A Ciceronian Enlightenment

This subproject seeks to analyse the contribution of Cicero’s political thought to the intellectual history of the Enlightenment.  Cicero was, on the one hand, a skeptic when it came to the various ethical outlooks of classical antiquity; on the other hand, he devised an anti-skeptical defense of natural law.  These two aspects of Cicero’s legacy were highly influential for a large number of Enlightenment thinkers and might provide a kind of hidden common denominator for the various strands of enlightened thought. The first, skeptical Cicero seems to have come to the fore in the disputes that involved the Deists and where heavy use was made of De natura deorum and De divinatione. The second aspect of Cicero’s legacy, his anti-skeptical defense of a theory of justice based on a lean natural law, was seemingly in tension with the first and was crucial for those seeking to defend a denominationally neutral account of sociability and the possibility of justice.

A Natural Law for Skeptics

There is a strong affinity between the natural lawyers of the early 17th century enlightenment on the one hand and the thinkers of the 18th century, especially the writers of the Scottish Enlightenment, on the other. This subproject will investigate the Ciceronian connections between Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), Samuel Pufendorf (1632-1694) and Jean Barbeyrac (1674-1744), and the influence these men had on important 18th century thinkers such as David Hume (1711-1776) and Adam Smith (1723-1790). The works by these writers are united by a strong and abiding interest in Cicero and much Ciceronian content. The relationship between skepticism and natural law played a crucial role, as did the tension between natural law and popular sovereignty already present in Cicero’s own thought.

The effect of this ‘Ciceronian Enlightenment’ reaches the most important writings of the American Enlightenment, too, such as John Adams’ A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (1787). In the vein of Günter Gawlick’s early exploration of the relationship between Cicero and Enlightenment (Gawlick 1963) and Tadeusz Zielinski’s important survey of Cicero’s legacy (Zielinski 1908), there has recently been an uptick in scholarly interest in Cicero’s impact on 18th century thought. Especially Schmitt (1972); Fox (2013); Steel (2013); Sharpe (2015); Fox (2016); Manuwald (2016); Stuart-Buttle (2019); Hawley (2019); and Straumann (forthcoming) deserve mention here. Subproject IV will add to this growing, important body of literature and thus help elucidate 18th century thought from a deep historical perspective.