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Thread: Did Cicero Devise Modern Constitutional Thought on His Own?

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    Did Cicero Devise Modern Constitutional Thought on His Own?

    Did Cicero Devise Modern Constitutional Thought on His Own? is a review of Benjamin Straumann's Crisis and Constitutionalism: Roman Political Thought from the Fall of the Republic to the Age of Revolution: "...Straumann attributes the origins of constitutional thought in the European tradition to Cicero’s writings of the fifties BC. He then traces the development of this thought through the Enlightenment to the debates that accompanied the ratification of the U.S. Constitution in the 1780s."

    Of course the Greeks had constitutional theories. But the argument hinges on the distinction between a constitution designed to protect natural law, "pre-political" rights versus one to promote virtue. Note that the founders of the new conservative movement of the 1950s, Buckley and Kirk, also differed in this respect: Buckley, the more libertarian thought the purpose of government was to protect rights and the duty of the citizen was to provide virtuous example; Kirk, the more traidtionalist, believe the purpose of government was to promote virtue. One could argue that liberalism also sees the purpose of government as the promotion of virtue, though an abstract sort of virtue that replaces traditional virtue. But I digress...

    ...In the author’s view, what Cicero owes to Greek thought is less important than what he does not. What is important for Straumann is that Cicero builds his model upon a “natural law” foundation which depends upon pre-political rights. This differs from Polybius, who believed that the state is founded upon the human desire for justice, “that the development of justice and the transition from rule by power and strength alone to just rule, underlines the role of humans’ natural resentment at injustice.”

    The prevention of injustice is not quite the same as asserting that there are basic legal rights that have to be defended. Cicero’s ideal state differs from that of Plato because the Platonic state exists to promote virtue and the “legitimacy of government rests on the extent to which it succeeds in making the city’s citizens virtuous,” hence “there is no space for any extra- or pre-political happiness, nor for any normative claims vis-à-vis the state that are not themselves based on the rules of the polity.”

    The case against fundamental Aristotelian influence is more complex. In Aristotle’s view, a state is formed when several villages unite to form a single complex community, or polis, large enough to be self-sufficient. It originates from the needs of life and continues so long as it ensures the good life and enables man to express his nature as a political animal. That said, Aristotle also holds that the polis is, by nature, prior to the individual who would not be complete or exist without it. Thus, since the natural goal of the individual is the good life, that goal can only be obtained through participation in the polis. The goal of the state is not, in Straumann’s analysis, to protect the individual’s pre-political rights....
    The article criticizes that view.
    Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler

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    Cicero most certainly believed in free speech, whether to attack the upper-class or the ruling body.
    For waltky: http://quakes.globalincidentmap.com/
    "The Nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools."
    - Thucydides

    "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote" B. Franklin
    Igitur qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum

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    Indeed, a right he believed constitutions should protect.
    Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler

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