Nature, Justice, and Duty in the Defensor Pacis

Marsiglio of Padua's Ciceronian Impulse

Bibliographic Data

ID7353274
AuthorsCary J Nederman (0000-0001-8175-7141, University of Canterbury, corresponding author)
Year1990
Volume18
Issue4
Pages615-637
Publication date1990-11-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenuePolitical Theory (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0090-5917 • E-ISSN: 1552-7476
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/0090591790018004010
OpenAlexW1993197838
LanguageEN
Citations received7
References cited2

In his magisterial study of Marsiglio of Padua's political thought, Alan Gewirth identified three primary philosophic for the secular doctrines of the Defensor Pacis: Aristotelianism, Augustinianism, and Averroism.' According to Gewirth, a full understanding of the Defensor requires that we fully acknowledge Marsiglio's debt to these three intellectual systems.' The scholarly literature generally agrees with Gewirth; attempts to trace the sources of the Defensor's arguments about temporal politics have been confined almost without exception to the impact of the Aristotelian, Augustinian, and Averroistic traditions.3 Yet a look through the text of the Defensor suggests that Marsiglio was, in fact, familiar with and influenced by a broader range of texts than this approach implies. In particular, one would be remiss to exclude Cicero from any list of sources or authorities whose use in the Defensor ought to be investigated. It is too often forgotten that Cicero was the only political thinker of pagan antiquity whose writings continued to be accessible to the Christian West following the collapse of Roman domination. It is true that Cicero's two major political treatises, De Republic and De Legibus, were not directly

Cicero · Duty · Economic Justice · Political science · Politics · Classical Philosophy and Thought · Classics · History · Law · Medieval Philosophy and Theology · Philosophy · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought

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