The chapter from which the talk is excerpted addresses a concept commonly identified as the core of republican concerns: liberty. In critical response to the recent work of Philip Pettit and the Cambridge school on liberty, I argue for a new understand of republican liberty that better accounts for its representation in Roman thinkers in the context of Roman history and political practice. I am particularly concerned with two issues: the presence and role of the people in Roman thought, which ha…
Read moreThe chapter from which the talk is excerpted addresses a concept commonly identified as the core of republican concerns: liberty. In critical response to the recent work of Philip Pettit and the Cambridge school on liberty, I argue for a new understand of republican liberty that better accounts for its representation in Roman thinkers in the context of Roman history and political practice. I am particularly concerned with two issues: the presence and role of the people in Roman thought, which has received short shrift in recent studies; and the current understanding of what constitutes consensus in republican thought. In the course of handling these two issues, I rethink two common claims: that Roman politics and political thought aim toward the common good attained and articulated through consensus; and second, that the conditions through which consensus is reached confirm the irrelevancy of the Roman political experience for today, either because creation of consensus through public assemblies and the like demanded a high level of civic participation that is not sustainable under the conditions of modernity, or because Roman consensus was a creation of a senatorial elite with little or no investment in popular interests. Participation is a 'bedrock' value of republican thought, but in Roman writing it regularly transcends the strictly ballot-based, reactive role which neo-republicanists tend to assign it.6 Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic politics, Andreas Kalyvas’ 'politics of the extraordinary' and Nadia Urbinati’s work on democratic representation are important interlocutors in my account of republican politics and the interest it holds for us today.