The Stoic Idea of the City

by Malcolm Schofield

The Stoic Idea of the City offers the first systematic analysis of the Stoic school, concentrating on Zeno's Republic . Renowned classical scholar Malcolm Schofield brings together scattered and underused textual evidence, examining the Stoic ideals that initiated the natural law tradition of Western political thought. A new foreword by Martha Nussbaum and a new epilogue written by the author further secure this text as the standard work on the Stoics.

"The account emerges from a jigsaw-puzzle of items from a wide range of authorities, painstakingly pieced together and then annotated in a series of appendixes, the whole executed with fine scholarship, clarity, and good humor."— Times Literary Supplement

Genres: Philosophy

196 pages, Paperback

First published November 7, 1991

About the author

Malcolm Schofield is a British academic specializing in Ancient Philosophy. Having taught at Cornell University and the University of Oxford, he joined the University of Cambridge in 1972 as a lecturer in Classics and a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge.

Reviews

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

This short text (four chapters, followed by eight appendices, followed by an epilogue) provides an example of how doxography can be analyzed to the best scholarly standard, so as to attempt to recuperate an original ancient Greek source text by means of scholarship, even if Schofield never really satisfies the reader with the promised Stoic version of what a city (polis) or state (civitas) should be. The trick is, there is no Stoic work extant entitled Republic (nor one entitled Politeia, nor one called Utopia, these works lost to the sands of time long ago), and Schofield is trying to reinvent --albeit not out of whole cloth-- what such a work might have looked like, as it is known that Zeno and Chrysippus both wrote books under such a title. The reader might --in order to figure out what's going on here-- want to begin with an overview of what 'tenet-writing' (doxography, from doxa, opinion and graph, writing) looks like in general, and compare it to pastiche, patchwork, and other such things, and consider how fragments can be hijacked for ulterior purposes, appropriated and rerouted, contrary to the author's original intention. The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy online has an entry 'Doxography of Ancient Philosophy' about "works (or sections of works) taking as their subject matter the tenets or doctrines of [previous] philosophers," ranging from Cicero, in the 1st c. BC to Theodoret, in the 5th c. AD. Upon consideration of how difficult it might be to recuperate a lost text from its fragmentary remains, the reader is somewhat better prepared for Schofield's intense interest in the likes of the leavings of otherwise obscure figures from history, such as Philodemus (1st century BC), Dio Chrysostom (1st c. AD), a Sceptic called Cassius (otherwise unknown), Arius Didymus (1st – 3rd c. AD), Clement of Alexandria (late 2nd c. AD, e.g. author of Stromateis or ‘Patchworks’), Diogenes Laërtius (early 3rd c. AD), or Stobaeus (5th c. AD). For lack of the wonted source texts from Zeno or Chrysippus, Schofield has to rely on the writings about Zeno and Chrysippus in order to recuperate what these Greek Stoics' views (doxa) might have been, in a kind of detective work, winnowing through the hodgepodge that is doxological text, maybe to uncover with some degree of faithfulness a reconstruction of what a Stoic work entitled Republic might have looked like. As Schofield puts it, even as late in the argument as his epilogue: "Presumably much of the point of Zeno's work will have lain in its intertextuality, and in its implicit acceptance or criticism of the moral and political assumptions of his predecessors in the genre." (Schofield, p.171) He has to admit that he's providing an analysis of a pastiche on a pastiche, the point of which can only at best be presumed, based on what has been uncovered. (Still, I really liked Schofield's skewering of Plutarch's misreading of Zeno in Appendix A.)

So, there just isn't much remaining, and certainly not a sufficient amount, to reconstruct reliably what the Stoic 'ideal city' was, and as to what Zeno intended his Republic to say, it seems the only comfortable conclusion is that a key principle of it was that "the source of moral authority in any city of the good and wise is not man-made justice or variable convention, but the common law of nature." (Schofield, p.130), or that "Concord was the key idea of Zeno's Republic." (Schofield, p.117) The cautious conclusions of Schofield are masterful, if unsatisfying; the only substantial criticism I have is that Schofield discounts too easily the possibility that Zeno was intending his ideal city to be something like what we call today an intentional community, where it is 'rational to restrict community of goods to neighbours.' See pp.98-102 where Schofield teases out a "moralizing Chrysippean interpretation" in contrast to "what may originally have been a doctrine of Zeno's Republic [that] any act benefiting one's neighbour constitutes a good common to the neighbour benefited and the person who benefits him or her." (Schofield, p.101) Such a community would fit in with the antinomian tendencies of 'Zenonian thought.' Schofield dismisses early on any such antinomian reading of Zeno that would make him into some kind of anarchist. (Schofield, beginning of Chapter 2, "The City of Love", pp.22-23)

[Adam S. Rust · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is one of the more highly academic books I've read and I read academic books with decent regularity. In "The Stoic Idea of the City" Prof. Schofield engages in some deep textual archeology to try to reconstruct the political views of the early Stoics (of whom we have only fragments of their work).

After pages of textual spade work Prof. Schofield comes the conclusion that the early Stoics supported an egalitarian state with minimal class and gender distinctions. In Prof. Schofield's view the Stoic theory of the state laid the ground work for abandoning the polis as the central unit of political analysis. In its place Stoics and later political thinkers began to consider political issues in terms of natural laws that applied to all humans.

On the way to reaching these conclusions there are some side discussions about Stoic views sexuality and being a cosmopolitan (usually translated as "citizen of the world", but more accurately rendered "citizen of the universe"). Because of Prof. Schofield's dry writing style none of these discussions are as exciting as one would hope.

I found the topic interesting, but felt that most of the work in here could have been covered in a longish article of about 45 pages as opposed to a 200 page book. The introduction by the philosopher and classicist Martha Nussbaum summarizes things nicely if you want the executive summary of the argument.