The optimates: In defense of liberty

Abstract

Tumultuous times is what in political science we could say in view of the turbulent political climate and the motley selection of political parties and political ideologies prevailing today, it is necessary for this article to address the origins of structured political groups with serious differentiations in a vision of state and how to carry out public policies in a specific country. To do so, we do not have to go back to a modern French-style republics, but to the very origin of Western civilization, the Roman Republic, where we find clearly differentiated factions: The optimates and the populares, we will focus especially on the former, because despite the fact that with this group could be catalogued by contemporary political scientists as conservative, we see that in this precursor faction of a modern political party presented among its ranks two unconditional defenders of freedom and of the principles that today we identify them as libertarianism, these illustrious characters were Cato the Younger and Marcus Tullius Cicero. We will analyze the impact they had on the late period of the Roman Republic and later on the liberal thinkers of the West who would see in them an example to follow as unconditional defenders of a republican model that avoids the scourges of tyranny and authoritarianism. We will also discuss the influence these jurists had on the jurisprudence, legislation, and political theory of more contemporary Western times.