Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Schofield, Malcolm, Cicero: Political Philosophy. Oxford / New York:: Oxford University Press 2021, xiv + 285 pp.

Schofield, Malcolm, Cicero: Political Philosophy. Oxford / New York:: Oxford University Press... Did Cicero have a political philosophy? Not perhaps in the way that the philosophy of, say, Hobbes or Rawls (both of whom have small but significant walk-on parts in the book under review) might lend itself to relatively neat summary. That in turn, however, reflects something of the special interest of an encounter with Cicero’s writings in this vein, colored as they are by two distinct but related factors: firstly, Cicero’s conviction that philosophy cannot stand in splendid theoretical isolation, but must be informed by the practical realities, constraints even, of tradition and history; secondly, his own role as a senior statesman living out his political life, with wildly varying fortunes, during the period of almost continuous upheaval that marked the late Roman republic, eventually to prove its (and his) death-knell. If there is a common thread in Cicero’s political thinking, it may lie in the attempt to use the resources of philosophy to buttress a certain idea of republicanism. Both the attempt and its failure remain salutary, I think, for a contemporary readership.In this invigorating volume, part of the OUP “Founders of Modern Political and Social Thought” series, Malcolm Schofield offers a wide-ranging survey that gives the distinctive http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie de Gruyter

Schofield, Malcolm, Cicero: Political Philosophy. Oxford / New York:: Oxford University Press 2021, xiv + 285 pp.

Woolf, Raphael
Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie , Volume 105 (2): 3 – Jun 30, 2023
Download PDF
3 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/de-gruyter/schofield-malcolm-cicero-political-philosophy-oxford-new-york-oxford-xEGizGi2SV

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
de Gruyter
Copyright
© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
ISSN
0003-9101
eISSN
1613-0650
DOI
10.1515/agph-2023-0005
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Did Cicero have a political philosophy? Not perhaps in the way that the philosophy of, say, Hobbes or Rawls (both of whom have small but significant walk-on parts in the book under review) might lend itself to relatively neat summary. That in turn, however, reflects something of the special interest of an encounter with Cicero’s writings in this vein, colored as they are by two distinct but related factors: firstly, Cicero’s conviction that philosophy cannot stand in splendid theoretical isolation, but must be informed by the practical realities, constraints even, of tradition and history; secondly, his own role as a senior statesman living out his political life, with wildly varying fortunes, during the period of almost continuous upheaval that marked the late Roman republic, eventually to prove its (and his) death-knell. If there is a common thread in Cicero’s political thinking, it may lie in the attempt to use the resources of philosophy to buttress a certain idea of republicanism. Both the attempt and its failure remain salutary, I think, for a contemporary readership.In this invigorating volume, part of the OUP “Founders of Modern Political and Social Thought” series, Malcolm Schofield offers a wide-ranging survey that gives the distinctive

Journal

Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie – de Gruyter

Published: Jun 30, 2023

There are no references for this article.