Crisis and Constitutionalism: Roman Political Thought from the Fall of the Republic to the Age of Revolution by Benjamin Straumann (review)

“Roman political thought” in Benjamin Straumann’s subtitle means two things: one is the ideas that Romans had about political order and political society; the other is that, from the first century bce to more modern times, Roman politics has always been good to think with. Straumann makes three linked arguments, all of them new and important. The first is that the collapse of order in the late Republic led Romans to think about their constitution—the higher-order rules that govern the workings of government itself. The second is that as Cicero became increasingly aware of the problem posed by such higher-order rules—their sources and their application—he turned in the 50s to a concept of natural law that was not based on (Stoic) shared rationality, but on legal principles of equity and contract applicable even in a pre-political state of nature. And the third is that early modern political theorists look at precisely the same issues, often through a Ciceronian lens, emphasizing constitutionalism, structures, and limits in precisely the same ways that Cicero does.

The last of these arguments gets the least space in Straumann’s book, but has the widest ramifications, because it directly contradicts J. G. A. Pocock’s influential The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton 1975), which traced “classical republicanism” (emphasizing the importance of virtue and the need to combat corruption) from Aristotle to Machiavelli to Harrington and the Founding Fathers. Straumann neatly severs “classical” from “virtue” and shows that many of the figures Pocock discussed (except Machiavelli himself) were less interested in republican virtue than in constitutional safeguards against despotism. And Straumann brings to the study of Bodin, Montesquieu, Marchamont Nedham, Trenchard and Gordon, and John Adams a thorough and precise knowledge of Cicero—an author whom, notoriously, Pocock omitted entirely from his tale.

The first half of Straumann’s book is a series of careful arguments. First, a clear demonstration that Romans (not just Cicero) had an idea of constitutional rules, and thought about what they were. Second, Straumann analyzes late-republican arguments about specific areas of constitutional weakness and strength: on one side, the dangers of the dictatorship, extraordinary imperia, the Decemviri at the time of the Twelve Tables, and the senatus consultum ultimum; on the other, constitutional rights of popular sovereignty, provocatio, and private property. And finally, via Polybius, he turns to Ciceronian theory, in De re publica, De legibus, and De officiis, to show how Cicero believes in substituting the virtue of a system (the constitution) for the unreliable virtue of individuals, and how he buttresses this by an idea of natural law dependent on Roman legal principles of contract and equity.

Straumann’s book is much richer than a brief summary can reveal. Some arguments could be bolstered (and would be if the book were just about Cicero). Are the appeals to the constitution a rhetorical tactic as much as genuine sentiment? Is the distinction between ius and lex as clear as Straumann makes it? He might have brought in the importance of ius honorarium as equity, which is not constitutional but is related to ius gentium. More seriously, Straumann emphasizes Cicero’s constitutionalism in De legibus at the expense of the emphasis on the virtue of the rector in De re publica: there is a tension between virtue politics and constitutionalism that Straumann’s argument glosses over too easily.

But any weaknesses in Straumann’s argument are trivial compared to the virtues of his book. It is very rare to find someone talking about Ciceronian theory actually looking at historical events and Ciceronian speeches. It is a pleasure to have Cicero taken seriously as a political thinker without incessant nods to Greek models, and yet Straumann’s dissection of Greek political theory, while not...