kingship appeared to be feasible in theory, it presented serious problems in practice. Just, righteous, and moral kings constitute a highly positive boon for a political society and indeed appear from time to time.[87] Unfortunately, rule by a single man easily degenerates into the most unjust form of government: a tyranny. Cicero also expressed doubt about the potential to realize the other pure forms of government—aristocracy and polity—observing that “there is no type of republic [regime] that does not have a steep, slippery path to a neighboring bad condition.”[88] In order to allow philosophical theory to best reflect the realities of political practice, he proposed the mixed regime. Serving as a “moderation and mixing together” of kingship, aristocracy, and polity, the mixed regime represents each interest in society and allows the virtues of all philosophically-pure iterations of government to be present within the city.[89] By giving a political voice to the various interests of the society, the mixed regime fosters dialogue between the groups and makes it possible to uncover the common good. And, even more importantly, the mixed regime secures civil harmony in the city, cultivates friendship, staves off faction, and makes virtue possible.[90] “There is no cause for a revolution,” Cicero claimed, “where each man has been firmly placed in his own station and there is nothing beneath him into which he may plunge and sink.”[91] The mixed regime provides a powerful method of translating principles of pure justice, revealed through philosophy, into the more complicated realities of everyday political practice.
Conclusion
Cicero’s entire career testified to his conviction that the practice of political life could be united with the contemplation of philosophical truth. Though his profound legacy has not always been appreciated by those who preferred political revolution to political restoration, he offers to contemporary readers a timeless example of virtuous statesmanship. He perceived that the proliferation of Epicureanism threatened to unmoor Roman civilization from both political life and philosophical truth. Teaching that man is necessarily egotistic and that political duties are artificial constructs imposed upon individuals who would rather live without them, Epicureanism repudiated classical notions of the common good and civil harmony. The Epicurean affinity for materialism divorced citizens from their moral duties, cut them off from God, and denied the incorporeal, eternal nature of the human soul. Finally, it undermined healthy philosophical inquiry by teaching that wisdom is not the pursuit of truth for its own sake but is instead about finding cunning ways to advance self-interest and pleasure.
Cicero challenged the advance of Epicureanism by teaching the fundamental goodness of political life and by reiterating that philosophy should pursue eternal truth. Political life should not be perceived as unnecessary and burdensome, he insisted. Instead, politics is a natural and healthy part of the human experience that provides citizens with an arena in which they can cultivate their virtue. Citizens cannot refine their virtue, however, should they lack a set of common moral principles or feel no attachment to the rest of their political community. For this reason, Cicero revitalized the place of philosophy in his city. Philosophy—contrary to the claims of the Epicureans—possesses extraordinary political utility. By leading to the doctrine of the natural law, true philosophy teaches citizens about the permanent moral obligations that they owe to others and to God. Cicero concluded that politics and philosophy not only are compatible, but that they must be united in order to craft a sustainable republic. To harmonize politics and philosophy, he recommended that philosophers educate citizens about moral truth and the permanent character of human nature. He believed that statesmanship is a premier method of realizing philosophical truth in the practice of daily politics. However, reliance upon a single virtuous statesman is misguided, so Cicero also espoused his theory of the mixed regime as a method of realizing philosophical justice within the confines of political practice.
Cicero’s elaborate attempt to harmonize political life with the eternal principles of justice revealed through philosophical speculation makes him an extraordinarily relevant thinker for modern times. The dispute between the sovereign reason of the individual and the obligations that individuals naturally owe to their larger political community has been neglected despite its persistent relevance to contemporary life. Over two-thousand years after Cicero’s death, the United States Supreme Court maintained in Texas v. Johnson that flag desecration was a constitutional right because a principal function of republicanism is “to invite dispute.”[92] Justice William Brennan insisted that political liberty “may indeed serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger.”[93] The duty that each individual owes to his political community—to love it, cherish it, and to live in harmony with fellow citizens—went unrecognized, as the Court instead decreed that the individual’s autonomous freedom trumps solidarity behind a shared attachment to a larger community. Cicero’s life and career presents an alternative to the Epicurean political philosophy that guided this Supreme Court decision and reminds observers that the sovereign authority of individual reason must not be divorced from the common good of the larger political community. Mankind possesses a duty to God to pursue the truth, but they also owe it to their society to act virtuously in political community with others. Far from being an archaic reactionary as Hegel charged, Cicero’s unification of philosophic justice with political practice should serve as an example to all lovers of virtue in the modern age.
References
Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2011.
Cicero, Marcus Tullius. On Duties. Translated by Benjamin Patrick Newton. Ithaca: Cornell University, 2016.
Cicero, Marcus Tullius. On Moral Ends. Edited by Julia Annas. Translated by Raphael Woolf. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2001.
Cicero, Marcus Tullius, On the Republic and On the Laws. Translated by David Fott. Ithaca: Cornell University, 2014.
Epicurus. “Letter to Herodotus.” In On Happiness. London: Arcturus Publishing Limited, 2019.
Epicurus. Letters, Principal Doctrines, and Vatican Sayings. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964.
Hamilton, Alexander, John Jay, and James Madison. The Federalist: The Gideon Edition. Edited by George W. Carey and James McClellan. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Philosophy of History. Translated by J. Sibree. New York: The Colonial Press, 1900.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Philosophy of Right. Translated by S.W. Dyde. New York: Dover, 2012.
Lasswell, Harold D. Politics: Who Gets What, When How. New York: McGraw Hill, 1936.
Plato. The Laws of Plato. Translated by Thomas L. Pangle. New York: Basic Books, 1980.
Plato. “The Apology of Socrates.” In Four Texts on Socrates. Translated by Thomas West and Grace Starry West. Ithaca: Cornell University, 1998.
Plato. The Republic of Plato. 2nd ed. Translated by Allan Bloom. New York: Basic Books, 1991.
Notes
[1] Marcus Tullius Cicero, On the Republic and On the Laws, trans. David Fott (Ithaca: Cornell University, 2014), 111, sec. 5.1.
[3] Georg W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: The Colonial Press, 1900), 313.
[4] Cicero, On the Republic, 98, sec. 3.27.
[5] G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. S.W. Dyde (New York: Dover, 2012), xxx.
[6] Marcus Tullius Cicero, On Moral Ends, ed. Julia Annas, trans. Raphael Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2001), 13, sec. 30.
[10] Cicero, On Moral Ends, 15, sec. 1:37.
[11] Plato, “Apology of Socrates,” in Four Texts on Socrates, trans. Thomas West and Grace Starry West (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1998), 81, sec. 30b.
[12] Marcus Tullius Cicero, On Duties, trans. Benjamin Patrick Newton (Ithaca: Cornell University, 2016), 128, sec. 3.12.
[13] Cicero, On Moral Ends, 19, sec. 1.50.
[15] Cicero, On Moral Ends, 9, sec. 1.18.
[16] Epicurus, “Letter to Herodotus,” in On Happiness, (London: Arcturus Publishing Limited, 2019), n.p.
[17] Cicero, On Moral Ends, 9, sec. 1.18.
[18] Epicurus, “Letter to Herodotus,” n.p.
[21] Plato, The Laws of Plato, trans. Thomas L. Pangle (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 31, sec. 650b.
[22] Cicero, On the Republic, 95-96, sec. 3.12.
[23] Ibid., 96, sec. 3.16.
[25] Epicurus, Letters, Principal Doctrines and Vatican Sayings, trans. Russel M. Geer, (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), 70.
[26] Cicero, On the Republic, 96, sec. 3.17.
[28] Cicero, On Moral Ends, 17, sec. 1.42.
[30] Cicero, On Moral Ends, 17, sec. 1.42.
[31] Cicero, On the Republic, 100, sec. 3.34.
[32] Cicero, On the Republic, 124, sec. 6.33.
[33] Cicero, On the Laws, 143, sec. 1.37.
[34] Cicero, On the Republic, 30.
[36] Cicero, On the Republic, 33, sec. 1.9.
[38] Cicero, On the Laws, 138, sec. 1.25.
[40] Cicero, On the Republic, 30, sec. 1.2.
[45] Cicero, On Moral Ends, secs. 2.78–85.
[46] Cicero, On the Laws, 47, sec. 1.41.
[47] Ibid., 146, sec. 1.49.
[48] Ibid., 143, sec. 1.40.
[49] Plato, The Republic of Plato, 2nd ed., trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 167, sec. 487d.
[50] Cicero, On the Republic, 69, sec. 2.22.
[51] Ibid., 46, sec. 1.36.
[52] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2011), sec. 1177b27-29; Cicero, On the Republic, 33, sec. 1.8.
[53] Cicero, On the Republic, 30, sec. 1.1.
[54] Ibid., sec. 1.2.
[55] Ibid., 70, sec. 2.26.
[56] Cicero, On the Laws, 132, sec. 1.9.
[57] Cicero, On the Republic, 92, sec. 3.7.
[58] Cicero, On the Laws, 181, sec. 3.1.
[59] Cicero, On the Laws, 137, sec. 1.22.
[65] Cicero, On the Republic, 98, sec. 3.27.
[66] Cicero, On the Laws, 136, sec. 1.19.
[67] Cicero, On the Republic, 99, sec. 3.27.
[69] Cicero, On the Laws, 167, sec. 2.35.
[71] Cicero, On the Laws, 151, sec. 1.61.
[72] Cicero, On the Republic, 91, sec. 3.5.
[73] Cicero, On the Laws, 140, sec. 1.32.
[75] Cicero, On the Republic, 99, sec. 3.27.
[76] Cicero, On the Laws, 141, sec. 1.33.
[79] Cicero, On the Republic, 90, sec 3.3.
[80] Cicero, On the Republic, 90, sec. 3.4.
[81] Cicero, On the Republic, 35, sec. 1.15; Cicero, On the Laws, 150, sec. 1.58.
[82] Cicero, On the Laws, 187, sec. 3.14.
[84] Harold D. Lasswell, Politics: Who Gets What, When How (New York: McGraw Hill, 1936), iii.
[85] Cicero, On the Laws, 192, sec. 3.30.
[87] Cicero, On the Republic, 48-58, secs. 1.42-64.
[90] Cicero’s depiction of the “mixed regime” must not be confused with the theory of separation of powers defended in The Federalist which, instead of aiming to foster civil harmony in the society for the end of virtue, seeks to channel the factious propensities of man towards the end of securing individual rights. See, James Madison, “Federalist no. 51,” in The Federalist, eds. George W. Carey and James McClellan, (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001).
[91] Ibid., 60, sec. 1.69.
Related Posts
