Cicero lived in a world of political turmoil, but his ideas about law, liberty, and republican government survived long after the fall of Rome.
In this interview, Scott Nelson explores why an ancient Roman thinker still has important lessons for the modern world.
About the Guest
Scott Nelson is an independent scholar and Director of the Vienna Symposium, an institute devoted to the study of great texts. His last book, co-authored with Matthew Edwards, is Cicero, Politics, and the 21st Century.
Interview
Simon Sarevski: Of all the thinkers you could have written about, why Cicero? Why should someone today still take him seriously?
Scott Nelson: The idea to write on Cicero sort of came about randomly. Several years ago, my co-author, Matt, said we should write something together. So we looked at our common interests and, Rome being one of them, we thought Cicero would be interesting because his life provided ample material in terms of his deeds, his speeches, his philosophical ideas, and his private thoughts in his letters.
There are many thinkers today who pontificate better than they can put into practice. And there are, of course, many people who act without thinking. Cicero was one of the few who lived both the vita activa and the vita contemplativa. He was also witness to the tumults that overthrew the Roman Republic. Even if one were uninterested in his thoughts and deeds, he would still be worth taking seriously for the influence he has had on the development of Western civilization. He was read by the greatest thinkers consistently from the time of his death, through the remainder of Roman history, the medieval era, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment.
Is Cicero in any meaningful sense a “philosopher-king,” or is that the wrong way to think about him?
Scott Nelson: Yes, I would say that’s correct, though Cicero, like all Roman republicans, would probably have rejected the term “king!”
How would you describe liberty in the ancient Roman republican tradition — what did it actually mean in practice to be “free” in that world?
Scott Nelson: To be free is not to be a slave to anyone. This is political freedom: the freedom to govern yourself, to obey laws and not the arbitrary whim of a tyrant, not to have to answer to foreign rulers.
How has the idea of liberty changed across Western political thought — from the ancient world through Enlightenment liberalism?
Scott Nelson: As something that has always been considered desirable, liberty will likely always mean something slightly different to every person in accordance with whatever that person considers to be the highest good. It’s a massive topic, so I’ll make only a few remarks.
In the ancient world, I would say that there were two understandings of liberty – one is the political liberty I just mentioned, while the other is what you might call philosophical liberty. This is the freedom one has in exercising reason and not succumbing to the passions, which is a sort of liberty that Cicero also acknowledges. But if you were to ask a medieval Christian such as Dante, he would say that liberty ultimately is the love of God. Then with Hobbes liberty is connected to his materialist view of the world: you’re free as long as you’re alive and not physically impeded, which means you’re no less free under a monarchy than you are under a republic, so stop advocating for a republic because all you’re doing is causing violence and chaos and bringing us closer to the solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short state of nature. For Spinoza, who was worried about religious persecution of philosophy, liberty means freedom of opinion first and foremost. With the Enlightenment we also see a definition of liberty emerge that is understood as defending the individual against state interference, and thus a formal separation between state and society. Nevertheless, this doesn’t entirely displace the republican idea of liberty, which persists in the modern era in writers such as Rousseau. In the late 18th century and especially in the 19th and 20th centuries, you begin to encounter more frequently the idea of liberty as economic liberty, that is, free trade, freedom of contract, etc. For Marx, by contrast, such liberties are a mirage, and you attain true liberty only once you’ve finally overthrown the oppressive bourgeois class. For some 20th-century liberals such as Isaiah Berlin, F. A. Hayek, or Karl Popper, it is rather this claim to know true liberty — and the attempt to impose it on everyone else — that is the very root of totalitarianism.
In what you might call a “post-scarcity” modern world, has prosperity changed how we understand citizenship and political freedom?
Scott Nelson: Prosperity has changed our understanding of citizenship to an extent. Citizenship in the last analysis requires you to be willing to fight and die for your country. But there’s very little willingness to do this, particularly in many countries in Europe, where we are too attached to our prosperity. This is the old narrative about decadence undermining the capacity for collective action. As for whether prosperity has changed how we understand political freedom, I wouldn’t say it has changed our understanding so much as made political freedom less relevant. Many people don’t care about their political freedom as long as they are prosperous. Take away their prosperity and then all of a sudden they start talking about their political freedom and sovereignty and wanting to exercise it in the hopes of restoring their prosperity.
How would you describe the modern understanding of “liberty” in 21st-century liberal democracies compared to earlier traditions?
Scott Nelson: This depends on who you talk to. There is no one unequivocal modern understanding of liberty in 21st-century liberal democracies. Some will maintain one of the older definitions, such as the republican or Marxist definition; some will say it’s the right to be left alone by the state; some will say it’s the right to be left alone by society; some will say that it means feeling validated and seen by society, which means that liberty effectively amounts to a form of power over society. This last one reminds me of Cicero’s contemporary, the historian Sallust, who observed a connection between man’s innate desire for liberty and his innate desire for glory and domination.
If Cicero observed modern liberal democracies, what do you think would most surprise or disappoint him? What would concern him the most?
Scott Nelson: As in his own day, Cicero would be concerned with the feeble political class, its lack of ability and will to govern. He wouldn’t be so concerned with the people as such, because the people have always been fickle. Cicero would probably be surprised that we expend so much effort on trying to move the people and getting the people to think a certain way, as if all people were equal. He knew that not all people are equal and therefore not all deserving of attention. He also knew that gossip, which so many people think is the stuff of politics, was unimportant. In one of his letters he says he’s far more frightened of how history will judge him in six hundred years’ time than of the petty gossip of the day. He would be most pleasantly surprised to find that we’re still favourably discussing him two millennia after his death.
Has the internet and social media improved political discourse by widening participation, or made serious reflection harder?
Scott Nelson: These are two separate things. With the internet, we have access to more information than ever before. We also have access to a lot of useless distractions that impede serious reflection. It’s all a question of how we use the internet. But even if we use it to access useful information, access doesn’t necessarily imply serious reflection. Sometimes people think that information is knowledge. It is not. Information does not tell you what to think or what to do. Knowledge requires one to take a step back from all of the noise and think. To the extent that people confuse information with knowledge, then the sheer quantity of information out there does make serious reflection harder.
As for social media, in theory it should provide a venue for increased communication. In practice it impairs both communication and reflection. Communication requires a genuine willingness to listen deeply. Social media is more about announcing oneself and superficially engaging with others. It hasn’t widened participation so much as amplified the voices of those who are most effective at using it. It can politicize otherwise pointless issues, and so it confuses people as to what the public sphere actually is and where people can most effectively engage themselves politically. And because social media thrives on constant engagement and activity, by definition, it distracts people from serious reflection.
Modern liberal society is structured on functioning institutions. Can liberty survive without virtue, one of Cicero and the ancients’ key components, or is such value already embedded within institutions?
Scott Nelson: No. Institutions cannot survive indefinitely without virtue. At the end of the day, institutions are only as good as the people who animate them. Even the willingness to respect an institution is a virtue of sorts. The philosophers who conceived of liberal institutions knew that society was not composed of angels, and that a framework needed to be designed that could accommodate mediocre or even evil people. Nevertheless, if they focused more on institutions than on virtues, it’s because they could take it for granted that gentlemen would continue to pursue the latter. We can no longer make that assumption today. Cicero, too, couldn’t make this assumption in his own day: in addition to his On the Republic and On the Laws, he also wrote On Duties.
What are the main forces actively undermining liberal democracies today?
Scott Nelson: Liberal democracies are inherently unstable because they try to unite liberalism, whose scope is universal, with democracy, whose scope is limited. Liberalism treats each individual equally, regardless of sex, race, etc. Liberalism thus applies to all of humanity. Democracy, however, rule by the people, requires we have some notion of who the people are. No one genuinely believes that the whole world constitutes a people. Democracy therefore cannot include all of humanity. This tension is sustainable as long as people practice moderation, which is a very difficult virtue, especially in our era.
Liberal democracies today face additional issues. One is the expectation that the state will take care of everything. This expectation infantilizes people. A related problem is the expectation that problems should be solved at the level of politics to begin with. The solution may be less politics, less regulation, and more civil society, or at least a greater focus on politics at a lower level. Not all problems need to be addressed nationally or globally. Focusing on smaller and more concrete problems is more realistic, and because such goals are more realistic, people can actually take responsibility for meeting them.
Then there is the problem that liberal democracies today are unsure of what to strive for. Modern liberal democracy is built on a negative: thanks to the experience of the 20th century. It knows it opposes totalitarianism, but other than that it has no way of speaking to the deeper longings of man. It tries to let material prosperity, technology, and novelty fill this void, but many people remain lost and unhappy. This is less a problem of liberal democracy per se than of the spirit of the people in liberal democracy, which is increasingly plebeian. Liberal democracy is a constant wager that democratic institutions will not erode the aristocratic spirit required to sustain them.
Cicero lived through the end of the Roman Republic but continued to defend its ideals. Is there something instructive in that attitude for those who care about liberty today?
Scott Nelson: Certainly. Cicero witnessed more disorder and violence than we see today. It would have been very easy to fall into cynicism or retreat from politics entirely. Cicero did neither. He continued to defend it with man’s most divine gifts — reason and speech. Even Octavian, the future Emperor Augustus, who sold out Cicero to Mark Antony, could admit in his maturity that Cicero was a learned man, and a lover of his country.
What role, if any, should public intellectuals play in bringing philosophical ideas into broader public debate — and should the classics still play a central role in liberal education today?
Scott Nelson: Philosophical presuppositions are embedded in any debate. Whether the participants in the debate are aware of them or not is another matter. And so whether the public intellectual should explicitly explore philosophical ideas in broader public debate is a secondary question. The public intellectual’s primary goal is to speak the truth. Not all of them do this, of course, and prefer to play the role of partisan for this or that interest. Public intellectual is also a broad category. Anyone who goes beyond their specific area of expertise to discuss general questions of the polity is a public intellectual. So some public intellectuals will speak the truth by stating what’s at stake philosophically in public debate. Some will speak the truth by advocating concrete policy suggestions. Many will do little else than play to the choir and inflame people’s passions.
As for the classics and liberal education, yes, classics should continue to play a central role in liberal education. Liberal education is about knowing those things that make you a free, civilized person. This involves more than singing the praises of free trade and complaining about how the state makes it difficult to open a business. You can live in the most libertarian society and yet still be a plebeian in your mindset. The classics orient us towards eternal questions and put us in touch with a tradition that spans millennia. In societies where the emphasis is so much on the individual, it is salutary to be reminded that there are certain things greater than the individual. The classical tradition is one of them. The classics represent one of the pinnacles of human achievement. Because we are surrounded by mediocrity and the ephemeral, those who are worthy owe it to their ancestors and to themselves to study the classics.
Are there any books you think are particularly good entry points for thinking about liberty and political order today — and what makes them worth reading?
Scott Nelson: Following on the previous question, the classics. Classic works show us a world that is in some ways similar and in some ways different — this contrast helps us put our world into perspective. Delving into the past in general is useful not just for what one can learn, but also because we are generally less passionate about the past than we are about the present. We are thus better positioned to study the past with a sense of equanimity, which can help us more soberly reflect on the present. This sober reflection is essential for synthesizing information and turning it into knowledge, which we obviously need in our decision-making. Otherwise, we just spend our time reacting emotionally to everything around us. Spending time wrestling with classic works that explore the great questions of politics and human existence forces us to wrestle with our own interpretation of the world. Only once you have spent this time wrestling with your own ideas are you in a position to own them and to muster the courage to defend them and act on them despite all opposition.
So, which classic books should one begin with? Any beginning is a good beginning, but since you’ve asked me several questions about Cicero, I would say his On Duties. It outlines the virtues and is Cicero’s attempt to demonstrate that there is effectively no difference between the honourable and the beneficial, and that pursuing the honourable will always turn out to be the most beneficial. On Duties focuses on individual ethics, which is ultimately the only area where all of us are absolutely free — and if you want an introduction to Cicero, his life, and his ideas applied to today, then I would be remiss in my own duty if I neglected to plug our own book here: Cicero, Politics, and the 21st Century. And then for political order, I would recommend Plato’s Republic. Plato is too often written off today as a totalitarian thinker. This is incorrect. Cicero was closer to the mark when he wrote that the regime described in Plato’s Republic was not intended to be realized, but rather to show the nature of the political. Anyone who contemplates politics will find himself confronted with the questions that are raised in Plato’s Republic.
Finally, I end every interview with the same question: How can someone find freedom in an unfree world?
Scott Nelson: Freedom in the first instance is a state of mind. And because we can control our own minds, it’s something that we all have if we choose to exercise it. I’d say that with these interviews you’re already making good use of your freedom.