Introduction: Why Greeks and Romans? Why Ideas?

This book seeks to present an intellectual history of one of the most important contributions of Greco‐Roman antiquity to the Western tradition: political thought, traced by way of the concept of justice. Athens, Sparta, and Rome and the political ideas they engendered have exercised a crucial impact on Western history, both in the realm of political thought and in the realm of events and institutions. This book traces the history of ancient political thought by focusing on one of its most important and fundamental legacies, the idea of justice. Classical political thought formulated viewpoints and arguments that have influenced our own, often implicit, assumptions about justice. Beyond the direct influence, classical political thought offers an immense, unrivaled reservoir of arguments and critical reflection, a more or less original and at times strange vantage point from which to examine our current assumptions and prejudices. What we call “classical political thought,” however, is by no means a unified body of thought – quite to the contrary, it is a debate, an ongoing argument, and at times a cacophony of very diverse and oftentimes contradictory voices, particularly when it comes to the idea of justice.

In the chapters following this introduction, we will discuss, in the first two parts, Greek and Roman theories of justice in their historical context, from some of the pre‐Socratics to the later Roman Empire. The third part of the book will attempt to sketch the respective contributions of the Greek and Roman traditions of thinking about justice to early modern and Enlightenment political thought. There has been a tendency to overstate the influence of Greek, vis‐à‐vis Roman, political thought ever since democracy increasingly dropped its pejorative connotations from the nineteenth century onward, thus obscuring from our view the distinct contributions of Roman political thought. Roman conceptions of justice shall thus be rehabilitated in their significance and assigned their proper weight. Especially with regard to the idea of justice expressed as a system of rights – and potentially existing in tension with democracy – the emphasis on Athens and Greek political thought will have to yield to a more extensive treatment of the Roman tradition of justice. Thus, Cicero, Roman law, and Roman political thought and their concern with entrenched legal safeguards and property rights will be given the prominence they deserve. For the later reception of this tradition, the early modern tradition of natural law – Vitoria, Gentili, Grotius, Hobbes, Pufendorf, Locke – will be particularly salient given the important contributions these writers made to our modern, rights‐based conception of justice and the fact that they all drew on Roman political and legal thought.

The Gradual Encroachment of Ideas

But first, let us ask, by way of introduction, why should we bother with historical ideas about politics at all, with the arguments, beliefs, and theories put forward by people in the past? Why not just focus on what people actually did, rather than on what they thought? Moreover, why should we bother with Greek and Roman ideas about politics and the state?

Ideas can be important in two ways. First, they might be interesting in and of themselves, quite apart from the causal effect they have had in the historical process. Second, they might simply be interesting insofar as they contributed to history, insofar, one might say, as they were successful, had an impact, and made themselves felt. Both answers, to different degrees, commit us to the importance of ideas. If we were convinced, by contrast, that ideas only ever serve to veil aggression and self‐interest, or amount to mere rationalizations after the fact, there would be far less reason to take ideas seriously. One might then focus on what lies behind the ideas as the really important subject matter – economic processes, say, or power politics, or energy capture.

The present book takes ideas and arguments, understood broadly as that which is built out of concepts, to matter in both of the ways just outlined. Whether or not ideas ever actually play a causal role in the historical process, independent from brute material forces, is an empirical question that I think can plausibly be answered in the affirmative. This book is not, of course, designed to give such an answer; rather, it assumes its plausibility while adding, here and there, modestly to the material required to give a fuller answer.

Ideas that are of intrinsic interest for us matter for the simple reason that they intrigue and engross us, often because they promise to be of help in answering and solving problems and questions of our own. It might of course also be the case that it is the very strangeness of certain ideas that makes them interesting to us. The history of political thought allows us to break out of the chance sliver in time and place we happen to inhabit and to free ourselves of those ideas and institutions that we simply happen to have inherited. By showing the contingency of many of our assumptions, the argument goes, history allows us to assume a standpoint independent from them. This is a convincing claim – but, as we shall see, it may not carry us quite as far as its proponents usually assume.

Some political ideas and theories have had great historical influence, an influence by no means restricted to the domain of ideas and theories but extending to the realm of what human beings have done or what they have suffered – extending, that is, to the realm of political, social, and economic history. Think of Marxism and its impact on world history; it would be impossible to explain most of the political history of the twentieth century without making mention of Marxism, and it would be, at the very least, difficult to discuss the political system of present‐day China without any reference to the Chinese reception of Marxist ideas. Incidentally, this example also points to the difficulty with philosophies of history that assign material forces pride of place, as Marxism itself does: if historical materialism, as postulated by Marxism, were true, Marxism – a system of ideas, after all – should not have had the extraordinary historical impact in pre‐industrialized parts of the world such as Russia or China.

One way of stating the difference is that historical influence operates on the level of causes and the intrinsic interest of ideas on the level of reasons. However, the two should not be neatly separated, for the simple reason that an understanding of ideas and political theories is very often a necessary condition for explaining what people in the past have done – understanding ideas (reasons) is necessary to explain actions (causes). Insofar as humans have been historically motivated by ideas, arguments, and theories, their actions can only be understood and described if the ideas and theories they held are known to us. This can be shown by way of a few trivial examples. A man shows a booklet to a woman sitting at a counter – this may better and more accurately be described as the attempt of the man to enter the United States by showing a valid passport. This more accurate description requires that we know that people in a particular time and place held views pertaining to passports and borders and their importance. Someone scribbling something on a piece of paper can neither be understood nor correctly described if we do not know the ideas and intentions of this person, e.g., the intention to sign a contract of sale in order to acquire title to a piece of land. Examples like these are legion. We may conclude that studying the historical impact of ideas presupposes knowledge of these ideas.

Even if we grant that ideas and concepts are necessary to understand history, do ideas and concepts ever really amount to more than mere propaganda or rationalization? Do they ever really motivate historical actors? And even if we grant that an idea such as, e.g., the divine right of kings did in fact motivate some historical actors, we might still think of it as mere propaganda that was believed by those who stood to gain from it and had thus pragmatic reasons to believe it. But are there really any ideas that are of intrinsic interest, deserving to be scrutinized in their own right, even beyond their role in motivating historical actors in pragmatic ways?

Many historians are skeptical of the independent weight of ideas, both in the sense of having an impact on historical actors and even more so in the sense of having intrinsic interest. These skeptics prefer to think of intellectual history as the history of ideology, or what the classicist Ian Morris has dubbed “a pack of lies from which someone benefits.”1 That there is plenty of ideology in this sense in history cannot be in doubt. But note that for a “pack of lies” to be able to benefit someone, it has to be believed by someone else – the idea of ideology implies, rather than debunks, the impact of ideas in the historical process. It does not, however, imply that ideas are ever intrinsically interesting. To find that out, we need to know whether all ideas are of this ideological character.

To illustrate, we may look to the way the historian J.G.A. Pocock has described his approach to the history of ideas. Pocock writes that ideas in the history of political thought should be treated “strictly as historical phenomena and—since history is about things...