Abstract
Loss was a catchword in Zuccotti Park and other Occupied sites through the autumn of 2011, and it’s the sensation Tea Partiers cite to explain their rage: loss of livelihoods, health care, hope, and (voiced most angrily) loss of political capacity, as the gap between the haves and the have-nots expands and money twists politics to serve those best off. Articulating all these senses of loss is an important step toward political change. Now comes the tougher challenge (as George Shulman recently argued): finding in conditions and crisis new possibilities for politics. Dean Hammer believes that returning to late republican and early imperial Rome reveals such possibilities. With learning and passion, he argues that Roman writers view the political community in terms of lived affective connections and thus help us imagine politics afresh.
You may think you’ve seen this show before. But Hammer doesn’t play the same tune as Philip Pettit, Maurizio Viroli, Quentin Skinner, and other members of the post-1970s republican revival. Where Pettit finds in Roman thought the seeds of a theory of freedom, Viroli the makings of a passionate but unscary patriotism, and Skinner a unique intertwining of freedom, virtue, and public service, Hammer looks to the Romans for ways to think creatively about and out of loss: specifically, the loss of connectedness to a meaningful political life knit by common moral, aesthetic, and historical reference points.
Neo-Romans like Pettit spend few words on their progenitors (Skinner’s work on Quintilian and Sallust is a notable exception), and tend to quote the same handful of Latin loci classici. This makes a virtue of necessity, because Roman theoretical texts don’t square easily with modern political philosophy in content or style, and as a model Roman practice doesn’t bear serious examination. (What remains at stake in the neo-republicans’ habit of linking themselves to Rome is something of a puzzle.) So it’s heartening to see a book that concentrates on what Roman writers actually say, and that in the process forcefully hits the reset button on the neo-republican program.
Rather than trying to use republican ideas to modify liberal concepts (or vice versa), Hammer tracks his chosen thinkers’ explorations of the feelings and mental habits that anchor common life and guide moral judgment. Pairing Cicero with Arendt, Livy with Machiavelli, Tacitus with Montesquieu, Seneca with Foucault, galvanizes his claims about the motivating dialogic power of Roman writing. Hammer’s close readings clarify Roman concerns with embodiment, locatedness in time and space, sensation, sentiment, memory, and self-knowledge. His approach transforms the traditional picture of pragmatic Romans versus theoretical Greeks into what we could call, following Davide Panagia, a Roman phenomenology of politics.
Hammer sees his Romans’ preoccupations as a response to the loss of bearings the ruling class suffered during the turbulent century-long transition to autocratic rule. They seek to recover themselves by concentrating on “felt meanings” rather than reason or utopian experiments, and chapter by chapter Hammer enjoins us to regain, through their writings, the “feel for the world” that results from self-conscious, invested engagement with worldly things, relations, and sensations. (Their rejection of Greek abstraction, Hammer argues in his fine introduction, is why modern political philosophers turned away from Roman thought in the nineteenth century.) Grieving for his dead daughter in the months leading up to Caesar’s assassination, Cicero turns in the Tusculan Disputations not to Platonic forms but to a notion of the eternal “fostered in the tangibility and particularity” of things we come to treasure through memory (51). In his exemplar-studded history of Rome from its foundation, Livy exploits the essential relation between our images of the past and our capacity to imagine how best to live together, while Tacitus’s imperial histories teach readers how to recognize the psychological trauma created by the clouding effect of autocratic power on individual moral judgment. Half a century after Livy, Seneca lives in an unpredictable Neronian world where the historian’s project of re-animating exemplary images seems hopelessly out of reach. For him, the self must be envisioned anew through rigorous exercises of self-analysis that are undertaken in the company of others (thus recovering the self from the moral isolation imposed by the despot) and refined in the sensual act of writing, which ignites both the writer’s and the reader’s powers of creative self-making. Each chapter justifies the place of the word imagination in the book’s title.
Imagination and feeling are difficult concepts to manage, and the claim that they hold the key to resolving the destructive effects of loss can lead to frustrating gaps in the argument. Take, for instance, Hammer’s conclusion that in Tusculans, Cicero views reflecting on beloved landscapes, artworks, speeches, and one’s attachments to work and friendships as good training in the habit of care for the future. From contemplative reflection on the world, the thinker is led back to the world so that he can better safeguard it for the next generation. Countering standard interpretations of the dialogue, this powerful reading makes a persuasive introduction to Arendt’s deep interest in Roman thought, especially cultura animi, the cultivation of the soul. For Cicero and Arendt alike, “culture indicates a public attitude of sensitivity” to beauty, a capacity to recognize and love it. With his repeated citation of Cicero’s famous comparison of the republic to a painting whose colors are fading (De Republica 5.1.2), Hammer seems to suggest that the object of our recognition and love must be the republic, whose beauty we ought to preserve.
These are beautiful, stimulating ideas, nourishing to the minds of those primed for them, but Hammer pauses too rarely to address obscurities and potential objections. Does a cultivated imagination help the politician handle the gladhanding and dirty infighting that Cicero laments in De Republica 1? (Hammer answers that philosophy gives us fortitude, but doesn’t explain how.) What directs the mind trained on glory to remember the poor and disenfranchised? Such questions have been asked many times of Arendt’s work on political action, aesthetics, and judgment, and Hammer dismisses them too fast—brushing off Sheldon Wolin’s criticism of her notion of culture, for instance, with a tantalizing terse reference to Cicero’s comments on the role of the people in the formation of taste (73).
We should also ask whether and how norms anchor the imagination, keep “felt meanings” true to the world, and rein in communal passions. On the one hand, the republic may “perhaps never have been known” even to those who imagined it in writing (8): it may be a fantasy. On the other, the community thrives when it is able to share a common “animating vision” of itself, and it seems important to Hammer that this vision be not only plural and unfixed but somehow beautiful and true (already a tall order). To Cicero, philosophy’s value is that it “sharpens the soul’s perception of the ‘true nature’ of things” (55), and beauty is innate, the “manifestation of the true nature of things” (58). Autocratic despotism horrifies Tacitus because it destroys the “objectivity” of the markers by which institutions and norms operate (137)—the implication being that republican habits of thought preserve objectivity, perhaps via public deliberation (hinted at 71–73).
How are we to understand how imagination, truth, and beauty relate to one another, let alone feeling and objectivity? Or does the habit of cultivating sensitivity to felt meanings trump these questions? What happens when felt meanings fall prey to fantasy or cultivate destructive passions, and entire communities lose their moral bearings? (These are questions Arendt confronts in work Hammer does not cite, Eichmann in Jerusalem and Responsibility and Judgment.)
Consider the vivid images that Livy uses to define Rome as a regime of civic affection and to teach readers good political judgment. Locating this strategy in the rich context of ancient medical and philosophical investigations of phantasiai (images), Hammer selects memorable examples that reiterate his Arendtian commitment to the public nature of political action, such as Brutus’s display of Lucretia’s corpse, which prompts the uprising that establishes the republic. These images tend to showcase noble leadership—which Hammer knows, thoroughly versed as he is in recent scholarship on Roman spectacle and display, is a central motif of republican self-representation and self-understanding, not only in our elite literary sources (whose bias generally goes unremarked). They also symbolize the pitfalls of affective associations based on tradition and common feeling, which of course can cloud judgment as effectively as any emperor.
Republican politics was anchored in elite contests. Struggling to excel on the literal battlefield and in the metaphorical ones of the forum and senate-house, well-born Romans fought to gain elected office to establish and enrich their families. Doing res gestae—deeds witnessed for perpetuity in histories, poems, statues, and the like—is the core of the senatorial understanding of libertas: the positive freedom to act in public. (The value they placed on popular freedom to participate in politics may be gauged by the number of sentences Tacitus devotes to the people’s loss of suffrage under Tiberius: two.) When the system finally overbalanced into civil war and Caesar and his heir Augustus seized autocratic power, they created a crisis of senatorial agency that also revealed a terrible truth: the competitive world that Cicero, Livy, Seneca, and Tacitus mourn and memorialize as free had created autocracy. Not only loss but guilt and thwarted desire colors virtually every sentence they write about politics.
My purpose in recalling this history is not to scold the Romans for failing to see their world for the violent, exploitative, radically unequal arrangement it was, or Hammer for illuminating their thinking so eloquently—that would be puerile—but to ask whether it’s possible to attend to the rich experience of feelings and imagination without affirming equally rich and well-articulated values that guard against perversion and domination. Only an inspiring book prompts so many questions. This one richly deserves further response and development.