René Brouwer

What is the relation between Aristotle's accounts of justice in his Ethics and Politics? In line with Aristotle's encompassing understanding of the study of politics I argue that his full account of his concept of justice in the Ethics is – in relation to the organisation of the city – applied in the Politics. I do so by showing that in the Politics Aristotle applies notably two conceptions of justice from the Ethics: his general conception of justice as complete virtue and distributive justice as one his particular conceptions.

In this paper, I offer an analysis of the different understandings of 'system' in connection with the two main Western legal traditions. In the continental 'civil law' tradition, 'system' is used in relation to the substance of the law, whereas in the English 'common law' tradition 'system' is rather used in relation to the functioning of the law, in the sense of finding solutions to legal problems that are consistent with earlier ones. I explain these different uses from a historical point of view: in the civil law tradition the notion of system goes back to the exposition of substantive legal doctrine, which – under the influence of Stoic thought – was already developed by lawyers in the Roman Republic, and for the first time elevated to statute by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian, whereas in the common law tradition the Byzantine-Roman organisation was not taken over, and system rather connotes with the manner in which conflicts can be resolved on a case-by-case manner, and hence has come to refer to the machinery of law. These different meanings may pose a challenge where legal unity is sought between jurisdictions that belong to different traditions.

In this paper I argue that against the political and perhaps even religiously motivated background of the Constitutio Antoniniana, in order to further enhance the appeal of Roman law, Ulpian seeks to connect law and nature by using Stoic terminology. However, his usage of this terminology is radically distinct from the perfectionist Stoic approach.

The Stoics and the State is a welcome, and highly recommended addition to the growing literature on Stoic political thought by an eminent specialist of Stoicism, who is above all known for her monograph on Seneca's thought placed in the context of Stoicism as a whole.