Abstract
Gary Remer begins his important new book by citing a 2009 survey conducted in Great Britain, indicating that the public regards politicians as the least trustworthy group among all professionals. Needless to say, their reputation has not improved in the esteem of the British or American public in more recent years. One reason for cynicism toward politicians lies in a corresponding distrust of a primary democratic political art—rhetoric. Political rhetoric is seen by its detractors as a tool that politicians use to emotionally manipulate audiences, undermining hearers’ autonomy and their capacity to assess accurately their own best interests and the community’s good in a given situation. Critics of political rhetoric have a long and distinguished lineage, counting among their number thinkers such as Plato, Hobbes, and Kant. Over the past few decades, political theorists such as Ronald Beiner, Eugene Garver, Danielle Allen, and Bryan Garsten have defended rhetoric. 1 With the partial exception of Garsten, who devotes a chapter to Cicero in Saving Persuasion, these authors find their chief source of inspiration among classical authors in Aristotle. By contrast, Cicero is the hero of Remer’s work.
On Remer’s account, Cicero inaugurated an important and attractive “tradition of political morality” that is closely linked to the theory and practice of political rhetoric. This tradition conceives of the politician and orator as being bound by a duty to morality; however, the morality in question is a flexible and prudential “political morality,” anchored in the values of the community, which requires politicians to “balance” competing considerations, such as the demands of the “moral” with the requirements of the “useful,” and their obligation to lead with their responsibility for preserving the people’s independent judgment (p. 20). This morality is internal rather than external to the practice of rhetoric; thus Cicero, unlike Aristotle, provides a justification for rhetoric on its own terms (see especially chap. 1). Remer finds this Ciceronian political morality attractive because it places moral constraints on the orator/politician while at the same time owning up to the reality that at times the good of the community will require the good politician to engage in practices that are typically regarded as bad, such as deception. This latter set of concerns brings Remer into conversation with scholarship by Ruth Grant and David Runciman on political hypocrisy and with Michael Walzer’s work on the problem of “dirty hands” in politics. 2
Remer has a capacious understanding of who qualifies for admission into the Ciceronian tradition of political morality. While some members, such as Quintilian and John of Salisbury (pp. 26–33), undoubtedly adopted features of this “tradition” by reading Cicero, Remer does not require that writers be self-consciously following Cicero. For example, he includes Edmund Burke, the authors of The Federalist Papers, J. S. Mill, and Abraham Lincoln based almost entirely on the presence in their writings of themes associated with the Ciceronian tradition of political morality without attempting to document that these authors associated the ideas in question with Cicero (chap. 5). This approach allows Remer to avoid tediously rehearsing a long list of Ciceronian allusions in the previously mentioned writers, whose specific debts to Cicero can in any case be difficult to document given the pervasive presence of Cicero in eighteenth-century education. However, it also means that the plausibility of a “Ciceronian tradition” rests on the successful identification of a coherent set of ideas originally articulated by Cicero and received by later writers. Remer largely succeeds in this task, though in a couple of places he stretches to the limit the notion that all of these authors embraced an identifiable set of coherent ideas. Mill, for instance, rejects arguably the most central idea that Remer associates with Ciceronian morality: the “inherently moral character of the ‘sense of community’” (p. 163). Justus Lipsius creatively reworks Ciceronian material relating to a prudential account of politics, legitimating under certain conditions the statesman’s use of actions ordinarily regarded as vices, but he ultimately rejects the political rhetoric and republican government that would seem to be close to the heart of the Ciceronian tradition of political morality (chap. 4).
The book consists of an introduction, a conclusion, and six chapters arranged in chronological order by interlocutor; hence, the first chapter reads Cicero’s account of rhetoric against that of Aristotle, and the last chapter brings Cicero into critical dialogue with contemporary proponents of deliberative democracy. Still, each chapter features plenty of engagement with Cicero’s texts, so that Cicero himself is never left behind completely; this book is as much about Cicero as the Ciceronian tradition. The chapters progressively unlock, emphasize, and apply different and related aspects of Cicero’s political ethics, especially the central notion of decorum.
The first three chapters form a block, with a chapter on Cicero bookended by chapters comparing Cicero to Aristotle and Machiavelli. Chapter 1 clears the ground by arguing that Cicero is more relevant than Aristotle for a contemporary defense of rhetoric insofar as the Roman provides a more compelling response to the charge of manipulation. Cicero holds both audience and orator responsible for manipulation, while sketching a realistic utopia that “avoids the immorality of emotional manipulation by toning down emotions intended to overwhelm reasoned thought” (p. 60). Chapter 2 focuses on Cicero and outlines the idea that Remer sees at the heart of Ciceronian political morality: a decorum that embraces both the community’s sense of what is appropriate and the politician’s prudential consideration of what is in the community’s best interests. The need to allow space for the latter justifies politicians’ occasional departures from everyday morality. Like Machiavelli, Cicero eschews “clear-cut or permanent distinctions” between what is honorable and advantageous (especially for the political community) because both men “wish to signal the political actor’s need for flexibility” (p. 90). On the other hand, “Cicero, in contrast to Machiavelli, openly affirms that politics is incomplete without a dual commitment to the good and the beneficial” (p. 90).
Chapters 4 and 5 turn to the Ciceronian tradition. Chapter 4 features a close and sophisticated reading of Justus Lipsius. Remer convincingly shows how Lipsius derived a prudential view of political morality from Cicero. Indeed, Lipsius proves to be Ciceronian in form as well as in substance, following the Ciceronian device of arguing “on both sides of the question” by quoting Cicero against himself. Chapter 5 shows why it is important for those concerned with contemporary political ideas to pay attention to the history of political thought. Against the recent suggestion to dispense with the traditional dichotomous trustee–delegate model of representation, Remer argues that the traditional picture of representation is not arbitrary but reflects an awareness that the orator-statesman must be both dependent and independent of the claims of the community, a tension that goes back to the writings of Cicero himself. Through a careful consideration of Cicero’s texts, Remer demonstrates that the Roman’s account of rhetoric captures both the orator’s responsiveness to and independence from the people that constitutes “the two-sided nature of representation that characterizes the standard account of representation” (p. 151).
At some places in chapter 5, I thought that Remer pushed the view that ancient Rome possessed the modern concept of representation beyond what was permitted by the evidence and required by his argument. For instance, at one point Remer finds an analogy to the modern election of representatives in the image of a mob crashing an opponent’s political rally (contio). I have a difficult time seeing how the mob was “exercis[ing] its franchise” or “voting” by shouting down, physically assaulting, or threatening the life of the speaker (pp. 147–48), and I think I would be supported in this view by “Publius” in The Federalist Papers, discussed in this chapter as embracing the Ciceronian concept of representation. Surely Publius would have seen such mob violence as contributing to the “furious storms” and “tempestuous waves” of violent conflict that agitated “the petty republics of Greece and Italy”—an unhappy situation to which Publius—here Alexander Hamilton—saw the election of representatives as a remedy that was either a “wholly new” discovery or largely perfected “in modern times” (Federalist 9; a passage curiously omitted from Remer’s discussion). 3 Perhaps one could argue that the “modern” remedy of elected representation adopts the Ciceronian principle that the people were the “sovereign” legitimating authority while rejecting institutions such as the contio, in which Cicero, in line with Roman republican ideology, saw that authority as being embodied. And in fact, Remer does seem to argue for a new and radically different institutional embodiment of a Ciceronian principle when treating prudence, suggesting that Publius deemphasized the personal prudence of the Ciceronian orator in favor of the “institutional prudence” of checks and balances, separation of powers, and federalism (p. 160).
The book’s final substantive chapter compellingly brings Cicero into a critical conversation with contemporary proponents of deliberative democracy, that is, those who argue that legitimacy in collective decision making requires “deliberation conducted rationally and fairly among free and equal individuals” (p. 168). Cicero portrays such a situation in the discussions among elite Romans within his philosophical dialogues, but, according to Remer, he rightly recognized that such rhetoric was impracticable for use in politics where considerations of hierarchy and scale require a different, more emotional, style of rhetoric.
Arguably Cicero’s most recognizable contribution to political morality comes in the form of natural law, which influenced the later legal philosophy of Grotius and the cosmopolitanism of Kant. In contrast to these theories of a Ciceronian transnational morality, Remer’s Ciceronian tradition of political morality is decidedly communitarian, as he emphasizes in the conclusion (pp. 209–10). One might suppose that a type of political cosmopolitanism, drawn from Ciceronian natural law teaching, would significantly erode Remer’s communitarian Ciceronian political ethic. Yet to my mind Remer’s twofold defense of his approach based on fidelity to Cicero and contemporary practicability is very persuasive: a transnational “political” (rather than “moral”) cosmopolitanism is an impracticable ideal in our contemporary world and was in fact never endorsed by Cicero, writing during a time when the expanding Roman Empire would have made such an ideal more realistic than in our own day.
In fact, while Remer tends to find a tension between Cicero’s discussion of natural law and his own particularistic account of Cicero’s political morality (p. 77), an important strain within Cicero’s naturalism fits well within and indeed strengthens the broader picture Remer paints. In De officiis, Cicero argues that a natural social drive urges us to build up and strengthen human society. However, despite a strong and seemingly inflexible emphasis on the duty to keep promises, nature’s directives turn out to be highly contextual, requiring above all a prudential and accurate evaluation of the flourishing of one’s political community. Moreover, for Cicero, nature too has its place alongside the customs, tradition, and current opinion constitutive of the “sense of the community” that partially binds the orator. After all, Cicero argues that alongside the roles we acquire by chance and choice stands the general “role” of “human being” bestowed by nature. This “role,” which involves among other things a society-enhancing respect for other human beings, does not come in a neat package of abstract principles but exists embedded within and beneath the thick, contingent morality of culture and custom. It furnishes us with the sort of “moral sense” that Remer finds “basic to our species” (p. 108). The orator may arouse this sense through auditory and visual means in addition to rational arguments, a point Cicero communicates through his use of the metaphors of theatre and music. (Persona, “role,” is a theatrical term indicating the mask worn by actors. For the music metaphor, see especially De oratore 1.113–115.) While orators can certainly use nonrational resources to manipulate, they can also draw on these same resources to appeal powerfully to their audience’s natural moral sense in situations where mere rational arguments fall flat, as, for example, when eighteenth-century English abolitionists sought to show the dehumanization of the slave trade visually through graphic depictions of overcrowded slave ships. 4 Thus, Cicero’s naturalism is consistent with his view of political judgment as presented by Remer, which makes space for moral arguments aimed at the emotions as well as reason (chap. 1).
From start to finish, Remer rarely loses sight of the potential contemporary value of his historical material, and herein lies his most significant contribution. Ethics and the Orator succeeds admirably in showing how the study of Cicero’s political thought, which charts a path between an unrealistic moral idealism and an amoral world where politics is unleavened by morality, can still be relevant for modern debates in political philosophy, during a time marked by cynicism about politics and politicians. It deserves to be read widely by classicists, historians of political thought, and political theorists working on issues related to rhetoric, political deliberation, and political morality.