Review of E. Narducci 'Cicerone Prospettiva 2000. Atti del I Symposium Ciceronianum Arpinas. Arpino 5 Maggio 2000'

Cicerone Prospettiva 2000. Atti del I Symposium Ciceronianum Arpinas. Arpino 5 Maggio 2000 ; Interpretare Cicerone. Percorsi della critica contemporanea. Atti del II Symposium Ciceronianum Arpinas. Arpino 18 Maggio 2001 by E. Narducci Review by: Valentina Aren

Reconstructions of a Republic. The political culture of ancient Rome and the research of the last decade.

Review of (K. J.) Hölkeskamp Rekonstruktionen einer Republik. Die politische Kultur des antiken Rom und die Forschung der letzten Jahrzehnte (Historische Zeitschrift Beiheft 38). Pp. 146. Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2004. ISBN: 3-486-64439-4

The Discretionary Effect of CEOs and Board Chairs on Corporate Governance Structures

In this study we analyze the effect of latent managerial characteristics on corporate governance. We find that CEO and board chair fixed effects explain a significant portion of the variation in board size, board independence, and CEO-chair duality even after controlling for several firm characteristics and firm fixed effects. The effect of CEOs on corporate governance practices is attributable mainly to executives who simultaneously hold the position of CEO and board chair in the same firm. Our results do not show a decline in CEO discretionary influence on corporate governance after the enactment of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act and stock exchange governance regulations

Varro, the Name-Givers, and the Lawgivers: The Case of the Consuls

This essay aims at identifying a tradition of lawgivers in the political culture of the late Republic. It focuses on the antiquarian tradition of the second half of the first century BC, which, it argues, should be considered part of the wider quest for legal normativism that takes place towards the end of the Republic. By reconstructing the intellectual debates on the nature of the consulship, which at the time was carried out through the means of etymological research, this essay shows that, when set within its proper philosophical framework, ancient etymological studies acted as a search for philosophical truth and, in the case of Varro, identify the early kings as the first Roman lawgivers. In turn, the language of political institutions and its etymologies, conceived along philosophical lines, could become a weapon in the constitutional battles of the late Republic

Popular sovereignty in the late Roman Republic: Cicero and the will of the people

This chapter is concerned with the development of Cicero's conception of the relationship between popular sovereignty and aristocratic government from the De re publica to the De legibus. When placed in its political and intellectual contexts, this development represents a significant strengthening of its aristocratic bias – specifically when considering Cicero's proposed reforms to the institutions of the senate and censorship as well as to the right to vote and the tribunate. The most striking conceptual outcome of this development is a transformation, to use Cicero's own terms, of real liberty into an empty ‘species libertatis’. While some modern commentators have interpreted these two theoretical works as complementing one another, others have described the form of government resulting from Book 3 of the De legibus as a ‘strengthened control from the top’, to use Dyck's expression, often denouncing Cicero's blind conservatism and the resulting political system as almost an anecdotal curiosity. Intervening in the contemporary political and intellectual debate on the censorship and in dialogue with his Platonic model, Cicero re-elaborates the notion of popular sovereignty as formulated in the De re publica. In the De legibus he advances not only an institutional reordering of the commonwealth, but rather a different conception of the commonwealth, characterised by a ‘quasi-alienation’ of the people's sovereignty

Ancient History and Contemporary Political Theory: The Case of Liberty

Providing an introduction to this special issue on the ancient notions of liberty and its modern perspectives, this essay contains, first, some reflections about the relation between the fields of ancient history and contemporary political theory. Building on the comments of the final roundtable with Kinch Hoekstra and Quentin Skinner, it then makes an attempt at extrapolating some theoretical understandings of liberty from a wide range of geographical and historical contexts covered in the contributions. Moving away from a strictly classical Graeco-Roman focus, these include investigations from the second millennium BCE polities in the Levant to the Byzantine empire in the fifth-century CE