TY - BOOK ID - 109598526 TI - Cicero and the people's will : philosophy and power at the end of the Roman Republic PY - 2023 SN - 9781316514115 9781009082587 9781009077385 1009085093 1009082582 1009084895 1316514110 PB - Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, DB - UniCat KW - Elite (Social sciences) KW - Political science KW - Republicanism. KW - Will. KW - Political activity. KW - Philosophy KW - History KW - Cicero, Marcus Tullius KW - Political and social views. KW - Rome KW - Politics and government KW - Philosophy. KW - Philosophie politique KW - Politique et gouvernement KW - Cicéron KW - Pensée politique et sociale. UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:109598526 AB - This book tells an overlooked story in the history of the will, a contested idea in both politics and philosophy of mind. For it is Cicero, statesman and philosopher, who gives shape to the notion of will as it would become in Western thought and who invents the idea of 'the will of the people'. In a single word - voluntas - he brings Roman law in contact with Greek ideas, chief among them Plato's claim that a rational elite must rule. When the republic falls to Caesarism, Cicero turns his political argument inward: will is a force to win the virtue in the soul that was lost on the battlefield, the marker of inner freedom in an unfree age. Though his vision of a free republic failed in his time, Cicero's ideal of rational elitism has shaped and fractured the modern world - and Ciceronian creativity may yet save it. ER -