Civic Justice

This imaginative and original study traces the passage of the civic idea of justice from its origins in the ancient Greek polis and Roman civitas, through its various transformations in medieval and Renaissance Europe, to the modern world and its adaptation by the American Republic. Peter Murphy systematically explores the meaning of civic justice in its philosophical, art-historical, sociological, and political dimensions. The classical city embodies civic justice as a beautiful equilibrium of contending forces. Murphy traces its ascent and descent. Following the fall of Rome and the collapse of the City form, the civic idea finds renewed expression during the Renaissance in the Italian city-republic, both in its political arrangements and in the works of the great humanist architects who captured the virtues of civic pride, proportion, symmetry, and moral beauty in stone. The humanist legacy will in turn profoundly influence later European society and the new world. Reflected in its historical oscillations, the delicate balance of civic forces is frequently subject to crisis: it breaks down or is altered by the emergence of the absolutist state, capitalism, mercantile imperialism, and modern expansionism. In analysing these, Murphy addresses fundamental questions about the use and abuse of space in city architecture, the quality of urban life, and the interplay of reason and authority, freedom and limits, and modernity and antiquity in Europe and America. He concludes with a sustained reflection on the legacy of the American Republic. Founded on a torturous compromise between resistance to authority and the civic ideals of justice, America becomes the first great republic to disavow the city - a disavowal that has had enduring and tragic effects on its politics and social life. This superb volume is a provocative re-evaluation of the significance of humanism and the relevance of an enduring classical idea to contemporary life.