Although the past three or so decades have seen a rapidly growing interest in Cicero's political thought and Roman political thought more broadly, there was previously no in-depth investigation into Cicero’s conception of justice and much less into its long-lasting historical influence over the centuries. This is all the more surprising since not only is justice the indisputable cornerstone on which Cicero's political theory is built, but also is it this very aspect of his thought that was to exert the most significant impact on later intellectual history, providing ammunition in particular to those early modern thinkers who eventually broke with Aristotelian, Epicurean and Stoic views on justice. The fact that this had not been appreciated in scholarship was mainly due to the unfounded belief, so prevalent among intellectual historians, that Cicero's political thought was by and large a second-rate adaption of pre-existing Greek theories. By contrast, our project demonstrated the true novelty of Ciceronian justice and its revolutionary impact at least until the Enlightenment, using it as a key conceptual lens through which to investigate the European heritage of political and legal thought. The project was innovative in bringing the reception of classical antiquity to bear on a topic of obvious significance from a perspective of the longue durée, thereby integrating disciplinary approaches from ancient philosophy, intellectual history, the reception of classical antiquity and legal history. The diachronic element was supplemented, within each subproject, with appropriate sensitivity to historical context.
Aiming thus 1) to present Cicero's conception of justice as a substantive contribution to the history of political thought in its own right and 2) tracing its powerful afterlife over the long term, from its inception in the late Roman Republic to its role in shaping the debate on natural and international law in early modern Europe, the JustCity project targeted two goals to push scholarship beyond the state of the art. With a view to the first goal, i.e. establishing Ciceronian justice as an idea conceived independently of, and indeed in contrast to, the traditional Greek notions of justice, we have made significant progress in exploring the very distance between Cicero and his Greek predecessors, especially Plato, Aristotle, and the Hellenistic schools.
The innovativeness of Cicero's conception of justice must be seen in its specifically juridical character and its attempt to turn earlier virtue-based accounts of distributive justice into a law-based account of procedural commutative justice. Cicero accepted Aristotle's diagnosis of civil war as sparked by competing accounts of justice; but Cicero thought that Aristotelian distributive justice itself merely added such a competing account, thus exacerbating the problem. Cicero's solution seeks to overcome skepticism vis-à-vis the competing accounts of justice and the good life by formulating a concept of natural law designed to survive such skepticism. Regarding the second goal, i.e. the demonstration of the long-term time travel and heavy impact of Ciceronian ideas, our project paid due attention to the reasons why these ideas managed to travel so well across time and to exert such influence. On this matter, our research suggests that it was especially the narrowness of Roman legal concepts and disinterest in the regulation of ritual and social hierarchy that accounts for Cicero's influence in tandem with his academic skepticism about accounts of virtue-based justice, which made Cicero newly relevant in an age of religious civil war and large territorial states.
