The deep & ambivalent histories of #Cicero’s ‘salus populi suprema lex esto’, ‘the health of the people should be [not is!] the supreme law’, span everything from ‘the health of the Emperor’ (with those tangled connections of nomos & nemein—the Shepherd-King) to the body politic

So there is an association that @DrMatthewSweet has discussed before: the health of the ruler is the health of the people; the application of the *law* governs the health of the nation; the healing of the people is the healing of the body politic. The many become the one

As this inner logic suggests, in the argument put by Ferejohn and Pasquino, its use from Machiavelli to Rousseau, is ‘a kind of bridge between the Roman model of dictatorship and the modern idea of constitutional emergency powers’—which should make us pause for thought

Hence the maxim is applied from Hobbes through Locke, Hutcheson & the Founders—but always freighted with its underlying tensions. As Adams adroitly observed, ‘The public good, the salus populi is the professed end of all government, the most despotic, as well as the most free’

In the 19C, the maxim definitely *was* secularised in Europe & the US as sanction for the exercise of radical state reform of public health. We justifiably read this as progress. But pause also to consider the equivocal registers of ‘health’, ‘NHS’, ‘law’ abroad in this UK crisis