Crisis and Constitutionalism: Roman Political Thought from the Fall of the Republic to the Age of Revolution

Crisis and Constitutionalism argues that the late Roman Republic saw, for the first time in the history of political thought, the development of a normative concept of constitution--the concept of a set of constitutional norms designed to guarantee and achieve certain interests of the individual.Benjamin Straumann first explores how a Roman concept of constitution emerged out of the crisis and fall of the Roman Republic.The increasing use of emergency measures and extraordinary powers in the late Republic provoked Cicero and some of his contemporaries to turn a hitherto implicit, inchoate constitutionalism into explicit constitutional argument and theory.The crisis of the Republic thus brought about a powerful constitutionalism and convinced Cicero to articulate the norms and rights that would provide its substance; this typically Roman constitutional theory is described in the second part of the study.Straumann then discusses the reception of Roman constitutional thought up to the lat