Cicero the Pragmatist

Mary Ann Glendon offers a thoughtful piece in First Things on the merits of Cicero and his vision of statecraft.

No philosophical discourse is so fine, he maintained, “that it deserves to be set above the public law and customs of a well-ordered state.” Following Aristotle, he held that moral excellence is a matter of practice, but it seemed evident to him that its most important field of practice was in the government of the state. Philosophers, he said, spin theories about justice, decency, restraint, and fortitude, but statesmen are the ones who must actually set the conditions to foster the virtues that are necessary to a well-functioning polity. “There can be no doubt,” he maintained, “that the statesman’s life is more admirable and more illustrious, even though some people think that a life passed quietly in the study of the highest arts is happier.”

However, Cicero's apparent subordination of philosophy to the practical concerns of state earned the ire of Eric Voegelin (of "immanentize the eschaton" repute), who much prefers Plato for politics:

His [Cicero's] clearness is a clearness of formula, not of thought; not only is he not an original thinker, but he expressly refuses to be one; going to the bottom of the problem is not an occupation for a gentleman, active in politics, but the affair of a "schoolmaster". His work is entirely devoid of the sublime unclearness of a great mind wrestling with his problem, fanatically engaged in his search for the structure of reality, happier to find a problem than to solve one. There are no problems in Cicero; whenever there is one insolent enough to come near the surface, the firm hand of the Roman consul and imperator comes down and bends it under the yoke of his authoritative language.

Michael P. Federici makes a good point in his study of Voegelin's philosohpy and life. "Politics can never fully realize the paradigm of order created by the philosopher, but it is nonetheless the duty of the philosopher to create tension between the order of the city and the order of the philosopher's soul. Cicero refuses this task."