Dan Edelstein’s research while affiliated with Stanford University and other places

Plutarch and Machiavelli: What could they have in common? Machiavelli may have mined Plutarch for historical exempla, but his political arguments could not be more different. Or could they? In this article, I make the case that Plutarch in fact is the source of some of the more iconoclastic claims of The Prince , from the conquest of fortune to the importance of being feared, and even the necessity, on occasion, of immoral acts. If this connection has been overlooked, I suggest, in conclusion, it is because we have artificially segregated Plutarch and Machiavelli into “moralist” and “realist” camps when both actually participate in a common style of political thought, which can be called “prudential politics.”

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.