The Cicero renaissance in political theory continues. Gary Remer's Ethics and the Orator comes on the heels of other major books on Cicero's political thought, Jed Atkins's Cicero on Politics and the Limits of Reason (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Walter Nicgorski's Cicero's Skepticism and His Recovery of Political Philosophy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). The tide becomes even more impressive when one includes recent treatments of Cicero's broader philosophical work, such as Raphael Woolf's Cicero: The Philosophy of a Roman Skeptic (Routledge, 2015) and a number of other recent collections of papers, as well as translations and commentaries on Cicero's own texts. The movement was perhaps inevitable if overdue. Cicero was such an important conduit for classical ideas into both the Renaissance and then the modern world and was viewed as such an authority, even by thinkers who were otherwise hostile to premodern thought (David Hume, for example), that it was only a matter of time before he was taken up again as a crucial thinker in his own right.

The distinctive element in Remer's excellent book is indicated by his subtitle: The Ciceronian Tradition of Political Morality. For Remer, Cicero is the founder of a tradition of political thought that is organically related to the other great figures in classical political philosophy, but also distinctive in a way that makes him particularly relevant to our own time. Here it is important that Remer's account emphasizes both the aspect of rhetoric itself and a particular approach to political morality. The two are related since Remer's Cicero sees rhetoric not as a morally neutral instrument, but as an integral part of an ethics that elevates practice over theory and holds that the welfare of the political community is “the supreme moral standard” (28; cf. 67, 72, 134).

The book is divided into six chapters that first develop an account of Cicero's own views on rhetoric, political morality, and their relationship to one another; then develop the notion of a Ciceronian tradition through discussion of Cicero's relationship to Machiavelli and Justus Lipsius; and finally, bring that tradition to bear on modern political questions by discussing the practices of representation and deliberative democracy in light of Ciceronianism.

Remer's comparison of Aristotle and Cicero in the first chapter is quite subtle and centers on the questions of whether and to what extent rhetoric constitutes morally dubious forms of manipulation. Here he stresses that where for Aristotle ethics is an external limit on rhetorical practice, Cicero sees an integration of the two (48–49). While rhetoric does aim to play on the emotions, it is not a form of domination, since it is itself open to influence by the audience (51–53, 61). Moreover, for Cicero rhetoric always already includes a respect for decorum, which indicates a fittingness to speaker, subject, occasion, audience, and medium (51). Ciceronian rhetoric is therefore never morally neutral. This theme carries over into the second chapter, which treats Cicero's political morality more broadly, and is the most theoretically significant chapter in the book. Remer is concerned here with the difference between ordinary morality and political morality, usually discussed in contemporary political philosophy as “the problem of dirty hands” (in Michael Walzer's celebrated formulation). For Cicero, the problem must be viewed in light of the Stoic theory of a kind of double morality, the perfect version of the natural law followed by the sage and the somewhat diluted version (called “middle” or “intermediate”) followed by everyone else. Political morality constitutes something of a third category: actions that are not deviations from morality so much as actions that can be morally taken only by political leaders in defense of the common good (64–65). On Ends and the Tusculan Disputations present morality simply, while specifically political morality is seen in On Duties. There Cicero distinguishes between morally relevant personae, one of which is the persona we choose by choosing a way of life, including what would be called by contemporary moral philosophers “role-specific duties,” but also what one might call role-specific powers. Political morality then is a part of the middle or intermediate morality of ordinary life that concerns those who voluntarily take on political responsibility. It allows for acts that would be condemned by ordinary moral standards.

One can easily see how this view could lead to a kind of amoralism in politics and Remer's third chapter answers this concern by comparing Cicero's view with that of Machiavelli. Cicero recognizes the claims of both honestas (the right) and utilitas (the expedient). Both are related to moral considerations, but where honestas has a universal perspective, utilitas is related to one's own society (95; cf. 108). What is needed here is a kind of balance of the two (96, 104, 106, 151). Machiavelli, however, simply opts for utilitas, which may or may not align with morality depending on the circumstances. This line of thought continues in the fourth chapter, where Remer moves from Cicero alone into the Ciceronian tradition and a discussion of the Dutch humanist Justus Lipsius (1547–1606). Lipsius has often been read as being influenced disparately by Cicero and Tacitus, the latter seen as a kind of proto-Machiavellian. Against this view, Remer contends that Lipsius was a consistent Ciceronian, who exemplified the balance between the moral and the expedient in defending the need for statesmen to sometimes engage in fraud or deceit for reasons of state.

In chapter 5 Remer considers the question of representation, which is initially paradoxical given the (at least formally) democratic practices of the Roman republic. Cicero's conception of the orator-statesman, he argues, includes a notion of representation and thus bridges the space between ancient and modern republicanism. The practice of oratory requires the statesman's own arguments to incorporate his understanding of the sense of the community (148–49) and so to balance in himself independence from popular sentiment and representation of it, a view that grounds the traditional distinction between a representative and a delegate made famous especially by Burke, but which can be found also in the Federalist and J. S. Mill. This modern relevance of Ciceronianism is carried up to the present day in the sixth chapter, which puts rhetoric in conversation with the idea of deliberative democracy. Deliberative democrats aim to introduce some element of conversation into the political institutions and practices of large modern states. Cicero tended to associate conversation with philosophical inquiry as distinct from oratory, which aimed at action, and Remer ably defends his view against the contemporary deliberative democrats.

Ethics and the Orator is clear, well written, and erudite. As impressive as Remer's command of the texts and literature on Cicero is, he is never a pedant. Moreover, he uses his Cicero to address questions of continuing saliency. Most of all his account well illustrates ways in which Cicero was perhaps the classical political thinker most concerned with the transcendence of the common good. Interestingly, just this aspect of Cicero provokes a host of additional questions: while Remer opposes Cicero's “balanced” and “pragmatic” yet deeply moral approach to “absolutist moralism” (203), one is left wondering how far this goes. In his discussion of Cicero's allowance for statesmen to act in ways condemned by ordinary morality, most of the examples concern violations of positive law or custom, but there are much trickier cases. Extrajudicial killings of conspirators against the state are one thing; the intentional killing of noncombatants as a tactic of war, interrogational torture, and the collective punishment of populations that may include terrorists are something else. Lipsius was a Christian Ciceronian, and Remer describes some ways in which his Christianity modified his application of Ciceronian political morality (134–35), but he still seems to have allowed for moral flexibility by princes. For many other Christian political thinkers, the common good of society is itself subordinated to the supremely transcendent common good of the universe, rendering such flexibility problematic.