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Cicero’s political philosophy — I — A truly Socratic philosopher
I write a lot. And I read a lot more. The two go together, and my experience is that they should be practiced at the very least in the proportion of 1 to 10. 1 to 100 would be preferable, but I don’t have that much time or patience.
Once in a while, a book crosses my iPad and makes an indelible mark on my way of thinking. One such book that I have finished recently is Walter Nicgorski’s Cicero’s Skepticism and His Recovery of Political Philosophy, published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2016. I don’t know Nicgorski personally, but I owe him a big intellectual debt. He is a classically-trained political theorist in the Department of Political Science at Notre Dame University, and is primary interests are the political thought of Cicero, that of the American founding fathers, democratic theory, and the theory and practice of moral and liberal education.
The series of posts of which the present one marks the beginning will explore the major ideas of Nicgorski’s book on Cicero’s political philosophy, and you may reasonably wonder why. Nicgorski himself lays out the case in the Introduction to his volume.
To begin with, Marcus Tullius Cicero, born in 106 BCE and murdered in 43 BCE, is in many ways a philosopher for the post-modern era. This surely may come to you as a rather surprising…
