A Ciceronian Defense of Democratic Participation

Abstract

Opposing the usual elitist presentation of Cicero, I identify three arguments favoring democratic participation in De re publica and De legibus. The first sees democratic participation as a demand of the common people, which results from their untamable desire for freedom and must be fulfilled to avoid civil unrest. The second sees it as an instrument to lessen the likelihood of elites’ corruption. The third incorporates the previous two under an account of state legitimacy, arguing that democratic participation is just because without it, the civic community under a state’s rule cannot be a partnership and hence the state cannot be a legitimate one as a common property of the people. I argue that this account of state legitimacy differs from the one in Pettit’s republicanism and may help clarify the normative commitment to the public nature of the state that underlies the current “realist” and “instrumental” defenses of democracy.