Joy Connolly’s The Life of Roman Republicanism aims to recover the “suppressed history of republican thought” (pp. 203, 204, 206) and demonstrate how it can help us to “think through the challenges of citizenship in a liberal democracy, and especially the tragically pressing predicaments of poverty, exclusion, and apathy” (p. 15). According to Connolly, republicanism is an “interrogative ethos” (p. 208) that withstands the allure of thinking about the human condition in terms of stable centers, figuring it instead as everywhere marked by multiplicity, mutability, contradiction, disruption, and inconclusiveness. Connolly defends this argument by calling upon evidence drawn mainly from the work of Cicero, Sallust, and Horace—an unconventional array of sources that marginalizes several writers commonly associated with Roman republicanism while emphasizing others who are not generally thought to have participated in the republican tradition at all. This reorganization of the republican canon marks a second aim of Connolly’s book, which is to argue that “Cicero’s Verrines, Caesarian orations, Republic, and Laws; Sallust’s Catiline and Jugurtha; and Horace’s Satires” stand “at the center of the republican tradition” (p. 1).

Connolly’s impulses here are worthwhile, particularly her sense that Roman political thought has more to offer to contemporary audiences than what has been captured by neo-republicans like Philip Pettit. Moreover, her success in generating excitement around the potential of Roman political thought is sure to have a lasting impact on scholarship in this field. But The Life of Roman Republicanism is also likely to leave its own readers disappointed, in part because it offers only a preliminary case for its proposed re-readings of individual texts and in part because it rests on a muddy justification for recognizing these texts as central to republicanism.

Connolly offers us a glimpse of this peculiar mix of strength and weakness in her claim that republicanism has been a victim of “suppression.” While Connolly is undoubtedly right to hold that much recent scholarship on Roman political thought has been selective and that neo-republicans in particular are guilty of distorting Roman sources in such a way as to accommodate liberal sensibilities, her further claim—that republicanism has been a victim of systemic biases in political theory—is significantly less tenable, relying as it does on questionable generalizations about the field. According to Connolly, “most classical and contemporary approaches to politics” have at their “core” a “commitment to the concept of sovereignty” and “the tendency … to treat human beings as rational calculators or creatures of practical reason (p. 203), and such assumptions have “hobble[d]” our ability to discern the unique insights that Roman republicanism has to offer (p. 205). But postmodernism, the strain of political theory that Connolly elsewhere identifies as having the most “common ground” (p. xv) with Roman republicanism, has been a dominant force in contemporary political theory for decades now, making it difficult to see how it has been prevented from engaging with Roman sources.

A more likely explanation for the freshness of Connolly’s book lies in her own scholarly strengths, most notably her openness to unconventional, but potentially constructive, textual combinations. Not everyone would read Cicero’s Republic and hear echoes of Michael Fried’s objections to minimalist art (pp. 23–6), liberal hegemony or not. Indeed, The Life of Roman Republicanism reaches confidently beyond the boundaries of political theory and classical studies at every turn, giving the book an uncommon and welcome vivacity.

Still, one would like to have seen more of this energy spent defending its key interpretive claims. For example, Connolly argues in Chapter 1 that Cicero’s Republic articulates an essentially antagonistic and contestatory vision of Roman political history and, further, that we should infer from this evidence that “[t]he legitimacy, indeed the inevitability of resistance is … built into Cicero’s understanding of republican authority and order” (p. 171). But the book only briefly compares the Republic with other retellings of Roman history with a view to isolating its distinctive features (p. 39). Moreover, Cicero’s references to political conflict in the Republic are situated in a broader teleological narrative that weighs heavily against the idea that Cicero is friendly to antagonism as such: according to Scipio, the crucial feature of a republican constitution is not “resistibility” but equity (2.57, 2.62) and justice (2.46, 2.69–70) and he approves of specific instances of political conflict in Rome only insofar as he believes they were instrumental to achieving these goals. Indeed, Scipio expressly condemns “resistance” when it is not directed at these goals (e.g. 2.60) and presumably views all popular contestation that followed Rome’s achievement of a balanced constitution in the early Republic as similarly illegitimate. Finally, we cannot ignore the fact the Republic is a dialogue and these judgments about Roman history belong to Scipio, who may or may not serve as a reliable guide to Cicero’s own views.

Whether or not Connolly is right to characterize Cicero as “a thinker concerned with collective antagonists and competing interests” (p. 20), she is surely correct to identify him as a leading figure of the republican political tradition. But it is surprisingly difficult to grasp the criteria according to which she does so, or indeed how she determines the boundaries of the republican political tradition to which he is said to belong. This is a problem because it leaves Connolly’s readers unable to assess her various descriptions of the republican political tradition, including her claim that particular texts by Cicero, Sallust, and Horace stand at its “center.”

One criterion we could use to determine if we are dealing with an example of republican political theory is the author’s own testimony. That is, we might look for textual evidence suggesting that a writer intended to address the subject of republican politics—ideally, explicit references to things called “republics.” This approach would lead us quickly to Cicero but not to Horace, who nowhere mentions or alludes to republican politics. It may be that Connolly’s discussion of authorial intention early in the book is meant to address this problem (pp. 1–3). According to Connolly, what interests her about the texts under consideration is not what their authors intended them to say, but whether or not they can be said to offer a response to certain “contemporary questions” (p. 19). But the two questions that Connolly identifies as having some answer in the work of Cicero, Sallust, and Horace—“the extent of individual participation required from citizens of modern democracies” and “the relationship between poverty and political apathy” (p. 19)—are not self-evidently republican questions. In any case, this approach would require that Connolly endorse some preconception about republicanism, a move that would make it difficult (although not impossible) for her then to argue that Cicero, Sallust, and Horace challenge our preconceptions about the republican political tradition. Still, this appears to be Connolly’s preferred approach: Horace’s republican credentials, for example, are ultimately his interest in freedom and virtue (pp. 121–5), two themes that Connolly elsewhere suggests we should associate with an entirely different “strand of republican filiation” than what she will address in this book (pp. 17–18; see also her more general dissatisfaction with treatments of Roman republicanism that focus on “concepts” and “values” on p. 205).

The bigger question, however, is why Connolly feels it necessary to frame her project as a contribution to the history of republican thought at all. Reading The Life of Roman Republicanism, one senses that Connolly is less excited about how these texts stand in relation to something called “republicanism” than how they incorporate and respond to features of a political climate remarkably similar to our own. Facing “highly unstable conditions … under which a culture of rational deliberation was difficult if not impossible to sustain or even imagine,” Connolly explains, Roman writers produced texts “linked by concern for how men in such conditions come to know the world, how they make judgments about it, and how they communicate knowledge and judgments to others” (p. 204). Rather than mire herself in a debate about what republicanism “really was,” Connolly might have built her book more solidly around this insight, for which her chapters provide more and better evidence. What it might have permitted her to argue is that Roman political thought has value beyond its contributions to the republican political tradition: Indeed, it may be most relevant to contemporary audiences when processing the trauma of Roman republicanism’s final collapse. If Connolly is right to hold that ours is a time of “crisis” (p. xiii) in which “public order” has replaced meaningful political participation as the preeminent value in American political life (p. x) and democracy has become nothing more than a façade whereby elite power acquires the veneer of popular approval (p. xii), Life After Roman Republicanism would appear to be the book we really need.