The revival of interest in Roman political thought has been one of the most conspicuous developments in political theory and intellectual history over the past two decades. Scholars such as Philip Pettit and Quentin Skinner have returned to ancient Rome, as Dean Hammer observes in this volume, to “develop a social ideal that is anticollectivist, anti-atomistic, and antimajoritarian” (p. 207). This reflects a broad shift from ideal theory to an antifoundational mode of political theorizing that acknowledges the messiness and historicity of public life. Historians of political thought, meanwhile, now find themselves in greater intellectual and affective sympathy for those whom they study, who frequently understood and probed contemporary moral and political problems through the lens of Roman history and philosophy.

If, as Hammer observes, in Skinner’s genealogical account of neo-Roman republican theory Cicero is “largely indistinguishable from Sallust, Livy, Seneca, and the Digest” (p. 207), a plethora of monographs and edited collections have recently been published that draw attention to the distinctive characteristics of Cicero’s philosophy. This conviction that Cicero has something uniquely valuable to say has considerable historical pedigree, as the cases of Augustine and Jerome no less than Locke and Hume illustrate. Their judgments stand in marked contrast to later nineteenth-century commentators—such as Theodore Mommsen—who disparaged Cicero’s works as entirely derivative of his Greek predecessors, who truly merited the title of philosophers.

This volume helps to explain why Cicero’s philosophy so appealed to premodern commentators. It focuses squarely on “the Ciceronian tradition in political theory,” which has so far escaped concerted interrogation (p. 6). The chapters discuss figures who, the editors claim, were “central” to the development of this tradition from the early Christian era into the Enlightenment: Augustine, John of Salisbury, More, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hobbes, Locke, Adam Smith, and Burke. The essays are of a uniformly high quality: beautifully written and accessible to the nonspecialist.

What, then, sets the “Ciceronian tradition” apart from other traditions? In his essay on Hobbes as a key figure in “the anti-Ciceronian tradition,” Daniel J. Kapust provides a handy summary: Cicero maintained “the fact of human sociability, a fact with normative import; the origins of human virtues in sociability; the key role of intersubjectivity in the formation of the human personality and the development of the virtues; [and] the non-contractual foundations of human society” (p. 120). The contributions to the volume show how these insights were recognized and developed by various philosophers working in different historical contexts.

Cary J. Nederman’s beautifully wrought piece shows how John of Salisbury explicitly identified himself with Cicero’s ideas. John emphasized humankind’s natural inclination to society and fellowship, generating a collective responsibility to cultivate our rational and linguistic capacities—even as grace must then supplement our (and nature’s) efforts. Gary Remer interprets More’s Utopia as placing the Ciceronian tradition in dialogue with its Platonic alternative. Ciceronian rhetoric is guided by considerations of “practical morality”: the orator (a perfect statesman and republican citizen) must adhere to the rules of decorum, and thereby “accommodate his positions to and compromise them for his audience” (p. 61). More (the character) encourages Hythloday to recognize the illegitimacy of “relying on reason independent of community values as the standard of truth and morality in policy matters” (p. 56). Cicero’s emphasis on humankind’s natural desire for fellowship, and the “normalisation of social harmony” (p. 97), to which it gives rise, was rejected root and branch by Machiavelli, as Michelle T. Clarke argues. For Machiavelli, nature has “nothing to say” (p. 93) about what people owe to one another, and the contingently useful (utile) cannot be reconciled with the immutable demands of morality and justice (honestum) through an appeal to the imperatives of societas, as Cicero maintained. Emily C. Nacol’s essay on Locke identifies the Ciceronian “echoes” of his theory of property, which “depends heavily on a prior understanding of humans as sociable creatures with duties to one another” (p. 141) and means that “economic questions about property and wealth are always moral ones” (p. 145). Cicero’s emphasis on intersubjectivity and decorum, Michelle A. Schwarze argues, was developed by Adam Smith to address a problem that Cicero had himself identified: the tendency of the emotions of anger and resentment to disturb social relations. Smith’s “spectatorial” theory of morals recast resentment in a more positive light: if the socialized individual’s resentment is informed (and disciplined) by the impartial spectator, it acquires a more objective character, reliably alerting us to instances of societal injustice and motivating us to seek redress.

As the volume proceeds chronologically, its genealogical objectives sit increasingly uneasily alongside its normative commitments. The earlier essays on Augustine and John reconstruct these historical figures’ own distinctive interpretations of Cicero based on explicit references to the ancient philosopher in their works. This allows for the possibility that they interpreted Cicero in ways that appear odd, even eccentric, to us. For example, Brandon Turner shows that Augustine, like many others, foregrounded Cicero’s conception of justice as the queen of the virtues and developed his insight that perfect justice is elusive in earthly communities. Yet, this Cicero was reconciled to Augustine’s “two cities” cosmology and, read as a “proto-Christian” (p. 20), made to countenance religious intolerance in the name of justice, which “means directing citizens toward the true law, which is determined only by God” (p. 28). Augustine’s attitude toward the heathen Cicero was nonetheless characterized by ambivalence, traces of which remain in Montaigne, as Eric MacPhail illustrates. Montaigne was perturbed, like Augustine, by Cicero’s occasional willingness to countenance the love of praise and earthly glory as a motive to seemingly moral (and socially beneficial) conduct, thereby disclosing “the atheist potential of Ciceronian ethics” (p. 109). Given Cicero’s equivocal position on vanity and self-love, Montaigne raised the question, How robust could a Ciceronian response be to “the rampant Machiavellianism of his era” (p. 112) or, we might ask, to the Hobbism of a later period?

However, the ambivalence toward Cicero that characterizes his earlier reception appears to drop out of the picture from the seventeenth century—or so this volume implies. Kapust presents Hobbes as unequivocally critical of Cicero. But in drawing this contrast so sharply, Cicero and Hobbes are dissolved into Ciceronianism and Hobbism. If “the Ciceronian tradition” is, as Kapust maintains, held to assert “the non-contractual foundations of human society,” (p. 120) then it is difficult to understand why the great “modern” natural-law theorists—notably Grotius and Pufendorf, both conspicuously absent from this volume—identified their theories so closely with Cicero’s philosophy. Meanwhile, Hobbes’s most explicit critical engagements were with Aristotle, whereas Cicero usually appears in company (“Aristotle, Plato, Cicero [and] Seneca”). Where is the evidence that Hobbes identified Cicero’s political philosophy as distinctive or articulated his theory as a critique of “the Ciceronian tradition”—rather than the Aristotelian or the broader Roman republican tradition?

Nacol’s and Schwarze’s arguments are similarly based on “resonances rather than references” (p. 141) to Cicero in the writings of Locke and Smith, the putative “Ciceronianism” of whose philosophy is detected only in those aspects of their theories that are palatable to contemporary political theorists. But it is arguable that Locke’s justification of economic inequality and the violent expropriation of aboriginal land, and Smith’s troubling emphasis on civility and social conformity, are of a similarly “Ciceronian” hue. Daniel I. O’Neill’s chapter is unusual in drawing attention to less savory aspects of Cicero’s legacy. O’Neill argues that Burke’s invocation of Cicero in his prosecution of Warren Hastings repurposed Cicero’s apology for empire. Burke claimed that in the British case, imperium and libertas were in harmony; indeed, he saw imperial expansion as motivated by considerations of justice and humanity rather than greed and cruelty, just as Cicero had believed was true of Rome’s empire. O’Neill questions both accounts.

Numerous other volumes dedicated to Cicero’s legacy are on the production line, and this volume can act as a template for how classical scholars, intellectual historians, and political theorists can be brought into fruitful dialogue. Its essays are, without exception, stimulating and provocative, and they deserve a wide and engaged readership.