Download PDF | Lex Paulson - Cicero and the People’s Will_ Philosophy and Power at the End of the Roman Republic-Cambridge University Press (2022).
287 Pages
CICERO AND THE PEOPLE’S WILL
This book tells an overlooked story in the history of ideas, a drama of cut-throat politics and philosophy of mind. For it is Cicero, statesman and philosopher, who gives shape to the notion of will in Western thought, from criminal will to moral willpower and “the will of the people”. In a single word – voluntas – he brings Roman law into contact with Greek ideas, chief among them Plato’s claim that a rational elite must rule. When the Republic falls to Caesarism, Cicero turns his political argument inward: Will is a force in the soul to win the virtue lost on the battlefield, the mark of inner freedom in an unfree age. Though this constitutional vision failed in his own time, Cicero’s ideals of popular sovereignty and rational elitism have shaped and fractured the modern world – and Ciceronian creativity might save it.
Lex Paulson is Executive Director of the Université Mohammed VI Polytechnique School of Collective Intelligence (Morocco) and lectures in advocacy at Sciences Po, Paris. Trained in classics and community organizing, he served as a mobilization strategist for the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama in 2008 and Emmanuel Macron in 2017. He has led projects in democratic innovation and leadership for UNICEF, the US State Department, the French National Assembly, and the National Democratic Institute. He served as legislative counsel in the 1111th US Congress (2009–2011), organized on six US presidential campaigns, and has worked to advance democratic innovation at the European Commission and in India, Tunisia, Egypt, Uganda, Senegal, the Czech Republic, and Ukraine.
Introduction It is clear that there is a problem about the will in ancient philosophy, but it is not so clear just what the problem is. Whose idea was the will? Many of us may share the intuition of an inner force by which we try to direct the course of our lives. So, too, may we feel caught in a contest of forces – of matter or spirit – that limits our ability not only to live the life we want, but even to choose what we know is best. How much of “us” is fixed in place by our genes, or our culture, or the force of our habits? If we have a will, is it free? In the face of such doubts, politics may seem a distant concern. Yet the same word recurs. A profound and complex issue affecting millions is narrowed into a binary choice – “yes” or “no,” that party or this one. The votes are counted. And then, says the winning more-than-half to the losing almost-half, “the will of the people has spoken.”
The phrase is so common that its strangeness can fail to register. How could any large and diverse body of individuals, many of whom bitterly disagree, share a single will? Who has the right to declare what that is? And why would it stay binding even as minds and circumstances change? Most of us would shudder to think that partisan squabbles could hinder our ability to live a good life. But what if these two realms of will – the psychological and political – were linked together from the start? And what if this story, steeped in ancient history and thought, could teach us something about the dysfunctions of today’s world – about why our republics are not democracies, and how to create meaning in a broken age? Genealogies of the will have traditionally centered upon Augustine of Hippo (– ), whose treatises in Latin framed the debates of medieval Christians and secular moderns in turn.
Those pushing further back find antecedents to Augustine’s notion of will in the ideas of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. And yet, these scholars largely agree: voluntas, Augustine’s word for will, has no direct equivalent in Greek. The etymological problem is compounded by a historical one: Augustine admits he did not enjoy reading Greek, nor did he ever master it. But he loved Cicero. Until now, the statesman and philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero (– ) has played a minor role in the history of will. As some have remarked, his is the best-documented life of any man or woman before the Christian era. His orations, treatises, and letters were recopied through the centuries out of reverence, not necessarily for his achievements, but for his language. Readers of all faiths agreed that the magnificence of Cicero’s prose was without precedent or peer. And regarding the will, digital archives confirm a curious fact. All extant texts prior to the st century yield around two dozen occurrences of voluntas and its cognates. In Cicero’s corpus it appears times (see Table )
Cicero’s references to the will are wide-ranging and lifelong. In his early letters and speeches, voluntas measures criminal intent and maps hidden lines of influence. As the Republic tumbles into civil war, Cicero theorizes the will of the Roman people as the sole lawful source of power (De republica and De legibus, late s ). And with Rome in the grip of Caesarism, his treatises name the will as the seat of virtue (De finibus, ), give the first account of willpower (Tusculan Disputations, ), link human and divine will (De natura deorum, ), and, in De fato ( ), defend the will’s freedom in a causally determined world. The earliest surviving occurrences of “will of the people” (voluntas populi) and “free will” (libera voluntas) are both found in Cicero.
This book seeks to unearth a long-ignored chapter in the intellectual history of the will. It is a Roman story, springing from and woven into the fall of its Republic. Dio Cassius observed that some essential concepts such as auctoritas are indigenous to Latin and not mere translations of Greek ideas. I argue likewise that the will is an original Latin contribution to the Western mind. In making this case, I borrow Carlos Lévy’s distinction between a concept, which “encloses reality in a unity of meaning,” and a notion, which “accepts approximation, a multitude of elements, preferring suggestion to the imposition of one framework, at the risk of offering contradictory signs.”
In its staggering variety, Cicero’s voluntas is better seen as a notion than a concept. As we will see, in this one capacious word he joins multiple streams of debate that had not intersected in Greek, opening new fields of meaning for the will as a rational force in society and the soul. Consider a passage from one of Cicero’s late courtroom speeches, the Pro Ligario ( ). His client, Q. Ligarius, briefly led the Pompeian forces in Africa during the civil war and is now accused by a political rival of perduellio, siding with a presumed enemy against the Roman people and their new dictator. With Caesar himself presiding, Cicero pleads for a different view of his client’s intentions, which he claims are even more blameless than his own: [Ligarius] went out as legate in time of peace, and in an utterly peaceable province he so bore himself that peace was its highest interest ... [While] his departure implied a will which did him no discredit [voluntatem habuit non turpem], his remaining was due to an honorable necessity ... You have then, Caesar, up to this point no evidence that Ligarius was alien from your goodwill [nullum ... signum alienae a te voluntatis] ... ... When Marcus Cicero maintains in your presence that another was not of the same will that he admits of himself [in ea voluntate non fuisse, in qua se ipsum confitetur fuisse], he feels no fear of what unspoken thoughts may fill your mind ... Not until war had been engaged, Caesar, not indeed until it had run most of its course, did I, constrained by no compulsion but led only by a deliberate judgment and will [nulla vi coactus, iudicio ac voluntate], go forth to join those who had taken arms against you. In a single passage, the will appears as Ligarius’ righteous state of mind (voluntatem habuit non turpem), as Caesar’s goodwill (nullum ... signum alienae a te voluntatis), as a partisan adherence Cicero regrets (in ea voluntate non fuisse ...), and as the inner force carrying out a reasoned judgment (iudicio ac voluntate). Voluntas, in other words, is not a specific and determined concept; it is a notion that assembles a constellation of meaning.
Though the agile orator uses different senses of will to refer to Ligarius, Caesar, and himself, its rapid recurrence creates an effect: Three men, seemingly at odds, are subtly conjoined. Cicero wins his friend’s acquittal. Though evidence is scarce, we can infer from the two dozen occurrences of voluntas before Cicero and a handful of later references where the notion may have stood as he found it. As we will see in Chapter , voluntas seems always to have held a dynamic, “onrushing” quality, denoting a deliberate, uncoerced choice. In these early Latin texts, voluntas is a legal or political desire-in-motion, a force by which actors with status shape their world. It is a “willing” but not yet “the will.” By the nd century , we find the playwrights Plautus and Terence adding psychological shadings that likely informed Cicero’s study of politics, oratory, and the soul. Why did Cicero need this notion? Though we find no full-blown “theory of the will” in his corpus, he deploys the word for each of his most important purposes. The first of these is survival. In an age of politician–generals, Cicero has no army. He is a “new man” (novus homo) in a republic led by noble families. From his youthful prosecution of the wealthy Verres to his suppression of Catiline’s conspiracy as consul, Cicero’s career is a series of risky bets underwritten by intellectual gifts.
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