The Society of Humankind: Roman Justice from Antiquity to the Enlightenment

The Society of Humankind - Roman Justice from Antiquity to the Enlightenment

The “JustCity” ERC Research Project 2025 Conference

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We take it for granted that human beings can make claims against each other. But why is this? And what kinds of claims are legitimate? Historically, an important justification for this ability has been the idea that humans live together in societies, be they societies of human beings, citizens or states. Making claims in the context of social and juridical bonds is at the heart of the Roman theory of justice and differentiates it from alternative conceptions, such as eudaimonist and distributive models, which have their origins in the Greek tradition. While these Greek conceptions of justice continue to have resonance today, it is the Roman theory and its legacy which is uniquely able to explain the dominance of a connection between claim-making, rights and justice. Our ERC- project ‘The Just City’ identifies the Roman thinker and statesman Cicero (106-43 BCE) as the key figure in this story: he combined Stoic natural law with Roman private law and political institutions to theorise humankind as a juridical society. The successful transmission of much of his large body of work ensured that Cicero’s ideas would become foundational to the development of later
political and legal thinking. This explains why later debates over justice in Western thought took the forms that they did, positing, for example, a crucial distinction between benevolence and strict obligation. The final conference of the Just City project brings together experts to examine this Roman concept of justice and its subsequent reception and adaptation. We will explore its development from its classical origins via Christian Late Antiquity to the Age of Revolutions, tracing its influence on a range of key moments in the history of political thought including the emergence of the Law of Nations and debates over Social Contract Theory.