Heidi Alexander, Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow health secretary, has emphasised how important it is ‘to weave into [Labour’s] language, our narrative and our political mission a fundamental respect for taxpayers’ money, something that is clearly missing given our current reputation for profligacy’. Cicero would be cheering her on.
Cicero’s de officiis (‘On Duties’) was composed in 44 bc, the year in which he was assassinated on Marc Antony’s orders. The work, the second to be printed in the Gutenberg revolution after the Bible, was immensely influential during the Renaissance and Enlightenment. In it, he envisaged a community bound by partnership (societas) and trust, whose leaders obeyed the law and had the common good at heart, and in which gloria was won not by military achievements but by winning the respect of one’s fellow men. In pursuit of that vision, he was the first major political thinker to argue that the primary purpose of the state was the protection of private property: ‘It is the proper function of the state and its citizens to ensure for everyone the free and undisturbed guardianship of their possessions.’
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