Epicurean Justice

The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus and his followers advanced a sophisticated theory of justice that occupied a middle position between Plato and Aristotle on the one hand, and some Sophists on the other. They held that justice is neither fully natural nor fully conventional; that there is a robust virtue of justice; and that it is always better to be just than to be unjust, but it is not always better to obey the laws. In this book, the first English-language monograph on the topic, Jan Maximilian Robitzsch draws on a range of sources including papyrological evidence to give a comprehensive account of Epicurean justice. He shows how it relates to Epicurean philosophy as a whole, and discusses to what extent it can be seen to anticipate modern positions such as contractarianism and legal positivism.