The nature of the Roman political order has been hotly debated over the past forty years. In 2004 Karl-Joachim Hölkeskamp intervened polemically and programmatically in this debate, both with a monograph (Rekonstruktionen einer Republik, translated into English as Reconstructing the Roman Republic in 2010) and with a collection of earlier articles (Senatus populusque Romanus, also 2004). The present volume gathers together ten further pieces by H. on this subject published between 2005 and 2017, each with revisions and more recent bibliography added.

Those familiar with H.'s earlier works will recognise many themes: in-depth historiographical analyses of previous approaches (chs 1–2); H.'s own distinctive focus on political culture, with an emphasis on the fraught interplay of competition and consensus characteristic of this culture in Rome (chs 3–5 and 10); and the nature of this competition and the ways in which consensus was created (chs 6–9). These more recent articles seem less occupied with the trench warfare of scholarly debate than H.'s previous works. As they follow the inner logic of H.'s own views, they bestow upon the reader the gift of seeing a holistic vision of a historical problem unfold on the pages.

H.'s approach constitutes a ‘Kulturgeschichte des Politischen’ (88), in which culture emerges as the crucial medium for constituting and reproducing a political order (82). The classics of cultural anthropology, Geertz and Bourdieu, shape this approach, as does an ongoing German debate about the nature of politics and power in the early modern period: Landwehr, Schloegel and Stollberg-Rillinger are key. According to H., this perspective can take the place of the Muenzer/Gelzer/Syme/Badian view of politics as a zero-sum game among oligarchical factions (ch. 2), not least due to its ability to transcend the tension between law and history inherent in Mommsenian constitutional history (ch. 1).

For H. politics is not a top-down process but a discursively and symbolically constructed arena, in which actors try to enforce generally binding decisions, mostly through communication (77, 164). Formal institutions and procedures together with commonly accepted world views and expectations constitute this arena (84–5), and its construction relies on the expressive dimension of politics, where different media, from processions to monuments, constitute and reproduce the political order (86–8). Power in this arena is a communicative relationship through which certain people and norms are recognised as having legitimate authority (81). Following this approach, H. comes down firmly against Fergus Millar's democratic vision of Rome. H.'s Rome is a place in which the political elite is in power (‘die Herrschenden’) and the people are their subjects (‘die Beherrschten’).

H.'s account of Roman political culture departs from the establishment of a new political elite after the Struggle of the Orders had disrupted the Patrician monopoly on office-holding (107). As merit replaced inheritance as the principle for allocating offices, this new elite turned to a third party, the populus Romanus, to adjudicate its competing claims through (s)election (119, 139–41), thus vying with each other in increasing the gloria and maiestas of the populus Romanus, as is evident in elite rhetoric and public rituals such as the triumphal procession (168–70, 209–18). The position of the populus as reference point for elite competition also explains why this elite transformed the city of Rome into a public multimedia memoryscape of their own achievements (143–7 and chs 7–9). The transition from inheritance to merit as the principle for allocating offices in the fourth and third centuries can thus explain many features of Roman political life that might otherwise be seen as signs of a democracy.

Following Simmel, H. explains that a consensus about the rules of the game must accompany competition (118, 148). One such rule in Rome was that office-holding ancestry provided contenders for office in Rome with symbolic capital (151–61). H. also reveals a strong consensus about a steep hierarchy between the political elite and the populus, in which the latter was to play an obedient part, which seems ill at ease with democratic sentiments (171–82). Triumphal and funeral processions, public speaking at contiones and the annual election of magistrates were civic rituals performing this hierarchy, and while the elite staged these rituals, the people were always present — as audience for the display, as reference point for the achievements on display and as third party judging the display — thus arguably partaking in the performance of this order (96–101, 234–6). Power (‘Herrschen’), H. concludes, depends on the ‘Mitherrschen der Beherrschten’, on the participation of the subjects in their own subjection (105).

H.'s vision, while by no means an orthodoxy (consider, for example, the analyses of Henrik Mouritsen, Cristina Rosillo-López or Jan Timmer), has much to recommend itself, not least its ability to explain so much of what we know about Roman political life. It can also be developed further. H. emphasises the imperial nature of the republican political order, the fact that the new elite established and legitimated its position through the successful (re)conquest of Italy in the fourth and third centuries (107). And yet, the ups and downs of Roman military success after 250 b.c. do not feature in H.'s vision. Strikingly, however, starting in the mid-second century several diagnoses of imperial crisis coincided with one of the many moments in republican history in which the balance between elite consensus and competition was tilting in favour of the latter (326–7). Crucially, the consensus broke around what H. sees as the foundational consensus of Roman political culture: the idea that the office-holding elite were best equipped to manage the gloria and maiestas of the populus.

Signs of this breaking consensus include the institution of standing jury courts, later with non-senatorial juries, to try Roman office-holders for misconduct in their management of the empire, as well as laws, such as the lex de provinciis praetoriis, that infringed on this elite's freedom to deal with Rome's allies as they saw fit. This coincidence of imperial crisis and breaking consensus confirms H.'s analysis of the legitimatory basis of the elite's position but it also suggests that the consensus on which, according to him, Roman political culture was based was not just created through its communication in various civic rituals but also depended on the historical reality to which these rituals referred. Roman political culture, as H. sees it, might have been imperial in a more substantial sense than he himself allows.

Considerations such as these testify to the great intellectual acuity of H.'s vision in fitting together high-level abstraction with the details of Roman political culture. As such, his work constitutes a productive starting point for further research on the subject, as well as a model of historical scholarship more generally.