Cicero, Politics, and the 21st Century

Introduction

Politics is dirty. It revolves around power, a necessary evil. Political ethics, then, is indeed the ethics of doing evil.¹ And the politics of the late Roman Republic was no exception. Cicero’s Second Philippic, which the unnamed senator in the opening vignette was reading with great amusement, was only one additional contribution to the debates and conflicts marking the end of the Republic. For his unbridled wit and opposition to Mark Antony, Cicero would pay with his life. This is a book about politics – the politics of our era and the politics of Cicero’s era.

The idea for the book came to us the same way our unnamed senator’s musings came to him: over wine and discussion. What was originally intended to be an article expanded into a book.² It has become almost trite at this point to enumerate the laundry list of so-called crises that have befallen us in the past few years: Brexit, Trump, the rise of illiberal regimes; political scandals, embezzlement, the increasing politicization and polarization of the media and public discourse; witch-hunts conducted in the name of the latest social justice fad, etc. etc. To the average person, politics, especially in the West, has disintegrated into chaos. It all too easily confirms the assertion that politics is dirty.

The authors share in some of this dismay. Indeed, it has provided ample material to discuss and debate for hours on end. But we are also both students of history. We firmly believe that we can learn from the past. As we cast our gaze back on antiquity, we find that what we witness today may be novel in its expression, but it all consists of variations on the underlying dynamics of politics itself. Strip us of our modern technology and when we look back at ancient Rome it is astounding to see how little we’ve changed.

What a sobering thought. It’s somewhat depressing, even. We have become so accustomed to the idea of progress that it’s discomforting to find we might not be so superior to our ancestors after all. But this can actually be a cause for hope. It can be a cause for hope because it means what we are experiencing is nothing new, and so we can benefit from the wisdom of the past. This is where Cicero comes in.

Cicero is an enlightening guide to thinking about politics for a variety of reasons. For one, he seems much closer to us. His was a gentler spirit. Like many of us today, he was a talker, not a military man. Like us, he was flawed. He was at times hesitant and weak, he could be intimidated, he craved praise and reassurance, and he made mistakes. He was human, all too human. He was not of a noble Roman family, and so he had to build his reputation from the bottom up.

He also lived at one of the most well-documented and important turning points in ancient history. In retrospect we know it was a turning point. The actors themselves knew it was an important moment in time, but they did not have the benefit of knowing their future as we know their future. They had to act in the same cloud of uncertainty that surrounds us as we make decisions that will affect our future. The historian’s past is the statesman’s future.

But Cicero’s time period is pertinent to us for other reasons as well. Marked by scandal, inequality, political polarization, disaffected people and disconnected elites, and rank cynicism, Cicero’s time was not unlike our own. And it was considerably more violent. They did not have the luxury of worrying about equity or the environment. Cicero experienced all of this and yet still thought a noble politics was possible. Nowadays we find it virtually impossible to envisage nobility in politics. Yet it is nobility in politics that we require. This is because as long as humans interact with one another, politics is inevitable. Socialists and libertarians – who think they are so opposed to one another – both have great faith in progress and share in common the desire to eliminate politics, either by letting the market reign supreme or by pushing toward a society beyond capitalism and vice, where we all naturally love one another. They are naïve, for this will never happen. Even if it did, politics would still be present – it would just be played in a different key. We must therefore know how to navigate this necessary evil, as unattractive as we may find it. To do so, all the while aiming at the good, is noble; for it sets an example of human excellence and dignity toward which we can strive. It reminds us that heroism and sensitivity to human greatness is no less possible than it is needed in a republic. We need those who aspire to such excellence and virtue to enter politics. Good laws and institutions are powerless without good men and women.

In what sense is Cicero great (and good)? This is one of many topics that will be addressed in this book. He is great because he sought to ascend above the people of his time. Even more than most of us, Cicero experienced first-hand the dirty and dangerous world of politics. Some politicians respond by holding on to their ideals at all costs, and they often find themselves swept aside. Others compromise their ideals – never all at once, but gradually – until they find themselves like boats adrift, adept at avoiding rocks, but sailing aimlessly. Cicero avoided both traps. He balanced the pursuit for power, honour, and justice. In both his political and his philosophical commitments he sought truth. As a result, he could still find nobility in politics.

But Cicero also balanced the active life against the contemplative life. He was a statesman and a philosopher. He took the time to think deeply about the principles of politics and ethics. It behooves us, who have very little time, to consult the works of those who thought deeply. He sought to accomplish that rare reconciliation between theory and practice, knowledge and action, philosophy and politics.

It may sound strange at first to think reconciling theory and practice is rare. After all, we are inundated with data that we use in our evidence-based policymaking. But science alone cannot tell us what we should do. That is a question of our goals, and ultimately our most deeply held ideals. The ideals worth having and the best way to attain them depend not on science but on the ancient virtue of prudence. Cicero was a prudent man.

We often fail to interrogate our ideals philosophically. Why would we when science, capitalism, and liberal democracy have brought us so much freedom and prosperity? True philosophy is almost as seldom discussed today as true statesmanship. We are in need of both, not just to meet the challenges of the day, but also in order to understand the enduring dilemmas of politics. But if politics itself has remained relatively constant throughout history, what has changed is the way we understand politics. That we are shocked or outraged when we encounter intolerance, illiberalism, the rejection of science, or good old fashioned realpolitik in international affairs, is a testament to how effective the promotion of liberty, science, and a rules-based international order has been.

But as students of history we do not have the luxury of assuming our wishes constitute reality. Our liberal democracies are fragile and imperfect. We shouldn’t indulge in the end of history delusion that the default state of human community is liberal, democratic, and secular. Judging by history and the nature of man, such delusions are not only false but also dangerous: they encourage a naïve optimism that weakens our resolve in the face of the real threats to our civilization. Let the reader not misunderstand the criticisms of modern liberalism and democracy to be found in this book; [w]e are not permitted to be flatterers of democracy precisely because we are friends and allies of democracy.³ In light of this, Cicero’s example is all the more laudable; for he waded through a much deeper swamp of corruption and malice, and yet he still fixed his gaze upward. And he was successful.

This book is intended for the general reader who probably remembers hearing about Cicero in school and who is interested in history, politics, and philosophy. It is not strictly speaking a biography of Cicero, nor is it a scholarly dissection of his life and works; rather, it uses his life and writings and his time period to help us better understand politics in the 21st century and the phenomenon of politics more generally. Oftentimes a philosophical disquisition or overly scholarly work is insufficient for understanding politics as it is experienced by political actors themselves. To understand politics in motion we must look at a life in politics, with all of the imperfection and uncertainty as experienced at the time.

The authors have not shied away from humorous asides, a decision which they believe Cicero would have commended; after all, he could be a very funny man. Besides, sometimes truths are best expressed through humour. Indeed, humour separates free societies from totalitarian ones; tyrants don’t know how to laugh – least of all at themselves.

The book is divided into three parts, each examining a different dimension of politics as experienced by Cicero: Power, Truth, and Nobility.

The first part – Power and Politics – outlines Cicero’s climb to power, how he builds up trust, how he balances the pursuit of power with his desire for recognition and his sense of justice. It concludes with his consulship – the highest office in the Roman Republic – in 63 BC and an investigation of the purpose of power and the nature of ambition in the context of the Catilinarian conspiracy, where Cicero permits extrajudicial executions to deal with a state of emergency.

The second part – Truth and Politics – sees Cicero in his wilderness years. Focusing on his philosophical works, it takes a step back from the turbulent politics of 62-46 BC when Cicero’s influence, like that of many others, was marginalized in the face of the Triumvirate and civil war. Cicero was still active, to be sure, but it was also a time of reflection. So, too, our narrative becomes more philosophical, focusing on the question of the good society and the inevitability of the split between elites and the people. We look at Cicero’s almost Burkean explanation of Rome’s genius through the centuries. We then discuss the importance of how one understands history and how that is related to civilization. Finally, we conclude by looking at the importance of how we use words in a liberal democracy, and why we should care about the words of praise that so many statesmen and thinkers through the ages have spoken of Cicero.

Armed with this philosophical perspective, we return to the narrative of Cicero’s life in the third part – Nobility and Politics. We pick up in 46 BC with Caesar as dictator. Following the Ides of March Cicero would find himself in the role of senior statesman. He would pen one of the most important works of the Western tradition: De officiis. Having turned from considerations of the mixed regime and history and civilization in the second part, we present some of the most salient themes of Cicero’s De officiis here, since the institutions outlined in Part II can survive only with the virtues outlined in Part III. Mobilizing his eloquence and all of his influence Cicero would also deliver some of the most powerful speeches in Western history – his fourteen Philippics. We conclude by summing up what Cicero’s words and deeds tell us about nobility, the need for virtuous statesmanship, and the defence of politics.

If the reader comes away with a greater appreciation of antiquity and with a glimmer of hope for our politics yet, then we will have more than succeeded in our task.

¹ Morgenthau, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics, 172.

² Ironically, the topic of the article – Cicero and International Relations – is the one thing that didn’t make its way into the book.

³ Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern, 24.

Part I: Power and Politics

Power and Politics

Power is the currency of politics. Anywhere that we encounter a struggle between individuals to impose their will on one another, regardless of the other’s ability or willingness to resist, we can say that we are involved in politics. This can happen in families, in companies, in schools, and in states themselves. Sometimes the struggles are all the more catty in places you would least expect it. Henry Kissinger is reputed to have said that academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low.¹ This may be accurate, or it may be that one would hope institutes devoted to disseminating knowledge are free of playing power-grabbing games. They’re not. Power is an inevitable factor in our social lives. Wherever human beings interact, it is an unavoidable fact that hierarchies of some sort will develop. Pace the utopian dreams of some anarchists or any shade of Marxist, or even defenders of the democratic devolution of ever more competencies to the people, we simply cannot function efficiently without an order that puts decision-making and execution into the hands of a few and not the many.²

Such statements about the nature of power and hierarchy might sound uncomfortable to us in this egalitarian day and age, where we try to minimize the dirty truths about politics as best as we can. But we are not wholly shielded from these facts; nor, for that matter, do we want to be. We like power. We are fascinated by its inner workings and by the concept of controlling others. Go into any bookstore from Beijing to Bucharest to Boston and it’s the same collection of books being marketed to the professional classes. They deal with how to become an effective manager or how to control or seduce people, with a few of the standard self-help books thrown in for good measure. Look at some of the most popular TV series: Game of Thrones, House of Cards, The Sopranos. We are fascinated with watching people dominate and manipulate each other, sometimes in very violent ways.

This phenomenon doesn’t stop at pop culture though. It has seeped into our institutions of higher learning. It may have started with the perversion of a tradition of critical thinking begun by the 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant.³ For critical thinking means thinking deeply and asking ourselves what our knowledge is based on. It means not taking things at face value, which can also sometimes mean finding motives and justifications that are not really there. In the hands of Karl Marx critical thinking morphed into a tradition of analyzing the inevitable downfall of capitalism as well as promoting the proletarian revolution that would bring about this downfall (although it’s unclear if Marx ever decided whether History had declared this revolution would definitively happen or if we were required to step in and give History a little nudge.) From Marx we inherited a suspicion of capitalism, the wealthy classes, and a quasi-Christian message about how the rich would be brought to heel by the downtrodden of society. And by downtrodden We mean the working classes, not the peasants; like many of our left-leaning global elite today, Marx was too much of an urbanite to have much sympathy for the concerns of country folk. The final nail in the coffin, though, came in the form of the Foucault-Derrida-Lacan triumvirate that effectively reduced any honest analysis of a social situation to a power discourse or a linguistic game.

What all of these strands of thought hold in common is the devaluation of the truth of a proposition in preference of critically looking behind the proposition at the power wielders who put it forward. Once truth has been prostituted to power, there is theoretically no end to the bogeymen that can be pilloried, although in practice the victims of these academic attacks tend to be those groups historically perceived as holding power, or Western civilization as a whole.

Power is as ubiquitous as our interest in it. We are fascinated by it perhaps even more so today now that its sources in our complex societies are increasingly more difficult to define. Who held it in the past? God, or rather any one of His lower, earthly representatives – and some of them were very low indeed – and the King or nobleman or tyrant or what have you. Many no longer believe in God, and so sacred power has diminished; and, in the West at least, we have largely done away with non-democratic forms of temporal government.

So what is this fluid concept that has been with us for so long and yet flits from one person to another or away from people entirely, like a hog at a greased pig scramble? The German sociologist Max Weber defined power (Macht) as the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance, regardless of the basis on which this probability rests.⁴ Downstream from that we have authority or domination (Herrschaft), which is the probability that a command with a given specific content will be obeyed by a given group of persons, as well as discipline, which is the probability that by virtue of habituation a command will receive prompt and automatic obedience in stereotyped forms, on the part of a given group of persons.⁵ Without bogging ourselves down in a discussion of sociological terminology, the essential point is that power is not only what allows you to get someone else to do your bidding, but it is also grounded either in the threat of the use of force or in some form of legitimacy. It is a mark