Treatise on the Commonwealth by Cicero

Author:Cicero [Cicero]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Politikwissenschaft
Publisher: Jazzybee Verlag
Published: 2018-03-13T23:00:00+00:00

INTRODUCTION TO THE THIRD BOOK,

BY THE ORIGINAL TRANSLATOR.

Cicero here enters on the grand question of Political Justice, and endeavors to evince throughout the absolute verity of that inestimable proverb, “Honesty is the best policy,” in all public as well as in all private affairs. St. Augustine, in his City of God, has given the following analysis of this magnificent disquisition:

“In the third book of Cicero’s Commonwealth” (says he) “the question of Political Justice is most earnestly discussed. Philus is appointed to support, as well as he can, the sophistical arguments of those who think that political government cannot be carried on without the aid of injustice and chicanery. He denies holding any such opinion himself; yet, in order to exhibit the truth more vividly through the force of contrast, he pleads with the utmost ingenuity the cause of injustice against justice; and endeavors to show, by plausible examples and specious dialectics, that injustice is as useful to a statesman as justice would be injurious. Then Lælius, at the general request, takes up the plea for justice, and maintains with all his eloquence that nothing could be so ruinous to states as injustice and dishonesty, and that without a supreme justice, no political government could expect a long duration. This point being sufficiently proved, Scipio returns to the principal discussion. He reproduces and enforces the short definition that he had given of a commonwealth—that it consisted in the welfare of the entire people, by which word ‘people’ he does not mean the mob, but the community, bound together by the sense of common rights and mutual benefits. He notices how important such just definitions are in all debates whatever, and draws this conclusion from the preceding arguments—that the Commonwealth is the common welfare whenever it is swayed with justice and wisdom, whether it be subordinated to a king, an aristocracy, or a democracy. But if the king be unjust, and so becomes a tyrant; and the aristocracy unjust, which makes them a faction; or the democrats unjust, and so degenerate into revolutionists and destructives—then not only the Commonwealth is corrupted, but in fact annihilated. For it can be no longer the common welfare when a tyrant or a faction abuse it; and the people itself is no longer the people when it becomes unjust, since it is no longer a community associated by a sense of right and utility, according to the definition.”— Aug. Civ. Dei. 3-21.

This book is of the utmost importance to statesmen, as it serves to neutralize the sophistries of Machiavelli, which are still repeated in many cabinets.

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