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| Republicanism |
Republicanism is one of the great traditions of Western political thought. To say that republicanism is a "tradition" of political thought is to say that distinctively republican ideas about politics have been championed by a number of authors in the history of political theorizing, and that many of the later authors who championed those ideas consciously drew on and developed the work of earlier ones.
This continuity of reference and influence makes it possible to trace a republican strand in Western political writing. But what ideas about politics are distinctively republican? What ideas define the republican tradition?
The republican tradition is often associated with the claims that citizens can only be free in a free society, that the opposite of freedom is a state of dependence akin to slavery, that societies are most likely to enjoy freedom and to realize their common good when they are governed by politically engaged citizens who act from the civic virtues, and that the pursuit of the common good is undermined when citizens' virtues are corrupted by selfishness, luxury, and ambition. These claims turn up consistently in the writings which make up the republican tradition from Rome at least through the eighteenth century.
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| The classic texts |
The classic texts of the republican tradition were produced in political circumstances very different than those of the early twenty-first century. These texts commend ways of life, such as a life of politically active citizenship, that are open to relatively few citizens of large, modern societies such as England and the United States.
The political threats in the face of which these texts were produced were quite different than the threats to liberty and equality posed by the modern states of late capitalism. Republicans' emphasis on civic virtues raises the possibility that republican politics would be difficult to sustain under conditions of moral pluralism.
It is therefore not immediately clear that republicanism can provide guidance to modern politics. Even if republican ideas can provide some guidance, it is far from clear that republicanism alone can provide sufficient guidance. Perhaps republican ideas about politics are most useful as supplements to political theories that belong to other traditions of political thought and that are explicitly framed for current conditions.
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| political philosophy |
Republicanism has enjoyed a revival in legal and political philosophy since the 1980s. Those who have revived republicanism in these disciplines have tried to apply the insights and arguments of the tradition to contemporary politics.
But some participants in the revival themselves seem to raise questions about the sufficiency and distinctiveness of republicanism. They move easily between republicanism and democratic liberalism and seem content to describe themselves as both republicans and liberals.
The fact that they do so raises questions about whether any version of republicanism that is of more than historical interest is faithful to ideas that have distinguished the republican tradition.
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| contemporary politics |
It also raises questions about whether versions of republicanism that bear on contemporary politics are part of a strand that ought to remain distinct from other movements of political thought. Perhaps the insights of republicanism are best absorbed into liberalism, a tradition which has its origins in the early modern period.
Late twentieth-century work on republican views of liberty has, however, changed the way historians and political theorists think about republicanism. It has already shed new light on some of the classic texts in the republican tradition.
It promises to show how some of the claims characteristic of republican writing can be systematically united and given a theoretical basis. And it promises to illuminate deep and interesting differences between republicanism and liberalism. If these promises can be made good, then republicanism's claim to be a distinctive family of political thought—and one of continuing relevance—can be vindicated.
Roman Republicanism
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| Roman Republicanism |
The origins of the republican tradition lie in the writings of Roman political thinkers, such as Cicero and Sallust, who lamented and analyzed Rome's transformation into an empire just before the beginning of the common era. They came to be called "republicans" in part because the form of government they favored was that of pre-imperial Rome—a regime for which Cicero popularized the name "the republic."
They are also called "republicans" because of the features of that government that they seized upon when arguing that rule by the republic's government was superior to imperial rule. The words "republic" and "republicanism" derive from the Latin phrase res publica, which means "public matter."
According to these thinkers, the republic was better suited to advance the common good of the Roman people than the empire was because, unlike the empire, its government was participatory. It was governed by publicspirited citizens—in particular, public-spirited citizens serving in the Roman senate—who devoted themselves to the pursuit of public matters rather than to the pursuit of their own wealth and ambition.
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| Dream of Scipio |
In the "Dream of Scipio," Cicero famously claimed that those who dedicate themselves to the preservation of the republic would enjoy an eternal reward. Such devotion to the republic, he thought, required civic virtue. Republican writers claimed that the Roman republic was subverted by corruption. It was subverted, they said, by those who sought and used political power to further their own ends rather than the common good of the Roman people.
Renaissance and Early Modern Republicanism
Republicanism had little impact on the political thought of the Middle Ages, though some of the writings of Cicero were certainly known to such great medieval philosophers as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. But the writings of the Roman republicans were important sources for political thinkers in Renaissance Italy who wanted to maintain the freedom of city-states against internal and external threats.
They were also important sources for thinkers in seventeenth-century England who opposed the absolutist tendencies of the Crown. These writers located themselves in the tradition of Roman republicanism.
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| Renaissance Italy |
They drew on republican claims about the importance of political participation, the need for a virtuous citizenry and the threats posed by corruption and self-interest, even as they adapted those claims to their own situations.
Among Italian thinkers, the greatest was undoubtedly Machiavelli, especially the Machiavelli who wrote The Discourses. Machiavelli believed that the citizens could only enjoy freedom if their city was free.
One of the most significant threats to a city's freedom, he argued, was an internal threat: the threat posed to a city's good government by factions that would pursue their own interests once in power. Inspired by the political ideas of the humanist tradition and the writings of Roman republicans, Machiavelli argued that the dangers of factionalism could best be averted by a government of citizens committed to the common goods of civic wealth, glory, and independence.
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| The Discourses |
English republicans such as John Milton and James Harrington were less concerned with the threat of faction than they were with what they regarded as the absolutist tendencies of the monarchy. They maintained that absolute power corrupted, but it did not corrupt only the monarch.
A powerful court, they thought, was one that corrupted courtiers and politicians by encouraging their dependence upon royal favor. English republicans stressed the importance of the civic virtues, among which they numbered independence and frugality.
They held up as models of good government the republics of Renaissance Italy, and the Roman republic. Historians sometimes call them "commonwealth men" because of their support for the Puritan commonwealth.
The Republican Revival
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| The Republican Revival |
The last third of the twentieth century saw a resurgence of scholarly interest in republicanism, primarily but not exclusively in the English-speaking world. The resurgence of interest among American Constitutional lawyers in the 1980s and 1990s came to be known as the "republican revival."
That term can be stretched to encompass the contemporaneous revival of interest in republicanism among political philosophers. The republican revival among lawyers and philosophers was preceded by and drew upon work by historians of Renaissance political thought and by historians of the American founding.
Indeed it was because of the resurgence of interest among historians that so much has been learned about early modern republicanism. It is useful to begin a survey of the republican revival with a look at some of the historical work that preceded and influenced legal philosophers responsible for the revival.
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| Louis Hartz |
In the 1950s Louis Hartz articulated what was for a time the received orthodoxy about the intellectual foundations of the American Revolution and founding. According to Hartz, the revolutionaries and founders owed their greatest intellectual debts to the classical liberalism Hartz ascribed to John Locke. In the 1960s historians of the American founding and its intellectual antecedents, notably Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood, raised serious challenges to this orthodoxy.
Bailyn and Wood argued powerfully that the intellectual underpinnings of the revolution and the founding period were in large part republican, drawn from the English commonwealth tradition of the previous century. John Pocock, who traced the origins of the commonwealth thought to Renaissance Italy, provided an even longer genealogy for American republicanism.
Bailyn and Wood mined the pamphlets and popular literature of early America for evidence of republican political thinking. The expressions of republicanism they found there included pervasive emphasis on the need for citizens to dedicate themselves to the common good and on the deleterious effect of faction and the elevation of private over public interest, concern with the corrupting effects of various forms of dependence upon Britain (including dependence on its monied and manufacturing interests), and the description of American dependence as a condition of slavery.
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| condition of slavery |
Pocock, Bailyn, and Wood all maintained that the republicanism of the American founding was only gradually eclipsed by other forms of political thought in the years or decades that followed.
The question of whether and to what extent the American founders were republicans is a question of some importance for legal philosophy. The founding period of the United States was the period in which the body of the American Constitution and the Bill of Rights were written.
The conclusion that the founders owed deep intellectual debts to republicanism arguably has profound implications for how the Constitution and the Bill of Rights should be read and applied. The argument that it has such implications seemed especially pressing to legal scholars at a time when some were defending originalist canons of Constitutional interpretation.
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| profound implications |
In the 1980s Constitutional scholars began to draw on the historical work of Pocock, Bailyn, Wood, and others, and initiated the republican revival in legal scholarship.
The leading figures of this revival, such as Cass Sunstein and Frank Michelman, emphasized the participatory strain of republicanism. Republican government, according to these thinkers, is government by citizens who participate in politics.
The politics in which they are to participate is to be deliberative: citizens of a republican regime are to participate in collective deliberations about public matters. Such public deliberation, they argued, promises to combat the factionalism and self-interest that republicans had traditionally seen as undermining good government.
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| public deliberation |
It does so because the process of deliberating with others is not one of bargaining in which parties try to satisfy the preferences they have formed before public deliberation begins. Rather, it is to be a process of reasoning with others about how to advance the common good. When citizens reason together about the common good, they are forced to rethink whatever selfand groupinterested preferences they may bring into public deliberation.
Republican accounts of politics had previously been addressed to societies much smaller than the democracies of the late twentieth century. Framing a version of republicanism adequate for such large societies required imagining institutional forms through which republican government could be exercised within them.
The leaders of the republican revival in the law offered republican readings of the American constitution and drew out the implications of those readings for a host of questions in public law, from environmental law to campaign finance reform.
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| finance reform |
The republicanism offered by republican revivalists in the legal academy—like the republicanism uncovered by historians of the American founding—emphasized the value of political participation, the importance of their commitment to the common good and the threat posed by citizens' unregulated pursuit of selfand groupinterested preferences.
Because of these emphases, republicanism seemed to offer a healthy corrective to the individualism, self-interest, acquisitiveness, and withdrawal from public life that some thinkers, such as Michael Sandel, have alleged that liberalism encourages.
Yet the republicans in the legal academy saw significant continuities between their own views and some forms of liberalism, particularly between their own views and the version of liberalism developed and refined by John Rawls from the 1960s until his death in 2003.
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| John Rawls |
By a decade after the republican revival began in American law schools, some of its leading figures had ceased to insist that there was anything distinctively republican about their views.
Even some who continued to describe themselves as republicans, such as Sunstein, also described themselves as liberals and "deliberative democrats" as well. The development of a republicanism that was explicitly contrasted with liberalism had to await the republican revival in constructive political philosophy.
According to some leading republican political philosophers, the differences between republicanism and liberalism lie, not in the former's emphasis on political participation and civic virtue or in the latter's emphasis on individual rights, but in the very different conceptions of political freedom associated with each.
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| individual rights |
Liberalism, as its name suggests, is a political philosophy that values liberty. The liberty that liberals are sometimes said to value is what has come to be called "negative liberty." Someone enjoys negative liberty to the extent that she can act as she likes, without external impediments.
Political liberty is the freedom citizens enjoy in political society. Those who identify political liberty with negative liberty must think that even the best law is an external impediment to action, and so interferes with citizens' political liberty.
If they also think, as liberals do, that it is the job of government to promote and secure political liberty, then they must also think government should rely as little on these impediments as possible. It should secure as much negative liberty for citizens as is compatible with the enforcement of laws needed to maintain public order.
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| public order |
Some of the most prominent republicans who have contrasted their views with liberalism have contrasted them with versions of liberalism which equate political liberty with negative liberty. They have introduced another kind of freedom, which they call "freedom as nondomination."
They have argued either that political liberty includes both negative liberty and liberty as nondomination, or that it consists in liberty as nondomination alone. To appreciate the differences these republicans see between liberalism and their own views, it is necessary to see what it is for one agent to dominate another.
One agent dominates another just in case the former is in a position to interfere arbitrarily with the choices of the latter. An agent is in a position to interfere arbitrarily with another's choices just in case that agent is able to interfere with the other's choices without having to take the latter's interests into account.
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| interfere arbitrarily |
This way of characterizing domination implies that there are two important differences between liberal views which identify political liberty with negative liberty and republican views which either equate political liberty with liberty as nondomination, or which claim that political liberty includes liberty as nondomination.
One difference is that, according to the latter, not all laws restrict citizens' freedom. When political authorities take account of the interests of citizens in the enactment and enforcement of law, they do not dominate citizens.
They do not dominate them because, though the laws may interfere with citizens' freedom of action, they do not do so arbitrarily. Therefore, though these authorities compromise citizens' freedom on liberal accounts which equate liberty with negative liberty, they do not do so on republican accounts.
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| republican accounts |
The other difference is that republicans think one person can restrict another's liberty just by being in a position to interfere with him arbitrarily, even if she never actually interferes with him at all.
Thus a political authority who can exercise power without accountability, but who chooses to enact laws which further the common good, still dominates citizens. These citizens therefore lack political freedom on republican accounts but not on liberal ones.
The account of liberty as nondomination has been stated and defended most notably by Philip Pettit, beginning in the mid-1990s. Pettit labels that account of freedom a "republican" account because he claims that it is found in the seminal texts of the republican tradition.
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| republican tradition |
He argues quite convincingly that, by taking freedom understood as nondomination as the supreme political value, he can account for why republicans have valued political participation and why they have maintained that citizens are free only in free societies.
Quentin Skinner, the historian of Renaissance republicanism, also has claimed to have found a distinctive conception of liberty in the republican tradition. In response to Pettit's work, Skinner has argued that republican political liberty includes both negative liberty and liberty as nondomination. Whether Pettit's or Skinner's view of political liberty is more faithful to the texts remains a matter of scholarly debate.
What is beyond debate is that Pettit's conceptual work on republican liberty has greatly influenced historical work on republicanism, and that Pettit and Skinner have taken the republican revival to a new level of philosophical sophistication. Questions remain, however, about exactly where their versions of republicanism differ from prominent forms of liberalism which do not equate political liberty with negative liberty.
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| negative liberty |
The liberalism developed by Rawls in the last third of the twentieth century has been enormously influential. Rawls argued for principles of justice which, he maintained, would be agreed to in what he called "the original position."
The original position is, like the state of nature in Locke's work, a condition appropriate for writing a social contract. Thus the principles of justice Rawls defends are principles citizens would choose for themselves under the conditions appropriate for such a choice.
Rawls calls a society which is regulated by those principles a "well-ordered society." When citizens live in a wellordered society and when their own plans are in accord with the principles of justice, they live under and act from principles they would give to themselves. To be autonomous is, literally, to give oneself a law. Citizens who live in a well-ordered society and act from principles they would give themselves therefore enjoy an important form of autonomy, which Rawls calls "political autonomy."
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| political autonomy |
