The words “orator” and “Ciceronian” may strike some readers as archaic, but the basic problem at the root of Gary Remer’s very fine new book could not be more familiar or more central to contemporary politics: Can effective politicians be moral? Can they respect the kind of principles that you and I apply to our own behavior? Or do the demands of political life, the needs of the community, and the dilemmas of leadership make ordinary morality impossible or unreasonable for them? Do our leaders dirty their hands so that the rest of us can live free of life’s ugly necessities? Or is that line of thought just their excuse for bad behavior?

Cicero, the famous defender of the Roman Republic in its last days, was a politician of a sort recognizable to us today. We have many of his speeches, and while they are impressive, they are also full of the high self-regard, manipulation, slandering, and pandering that we know from today’s news. Even more revealing are Cicero’s private letters, which show that fragile egos, a propensity for self-deception, and a bracing moral “flexibility” were as present in the ancient Roman Senate as they are in Washington. Still, after the shock of discovering that “the ancients” were flesh and blood, a reader wading through these materials can discover in Cicero’s political life a kind of integrity. The senator and consul does seem to have cared deeply about the idea of a republic and he made sacrifices for it. In his more philosophic writings, mostly penned during periods of enforced exile from Rome, Cicero elaborated the Roman view that moral duties arose from the roles that one falls into and the political offices that one chooses to occupy. In a long public letter to his son that became central to liberal education in the Renaissance and afterwards (De officiis), he insisted that a practical man could find ways of pursuing both what was morally right (honestum) and what was practically useful (utile).

Machiavelli tossed aside this fatherly advice and told young princes to focus on the utile. One common story about the history of political thought follows Machiavelli’s advice as it was systematized and tamed into utilitarianism, the dominant approach to politics and economics today. In that story, Machiavelli plays the modern realist to Cicero’s ancient idealism. Ethics and the Orator aims to modify this account. Cicero’s view is, in fact, more realistic than Machiavelli’s, Remer suggests, because it is simply not in our nature to leave morality out of our thinking about politics (pp. 107–8). Moreover, Remer argues, Cicero’s approach shows how it is possible to adapt to the demands of particular situations in politics without throwing morals to the side altogether. The great benefit of Cicero’s “rhetorical” approach to politics, on Remer’s account, is that it demonstrates how thinking about morals can be an integral part of the very practical, context-dependent adjustments that politicians have to make to be effective.

After an engaging introduction situating the book with respect to recent efforts to revive rhetoric in political theory and recent scholarship on Cicero, Remer offers two chapters elaborating the idea of decorum as a moral duty and defending a theory of “role morality” that can be spun out from Cicero’s talk of the duties that stem from the various personae that we adopt in life. The middle two chapters argue that Cicero’s influence on early modernity has been eclipsed by an overemphasis on Machiavelli and Tacitus. Lipsius, for example, is shown to have relied more than is usually acknowledged on Cicero for his account of “mixed prudence” in Politica IV.13. Chapter 5 draws an interesting link between rhetoric and representation, showing how the ethical dilemmas that a Ciceronian orator faces are very similar to the dilemmas of our elected representatives, such as the question of whether to act as a trustee or a delegate. This allows Remer to diminish the importance of the ancient–modern divide and to portray Edmund Burke, the Federalists, and J. S. Mill as Ciceronians of a sort. The final substantive chapter cements the case for Cicero’s realism by contrasting his ethics for orators with the less practical and less reasonable demands of the deliberative-democratic theory that has been influential since the 1990s.

At the heart of the book is an appreciation for the moral aspect of the context-dependent prudence that Cicero described. Like many politicians today, Cicero spent much of his time trying to gain support for himself and his preferred policies by speaking to groups of fellow citizens in settings both formal and informal. This ordinary activity of persuasion requires a speaker who wants to be effective to take careful note of the particular concerns and mood of his audience, the practical possibilities of the moment, and the deeper traditions and norms in which he is working. An orator must meet his audience where he finds them, and if he strays too far from their sense of what is appropriate—if he lacks a sense of decorum—he will lose them. This rhetorical adjustment to the audience offers a model for the more general attunement to circumstance that characterizes Cicero’s approach to politics.

The key philosophic point that Remer makes is this one: The demand to work within the confines of an audience’s opinions should be understood not merely as advice to orators about what will make them most effective but as a moral duty. A number of the theorists who have sought to rehabilitate the Aristotelian rhetorical tradition for consideration today have downplayed the moral aspect of persuasion and focused on its technical artistic dimensions (Eugene Garver, Aristotle’s Rhetoric: An Art of Character [1994]; Bryan Garsten, Saving Persuasion [2006]). Remer points out that this position fails to provide any strong moral guidance for, or constraints on, orators. He prefers Cicero to Aristotle because Cicero elevates the demand to work within the confines of decorum into a moral requirement, thus bringing ethics into the heart of rhetoric. Moreover, Remer remarks that this sort of moral requirement is especially appropriate for politicians, who have a duty to work on behalf of popular opinion and within the general sense of the community (sensus communis).

Remer cites Michael Walzer throughout the book, especially in the introduction and conclusion, and it is clear that he shares Walzer’s sympathetic understanding of our necessary embeddedness within particular communities (Walzer, Spheres of Justice [1984], Interpretation and Social Criticism [1987], The Company of Critics [1988]). Thus, when he makes the case for preferring Cicero to Machiavelli as a model of rhetorical politics (against Victoria Kahn (Rhetoric, Prudence and Skepticism in the Renaissance [1985], Machiavellian Rhetoric [1994]) he remarks, interestingly, that Machiavelli “offers us a rootless theory” (p. 106). By this he means that Machiavelli, in proposing a theory so shocking to the sensibilities of his time and place, declined to use the resources that could be found in “the deeply rooted values of his society” (p. 106), instead introducing an understanding of glory unsuited to his context. Cicero’s moral and practical superiority to Machiavelli is said to consist in his being more respectful of the reigning assumptions of his time, and in his advising us to do the same.

Machiavelli was indeed offensive to the reigning modes and orders, and he told his readers why: he thought the sensus communis of his time and place—shaped by “our present religion” (Christianity)—was corrupt (Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy). Machiavelli’s sense of his own predicament raises questions that Remer’s book never quite answers: Do orators have a moral duty to defer to the sense of the community even when it is corrupt? What sort of rhetoric is appropriate for moments when the reigning laws or culture need to be disrupted? In a corrupt time, would an ethical orator’s sense of decorum tie him to the deck of a sinking ship?

Remer’s analysis is subtle and thoughtful. He sees the problem and points to Cicero’s invocation of ancient traditions outside current corruption, and to the American Founders’ hope for a deliberative process that would “refine and enlarge” public opinion, as possible responses. Neither of those replies seems quite reassuring enough today. If it is true that morality for politicians is best understood as a sense of decorum informed by society’s reigning mores, we may be wrong to expect too much of our political leaders. It may be that not even the most ethical of orators could save us from the corruption of our times.