Book Review: Ethics and the Orator: The Ciceronian Tradition of Political Morality, by Gary A. Remer

• DOI: 10.1177/0090591717743974
• Date: 01 February 2019
• Published date: 01 February 2019
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

142 Political Theory 47(1)

Ethics and the Orator: The Ciceronian Tradition of Political Morality, by Gary A. Remer.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.

Reviewed by: Jed W. Atkins, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, US

DOI: 10.1177/0090591717743974

Gary Remer begins his important new book by citing a 2009 survey con-

ducted in Great Britain, indicating that the public regards politicians as the

least trustworthy group among all professionals. Needless to say, their reputa-

tion has not improved in the esteem of the British or American public in more

recent years. One reason for cynicism toward politicians lies in a correspond-

ing distrust of a primary democratic political art—rhetoric. Political rhetoric

is seen by its detractors as a tool that politicians use to emotionally manipu-

late audiences, undermining hearers’ autonomy and their capacity to assess

accurately their own best interests and the community’s good in a given situ-

ation. Critics of political rhetoric have a long and distinguished lineage,

counting among their number thinkers such as Plato, Hobbes, and Kant. Over

the past few decades, political theorists such as Ronald Beiner, Eugene

Garver, Danielle Allen, and Bryan Garsten have defended rhetoric.1 With the

partial exception of Garsten, who devotes a chapter to Cicero in Saving

Persuasion, these authors find their chief source of inspiration among classi-

cal authors in Aristotle. By contrast, Cicero is the hero of Remer’s work.

On Remer’s account, Cicero inaugurated an important and attractive “tra-

dition of political morality” that is closely linked to the theory and practice of

political rhetoric. This tradition conceives of the politician and orator as

being bound by a duty to morality; however, the morality in question is a

flexible and prudential “political morality,” anchored in the values of the

community, which requires politicians to “balance” competing consider-

ations, such as the demands of the “moral” with the requirements of the “use-

ful,” and their obligation to lead with their responsibility for preserving the

people’s independent judgment (p. 20). This morality is internal rather than

external to the practice of rhetoric; thus Cicero, unlike Aristotle, provides a

justification for rhetoric on its own terms (see especially chap. 1). Remer

finds this Ciceronian political morality attractive because it places moral con-

straints on the orator/politician while at the same time owning up to the real-

ity that at times the good of the community will require the good politician to

engage in practices that are typically regarded as bad, such as deception. This

latter set of concerns brings Remer into conversation with scholarship by

Ruth Grant and David Runciman on political hypocrisy and with Michael

Walzer’s work on the problem of “dirty hands” in politics.2