The Project

With a focus on Cicero’s conception of justice and its lasting intellectual legacy, the JustCity project delves into one of the most innovative and influential, yet widely neglected contributions the history of Western political thought has to offer. Not only does Cicero’s law-centred conception of justice, both within and between states, mark a significant departure from the virtue-centred conceptions of justice typical for earlier, Greek theories, it also paved the way for what has come to be known as the constitutionalist tradition in political thought, as well as for the emergence of natural and international law in early modern Europe. In order to fully appreciate its massive impact in the long term, the project will trace Cicero’s conception of justice as it is first and foremost expressed in the famous Carneadean debate in the Republic through four historical inflection points: (i) its inception in the late Roman Republic; (ii) its transmission by the Christian writers Lactantius and Augustinus; (iii) its use by Alberico Gentili and other early modern thinkers engaged in debates on international politics and the law of nations; (iv) its effect on 18th century Enlightenment thought, as mediated by early 17th century natural law theorists. In connecting these four inflection points, which designate the four main themes of the project, JustCity pursues a longue durée intellectual history of one of the most fundamental and controversial concepts of Western political thought. The project is methodologically innovative and shows how the reception of classical antiquity can be operationalized and made fruitful for a long-term perspective in the history of ideas.

Ciceronian Justice

One of the most innovative and historically most influential notions in the Western debate about justice is the political theory of Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC).  Cicero saw a causal connection between a deficit of justice and the fall of the Roman Republic and the beginning of military despotism.  Writing in the context of the crisis and downfall of the Roman Republic in the mid-first century BC, Cicero developed his conception of justice in direct response to the breakdown of political order surrounding him.  Unlike contemporaries and later scholars alike, who thought a decline in elite and civic virtue had caused the Republic to fall, Cicero plainly blamed the fall of the Republic on a deficit of justice.

But what does justice consist in?  Does justice require that there be individual rights?  Does it require economic equality?  What is the scope of justice?  Does it reach beyond the state?  Are the demands of justice universal?  Can we know what justice consists in?  Does justice impose constraints on the way governments operate?  Are only certain constitutional forms just?  Do laws have to conform with justice?  And is justice merely an instrumental value, because it is conducive to stability? Cicero proposed answers to these questions that were both very influential until at least the Enlightenment and importantly different from the answers given to these questions by Greek thinkers. 

A Puzzle

Until quite recently, scholarly orthodoxy in the history of political thought and political theory viewed republicanism, civic liberty and civic virtue as the most important heritage of a pretty coherent, “classical” Greco-Roman antiquity.  This view leaves entirely unexplained why key early modern thinkers focused strenuously on Cicero and the fall of the Roman republic, rather than on Greek republicanism. In the last decades, however, the supposed unity of classical republicanism has started to crumble as we are gaining more knowledge.

As a very rough approximation, and a bit tongue in cheek, you can see on this graph that the fates of Aristotle and Cicero diverge strongly in English books since 1500. This isn’t anywhere near fine-grained enough of course, but it’s consistent with what I established independently about the relative influence of Greek and Roman political thought: Greco-Roman unity cannot be upheld.

In a series of very influential publications directed against the unitary view, Quentin Skinner has argued that a distinctly Roman republicanism is the most important European heritage from antiquity. But Skinner was primarily interested in civic liberty and civic participation. He was not concerned with the fall of the Republic and Cicero’s claims about justice. Scholarship on early modern theories of natural law has contributed to undermining the unitary view; recent research has shown, e.g., that Grotius was not interested in republican virtue, but instead relied heavily on Roman law and Cicero.

Many other prominent political theorists, such as Bodin, Gentili, Harrington, Locke, Trenchard and Gordon, Montesquieu, Adam Smith and some of the American founders were not republicans in the conventional sense either, as research on Gentili and the history of constitutionalism has confirmed. Instead, these thinkers built their normative theories on Cicero’s concept of justice, which until the late 18th century was widely appreciated as the cornerstone of normative political thought. The early modern authors knew that right at the centre of Cicero’s political thought there is a fully-fledged theory of justice hiding in plain sight. Cicero’s justice is conceived as a necessary foundation for the republican order, an answer to the breakdown of the Roman republic, not simply a nostalgic evocation of long-lost republican virtue.

A Possible Solution

Our project therefore seeks to shift focus from republicanism to the more foundational question of justice.  It will explore the novelty of Cicero’s conception of justice vis-à-vis his Greek predecessors; how Ciceronian justice relates to other key legacies of classical political thought such as republicanism and Roman law; and how it was historically influential over the very long term.

Cicero gives criteria of justice for political orders.  But Cicero’s justice also explains the stability of political orders and of how people come to agree on their principles and cooperate; justice is the cement of order, as it were.  For Cicero, you cannot have justice without the state – but you cannot have a state without justice either. Cicero’s justice is original in several ways.  It is very much focused on the protection of political due process and private property rights.  Justice is no longer primarily seen as a virtue or character trait but as a system of enforceable legal rights.  While Aristotle’s focus had been on distributive justice, Cicero turns Aristotelian distributive justice into mere unenforceable beneficence.  This departure from distributive justice was, for better or worse, historically very influential.  Lastly, Cicero’s justice is international and explicitly meant to apply to relations between city-states, and to the justice, or lack thereof, of imperialism.  It is also meant to apply to non-citizens.

The project is grounded in shared source corpora and profits from new critical reconstructions of bk. 3 of Cicero’s Republic, new text editions and a veritable surge of scholarly interest in Roman political thought and Roman law and society.  To provide focus, we harness the study of classical reception to long-term intellectual history.  Cicero’s long-term impact cannot be established with orthodox Cambridge School contextualism.  A new approach is needed, perhaps best called ‘analytic contextualism’, which does not reduce thought to context and appreciates the causal effect of concepts in history.

Outlook

We hope to achieve a reinterpretation of the intellectual history of justice in the West, based on the rediscovery of Cicero’s neglected theory.  This deep and long history may reveal a new understanding of the foundations of democracy; it will expose underlying common denominators of current conceptions of justice; and it will inspire thinking on the empirical consequences of justice, transitional justice, and economic justice.