For fear of prompting a flight of general readers, I’d better not start by saying that Vittorio’s book is erudite, covering not just Cicero but a great deal of political philosophy along the way. But stay! It’s highly accessible, an enjoyable read. It’s important too; it works to restore a word drained of full meaning and traditions by modern usage, variously US politics, Irish irredentists, and simple opponents of monarchy. He’s arguing for republicanism, redolent of informed, participative citizens coming to judgement on matters concerning their polis. He uses the work of Cicero and Roman times to comment on today’s politics.
I’ve never met Vittorio but I know him as we engage fairly regularly on social media and often on matters related to our common membership of the Labour Party. I was therefore a little nervous on approaching his book as he’d asked me for comments and I feared I’d have major differences; I’d assumed it would shy away from the fraught state of politics today. It doesn’t. Nevertheless, I do have problems located for the most part in my own relatively demoralised views on the future of democracy. I should explain.
I followed the late Brian Farrell, a fond friend and mentor, in teaching a long-standing BA elective course in Political Communication at UCD. (It sometimes had a slightly different title and one witty student dubbed it “Dead Philosophers Meet the Internet”.) It had a practical bent in that I incorporated an understanding of technology and reached into policy starting at that time with broadcasting and print, and then changed with the technology. It led me to a position where I had to move the old distinction between the needs of liberal citizens and republican citizens to a core aspect of the course and this meant sundering the mass element of mass political communication. From that point on elitism threatened to swallow the republican. As others – including JS Mill and Habermas – have done I resorted to the standard get-out of raising the masses to republican participation.
Now, let’s come abruptly to the point. I tend to argue of late that the possibility of recreating that mass no longer exists, that huge numbers, perhaps the overwhelming majority, would not merely prefer – as before – an absence of politics and other “old” serious matters but are now outside any realistic chance of discursive material reaching them. The situation didn’t arise suddenly or lately; it’s been developing for decades. Indeed there’s an opportunity to write a largely technological history: broadcasting, narrowcasting … all the way to personalised advertising and at every point there’s a familiar political clash over regulation to achieve public service.
Vittorio is of course well aware of the necessities to republican participation, the education, leisure, equality, security, ability and tendency to philosophise. He has faith in the possibility of delivery, primarily through education. I don’t. I seem to be staring confused into a very different era in which traditional remedies cannot be effective. Damn right, I can become demoralised about the survival of democracy but also excited by these interesting if dangerous times and the drive to think this through.
Thanks, Vittorio.
*https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/why-cicero-matters-9781350376694/