The problem with Brexit is that parliament is not designed to do what the people have commanded it to. MPs feel their job is to construct their own manifesto and deliver on that, not on something foisted upon them by an ignorant public in the name of ‘popular sovereignty’. Unlike MPs, however, Cicero understood the importance of that sovereignty, and discussed it in detail in his On the Republic (De re publica).
At the heart of the res publica, he argued, was the notion of the public interest, which he defined as ‘people coming together to form a society by agreeing about what justice is, and mutually participating in its advantages’. Of these, freedom (libertas) was the most important. But if a tyrant put himself in charge of that ‘public interest’ (he meant Julius Caesar), the people would lose those rights of ‘justice’ and ‘mutual advantage’ which lay at the heart of the free republic, and so lose their libertas.
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