Cicero, Roman Republicanism and the Contested Meaning of Libertas
| Published date | 01 October 2014 |
| Date | 01 October 2014 |
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-9248.12037 |
| Author | Geoff Kennedy |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Cicero, Roman Republicanism and the Contested
Meaning of Libertas
Geoff Kennedy
Durham University
Despite growing interest in neo-Roman republicanism, few republicans examine the character of Roman republi-
canism, either in its constitutional practice,its social relations or in the works of its primary defender s.This ar ticle
examines Cicero’s two systematic dialogues of political philosophy – De Re Publicaand De Legibus – in order to assess
the status of liberty as ‘non-domination’ in these texts. It argues that,f ar from liberty as non-domination being the
operative conceptual ideal in Cicero’srepublicanism, concordia along with equity as a form of proportionate equality that
depends upon the recognition of substantive differences of status and power serves as the foundation of his republican
political thought.This for m of ordered liberty is offered as an alternative to the conception of liberty as a form of
‘non-domination’ that Cicero attributes to the democracies of ancient Greece and the populist project of popular
reformers such as Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus.
Keywords: republicanism; liberty; Cicero; Rome
In recent years,‘neo-republican’ scholars have articulated a republican conception of liberty
as an alternative to that of the ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ conceptions of liberty. These
contributions to political philosophy turn to the history of Roman republican political
thought as the basis of this alternative tradition.According to Quentin Skinner (1978; 1984;
1993; 1998;2002; 2006), republican writers in Renaissance Italy such as Machiavelli sought
to recover the Roman tradition of libertas and‘free states’. In seventeenth-century England
neo-Roman writers inspired by Machiavelli as well as by Cicero and the Roman historians
argued that freedom is not merely freedom from external interference in the Hobbesian
sense; rather, freedom means independence from the will of others. From this perspective,
a constraint is not characterised merely in terms of coercion or interference, but rather in
terms of a persistent condition of dependence on the arbitrary will of another being.
Similarly, Philip Pettit (1997) has articulated a theory of republican liberty as a form of
‘non-domination’ as opposed to the‘non-interference’ prized by liberals. Other republican
theorists have sought to elaborate republicanism further as an alternative to liberalism and
communitarianism in the modern world (Maynor, 2003; Viroli, 2002).
In doing so,republican theorists argue that Isaiah Berlin’s (1958) dichotomy of ‘negative’
and ‘positive’liber ty is unrepresentative of the most prominent historical articulations of the
concept of liberty.For Pettit (1997, p. 18), the‘negative–positive distinction has served us ill
in political thought’, by perpetuating the myth that ‘there are just two ways of understand-
ing liberty’. The irony is that Berlin’s conception of negative liberty as the ‘authentic’
conception of liberty stems initially from Hobbes’ definition, which serves to depoliticise
liberty and make it compatible with absolutism. The neo-Roman conception of liberty,
however, is ‘neither the negative nor the positive liberty described by Berlin and Constant’
(Viroli, 2002, p. 40). Existing within the interstices of negative and positive liberty,
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doi: 10.1111/1467-9248.12037
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2014 VOL 62, 488–501
© 2013The Author.Political Studies © 2013 Political Studies Association
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