Cicero's Social and Political Thought (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 441 chief book on substance does leave us with the perplexities, Graham has effectively argued for; that these result from the infection of S2by St is not a convincing part of the argument. These middle chapters are the best part of the book, both for their acuity and their challenge. In them, TST appears more a'distraction than a foundation or a conclusion. What Graham gives us is a gold mine of resources and issues to think afresh about questions of Aristotle's development. He also gives us a land mine of misconstruals and obfuscations in an effort to assert his theory of how that development proceeded. The sustained scholarship of the middle parts is impressive and valuable and makes the book worthwhile reading, but the self-conscious insistence on its thesis proves intrusive and unconvincing. THOMAS M. OLSHEWSKY Universityof Kentucky Neal Wood. Cicero's Social and Political Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Pp. xiii + 288. $35.oo. Neal Wood rightly laments that today only classicists take Cicero seriously (8) and argues persuasively for his importance as a social and political thinker of some originality . Not only did Cicero influence the philosophers of early modern Europe (1), but he also anticipated the increasingly conservative mentality of our own time (2o8). In this account, Wood defines Cicero's place in the history of political philosophy, noting what was borrowed from the Greeks and what was bequeathed to posterity. A special virtue of the book is its avoidance of reductionism or oversimplification. Cicero's eclecticism is respected at every turn. On the negative side, the book is somewhat weakened by methodological and linguistic problems in the treatment of the details of Roman history and of Cicero's Latinity. Wood first explores the legacy of Cicero, explaining that the eighteenth century was the peak of his influence as .ahumanistic skeptic, literary stylist, and philosopher (3)- In the nineteenth century, interest in his thought declined as the great German Classical historian Mommsen directed his culture's interest in things Roman more toward the idealization of Caesar as a savior from the political fragmentation of the Civil Wars. (German political disunity of the period mirrored the Roman experience. Indeed, even today one seldom finds a German scholar who will actively criticize the moral and political reforms of Augustus Caesar, brought about in the interest of state unity.) Meanwhile, the British focused their interest upon the Hellenic world. Wood goes on to argue that Cicero deserves serious consideration today not only as a doxographer, but also as an original thinker. Not only did he provide the first formal definition of the state, but he was also the first to stress the paramount importance of private property and the role of the state in its maintenance (1 x). Beginning with a detailed discussion of Cicero's doctrine of natural law, which arose from his unshakeable belief in the rational order of the universe and of man (7o), Wood discusses in detail Cicero's idea of the state (chaps. 7-8) and adherence to the doctrine of the mixed constitution 442 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 28:3 JULY 199o (chap. 9). Along with the discussion of political philosophy, we are given a rather conventional analysis of the society for which Cicero was writing: the decaying aristocracy of the late Roman Republic. The author describes the gradual transformation from a condition of heterogeneity within the ruling class---senators, landed gentry, publicani all performing their separate tasks---to one of the homogeneity of an undifferentiated mass, and thence to a final state of fragmentation of temporarily aligned interest groups and rampant social individualism (cf. 38, 77, 21o-12). Here a terrible irony emerges: Cicero's own political doctrines (for example, his idea of psychological personae unique to the individual [85]) offered to his society a rationale for the very individualism that was tearing it apart. His cure, in other words, was itself a symptom of the disease (213). Despite its virtues, the book has glaring weaknesses. I can make little sense of the progression of thought in the presentation of the demographics of Italy in Cicero's time (15f.). Estimating a total population in...