Commonwealth, People, Civil Community – State? Revisiting Augustine's Polemic with Cicero
Journal: Social Evolution & History. Volume 24, Number 2 / September 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.30884/seh/2025.02.17
Alexander V. Marey
HSE University (National Research University ‘Higher School of Economics’), Moscow, Russia
In my paper, I return once again to the question of whether it is appropriate to introduce the concept of the State into the texts of Cicero and Augustine. In his first book De re publica, Cicero provides a famous definition for the term ‘people,’ describing it as ‘multitude of people associated with each other by consensus on justice (ius) and mutual benefit (utilitas).’ What unites many individuals into a people was termed by Cicero as res publica. Almost five centuries later, Aurelius Augustine challenged Cicero's definition, proposing his own, according to which a people is ‘a unity of reasonable beings bound together by a common agreement about the objects of their love’. To denote the trigger for political unification, Augustine also used the concept of res publica. In describing the genesis of a people from, so to speak, a spatial perspective, Augustine asserts that, after the family and the city (civitas), the third stage of human association emerges, namely, the circle of the earth (orbis terrae). Existing Russian translations of Cicero and Augustine, render a number of the aforementioned concepts – civitas, res publica, and even orbis terrae – as ‘state’. I dare to argue that this interpretation of Roman political terminology is discursively incorrect and leads to distortion of the thoughts of both the Roman orator and the Hippo's Bishop. The inaccuracy of this interpretation, I believe, lies primarily in the fact that it allows for the introduction of a political subject into the texts of Cicero and Augustine that was absent from their works – namely, the State. For both authors, the only possible political subject was the people themselves, whose visible form of manifestation was the civil community or the city (civitas). The difference between the two authors lies only in the definition of the trigger that transforms a multitude of individuals into a single political organism – either rational deliberation on the rules of communal life as proposed by Cicero or emotional unification around a common object of love as insisted upon by Augustine. The presence of this commonwealth – res publica – is what makes a people a people in the true sense of the word.
Thus, my first argument is based precisely on the discursive error of translation. In modern realities, the state is conceived as an active political subject, moreover, the only legitimate political actor within its borders and, consequently, the only possible source of law and simultaneously the guarantee of its execution. Attempting to introduce such a category into texts from the first centuries of our era inevitably leads to semantic confusion hindering the correct interpretation of Cicero's and Augustine's words. I would add that from an institutional perspective, the state is seen as a system of political and legal institutions existing within a defined territory and alienated from the population it governs. This in turn does not align with the notions of ‘Commonwealth, the people's thing’ or ‘the circle of the earth’ that the authors discussed in this text attempt to formulate.
Consequently, the introduction of the category of the state into the texts of Cicero and Augustine is the result of a poorly reflected use of the method of exo-definitions. The essence of this method lies in what can be called ‘naming from the outside.’ The phenomenon of interest to scholars is studied, typologized, and checked against pre-developed criteria. A kind of ‘grid,’ created by the scholar (a metaphor by Aron Gurevich), is imposed on the phenomenon. If it meets a significant number of these criteria, it is classified into a particular category of phenomena. However, I would like to emphisize that these criteria are developed in isolation from the source material, formulated based on the realities and ideas of the era when the scholar lives and works. When applied correctly, this approach offers significant opportunities for comparative-historical or anthropological research, but it seems to work poorly with the history of social, political, and juridical thought, that is, with the history of human ideas about how society as a whole or any of its parts should function.
An alternative set of research tools can be called the method of endo-definitions, or ‘naming from inside.’ When using this method, greater attention is paid not to the correspondence of the studied social structure to external features identified by the researcher, but rather to the perception of society by its inhabitants and their reflection – if it exists – on their social structure. The focus shifts to the system of concepts developed in the language of the studied culture to describe their forms of social and political organization and their legal structure. Accordingly, the approach to interpreting these concepts also changes – we strive not to translate them into the closest and most understandable analogous word in our language for the modern reader, but instead take a longer and more difficult path of constructing or creating new concepts or reviving old ones imbued in this case with new meaning. Often it is necessary to abandon the principle of ‘one word by one word’ generally accepted in scientific translation and convey the content of a foreign concept using several words or even a whole phrase in Russian.
And if we approach the texts of Cicero and Augustine, which were the initial subjects of interest, from the perspective of this second method, refusing to introduce categories alien for Latin language such as the state or state union into them, we can see that both authors focus precisely on the people as the subject of political action. For Cicero, this people is still relatively small in number and not significantly different from the Roman civic community (Civitas Romana), which makes it possible to interpret the rational daily discussion of rules of communal life as a trigger for political unification of that community. For Augustine, who lived in the early fifth century CE, the Roman people appeared as a vast whole, stretching from Britain to Mauritania and from Portugal to Armenia (indeed – I note in the margin – Augustine's treatise The City of God is one of the most elegant sources that excellently demonstrates that the reforms initiated by Caracalla in 212 AD had finally begun to take effect in full force). At the same time, in the view of the Bishop of Hippo, the Roman people remained a unified people – a political actor capable of enacting laws, appointing emperors, and so on. The rational mechanisms for producing civic solidarity proposed by Cicero no longer worked – Augustine notes the diversity of languages, which disunites the people and hinders any possible rational communication. In search for other mechanisms to produce civic solidarity, Augustine turns to political emotions, rightly believing that, where rational considerations of common benefit and law fail, shared feelings can take effect. However, whether united rationally or emotionally, the political subject for both authors remains the people, and the form of its manifestation and most compact existence becomes the civitas, that is, the civic community, the city. The state, however, is absent in both cases.