Crisis and Constitutionalism is a remarkable—and remarkably ambitious—book. Benjamin Straumann seeks not only to reconstruct a distinctively Roman tradition of constitutionalism that profoundly shaped medieval and early modern constitutionalism, he also seeks to disprove scholarship such as J.G.A. Pocock’s 1975 Machiavellian Moment, Quentin Skinner’s work on Machiavelli, and Ronald Syme’s 1939 The Roman Revolution. Straumann’s grasp of an extraordinarily wide range of primary sources, ranging from Plato to Adams, along with his close and careful engagement with secondary scholarship from a variety of disciplines, is nothing short of astonishing. Crisis and Constitutionalism is sure to impact subsequent scholarship on constitutionalism, Roman law and political thought, republicanism, and early modern thought.

Straumann makes several broad arguments: that the Romans of the late republic, especially Cicero, had a concept of constitutionalism; that this concept was articulated most prominently in debates over emergency powers; that this understanding of constitutionalism was not found in Greek political thought; and that Roman constitutionalism profoundly influenced medieval and early modern accounts of constitutionalism. The claim that Rome did, indeed, have a constitutional mindset and that Romans understood their politics as being structured by a constitution is controversial, and Straumann acknowledges this in the Introducation. One looks to Benjamin Constant’s 1820 account of Rome in “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns,” or Philip Pettit’s and Quentin Skinner’s more recent accounts of Rome, which prioritize non-domination, or any number of classical scholars, for examples of important work that question the Rome-constitutionalism connection.

Straumann develops a model of constitutionalism entailing four components: “a) entrenchment, i.e. rules that are considered more entrenched…b) political importance, i.e. rules that are of great importance through which political power is exercised; c) normative importance, i.e. rules that betray…underlying political theory…[and] d) the rules in question are assigned a juridical quality” (p. 18). Straumann does not seek to show that there was a constitution, per se, in the 1^st century BCE; focusing instead on “constitutional thought and argument,” he argues that the late republican thinkers “were highly sensitive” to whether various emergency measures were legitimate.

With this model in mind, Straumann surveys a wide range of 2^nd and 1^st century Roman political and legal thought, along with oratory, to show that the Romans did understand pre-political rules to constrain their politics (Part I, Chapter 1)—in fact, there seem to be two rival conceptions, one popular stressing the assemblies’ sovereignty (found in, e.g., Livy and articulated by, e.g., Tiberius Gracchus), and one more senatorial and looking to pre-political principles to limit popular sovereignty. Cicero is the Roman constitutionalist par excellence, given his own efforts to develop a pre-political account of ius (drawing on natural law) and property that limited political action. Crucially, these accounts, popular or senatorial, were articulated in the context of and in response to various forms of emergency legislation in the late republic (Part I, Chapter 2), particularly the frequent use of the dictatorship, the development of the senatus consultum ultimum, and the granting of extraordinary commands. Worries over these emergency acts led an array of figures to debate limits to popular rule (that is, of the comitia), the paramount importance of the provocatio (right of appeal), and the status of private property (Part I, Chapter 3). This backdrop is crucial to understanding Cicero’s thought (Part II, Chapter 4), which is deeply Roman precisely because of its constitutional focus, and which is deeply rooted in its context precisely because Cicero is seeking to develop a normative account of pre-political rules that could mediate debates that shook the late republic. Finally, the Roman emphasis on constitutionalism was distinctively Roman, with neither Plato nor Aristotle developing constitutional theories (Part II, Chapter 5).

The pace picks up in Part III, which traces the reception of Roman constitutional thought in the Principate, medieval, renaissance, and early modern periods. Straumann convincingly shows (Part III, Chapter 6) that Ptolemy of Lucca and Salamonio drew on Roman constitutional theory in developing their accounts of limited government, and argues against Skinner (Part III, Chapter 7) that we should not understand Machiaveli as a Roman republican so much as a neo-Augustinian devotee of a pagan “virtue-oriented tradition” (p. 268). The early modern reception of Roman constitutional theory culminates in Bodin, the “key protagonist in the constitutionalist strand of thought” (p. 278), whose account of sovereignty and its limits was rooted in his reading of Roman legal and institutional history. The Epilogue, which Straumann describes as a “bird’s eye view” (p. 303) of the subsequent development of Rome-inspired constitutionalism from Bodin to the Federalists, touches on figures such as Hobbes, Botero, Nedham, Harrington, Locke, Montesquieu, and Adams. In the Epilogue, Straumann’s powerful critique of Pocock comes through most clearly, in my view, for here we see that various post-Machiavellian republicans were not virtue-focused, but instead rule and constitution focused. Indeed, Straumann suggests that we should simply discard the concept “classical republicanism” (p. 304) altogether, replacing it instead with “constitutional republicanism,” on the one hand, and “a polis-centered concern with virtue and political eudaimonism,” on the other.

Let me now offer a few words of criticism. Those who have read Skinner’s early methodological work, for instance, might quibble with Straumann’s use of the term “proto” to describe various arguments and positions—“proto-Hegelian” (p. 149), “proto-Hobbesian” (p. 160), and “proto-Lockean” (p. 185). I found myself unpersuaded by Straumann’s reading of Machiavelli: I think he is more than right to hone in on the virtue and grandezza-centric dimension of the Discourses, but it struck me that he did so at the expense of the institutional dimensions of the Discourses and of the possible priority of liberty as a normative principle in Machiavelli’s thought. I would like to have seen Straumann discuss Augustus’ new order at greater length, as his analysis of Roman constitutionalism would shed much light on debates among historians and classicists about Augustus’ use of republican legal forms and institutions—a use that would be an interesting test of Straumann’s argument. Finally, though Straumann is careful to avoid making an empirical claim about the existence of a constitutionally structured Roman republic, focusing instead on Roman thought, his argument begs the question: Was the Roman republic ever a constitutionally ordered polity? If Roman constitutionalism was, in a sense, always implicit, becoming explicit (like the owl of Minerva) only with the decline of the republic in the 1^st century BCE, what gave rise to this decline? Do the crises figures such as Cicero grapple with precipitate the decline of the republic, or are the crises themselves symptoms of Rome’s decline?

No book can do everything, even one as ambitious in scope and argument as this one. To conclude, while Crisis and Constitutionalism joins a number of recent books on Roman political thought—e.g. Dean Hammer’s 2014 Roman Political Thought, Joy Connolly’s 2014 The Life of Roman Republicanism, Jonathan Zarecki’s 2014 Cicero’s Ideal Statesman in Theory and Practice, Jed Atkins’ 2013 Cicero on Politics and the Limits of Reason, and my own 2011 Republicanism, Rhetoric and Roman Political Thought—it does not simply add to this recent renaissance. Instead, it fulfills it: It shows that the Romans were decidedly different from the Greeks, that this difference gives normative weight to the Romans, and that the Romans should be of far greater interest to political theorists than they have been for the last 100 years of largely Greek focused scholarship.