The Lex of the Earth? Arendt’s Critique of Roman Law

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Neoliberal politics is the politics of the elites, and has very little to do with democracy. At least when compared to the first and true democracies created by the Greeks. Notwithstanding the fact that women and slaves were excluded from politics, the Greek city-states were tremendously creative in many fields of life, such as administration, philosophy, art – and war. The talk explores in what sense the radical impulse from the Greeks can inspire us today, especially in terms of political creation, following and comparing the important work of philosophers Hannah Arendt and Cornelius Castoriadis, author of The Imaginary Institution of Society. Critics have argued that the situation of the Greeks is too different to be able to inform our own political problems. However, even though our societies are more complex and differentiated, it is often claimed that the world has “grown smaller”. In certain, important aspects, I argue, we find ourselves in a predicament similar to that of the Greeks. Just like the well-being of the polis depended on the involvement of each and every citizen, so the well-being of the planet depends on us today: not as private individuals, but as citizens involved in political creation.

Political Theory, 2002

A rendt's work shows a continual intellectual engagement with the Romans. She refers to the "political genius of Rome" as "legislation and foundation."' She suggests that the "one political experience which brought authority as word, concept, and reality into our history-the Roman experience of foundation" has been "almost entirely lost and forgotten."2 She describes the Romans' "loving care" of the world which underlay their distinctive "concept of culture."3 She attributes to Cicero the inspiration for Augustine's love of philosophy, the source of Hegel's view of philosophy as reconciliation to the disunity of the world, and the basis for the view of philosophic training as critical for cultivating the mind for judgment.4 She credits to the Romans an awareness of forgiveness that was "a wisdom entirely unknown to the Greeks" (HC, 243). She traces back the "faculty of making promises," fundamental for the stability of the world, to the Roman legal system (HC, 243). She argues that the early Christians "consciously shaped their concept of immortality after the Roman model, substituting individual life for the political life of the body politic" (HC, 315). She opens The Life of the Mind with a quote from Cato and begins the fifth chapter of On Revolution with a selection from Virgil. And she looks to the Romans in her elevation of courage as a political virtue, in her discussion of freedom, and in her notion of tradition.5 Yet these connections remain largely unexplored. Instead, disputes about Arendt's indebtedness to the ancients are more often fought on the terrain of Athens. Macauley notes an instance when "Arendt seems to prize the Roman perspective over the Greek," adding parenthetically, "somewhat untyp-

Among the many parallels between Hannah Arendt and Cornelius Castoriadis is their shared interest in the kind of politics that is characteristic of the council movements, revolutionary moments and the political democracy of ancient Greece. The essay seeks to elucidate how the two thinkers fill out and complement each other’s thought, with special attention to political creation – an ambiguous theme in Arendt’s thought. While critical of the notion of ‘making’ in the political field, Arendt also emphasizes the importance of building institutions. To take this seriously means that her analyses of the nature of politics must be modified, and in this respect, Castoriadis’s understanding of politics as institution-building can serve as a guideline. On the other hand, Arendt’s concept of ‘plurality’ in the public sphere represents a level of political analysis that is underdeveloped in the work of Castoriadis. Taken together, their thought highlights many important aspects of political creation in a radical sense.

Polis, 2019

For Hannah Arendt, a twentieth-century German-American political theorist, there is probably no concept more distinctive to Roman politics, and more associated with the Roman senate, than auctoritas. In this article, I explore an ambiguity and tension that lies at the heart of auctoritas and of Roman republican politics: the tension between continuity and tradition, on the one hand, and authoring and augmenting, on the other hand. I look first at how Cicero and Sallust negotiated this tension. I then examine how Arendt looks to this past, seeing the breakdown of auctoritas as symptomatic of a more modern loss of memory, both of tradition and of the authoring spirit (even the revolutionary spirit) that gives rise to those traditions. The tension that exists in auctoritas, the question of how one can author within history, has implications for Arendt's understanding of participatory politics.

"Where did the writers of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries seek the legal maxims and methods, the principles governing treaties or embassies or jurisdiction or property, and the broader ideas of justice in the inception, fighting, and conclusion of war, which they built into a law of nations of enduring importance? To a considerable extent, they looked to Roman law, Roman debates about the justifications of Rome’s wars and imperial expansion, and a rich tradition of ius naturae and ius gentium deriving from Greco-Roman and early Christian sources. This book brings together a set of fresh perspectives exploring the significance and implications of the use made of Roman legal concepts, and of Roman just war theory and imperial practice, by early modern European writers who shaped lasting approaches to natural law and the law of nations. "

Political Theory, 2002

Arendt’s thought defends the existence and irreducibility of political community as part of any human community. There is no possible depoliticised utopia of technocratic planners or of spontaneous orders, which evades the need for a political sphere. That is a sphere that mixes competition for power and the pursuit of political values, and that is an inevitable part of any human community. The political sphere is one of selection with regard to membership of political elites in different political currents, and in the overarching political elite of state institutions. Arendt provides a framework for social justice which is much more engaged with the nature of politics as contestatory and as oriented towards the conquest of power, than the Rawls approach of public reason, or other approaches to political foundations such as discursive rationality in Habermas. The advantage of Arendt’s approach is that is does not need to presume a perfectly rational basis for distributing economic goods or a perfectly rational basis for political judgement. Even if we just take those rationalistic approaches as guiding ideals, they lead to theory unable to deal with the spontaneity necessary to a dynamic economic order, or the agonism necessary to pluralist political life. Political justice is partly established through the competitive means of selecting a genuine political élite, and detached from possession of economic goods. There cannot be a complete separation between political elites and economic elites. Members of the political elite are likely to be economically privileged as political actors, and have have advantages in becoming economic actors. We should not seek a rationalistic determination of economic distribution or of the arguments of politics. We should seek a framework that is both sustainable and adaptive, an evolutionary framework, where rules are clear and known but can be debated and changed. The political elite has been tested in the competitive nature of elections, and is not able to direct all economic goods towards itself. Arendt shows how there can be a framework, rules, institutions and elite formation which are open to spontaneity and conflict.