What political ideas are supported by Stoic philosophy?

Becoming something of a majority leader, Cato pressed his conservative optimates to pass a resolution condemning Pompey’s attempt to change election law for his own interest…

The Stoic leading the statehouse thwarted the conqueror at every turn, using his now-perfected filibuster to kill the populist legislation. With little room to maneuver, Pompey would try a new approach.

—Pat McGeehan, Stoicism and the Statehouse (2017), p. 56–7.

This passage from West Virginia state delegate Pat McGeehan’s recent book illustrates one of many ways that today’s students of Stoic tradition have found it to be a rich resource for ongoing political inspiration.

While the idea of a “political stoic” personality may sound like an oxymoron to our modern ears, the Stoics were famous in the ancient world for being politically engaged.

Today we normally think of a “stoic” as a rather amoral person—obsessed with eliminating uncomfortable emotions, and indifferent to the events around them. But to the ancients, Stoicism was an extremely active and pro-social life stance that focused very much on finding ways to (materially!) serve and benefit the people around us. So much so, in fact, that a Stoic who wanted to withdraw from politics had a lot of explaining to do! Justice—and an especially broad and demanding understanding of Justice at that—is one of the four virtues that lie at the center of the Stoic life, and to be apolitical was tantamount to being un-Stoic.

Modern Stoics have recently dusted off this long-neglected and once-famous aspect of Stoic moral philosophy and begun to bring it back into fashion—McGeehan’s book being a case in point.

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