Here is St. Augustine writing after the sack of Rome in the
year 410 and interpreting Cicero’s work On
the Republic. The subject is Scipio Africanus, who destroyed the Phoenicians,
yet the heroic leader laments the absence of a “common sense of right” in the Roman
Republic:
Book II, Chapter 21. City
of God
He [Scipio] starts by repeating and supporting his brief
definition of a commonwealth, that it is ‘the weal of the community’, and he
defines ‘the community’ not any and every association of the population, but
‘an association united by a common sense of right and community of
interest’. He goes on to point out the
advantage of definition in argument; and from these definitions of his he
derives the proposition that a commonwealth (i.e. the weal of the community’)
only exists where there is a sound and just government, whether power rests
with a monarch or a few aristocrats, or with the people as a whole. But when the king is unjust (a
‘tyrant’, as he calls him, in the Greek manner), or the nobles are unjust
(he calls such a combination a factio – a caucus) or the people are unjust
(and for this he finds no accepted term, unless he should call it a collective
tyranny), then, he holds, the commonwealth is not corrupt, as had been
argued on the previous day, but, by a logical conclusion from the definition,
it ceases to exist at all – for there can be no ‘weal of the community’, if
it is unjust, since it is not ‘associated by a common sense of right and
community of interest’, which was the definition of a community.[1]
Book XIX, Chapter 21. City
of God
This brings me to the
place where I must fulfil, as briefly and clearly as I may, the promise I gave
in the second book. I there promised
that I would show that there never was a Roman commonwealth answering to the
definitions advanced by Scipio in Cicero’s On the Republic. For Scipio gives a brief definition of the
state, or commonwealth, as the ‘weal of the people’. Now if this is a true definition there never
was a Roman commonwealth because the Roman state was never the ‘weal of the
people’, according to Scipio’s definition. For he defined a ‘people’ as a
multitude ‘united in association by a common sense of right and a community of
interest’. He explains in the
discussion what he means by a ‘common sense of right’, showing that a state
cannot be maintained without justice, and where there is no true justice there
can be no right. For any action
according to right is inevitably a just action, while no unjust action can
possibly be according to right. For
unjust human institutions are not to be called or supposed to be institutions
of right, since even they themselves say that right is what has flowed from the
fount of justice; as for the notion of justice commonly put forward by some
misguided thinkers, that it is ‘the interest of the strongest’, they hold this
to be a false conception.
Therefore, where
there is no true justice there can be no ‘association of men united by a common
sense of right’, and therefore no people answering to the definition of
Scipio, or Cicero. And if there is no
people then there is no ‘weal of the people’, but some kind of a mob not
deserving the name of a people.[2]
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