Benjamin Straumann’s research while affiliated with University of Zurich and other places

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note that the online publication date for this handbook is the date that the first article in the title was published online. For more information, please read the site FAQs.

This article seeks to show the importance of Cicero for Kant by pointing out the systematic relationship between their respective views on ethics and law. Cicero was important to Kant because Cicero had already elaborated an imperative, “quasi-jural” conception of duty or obligation. Cicero had also already prefigured the distinction between ethical duties and duties of justice. The article does not establish any direct historical influence, but points out interesting systematic overlaps. The most important in the realm of ethics are a universal rationalism; a rule-based normative framework of duty; and skepticism about (Cicero), or rejection of (Kant), eudaimonism. In the realm of political theory, it is the centrality of law and of property that unites both thinkers; both reject voluntarism in thinking that consensus flows from the right external laws, not the other way around, and thus creates a juridical community; and lastly, both Cicero and Kant believe that transparence, or publicity, is a key ideal that might be presupposed by both the ethical and the juridical domain. The article thus shows that both Cicero and Kant separate ethics from law, but there are indications that neither has given up the aspiration to bridge the two realms on a higher plane. This reading of Kant yields both a more Ciceronian Kant and allows us to perceive Kantian aspects of Cicero.

In this article, we discuss Greek and Roman conceptions of liberty. The supposedly ‘neo-Roman’ view of liberty as non-domination is really derived from negative Greek models, we argue, while Roman authors devised an alternative understanding of liberty that rested on the equality of legal rights. In this ‘paleo-Roman’ model, as long as the law was the same for all, you were free; whether or not you participated in making the law was not a constitutive feature of liberty. In essence, this Roman theory was a theory of freedom as the rule of law and the guarantee of equal rights, especially due process rights. For this Roman concept of ‘legal liberty,’ as we call it, political participation was neither necessary nor sufficient. Theorized by Cicero and historicized by Livy, the Roman understanding of freedom flourished in early-modern times, proving important to paradigmatic republican authors such as Machiavelli and Rousseau as well as to Hobbes, whose work we discuss as a helpful point of comparison.

While most scholars today recognize that Roman writers occasionally used ius to denote a subjective right, the extent and reasons for this usage have not been well studied. In this article, we offer an analysis, based on a statistical survey, of how Cicero and Livy used ius to designate a range of subjective rights. We also trace this usage back to the basic Ciceronian metaphor of the populus as a kind of societas . Rights, in the Roman context, emerged out of this legal-commercial comparison, in which citizens (or even members of different nations) are entitled to equal rights in their common venture.

Thucydides and Hobbes are often interpreted as ‘realists’. States vis-à-vis each other remain in the state of nature and are conceptualized in analogy with individuals in the state of nature. States are therefore seen as engaging in the kind of self-interested behavior that makes cooperation elusive. In this chapter I argue that Thucydides’s Melian Dialogue might have shown Hobbes that the analogy between individuals and states does not really go all the way. For Hobbes, states are the artificial structures within which individuals may satisfy their subjective desires; once the Melian commonwealth could no longer guarantee its citizens’ safety, it would have been rational for the Melians to surrender, rather than risk an overwhelmingly probable catastrophe. States and individuals are also distinct in that the former may develop better knowledge of the laws of nature than individuals ever could. This fissure in the individual-state analogy is the lesson Hobbes drew from the Melian Dialogue, as can be seen in his analysis of sovereignty by acquisition in the Leviathan. Thucydides was important because his history, Hobbes thought, was true and could therefore provide useful examples of reason and its defects in action; the Melians might thus in addition have provided an illustration for what Hobbes believed was wrong with the Foole’s reasoning. Accordingly, Thucydides can be seen to have provided a foundation for Hobbes’s argument for peace and individual self-preservation.

The Cambridge Companion to Grotius offers a comprehensive overview of Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) for students, teachers, and general readers, while its chapters also draw upon and contribute to recent specialised discussions of Grotius' oeuvre and its later reception. Contributors to this volume cover the width and breadth of Grotius' work and thought, ranging from his literary work, including his historical, theological and political writing, to his seminal legal interventions. While giving these various fields a separate treatment, the book also delves into the underlying conceptions and outlooks that formed Grotius' intellectual map of the world as he understood it, and as he wanted it to become, giving a new political and religious context to his forays into international and domestic law.

The possibility of cooperation and the stability of political order are long-standing problems. Polybius, well known for his Histories analysing the expansion of Rome and his description of the Roman constitution, also offers an intriguing social and political theory that covers ground from psycho-anthropological micro-foundations to institution-based political order, providing a genealogy of morals and political order that is best understood in game-theoretical terms. In this paper I try to give such an interpretation. Polybius’ naturalistic, proto-game theoretical views show similarities with Hume, Smith and especially Hobbes’ doctrine of sovereignty by acquisition. However, Polybius is original in crucial regards, giving a motivationally plausible account of institutional and especially constitutional solutions to moral and political problems. Constitutional order, for Polybius, embodies and makes possible in the first place a kind of political reason that cannot be had individually. Polybian political theory thus offers interesting solutions to problems concerning moral motivation, collective action, and the conditions for political order, as well as the explanation and character of institutions.