The ancient Greeks and Romans had a particular way of understanding the relationship between the political and the ethical, which illustrates the larger educational significance of studying classical political thought with attention to its particularity. Ancient Greeks and Romans maintained that political institutions and practices ought to provide an education to virtue. In itself this belief is not distinctive, since virtually all societies have sought to develop functional excellences of character, that is, virtues that are relative to, and instrumentally useful for achieving, particular goals of specific cultures. By contrast with later Christian or commercial virtues, however, the ancient Greeks and Romans emphasized the political virtues and the deliberative prudence of active, self-governing citizens. By contrast with many others, including the ‘‘moderns’’ of Europe and North America, they also laid particular stress on human excellence or nobility, as opposed to the gentler or more peaceful virtues of tolerance, decency, and civility. And, finally, rather than adopting a strictly functional or instrumental conception of virtue, they typically envisioned virtue as an excellence of character whose active exercise was intrinsically good for the virtuous agent.
For the sake of comparison and contrast, it will help to sketch certain later, and perhaps equally distinctive, conceptions of virtue and its relation to political life. By contrast with the fundamentally civic concerns of most ancient polytheists, Christian thinkers, for example, always granted primacy to charity and humility as the chief virtues enabling human beings to fulfill their natural human vocations. The Christian virtues provided a way for the dutiful and observant to win their ultimate reward in the afterlife, that is, a proper place in the heavenly city. As Todd Breyfogle shows (chapter 32), Augustine adapted the polytheistic civic models to a new metaphysical narrative in which our sojourn on earth, even if virtuous or humanly excellent, could only ever have an educative function orienting us to the more important concerns of another type of ‘‘city.’’ In Eric Brown’s view (chapter 31), this late antique and medieval norm was developed out of a much earlier countercultural stance: already in the fourth century bc, Plato’s Socrates had begun to develop private, nonpolitical virtues as an act of political criticism and defiance. Adapting the earlier Socratic model, the Christian virtues constituted an explicit rejection of the polytheists’ way of relating the ethical to the political.
When we turn to the early modern founders of liberalism, the situation is of course entirely different. Despite recent liberal aspirations to separate politics and ‘‘morality’’ (e. g. Rawls 1971), the classical liberals, such as Hobbes, Locke, Kant, and Mill, did not shy away from using political authority to help educate citizens to function virtuously in diverse spheres such as commerce and civic life (Berkowitz 2000). In his Report to the Board of Trade (1697), for example, John Locke recommended, like many others of his day, the use of work-houses, child labor, and whippings for beggars, in order to cure the poor of their indolence and to promote industry and self-discipline (Tully 1993: 234-41). In the eighteenth century, as J. G. A. Pocock has shown, a newly ‘‘commercial humanism’’ redefined the ancient, austere, and predominantly civic virtues with the aid of the novel concept of ‘‘manners,’’ so as to produce a more peaceful and socially diverse expression of the citizen’s proper and virtuous functioning (Pocock 1985: ch. 2; cf. Rahe 1992). More recently, in their political practices and practical ideologies, contemporary nation-states have also used political authority to show disapproval of, and even to outlaw, behaviors which were seen to be immoral or intolerable, such as sodomy, bigamy, or blasphemy. Neoconservatives in the United States see a state role for enforcing ‘‘family values’’ and patriotic virtues (Berns 2001; cf. Nussbaum and Cohen 2002), while ‘‘communitarians’’ and liberals alike have argued for the social and political benefits of cultivating virtues of character (Bellah et al. 1985; Dagger 1997). The foregoing examples represent merely a few of the diverse functions to which virtue has been put in modern European and North American theory and practice. Obviously, the horizon of this discussion could be vastly extended if we should turn to the history of Asian or Middle Eastern practices of virtue.
Against this necessarily schematic outline, we can come to understand the highly particular role played by conceptions of ethical and intellectual excellence in classical political thought. In their political theories and ideologies, the ancient Greeks and
Romans emphasized the specifically civic virtues of character such as justice, loyalty to the community, piety, civic friendship, self-control, and courage. Even more importantly, they emphasized civic prudence - that is, the citizens’ capacity to deliberate effectively on the city’s momentous concerns, such as war and peace, awards of citizenship, the maintenance of sacred land, and the use of collective material resources for public building-projects and festivals. Ancient political thought thereby asserted the importance of the citizens’ intellectual faculties - not, of course, their philosophical capacities, but rather the ordinary prudence that enabled citizens to recognize and pursue their own self-interests as members of small-scale political communities. This constitution of the ancient citizen as an active deliberator points to a more actively and robustly civic conception of virtue than those found in the patristic literature, or again in the teachings of early modern liberals such as Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke, or, finally, in the particular brand of contemporary liberalism associated with figures such as John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and Judith Shklar.
As a counterpart to their concern with virtue, the ancients also meticulously explored the vices that corrupt political life, such as cowardice, greed, dishonesty, self-indulgence, and lack of discretion. In virtually every case, ancient Greek and Roman thinkers and citizens used the language of vice to criticize members of the body politic who failed to make an adequate contribution to civic vibrancy and health. In the distinctive Greek and Roman political environment, the modern commercial virtues would have appeared narrowly self-interested and calculating. They would have been ranged among the vices, above all as greed (pleonexia or avaritia) or self-indulgence ( akolasia), but more generally as selfishness that diverted a citizen’s attention from the common good. In the mostly small, mostly egalitarian political communities of the Greek and Roman world, the civic orientation of the citizenry was central to the ancient city’s material prosperity, military security, and general well-being.3
Political thinkers and citizens of classical antiquity in general viewed their political lives from within the framework of virtue and vice. As we discover in the essays of Malcolm Schofield, Charles Hedrick, and Philip Stadter, along with the contributors to part III (‘‘The Virtues and Vices of One-Man Rule’’), Aristotle and his philosophical forbears did not originate this emphasis on the interconnections between politics and civic virtue. It wasn’t only in the philosophers’ imaginary utopias that political thinkers envisioned political power as capable of helping citizens achieve a good life through educating them to justice, civic friendship, and prudence. Rather, from its earliest appearances onward, Greek and Roman political reflection emphasized the character development of citizens as the key ingredient in both individual and civic flourishing. This is as obvious from reading the Roman historian Livy as it is from reading Homer, Herodotus, and the Athenian orators. Contrary to a frequently expressed view, the ancient philosophers did not construct utopian cities of virtue and reason in a vacuum; rather, they developed preexisting lines of thought and intervened in contemporary debates.
The ancients’ concern with citizenly character, of course, presupposes the allimportant category of citizenship itself. It is with the category of citizenship that we can begin to move from identifying the ancients’ distinctive concerns to exploring their larger theoretical significance. As P. J. Rhodes illustrates in chapter 4, citizenship and civic ideology were central to the ancient understanding and experience of politics. Given the traditions of civic humanism developed in the Italian city-states, revived by the American Founders, and again rejuvenated by modern theorists of citizenship (e. g., Arendt 1958; cf. T. Pangle 1988; Oldfield 1990; Zuckert, chapter 34), it would be misguided to assert that ideals of active, excellent, and intrinsically worthwhile civic virtues were the unique prerogative of ancient Greeks and Romans. As Christopher Nadon shows in chapter 33, citizenship has constituted a central theoretical and practical category wherever republican forms of political organization have prevailed, such as Renaissance Italy or the colonial United States. More broadly, in fact, the continental tradition of modern political philosophy - including Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Hegel - has built upon and extended the ancient theories of citizenship and civic virtue. Even though such figures often transfigured ancient theories, they tended to agree that the classical experience of citizenship was one of the most fruitful sources of inquiry into this critical political idea. The reason is, roughly, that the egalitarian ancient city-state expected and often demanded from its citizens an extraordinary degree of civic participation and interest. Such demands led to an exceptional degree of reflection upon the nature of civic virtue and vice and on the broad questions of moral psychology and political agency that such reflection usually inspired.
Contemporary political philosophers have increasingly acknowledged the political and ethical importance of virtuous citizenship, and the ancient Greeks and Romans have continued to provide a language for helping them articulate and defend their views. In political philosophy, republican theorists such as Ronald Beiner (1992), as well as liberal perfectionists such as Stephen Salkever (1990; cf. Collins 2006), have turned to the ancients in order to find an appropriate vocabulary and understanding of civic, deliberative virtue; and theorists have begun to talk seriously about democratic virtue (Euben, Wallach, and Ober 1994b; Wallach 1994; Zuckert, chapter 34). Among other things, these theorists are concerned with cultivating prudence, with overcoming apathy, and often with encouraging contemporary citizens to put substantive ideas about human goodness onto the common table of public, democratic deliberation. Guided by the political reflections of the ancients, these theorists explore how we might elevate the modern citizenry’s understanding and experience of politics to a level commensurate with its democratic power. The present volume puts on display, among much else, the rich and theoretically well-informed vocabulary of political virtue that the world of classical antiquity has to offer theorists interested in improving the quality of our civic discourse. At all events, classical political life and thought help us to raise additional questions about the distinctively Rawlsian brand of liberalism that remains suspicious of any public conversations based on comprehensive or substantive conceptions of human goodness.
Even if the particular ancient experience has broad philosophical appeal for modern theorists, however, it is worth entering at least one caveat. By contrast with the ancient polis, modern states are large-scale, socially differentiated, and pluralistic political entities. Hence, any efforts to adapt ancient theories or ideologies of virtue to the modern context must contend with these formidable practical differences.
The modern interest in ancient citizenship and citizenly virtue should not lead to calls for wholesale importation of the ancient models into modern nation-states. At least since the publication of Benjamin Constant’s ‘‘The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns’’ in 1819 (Constant 1988; cf. Holmes 1979), and recently since the reinvention of this distinction by Isaiah Berlin (Berlin 1958), political theorists have been all too familiar with the dangers of utilizing political power to inculcate virtue, particularly in modern conditions. As a result, contemporary theorists tend not to commit themselves so strongly to a program of virtue cultivation as Rousseau did in his Letter to d’Alembert. Yet, as we have just seen, the contemporary turn to virtue, among liberal, republican, and conservative theorists, is substantial and increasingly important. The thought behind this ‘‘characterological turn’’ is that there must be middle ground between the individualistic, libertarian outlook (cf. Kateb 1992; Nozick 1974) and the insanely demanding standards of virtue-oriented organizations of power such as (say) the Iranian theocracy.
Our particular understanding of that middle ground must both respect modern ideals of freedom and autonomy and adequately educate modern citizens to eschew unreflective relativism and naive conformity to present standards. Classical political thought might prove especially helpful and challenging to modern theorists as we struggle to find such a middle ground. The essays in the present volume indicate just how rich, complex, and diverse the Greek and Roman understanding of civic virtue and deliberative prudence could be. It is hoped that the present collection will provide an interpretative and philosophical basis for supplementing and enriching recent efforts, for challenging contemporary orthodoxies, and for stimulating further reflection upon the political possibilities of virtue politics in modernity.
World History
