Republican Theory in Political Thought: Virtuous or Virtual

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REPUBLICAN THEORY IN POLITICAL THOUGHT

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Also by Bill Brugger DEMOCRACY AND ORGANISATION IN THE CHINESE INDUSTRIAL ENTERPRISE, 1948–1953 CONTEMPORARY CHINA CHINA: The Impact of the Cultural Revolution (editor) CHINA SINCE THE ‘GANG OF FOUR’ (editor) CHINA: Liberation and Transformation, 1942–62 CHINA: Radicalism to Revisionism, 1962–79 CHINESE MARXISM IN FLUX: Essays on Epistemology, Ideology and Political Economy (editor) MODERNISATION AND REVOLUTION (with K. Hannan) AUSTRALIAN POLITICS: Theory and Practice (with D. Jaensch) CHINESE MARXISM IN THE POST-MAO ERA (with D. Kelly) POLITICS, ECONOMY AND SOCIETY IN CONTEMPORARY CHINA (with S. Reglar)

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Republican Theory in Political Thought Virtuous or Virtual? Bill Brugger Professor of Politics Flinders University Adelaide

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First published in Great Britain 1999 by

MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0–333–75141–8 First published in the United States of America 1999 by ST. MARTIN’S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 0–312–22053–7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brugger, Bill. Republican theory in political thought : virtuous or virtual? / Bill Brugger. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–312–22053–7 (cloth) 1. Republicanism—History. 2. Republics—History. I. Title. JC421.B797 1999 321.8'6—dc21 98–43284 CIP © Bill Brugger 1999 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10 08

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

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Contents Acknowledgements

vii

Introduction

1

1.

Early Modern Republicanism

22

2.

Enlightenment Republicanism

49

3.

Mechanical Republicanism: The American Case

79

4.

Contemporary Republicanism in What Used to be Called the ‘First World’

118

Prospects for Republicanism Elsewhere

153

5.

Conclusion

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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Acknowledgements Thanks are due to Sherrie Ryan, Sarah Munn and Gerry Pye for their helpful comments, to Linda Auld and Julie Tonkin for their editorial work and to Suzanne Brugger for her support.

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Introduction Recently there has been a considerable revival of interest in the theme of republicanism in the United States and some other Englishspeaking countries. Republicanism has become ‘trendy’: ‘Republicanism’, ‘classical republicanism’, and ‘civic humanism’ are cognates for a paradigm of social organization – or ideology – which in the last two decades has become a ‘happening’ within American political thought. The new republicanism (in contrast to the old republicanism of the Federalist Papers, for example) has achieved the status of an intellectual buzzword; the addition of ‘republicanism’ to the title of any scholarly work makes the work appear both more relevant and respectable (Engeman 1993: 331). Amongst United States historians, that revival has been the result of a re-interpretation of the country’s post-revolutionary history (Pocock 1975). More generally, the revival has been due to a general dissatisfaction with interest group pluralism and an economic model of politics, pioneered by Anthony Downs (1957), which are felt to have collapsed the public interest into private interests (Sandel 1996; Sunstein 1993b). The republican tradition is considered attractive because, while recognizing the salience and even the value of group struggle in the spirit of Niccolò Machiavelli, it preserves a hostility towards what used to be called ‘factions’. A good government, it holds, is one which selects all that is best in divided interests and distils them in the name of the public interest or the common good. But, of course, old questions remain about the very existence of a common good, who is to do the selecting and why ‘factions’ are so very bad. Predictably, ‘civic republicans’ have been condemned, in the manner once directed at ‘communists’, as élitist harbingers of ‘totalitarianism’ (for example Gey 1993). The minimum republican requirement of selecting all that is best in divided interests and distiling them in the name of the common good overlaps elements of both the social liberal tradition and a tradition which has become known as communitarian; and the formulation of contemporary republicanism has been influenced by 1

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Republican Theory in Political Thought

the recent heated debate between scholars identified as liberals and communitarians, or in John Rawls’ (1988: 272–3) terms between liberals and civic humanists. Thus a continuum may be discerned with positions marked out according to republican thinkers’ proximity to a liberal or a communitarian stand-point. But a continuum model is inadequate to capture modern republican thought. Let us consider a triangle, the three points of which are liberal-oriented, communitarian-oriented and pragmatist.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LIBERALS AND REPUBLICANS What are the differences between liberals and republicans? In early modern republicanism there were not many, since they were not pitted one against another but against oppressive monarchical rule. But today, where liberals and republicans are often opposed, scholars often highlight differences which are misleadingly read back into history. From the perspective of the communitarian point of the triangle, liberalism has always been too abstract. It assumes a presocial individual. It divorces people from the context in which they act. It brackets off many vital constitutive features of the self and consigns them to a private sphere which is deemed ‘non-political’. A few people at the communitarian end of the republican spectrum, therefore, affirm a holist ontology. More generally, however, republicans affirm an individualist ontology or an ontology which is family-based or relationship-based but lean towards a collectivist advocacy. That collectivist advocacy has engendered the ire of many liberals. Consider liberal criticisms levelled against Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu and Jean Jacques Rousseau. The liberalpluralist, Isaiah Berlin (1969) criticized the former, when Montesquieu ‘forgot his liberal moments’, for what he calls his positive view of liberty: that is a view of liberty which stresses self-mastery in a collective context. Berlin, and more famously the liberal Benjamin Constant (1988: 106–9, 177–8), criticized Rousseau also for that ‘positive’ view of liberty and the dangers of tyranny implied by his collectivist notion of sovereignty. The difference between the critics and those eighteenth-century writers, however, does not lie in their ontology since both of the latter were individualist in that regard. Some liberals, such as T. H. Green, moreover, could affirm a holist

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ontology. The usual difference lies at the level of advocacy. But note I say usual rather than definitive. Charles Taylor (1989a), a notable exponent of ‘civic republicanism’ who highlighted the disjunction between ontology and advocacy, has combined a holist ontology with an individualist advocacy. In charting differences, therefore, scholars must be very careful of crude statements to the effect that individualist ontology is characteristic of all liberals and holist ontology is characteristic of republicans. Individualist ontology is probably more common in both. Nevertheless collectivist rather than individualist advocacy is more frequently found at the communitarian point of the republican triangle. At that point there is an emphasis on virtues. A long tradition followed Cicero (1967: I, V–XLV, 44–96) in referring to ‘four cardinal virtues’, wisdom/prudence, justice/generosity (public spirit), fortitude and temperance (decorum), noting the conflict which can occur among them. Many others were added subsequently and attempts were made to determine their relative importance.1 I shall argue later that republican thought was characterized by an attempt to distil out of those virtues explicitly civic virtues. Since liberals may also talk about virtues, a consideration of virtues by itself is not a feature distinguishing liberals from republicans. Amongst republicans at the communitarian point of the triangle, however, there is often a virtue-centred approach which is absent in liberalism. What is the difference between a virtue-centred approach and its opposite – an act or rule-centred approach? J. B. Schneewind (1990) has argued that the central question in a virtue-centred approach is not ‘what should I do? but ‘what sort of person am I to be?’ The common good, therefore, depends on enough people having the appropriate virtues and virtuous motivations. An actcentred approach, on the other hand, being concerned with what to do, is not primarily concerned with motivations but merely with rules which shape behaviour. A virtue-centred approach, moreover, is highly contextual giving priority to the judgment of the virtuous rather than to rules and often, but not always, according special status to people with greater insight into virtues appropriate to a situation. According to that approach, virtue constitutes individual personality and the community. Living alone and living without virtue are harmful to both. There must, of course, be rules which give rise to virtues but virtue-centred theory insists that cardinal virtues have a life of their own and may not be reduced to rules (Schneewind: 43–4).

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That way of looking at the world is not liberal. Liberal theory does not see virtues standing on their own; it is rule-centred. In John Locke’s (1910: II, XXVIII, 284) words: By what standard soever we frame in our minds the ideas of virtues or vices, they consist only and are made up of collections of simple ideas which we originally received from sense or reflection, and their rectitude, or obliquity, consists in the agreement or disagreement with those patterns prescribed by some law. Employing the distinction between virtue-centred and rule-centred approaches as a way of demarcating republicans from liberals, however, is bedevilled by the fact that the approach of many republicans, even at the communitarian point of the triangle, has also been rule-based. After all, rule-based theory is characteristic of Christianity. For the Christian, however much faith or love might be fundamental Christian values and however much Christians might wish that they ought to stand on their own, the starting point in social theory, at least since St. Thomas Aquinas tried to combine Aristotelian value theory and natural law, has been acts which might or might not be sins prescribed by a law (Schneewind 1990: 44–5). The belief that love and faith are commands of God, moreover, subsumes them under a supreme law and deprives them of the status of virtues standing alone. Evil, likewise, is defined by a rule and can under no circumstances be countenanced. We obviously cannot disqualify Christians as republicans. Indeed, Chapter 1 will note, the seventeenth-century English republicans were amongst the most zealous Christians. Kantian republicanism, discussed in Chapter 2, was also rule-centred. Immanuel Kant’s political theory was concerned with organizing rules governing Right and justice rather than an affirmation of virtue which belonged to a different sphere of life. I cannot, therefore, characterize republican theory as virtue-centred. I merely wish to note that, whereas many republicans, at the communitarian point of the triangle and perhaps at others, have subscribed to a rule-centred ontology, their advocacy to all intents and purposes has been closer to that of virtue-centred theorists. Subsequent chapters will observe that they achieved that position by articulating a set of artificial civic virtues which were separate from the others, as noted above. They were separate, moreover, to the extent that they depended on a relatively autonomous sphere of politics.

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Those at the pragmatist point of the republican triangle have much less to say about virtues than those at the communitarian point. They agree, however, that liberals tend to maintain an abstract pre-political stance and distance themselves too much from actual political activity but, contrary to those at the communitarian point, stress that truth is actually created in that activity (Barber 1984: 30). Benjamin Barber (1984: 26–92), for example, has mounted a strong attack on liberalism’s ‘Newtonian’ background – the belief in an antecedent mechanics of human nature, its ‘Cartesian’ epistemology which presupposes the possibility of neutral scientific observation and its atomistic psychology. As a pragmatist he rejected antecedent truth in the realm of politics. Politics, he argued, creates its own conditions for existence. Politics must not depend on philosophy (Barber 1984: 169) since it is not about making correct choices but making choices correctly (Barber 1984: 200).2 Politics itself defines what liberty and equality are to mean (Barber 1984: 157) and there can be no pre-political master principle in the manner proposed by Kant. Since it is its own epistemology, people know about politics by engaging in it. But what is the difference between liberals and republicans at the liberal point in the triangle? An apparent difference, which will be explored in this book, lies in the republican refusal to collapse politics into economics, a repudiation of what has recently become known as public choice theory, a criticism of the excessive privatization of social life and a belief in leadership in forging the public interest. But many self-professed social liberals would not accept that those features constitute a difference. I wonder also whether they would accept the argument that liberals and republicans have a different conception of liberty. There are many different arguments about liberty. One school of thought contends that whereas liberalism maintains at its core a negative concept of liberty or freedom from interference, republican self-determination, from which all other republican values are said to flow, in its ‘deep’ early modern version, demanded a positive view of liberty (Michelman 1986: 24–6, 47). Quentin Skinner (1984 and 1990), however, has made a convincing case that the republican conception of liberty, in its early modern version, was essentially negative. Following Skinner, Philip Pettit (1993a) initially maintained that, while both liberals and republicans are usually concerned with liberty defined in a negative sense, liberals adopt a quantitative view – a person’s liberty is a measure of the degree of non-interference;

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thus a person is always to some extent unfree because every liberty in one place entails a constraint at another and one of the major preoccupations of utilitarianism has been to work out the optimal balance of liberty and constraint. Republicans, on the other hand, adhere to a qualitative view; a person is free to the extent that there exist institutional protections against interference. Republican liberty, as he put it, is enjoyed resiliently. Following Montesquieu (1989: XII, II, 188), Pettit saw the issue for republicans as not simply being left alone – a situation which may occur in a despotism – but enjoying the security of institutions which protect a person from unwanted interference. Of those institutions, some might be customary but the most important are legal. Thus a liberal might argue that all law is a restraint on liberty even though restraints on individuals might be justified in promoting the greater liberty of the whole society. Republicans, on the other hand, tend to consider law as enabling and providing the basis for non-interference. By 1997, however, Pettit (1997: 27) had gone much further than Skinner in seeing republican liberty as a third form of liberty which was not typically positive nor negative and that became the organizing feature of his book Republicanism. Describing the republican conception of liberty in the sense of non-domination by others, he rejected the characterization of republican liberty simply as negative on the grounds that there is a strong theme in republican writing which insists that domination might still exist in the absence of interference, as in the case of the relationship between the benevolent slave-owner who does not interfere with the slave’s choices. Liberty, moreover, might be lost even where there is no interference. Republicans, therefore, condemn domination even if actual interference does not take place whereas liberals tend to believe that only actual interference matters. The point for republicans is not to have any kind of choice or the quantity of choice but to have undominated choice – quality choice. That view of liberty should not be seen simply in terms of the positive view of liberty as selfmastery through political participation but should be considered as the absence of mastery by others. But Pettit did not dismiss the notion of freedom as personal self-mastery. He simply relegated it. While there certainly can be non-domination without personal selfmastery, he noted, there can hardly be any meaningful form of self-mastery without non-domination (Pettit 1997: 81–2). Interference, on the other hand, might exist without domination, as in the case of non-arbitrary interference to further one’s interests

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or law based on the common good (Pettit 1997: 21–7). Such interference rather than an infringement of liberty actually creates it. While repeating Skinner’s rejection of positive liberty by noting the recurrent theme in republican writing which emphasizes the importance of certain types of non-interference, Pettit nevertheless came to reject the idea of non-interference as a defining element of republican liberty.3 Non-domination, Pettit (1997: 92–5) maintained, depends on a strong constitutional state. After all, affirming the principle of nondomination in a state which can not guarantee it may result in either civil war or a culture of perpetual deterrence. Non-domination, moreover, has to be intense. Indeed the intensity of non-domination, within limits, takes precedence over its extent. The former may enlarge the latter while the reverse is not necessarily the case (Pettit 1997: 103–6). That republican conception of liberty as non-domination can be best summed up by considering its antonyms. For the liberal, the opposite of liberty is simply restraint while, for the republican, the opposite of liberty is, in the strongest sense, slavery, in a weaker sense subordination to the will of others and, in an even weaker sense, simply vulnerability. Republican liberty, therefore, defies the attempts of those theorists who seek to separate liberty from security (Pettit 1997: 46). Pettit’s (1997: 106–9) argument about the character of institutions is perhaps the most important part of his analysis. Institutions of the free state, he maintained, do not cause liberty. They constitute it. He illustrated that proposition by analogy. Antibodies in the blood do not cause immunity from disease; the presence of those antibodies is what immunity actually means. The antibodies constitute immunity. Likewise legal institutions in a republican state dedicated to non-domination do not cause liberty. They constitute it. Here I am tempted, in the manner of Barber, to ask: what causes institutions? If it is dialogical politics then politics itself constitutes liberty. The crux of the matter, for Pettit (1993b: 164–71; 1997: 67, 122), is the common argument that whereas the liberal sees liberty as essentially pre-social, the republican sees liberty as constituted by the law which transforms customs and creates citizens. The ‘freedom of the city’ or civic liberty is of much greater value than the ‘freedom of the heath’. For the republican, the rule of law brings liberty into existence.

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The idea of liberty as non-domination leads to a conception of rights somewhat different from that of liberals. Original liberalism derived much of its philosophy from natural rights thinking which was deontological. Republicans, on the other hand, Pettit argued, while sometimes talking about ‘natural rights’, tend to seek a consequentialist justification – an observation which calls into question Kant’s republicanism which Pettit ignores but to which we shall return. For many liberals the notion of natural rights is important in the affirmation of a private sphere into which the state cannot intrude. A republican justification for maintaining a private sphere, on the other hand, might talk about maximizing non-domination in society. After all, as Iris Young (1990: 119–20) pointed out, a private sphere defined by the public sphere tends to increase domination. We should define our own; and the sum total of our self-definitions might minimize domination. That point is rarely understood by critics who are contemptuous of a ‘civic republicanism’ which is supposedly always seen as defining the private in terms of the public (Gey 1993: 811). A commitment to non-domination demands the opposite. Nevertheless a case may be made that by demarcating a specifically private sphere a government might remove irresolveable questions from the public agenda in the hope of furthering the better functioning of public life; but the result of such action can be domination, as many feminists have observed. Perhaps more seriously, as subsequent chapters will explore, the result may be marginalization, which can occur in the absence of domination, and might be more debilitating. Though not all social-liberals would agree, Pettit has made a plausible argument about the difference between liberal and republican views on liberty. There might also be a difference in views concerning the neutrality of the state. Cass Sunstein (1993a: 68–92), also a notable exponent of contemporary republicanism, has argued that the contemporary liberal state, in positing state action as ‘neutral’, tends to privilege the status quo, in particular the current distribution of property. Sunstein, however, has remained at the liberal point of the triangle in his unwillingness to abandon the idea of neutrality, since to do so, he felt in Kantian manner and in clear opposition to Barber, would be to collapse law into politics. Here Sunstein’s pragmatism differs from the position of many postmodernists4 who draw a very different conclusion from the association of neutrality with the status quo and tend to indict liberalism for collapsing politics into law (Connolly 1991: 74, 161).

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Sunstein (1993a: 133–41, 183–5, 351–3) put forward a list of democratic principles to supplement or reinforce contemporary liberal ideals. These were a commitment to internal consistency, to a belief in impersonality and a social point of view in decisionmaking as far as those are possible, to democratic deliberation, public justification and the rights necessary to maintain it, to citizenship seen as widespread participation of independent people aimed to achieve ‘beneficial political outcomes’, to agreement as a regulative idea in which ‘correct’ as opposed to simply perspectively-derived decisions are possible and to political equality which requires, among other things, access to a good education, freedom from desperate conditions, opposition to caste systems and rough equality of opportunity. In short, Sunstein (1993a: 175) proposed an ideal system which does not accord undue respect to existing (exogenous) preferences but seeks to ‘inculcate the best or highest kinds of desires and beliefs’, which was precisely John Stuart Mill’s (1910: 7–10) important qualification, and subversion, of utilitarian neutrality. Sunstein’s (1993a: 186) expressed aim has been to establish ‘a mild form of liberal perfectionism’ – a term which would surely upset Rawls but not Mill. He demanded the creation of a state which is not arbitrary, in the sense of one where decisions by an élite or even a majority are self-serving and are arrived at without the felt need to offer reasons intelligible to different people. Sunstein’s ideals are completely in accord with a powerful strand in traditional republican thought – the attack on arbitrariness. They are also in accord with much in the social liberal tradition and, he would agree, hardly constitute a decisive difference from liberalism. But, in my view, they are also hardly neutral as to the good life. Sunstein and Pettit nevertheless both persist in the view that the republican state must be neutral. If, however, Pettit has succeeded in advancing a view of liberty significantly different from that of social liberals, does his view lead to a significantly different view on that neutrality? In accordance with his view of liberty, he argued that, while republicans and liberals both agree that the state is neutral, the republican conception of neutrality differs from the liberal: Contemporary liberals claim to satisfy neutrality by looking for a state in which each individual is enabled to pursue their own conception of the good. Republicans satisfy neutrality through having the state acknowledge only the ecumenical or non-sectarian good represented by the freedom of its citizens (Pettit 1997: 96n).

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But can Pettit combine neutrality with a commitment to nondomination? Consider once again Pettit’s (1997: 9) insistence that the old dichotomy of positive and negative liberty is misleading and that the difference between liberalism and republicanism lies in the liberal’s stress on freedom from interference as opposed to the republican’s emphasis on freedom from domination. That position leads to a criticism of liberals who are said to adhere to: the assumption that there is nothing inherently oppressive about some people having dominating power over others, provided they do not exercise that power and are not likely to exercise it. This relative indifference to power or domination has made liberalism tolerant of relationships in the home, in the workplace, in the electorate, and elsewhere, that the republican must denounce as paradigms of domination and unfreedom. And it has meant that if liberals are concerned with issues of poverty, ignorance, insecurity and the like, as many are, that is usually because of some commitment independent of their commitment to freedom as noninterference; say, a commitment to the satisfaction of basic needs, or the realization of a certain equality between people. If the state’s concern with non-domination involves distinct views on the proper arrangement of the home and the workplace, how can it be neutral? The basic belief that the state is neutral with regard to the good life can only be sustained, I believe, by a deeper belief that the state must be kept separate from civil society. Pettit’s argument weakens that separation. That is particularly the case when we consider structural domination. I shall return to that point in Chapter 4. Suffice it to say at this point that many left-of-centre liberals would object to the distinction Pettit draws between liberals and republicans and, according to Pettit’s rubric, should be called republicans. Some of them no doubt see no contradiction between their liberalism and republicanism. Rawls, a paradigmatic liberal, they might conclude, has good republican credentials and might agree with some avowed republicans that his ‘original position’ with its ‘veil of ignorance’ reflects republican tenets of impartiality (Michelman 1988: 1567n). If others feel that is going beyond the limits of credibility, they might concur that the later Rawls comes very near to both the liberal and, interestingly, the pragmatic point of the republican triangle. For Rawls (1985), justice was to be

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‘political and not metaphysical’. In my view that advocacy was what four centuries of republicans, gradually escaping from natural law and beset on the way by millenarian outbursts, have been groping for. The development of pragmatic (as in Sunstein 1993a) or postmodern republicanism is not surprising. The earlier Rawls, moreover, was attacked in a manner similar to that endured by many republicans. Consider the criticisms of Rawls by John R. Lucas (1980) from a classical liberal position, by Robert Nisbet (1974) from a conservative position and by the early Michael Sandel (1972) from a communitarian position. Lucas took a stand against justice seen as mutual advantage instead of strict impartiality; Nisbet attacked speculative history. Sandel criticized Rawls for taking human subjects as individuated in advance of any ends they might have. My argument will be that much of the republican tradition is, in fact, based on mutual advantage rather than simple self-sacrifice. Most republican history has indeed been highly speculative, deriving from a fusion of ‘true history’ infused with a moralistic purpose and pragmatic history (Gilbert 1965: 203– 301). It often did appear, in Rousseauesque fashion, as histoire raisonée or hypothetical anthropology,5 as was quite manifest throughout the eighteenth-century Enlightenment (Gay 1977: I, 36–7). Finally, as suggested earlier, republicans, in their argument with tradition, usually did consider people as partly individuated in advance of their ends. But so in practice do most communitarians, including Sandel; the point of difference is that they are loath to admit it (Kukathas and Pettit 1990: 108). Rawls, as he reflected and responded to influences from the three points of the triangle, might be cast as a republican. But he is still more likely to be rejected from the perspective of its communitarian point. This book does not intend to slot him neatly into a box.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN COMMUNITARIANS AND REPUBLICANS I have traced the basic differences between republicans and liberals which will be explored in later chapters. What are the differences between republicans and communitarians? Pettit has argued once again that one of them concerns the neutrality of the state. Can Pettit (1993b: 192) sustain his argument that, despite all their differences, both liberals and republicans are opposed to communitarians

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who deny the possibility of the state being neutral with regard to the good life? I have already cast doubt on republican state neutrality when discussing the difference between a liberal position and Pettit’s republicanism which insists that there is no justified end for the republican state other than the achievement of freedom as nondomination (Pettit 1997: 80, 96–7). Communitarians are more blunt. How can a state be neutral, they ask, if society itself cannot be neutral? After all, the very word ‘society’ indicates a range of shared orientations. With that in mind many scholars throw considerable doubt on the ability of the state, liberal or otherwise, to achieve neutrality (for example, Neal 1985). I shall not affirm those arguments here since I am quite prepared, in Humean fashion, to affirm the value of ‘necessary fictions’, in particular the autonomy of politics, as subsequent chapters will make clear. But, at a philosophical level, I do wish to repeat the question: can non-domination entail the idea of state neutrality? If it cannot then republicans and communitarians are at one on that issue. Thinking historically, moreover, I can find little evidence of any advocacy of a ‘thin’, or, as Sunstein (1993a: 185), following Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, put it, ‘vague’ theory of the good among early modern republicans. For most of them the idea of a free polis was thickly contextual. Some scholars have argued that United States republicanism, discussed in Chapter 3, does present a ‘thin’ theory of the good though I am far from convinced. In that connection Taylor (1989a: 176–7) has made the point that the organs of the American state can avoid explicit commitments concerning belief in God and the status of homosexuals but not on the icons of American history; and, we shall see, mainstream republican thought is replete with iconography. A stronger case can be made on Kantian grounds for a ‘thin’ theory of the good in what I characterize in Chapter 2 as ‘virtual’ republicanism – a republic based on hypothetical representation – but that kind of republicanism is one which Pettit avoids. Suffice it, at this stage, to cast doubt on the first of Pettit’s claims to separate republicans from communitarians. Pettit’s (1997: 8) second claim is that republicanism should be distinguished from that ‘populist’ form of communitarianism which he associated with Hannah Arendt (1958, 1963). Populist communitarianism, often misleadingly described as ‘republicanism’, apparently:

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represents the people in their collective presence as master and the state as servant and suggests that the people ought to rely on state representatives and officials only where absolutely necessary; direct democracy, whether by assembly or plebiscite is the systematically preferred option. Republicanism, on the other hand: sees the people as trustor both individually and collectively; and sees the state as trustee; in particular it sees the people as trusting the state to ensure a dispensation of non-arbitrary rule. Republicans, Pettit maintained, do not desire general political participation as an end in itself but only as a means to secure freedom from domination. As will be argued below, Pettit is correct in observing that earlier forms of republicanism displayed a limited role for popular participation. Many modern recapitulations of ‘classical republicanism’ have been misleading in lumping together an Athenian participatory model with a model of the mixed constitution, celebrated originally by Polybius, which derived from Sparta and Rome and had little to do with participation (Nippel 1994: 7–9). But it is difficult to accept Pettit’s identification of communitarianism with populism. That identification applies to no communitarian in the Hegelian stream which has been extremely influential. The charge of populism, however, might apply to Barber’s (1984: 194, 236–7) Strong Democracy, which I consider to be within the republican tradition at the pragmatist point of the triangle. I shall discuss at length the positions of Pettit and Barber in Chapter 4, but at this stage I must outline their basic points of difference and commonality. Pettit I characterize as a ‘weak republican’ and Barber as a ‘strong republican’, though he called himself a ‘strong democrat’. They arrived at their different evaluations of democracy through different evaluations of liberalism – and, as Chapter 3 will flesh out, it is difficult nowadays to define anything except through the prism of liberalism. As noted above, Pettit criticized conventional forms of liberalism rather narrowly for their insistence on freedom as non-interference and their colourless view of political life but did not demand widespread political participation. Barber, however, did, going further than Sunstein who shared some of his pragmatist views. In contrast to liberalism, Barber envisaged democratic participation as the process of constructing politics and

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not merely one means among others to secure something else. Nondomination, as a procedural norm, might be a condition of effective political discourse but it is not its object. Weak republicans, at the liberal point of the triangle, would probably denounce Barber’s position as ‘communitarian’ but that would be misleading since Barber refused to regard community as antecedent to politics; as he saw it community is to a large extent created by politics (Barber 1984: 133). Barber and Pettit, therefore, both distanced themselves from the ontological holism characteristic of communitarians. We have noted that such holism is usually, but not always, absent among republican writers although they might use organic analogy (Pocock 1975: 307–8). To illustrate the point, let us turn once again to Montesquieu and Rousseau but this time consider a communitarian objection to their views – that of G. W. F. Hegel whose influence is important among those contemporary communitarians who stress the organic nature of communities and the important constitutive role of traditions. Not all of those communitarians, however, have acknowledged that influence. Hegel (1967: 178, 292) criticized Montesquieu for seeing a constitution as something which people actually make and not ‘in and by itself’ and for advocating a separation of powers which ‘destroys the unity of the state’. He criticized Rousseau directly for his individualist ontology, seeing Rousseau’s theory as being based on individual self-interest and not ‘a people’s organic life’ (Hegel 1967: 156–7). We see here that the argument of some critics that a central principle of ‘civic republicanism’ rests on the affirmation of an organic community, as exemplified by Steven G. Gey (1993: 806), is quite simply wrong. We also see more clearly than before why the strong democratic position, exemplified by Barber, should not be considered as communitarian. On the first point, noted above, Barker would side with Montesquieu rather than Hegel. Despite his concentration on the constitutive nature of democratic participation and the importance of self-regulation, Barber (1984: 308–9) emphasized constitutional checks and balances. On the second point he contrasted his ‘strong democracy’ with democracy based on organic unity (Barber: 1984: 148–50). Since community was to a large extent created by politics, moreover, he did not accord tradition the weight it often has in communitarian discourse (for example, MacIntyre: 1984). Barber advocated creating a new polity by new political action. Despite Barber’s trenchant denunciation of liberalism and what appear to

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be very radical proposals for reform, he came to a hardly communitarian conclusion: ‘there is little wrong with liberal institutions that a strong dose of political participation and reactivated citizenship cannot cure’ (Barber 1984: xi). Whilst owing much to Arendt and her revival of the notion of the vita activa, Barber (1984: 118) was careful to distance himself from what he one-sidely called her ‘republican nostalgia’.6 Barber’s pragmatist position seems far from communitarian pre-liberalism but it is much more than what Philippe Schmitter (1995: 19) saw as ‘a laundry list of relatively minor complaints about existing practices’. Pettit would probably see ‘strong democrats’ as ‘communitarians’ in the spirit of Arendt, but his modest ‘gas-and-water-works’ republicanism – a term borrowed from the Fabian view of socialism (Pettit 1997: 239) – shared with the proposals of ‘strong democrats’, at the pragmatist point in the triangle, the practical desire not to depart radically from the current institutions of the liberal state. There may also be a difference between communitarians and most republicans in their manner of teleological thinking. There is a teleological element in both, as there is in Hegelian liberalism as exemplified by Green. Clearly, however, the appeal of most republicans to a consequentialist justification of their position is more thickly teleological than the position of liberals but it is less thick than that of communitarians (Pettit 1997: 97–102). A core element of communitarian theory is the belief that civic action should be geared to the fulfilment of people’s basic nature as potentially full members of a pre-existing community. Elements of that view may be found in republican thought and some republicans have expressed it strongly, though generally we are presented with a picture of human nature which is more plastic. While among some republicans a desire to impose an ideal form upon both fate and society may be discerned, there is a pragmatic stream of thought, represented here by Barber, which, seeing human nature as created in the political process and not posited a priori, would reject imposing a particular form upon society. Republicans would certainly concede that humans are basically social animals but, for his part, Pettit insisted that not all humans are oriented towards the participatory telos; that depends on particular contexts. In so far as there is a republican telos, Pettit is surely persuasive in casting it in terms of an absence – nondomination – rather than in terms of fulfilment. There appears to be a difference also in what many consider to be the most important ontological issue in political theory – the

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relationship between the universal and the particular. Early modern republicanism grew out of a civic humanist tradition, dating from the fifteenth century, which moved away from a focus on a divine cosmos to ‘attempt to realize a universality of values within a particular, and therefore finite and mortal, political structure’ (Pocock 1975: 84). For some, that universality of values might be found in divine or ‘natural law’, but increasingly, as noted above, natural law, while perhaps still affirmed at an ontological level, was considerably weakened in republican advocacy. It became unnecessary or irrelevant to forging what was essentially an artificial régime in the sense of a work of human artifice; and here perhaps Sunstein’s liberal-oriented, or Barber’s more full-blown, pragmatism can be seen as the end process. Most forms of republicanism offered an attenuated version of universalism, an observation which reveals as bizarre Gey’s (1993: 839) trenchant attack on ‘civic republicanism’s’ strong adherence to ‘universalism’. While liberals still sought values in natural law or turned to general principles of utility, republicans tended to seek universal values not in philosophy but in history; and this is one of the reasons why Kant’s ‘republicanism’, which strove to link non-empirical Reason with everyday understanding through judgment, is seen as more liberal than republican (Stedman Jones 1994). That form of republicanism will be discussed in Chapter 2. The typical republican approach to history was different from that of communitarians, or at least the Hegelian kind, which tended to affirm a particular history by seeing elements of the Absolute Spirit refined in terms of Sittlichkeit (social ethics). As we have noted, republican principles drew upon an inductive grasp of principles drawn from a number of different and idealized histories, at first Rome or Venice and later the United States. The early modern republicans, John Pocock (1975: 54) argued, saw history not in terms of continuity but as a series of ‘moments’; and they strove to identify those where the possibility to institute a new régime was presented. Confronting that view of history, legions of historians of particular countries have criticized republican writing on empirical grounds. Political theorists, however, accustomed to the dichotomy between tradition and custom on the one hand and abstract universal principles on the other, have been equally frustrated by most republican writing. They might object to the way ‘the greats’ in their profession have been treated – for example the way Aristotle has been read to justify the vita activa to the exclusion of his much wider logocentric

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view, or the way civic virtues, which in ancient times were treated as inferior to moral virtues, have been prised apart from the ancient framework. For doing precisely that, the communitarian Alasdair MacIntyre (1984) has indicted the Enlightenment and liberalism. But the process began much earlier and it is possible to extend his critique to early modern republicanism.

THE AIM OF THIS BOOK This book will try to make a case for the continuing distinctiveness of republicanism. It will attempt to construct an ideal-type. Max Weber’s (1949: 90) famous ideal-type was ‘formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view and by the synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent concrete individual phenomena which are arranged according to those one-sidedly emphasized viewpoints into a unified analytical construct’. A common criticism of ideal-types has been their tendency to be transformed into what Thomas Kuhn (1970) called ‘paradigms’, which screen out anything which does not fit into their matrix for puzzle-solving and which, in ‘normal’ times, ignore the subversive and revolutionary strands which exist within them. In Arendt’s (1977: 80–1) terms they can be seen as part of the modern tendency to replace meaning by simple ‘patterns’. Along those lines, historians have criticized the extent to which a focus on ‘ideology’ ignores the diversity of ideas (Appleby 1992: 124–39). They have called attention to the synchronic nature of ideal-types – their ahistorical character. To adopt a diachronic approach in characterizing a social phenomenon it is probably necessary to dispense with ideal-types and to focus on some sort of essence. That is the value of Pettit’s approach which took liberty as non-domination as an essence; and that, in contrast, might be the promise of Frank Michelman’s (1986) approach which has sought to organize the republican principles of common good and civic virtue in terms of an essential notion of self-determination as positive liberty. The problem, however, with taking attitudes towards liberty as an organizing essence is that republicanism can become confused with liberalism and communitarianism. But if attitudes towards liberty are not taken to be the organizing essence, it is very difficult to discern what could be. Is it possible to distil any single essence out of the concept res

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publica (the public thing)? That word, which evokes memories of pre-imperial Rome, is unfortunately untranslatable. Does it mean simply the absence of a monarch? There is, and always was, much more to republicanism than that. Many early republicans saw no problem in including a constitutional monarch under their rubric and, as we shall see, Kant was most enthusiastic about the association of republicanism with constitutional monarchy. Does it mean that political power derives from the people? If it does, it is vacuous since that belief is not particularly republican and could apply to some medieval monarchies in which what Walter Ullmann (1965) called the ‘ascending’ theme of government and law offset the ‘descending’ one. Indeed, as the famous early modern republican poet and pamphleteer John Milton (1847: 317–8, 335) insisted, kings subscribed to it in their coronation oaths, promising to rule according to law and to give the people such laws as they themselves ‘should [or shall] choose’.7 That statement, which anticipated Kant, suggests that the origin of what I shall term virtual representation was rooted in traditional theories of monarchy. Does the idea that political power derives from the people mean the same thing as ‘popular sovereignty’? If so, what is sovereignty and who are the people? Does sovereignty apply to the executive or the legislative power or to both? Is the existence of the people empirically verifiable or is it an artefact of the constitution which, as Kant (1991: 101) following Rousseau (1968: I, V–VI, 58–64) saw it, turns a ‘mass’ into a ‘people’ or, again in Kantian terms, is it a construct of Reason? (See Stedman Jones 1994: 170). When we consider those questions, I shall argue that the term popular sovereignty appears too problematic to provide an essence which informs all the other aspects of republicanism. With all that in mind I must perforce fall back on an ideal-type and strive to avoid the pitfalls. Nevertheless, ideas about popular sovereignty must feature in its construction. I offer four variations on the ideal-type of republicanism – early modern, Enlightenment, mechanical American and contemporary. The construction of the ideal-type will inevitably be somewhat arbitrary and its validity consists solely in its utility in answering particular questions. If those questions focus on the response of political theory to economic development, republicanism will be categorized in a manner different from the way it would be if the questions focus on the way the components of ‘the people’ are viewed, how they are said to rule, the relation of political theory to the

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shape of history, the place of virtue and law and how liberty is conceived. It is the latter focus upon which I shall concentrate. The book is divided into five chapters. The first deals with early modern republican thought in the Renaissance and in seventeenthand early eighteenth-century England. I had few problems in deciding on which thinkers to focus since the field has been ploughed over many times. The second chapter, on the Enlightenment, deals with Montesquieu who has achieved the reputation as a kind of republican saint and with Rousseau who is often wrongly taken in the English-speaking world to be the opposite. It departs from conventional approaches, however, in considering Kant whose deontology and transcendental universalism often result in his being excluded from most accounts of republican thought. He is included here because of the profound influence on the modern world of Enlightenment views and what I call ‘virtual republicanism’. The third chapter is once again fairly conventional, focusing on the early United States which, while maintaining elements of virtual republicanism, is famous for its mechanical approach and for the enormous and on-going debate on the precise content of ‘republicanism’ and its relation to liberalism. Finding a focus for the fourth chapter which deals with contemporary debates was quite difficult. The ideas of Pettit and Sunstein were obvious candidates for consideration because of their professed adherence to the liberal point of the republican triangle. The choice of Barber, however, may be controversial since he does not describe himself as a republican, though I feel he is the clearest manifestation of someone at the pragmatic point of the triangle. As for the communitarian point, I have considered the recent ideas of Sandel in the third rather than the fourth chapter because of their historical nature. Sandel was once seen as an arch communitarian but he has recently described himself as a republican, perhaps because the term communitarian is becoming increasingly associated with conservative thought. But, as Sandel himself insists, he is merely harking back to a long United States tradition in which republicanism could be seen as either radical or conservative. The fifth chapter was the most difficult to write and readers will no doubt find it the most unsatisfactory since it attempts to provide a discussion of the prospects for republican thought outside what used to be called the ‘first world’. Covering aspects of political economy and culture, it could only be a cursory account and may be criticized for its broad-brush approach and its neglect of certain

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cultures and certain parts of the world. Faced with inevitable criticism I shall take solace in the observation that the work of Barrington Moore Jr (1966) was criticized on empirical grounds for each and every historical section of his Social Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship but was celebrated for a stimulating nomothetic approach. The final chapter might also be criticized for ethnocentrism. After all, republicanism is a Western idea and at one stage contained a powerful imperialist element. But it usually no longer does so and, unlike a particular view of democracy, has not, in recent years, been rammed down other peoples’ throats. Its arguments deserve study in all cultures; but in the near future I do not see much chance of its generalization. In constructing my ideal-type of republican values, I have singled out four aspects. First there has to be some notion of popular sovereignty. Over the centuries, as I shall narrate, republican thought has moved from advocacy of a mixed constitution based on different social ‘orders’ to a view of sovereignty which is to a degree mechanical or virtual and to one which has to take into account the exigencies of globalization. But considerations of globalization should not preclude considerations of popular sovereignty. At the centre of republican thought is a strong constitutional state based on the rule of law and opposition to arbitrariness and with a clear notion of the common good or the public interest which is not simply the result of group pressure. That state is sustained by a belief that politics is relatively autonomous. Popular sovereignty, moreover, requires some degree of citizen participation and what is nowadays called deliberative democracy, though there are different views on how much. Second, I shall insist, the republican tradition maintains a view of history which is concerned with systemic corruptibility. At one stage that view of history was cyclical but later it accommodated ideas about progress. Despite its transformations, however, it preserved a sensitivity to what is now called Contingency. Third, I shall note that republican thought has developed an important role for specifically civic virtues. Those virtues were gradually separated from virtues in general and from public virtues appropriate to a context wider than the relatively autonomous political sphere. Civic virtues were deflected and privatized during some of republicanism’s moments but still remain essential. Those virtues are practical and situational and should not be seen as some ‘celestial’ creation of a civic republican élite to be instilled into the citizenry (Gey 1993: 853). Fourth, I agree with Pettit that the republican

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tradition maintains a qualitative rather than a quantitative view of liberty as non-domination which has to be enjoyed resiliently, though I shall argue that in the contemporary world it must embrace specifically inclusive non-domination which counters marginalization. According to that view, law is constitutive of liberty rather than being simply a restraint upon it. Rights, moreover, are seen more as entitlements than claims against society. When I talk of republican values in subsequent chapters, that is what I mean. If that summary of my thesis is seen as too wordy, let me reduce the argument to two sentences. Early modern republicanism, a creation of proud citizens who affirmed civic virtue against fortune, evolved into mechanical and virtual forms, revealing shortcomings which are now being addressed by reference to some earlier republican themes. The future of that recapitulation, in which I have only limited confidence, depends on its ability to extend to contemporary socialist, feminist and environmental concerns and to become relevant to countries outside what used to be called the ‘first world’.

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1 Early Modern Republicanism The kind of republican which this chapter will discuss is usually called ‘classical’, defined by Zera Fink (1962: viii) as follows: By a ‘classical republican’ I mean a person who advocated or admired a republic and who took his ideas for such a government in whole or in part from the ancient masterpieces of political organization, their supposed modern counterparts, or their ancient and modern expositors. Like Fink, I shall focus not on the ancient writings themselves but what Renaissance and post-Renaissance writers took those ideas to be, the use they made of them and how they modified them in the light of contemporary developments. The starting point is the work of Machiavelli (1970) who, while admiring classical Rome, actually broke with many of the ideas which informed it. While purporting to extol the virtues of Rome expounded by Livy, he actually transformed them. For many, therefore, he was ‘early modern’ rather than ‘classical’, and for that reason I prefer to use the former term, the term classical referring simply to Greece and Rome. In describing early modern republicanism in a few pages, I, of course, do not offer a history. Excellent accounts of the history of the republican ideal over the past five hundred years have been produced together with fascinating studies of the ideal’s ‘historical presentation’; that being Pocock’s (1975: 183) phrase signifying a schematic paradigm rather than a series of exhaustive intellectual biographies. Those studies show the complex interweaving of a host of different themes and influences (Pocock 1975; Fink 1962); but even they have been criticized for lack of subtlety. It would be a shallow and presumptuous exercise to try to sum up that literature here. I shall simply confine myself to explicating the four themes outlined in the Introduction which form the basis of the ideal-type I wish to construct. Those themes, it will be remembered, are popular sovereignty, the shape of history, the importance of virtue and the conception of liberty. In the eyes of early modern republicans, views 22

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on those themes were sometimes seen in ‘as if’ or ‘virtual’ terms but nowhere near as much as in the republicanism of the Enlightenment discussed in Chapter 2.

POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY AND THE MIXED CONSTITUTION As some scholars see it, the term sovereignty, which refers to the existence of only one supreme authority in a society, is quite modern. Noting that feudalism consisted in a hierarchy of diffused and overlapping authorities, they maintain that the idea had no content before the sixteenth century (Jouvenel 1957: 169–85). The idea of undivided sovereignty was put forward in response to the European religious wars. Other scholars have argued that the concept of sovereignty, though expressed in different terms, became prominent when the Roman republic metamorphosed into empire in the first century of the common era, when the original res publica actually disappeared, and gained a new prominence in Europe after the Middle Ages (Hinsley 1986: 107–8). The most celebrated of those early exponents of sovereignty, Jean Bodin (1955: I, VIII, 31–3; II, I, 52–56; VI, IV, 190–200) favoured monarchy since that was seen as the best, but not the only, way to maintain its indivisibility. The idea of a mixed constitution (politeia) with power shared among the executive magistracy, the aristocracy and the common people, to which many early modern writers adhered, seemed a logical absurdity and tantamount to anarchy. How could there be three supreme loci of authority? But a mixed constitution was precisely the formula adopted by most early modern republicans. Faced with such opposition, theorists of the mixed constitution did not talk much about sovereignty in the sixteenth century. But in the seventeenth century they responded to the anti-republican archtheorists. A common position, upheld by Milton (1847: 233) and Algernon Sidney (1996: III, XXX1, 502) amongst others, was that all governments were to a degree mixed but sovereignty was indivisible. It resided in the people but could be delegated to a king or another form of magistracy and to an aristocracy. For that reason the king had been inferior to parliament (Milton 1847: 400, 334; Sidney 1996: II, XXXII, 313). But it was the people and not parliament which was sovereign, Milton (1847: 446) felt, in proposing that a new parliamentary body should be defined explicitly as holding

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only authority delegated by the people and not sovereign authority. The conclusion drawn by Sidney (1996: I, VI, 20–1), in refutation of Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha: A Defence of the Natural Power of Kings against the Unnatural Liberty of the People is clear: God cannot be the author of a democracy otherwise he would have also to be the author of a tyranny. Only the people enjoy political authorship. ‘If the multitude, therefore, do institute, the multitude may abrogate, and they themselves or those who succeed in the same right, can only be fit judges of the performance of the ends of the institution.’ That text, however, is not clear exactly what the ontological status of the people actually was, whether a ‘multitude’ was the same as a majority and whether a people existed prior to a constitution or whether it was the constitution which turned a mass into a ‘people’; (see Kant 1991: 101). The ‘virtual’ had yet to be theorized. We shall return to that very ‘modern’, rather than early modern, ontological question in the next chapter. Filmer, who defined sovereignty by reference to ‘natural’ family relations, was easy to refute; Thomas Hobbes was much more formidable a foe because of his ‘realism’ – the view that only one element of political life deserved to be considered ‘real’ – power. Sidney (1996: XVII, III, 409) criticized him; but the most eloquent republican criticism of Hobbes’ views on sovereignty had already been put forward by James Harrington in his fictitious and utopian account of England, entitled Oceana. Harrington (1977: 162–3) insisted, against Hobbes, that authority was not the same thing as power. Writing in 1656, after parliamentary victory in the English Civil War, Harrington was faced with the task of working out what sovereignty might mean when ‘the king in parliament’ of two houses was defunct. For reasons which we shall explore later, he felt that the feudal ‘standing aristocracy’ had been destroyed and there was thus no need for a House of Lords and a monarch whose position depended on that aristocracy. But was government by a single chamber satisfactory in utilizing available talent? Milton pointed out that the record of the single chamber English Commonwealth Parliament, governed only by natural law, ridden with factional troubles and beset by military interventions, had been atrocious and the institution needed to be replaced. He proposed a new permanent senate (a Grand Council), preferably with life-tenure to reflect more natural aristocratic values. The best place for popular assemblies was in the various cities and towns.1 Harrington (1977: 206), however, also motivated by

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aristocratic sensibilities and convinced of the virtues of a mixed constitution, argued that ‘a council without a balance is not a commonwealth, but an oligarchy’. There was indeed a need to institutionalize a new aristocracy of the mind in a rotating senate but it should complement a powerful popular assembly. He went on to propose a new form of magistracy and to argue that, while the virtues of the one ruler were not necessary in the new commonwealth to maintain a balance, a law-giver, who had to be a ‘gentleman’, was needed to institute a new constitution (Harrington 1977: 172–4, 183).2 Indeed, Oceana was dedicated to Oliver Cromwell – a mixture of Lycurgus the Spartan and Moses, the founder of the ‘Israelite commonwealth’. The idea that a single law-giver was required to institute what Machiavelli called new ordini – ‘fundamental ordinances which give the polity its form by determining the distribution of the several political functions or powers’ (Pocock 1975: 254) – occurred often in early modern republican thought (Machiavelli 1970: I, IX, 131–4) and had traditionally been closely associated with the idea of a mixed constitution (Fink 1962: 9–10). Rome and Sparta were frequently celebrated but there was clearly no similar founding among the early modern republics such as Venice, which was popular among early modern republicans, and Florence, discussed at great length by Machiavelli (for example, 1970: I. XLIX, 231; 1988). That lawgiver was portrayed as claiming to be divinely inspired and, in Rousseau’s (1968: II, VII, 87) words, had the capacity to ‘compel without violence and persuade without convincing’.3 Among various writers there were differences on the qualities the law-giver should possess – in the Florentine Francesco Guicciardini’s words, whether the best analogy was a cook making pasta or a doctor curing a disease (Pocock 1975: 123–4, 137). But did the notion of a law-giver contradict the idea of popular sovereignty? Hanna Pitkin (1984: 295) thinks it must have, since, ‘. . . meant to comfort the self, the [image of the] Founder is actually a fantasy of self-denigration’. Instead of empowering, it leaves people helpless ‘blaming their princes’ for their fate. That might be true but it was also undoubtedly the case that Harrington initially saw no contradiction between the role of a law-giver and popular sovereignty. Nor did Rousseau who was later to insist that the lawgiver’s power was legislative and not sovereign – a significant point perhaps when we consider that Cromwell declined kingship. Nevertheless Cromwell was apparently unimpressed with Oceana because

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he interpreted it as requiring him eventually to give up power (Fink 1962: 85). Why, after all, should a law-giver surrender power to the citizenry? Commenting on Machiavelli, Guicciardini (1965: 76–7) had noted the danger of law-givers actually becoming rulers. Sidney had no doubts about the tyrannical Cromwell who had removed him from parliament and, by the time of the English Restoration, Milton (1847: 445), who once had confidence in Cromwell as a law-giver, rejected the idea of any single man holding supreme power under any circumstances. Harrington was quite clear that the idea of popular sovereignty meant that sovereign power was delegated solely to the popular assembly and only that assembly could make laws. The function of the senate was simply to debate and to propose. In a sense, Harrington was a few hundred years before his time since the twentieth century division of power in the British Houses of Parliament does indeed locate most effective decisionmaking power in the House of Commons, and the House of Lords does perform an advisory role. In another sense, however, he offered a reversal of the twentiethcentury British pattern since the councils of the proposed senate were to perform an initiating and not a review function. On closer inspection, some of his proposals seem quite problematic, especially the stipulation that the senate was only to debate and the sovereign assembly was to decide without debate, in a manner similar to that affirmed in the work of Guicciardini (1994: 116–22) in the previous century. It is difficult to imagine how that particular scheme would have worked in England. Yet his proposals are interesting in pointing to the problem of locating parliamentary sovereignty, in a bicameral system, only in the house which directly represents the people. Harrington’s proposals for popular sovereignty did not convince many of the politicians of his day and the initiative in arguments about sovereignty rested in the hands of enemies of republicanism as the Rechtsstaat (the state based on law) gave way to Machtstaat (the ‘realist’ state based on power). Theorists of the latter, in absolutist fashion, extended the ideas of Bodin4 in claiming that there had to be an arbitrary element in supreme authority, be it monarchical or parliamentary; the ‘real’ had to be arbitrary. Some early modern republicans protested, since arbitrariness was felt to be the very antithesis of their ideals which were based on the rule of law and the struggle against arbitrariness was what the English Civil War had been all about. Indeed, Pettit (1997) is surely correct in

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his repeated reference to arbitrariness as a central republican anathema. Could a conception of popular sovereignty be advanced which was not arbitrary? A lot here depends upon what is meant by ‘arbitrary’. If arbitrary means simply having the opportunity to exercise choice, then sovereignty had to be arbitrary. As Sidney (1996: III, XLV, 569–70) put it: If it be objected that I am a defender of arbitrary powers, I confess I cannot comprehend how any society can be established or subsist without them; for the establishment of government is an arbitrary act, wholly dependent upon the will of men. The particular forms and constitutions, the whole series of the magistracy, together with the measure of power given to everyone, and the rules by which they are to exercise their charge, are so also. . . . The various laws and governments, that are or have been in several ages and places, are the products of the various opinions in those who had the power of making them. This must necessarily be, unless a general rule be set to all; for the judgments of men will vary if they are left to their liberty, and the variety that is found among them, shews they are subject to no rule but that of their own reason, by which they see what is fit to be embraced or avoided, according to the several circumstances under which they live. The above is characteristic of the posthumous version we have of Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government which is full of bold statements; those statements, however, are followed by qualifications which give a very different picture. As Sidney saw it, the difference between good and bad governments did not depend simply on the existence of an element of arbitrariness as simple choice. It depended on whether they were ‘well constituted’ in relying on sovereign power vested in the people who had available mechanisms to ensure that governmental action took into account their interests and opinions and whether legislators were bound by their own laws and had not usurped previous laws passed by a popular sovereign legislature. Legislative power, therefore, while being in one sense arbitrary, was not arbitrary in the sense of decisions taken at a decisionmaker’s pleasure which disregard the interests and opinions of those they affect (Pettit 1997: 55–8). While liberty, at one level, demanded arbitrariness, at another, arbitrariness which contravened the rule of law was condemned. The root of the problem here lies in the fact that considerations

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of sovereignty often appear to belong to a discourse different from that of politics. Republican politics, in its early modern sense, is about handling conflicting interests so that they may participate in the business of government and considerations for the liberty of a polity together with the individuals within it. Sovereignty, a more abstract concept, is about ultimate authority. For someone steeped in the early modern tradition, considerations of politics occur every day, whereas matters concerning sovereignty usually only surface in times of emergency (Crick 1964: 28–30). It is significant here to note that the arch-theorists of sovereignty – Bodin and Hobbes – wrote at times of extreme emergency and that may be why they favoured monarchical rule. It is also significant that considerations of sovereignty have preoccupied students of international relations concerned with perpetual emergency and constructed reality – ‘realism’. Their language is the language of statecraft, rather than politics. That is surely why Machiavelli in The Prince – his book on statecraft – did not use the word politico when discussing the status of a prince, a ruling group or matters of territoriality (Viroli 1990: 161). The Prince was not about politics as Machiavelli understood it; and for his republican views we have to consult The Discourses on Livy. Republican discourse deals usually with normal politics and breaks off when rule requires emergency measures such as the employment of a dictator. But, of course, there can be no politics in the early modern sense, which depends on social order, unless there is ultimate recourse to a sovereign power and considerations of sovereignty can quickly be called into being (Crick 1964: 28–30). The distinction between normal and emergency politics is undoubtedly very useful but I have doubts about the distinction between normal and constitutional politics, which raise vital questions of sovereignty. Maintaining that distinction often privileges the status quo as, it will be remembered, Sunstein (1993a: 293) was at pains to expound. It also raises vital questions about representation as Chapter 3 will discuss.

THE SHAPE OF HISTORY The idea of a mixed constitution in a cyclical view of history, which characterized early modern republicanism, has been summed up in Pocock’s (1975) monumental Machiavellian Moment. That work traced the theme of republicanism through Florence, ‘mythical’ (idealized)

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Venice,5 the works of Harrington who was greatly inspired by the Venetian myth, those of the neo-Harringtonians and those of the founders of the United States. The starting point was Polybius’ ‘cycle of constitutions’ which consisted of a cyclic movement through the six-fold Aristotelian categories of monarchy/tyranny, aristocracy/ oligarchy and democracy/ochlocracy (mob-rule). A republic was a stage in the cycle in which a balance among the rule of the one, the few and the many was achieved. There were different emphases among different writers as to which element should be dominant (Fink 1962: 1–27). But, as observers of Renaissance Italy knew too well, that balance was precarious, as the virtues appropriate to each form of rule degenerated when insufficiently checked by those of the others. That was an instance of physis – the normal life– death process of living things (Pocock 1975: 77–80). The early modern republican tradition centred on the impermanence of power – the very opposite of what Gey (1993: 888), that modern critic of ‘civic republicanism’, strangely insists is one of its crucial elements. A key term here is Fortuna which was seen in sexist terms as a female force, originally a Roman goddess, characterized as sometimes creative in the Roman tradition, sometimes destructive in the Christian tradition – as opposed to the Virgin Mary, but always unpredictable within a context of repetition symbolized by her turning a wheel or a number of wheels (Pitkin 1984: 138–69). Fortuna was to be handled imperfectly by virtue or, more narrowly, by virtù, a process which prior to Machiavelli was seen in terms of choosing one’s wheel but which Machiavelli saw as grasping it. Virtù, in the hands of Machiavelli at least, was usually translated in a macho way (Pitkin 1984: 25 passim) as determination and resourcefulness. For Machiavelli (1961: XXV, 130–1), the appropriate action depends on the extent to which Fortuna is seen as a woman: ‘Fortune is a woman and if she is to be submissive it is necessary to beat and coerce her’. Fortuna, however, may appear as a flood/storm – a natural force against which one might take precautions but which one cannot beat nor coerce (Pitkin 1984: 148–53). At a psychological level, therefore, the aim of virtù might be seen as ‘conquering or mastering Fortuna, sometimes of pleasing her and winning her favour, sometimes of anticipating and adapting to her will, sometimes of securing a sphere of autonomy from her power’ (Pitkin 1984: 155). In the language of the twentieth century it might simply mean anticipating and dealing with unforeseen consequences (Pitkin 1984: 164–5) – dealing with Contingency, to which

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we shall return. At a broad practical level, however, while associated with ethics, virtù signifies action in response to the context in which ethical problems arise (Pocock 1975: 167). Here virtue or virtù was innovative in that, in the manner of sexual conquest (Pitkin 1984: 144), it imposed form on Fortuna and on society. The picture, therefore, showed a struggle between the teleological realization of form through virtue (virtù) and the non-teleological workings of Fortuna (Pocock 1975: 207–8), as we noted in the Introduction. All that could be hoped for was the temporary dominance of virtù or virtue and maintaining a balance between the rule of the one, the few and the many. The fragility of that balance was nowhere more graphically demonstrated than when Charles I’s recently-appointed scriptwriters, Lucius Falkland and John Culpepper, using republican language though themselves hardly republicans, insisted on it a few weeks before the outbreak of civil war in 1642.6 The escape from cyclic history took the form of the kingdom of God, which occasionally might find worldly expression in the hands of people such as Girolamo Savonarola. Venice, however, was often portrayed in terms of immortality. Within the writing on Venice there were hints of a sociological explanation for long-term stability but the analyses were by no means so well worked out as that of Harrington in the seventeenth century which focused on England. Harrington, albeit within a framework of millennial thinking, put forward a strong sociological argument about irreversibility. Thus Harrington’s (1977: 155–359) fictitious account of England saw feudalism, which tied land tenure to the obligation to perform military service for a lord, giving way to free tenure of land and citizens bearing arms,7 divided into ‘foot’ and ‘horse’ with a property qualification for membership of the latter (Harrington 1977: 213). Here Machiavelli’s (1970: I, VI, 118–24; II, XX, 339–41; 1965: I, 14–43) denunciation of the use of mercenaries springs to mind together with his argument that citizens bearing arms were crucial in a republic and particularly a republic aimed at expansion. Indeed, Machiavelli would have approved of the imperialistic mission of the republic of Oceana – ‘to aspire unto the empire of the world . . . to put the world in a better condition than it was before’.8 Machiavelli, who had not been enamoured of Venice, would have approved of that departure from the Venetian model to which Harrington (1977: 328, 332) usually adhered.9 But there was a difference between Harrington and Machiavelli. While Machiavelli predicted corruption, in the sense of decay, and dissolution of that republic,

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Harrington (1977: 274–8) did not see corruption as inevitable. Corruption could be prevented by the government adjusting the distribution of power to the distribution of property. That apparent irreversibility, however, was not predicated on any awareness of the rise of capitalism. Harrington’s dynamic focused not on what Karl Marx called the ‘forces’ and ‘relations of production’ nor the dynamics of civil society but on legislative action. King Henry VII had emancipated military tenants to lessen the power of the everunstable nobility and had caused its destruction. The demise of the old aristocracy, moreover, provided an opportunity to institute what Machiavelli had called new ordini. Harrington recommended many such orders, believing that the old cycle could be halted. But, while there was a prospect of immortality similar to that which Harrington (1977: 320–1) believed to have been the case in Venice, elements of the old cyclic view remained in his recourse to ancient prudence (Pocock 1977: 52–8). Harrington’s emphasis on potential irreversibility was shared by the pessimistic Milton (1847: 445) despite his concern about degeneration. But their ideas were put forward not long before the English Commonwealth collapsed, and in part during the restoration of the monarchy, as later the anti-republican David Hume (1894: 31–5) was not slow to point out. In the new climate, Harrington’s ideas were still advanced, though often inverted in favour of elements of the ancient English constitution to support a more moderate reformist position (see Nevill 1968). In the hands of Sidney (1996), however, what at first appeared to be a reformist position thinly masked a restatement of ‘the old cause’ and his execution, or martyrdom, in 1683 is hardly surprising. For a while the Venetian ‘myth’ still found many admirers amongst English Whigs and sometimes took the form of proposals for new institutions in America. By the time of the ‘glorious revolution’ of 1688, however, the attraction of Venice had waned in the face of much anti-Venetian propaganda, though the influence of that myth was to last for at least another century (Fink 1962: 123–48, 176–83). In the new situation, where the language of custom had been revived, was history still seen as taking a cyclic pattern? In general, régimes continued to be portrayed as waxing and waning, but now within a dialectic of progress and disruption in which more and more faith was placed in the former. But progress still had to be theorized – at first by political economists – the contribution, amongst others, of the Scottish School – then by theorists of Reason – the

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contribution of Kant and Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet discussed in the next chapter – and then by theorists of the Absolute Spirit such as Hegel. That, however, was far in the future. During England’s, or after 1707 Britain’s, ‘Augustan Age’ – that rather unfortunate term for those modern republicans who detested the Augustan perversion of ‘republican values’ (Shklar 1990: 265–6), there was fierce debate, Pocock (1975: 462) argued, between ‘country’ and ‘court’, focusing on ‘virtue versus passion, land versus commerce, republic versus empire and value versus history’. Adherents to the ‘country’ position were at pains to repeat Machiavelli’s point that polities became corrupt and undermined republican foundations when professional soldiers and a standing army replaced citizen militias, when finance became divorced from production and when land was no longer seen as the main source of wealth. In that context in the wake of the South Sea Bubble dé bacle, between 1720 and 1724, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon (1971) published their Cato’s Letters which articulated a Machiavellian and radical Whig criticism of British politics under Robert Walpole, with a constant denunciation of corruption (Trenchard and Gordon 1971: I, 20, 132–42). As Trenchard and Gordon (1971: II, 37, 28; I, 3, 11) saw it, Britain was already a republic although it had a king but would not survive without equality in property. That was not absolute equality but was defined simply as conditions under which people could avoid dependence (Trenchard and Gordon 1971: II, 43, 71–4; II, 45, 85–90). The existing inequality sapped virtue and destabilized the commonwealth. The remedy was an agrarian law ‘or something like it’ (Trenchard and Gordon 1971: II, 35, 16), together with a return to elements of the ancient constitution and significantly the development of commerce which could not thrive adequately under arbitrary governments where there are unjust impositions, monopolies and paper speculation (Trenchard and Gordon 1971: II, 64, 267–72). Autocrats, priests and stockjobbers were the enemy. The seemingly contradictory affirmation both of the progressive nature of commerce and a return to an ancient constitution in Cato’s Letters may be seen in terms of their incorporation of conflicting republican and liberal views. Autocrats, priests and stock-jobbers were not the enemies only of republicans who stressed ‘country’ values. They were the enemies also of liberals whose views concerning corruption might have been somewhat different and who were not convinced about the need to revive an ancient constitution.

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One feature of the old republican view was that corruption was simply the cyclic decay of public life which might be forestalled by revitalizing virtue or changing agrarian laws, whereas a growing liberal view was that corruption was not tied to a cyclic view of history and constitutional imbalance modelled on the human lifecycle; it consisted simply in distributive unfairness which rewarded the idle rather than the productive, the thrifty and the frugal – qualities important in the growing English Protestant ethic (Kramnick 1990: 247). As noted in the Introduction, during recent decades scholars have engaged in furious polemic about which eighteenthcentury thinkers articulated which set of values and at what point in the eighteenth century the old view of corruption gave way to liberal diagnoses and remedies. Historians debate issues such as the extent to which the corrupting effect of the eighteenth-century British national debt was condemned because it gave rise to an urban class devoid of virtue (a republican complaint) or because it drained resources from productive activity (a liberal complaint) (Kramnick 1990: 165, 177–81, 230–1). The fierceness of their polemic is surely in part due to projection backwards of late twentieth-century issues. I am not certain that the issue was all that clear cut and will return to the debate in later chapters. Suffice it to note that by the mid-eighteenth century the cyclic view of history with its particular conception of corruption began to change.

THE PLACE OF VIRTUE Reflecting on the sexist portrayal of the struggle between virtù and Fortuna, it is clear that its Latin root – vir (man), which was related to vis (strength), was taken extremely seriously. Interestingly vir was also the root of the medieval, and decidedly unclassical, Latin word virtualis (virtual), though my discussion of that term will wait until the next chapter. Machiavelli, of course, carried the sexist connotations of the term to an extreme. His use of the word, moreover, was different from that of contemporary Christians. Machiavelli’s (1961: XVIII, 99) virtù owed nothing to any divine order and consisted simply in a willingness to do whatever was necessary for civic greatness and, if that involved qualities more appropriate to the beast than the man, so be it. Machiavelli’s ideal beasts were the lion and the fox. He saw himself usually as a fox, imagined himself sometimes to be a lion but realized that both

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were inferior to being a classical Roman citizen, even if that citizen had to have recourse to the ‘centaur’ (Machiavelli 1961: XVIII, 99). As Pitkin (1984: 25–105) pointed out, one of the great problems of interpreting Machiavelli lies in his extolling the virtues of three totally different character types in different places in his writings – the founder (lion), the schemer (fox) and the virtuous citizen. When interpreted as the qualities of a lion, virtù might be translated as determination but, when translated as the qualities of Machiavelli’s fox, virtù might involve deceit or dissimulation in the interest of the common good (Machiavelli 1961: XVIII, 99–102), an observation which was objected to by his friend Guicciardini (1965: 112–3). Machiavelli’s virtù, therefore, was narrower than the ‘four cardinal virtues’ and sometimes in direct opposition to one of them – justice.10 Conventional virtues, Machiavelli (1961: XV, 92) noted, might be more apparent than real and could lead to ruin. He made that quite clear in his advice to the prince of a new régime; but the same qualities of virtù were required in the leaders and the armed citizens of a republic and, he observed, it was in republics that virtù was more likely to be found (Machiavelli 1965: I, 77–8; 1970: I, IX, 132; III, XLI, 514–15).11 Machiavelli’s narrowing of virtue was by no means typical of early modern republicans. Nor was the fact that he was what was described earlier as a virtue-centred, or virtù-centred, theorist. Most early modern republicans, including Harrington, maintained a rule-centred ontology but, as the Introduction noted, to all intents and purposes their advocacy appeared virtue-centred. Ontology, however, could have some effect on advocacy. Machiavelli’s virtue or virtù-centred ontology could countenance evil for the sake of the greater good. Christian theorists, who saw evil and the proper attitude towards it defined by a rule of God, could not. Thus many of them notoriously excoriated what they felt to be Machiavelli’s countenancing evil and showed extreme distaste for attempts to give priority to virtù over the morally good person.12 For Christians, theological virtues were established by God’s law and thus the traditional doctrine of the mean, which held that virtues were always endangered by being taken to an extreme, could not apply to them. For example, in Christian eyes, a person can not be too just or too faithful to God. But, Christians reasoned, not all virtues were like that. There must be other virtues which were not established by God’s law and to them the doctrine of the mean applied. That bifurcation of virtues, I argue, would lead eventually

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to the articulation of specifically civic virtues appropriate to an autonomous political sphere, which might be bent in a republican direction. Nevertheless, since those civic virtues were always considered to be inferior to moral virtues, the Christian separation of theological from other virtues could never be complete. That was nowhere more evident than in the seventeenth-century Puritan revolution. At one level Christian republicans subsumed politics under much grander concerns and at another realized that the main error of their opponents lay in not paying sufficient attention to civic virtues appropriate to a relatively autonomous sphere of politics. The latter was the main sin of clerics whom they fiercely attacked. To be consistent, Christian republicans had to demand that the domain of the divine, which the scriptures saw in monarchical terms, be separated from the conditions necessary for civic life such as freedom of speech, of which Milton was a firm advocate. The result was often tortuous, as was so graphically shown in Milton’s confrontation with Satan’s ‘false republicanism’. That republicanism was ‘false’ because it reduced the theological to the civic and exhibited Satan’s excessive pride. Such also may have been the sin of Cromwell (Worden 1990). Machiavelli, of course, had not engaged in such tortuous reasoning. He simply did not treat civic virtues as inferior to moral virtues. Nor did he follow his contemporaries in seeing civic virtues as always governed by the doctrine of the mean. While sometimes talking of seeking a mean, Machiavelli (1970: I, XXVI, 177) reminded his audience that a search for the mean could lead simply to commonplace muddling through and to a failure to seize opportunities. It could thus bring about ruin. I wonder, therefore, what he would have made of his seventeenth-century English admirers. He might have agreed with Harrington that people were not only ‘rational and political’ creatures but ‘philosophical and religious ones’ (Pocock 1977: 120). He might also have agreed with Harrington’s distancing himself from the Levellers who considered liberty as rooted in ‘nature, reason and spirit’ rather than property. But what would he have thought of Harrington’s adherence to the contemporary view that the republic might be cast, in Pocock’s (1977: 26) words, as ‘the work of grace acting in history’. To be sure, Machiavelli had used the term grace in the context of the law-giver but, as Pocock (1975: 170, 190) noted, it was hardly seen as an ‘independent variable’. Harrington, it seems, took the term more seriously.

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He saw the republic as ‘a body in which God was mystically present, even in those ordini which prevented its degeneration’. He argued that Israel had been a popular commonwealth (republic) ‘to demonstrate that the principles of government enjoyed the authority of revelation as well as reason . . . that republic and theocracy were identical’. The millennium was ‘a climactically satisfactory solution to the problem of republican immortality’ (Pocock 1977: 73). I doubt whether Machiavelli would have been convinced. I am sure, however, that Machiavelli would have agreed with Harrington’s fierce anti-clericalism. Although arguably a pagan, Machiavelli might also have looked sympathetically on Harrington’s attempt to cast theocracy in terms of popular self-rule by assemblies, the original ecclesia. The people were required to ‘confirm all their laws even though proposed by God himself’ and God granted them the capacity to reject them or to depose Him as the supreme civic magistrate (Harrington 1977: 175). But, Harrington insisted, the spirit of the nation could never be atheist nor, because the people were supreme, could there be a ‘commonwealth of saints’.13 A national, as opposed to a universal, religion was necessary because ‘a commonwealth is nothing else but the national conscience. And if the conviction of a man’s private conscience produce his private religion, the conviction of the national conscience must produce a national religion’ (Harrington 1977: 185). That religion, however, had a particularly democratic slant and allowed a law-giver considerable liberty to institute orders in initiating a commonwealth and the citizenry independently to exercise virtue. God might be the ultimate law-giver but he was not a legislator and those clerics who legislated in his name, according to their conception of divine law, were to be opposed. We see here echoes of Machiavelli though, it will be remembered, the Florentine stressed not the divine derivation of religion but its important civic function. Religion was necessary to promote order and provide the right conditions for the exercise of citizen virtue or virtù. Contemptuous of the contemporary exercise of Christianity which subordinated liberty to humility, abnegation and contempt for mundane things, he advocated the religion of ancient Rome which was better suited to controlling Fortuna because it had been based on ‘strength to do bold things’ not ‘strength to suffer’ (Machiavelli 1970: II, II, 277–8). In that light Sidney (1996: II, XXIII, 210) followed the Florentine in insisting that ‘God helps those who help themselves’. Christians, however, would hardly agree

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with Machiavelli’s (1970: I, XI–XV, 139–52) extreme demand that rulers of a republic or a kingdom ‘uphold the basic principles of the religion which sustains them . . . even though they be convinced that it is quite fallacious’. But they might affirm the paramount importance of religion’s social function. Later the monarchist Edmund Burke, while a true believer, argued that religion was necessary to keep the masses quiescent. That point was subsequently taken up by Marx with diametrically opposite intent and much later by enemies of ‘civic republicanism’ who condemned it for its alleged Burkean distrust of the people (Gey 1993: 891–3). Indeed it is difficult to see how Machiavelli’s affirmation of a possibly false political religion which may be manipulated by a few can be reconciled with the transparent virtues of republicanism (Pitkin 1984: 89). Machiavelli saw civic law in much the same functional sense as religion. Civic law which derived from virtues or virtù was by no means weaker than law which derived from nature. Indeed, it could be stronger since, while virtue might be the animus of the polity in his preferred state, there was no effective regulator other than political organization. After the establishment of his ideal régime, the rule of law was to be paramount though, following Roman precedent, he saw the value of a dictator, appointed for a limited period of time, intervening to solve crises; it was crucial, however, that the dictator did nothing to diminish the constitutional position of the government (Machiavelli 1970: I, XXXIV, 193–6).14 Commenting on Rome at the beginning of his Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli (1970: I, I, 104) observed that ‘the laws kept it so rich in virtù that there has never been any other city or any other republic so well adorned’. Despite his criticisms of the Rome painted by Livy, that theme pervaded his work and early modern republican writing in general. Once we entertain the thought that religion performs a necessary function in all societies, questions arise as to the extent it might be ‘natural’, as Harrington maintained. The way seems open for some form of natural law. Indeed, even the strictest virtue-base theorists had recourse to general principles of ‘sympathy’ and to determining what virtues are the direct and ‘natural’ products of human passions running one into another and which are artificial virtues, covering ‘clear and definite claims which may be enforced by law’ (Schneewind 1990: 51).15 Hume (1911: II, 275, 297), though writing in the eighteenth century, produced a list of natural and artificial social virtues which would surely have been affirmed in

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the early modern period. The natural virtues included meekness, beneficence, charity, generosity, clemency, moderation, equity, humanity, compassion, gratitude, friendship, fidelity, zeal, disinterestedness, liberality ‘and all those other qualities which form the character of good and benevolent’. The artificial virtues he saw as justice, fidelity to promises and allegiance to government (Hume 1911: II, 184–90, 219–27, 240–52). He considered them artificial because they are conventional products of particular societies designed to ensure their preservation. They are not ‘celestial’, as Gey (1993: 853) maintained in his denunciation of ‘civic republicanism’, and depend upon the extent to which members of society subscribe to expectations of reciprocity. There are echoes here of Cicero’s belief that justice depended on trust. For Hume, however, while the natural virtues stem from natural affections for other people, the artificial (or civic) virtues stem from socialized self-interest. We return to the supposed contradiction between republicanism and commercial activity raised in the preceding section. Is there then any basic contradiction between virtue and interest? Modern political theorists have agonized over that question and philosophers have always worried about avarice but I cannot see the question as fundamental in early modern republicanism. From the revival of republicanism at the time of the Renaissance in rapidly developing commercial cities through to the eighteenth century, republican social theory had to take account of interest, though until the eighteenth century many of what are now called ‘interests’ were often grouped under the heading of ‘passions’; and the transition from passion to interest, through conflict, subsumption of the former by the latter and then the romantic reaffirmation of passions has been ably traced by Albert O. Hirschman (1977). In the fifteenth century, observers of Florence noted that the mobilization of intelligence in that city with its concomitant virtue was partly due to its large numbers of merchants (Pocock 1975: 91). The great model, Venice, had also flourished because of trade. Republicans generally condemned discord (Skinner 1981: 66), but Machiavelli, contrary to his contemporary compatriot Guicciardini (1965: 68–9), while denouncing factions and advocating citizen poverty,16 saw the conflict between what later became known as economic interests as having a salutary effect;17 hence the need creatively to manage conflict by means of virtù (Machiavelli 1970: I, IV, 118–24) – or, in Barber’s (1984: 119, 151) words, to transform conflict rather than simply suppressing, avoiding or tolerating it. Milton (1847: 451), moreover,

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attacked the idea that monarchy had to be restored to maintain trade and, while criticizing superfluities, observed with approval that trade flourished best in free commonwealths – in Italy, Germany and the Low Countries. Of course, it is possible to defend trade in terms of the common good but it is extremely difficult to disassociate it from self-interest and not to see the latter as having positive value. My argument, therefore, is that too much has been made of the contradiction between economic interests and republicanism. The widely-held view that commerce might lead to corruption is no argument against commerce which flourished well in republics. But we should not jump to the other extreme and argue that early modern republicanism was actually the product of early capitalism any more than the Protestant ethic was caused by early capitalism, as Weber (1930) insisted. Both clearly pre-dated capitalism. The various early modern republicans considered above differed considerably in their approach to virtues and virtù, in their enumeration of virtues and in the relation of virtues to natural law. We might break down the various republican virtues into the ‘classical’ variety which has been crudely categorized as opposing weakness, those which resulted from the Christian stress on self-denial and opposing licentiousness and the contractual virtues which stressed adherence to contract as opposed to untrustworthiness – each of which has a different relationship to liberalism. We might agree with Alan Craig Houston (1991: 6, 146–78) that the early modern republican package of those virtues, as exemplified by Sidney, only had meaning in terms of rights, interests, laws and contracts. We might trace the complex interrelation between older civic virtues and the Protestant Dissenters’ inner-regarding virtues of productivity, thrift and frugality (Kramnick 1990). We cannot deny, however, that, for all early modern republicans, virtue/virtù was of paramount importance. We must surely agree, moreover, that virtue/ virtù was held usually to be real and appropriate to the res of the res publica rather than ‘virtual’. It was real in a manner different from the ‘realism’ of Hobbes and those like him.

LIBERTY The Introduction noted that many scholars have argued that the republican view of liberty, or more generally the ‘ancient’ view

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of liberty (Constant 1988: 309–28), gave priority to the positive conception – an exercise view of liberty signifying achieving one’s potentiality in concert with others and perhaps freedom from one’s baser self – as opposed to a negative one, simply freedom from interference.18 That view was accepted by Michelman (1986: 36–55) who saw early modern republican positive liberty giving way to negative liberty in eighteenth-century British opposition ideology. But, we have noted, the view of early modern republican liberty as positive has been challenged in recent years. To be sure, Machiavelli (1970: I, III, 112) saw confusion and disorder arising from people being ‘free to choose’ and ‘do just as they please’. But, Skinner (1984, 1990, 1998) argued, early modern republicans saw liberty in the sense of being unobstructed in the pursuit of whatever ends they might choose to set themselves – to act without being ‘dependent on others’ (Machiavelli 1970: I, I, 104). To do that, they required three of Cicero’s ‘four cardinal virtues’, the virtue absent in Machiavelli’s writing being justice. The ends of a few might be dictated by ambition but that of the many was simply to live in security (Machiavelli 1970: I, XVI, 156) and in the absence of dependence which curtailed the exercise of rights (Skinner 1998: 84). Such a condition could be effectively achieved only in a self-governing republic where the consequences of ambition might be contained. Hobbes and countless theorists after him, Skinner went on, failed to grasp that point, crucial to early modern republicans. Republicans could not separate the liberty of the commonwealth from the liberty of particular people and could not conceive negative liberty simply in terms of individual rights. In the early modern republican tradition, that could be imprudent. The above suggests that in the early modern republican tradition it is impossible to separate poles of liberty and to attempt to do so is to make the past serve the present polemics referred to above. Early modern republicans were simply talking about negative liberty and its safeguards. Pettit (1993a: 30–1) has drawn our attention to the position outlined in Cato’s Letters: True and impartial Liberty is . . . the Right of every Man to pursue the natural, reasonable, and religious Dictates of his own Mind; to think what he will, and act as he thinks, provided he acts not to the Prejudice of another, to spend his own Money himself and lay out the Produce of his Labour his own Way; and to labour for his own Pleasure and Profit, and not for others

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who are idle, and would live and riot by pillaging and oppressing him, and those that are like him (Trenchard and Gordon 1971: II, 62, 248). But, as noted in the Introduction, Pettit moved away from a conception of early modern republican liberty simply as negative. He began to focus on the way republicans see institutions constituting liberty as non-domination and being constituted by it. Free citizens make laws but laws make liberty. As Harrington (1977: 205) put it: ‘Give us good men and they will make us good laws’ is the maxim of a demagogue. But ‘give us good orders and they will make us good men’ is the maxim of the legislator and the most infallible in the politics. That statement might be read as a mechanistic devaluation of the value of democratic participation in the spirit of Plato’s Laws rather than the much celebrated Athenian model (Nippel 1994: 21). In the light of what has been said before, however, such a judgment is perhaps somewhat harsh. The relationship between citizens and laws is reciprocal and, for the early modern republican, liberty should be seen dialectically. The argument about the dialectical relationship between citizens and law in fostering liberty does seem to me to capture much of the early modern republican spirit. So indeed does Pettit’s general argument about liberty as structural non-domination. To support his case, Pettit (1997: 31–5) cited numerous examples from early modern republican writing which contrasted liberty with institutionalized slavery or simply living at the will of another regardless of the degree of interference. Prominent among the many references was Harrington’s (1977: 170–1) rebuttal of Hobbes’ (1946: II, XXI, 140) claim that the liberty in Lucca and Constantinople were the same. The point was not the permissiveness of the rulers, which in Turkey might have been quite great, nor their kindness but the fact of institutionalized domination. In Sidney’s (1996; I, V, 17; III, XXI, 441) words: . . . liberty solely consists in an independency upon the will of another, and by the name of a slave we understand a man, who can neither dispose of his person nor goods, but enjoys all at the

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will of his master. . . . He is a slave who serves the best and gentlest man in the world, as well as he who serves the worst. Pettit’s categorization of republican liberty as non-domination is persuasive. Clearly, though, the implications of his argument that the realm of liberty should be expanded to include all dominating relationships would not have occurred to most of the early modern republicans discussed in this chapter and, as Pettit (1997: 47–9) noted, when the wider implications of liberty as non-domination did surface, they baulked. Sidney (1996: 548–9), for example, could not imagine how servants could escape non-domination? The same goes for women in the thickly sexist climate of the time. The structural importance of civic law in constituting liberty, however, was fully appreciated by early modern republicans. We have noted that civic law is very important in virtue-centred theory because that theory sees organization as the polity’s only regulator. In early modern republican theory, moreover, whether virtue or rule-centred, the rule of law was also particularly important in that it was seen as offering a much surer guarantee of security than the rule of a powerful monarch. It might also have been stronger when seen to be the creation of virtuous citizens rather than that of an external power, excepting, of course, the law-giver initiating a régime, even though a particular citizen enjoying liberty might not have been an active participant in the creation of that law. The important point is not so much the existence of freedom as empowerment attained by active participation in politics, though that could certainly be very significant, particularly in republics, such as Florence, which were said to have been addicted to it (Pocock 1975: 152). More vital was the feeling of liberty derived from the visible presence of guarantees and the absence of institutionalized domination which itself could lead to a form of empowerment (Pettit 1997: 69). Also important at the time was the sense of being a member of a free society obtained by the act of voting and the esteem accorded by one’s fellows for being able to perform that act. Here Guicciardini’s observation of the Venetian secret ballot springs to mind. That ballot, he observed, seemed to be aimed not so much at making a rational choice as to communicate to others concern for the common good in the act of choosing (Pocock 1975: 285). But the obverse was clear. Guicciardini was implicitly critical of the Venetian ballot as were many later writers who felt that the expressive function of voting might detract from rational deliberation.

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Indeed a common criticism of the way French universal manhood suffrage, welcomed in 1848 as the very essence of ‘republicanism’, was greeted, was that the focus was on celebration of belonging rather than rational action or liberty (Ronsanvallon 1994: 204). Despite those criticisms, however, we see here a conception of liberty far wider than the liberal one, highlighting a very important psychological dimension – the capacity to look another in the eye. The liberal position, by contrast, considered feeling, like motivation as discussed earlier in connection with virtues, as relatively unimportant (Pettit 1993b: 169–71; 1997: 71–3). That distinction makes analytical sense though we return to the empirical question discussed earlier. It is difficult to work out who among early republicans and liberals made that distinction clear. I can only repeat: Pettit’s and others’ distinctions between liberalism and republicanism, from a twentieth-century perspective, were difficult to make in the early modern republican context. The original consequentialist thrust of republicanism was entwined with natural rights thinking. Nevertheless, it will be remembered, natural law might be affirmed at one level and then bracketed off in practice. Arguably when early modern republicans spoke of ‘natural rights’ they were less than strictly deontological. As Pettit (1997: 101) put it: My inclination is to think that when republicans spoke of natural rights . . . they generally meant to argue that certain legal rights were essential means of achieving freedom as non-domination, and that the description of such rights as natural did not have more than rhetorical significance for them. In particular, it did not imply that the rights were fundamental norms that called to be honoured in deontological fashion. Pettit’s intuition might be correct. I would add, however, that another important analytical, but not hard and fast empirical, difference may be that, for the early liberal, individual rights usually referred to rights as claims against the community rather than entitlements simply to be a citizen and to pursue virtue. Together with consequentialist arguments about the development of knowledge in society, Milton (1847: 103–19, esp. 108) affirmed the latter in championing freedom of the press against the Commonwealth government which he served. To pursue virtue a person is entitled to be exposed to vice. The new government, he felt, was making the same mistake of the old clerical establishment, against whom he inveighed

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time and again. That establishment had stunted virtue in the name of perverted virtues. In my view the same might be said about political religion. Milton was wary of the civic power legislating actively in matters of religion. In response to Cromwell’s permitting his major-generals to enforce religious decrees, but safely after the Lord Protector’s death, he published in 1659 ‘A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes: Shewing that it is not Lawful for Any Power on Earth to Compel in Matters of Religion’. He was, of course, writing about the catholic religion in the sense of a universal Christian religion as opposed to a religion which called itself Roman Catholic which he regarded as a contradiction in terms. Nevertheless, when we consider his opposition to committing ‘violence in the conscience uncommitted’, his argument may be read as referring to any religion, including the purely civic (Milton 1847: 412–22, esp. 414). Milton was usually as dedicated to tolerance as most liberals and, like them, he saw the need for limits but also, like so many of us, he recommended limits which overreached the bounds of tolerance. Reacting against the toleration of Roman Catholicism by the restored monarchy in 1673, he demanded restrictions be placed on ‘popery’ which undermined national security and diminished liberty. Here he went beyond most liberals and prudent political concerns to demand the removal of Catholic ‘idols’; and if Catholics complained that this was a violation of their conscience, ‘we have no warrant to regard conscience which is not grounded on Scripture’ (Milton 1847: 562–6, quote 564). In parenthesis, it is worth noting that that sentiment would hardly be consonant with a neutral view of the state.

CONCLUSION I have outlined four basic features of a republican ideal-type in early modern form – delegated popular sovereignty in a mixed constitution, a cyclical view of history with considerable modifications, an important place assigned to virtue or virtù and a qualitative conception of liberty. Justification for the above features was sought by reference to classical Greek and Roman texts; but biblical sources were also important as were contemporary descriptions of ‘mythical’ exemplars, especially Venice, and stories about Europe in bygone days, concerning, for example, ancient Germany and Saxon

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England. Above all, an enormous influence was exercised by Machiavelli, particularly his Discourses on Livy, with the neoHarringtonian Henry Nevill (1968: 81, 92) going so far as to describe him as ‘divine’. But right from the time of the Florentine himself, there were republicans such as Guicciardini (1965: 30) who did not have so much faith in the widespread application of Roman examples and who wished to temper his virtù. As mixed constitutions, the models presented included a democratic element and the desire to curb a strong executive with rights of resistance; but all, by twentieth-century standards, and most, by the standards of their own time, were aristocratic, reflecting perhaps the importance of Spartan models and Roman sources compared with the Athenian. With that in mind we may understand Isaac Kramnick’s (1990: 1) observation that in contrast to liberalism which is an ideology of industrious and diligent work: Republicanism is historically an ideology of leisure. Its conception of citizenship privileges people who need not work, who have the time to devote themselves to civic life. In this commitment to public duty independent landowners realize their essence as human beings. Many of the early modern republicans were indeed aristocrats but not all were landowners and not all were leisured. Many possessed credentials which were just as middle class, even perhaps as ‘bourgeois’ if that term had any precise meaning in those days, as people now identified as ‘liberals’. But there is no denying their prevailing aristocratic orientation. Of course, the degree of aristocratic sentiment varied, with Guicciardini fairly high on the aristocratic spectrum (Gilbert 1965: 271–301), both affirming the necessary connection between popular participation and self-government and exhibiting distrust at its exercise (Pocock 1975: 142, 226–7, 232). Democracy was frequently disparaged and favourable references to democracy often interpreted that word in terms of aristocracy. As Wilfried Nippel (1994: 7–9) reminded us, the mixed constitution derived from sources other than the Athenian. But, at least for some, democracy was seen as a necessary component of the mixed constitution. As Pettit (1997: 29–30) has maintained, popular participatory democracy was not seen as an end in itself but as one means to safeguard liberty as non-domination. All the early modern republicans, moreover, maintained some

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version of a balance of powers though that was usually justified in moral terms as opposed to a focus on institutional checks; and the early thinkers did not make much of a separate judiciary. Some, such as Sidney (1996: II, XXXII, 309–10), maintained a version of social contract; though it is fair to say that Hobbes’ use of that term may have deterred others (Robbins 1968: 46). Most important, whether virtue-based or rule-based, all early modern republicans insisted on the rule of law, implying law’s constitutive nature, and condemned arbitrariness in theories advocating absolute monarchy, though some saw the need for dictatorial rule in emergency situations. Some early modern republicans were sexist in categorizing the female Fortuna (Pitkin 1984: 138–69); with Machiavelli, according to Pitkin (1984: 109–37), exhibiting consistent contempt for and fear of women. Most early modern republicans, however much they might have opposed patriarchy as spelt out by Filmer, appeared sexist in affirming literally what would later be spelt out as ‘fraternity’ – the concomitant of ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’ (Pateman: 1988). As Pitkin (1984: 240) put it: The shared discipline of republican Citizenship . . . is the final male resource against feminine power. Yet its origins are a mystery, and its continuing maintenance against internal corruption and external attack is highly problematic. Even fraternal Citizens fail to escape nature’s and fortune’s power for long. In the political climate of the time the gender implications of nondomination were not explored. The early modern republicans were all patriotic, usually racist in their orientalist comments about Turkey and culturalist in the recourse to mythical ancient constitutions; but they were by no means as nationalistic as their nineteenth century successors, at least in the sense of affirming the nexus of land and language (see Gellner 1983).19 Many republicans, moreover, included what nowadays might be called an imperialist mission,20 with Milton and some other defenders of Venice as clear exceptions. That mission required citizens to bear arms; but, more important, an arms-bearing citizenry was seen as necessary for domestic liberty; the lack of such an armsbearing citizenry was considered one of the few failings of Venice. As patriots, most early modern republicans condemned discord and factions which made most of them hostile to political parties; though Machiavelli and Sidney stressed the positive value of conflict – contrary

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to the views of modern critics of ‘civic republicanism’ which stress its ‘totalitarian’ implications. The republicans advocated serving the common good; but that did not mean self-abnegation. Indeed, in the case of Machiavelli and Harrington, conventional Christianity was criticized for producing such an attitude. Nor did it mean renunciation of self-interest and commercial life, though there were differences of emphasis on those issues. But early modern republicans did not see the market in an abstract sense as a ‘natural’ regulator. While most believed in hierarchy, moreover, they were generally anti-clerical. There were differences in early modern republicans’ conceptions of popular sovereignty, in how they saw the relationship of virtue (virtù) to natural law, in their views concerning a cyclical view of history and irreversibility and in their understanding of the scope of liberty. But all considered virtues important, while differing on the nature of virtues, the supremacy of justice and the degree of artificiality of particular virtues. Most, but not all, moreover, accorded a privileged position to those with a special insight into virtue – a later focus of criticism. All saw the dangers of corruption and upheld a resilient conception of liberty as non-domination. Whatever differences there might have been on the ancient constitution of their peoples (compare Harrington and Milton),21 the idea of renewal was generally very important, though it varied in degree and polemical content (Houston 1991: 218). Thus the theme of a law-giver who initiated new ordini was a recurrent feature though actual candidates for that role in the contemporary scene, such as Cromwell, proved disappointing, (see Nevill 1968: esp. 180). Since early modern liberals and republicans were engaged in struggle against the same enemy, I have argued that we must be very wary of the current fashion of magnifying the differences between early modern politicians labelled nowadays as ‘liberal’ and ‘republican’, though a few tentative analytical distinctions may be put forward. We should note also the obvious point that early modern republicans were also very different from later socialists. While some may have been relatively egalitarian whilst still aristocratic, the role of private property was not challenged and was usually affirmed. Talk of equality did not refer to absolute equality in property, nor usually the distribution of governmental authority; it was always tied to the notion of avoiding dependence on particular others (Pocock 1975: 209). We have noted that theme especially in Cato’s Letters. Certainly poverty was occasionally extolled, but that probably

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meant the willingness to sacrifice private satisfactions for the common good rather than the non-possession of goods (Pocock 1975: 294). The language the early modern republicans used was, of course, very different from that employed in later centuries. A crucial difference was the paucity of ‘as if’ thinking and usually a rejection of virtual representation. Such ‘virtuality’ was not totally absent but it was not theorized. Subsequent chapters will show that republican language continued to be salient after the beginning of the eighteenth century – the point at which this chapter breaks off – but the changes in a ‘virtual’ and mechanical direction were to modify the republican message.

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2 Enlightenment Republicanism During the mid to late eighteenth century, many European Enlightenment thinkers considered republicanism obsolescent. The Scottish Enlightenment scholar, Adam Ferguson (1966: 60), writing in 1767, remarked: The small republics of Greece, indeed by their subdivisions, and the balance of their power, found almost in every village the object of nations. Every little district was a nursery of excellent men, and what is now the wretched corner of a great empire, was the field on which mankind have reaped their principal honours. But in modern Europe, republics of a similar extent, are like shrubs, under the shade of a taller wood, choked by the neighbourhood of more powerful states. In Ferguson’s work, and in Scotland in general, republican ideas appeared in muted form; and in France republican ideas were only vigorously pressed into service during the tensions of the early 1790s (Imbruglia 1994). But there were some notable explicit affirmations of republicanism in Europe before the French Revolution. That republicanism appeared in constantly changing form as was manifest in the writings of Montesquieu, Rousseau and Kant. All three were avowed republicans and all three have been celebrated as Enlightenment thinkers, although Rousseau’s (1964: 31–74) ‘First Discourse’ might be described as anti-Enlightenment. He, of course, notoriously denounced, and was denounced by, other Enlightenment philosophes – a factor in his marked paranoia (Grimsley 1961, 1968). Each, moreover, as Peter Gay (1977: I, 17) pointed out, belonged to a different generation and each may be designated as characterizing a new form of republicanism. Many writers in the United States have singled out ‘the great Montesquieu’ as heralding a significantly modern form of republicanism, while observers of France might wish to place greater emphasis on Rousseau. The writings of each were of considerable importance in the two great revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century. More generally 49

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Montesquieu has been celebrated as heralding a new ‘commercial republicanism’ (Lerner 1987: 195–221) and Rousseau as pioneering a revolution which prefigured Kant in sharply separating morality from prudence and the moral law from positive law (Beck 1984: 22–5). To my mind, however, Kant’s break with early modern republicanism was more significant than either. My argument may occasion incredulity among readers since Kant, while a great philosopher, is not usually taken to be a major political theorist. Kant had no ‘fourth critique’; and his scattered writings on political theory towards the end of his life (Kant 1963a, 1991) were not always coherent and were often ‘boring and pedantic’ (Arendt 1982: 7–10). I shall contend, however, that Kantian ideas were important in shaping ‘virtual republicanism’. Elements of that form of republicanism existed long before Kant; but Kant epitomized it. Let us now compare the three Enlightenment thinkers and contrast them with a few others such as Adam Smith and Ferguson.

SOVEREIGNTY Many Enlightenment scholars, following Bodin and contrary to a broad interpretation of the received Aristotelian tradition, took sovereignty to be legislative power and not executive power.1 In The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu (1989: IV, V, 35–6) considered aristocracy and democracy both as sub-types of republican government. The republic was characterized as small in size, moderate in policies and governed, of course, by the principle of political virtue. Whereas the democratic sub-type stressed the spirit of equality, the aristocratic type replaced (sic) that by the spirit of moderation (Montesquieu 1989: V, VIII, 51). Monarchies were said to be more substantial in size, moderate in policies restrained by traditional systems of law, but were governed not by virtue but by honour. The third type – despotisms – were characterized as large in size, immoderate in policies, largely lawless and governed by fear (Montesquieu 1989: II–VIII, 10–128). In that categorization Montesquieu’s combination of aristocracy and democracy was somewhat different from the approach of those who went before him. He nevertheless preserved the early modern republican preference for an aristocratic version of republicanism which represented the people. Rousseau (1968: II, VII, 84–8), however, who admired Montesquieu, was quite different, appearing at times quite traditional and

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at others radical. His most famous traditional element was an affirmation of the ‘state of nature’ which was repudiated by many contemporary thinkers (Ferguson 1966: 1–10). In traditional mode he also affirmed the role of the law-giver.2 ‘At the birth of political societies, it is the leaders of the republic who shape institutions but that afterwards it is the institutions which shape the leaders of the republic’ (Rousseau 1968: II, VII, 84, referring to Montesquieu). In the mid-eighteenth century that idea was fading, as is evident in the words of Ferguson (1966: 123): We are . . . to receive with caution, the traditionary histories of ancient legislators, and founders of states. Their names have long been celebrated; their supposed plans have been admired; and what were probably the consequences of an early situation is, in every instance, considered as an effect of design. Ferguson exhibited a more sociological bent. Yet the idea of a deliberate ‘founding’ still found voices. Even Smith, heralded as one of the major founders of social science in the late eighteenth century, an innovator in the sense that he saw the market as a non-political regulator and who had a marked contempt for politicians at a time when the language of ‘economy and society’ was replacing the language of politics, cautiously affirmed the idea of a founding (Winch 1978: 159–60, 172). Rousseau’s modernity, on the other hand, was shown in his articulating more clearly than earlier republicans the idea that sovereignty is artificial.3 A social contract was not a time-honoured institution which determined the relations of the various bodies which form a government but was simply the act whereby a population became a people (Rousseau 1968: I, V–VI, 58–64). The people at one level constituted the state and at another were constituted by it. That rationale for the construction of a state on republican lines introduced a note of virtuality but Rousseau would not entertain virtual representation or any form of representation in the legislative power at least in its ideal state.4 In condemning the very idea of representation in the legislative power Rousseau might be considered a democrat, though, in traditional mode, he defined democracy in relation to the executive power and considered it impossible or at best suitable to small and poor countries (Rousseau 1968: III, IV, 112–4, VIII, 125). For Rousseau, the sovereign legislature consisted of the whole people:

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‘Each one of us puts into the community his person and all his powers under the supreme direction of the general will; and as a body, we incorporate every member as an indivisible part of the whole’. [That union] was once called the city, and is now known as the republic or the body politic. In its passive role it is called the state, when it plays an active role it is the sovereign; and when it is compared to others of its own kind, it is a power (Rousseau 1968: I, VI, 61–2). Rousseau (1968: III, XII–XIV, 136–9), favouring the active role of the people assembled, insisted that the people could not surrender their sovereignty nor be represented (Rousseau 1968: II, I, 69–70; III, XV, 140–3) and maintained that sovereignty of the people was indivisible (Rousseau 1968: II, II, 70–2). Had Rousseau developed a view of sovereignty which was not arbitrary in the sense of negating the rule of law? As noted in the Introduction, liberals, such as Constant (1988: 106–9, 177–8), protested that his social contract, while correctly based on the selfinterest of individuals, gave rise to an unlimited sovereignty which, contrary to Rousseau’s belief, had to be delegated sooner or later and could lead to arbitrary injustice. Some communitarian critics, such as Hegel (1967: 156–7), on the other hand, criticized any theory of social contract which started from arbitrary individual selfinterest and not from a theory of sovereignty based on the ‘absolutely rational universal will’ and on a people’s organic life; that could lead to the dissolution of sovereignty. Both Hegel (1967: 157) and Constant (1988: 108) saw Rousseau paving the way for the horrors of the French Revolution. Rousseau (1968: III, VII, 122–9) also left himself open to republican objections. While entertaining the idea of mixed government, Rousseau, at least in principle, rejected the idea of a mixed constitution, as defined earlier. Many early modern republicans had expressed fear that the disturbance of that mixed constitution, which rested on functional balance among social orders, could lead to anarchy or tyranny of the majority.5 But Rousseau may be defended. Maurizio Viroli (1988: 6–10) has noted that his general will was rational; it did not boil down to the whims of individuals and found its expression in general laws. Indeed, Rousseau’s whole work was pervaded by the need for the rule of law and at one point he defined a republic solely in those terms (Rousseau 1968: II, VI, 82).6 Rousseau was quite explicit that the sovereign was not above civic law and was certainly no

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advocate of unlimited democracy. He declared that he would have fled from a republic where the people executed its own laws (Rousseau 1964: 82) and was hardly an advocate of the ‘populism’ for which Pettit (1997: 30) claims he was probably responsible. Above all Rousseau, while sensing revolution was in the air, positively feared it (Roosevelt 1990: 115–6; Rousseau 1964: 172; 1990b: 229). Viroli’s and others’ defences are cogent; but undeniably the fear of tyranny which animated Rousseau’s critics has led some people to discard the notion of sovereignty altogether, as Arendt believed the Americans did. For Arendt (1963: 152), that was the ‘greatest American innovation in politics . . . the insight that in the realm of human affairs sovereignty and tyranny are the same’. She was wrong! The Americans attempted to work out a new conception of delegated sovereignty, as the next chapter will show. They did, however, further a process about which Denis Diderot, Rousseau’s one-time associate in the famous Enlightenment Encyclopédie project, had complained – the eclipse of sovereignty by administration (Imbruglia 1994: 69, 77, 80). Kant, who lived to theorize the French Revolution, following the Abbé Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, distinguished the form of sovereignty from the mode of government. Adhering to that separation, Sieye`s had justified the retention of the French monarchy in government after 1789 (Stedman Jones 1994: 155–6). That separation had been prefigured by Bodin (1955: II, VII, 74–5) and, of course, Rousseau; but Kant’s formulation used a taxonomy much more complicated than those found among earlier thinkers. According to his influential essay ‘Perpetual Peace’, there were three forms of sovereignty – autocracy, aristocracy and democracy. The form of government, stemming from a constitution ‘whereby [in Rousseauesque fashion] a mass becomes a people’, however, referred to the way power is exercised and that could be despotic when ‘the laws are made and arbitrarily executed by one and the same power’ or republican when the executive power is separated from the legislative power (Kant 1991: 100–1). I am not sure, however, what Kant’s preferred combination was. After all, he lived in Prussia, an ‘enlightened’ autocracy which was the simplest – therefore the ‘best’ – form of government, but also the ‘most dangerous’ (Kant 1991: 161–2; 1965: 110–1). Although Kant was probably not the apologist of Frederick the Great that some commentators have made him out to be, one interpretation sees him as favouring autocracy exercised in a republican manner. Autocratic rule might be preferred since aristocracy

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and democracy were more inclined to be self-centred. Indeed, Kant went further than some other eighteenth century writers, who felt that democracy and despotism were polar types but could easily turn one into another (Ferguson 1966: 72), by declaring that the truest democracy, interpreted in the conventional sense of direct democracy, was necessarily a despotism: because it establishes an executive power through which all the citizens may make decisions about (and even against) the single individual without his consent, so that decisions are made by all the people and yet not by all the people; and this means that the general will is in contradiction with itself, and thus also with freedom (Kant 1991: 101). Frederick the Great, therefore, could speak of himself as the highest servant of the state – an attitude impossible in a democratic state ‘because everyone wants to be ruler’. Thus Kant (1991: 101) argued: ‘the smaller the number of ruling persons in a state and the greater their powers of representation, the more the constitution will approximate to its republican potentiality’. For Kant (1991: 187) the manner of rule was crucial: It is the duty of monarchs to govern in a republican (not a democratic) manner even though they may rule autocratically. In other words they should treat the people in accordance with principles akin in spirit to the laws of freedom which a people of mature rational powers would prescribe for itself, even if the people is not literally asked for its consent. In contrast to the ideas of Rousseau, which despite suggestions of virtual republicanism prescribed the actual participation of the people in legislation, we are presented here with a clear statement of thorough-going virtual republicanism. A republican spirit consisted in the hypothetical prescriptions of a people once they become mature. The same ‘as if’ methodology Kant (1991: 79) applied to the ‘social contract’. That was not a fact but simply an idea of Reason, as he expounded in his ‘Theory and Practice’: [The social contract] is in fact merely an idea of reason, which nonetheless has undoubted practical reality; for it can oblige every legislator to frame his laws in such a way that they could have

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been produced by the united will of a whole nation, and to regard each subject, in so far as he can claim citizenship, as if he had consented with the general will. This is the test of rightfulness of every public law. Scholars, such as Hume, had remarked that the idea of a social contract was fictitious but useful; but not that it was real simply by virtue of practical Reason. Autocracy, therefore, could be defended on republican grounds. But surely despotism could not be defended in that way since republicanism and despotism were said to be contradictory forms of government. If, however, despotism refers only to constitutional provisions and if republicanism refers to a particular spirit, Kant (1991: 118) could entertain the possibility of a state being governed in a republican way even if its constitution provided for a despotic ruling power. Short of that extreme, an enlightened monarch might be best equipped to maintain a republican spirit until the people are ready to assume their responsibility. That position is far from the kind of republicanism we have so far examined. Kant, therefore, went beyond the early modern republicans in his emphasis on the crucial role of representation; but, I repeat, he talked about representation of a particular spirit rather than representation actualized in concrete institutional forms (Stedman Jones 1994: 157–8). His advocacy, which owed much to Rousseau, was in fact the very antithesis of Rousseau. The people may be ‘master’, and all humans need a master (Kant 1991: 46), but the people, as master and as the source of sovereign legislation, cannot themselves legislate, in Kant’s (1991: 145; 1965: 86–7) view, because that would make them judges in their own cause. Popular rule had to be virtual. Kant, therefore, in affirming the ‘general will’, felt that a monarch could articulate it. That general will and popular sovereignty itself, Otto Gierke (1958: 153) observed, did not refer to an empirical or historical aggregate but an idea of Reason – just like the social contract or, more deeply, transcendental freedom and things-in-themselves which cannot be proven to exist. The people, it will be remembered, was not the same as ‘the mass’ but needed a constitution to be actualized. The regulative principles of Reason were not just heuristic devices but had practical power and could supply a moral standard and ‘form the basis of the possible perfection of certain actions’ (Kant 1964: 486; Stedman Jones 1994: 164–5).

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In short, my argument is that virtual republicanism, as exemplified by Kant, was quite new and very modern. Kant borrowed Rousseau’s idea of the ‘general will’ but interpreted it in a way more reminiscent of the earlier argument of Diderot who, seeing it as a construction of Reason, envisaged a general will of humankind. Rousseau had been more traditional. Contrary to his critics, who want to cast him as a ‘totalitarian’, he felt that the general will was the product of a particular society. It rested on individual autonomy and could not be imposed on others out of considerations of Reason (Chapman 1968: 83). The general will was not a product of Reason but of commitment. That is not to say, however, that Rousseau saw no possibility for general norms governing international relations; in fact his constructivist, rather than transcendental, principles for international relations were probably more persuasive than those of Kant (Roosevelt 1990: 69–89).

THE SHAPE OF HISTORY Montesquieu has often been heralded as inaugurating a new form of republicanism which was held to be both sociological (Aron 1968: 17– 62; Gay 1977: I, 34) and commercial. But was his sociological approach new? Montesquieu’s thought is celebrated for its emphasis on the relativity of morals. But that was true also of Machiavelli’s thought. In that regard, Bernard Crick (1970: 28), contra Raymond Aron, argued that it was Machiavelli who was perhaps ‘the first master of political sociology’. More specifically, the new sociological approach had no place for the idea that great leaders made history except sometimes in founding régimes nor, despite Montesquieu’s delight in classical learning, did it entertain the view that elements of the ancient world could be replicated. But that also was hardly new. Montesquieu clearly departed from Machiavelli in being sceptical about the relevance of the classics. But so had Machiavelli’s contemporary Guicciardini (1965: 30) and other early modern republicans. Rousseau, however, was not so sure about the irrelevance of the ancients to the modern situation and for that reason, Judith Shklar (1990) argued, while admiring Montesquieu, he could not help feeling that Montesquieu had let republicanism down. Was Montesquieu’s (1989: XX–XXI, 337–97) emphasis on the importance of commerce to the shape of history particularly new? Harrington and others had stressed irreversibility; but the idea of

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a historical progression from a society based on landed property to one based on mobile property was far from his position. The eighteenth-century preoccupation with stages in the progress of political economy led commentators to argue that credit, so vital to the new political economy, instead of being seen as a source of corruption, was actually consonant with virtue. Montesquieu (1989: XX, I–II, 338–9) believed that credit, though initially fictitious, could become real and could develop into confiance – the basis of trust, which for Cicero (1967: I, VII, 46), to whom most republicans made reference, had been a precondition of justice. Thus, I have noted, some scholars argued that Montesquieu was one of the founders of a new form of republicanism – ‘commercial republicanism’, contrasted perhaps with that of Rousseau (1968: III, XV, 140) who described ‘finance’ as ‘the word of a slave . . . unknown in the true republic’.7 The preceding chapter, however, should have given cause to doubt whether an affirmation of commerce was so radically discordant with the views of early modern republicans. That chapter attempted to refute the allegation that early modern republicanism was essentially anti-commercial. Yet clearly, Montesquieu, along with Sir James Steuart, stands out as epitomizing a new, constantly reiterated, view that commercial development has a benign influence on politics, making war and strife in general less likely. That perspective is far from those of Machiavelli who, as Hirschman (1977: 33, 41) pointed out, while initiating ‘the train of thought that developed into the idea of pitting passions against passions’, would have been outraged to see avarice promoted ‘to the position of the privileged passion, given the job of taming the wild ones and of making in this fashion a crucial contribution to statecraft’. Indeed Montesquieu seemed less in the old republican mould than Smith (1978: 540), the very father of modern economics, who, among many other typically early modern republican statements, noted that one of the bad effects of commerce was that it ‘tends to extinguish martial spirit’. At the same time Smith displayed an ambivalent attitude towards the supposed beneficial contribution of commerce to peace (Hirschman 1977: 104–7). Ferguson (1966: 24, 61) was even more sceptical, not just because of his role as one-time chaplain of the Black Watch but in reflecting general views of the Scottish Enlightenment in seeing war as a result of human nature and essential for civil society; that may have been one of the reasons why the highlander (a rare occurrence among the Scottish Enlightenment)

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could not be repackaged in the nineteenth century as an ideologist of progress so effectively as Smith. I am not sure whether to classify Smith as a republican or indeed how to classify him. Here I am indebted to Donald Winch (1978: 141) who, against the protests of Kramnick (1990: 36–7, 168), has done much to demolish the view that Smith should be cast, in nineteenth-century vein, as a nostalgic Tory, the apostle of capitalism or as a precursor of Marx. In rejecting a Lockean pre-political state and derivations from ‘origins’ which Ferguson (1996) had done much to demolish, Winch (1978: 51–3) argued, Smith was less a Tory than an old-fashioned republican believer in the relative autonomy of the political. His version of ‘the labour theory of value’ was probably not, in Lockean or Marxist vein, a statement of the origin of value (Winch 1978: 58). In his view of history proceeding in stages, he was always mindful of the relatively autonomous role of politics and, far from heralding a bright and beautiful capitalism, his approach was markedly pessimistic, perhaps reflecting the old republican cyclical view (Winch 1978: 63–4, 70–102) or alternatively a view common throughout most of the Enlightenment and so prominent in Ferguson (1966) which alternated between pessimism and optimism (Gay 1977: I, 20–1). As for his closeness to Marx, Winch (1978: 82) pointed out, he described not what Marx in the nineteenth century considered as ‘alienation’, nor the liberal view of ‘corruption’ seen simply as distributive unfairness but simple oldfashioned republican ‘corruption’ as systemic constitutional degeneration. While pioneering a new form of economics, Smith appeared to reflect early modern republican thought, or at least Ferguson’s critical views concerning the division of labour. Most republicans, through the Scottish Enlightenment to Alexis de Tocqueville, though welcoming commerce, maintained a very ambivalent attitude towards it. It was not so ‘doux’ as Montesquieu made it out to be and, to the extent that it was doux, it was potentially corrupt (Hirschman 1977: 60–135). Considering the above, one could easily see Montesquieu as more modern than Smith or Ferguson who borrowed much from the French aristocrat. But if our focus is on the shape of history, there is probably no need to do so. Important to the argument here is that, despite all his faith in the benign effects of commerce, Montesquieu still envisaged political decay. While reference to the Polybian cycle was not his only account of decline (Shklar 1990: 268), he retained the old view that balance was unstable. Here he was little different

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from Hume, that other famous summariser of the debate, though his republican preferences clearly ran counter to Hume’s conservative ones. Hume (1894), discussing the British version of the mixed constitution, the compromise between absolute monarchy and popular rule, thought that it would degenerate to one extreme, with the former being the more likely and preferable. That view of history, moreover, seemed to suggest the eventual collapse of the separation (or balance) of powers, among the executive, legislature and judiciary, which had been pioneered by seventeenth-century English republicans, celebrated in an idealized picture of England by Montesquieu (1989: XI, VI, 156–66), and was to be criticized in its alleged British form by Kant (1990: 186–7) and, as we saw in the Introduction, rejected by the communitarian Hegel (1967: 292). Although republicans such as Montesquieu emphasized the importance of commerce to peace and preventing despotism and saw it as a necessary condition for citizenship, a strong republican view throughout the eighteenth century, while affirming the necessity of commerce, held that commerce gave rise to luxury which in turn led to corruption. Virtù’s struggle was now seen not as against Fortuna – a concept for which ‘the sociological’ Montesquieu had little use, although in many writings a ‘wheel of fortune’ was still referred to. The struggle was more specifically against particular manifestations of that corruption and we may argue as to the extent to which it was seen in an early modern republican (entropic) sense or what is now seen as a specifically liberal (corrosive) sense. Here we need simply note that many people still maintained the old view that the contradictions among the agents of rule, between personality and society, culture and virtue, and much else were unstable. But, as I have noted, the pessimism was qualified. Among the Scottish School of political economy, Pocock (1975: 504) maintained, there were many who believed that an equilibrium of long-term duration might be established. Historians will no doubt argue about how long the ‘long-term’ might be or the extent to which a historyless modern liberal ‘economics’ was emerging. Suffice it to point out that Pocock (1975: 509) who, of course, stressed the continuance of the early modern republican view of history, maintained that while ‘English and Scottish theorists could not free themselves from the vision of some ultimate corruption, . . . [they] had for the most part freed themselves from riding upon a wheel where the catastrophe might come at any moment’. Consider the final section of Ferguson’s (1966: 278–80) Essay on the History of Civil Society which

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affirmed the value of human action in countering degeneration and noted that despotism destroys itself. In Britain, the more sanguine view of the Scottish School was attractive whether interpreted in what would nowadays be called a liberal or old-style republican manner, whilst Rousseau who seemed to point to an apocalyptic solution of contradictions – an escape from history – was not. Yet, in fact, Rousseau (1968: III, X, 131–5) was more pessimistic than his followers. He echoed the entropic republican view concerning the inevitable degeneration of all governments and saw trade not as a solution nor a positive element with adverse side-effects but as a major problem in itself. I can only reiterate the point made earlier: contra Gey, the republican view insisted that power was impermanent. Was Kant different? Kant’s (1991: 50–1) ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ which consisted in the realization of a progressive but hidden plan of nature – the antithesis again of Rousseau – was hardly cyclical and hardly in the tradition of the early modern republicans. It was also perhaps an affirmation of progress more clear-cut than those found among many other Enlightenment thinkers who, while affirming progress, tended to portray a dualistic history where periods of Reason alternated with periods of superstition (Gay 1977: I, 33–4; II, 99–125). Yet Kant’s writings were replete with melancholia (Arendt 1982: 24–5). As Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (1972: 85–6) saw it, ‘the root of Kantian optimism, according to which moral behaviour is rational even if the mean and wretched would prevail, is actually an expression of horror at the thought of reversion to barbarism’. For all his advocacy of Reason, Kant, in sociological mode, displayed a ‘radical scepticism’, which Gey (1993: 882–7), strangely and contrary to all I have argued so far, maintained was characteristically absent in ‘civic republicanism’. Less dramatically it was clear that Kant’s approach to ‘critique’ demanded that he complain about progress (Arendt 1982: 41). He was careful to point out that the Age of Enlightenment was not yet an enlightened age (Kant 1991: 58) and sympathized with the unfortunate patient, beset with an over-confident doctor, who complained that he was ‘dying of sheer recovery’ (Kant 1991: 189) – a portent perhaps of sufferers from economic rationalism in the late twentieth century. Enlightenment was dialectical, as Rousseau (1964: 34) had noted and for which position Ferguson (1966) had provided much evidence. The dialectic was seen tragically in the fate of Condorcet (1955) in the French

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Revolution whose enthusiastic Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind was written in fear of execution (Gay 1977: II, 112–22). That dialectic was later to be theorized most famously by Horkheimer and Adorno (1972: 3–42, 81–119). Their treatment of dialectic, however, was far more Hegelian than mine in that they saw the Enlightenment negating itself and becoming a form of ‘totalitarian’ domination: ‘Once it is harnessed to the dominant mode of production, the Enlightenment – which strives to undermine any order which has become repressive – abrogates itself’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1972: 93). That is much further than I want to go. I wish merely to point out the bright and dark sides. Kant’s view might find some antecedents among those republicans who separated nature from culture but there were few republican precedents for seeing Reason abstracted from context. What was wrong with the old idea of Fortuna and cycles of virtue and vice, from the perspective of a wise creator or a right-thinking person, Kant (1991: 88) argued, was that they were irrational and made history into a farce: It is a sight quite unfit not so much for a god, but even for the most ordinary, though right-thinking man, to see the human race advancing over a period of time toward virtue, and then quickly relapsing the whole way back into vice and misery. It may perhaps be moving and instructive to watch such a drama for a while; but the curtain must eventually descend. For in the long run, it becomes a farce. And even if the actors do not tire of it – for they are fools – the spectator does, for any single act will be enough for him if he can reasonably conclude from it that the never-ending play will go on in the same way for ever. If it is only a play, the retribution at the end can make up for the unpleasant sensations the spectator has felt. But in my opinion at least, it cannot be reconciled with the morality of a wise creator and ruler of the world if countless vices, even with intermingled virtues, are in actual fact allowed to go on accumulating. Fortuna and the idea of cycles of corruption, it seemed, had now been replaced by the march of Reason. As Kant (1991: 41) put it: Individual men and even entire nations little imagine that, while they are pursuing their own ends, each in his own way and often in opposition to others, they are unwittingly guided in their advance

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along a course intended by nature. They are unconsciously promoting an end which, even if they knew what it was, would scarcely arouse their interest. Since the philosopher ‘cannot assume that mankind follows any rational purpose of its own in its collective actions’, Kant (1991: 42) argued, ‘it is for him to attempt to discover a purpose in nature, behind this senseless course of human events’. According to that view, Arendt (1982: 56) observed, the historian is no longer a teller of individual stories, as manifested in Machiavelli’s (1988) Florentine Histories (or stories) often wrongly translated as the History of Florence, but is a judge of progress. Arendt’s insight is crucial. For Kant (1963a: 51), progress was not a story which had to have an end. There was no end to progress; and Hegel’s later mistake might have been to see history as a story with all the necessary ingredients of storytelling – an end and a subject, the Absolute Spirit. There was no end but there was an aim – the attainment of the perfect republican constitution (Kant 1991: 50). Here Kant (1991: 100) emphasized the association of the ‘republic’ with peace and hope. Kant’s ideas seemed new. But were they? Interestingly ideas about degeneration still surface in his writings: A prolonged peace favours the predominance of a mere commercial spirit, and with it a debasing self-interest, cowardice and effeminacy, and tends to degrade the character of the nation (Kant 1952: I, XXVIII, 113). While Kant (1963a: 66–7) vehemently denounced war, and even more the wasteful preparation for war, he at times seemed to reflect that earlier republican view, echoed more recently by Ferguson (1966: 24), which saw war as playing an important part in the development of culture and freedom. Here, like most Enlightenment thinkers, quite erroneously, he contrasted Europe with what nowadays would be called an ‘orientalist’ view of China where a supposed absence of war was linked to an absence of liberty. In all that I wonder whether Kant was simply reflecting the old pre-modern republican ideas about cycles of corruption or simply what was referred to above as the dialectic of Enlightenment – a view which later became celebrated as the ‘cunning of Reason’. Kant’s concern with peace and hope was reflected in his enthusiasm for the early French Revolution which promised precisely

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that. But Kant was enthusiastic in virtual mode which earned the scorn of Marx (Marx and Engels 1976: 195). Kant had no enthusiasm for the act of rebellion itself. Since Kant made a distinction between the principle according to which one should act and the principle according to which one should judge (Arendt 1982: 48), he condemned revolution as unjust (Kant 1991: 184n) whilst praising the good intentions of revolutionaries.8 Kant’s observations now seem bizarre and people nowadays are surely more inclined to accept Alexander Hamilton’s Fergusonian criticism, in the Federalist Papers published before the French Revolution, of those who associated a republic based on commerce with peace as if it were not administered by ‘men’ (Hamilton, Madison and Jay 1961: VI, 56–7). Rousseau (1990a), whose prescriptions for peace depended more on constructive human action, I am sure, would have agreed with Hamilton on that point. Moreover, the French republic clearly conformed to the Machiavellian model – the revolution produced a ‘republic for expansion’. Indeed, Kant’s wider view of history seems even more bizarre in the modern world of sociology where sociological laws do not depend upon a hidden hand of nature. Since Tocqueville and Marx, we have become accustomed at looking at the French Revolution in sociological terms. Contrary to Aron, modern sociology appears not to have been the product of the Enlightenment (of Montesquieu, even of Ferguson) but the consequence of its failed hope in Reason. Yet, in a way, abstract Kantianism and modern sociology may be seen to complement each other. I shall return to that point in the subsequent discussion of liberty. As an example of a sociological approach to the disjunction of Enlightenment ideas and social institutions, consider the work of Patrice Higonnet (1988), who, in Tocquevillian (1945: II, 19) fashion, undertook a comparative analysis of revolutionary America and France. In the latter country, he argued, the ideas of the Enlightenment played themselves out in and around a state structure which rested on a profoundly ‘corporatist’ foundation.9 The revolution occurred when the corporatist structure weakened and sections of the élite fought each other in the name of an individualism which had no social basis. Kant (1991: 74) had denied that corporations could be free, insisting only on the liberty of individuals and, whether they had read him or not, French revolutionaries were inspired by similar ideas. The revolution soon gave way to corporatist nostalgia, a total abandonment of individualism, dependence on mass violence

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and then the abandonment of the revolution. In America, on the other hand, Chapter 3 will show, revolutionary ideas were institutionalized in a new mechanical structure which found resonance in an actually existing civil society as opposed to the civil society which Kant and many others theorized but which seemed to be only an intellectual construct in France. In France revolutionary ideas were suppressed or disfigured behind a screen of aggressive patriotism, to emerge spasmodically with violent force through much of the nineteenth century. The sociological thesis here seems to be that the construction of an ideal state should not be too much out of kilter with the structure of civil society, which we have touched on earlier and to which we shall return. With that thesis in mind we may understand the reintroduction of a significant property qualification in the rather conservative French Constitution of 1795 on the grounds that it was a temporary measure dictated by the fact that the Republic was ‘fifty years ahead of its time’ (Fontana 1994: 126). Timeless Reason, theorized by Kant, it seemed, handled temporal events in an odd way. Nevertheless, when affirming the important limits imposed by civil society or its absence, caution must be displayed. That is not because the ‘sociology’ in question is somehow wrong or because there is no determinism in economic history but because deterministic views of politics may imply a linear construction of political history which is hard to sustain and might be used to consign certain societies to the status of being necessarily politically underdeveloped. The relative autonomy of politics must not be rejected too easily because, however fictitious from a sociological point of view it may be, it enjoys a Humean utility and perhaps a ‘real’ effectiveness with which Kant might have sympathized. We are considering here what Arendt (1977: 41–90) criticized as the ‘history of process’, where inexorable non-human processes are seen to swamp ordinary human experience and to paralyse people’s capacity for political action, where patterns are mistaken for meaning (Arendt 1977: 81) and where large numbers of people may be sacrificed to ‘history’. In that regard, unfairly I think, she blamed Marx who had apparently been much too impressed by the progressive nature of capitalism. Certainly Arendt (1977: 81) is correct in seeing Marx as the ‘last of those thinkers who stand at the borderline between the modern age’s interest in politics and its later preoccupation with [impersonal] history’. But Marx cannot be blamed for

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the views of later Marxists. While some later Marxists can indeed be criticized for turning a philosophy of freedom into a series of laws which denied it, there have also been Marxists, notably in the Gramscian tradition, who have sought to recover politics. Marx is valuable here not because he shares the Kantian and Hegelian view that history is actually going somewhere but because of his concern to unmask ‘virtual’ forms or ‘shells’. Marx and Kant are both notable for theorizing the notion of ‘critique’ which seeks to explode dogma without plunging into scepticism (Arendt 1982: 33–40), though, we have noted, Kant was not devoid of profoundly sceptical moments. Along with many scholars, I am sure Marx, who at one stage claimed he was ‘not a Marxist’, would have applied his critical skills to unmasking ‘Marxism’ as would Kant have applied his skills to unmasking ‘Kantianism’. Just as ‘Marxism’, contra Marx, can lead to fatalism, a Kantian view, contra-Kant, can lead to rationalizations of a ‘republic’ playing itself out in thin air,10 as seemed to be the case in France after the Great Revolution – a republican mystique in which ‘every Frenchman’s Republic has quite a special meaning for him. But it is not always the same Republic’ (Pickles 1962: 8). Kantian construction out of thin air might be discerned in those states which call themselves ‘republics’ and claim to represent the ‘will of the people’ but which are actually autocracies. Their construction, however, owes more to historical imagination than the ideas of Kant himself. Kant’s republic, I emphasize, was a product of Reason and not of historical imagination common in many states and currently elaborated by many theorists of nation-building (Anderson 1991).11 It was far from the invention of particularistic nationalism (Gellner 1983: 55). The latter approach, which sees romantically-inclined élites creating ‘peoples’ out of a fabricated tradition, was noted earlier in connection with those who sought to create a ‘republic’ out of a mythical Saxon England or the people of the German forests. It could also be seen among those French revolutionaries who attempted to pit a Gallic tradition against Frankish kings. Kant’s approach, however, which stressed the role of Reason in creating a people out of a ‘mass’, rather than harking back to a tradition, emphasized the rational creation of something quite new. Though reference was made to Rousseau rather than Kant, it was articulated in the position of those who argued that the French Constituent Assembly ‘gave existence to the nation in whose name it was called to speak’ (Gueniffey 1994: 97), against Sieye `s protestation

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that it is the government and not the people which is constituted (Pasquino 1994: 111). Kant, of course, did not consider the creation of a new nation in sociological terms. Nevertheless a sociological argument can be made in the French case to the effect that the ancien régime had been characterized by a constitution in which rights could not be separated from the positive law which gave them existence (Gueniffey 1994: 106) and in which the political sphere gave structure to the social (Ronsanvallon 1994: 203). Thus the people, or in the idiom of the late eighteenth century ‘the nation’, had to be constructed. That was eventually achieved by the suppression of a significant proportion of the population which was now forced to speak French. Kant’s synthetic construction was based on a universalistic conception of citizenship. He was, of course, concerned with ‘big universals’ as international relations scholars constantly remind us. But he was practical enough to realize that ‘small universals’ were the most which could be realized in the current climate. Some scholars, influenced by that strand of logic which rejects large and small universals in the manner of those logicians who regard talk of large and small infinities as a logical absurdity, cannot see how Kant could be considered the philosopher of the nation; (see Gellner 1983: 131– 2). But, recalling that strand in the republican tradition which sought to concretize the universal in the particular, we can understand this aspect of Kant’s republicanism. The nation, in the restricted sense of nation-state, was to be constructed on the basis of a public sphere founded on Right and not ethnicity or an imagined community. This is why Kant is a theorist of the nation while being a staunch opponent of nationalism (Addi 1997: 116–7; Gellner 1983: 131). We shall return to that distinction in Chapter 5. Suffice it to point out that the problem with that way of thinking is that it is difficult to achieve universal acceptance of the dictates of Reason. Many of the struggles of the past two hundred years have been the consequence of empirical persons not accepting their constitutionallydefined role as a particular ‘people’. Rarely do such persons theorize secession (Buchanan 1991). When they do, they often mobilize other elements of Kant such as ‘equality of respect’. When they come to consider the rationale for a new state, moreover, Kantian theory is usually far from their thoughts. More likely they resort to historical imagination. Hegel would by no means concur with the synthetic construction of a people; but, in a way, he was as modernist as Kant. History is

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not just a memory of the past but is something written; and woebetide ‘history-less peoples’. History is not just going somewhere but is going where historians say it is. For Hegel, as we have noted, it is the story of the Absolute Spirit with an end in view. Kant’s ‘discovery’ is more complex and, while Marx started with Hegel’s story, the later Marxist interpretation which offers the alternatives of ‘socialism or barbarism’ is, to my mind, more persuasive than earlier progressive optimism or earlier republican pessimism about the inevitability of corruption. In my view history is open. That view shares Kant’s scepticism about the end of history but is probably out of kilter with the somewhat fragile Kantian faith in rational progress.

THE ECLIPSE OF VIRTUE Returning to the earlier discussion about how far Montesquieu departed from the views of early modern republicans, we might consider his views on virtue. One apparent difference between Montesquieu and some early modern republican writers is his treatment of judgment. ‘In republican government’, he noted, ‘it is in the nature of the constitution for judges to follow the letter of the law’ (Montesquieu 1989: VI, III, 76). Despite their manifest stress on the rule of law, early modern republicans usually saw judgment in more contextual terms; they were rarely ‘black letter lawyers’. Consider Sidney’s (1996: 465) observation that ‘no law can be so perfect, to provide exactly for every case that may fall out, so as to leave nothing to the discretion of the judges’. It is clear that tying down the law too tightly frustrates the deliberation of juries which for many republicans served as a model for deliberative judgment (Sidney 1996: 467–8). More broadly that action frustrates the capacity of a government to pursue republican aims (Pettit 1997: 175–6). Indeed excessive proceduralism is usually associated with contemporary liberals rather than republicans. Also surprising is Montesquieu’s (1989: VI, IV, 76–7) view that the idea of judges acting as arbitrators and seeking collective wisdom is more appropriate to a monarchy than a republic. Such action would seem to be a necessary check on arbitrary decisions so important to republican thought. Montesquieu, as a rule-centred theorist, clearly manifested faith in antecedent laws of reason – ‘supreme laws . . . based on the natural equality of men and on the obligations of reciprocity which proceed

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from this fundamental equality’ (Aron 1968: 53 based on Montesquieu 1989: I, I, 4–5). While Montesquieu (1989: XXVI, I–XIV, 494–510) at times required the subordination of civil laws to ‘natural law’, however, he usually insisted on their separate spheres. He was concerned to establish the difference between the ‘laws of perfection’ aimed at the goodness of the individual who observes them and civic laws which were systemic (Montesquieu 1989: XXVI, IX, 502) and which, custom permitting, gave rise to particular civic virtues. Montesquieu, moreover, was especially sensitive to the way geographical, demographic and economic factors influenced the nature of the régime. An underlying theme, on which he insisted in the Preface of his Spirit of the Laws, moreover, was the Machiavellian belief that virtue in a republic was not a moral nor a Christian virtue (Montesquieu 1989: xii). It could not, therefore, be reduced to Christian natural law. Here he seems squarely within the early modern republican tradition which might affirm natural law and then bracket it. Montesquieu’s specific conception of the relationship of law to civic virtue begins to appear not so very different from that of early modern republicans. But can we say the same thing about his treatment of honour? Montesquieu, it will be remembered, discussed virtue, honour and fear as characteristic of three types of rule. His treatment of fear, based on an ‘orientalist’ view, was shared by others and was hardly new, though his approach was different from Machiavelli’s (1970: III, XXII, 465–71) positive assessment of fear in a republic which was one way the virtuoso leader forced people to exercise virtù. His treatment of honour, however, did appear as a more significant departure. Honour, he considered, was the regulating principle of monarchies as opposed to virtue which was the regulating principle of republics. Here he may simply have been reflecting a typically eighteenth century view of honour as debased currency (Pettit 1997: 226). At one level he was extremely critical of honour seen as the sense of what a person owes to rank and station yet, at another level, Aron (1968: 27) observed, he evaluated honour positively ‘as the basis of social relationships and as a shield of the state against the supreme evil of despotism’. That interpretation suggests that honour could be seen as a type of virtue, albeit open to degeneration. Machiavelli, it will be remembered, often referred to the association of glory and virtù in his armed citizenry. He spoke of the need to base honour on desert. Guicciardini (1965: 13) likewise, while sometimes critical of ambition, at other times

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spoke of its value and was especially concerned with the motivating force of honour, particularly in his early works (Pocock 1975: 133–4, 137–8, 145, 219, 232, 243, 249–53, 256–9; Gilbert 1965: 277). So indeed did Harrington (1977: 170). Montesquieu, after all, did seem to reserve a place for honour in a republic. Rousseau followed suit and, far from being an extreme egalitarian, proposed a magisterial hierarchy based on talent in which the reward was honour and esteem and not pecuniary interest. In his prescriptions for Poland he described an elaborate hierarchy of honour with members displaying badges – gold, silver and steel – the last being the highest (Rousseau 1953: 245–57). In accordance with his basic philosophy, Rousseau saw honour as a prudential rather than a moral concern. But, the preceding chapter noted, among other republican writers, prudence, as wisdom, inevitably occurs in lists of cardinal virtues. Clearly some French Enlightenment thinkers saw honour and civic virtue as the same (Imbruglia 1994: 69). Whether honour is compatible with civic virtue or not, it is clear that what Pettit (1997: 235–56) called the ‘political economy of esteem’ – a system which rewards people ‘for arguing faithfully to what are perceived as shared interests’ – could only work in the presence of shared values about what constitutes actions worthy of esteem; virtue was inescapable. We shall return to that political economy of esteem in Chapter 4. If virtue was inescapable, did the relationship between virtue and interest change in the eighteenth century? The preceding chapter suggested that arguments to the effect that early modern republican thought should be characterized as pitting virtue against interest are suspect. Eighteenth-century republican thought considered the relationship between the two concepts to be even closer and entertained the ideas of Hume. But how could that be? Hume (1894) was explicitly anti-republican. His treatment of interest and his reduction of virtues to the principle of pleasure and pain, moreover, have been seen as paving the way for full-blown utilitarianism which devalued civic virtues explicitly and seemed to stand in stark opposition to republicanism. Despite the priority Hume accorded to virtue, the considerable attention he devoted to interests, especially in his treatment of artificial virtues, seemed far from Harrington’s (1977: 169) injunction to ‘raise ourselves out of the mire of private interest unto the contemplation of virtue’ and what many take to be the ‘self-sacrificing’ republican ideal. His civic virtues, moreover, stand in sharp contrast to those made famous by Montesquieu (1989:

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IV, V, 35–6): ‘renunciation of oneself’, ‘love of the laws and the homeland . . . requiring a continuous preference of the public interest over one’s own’. I have referred to Hume here, however, precisely to point out that his famous approach to virtues, sometimes referred to as mechanistic, was not entirely discordant with republicanism. Was not Machiavelli concerned with the virtuosi manipulating interestdriven people to become artificially virtuous (Pangle 1988: 63)? The gap between Montesquieu and Hume on the question of interests, moreover, is not as great as appears at first sight. Montesquieu, in idealizing England, was paying tribute to a country characterized by the politics of interest and we have already noted his extraordinary faith in the beneficial political consequences of commerce in a manner that Machiavelli would probably have found, in Hirschman’s (1977: 41) words, surprising and outrageous. That is not to say, as Shklar (1990: 269) suggested, that some readers might conclude that Montesquieu, in effect, abandoned virtue in favour of interest, as his celebration of virtue as the foundation of the republic made clear, but it is to say that he did not pitch virtue against interest. There were also similarities between Hume’s approach to interests and that of Rousseau who, despite his repudiation of personal interest in his prescriptions for community development at the level of advocacy (in particular personal interest as the motivation for public action), based his social contract at the ontological level on self-interest. Rousseau did not demand altruism for its own sake but sought a society in which the pursuit of self-interest was less directed at wealth. He attempted to show that justice was not necessarily in conflict with self-interest provided there was adequate reciprocity (Viroli 1988: 123–6). There was clearly a tension between virtue and interests, but equally important was the relationship between natural virtues and civic virtues which depend on a relatively autonomous political sphere in containing ‘natural tendencies’ which run counter to law. Was Rousseau’s view of politics and the civic virtues appropriate to politics not artificial like his view of sovereignty and the general will (Viroli 1988: passim)? As suggested above, both early modern republican theorists who considered virtue to be prior to law and those who had recourse to natural law saw civic law as vital in constituting the citizen and shaping the concrete virtues appropriate to that role. The citizen was seen not as some natural person but as a construct who imbibed the conventions of reciprocity (justice). Moral virtues, therefore, might be natural but

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civic virtues, which Montesquieu (1989: III, V, 25n) saw as separate, might be seen as artificial. I repeat, they were not ‘celestial’. Rousseau (1968: III, XVI, 144), like so many early modern republicans, in his Social Contract at least, felt that natural law had limited value in the governmental practice of the civil state.12 He nevertheless noted, in Machiavellian manner, that no state had ever been founded without religion at its base. True Christianity, however, could not hold a society together and was ‘contrary to the social spirit’; its spirit was ‘too favourable to tyranny for tyranny not to take advantage of it’ and true Christians were ‘made to be slaves’. Christian law was ‘more injurious than serviceable to a robust constitution of the state’. Clericalism, moreover, could create ‘two sovereigns’. Since a Christian republic was a contradiction in terms, he advocated an additional political religion which was subordinate to the state but which tolerated other religions ‘provided . . . that their dogmas contain nothing contrary to the duties of the citizen’. ‘Anyone who dares to say “Outside the church there is no salvation” should be expelled from the state, unless the state is the church and the prince the pontiff’ (Rousseau 1968: IV, VIII, 176–87). Montesquieu, whom he admired, would probably have been appalled by that statement as were many later commentators such as Constant (1988: XVII, 275). Indeed, John Chapman (1968: 86), who displayed a concern to save Rousseau from the label ‘totalitarian’, conceded that his advocacy of a political religion had serious totalitarian implications. Yet one may understand Rousseau’s belief that, while rational self-interest in social contract theory might be all right in providing the ontological justification for a state, community development, in a society where passions are strong, requires something else (see Viroli 1988: 11–4). I am not certain as to whether Kant would have agreed. But we remember Kant not for sociological thoughts but for his ‘as if’ methodology. As noted earlier, Kant’s methodology was modern in a sense that the ideas of Rousseau were not. Kant, of course, admired Rousseau. The only portrait in Kant’s house during his final years was that of Rousseau whom he eulogized as the ‘Newton of the Modern World’. Of Kant’s four revolutions, identified by Lewis White Beck (1984: 22), one was the Rousseauistic revolution based on Rousseau’s (1968: I, VIII, 65) argument that freedom is obedience to a law ‘one prescribes to oneself’.13 Yet, it will be remembered, Kant differed from Rousseau in rejecting the Genevan’s views concerning the concrete legislative role of the people. Kant’s representation was not concrete

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representation; it was hypothetical representation – a crucial element in what I call virtual republicanism. But were the corresponding virtues also hypothetical? It would be interesting to speculate on the virtual virtue of virtual republicanism, noted by Ronald Grimsley (1961: 77) in Rousseau, or what Kant’s enlightened philosophers, which, in Gramscian terms, were to be ‘organic’ to his prescribed state, would have done with it. Kant, after all, was noted for what Gareth Stedman Jones (1994: 171) described as the ‘pedagogic state’ backed up by philosophers. That state, while evoking early modern republican views about the importance of leadership in forging the public interest and the idea that some people might have a greater understanding of virtue than others, seemed quite new in the republican tradition. The old tradition was not anti-philosophical but it was fiercely anti-clerical. Could we be sure that Enlightenment thought was not aimed at producing a new ‘enlightened’ clergy, as critics of ‘civic republicanism’ have suggested that its advocates want? But a pedagogic state did not eventuate in what became known as the West until the twentieth century, and then it was far from Kantian. A Kantian pedagogic state did not arise in part because of what Kant did to virtue. A communitarian critique has been made that he privatized virtue and thus removed it from the republican agenda. That critique has been applied to the Enlightenment in general though, as noted earlier, privatization predated the Enlightenment and can been traced back to Protestant Christianity which celebrated the individual virtues of productivity, thrift and frugality (Kramnick 1990); those virtues, of course, were not unknown among Roman Catholics. Kant is famous for separating duties of law and justice, based on freedom of the will in accordance with the freedom of everyone according to a universal law, and duties of virtue and morality. The former, he argued, give rise to rules which can be made to apply even to a ‘nation of devils’ ‘so long as they possess understanding’ (Kant 1991: 112–13).14 The latter were first seen in the old context of imperfect duties and then later as duties which simply did not command compulsion (Kant 1965: 18–21). Kant here did not intend to devalue virtue; virtue was not inferior to the duties of law and justice but was simply not part of the doctrine of Right. But the result, among rule-centred theorists who often revered Kant, was a devaluation, since virtue was seen in terms of struggle within the Kantian self, divided between pure Reason and the passions and not as an Aristotelian settled and public principle (Schneewind

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1990: 61). In any case, after the French Revolution, the very term ‘virtue’ produced revulsion among many who remembered the revolutionary excesses. But was the decline of civic virtue inevitable? Schneewind argued that it was, once the world was no longer defined by like-minded privileged people such as Aristotle. The Aristotelian telos in its Christian form was dead and the Enlightenment gave rise to two alternative forms of teleology, pioneered respectively by Hume and Kant – the teleology of pleasure/utility and the teleology of Reason. As MacIntyre (1984) saw it, the former, in not being able satisfactorily to prioritize utilities and to separate pleasures internal to practices and external pleasures such as wealth and fame, led to incoherence and the latter to contentless abstraction. The Enlightenment had to fail; and the end of the road was Friedrich Nietzsche or perhaps lingering hopes of an Aristotelian revival. I do not intend here to evaluate MacIntyre’s provocative thesis which has been the subject of much polemic. Suffice it to note the eclipse of republican civic virtue in the face of utilitarianism and to reiterate the point that Kantian Reason, torn from an institutional setting, created problems for a republican agenda which shared with communitarianism the belief that virtues internal to political practice were generated within specific political arenas. We should not be surprised at the weakening of civic virtues in the face of utilitarianism and reductionist sociology, nor at their reformulation by a romantic movement which was hardly republican.

LIBERTY Montesquieu, Rousseau and Kant have all been celebrated as philosophers of liberty and have all been criticized for articulating liberty in its positive dimension. Does Pettit’s formulation of liberty as non-domination help us see those thinkers in a clearer light? Both Montesquieu and Rousseau adhered to a conception of liberty as non-domination. Both were indebted to Machiavelli, although both differed markedly from Machiavelli in condemning dissimulation and maintaining the value of justice. Montesquieu, however, has been lionized while Rousseau has been generally denounced, in large part because of his affirmation of political religion but also because of the influence of his followers for whom he can hardly be held responsible. As we have noted, Viroli (1988: 148–87), in

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his study of the Genevan, is anxious to set the record straight. For Rousseau, there could be no civic liberty, as opposed to natural liberty or moral liberty, without civic law and the general will; and in that sense one could be ‘forced to be free’. To break the law was to place oneself above it and violate the conditions of one’s liberty. But that was not complete subordination to the power of the state; Rousseau, time and again, criticized the abuse of state power in ‘republican’ Geneva. He did not demand total subordination to the community since he considered that the community was nothing if a single member was deprived of security. Nor did he deny negative liberty; Rousseau was most concerned with the protection of the individual from outside interference. Nor did he require the sacrifice of all private interests. He sought: not to destroy private property absolutely, since that is impossible, but to confine it within the narrowest possible limits; to give it a measure, a rule, a rein which will contain, direct and subjugate it, and keep it ever subordinate to the public good. In short, [he went on] I want the property of the state to be as large and strong, that of the citizens as small and weak, as possible (Rousseau 1953: 317). But the small and weak role of private property had to be guaranteed by law and could not be violated (Rousseau 1953: 324). The object here was not so much independence which in the natural or presocial state violated others or made one vulnerable to the will of others. It was liberty in the sense of avoiding dependent subservience. Significantly in that regard he adopted a cat motif for the frontispiece of his Social Contract since the cat is a convivial but never subservient animal. He put his view of liberty as non-domination succinctly: Liberty consists less in acting according to one’s own pleasure than in not being subject to the will and pleasure of other people; it consists also in not subjecting the wills of other people to our own (Rousseau 1972: 254). That is why, despite his blatant sexism and abandonment of his children, Joel Schwartz (1984) could see him as a precursor of women’s liberation. Avoiding subservience, moreover, demanded a certain degree of, but not extreme, equality; as Rousseau (1968: II, II, 96) made clear in his famous quote: ‘no citizen shall be rich

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enough to buy another and none so poor as to be forced to sell himself’. A corrupt state was one where liberty might be bought. The social contract was not something within which liberty could be traded (Roosevelt 1990: 83). With all that in mind, it is astonishing, Viroli remarked, that Rousseau should have been considered by some as ‘the theorist of totalitarianism’. No one would make the same accusation of Kant who also maintained, in Rousseauesque manner, that citizenship required avoiding dependent subservience. For that reason Kant (1991: 139–40; 1965: 79) disqualified as citizens all those who did not own property, ‘women in general’ and those who alienated their labour: The domestic servant, the shop assistant, the labourer, or even the barber, are merely labourers (operarii), not artists (artifices, in the wider sense) or members of the state, and are thus unqualified to be citizens (Kant 1991: 78n). For Marx, of course, that prescription was, in fact, an accurate description of contemporary society and was precisely the problem for communists to address. The recovery of artifices is what Marx’s views on overcoming alienation were all about and those remain a part of the modern republican agenda.15 Dependence on others effectively disqualifies people from citizenship. In Kant’s (1991: 74) words, they may be free as human beings, equal as subjects but not independent as citizens. Kant did not treat dependent people as formally independent; but, in the hands of others, his ‘as if ’ methodology later resulted in precisely that. In an age when a structure of dependence is being recreated under the illusion of self-employment, we need to look more closely at our modern conception of the Kantian ‘as ifs’. Specifically here, the crucial republican question is not the Marxist question as to what the conditions might be for the transcendence of capitalism but the Kantian question: what would society look like if it consisted solely of independent citizens where no resident was effectively disqualified? The need is to stand aside for a while from sociological determinants but then return to them. Of the major Enlightenment republican thinkers listed above, Rousseau was the least aware of sociological determinants because of his constructivist orientation. Montesquieu, as Aron reminds us, was the most aware and the Scottish School, exemplified by Ferguson and Smith, followed and went beyond him in its discussion of the

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division of labour. Yet it was Kant who confronted the crucial question which besets modern discussions of freedom – the relationship between free will and sociological determinism. The problem was to reconcile the Kantian project – a philosophy of freedom – with a sociological discipline which is determinist, which believes that all acts are causally connected with the antecedent state of the agent and background conditions. Kant’s approach was to affirm the compatibility thesis (the idea that free will and determinism may be united) in the phenomenal world – the world of practical freedom and to deny it at another level – the noumenal world from whence he deduced transcendental freedom. In Allen Wood’s (1984: 74) words, ‘it is tempting to say that he wants to show not only the compatibility of freedom and determinism but also the compatibility of compatibilism and incompatibilism’. I do not propose to explore that complex philosophical problem; I wish merely to point out that, after Kant, it became possible to affirm compatibilism and incompatibilism at the same time but not without some trauma. Trauma beset Kantians and non-Kantians alike. The pioneer sociologists Marx and Tocqueville, for example, wrestled with humans ‘making their own history but not in the ways they intend’. In Arendt’s (1977: 77, 79) opinion, they probably failed. Tocqueville came to despair of history altogether and Marx came to confuse history with politics, reducing it to pragmatism. In my view, her conclusions are wrong;16 but I can appreciate her concern at the collapse of politics which was central to the republican tradition. Weber, in that context, is perhaps more interesting; the roots of his depression probably lay in his neo-Kantian concern with the problem of compatibilism and incompatibilism. Less depressed and less great sociologists later either dismissed Kant or tried to assimilate him to a form of compatibilism he would have rejected (Allison 1990: 249), reinterpreted Marx as a crude determinist and marginalized Tocqueville as a mere ‘historian’ or celebrated him as a pre-sociological apostle of a pluralist freedom about which he was quite ambivalent.

CONCLUSION The Enlightenment was an intellectual awakening similar to the Renaissance. The Renaissance gave rise to early modern republicanism and the Enlightenment modified it. Both periods drew upon classical sources and both witnessed an affirmation and a rejection

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of the lessons of Rome. In that respect compare Rousseau and the older, but more modern, Montesquieu. The Enlightenment, however, saw the development of republican ideas which were much less down-to-earth than those of the Renaissance. Montesquieu may have been a proto-sociologist and among the most down-to-earth, but his stress on the ‘spirit of the laws’ produced a model of Britain which was quite fictitious, as Kant was quick to point out. Yet Kant went on to much greater levels of abstraction and Rousseau has been widely criticized for his unworldliness. We have seen that a case can be made that Montesquieu departed from the early modern republican cyclical view of history in his stress on the value of commerce; though I argued in the preceding chapter that anti-commercial feeling was not so significant among early modern republicans as some scholars believe. A more compelling case can be made for a decisive break if we focus on Montesquieu’s adherence to the view that commerce was associated with peaceful progress. Here Montesquieu may be contrasted with Rousseau and Ferguson and compared more favourably with Kant. Yet Montesquieu, Rousseau, Ferguson and Kant all displayed that mixture of elation and profound pessimism which characterized the Enlightenment. Even Kant, the most consistent believer in progress, at times manifested a belief in entropic corruption so characteristic of early modern republicans. The Enlightenment republicans considered in this chapter all believed in virtue, though Ferguson (1966: 250) saw civic virtue disappearing and Kant unintentionally marginalized civic virtue in his insistence on the autonomy of Right. I noted in the preceding chapter that, whether early modern republicans were strictly virtue- or rule-centred theorists, their political prescriptions tended to suggest the former. Montesquieu, a rule-centred theorist, may be seen as still conforming to that pattern. A case can be made, however, that Kant did not conform and that he collapsed civic virtue into law. Few in the republican tradition, examined in the preceding chapter, would talk of pure Right not ‘confounded with any precepts of virtue’ (Kant 1991: 134; 1965: 36). To my mind, though, that did not constitute his decisive break with the earlier republican tradition. Nor in my opinion did Kant’s decisive break consist in his strict deontology as opposed to the consequentialist position Pettit identified earlier as typically republican. To be sure, Kant was vastly different from Machiavelli. Machiavelli felt that evil had to be resisted because, if unchecked, it would spread. That resistance was vital even if it involved a lesser amount of evil. Kant

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(1991: 91), on the other hand, insisted that evil could never be countenanced. It was always destructive, fortunately even of itself (Arendt 1982: 51). One may recall Ferguson’s more specifically political point that despotism destroys itself. Passionately concerned with truth, moreover, Kant hardly belonged to that tradition which culminated in twentieth-century pragmatism. But I am not sure that those features of his thought were significantly different from all the early modern republicans. Nor do I wish to focus on Kant’s modern conception of civil society separate from the domestic sphere and the state, his treatment of publicity and the like. As I see it, there are two features of Kant’s thought which are crucial in modern thought about republicanism. The first of these is the view that Reason is distinct from the empirical world and can legislate for it. Arguments about free will and determinism were of great antiquity; but, with the advent of modern science, social science and political science, they took on a new form. Kant was above all a philosopher of freedom. Certainly that was freedom from domination which Pettit has identified as characteristic of republican thought. If it is the case, however, that the unempirical self legislates for the empirical self – not as tyrant but as disciplinarian – we are in the realm of positive freedom. Is that why Pettit does not include him in his Republicanism? Is that, moreover, Michelman’s (1986: 24–6) starting point for reading self-determination as positive freedom back into the earlier republican tradition? The second feature of Kant’s thought which I consider to be a decisive break in the republican tradition is the fact that Kant’s republicanism was virtual. His ‘as if ’ methodology went far beyond that of early modern republicans and Montesquieu. It owed a little to Rousseau but led to a view of representation which was largely spiritual. Here Rousseau, in rejecting representation, was much more concrete, even though his proposals seem unrealizable. We cannot blame Kant for the tendency of lesser thinkers to discern a republican spirit in a wide variety of régimes or to justify régimes which earlier republicans would have considered despotic. Nor can we blame him for the extension of Rousseau’s idea that it is a constitution which makes a ‘people’ out of a ‘mass’ to an excessively abstract notion of citizenship. All I can say is that a Kantian approach could be bent in those directions. It often is so bent and is countered by ‘imagined communities’, with often an exclusivist view of freedom in some countries which misleadingly call themselves ‘republics’.

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3 Mechanical Republicanism: The American Case According to many scholars, ‘classical republicanism’, or what I prefer to call early modern republicanism, was prominent in America’s revolutionary discourse. On liberty, equality, property and much else there was constant reference to classical or early modern examples – Greek, Roman and Renaissance. Some of the references were incisive but others were ignorant and muddled. Early modern republicanism, however, was only one stream of thought, mixing with Lockean liberalism, the ideas of famous English jurists, fanciful notions of Saxon England before the corruption of the Normans and New England Puritanism among other strands of Christianity (Bailyn 1967: 22–36, 80–1). Scholars are divided as to the relative importance of each. Those who stress the dominant role of the republican stream owe much to the work of Bernard Bailyn. According to Bailyn (1967: 34–54), the various streams of thought were brought together under the hegemonic discourse of ‘country’ politicians and publicists who derived much of their thought from Trenchard and Gordon’s (1971) Cato’s Letters which were said to have ‘ranked with the treatises of Locke as the most authoritative statement of the nature of political liberty and above Locke as an exposition of the social sources of the threats it faced’ (Bailyn 1967: 36). Critics, however, have felt that Bailyn’s assessment undervalued the importance of Locke and the liberal tradition. Drawing on Bailyn, Pocock has provided the clearest statement of the synthesis of the ideas of the American Revolution in terms of the hegemony of a republican discourse. He portrayed the synthesis as consisting in: a civic and patriot ideal in which the personality was founded in property, perfected in citizenship and perpetually threatened by corruption, government figuring paradoxically as the principal source of corruption; and operating through such means as 79

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patronage, faction, standing armies (as opposed to the ideal of the militia), established churches (opposed to the Puritan and deist modes of American religion) and the promotion of a monied interest (Pocock 1975: 507). Pocock (1988: 56), moreover, saw the American Revolution as a ‘founding’ in the sense that its leaders ‘grouped themselves with Theseus and Moses, Lycurgus and Romulus as founders of a “new order of the ages”’.1 The American revolution ‘in some sense’ formed ‘the last act of the civic Renaissance’ (Pocock 1975: 462). In making that statement, Pocock annoyed not only those who emphasized the importance of liberalism but those who maintained a wider view which saw the American Revolution squarely within the context of the Enlightenment. The preceding chapter noted that the idea of a ‘founding’ was present in some Enlightenment thought – notably in Rousseau but even in Smith – but, from the vantage point of the late twentieth century, the Enlightenment has been seen as dispensing with such notions in the sociological spirit of Ferguson. As Pitkin (1984: 105, 295) concluded in her analysis of Machiavelli, the idea of a ‘founder’ was a ‘fantasy of the impotent’ or of ‘self-denigration’. Significantly, what were once called the ‘founders’ of the United States are now usually called the ‘constitutional framers’. The old-fashioned view of a founding was clearly out of kilter with the received view of the Enlightenment. Enlightenment ideas, moreover, transmitted to America through ‘the great Montesquieu’, adhered to a view of political science, which, like natural science, sought universal laws and was not particularly attuned to borrowing from history in the old republican manner (Appleby 1992: 191). In America there also clearly existed the germs of that late Enlightenment view, which I tried to flesh out in the preceding chapter, that the new republic was an idea of Reason. Edwin Haefele (1993: 207) has drawn our attention to a sentence from F. Scott Fitzgerald (1989: 512): ‘France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter. . . . It was a willingness of the heart.’ I shall argue that the idea of the United States was more grounded than the formulations of the early French republicans who were perhaps just left with ‘a land’. The proposition that the United States was founded on an enduring idea, however, does suggest a significant departure from England, continuity with which was central to Pocock’s thesis.

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The idea of a state based on rational good will reflects that brand of Enlightenment republican thought which was to be celebrated by Kant some time after the American Revolution. It is not surprising, therefore, that some historians, galled perhaps by the idea that the American Revolution had been something less than thoroughly modern, have reacted most strongly to what they take to be Pocock’s view. The prism through which those critics have looked at the United States, however, is less Enlightenment Reason than pre-Enlightenment liberalism which was more downto-earth and tended to interpret reason with a small ‘r’. For many American scholars, modernity has been defined by liberalism. If Montesquieu and Kant were modern then they had to be ‘liberal’. And, if modernity was coterminous with liberalism, then the roots of the American Revolution had to be found in the arch-liberal Locke. Some liberals, therefore, have been concerned to reassert a powerful liberal impetus which existed at the time of the foundation of the republic (Appleby 1992). At times the recent debate has become quite bitter. Kramnick (1990: 35–40), for example, saw the neo-republican revival as ‘right-wing’, aimed at discrediting those who stressed liberal elements of the American bourgeois revolution. In evidence he cited Pocock’s (1985: 242) casting of him as a crypto-Marxist, who apparently needed Locke to vindicate Marx. For his part, Pocock (1988: 72) was clearly exasperated by the tendency for historians: to relegate anything ‘republican’ to a pre-American past, by depicting it as something archaic and impossible, the rule of a Catonic or Platonic agrarian estate, exercising virtue in the shape of a complete denial of self. These historians are saying the thing that is not, or at least never was, said by anybody. Pocock, with some justification, sought to distance himself from those who apparently offered a stereotypical view of ‘classical republicanism’. A common charge was that scholars who stressed ‘classical republicanism’ in America did not do justice to the thought of individual classical thinkers (Pangle 1988). The ‘classical republican’ stereotype was said to have reflected a post-1960s sentiment that a sense of community had been lost. In Thomas Pangle’s (1988: 48–53) view, a major culprit was Arendt (1958) whose Human Condition, with its supposedly nostalgic stress on the vita activa and disillusionment with modern reason, was an important influence on the Pocock school.

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The American revolution, Pangle felt, was new and, though Locke may not have been explicitly cited as its chief inspiration, its basis was Lockean, or Humean when it lost confidence in reason and turned to a more utilitarian interpretation of virtues. When early modern republican writers were cited, moreover, they were rarely seen as contradicting Locke (Pangle 1988: 30–6, 68–72). That is understandable when we consider the similarities between Sidney’s (1996) Discourses Concerning Government and Locke’s (1970) Two Treatises of Government which were both dedicated to refuting Filmer’s Patriarcha. Indeed Thomas Jefferson commented that both Locke and Sidney were the leading sources for the American understanding of the principles of political liberty and the rights of humanity. The similarities, moreover, led Houston (1991: 224–5), in his excellent account of Sidney’s life and influence in England and America, to conclude: [V]irtually all of the ‘republican’ principles drawn from Sidney’s writings were perfectly compatible with Lockean liberalism. . . . This conclusion casts doubt on the widely held view that there existed a distinct and coherent ‘republican’ language of politics in revolutionary America that was distinct from and in tension with Lockean liberalism. But not all scholars have been convinced; (see West in Sidney 1996: xv, xxiv–xxv). In defence of Locke’s influence, John Diggins (1984: 18–47) entitled the first chapter of his Lost Soul of American Politics, ‘Who’s Afraid of John Locke?’ Perhaps the question should have been: who’s afraid of Lockeanism? Lockeanism, an ideology replete with stereotypes, could be as far from Locke as some Kantianism is from Kant or some Marxism is from Marx, as noted in the preceding chapter. The ideas of the ever-rational Locke, translated into American ideology, could be quite irrational or non-rational in the sense that they were presented as offering justification without evidence or the felt need for seeking it; for Louis Hartz (1955: 11), ‘irrational Lockianism’ had been the ideology par excellence of America; it is ‘Americanism’ itself. If the United States ever had a civic religion that was it: the non-rational ideology, incorporating a view of progress and relegating discordant views to pre-history which ‘merged the highly secular strains of liberalism with the evangelical message of personal salvation’ (Appleby 1992: 10).

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Hartz (1955: 60–1) portrayed Locke’s theory as bearing out American empirical evidence: History was on a lark, out to tease men, not by shattering their dreams, but by fulfilling them with a sort of satiric accuracy. In America one not only found a society sufficiently fluid to give a touch of meaning to the individualist norms of Locke, but one also found letter-perfect replicas of the very images he used. There was a frontier that was a veritable state of nature. There were agreements, such as the Mayflower Compact, that were veritable social contracts. There were new communities springing up in vacuis locis, clear evidence that men were using their Lockian right of emigration, which Jefferson soberly appealed to as ‘universal’ in his defense of colonial land claims in 1774. A purist could argue, of course, that even these phenomena were not enough to make a reality out of the presocial men that liberalism dreamed of in theory. But surely they came as close to doing so as anything history has ever seen. The above is a fanciful picture, particularly its description of the Mayflower Compact which was far from one of free and independent people constituting by consent their own sovereign. Seventeenthcentury America could more correctly be characterized in terms of deference to royal authority and adherence to intolerant religion (Pangle 1988: 112–4). Nor did liberalism ‘sprawl unimpeded across the flat intellectual landscape of American abundance’ (Appleby 1992: 327). Nevertheless, the theme of natural Lockeanism remained very powerful. In that vein, Diggins (1984: 35) observed that Lockean political economy, which spelt out ‘the relationship of liberty and property to free labour and productivity . . . found not only theoretical resonance but factual existence in early American society’. Lockean liberalism fitted more closely the interests of a rising bourgeois class (Kramnick 1990). It showed that property was the fruit of labour, rejecting the classical view that property was prior to labour (Diggins 1984: 14). It also provided a rationale for dispossessing native Americans who were said to own no title to land with which they had not mixed their labour.2 How much did that picture contradict republicanism? Pangle (1988: 211) argued that the ideas of Locke, as opposed to the irrational ideology of Lockeanism, were clearly different from those of classical philosophy which ‘lacked the political science and political economy

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that shows how closely and effectively the individual good and social good could be coordinated through the right sorts of institutions and through education aimed at enlightened self-interest’. His view of ‘classical’ philosophy might be correct but many early modern republicans had moved on and could agree on the important coordinating role of institutions. Doubtless there were differences between early modern republican and liberal political economy particularly concerning the origin of value but, as the preceding chapter noted in the case of Smith, the differences had narrowed by the eighteenth century in the face of a mercantilist enemy. There were also significant differences concerning virtue, liberty, rights and much else but, in the context of an overriding concern to free the country from dependence, the views of Machiavelli which exerted an important influence on the American Revolution were not seen as diametrically opposed to those of Locke (Pangle 1988: 29–30). Earlier chapters observed that since liberals and early republicans shared the same enemy there was considerable overlap in their advocacy. What seems to be at issue is the influence of a late twentieth-century debate about ownership of a legitimating tradition – a debate involving imagination which frames the parameters within which sincere historians’ search for truth is interpreted. The debate may eventually be settled to the satisfaction of historians by good textual analysis but will continue to fuel an on-going ideological struggle in which ‘irrational Lockianism’ as portrayed by Hartz is pitted against ‘classical republican’ stereotypes. Stereotypical thinking, of course, is rarely so marked as among those thinkers who believe that there can be only one founding tradition. Consider Hartz’s description of abortive attempts by defenders of the ante-bellum South to reject Lockean ideas by invoking ancient Greek ideas and much else. There was, he argues, no effective tradition to fall back upon other than a liberal one (Hartz 1955: 145–77). Should one, therefore, discount all republican elements which might be discordant with liberalism or have the potential to be so? Should one, moreover, discount that strand of republican thinking which, pace MacIntyre, rejects falling back on to any tradition? A focus on a tradition of Lockean liberalism might not only obscure the importance of republican thinking but might also distort wider Enlightenment views concerning the march of secular Reason and virtual representation. It was a traditional liberal prism which resulted in the Enlightenment being interpreted in specifically

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liberal terms and reinforced by reference to the fact that Locke was frequently invoked by European Enlightenment thinkers. That prism might also have distorted and subordinated other strands of thought such as Protestant Christianity, to which many scholars, following Tocqueville (1945: 310–26), have assigned considerable importance (Kramnick 1990). Protestantism, of course, was bent in an Enlightenment direction by some eighteenth-century thinkers including Kant but there was always a tension between Enlightenment Reason and Augustinian faith. Protestantism, moreover, could be pressed into the service of republicanism as was evident in the case of Harrington and Milton but not without straining both theology and civic virtue. Its values of individuality, productivity, thrift and frugality could also be made to serve liberalism but there always remained problems about the limits of tolerance. In analyzing the founding of the United States, therefore, the distinct features of Protestant Christianity must not be collapsed into other ideological streams. Yet, as in the case of republicanism, there are some scholars who think that its influence has been overstated.3 More widely, scholars, in the tradition of ‘progressive’ history pioneered by Charles Beard (for example 1935), have gone further and have cast doubt on the causal weight given to ideological factors in general or have stressed their epiphenomenal character. Perhaps a sociologist of knowledge might argue that the appeal to early modern republicanism plus the addition of the ideas of Montesquieu were merely devices which might be used to achieve legitimacy in tense political times but which were soon seen as obsolete. Commenting on the English revolution, Marx (1969: 399) observed: ‘Cromwell and the English people borrowed speech, passions and illusions from the Old Testament for their bourgeois revolution’. But ‘when the real aim had been achieved, when the bourgeois transformation of English society had been accomplished, Locke supplanted Habakkuk’. Was early American republicanism the functional equivalent of the ideas of Habakkuk and was it rendered moribund either before or in the process of an American ‘bourgeois’ revolution which affirmed an up-dated version of Locke? Thinking about the thesis of transition from Habakkuk to Locke, some historians have argued that early modern republicanism died during the revolutionary years. Gordon Wood, for example, highlighted instances of early modern republicanism but focused on the huge change in American views of republicanism between the Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the Philadelphia Convention

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of 1787 which approved the United States Constitution. He noted that the last pre-modern revolution, based on something like the British ‘country’ ideology, soon adopted something like the British ‘court’ ideology in the absence of a court, symbolized perhaps by Hamilton; this heralded the ‘end of classical politics’ (Wood 1969: 606–15). I am not so sure. People still continued to evoke early modern republican themes and, according to some accounts, repeated elements of the ‘country’ ideology (Banning 1978). Indeed they argued bitterly about the nature of republicanism. According to some scholars, the anti-federalists of the late 1780s were more genuinely republican than the Federalists who were more liberal even though their position might also be described as ‘republican’. Joyce Appleby (1992: 253–76, 291–319, 323–7, 334–9) went further, looking beyond 1800 and opposing received wisdom about Jeffersonian ‘country’ values which Pocock (1975: 532–3) had echoed. She saw republicanism in the stamp of Harrington and Montesquieu as the domain of the Federalists who feared corruption; and she saw another kind of ‘republicanism’ in the stamp of Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, Locke and Smith as the domain of the Jeffersonians, who manifested a stronger confidence in progress and in the capacity of the economy to order society and who celebrated more forcefully a new beginning. Their antecedents were not all consistently liberal and their increasing liberal orientation could not yet be described as such. Republicanism was apparently a broad church. In a situation where the basic terms of political language were undergoing fundamental re-definition (Farr 1988: 22–3), terminology was confusing. I shall try to pierce through the confusion according to the ideal-type sketched in preceding chapters. After all that has been said above, I must stress that that ideal-type is far from a stereotype which may be defined as fixed in all details.

POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY The United States Constitution begins famously with the statement ‘we the people’. What was the ontological status of ‘the people’? The constitutional framers, moreover, rejected the old republican idea of a mixed constitution which depended on a balance of the ‘natural’ orders of society. How successful were they? Replacing the mixed constitution, they sought to articulate a view of popular sovereignty which depended on what was considered to be a radically

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new conception of representation. How much was that conception virtual in the sense described in the preceding chapter and how much was it simply mechanical? The efforts of the constitutional framers were spelt out in a number of crucial texts of which Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay’s Federalist Papers, written under the collective pseudonym Publius, have come to enjoy canonical status. Surely there are not many other series of letters written in haste to newspapers which may be described as ‘sacred’ (Clinton Rossiter, Introduction to Hamilton, Madison and Jay 1961: vii). How do we evaluate that sacred text? Chapter 2 considered the ontological status of the people in connection with Rousseau, Kant and the French Revolution. To what extent did the United States Constitution, or the constituent power which approved it, actually create the American people, whose instrument it was supposed to be? To a degree the constituent power which formed the United States Constitution and the constituted power which resulted therefrom, using Sieyès’ terminology,4 could be seen as creating the American people; and American assimilationist policies, heightened initially by the assumption that large numbers of native Americans were counter-revolutionary, were quite brutal. But that observation does not detract from the fact that in America, there was a wide consensus on the existence of a prerevolutionary people. While some inhabitants of what was to become the United States did not see themselves as part of an American people, it is fair to say that problems concerning the role of the Constitution in forging the people were initially not so serious as they were in France or more nearby in Latin America. The 13 colonies were contiguous, there was a network of good communications and their total area was smaller than Venezuela. In that connection Benedict Anderson (1991: 64) asked: ‘Had a sizable English speaking community existed in California in the eighteenth century, is it not likely that an independent state would have arisen there to play Argentina to the Thirteen Colonies’ Peru?’ Perhaps; but no such community did exist. The ontological status of an ‘American’ people, for a time at least, was relatively secure. In America with its common law tradition, the Constitution was considered, in early modern (liberal and republican) mode rather than the mode of the late Enlightenment, to be restoring and protecting the rights and liberties of some sort of pre-existing people. Higonnet, it will be remembered, argued that in America revolutionary ideas found resonance in an actually existing self-conscious civil society compared

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with France where civil society was seen to be more of an intellectual Enlightenment construct. Assuming the existence of a pre-existing people, questions arise about how it should be seen as acting and why it should act the way it was said to have done. The first question will be considered below in the context of representation. The second question poses thorny philosophical problems. How could a people be expected to honour a contract it had made with itself? Here once again we are in Kantian territory. One consequentialist answer is that such an agreement enhances personal capacity for freedom. Why, moreover, would a sovereign people choose to limit its own power? A traditional answer was that was precisely what God Himself had done and was again a sign of freedom. A more convincing answer was that self-limitation of the freedom of one generation might help promote freedom (as non-domination) of the next (Holmes 1988b). In that un-Kantian mode of reasoning is there a Kantian notion of freedom’s march? I shall not go into the other many fascinating metaphysical problems here. Suffice it to note that such questions were clearly on the agenda in the late eighteenth century and were accorded a relevance which had not been so marked in the days of early modern republicanism. Once again assuming the existence of a pre-existing civil society, how was it constituted and how might its elements be represented? Were there any natural orders? In America, there was some talk of representing ‘natural orders’ of society and, in the absence of an old aristocracy, of creating one (Bailyn 1967: 278–81). But more significant was the way the ontological basis of the early modern mixed constitution crept into discussions of the separation of powers which, it will be remembered, had come to refer to the exercise of power and not its source. Questions of constitutional engineering could lead back to questions of social ontology. Despite the affirmation of Montesquieu and reference to the separation of powers in the struggle with Britain, that separation had not been a major issue in the American revolution. It became important when it was seen that the revolution, in challenging the basis of the old executive authorities, gave what some felt to be excessive power to state legislatures. Noting that the legislatures swamped the other powers, Federalists sought to restore the power of the executive to effect a balance. But how was the balance to be maintained? Here John Adams was influenced by his experiences in France, Jean Louis de Lolme’s eulogistic Constitution of England

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and the anglomane persuasion which had sought to reform the French régime along the lines of the British (Appleby 1992: 188–209). He argued in the old mode that the executive was to maintain the balance, moderating popular excesses by all that was best in the old aristocracy and neutralizing that which was worst (Adams 1851: I, IV, 288–91). Adams recalled Machiavelli’s argument that society must recognize existing élites by giving them a place in government. To do so did not contradict popular sovereignty which was simply a system in which the people could choose what kind of government they liked; they did not have to choose a democracy and were advised to remain with mixed government (Appleby 1992: 199, 205). But that way of thinking was seen as reflecting an obsolescent view of sovereignty and was roundly condemned by those whose new views had no place for the representation of natural orders (Wood 1969: 567–92).5 It had been attacked in 1776 by Tom Paine – a person whom Adams detested (Bailyn 1967: 288–9). Paine (1970: 8–9) had regarded the classical idea of three orders, based on the one, the few and the many, checking each other as ‘farcical’. His objection was taken up by Madison, among others, who did not like Adams harking back to the early modern formulation of republicanism and justifying aristocracy. The repudiation of ‘natural orders’ according to the old view of the mixed constitution, however, did not preclude aristocratic formulations which repeated the old republican distrust of democracy. Madison, in early modern vein, explicitly described the new republic as superior to a democracy which, in his famous Federalist 10, was interpreted in the old sense of direct democracy and as a system in which the commons exercised excessive power (Hamilton, Madison and Jay 1961: X, 77–84). He and others retained the early modern republican distaste for democracy or, when assessed more favourably, the tendency to consider the term in an aristocratic manner. Federalists might have disparaged the term ‘aristocratic’, but their approach was precisely that. It was not to be until the mid-1790s that democracy was generally reinterpreted in more favourable light, to be appropriated by Jefferson, whom Appleby (1992: 315) insisted was profoundly anti-aristocratic, and eventually celebrated in the age of Andrew Jackson (Hanson 1985: 54–154, esp. 88). That, of course was the time when Tocqueville (1945) wrote his Democracy in America, though the influence of traditional views was such that the word ‘democracy’ in one edition of that book was translated simply as ‘republic’ (Hanson 1985: 125–6).6

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The Federalists’ fear of direct democracy was expressed in a manner which reflected both Enlightenment and early modern strands of republicanism. They stressed the danger of arbitrariness when a majority legislates in its own interest. Hostility to the arbitrariness of monarchical rule was, of course, the rallying cry of the American revolution, but hostility to parliamentary rule was also significant since parliament had seemed no less arbitrary (Bailyn 1967: 198–229). The arbitrariness of ‘popular sovereignty’ in the post-revolutionary chaos, moreover, appeared to many of the constitutional framers to be an even more terrifying prospect. They were surely not surprised nor too perturbed by the growth of factions but the idea that, with an inadequate constitution, the majority of the people itself could constitute a self-centred faction was seen by Madison and others as a vital threat (Banning 1988: 206). Such thinking was reminiscent of Aristotle’s (1952: III, X, 122) warnings that a majority in a democracy, in serving its own ends, might act unjustly and perhaps prefigured Kant’s arguments, discussed in the preceding chapter, to the effect that democracy was necessarily a despotism. Popular democracy, moreover, could always be invoked to justify a form of liberty far from what Pettit took to be the republican ideal of liberty as non-domination shored up by institutional guarantees. Kant’s arguments in ‘Perpetual Peace’ had yet to appear and the attempt by French revolutionaries to implement what they thought to be Rousseau’s ideas concerning popular sovereignty had yet to occur. Rousseau, moreover, appeared not to have had much influence in the United States of the 1780s, his Social Contract not being published in America until 1797.7 Nevertheless fears concerning the relationship between the affirmation of democracy and tyranny, similar to those described in preceding chapters, were often expressed. Madison’s Machiavellian answer to the problem, which was contrary to the advocacy of many contemporary civic humanists, was to recognize and protect the diverse basis for factional formation while relying on an aristocratic élite to neutralize the consequences. Thus, on the one hand, in Federalist 10 he maintained: The diversity of the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is . . . an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government (Hamilton, Madison and Jay 1961: X, 78).

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At the same time he strove to keep conflicting interests divided – to neutralize ‘factions’.8 In Sandel’s (1996: 82) view, Madison sought to disarm various interests and not to give them any weight if those interests conflicted with what he saw to be the ‘common good’ or the ‘public interest’: The reason for taking in, through an extended republic, ‘a greater variety of parties and interests’ was not to better approximate the will of the people; it was to increase the likelihood that these various interests would cancel each other out and so enable enlightened statesman to rise among them. It is possible to read the above quote from Madison as a vigorous defence of pluralism. But surely it was a pluralism constrained by an aristocratic notion of rule. Here the Federalist Papers have given rise to conflicting interpretations though a Machiavellian reconciliation makes sense. Madison’s denunciation of direct democracy was aimed at antifederalists. Yet, in the context of the debate about the Constitution, those anti-federalists were hardly consistent advocates of direct democracy. Throughout the decade after 1776 there had been numerous criticisms of the failure of assemblies adequately to represent their constituents, extending to attacks on the very nature of representation itself, though with little reference to Rousseau. Indeed, the idea that the people at large could be legislators had taken concrete form in Pennsylvania where the representative assembly had become a sort of upper house, faced by the people ‘out of doors’, who retained the right to legislate (Wood 1969: 366). That constitution, celebrated by radicals in France more than any other American constitution perhaps because of its resonance with the ideas of Rousseau, evoked many ‘classical’ memories particularly concerning its committee of censors (Gueniffey 1994: 100). By 1787, however, anti-federalists were not arguing in favour of direct democracy, as Madison’s attack on direct democracy suggested they were, but were expressing concern about the scope of representation and the adequacy of representation in the new federal Constitution (Ball 1988: 144–50). Some of them made recourse to the Pennsylvania Constitution’s evoking supposed memories of England in bygone times. The ‘ancient English constitution’ was invoked to justify representation by mandated delegates. These had supposedly been simply ‘attorneys of their constituencies’. That system,

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activists argued, had been perverted in the preceding two centuries and had been replaced by reasoning which justified the perfidious notion of ‘virtual representation’, opposition to which had been a major plank of the American revolutionaries (Bailyn 1967: 161–75; Ball 1988: 145–7). Rousseau would have seen that alleged perversion as inevitable; but early modern republicans might have come to a very different conclusion. A strong element in the early modern republican tradition opposed the idea of mandated delegates who articulated partial interests. In characteristic fashion Sidney (1996: III, XXXVIII, 531, XLIV, 565), had defended mandated delegates and then qualified that position by putting forward a truer form of representation which adhered to a trustee model which was to take cognizance of the whole common good. His stature was such that he was invoked by both sides in the American debate (Houston 1991: 258–60). In the wake of the chaos of the mid to late 1780s, Federalists continued to promote that trustee model (Wood 1969: 496–9). In Burkean fashion, considerations of popular sovereignty came to demand that each legislator represent the nation as a whole. The popular will was reinterpreted by legislators according to what they felt to be the popular need (Laski 1921: 220–3). But there was more to it than that; the very idea of Congress was founded on the idea of deliberative decision making which allowed representatives to change their minds through rational discussion. Thus Congress rejected the right of the people to instruct its officials (Sunstein 1993a: 22). Reliance on a trustee model exercised by enlightened statesmen was indeed an aristocratic formulation but one completely in accord with the republican tradition. What then was novel about representation in the United States? Delegated popular sovereignty was an old idea and the demise of the ontological rationale for the old mixed constitution had not precluded the continuation of an aristocratic rationale which Harrington would have recognized. The constitutional framers, while remaining in aristocratic mode, however, asserted that there was considerable novelty in the specific constitutional mechanisms they devised to prevent what was felt to be the dangers of legislators discriminating in their own favour (Hamilton, Madison and Jay 1961: LVII, 353) and the possibility of tyranny. As Madison most famously, put it: A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the

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necessity of auxiliary precautions (Hamilton, Madison and Jay 1961: LI, 322). The system mechanics of the United States owed something to Montesquieu (1989: II, I, 10), who defined republican government as ‘that in which the people as a body, or only part of the people, have sovereign power’ and who wrote of representation, but went far beyond his adherence to the early modern notion of balance. The American Constitution of 1787 transformed representation into a cement which connected officials with an undifferentiated ‘people’. In Madison’s view, the very term ‘republic’ was portrayed in essence as a system which represented the people in different ways. Influenced by Hume (Howe 1988: 111), he argued that the new form of republic rendered redundant Montesquieu’s belief that republics had to be limited in size. In his words, ‘America can claim the merit of making the discovery [of] the basis of unmixed and extensive republics’; and if anyone protested about the novelty of that formulation, he went on, the ‘glory of the people of America’, while paying ‘a decent regard to the opinions of former times and other nations’, consisted in not suffering ‘a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom or for names’ (Hamilton, Madison and Jay 1961: XIV, 101, 104). The Constitution, moreover, while hardly a novelty in being a written document for there were many in America itself, was claimed to be a significant departure from tradition since, in Madison’s words, it was ‘paramount to the government’ (Hamilton, Madison and Jay 1961: LIII, 332). That claim was strictly untrue since that idea had already been celebrated in Interregnum England – a factor which, Nippel (1994: 24) argued, constituted the decisive break between ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ republicanism. Nevertheless it did serve as a crucial founding belief. There was indeed considerable novelty in the very formalized and mechanical separation of powers which was said to have been absent in earlier republics. In the United States system some powers were centralized and others dispersed with the rationale that the indivisible sovereignty of the people was not compromised. As Chapter 2 noted, Arendt considered that that dispersal of sovereignty constituted its abolition and that was the greatest novelty of the United States Constitution. Hartz (1955: 44–5), on the other hand, more accurately, lamented the fact that sovereignty had not been done away with. The American revolutionaries ‘accepted the

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concept’ and then ‘tried to qualify it out of existence’. That was to be a source of considerable trouble. The explicit provisions for a federal structure were also quite new. Though there had been federal arrangements in earlier constitutions and constitutional proposals they were not referred to as such. Once sovereignty rested in the people the problem of conflicting state and federal sovereignties was supposed to disappear. Thus a completely new meaning had to be given to the word ‘federal’ which up to that time had not been used to denote a political power ‘vested with some at least of the powers of civil sovereignty over individuals in a “state of civil society” ’ (see Kant 1991: 102–5). Indeed, the debate between Federalists and anti-federalists centred on whether states should give up what had traditionally been called their ‘federative’ power, used in the context of relations with other sovereigns, in order to become ‘federal’ in the new sense (Pocock 1988: 61, 69). The many novel elements involved in the mechanical representation of the people in a federal state with a highly formalized separation of powers boiled down to one very significant departure from earlier republican schemes. Early modern writers and Paine had argued that the mechanisms of popular sovereignty had to be simple whereas the United States mechanisms were highly complex. As Condorcet (1955: 145) saw it in 1794, the United States system ‘impaired simplicity’; he regretted the fact that the Americans had portrayed an ‘identity of interests’ rather than an equality of rights – an identity which would cease to exist ‘once it gives rise to genuine inequality’; that was a remark which Adams later found incredible in a philosopher who claimed to understand human nature (Higonnet 1988: 251–2). But few people were aware at the time of just how complex the system was to become. Anti-federalists were quite clear about the enormous power – not simply executive – which was to be conferred on the President, whom, Theodore Lowi (1993: 159) argued, scholars and perhaps even the Supreme Court would presume, a century and half later, virtually to represent the people better than the legislature. But the anti-federalists did not realize how much legislative power could be wielded by the judiciary, contrary to Montesquieu’s argument and Jefferson’s warnings about the oligarchical despotism of judicial review (Hartz 1955: 133). Considerations of the role of the judiciary leads to the conclusion that one of the most marked features of United States’ republicanism was what Bruce Ackerman (1988) referred to, in Kuhnian

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vein, as the radical separation between ‘constitutional politics’ and ‘normal politics’. That distinction, it will be remembered, was present among the early modern republicans who separated the role of the law-giver from those of people engaged in mundane politics and in the different measures appropriate to statecraft and normal politics. The tradition was continued in the early United States in the preservation of the reserve right of revolution. In the words of Hamilton: If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no recourse left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government (Hamilton, Madison and Jay 1961: XXVIII, 180). Arguably the affirmation of the reserve power of revolution, also common to some liberal social contract theorists including Locke, demonstrated a belief in the very real sovereign power of a people which was more than the artefact of the Constitution. But that exercise of popular sovereign power was seen to be exercised only rarely. The people as a collective were supreme at the lofty level of constitutional politics, forming what Sieyès is celebrated for calling the ‘constituent power’, but not in ‘normal politics’, or in Sieyès’ ‘constituted power’, where in Publius’ (probably Madison’s) words the people as a collective experienced ‘total exclusion’ (Hamilton, Madison and Jay 1961: LXIII, 387). As Publius saw it, representation, a feature of classical politics, continued in the American republic but the collective exercise of sovereignty had been submerged in normal politics. I have noted that the separation of ‘normal’ politics from ‘constitutional’ politics can be traced back to early modern republicanism. But was the American devaluation of popular participation in politics a departure from the early modern republican ideal? Diggins (1984: 62–3) thought so, insisting that, far from the ‘classical’ republican ideal, the constitutional framers did not see participation in politics as honourable. The new mechanical constitution was considered to have reduced political participation largely to the selection of leaders (Hanson 1985: 58, 74–6), consonant with Madison’s view that political activity was inessential. Those leaders, moreover, Madison considered to be potentially unreliable. In Diggins (1984: 52–3) opinion, Madison displayed a distrust of both the people and their representatives. I have doubts about that characterization,

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recalling Lance Banning’s (1988: 195, 208n) observation of instances, particularly in 1789, where Madison affirmed the necessity of popular participation. But to the extent that Madison played down participation, was Madison making a significant departure from earlier republican views? He was certainly different from Rousseau who insisted that in a representative system people are free only when they are electing their representatives (Pocock 1988: 66); but how did he differ from the early modern republicans? Not significantly, I maintain, recalling the argument in Chapter 1 that the role of political participation in early modern republicanism has probably been over-stressed. Did the disillusioned Milton not distrust the people and their representatives? What sort of representation is ‘constitutional representation’? Ackerman (1988: 169) put it graphically: direct representation is mimetic, like the representation of an object in a photograph which lacks subtlety; constitutional representation, on the other hand, is like the product of a skilled artist who can convey a deeper meaning; it is semiotic. In this way the Supreme Court, labelled by some as non-representative in a mimetic sense, can be seen as representative in a semiotic sense. But are we talking here about a form of virtual representation – virtual in a sense different from that about which American revolutionaries complained but virtual in the sense considered earlier in the ideas of Kant? Kant, it will be remembered, could envisage a monarch engaging in what Ackerman would call semiotic representation. The role of the Supreme Court was different from that prescribed for courts by early modern republican writers who had little to say about the third element in Montesquieu’s separated powers. Reflecting their position, Smith (1937: 680) had observed that judicial independence was simply the consequence of the increasing workload of the executive power. It was now much more than that. Should it be seen as the epitome of virtual representation? Alternatively should it be seen as ‘the migration of self-government from the people to the Court’ (Michelman 1986: 66–73)? Perhaps that is going too far. Nevertheless we may understand the criticisms of those republicans who have bemoaned the fact that a republican conception of the rule of law has turned into an excessively courtcentred approach (Brest 1988). Ackerman’s views on representation certainly evoke memories of the virtual republicanism discussed in Chapter 2. There have indeed been strong virtual elements in United States republicanism

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though in categorizing that form of republicanism I prefer the term mechanical. Describing American republicanism, Russell Hanson has employed the term ‘revisionist’. That word may capture its virtual elements but is too loose. It could apply to anything after the early modern period and even to various forms of republicanism at that time which departed from a stereotype – fixed in all details.

THE SHAPE OF HISTORY Chapter 1 described an early modern republican conception of history which was cyclic. Though some early modern republicans believed that the cycle could be halted, there was a general belief that, whereas a new republic could establish new orders, there was a tendency for the republic to become corrupt. Chapter 2 noted that that view continued into the eighteenth century though became tempered with views of progress of which there were essentially two – one focusing on the evolution of stages in political economy and another consisting in the march of Reason. All three views could be found among American revolutionaries and scholars debate their relative importance within the terms of the furious polemic described at the beginning of this chapter. We have seen, however, among theorists of progress in the eighteenth century, that a dark side was presented along with the light. Pocock (1975: 507–17) is certainly cogent in pointing to the early United States preoccupation with corruption but it is impossible to decide whether that concern was a continuation of early modern republican views or simply what I described in Chapter 2 as the dialectic of Enlightenment. Chapter 2 noted the portrayal of both the bright and dark sides of progress in the works of Montesquieu who was a major influence on American events. That portrayal was also evident in the writings of Smith whose major work on political economy appeared in the same year as the Declaration of Independence. It is interesting in that light to consider Paine, one of the most fervent believers in progress who wrote at the same time and who has been celebrated as an arch liberal as opposed to a republican (Kramnick 1990: 133–60). Paine was a staunch advocate of the value of commerce, as was nowhere more clear than in his defence of the Bank of Pennsylvania against his Jeffersonian friends (Kramnick 1990: 158). He has been seen as affirming rights rather than virtue, detesting government and wanting to reduce it to a passive role, in

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anticipation, Kramnick (1990: 154–6) has argued, of Milton Friedman. From the perspective of the present, Paine may indeed have been more liberal than republican but, like Smith whom Kramnick sees in the same light, while advocating freeing trade from politics, Paine (1970: 44–5) nevertheless repeated the old idea that commerce diminished patriotism. Noting that the rich in London had lost their spirit, he demanded that America seek independence in 1776 before the growth in population and commerce diluted the American spirit. That demand does not sound much like the position of Friedman. Jefferson, like Paine, could also be seen as revealing a supreme confidence in progress in his insistence that one generation need not, and should not, bind another. Jefferson went so far as to conceive of constitutional renewal occurring every 20 years, seemingly confident that the process of renewal would serve the interests of progress. Madison, on the other hand, had severe doubts about that proposal. But was Jefferson’s faith in progress that much greater than Madison’s? An alternative explanation is that Jefferson’s call for renewal showed a lack of confidence in the normal process of evolution. Perhaps he envisaged the need for repeated dynamic action to prevent the corruption of what some have called his virtuous ‘yeoman’ values. Madison, on the other hand, rather than displaying pessimism about progress, may simply have been revealing practical concerns about the psychological effects of a continual state of interregnum. He may indeed have believed that a constitution, which bound future generations to a degree, rather than being simply a constraining device, could serve the cause of progress better than periodic renewal. The constitution could generate new possibilities (Holmes 1988b). Far from being the pessimist, as he is usually cast, he revealed optimism in his belief that time redeemed rather than destroyed virtue (Diggins 1984: 58). Was it Jefferson then who adhered more closely to the old cyclic view of decay to be combated by an American version of virtu`? If not Jefferson himself was it the Jeffersonians, who have been cast as echoing the British ‘country’ ideology – that odd mixture of transformed early modern republican views on virtue and downright conservatism? Adherents to that view might agree with John Murrin (1980) that, while the temporary victory of the Federalists may be described in terms of an equivalent of the ‘court’ ideology, that victory was short-lived and what characterized the United States after the election of Jefferson in 1800 was precisely a version of

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the ‘country’ ideology. For that reason, Banning (1978: 273–4) revised Wood’s date for ‘the end of classical politics’ until after the war of 1812. Murrin went further, noting that the course of the American revolution after 1776 was remarkably similar to the course of the English Revolution after 1688, with one major difference. In Britain the ‘court’ ideology very soon triumphed whereas in the United States the values of the ‘country’ ideology remained of crucial importance. An important factor here was the South which dominated the federal government until the Civil War and, even when defeated, still limited northern options. To support his argument, Murrin (1980: 423–5) highlighted the repeal of internal taxes, the commitment to pay off the national debt,9 the reduction in the size of the army and the determination to keep the Federal government small. Those measures appeared to reflect ‘country’ values designed to forestall corruption. The same point was taken up by Sandel in his attempt to show that what he calls the ‘procedural republic’ was largely a later invention. Sandel (1996: 124–50) highlighted the persistence in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century of elements of ‘the political economy of citizenship’ – a political economy geared to economic arrangements which are most hospitable to self-government and republican virtue. He recalled Jefferson’s (1982: 164–5) Notes on the State of Virginia, written in the early 1780s and published in 1787, which stressed virtue embodied in rural values as opposed to Hamilton’s view, which promoted industry and commerce shorn of any republican virtues (Hamilton, Madison and Jay 1961: VI, 56–7). Jeffersonian arguments, moreover, were said to be at the core of the view that the new republic did not need a modern manufacturing industry which could only lead to corruption and the degraded conditions of European cities. When that view inevitably collapsed, the new advocacy of domestic manufactures was justified in terms of promoting frugality and independence and avoiding the luxury of imports. In contrast Appleby (1992: 138) rejected the picture of imported English ideas boxed into ‘country’ and ‘court’ on the grounds that a powerful liberal dynamic was growing up outside social groups identified with those persuasions. The policies initiated by the Jeffersonians, reacting against both ‘court’ and ‘country’ tendencies in the preceding administration, were liberal, forward-looking and designed to promote commerce (Appleby 1992: 291–319, 323–5). As noted earlier, she was at pains to criticize the Jeffersonian ‘agrarian

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myth’ which derived from a later view that agriculture had to be backward while industry was progressive. Far from being a retreat to ‘yeoman’ values – a term Jefferson did not use, agrarian policy was a response to a growing international market for grain of which Jefferson was eager to take advantage (Appleby 1992: 253–76). Whatever the case, ‘country’ ideology dissipated, as a judicial system, perhaps more oriented to ‘court’ ideology, if that term still retained any meaning, secured the redistribution of property in favour of wealthy entrepreneurs. Those entrepreneurs were not particularly concerned with the attitude of the central government. As the United States industrialized with great speed, corruption occurred at state level (Murrin 1980: 427). One means of delaying corruption in the earlier republican view, Pocock (1975: 509–11, 534–5, 540–4) reminded us but in an American context, lay in the expansion of the régime as advocated by Machiavelli and many who came after him. With that in mind, the Jeffersonians were said to have advocated Western expansion which, Sandel (1996: 139) pointed out, was felt to strengthen independent virtues and ‘forestall the day when America would become a crowded, dependent, unequal society, inconsistent with republican government’. Was this the old view that an expanding frontier would trade space for the inevitable corruption of time, an idea long since abandoned by Madison? Many scholars would answer with a resounding no. A down-toearth rebuttal has insisted that the Jeffersonians had a far greater confidence in progress than that view suggests and Jefferson may have been motivated simply by a desire to reap the economic advantage of expanding the commercial frontier (Appleby 1992: 313–4). On the specific question of virtue, Diggins (1984: 117–30) asked how the old notion of republican virtue was possible without the crucial role of a long-settled polis? Nor should the West be romanticized. Theodore Roosevelt may later have extolled the ‘republican virtue’ of the pioneers, but the character of the West was hardly based on civic virtue as I have defined it. Rather it was a celebration of intense individualism, greed and an ideology which saw nature absorbing politics. Indeed, a case may be made that westward expansion was actually a source of corruption and that it destroyed a sense of community. Debate on that question, common among early modern republicans, found expression in the United States, for example, in the arguments of some anti-federalists who, following Montesquieu, regarded an extended republic as a

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contradiction in terms (Onuf 1988) and later among those who denied that the Eastern seaboard had anything in common with California and could not form a community (Sandel 1996: 163). Even later westward expansion could be seen as a major cause of the Civil War which nearly saw the collapse of the union. In the light of the above, I tend to be sceptical about the interpretation, cast in early modern republican terms, of Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis concerning the closing of the frontier at the end of the nineteenth century. That interpretation holds that the closing of the frontier exhausted virtù and foreshadowed a new period of corruption. Turner was certainly no early modern republican, writing at a time when, some argue, ‘the complex legacy of republicanism had been dropped from historical memory’ (Pickens 1992: 326) and alternative interpretations of his thesis have been put forward. But there exists a view that Roosevelt believed that corruption could be forestalled by expansion. Praising European imperialism in 1899, he commented: In every instance the expansion has taken place because the race was a great race. It was a sign and proof of greatness in the expanding nation, and moreover bear in mind that in each instance it was of incalculable benefit to mankind . . . When great nations fear to expand, shrink from expansion, it is because their greatness is coming to an end. And we are still in the prime of our lusty youth, still at the beginning of our glorious manhood, to sit down among the outworn people, to take our place with the weak and craven? [sic] A thousand times no! (cited in Hofstadter 1989: 275). Was this a plea for imperialism as renewal? Roosevelt (1967: 45–6) also saw little difference between the United States westward expansion and the annexation of the Philippines: There is not a dividing line of any kind to be drawn between our methods of expansion in 1898 and 1899 and the methods of expansion under which we acquired Michigan, Illinois, Florida, Louisiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Oregon, California, Hawaii and Alaska. Was this an echo of Harrington’s plea to aspire ‘unto the empire of the world . . . to put the world in a better condition than it was

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before’? Many of Roosevelt’s (1967: 27–36) speeches and writings suggest that it was. But surely it is going too far to blame the United States’ imperialist endeavour on early modern republican ideas. When considering the shape of history after the eighteenth century, it is perhaps far fetched to explain imperialism as an attempt to forestall corruption in the old early modern republican manner. There are other more modern explanations for imperialism. There was indeed a very strong concern about corruption. But I am not sure whether that related to the old idea of cyclic history or simply what I referred to in Chapter 2 as the dialectic of Enlightenment. After all the United States became pre-eminent as an exemplar of unilinear progress. Political economists could look to it for inspiration and so could Kantians. United States mechanical republicanism was not very Kantian; but there was something very Kantian about the way the history of the United States became seen in terms of the march of Reason. Consider Abraham Lincoln’s (1953: 23) ‘Gettysburg Address’, the basic message of which seemed to be that rational and universal freedom which constituted the United States was threatened and had to be reborn. However much he supported the struggle against slavery which invited Kantian reasoning, Lincoln did not take that as the prime rationale of the American Civil War; nor are his speeches remembered for cool sociological calculation about the best form of political economy to dominate the West. The union above all had to be preserved because it was based on a constitution which prescribed a free people. Reason was felt to be on the side of the union. Though Lincoln’s religiously-inspired language was far from that of the Enlightenment, there is an Enlightenment flavour to his argument, reflecting the point made at the beginning of this chapter that the United States itself might be seen as an idea of Reason. With that in mind I suggest that an obsession with corruption based on the dialectical nature of a founding idea is more likely to survive in a rationalized world than the old idea of corruption as the product of a ‘wheel of fortune’. A resulting hypothesis is that an obsessive concern with degeneration and betrayal varies in direct proportion to the degree that a régime is founded on an idea. Preeminent here have been the United States and the former Soviet Union. Such reasoning has little to do with early modern republicanism but has much to do with the dialectic of Enlightenment.

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THE PLACE OF VIRTUE The preceding section considered arguments about virtue in the context of the shape of history. More broadly one may ask whether the old notions of civic virtue survived to any appreciable extent in the new republic. Diggins and Pangle seem convinced that they did not. Diggins (1984: 20) could find no trace of earlier republican virtue or the Scottish School’s stress on ‘benevolence’ in the four most important works which informed the American Revolution – Paine’s (1970) Common Sense, Jefferson’s ‘Declaration of Independence’, Hamilton, Madison and Jay’s (1961) Federalist Papers and Adams’ (1851) A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America. The ‘Declaration’ explicitly borrowed from Locke and did not talk about virtue. Where virtue was mentioned in the other writings it was said to have meant something quite different from the older sense. Jefferson apparently ‘made happiness the end of life, virtue the basis of happiness and utility the criterion of virtue’ (Diggins 1984: 41). As Pangle (1988: 73) saw it, virtues were not taken as ends in themselves but as merely instrumental to the achievement of security, ease, liberty, selfgovernment and fame. Adams, moreover, influenced by Humean scepticism and residues of Calvinism, according to Diggins (1984: 69–99), undermined faith in virtue. An admirer of Machiavelli’s (1988) Florentine Histories, Adams (1851: (II), V, 5–105) still found much of it ‘humorous entertainment’ and its arguments too idealistic (Diggins 1984: 73–4). Adams tended to see virtue as being the consequence of a good constitution rather than its prerequisite. Madison agreed, pessimistically displaying, in Diggins’ (1988: 52–3) view, a distrust of the capacity of the people or their representatives for virtue.10 Where Madison was optimistic, however, it was in the belief that time was redemptive rather than destructive of virtue as noted above. Both his pessimism and his optimism were apparently diametrically opposed to the early modern republican view. The above might constitute a convincing refutation of some versions of a ‘classical republican’ stereotype. We have seen, however, that early modern republicanism was much more nuanced than that stereotypical picture. Chapter 1 argued that the idea of virtues standing on their own, a characteristic of virtue-based theory, was not shared by all early modern republicans. Machiavelli, who was a virtu `-based theorist, moreover, sometimes saw justice in instrumental terms. If, moreover, my argument about the existence of a

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republican version of artificial virtues is correct, there was a utilitarian element in the early modern republican conception of virtue. The ends to which artificial virtues were directed may arouse controversy but they would surely include self-government and liberty backed up by institutional safeguards and, contra Ferguson (1966: 40–57) and Kant, would not preclude happiness as a prime goal. Some ancient philosophers may have seen the realization of moral virtues themselves as the chief elements in happiness, but even they were not devoid of instrumental thinking when it came to civic virtues and that is why civic virtues were considered to be inferior to moral virtues (Pangle 1988: 56–7). For their part, early modern republicans were quite unashamed in seeing happiness as embracing a wide range of goods to which civic virtues might be directed. Undoubtedly early modern republicans regarded a certain level of virtue as a prerequisite for good government but that did not contradict the view that a good constitution served to instil virtues. I concede, however, that the observation that Madison, who was usually pessimistic, in arguing that time redeemed virtue, contradicted earlier republican pessimism. But even here, it will be remembered, not all early modern republicans believed in cyclic inevitability and the preceding section has suggested that it might be more fruitful to look at questions of optimism and pessimism in late eighteenth-century republicanism according to the dialectic of Enlightenment. More specifically in the American context, let us consider Diggins’ (1984: 20) argument that the key documents he cites, while talking of republican liberty, ‘hardly upheld the ideals of community against the threat of individualism or made public virtue the essential prerequisite of good government’. To be sure, Hamilton and Adams mocked virtue seen as a superhuman quality. But was it consistently taken as such? Diggins seems to think so in repeating a conventional view of the collective Publius. But consider Madison’s statement that while there is: a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust . . . there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. . . . Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form (Hamilton, Madison and Jay 1961: LV, 346).

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Are those qualities other than civic virtues? What are we to make of the statement that, whereas representatives will be restrained from discriminating in their own favour by the genius of the constitutional system, they will ‘above all’ so act because of the ‘vigilant and manly spirit which actuates the people of America – a spirit which nourishes freedom and is in turn nourished by it’ (Hamilton, Madison and Jay 1961: LVII, 353)? Is that not a reference to the sexist definition of virtue discussed earlier? Elsewhere Madison was more fulsome in his exaltation of virtue, his most eloquent statement occurring in the Virginia State Convention (Banning 1988: 194–5). Of course, Madison was concerned with interest and, in the spirit of Hume and eighteenth-century psychology, was groping for a way of controlling the passions, which, Chapter 1 noted, was what many interests used to be called. As Daniel Howe (1988: 125–30) pointed out, the collective Publius was probably engaged in projecting a current version of psychology on to political science. In that formulation Madison’s enlightened statesmen were the equivalent of the higher faculties of the mind which sought to control countervailing passions. They did not repress the passions; ‘they took advantage of them in order to overcome them’. Surely Madison’s notion of civic virtue, while including awareness of membership in a community of equals and the duties which followed, acknowledged full well the importance of self-interest, its positive value in an autonomous citizen, the need to express it but also the need for restraint. That common Enlightenment view did not dismiss the importance of civic virtue. Nor was it discordant with the ideas of Montesquieu. Banning (1988), however, argued that the Madisonian conception of virtue was discordant with Montesquieu’s position but that there was some continuity with the ideas of Harrington (1977: 172). Consider the latter’s famous parable which was designed to show the need for separating decision and choice, as discussed in Chapter 1. In order to divide a cake fairly, two serving girls decide that one, representing the few, will cut it and the other, symbolizing the many, will choose between the parts. Each pursues self-interest but within a context of collective agreement which demands virtue. Banning went on to argue that virtue was seen as vital in the context of abiding by collective agreements, but none expected self-sacrifice when it came to making ordinary decisions. The relationship of virtue and interest was only seen as contradictory within the context of the actions and rules governing the collectivity and not in normal

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decisionmaking. There may indeed be a political economy of virtue, as Ackerman (1988: 173) argued and we have noted, which economizes virtue in the American republic by separating constitutional and normal politics. The argument here sounds very liberal in a Rawlsian sense, but it is quite consonant with a long tradition of early modern republican thinking. I suspect Banning could find many more early modern republicans who expressed such views and might revise his adherence to the position that American public virtue was different from that of most early modern republicans. Abnegation of the self was not a consistent feature of ordinary decisionmaking in the early modern republican position. But Banning is surely correct in arguing that the crucial debate in late eighteenth-century America did not focus on selflessness versus selfishness in ordinary decisionmaking. It did not centre on whether people should be able to choose what they liked but on whether or not the new constitution was able to allow legislators to ‘cut the cake fairly’. The Constitution was indeed about providing a structure for virtuous decisionmaking by legislators – but only by legislators. In being indifferent on the making of particular decisions by ordinary citizens it, of course, had left itself open to the complaints of anti-federalists that rather than being a vehicle of virtue it conveyed the impression that the views of the people did not matter (Ball 1988: 150–2). In that sense it could be seen as facilitating corruption. But that is not to say that it was devoid of considerations of virtue. Surely, however, the inclusion of a Bill of Rights in the Constitution showed a lack of faith in the efficacy of virtue. That depends on how the Bill of Rights is viewed. The Bill was an afterthought and the framers of the Constitution, at first, did not see the need for it. Their arguments, focusing on sovereignty, did not have much to do with virtue. There was no need, they claimed, for any contractual document which specified those rights which had been reserved by the people and not surrendered to rulers, since nothing had been surrendered to the rulers and sovereignty resided with the people (Wood 1969: 536–43). After all, since Magna Carta, bills of rights were considered to be what kings gave to subjects. The Constitution was a Constitution not a royal charter. Speaking of bills of rights, Hamilton argued: It is evident . . . that, according to their primitive signification, they have no application to constitutions, professedly founded

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on the power of the people and executed by their immediate representatives and servants. Here, in strictness, the people surrender nothing; and as they retain everything they have no need of particular reservations (Hamilton, Madison and Jay 1961: LXXXIV, 513). The Bill of Rights, however, was eventually tacked on to the Constitution to satisfy the interests of the states which feared for their independence and at that time applied only to federal matters. Sandel (1996: 25–39) considered that reservation as evidence of the strength of republican views as opposed to liberal ones and it was not until after the Fourteenth Amendment, following the Civil War, that the Bill of Rights was used against state legislation. Eventually those rights were seen as claims against society rather than the old republican view, discussed in Chapter 1. The older view considered rights simply as the entitlements of citizens to ensure non-domination, as facilitators of political deliberation and factors in enhancing community (Sunstein 1993a: 9). Interestingly the older view of rights surfaced during the periods of the ‘New Deal’ in the 1930s–40s and the ‘Great Society’ in the 1960s (Sunstein 1990: 17–29). The crucial point needs to be underlined: ‘rights-talk’ is not ipso facto liberal, as many communitarian critics maintain. Nor does it negate considerations of civic virtue. It may be seen as liberal when rights are seen as pre-social or as claims which may be pursued even against the common good. When rights are seen simply as protective devices to maintain liberty as non-domination or as means to foster the common good and the civic virtues necessary to sustain it, they are in accord with the early modern republican view. That view of the Bill of Rights has been obscured, Sandel (1996: 39–42, 47–9) argued, by a liberal interpretation – ‘rights as trumps’, which was largely a product of the second half of the nineteenth century. Arguments about the irrelevance of virtue at the time of the founding of the United States, therefore, may be questioned. I can only repeat: critics of the important impact of ‘classical republicanism’ on that founding have been responding to a stereotype in much the same way as critics of ‘ancient liberty’ responded to a stereotype. Pangle (1988: 18–9) is surely correct in warning us against stereotypes, particularly the Weberian neo-Kantian assumption that duty is always radically separate from pleasure and the failure to

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see that self-love could be the basis for social obligations. He is cogent in pointing to Lockean discourse which held that the purpose of government was the preservation of property and not to define happiness, virtue or salvation. Civil society, therefore, should not ‘bow to men who claim to possess some special insight into the meaning and purpose of life’ (Pangle 1988: 253–4). But he would surely agree that some early modern republicans shared the latter view. Consider Harrington who, despite his aristocratic sensibilities, had no place for an all-knowing élite. It might be the case, moreover, that the classical common good required sacrifices on the part of individuals and an appeal to nobility to an extent that modern society did not (Pangle 1988: 211) and that a modern notion of the common good included liberties both public and private, including ‘the right to refuse most of the burdens and responsibilities of republicanism’ (Pangle 1988: 117). But enough was said in preceding chapters about the relationship of virtue to self-interest for us not to extend those observations to all early modern republicans much less the Enlightenment ones. Wariness about discounting the importance of considerations of virtue in the founding of the United States should be extended to include Wood’s view that, in the period 1776–87, a faith in civic virtue was replaced by considerations of interest. A number of scholars have taken him to task on that score, (for example Higonnet 1988: 276). Undeniably though, while elements of early modern republicanism survived in the United States throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, the discourse of virtue kept disappearing and then coming back. That could even occur in the writings of the same person. Consider Noah Webster who was committed to creating an American national language, first through his famous speller and then through what was to become one of the most famous dictionaries in the world. He followed the stance of many Federalists in 1787 by declaring that ‘the system of the great Montesquieu will ever be erroneous, till the words property or lands in fee simple are substituted for virtue throughout his Spirit of Laws’. Then in the 1790s, changing from the mood of liberation to the old republican theme of preventing inevitable corruption or perhaps the darker side of the dialectic of Enlightenment, he began to affirm the old virtues. Finally in the dictionary, which did not achieve fame until after his death in 1843, under the heading ‘virtue’ he wrote: ‘Strength . . . Bravery; valor’ and in brackets added, ‘Meaning obsolete’. But perhaps Webster’s conclusions may be dismissed as those

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of a bitter old man, since, under ‘republic’, he noted that the word referred to ‘Common interest; the public’ and added in brackets ‘Not in use’ (Ellis 1979: 193, 211–12). Was republican virtue dead by the 1830s? Tocqueville has been characterized as the ‘coroner’ of classical political philosophy in the United States, ‘the intellectual who assigned himself the task of inquiring into the causes of the death of the republican tradition in liberal America’ (Diggins 1984: 231). Was the view of virtue which remained totally different from that enshrined in early modern republicanism? Or was it the case that the Federalists had taken a mechanical turn and had moved from a stress on personal virtue to a notion of systemic virtue, in a manner similar to Machiavelli who ‘turned increasingly from a consideration of the individual virtues of The Prince to a discourse on the collective virtue of the citizen body as a whole’ (Hanson 1985: 72). Could the argument be made that the Federalists, familiar with Hume’s mechanistic view of morals, had striven to elaborate a mechanical system of rules which would allow virtues to thrive in a new situation (Higonnet 1988: 210; Hanson 1985: 73) in place of the individual focus on virtue which had been maintained by the anti-federalists and theorized by Kant? James Farr (1988: 23), among others, described the process as the mechanization of or systematization of virtue which he traced back to Montesquieu. In the light of what has been said before, I have serious doubts about characterizing Montesquieu as the precursor of what I have termed mechanical republicanism. But surely it is difficult to argue that a coherent view of civic virtue survived into the Jacksonian period which has been described as an age of ‘utility resplendent’ (Lerner 1987: 201–4)? Sandel maintained that it did and persisted beyond that date; but not all are convinced. Developing his argument about the ‘political economy of citizenship’, which, we have seen, drew upon Jeffersonian agrarian values, he went on to recall the model industrial community of Lowell, Massachusetts, ‘the leading industrial town of the Jacksonian era’ which was set up to prove the compatibility of manufacturing and social virtues (Sandel 1996: 150–4). Republican considerations of virtue, moreover, informed both the advocates of protectionism to keep out the corrupt and laissez faire to encourage the moral discipline of republicans. Poverty was attacked not because of its unfairness but because of its harmful effects on republican civic virtues. Republican ideas, moreover, informed both the Jacksonians’ criticism of big business and the central bank, and the arguments

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of their Whig opponents who favoured the expansion of business but curtailing the power of the presidency (Sandel 1996: 156–67).11 On both sides, he argued, debate was couched in terms of republican virtues in a way which seems barely conceivable today when the ideas of the procedural republic have set the terms of debate in that country and where the logic of capitalism has rendered out of date a political economy geared to anything but profit. There have been many objections to the points Sandel has made. We have already remarked on different views on Jeffersonian political economy (Appleby 1992: 253–76: Pangle 1988: 98–104). What lessons, moreover, can be gained from the Lowell experiment which failed? What should we make of the arguments of the Jacksonian era when both Democrats and Whigs used the rhetoric of ‘republican virtues’ to denounce one another without any mutually recognized norms for using language (Diggins 1984: 113)? Jacksonian virtue could perhaps more fruitfully be seen in Lockean terms as exalting productive labour as could the later attack on the trusts which deprived citizens of their rights to ownership and opportunity.12 What, moreover, can be done with a classical republicanism which was pressed into the service both of those who supported and opposed slavery (Diggins 1984: 140–3)? The point, however, is that Sandel’s arguments might persuade us that considerations of virtue, dominant or not, relevant or not, remained salient. We must be careful, however, about exactly which sort of virtues we are talking. Consider Lincoln. Surely considerations of virtue were nowhere more prominent than in his utterances: Our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust. Let us repurify it. Let us turn and wash it white, in the spirit, if not the blood, of the Revolution. . . . Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices and policy, which harmonize with it (Lincoln 1953: II: 276). That may have been a call for virtue but, Diggins (1984: 312, 315) maintained, it was not the old republican virtue. It had ‘more to do with holiness than with heroism’; it reintroduced ‘into political discourse the Christian moralism that Machiavelli had purged from his theory of statecraft’; Lincoln (1953: V: 404) was concerned with a major war of principle: ‘God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time’. Lincoln’s virtue appeared not to be a republican evaluation of practicalities nor a calculation of interest. If

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God wills it, Lincoln (1953: VIII, 333) insisted, the war should go on ‘until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword’. Here Diggins has made a telling point since, we have seen, a separation must be made between virtues in general and republican civic virtues which depend on a relatively autonomous sphere of politics. Machiavelli would surely have condemned Lincoln’s ‘spiritual ecstasy’. His emphasis on the functional need for religion surely did not extend to a political religion which was self-destructive. Seventeenth-century English republicans, who often had difficulty separating civic virtues from more lofty ideals, however, might have been less critical of Lincoln. As for Kant, I suspect that he also would have criticized Lincoln’s ecstasy but probably would have admired him, in the spirit of his enthusiasm for the French Revolution. We can never know; as we cannot know what Kant might have thought of Lincoln’s more rational defence of maintaining the union discussed earlier. But that defence, of course, could not be seen in terms of Kantian virtue which had allegedly ceased to be public. However Lincoln’s political religion is interpreted, there is no denying that major changes occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the aftermath of the Civil War, when, in Hartz’s (1955: 203–27) words, the Whigs ‘discovered America’ in the form of the Horatio Alger myth, few historians could argue that ‘country’ values remained strong. At that time, Sandel observed, a discourse based on liberal voluntarism – freedom of choice – became more and more important. According to that way of thinking, the advocacy of abolitionists became seen as having been more effective in ending slavery than considerations, much more potent at the time, concerning the effect of slavery on free institutions and free labour in the newly opened up territories of the West (Sandel 1996: 177–8). The struggle against slavery had coincided with a major debate on whether wage labour was consistent with a republican conception of liberty. The old republican view held that working for a wage was only justified as a temporary measure until one was in a position to work for oneself under conditions which would form qualities of character or virtues conducive to self-government. That view, it will be remembered, was reflected in the Marxian distinction between the artisan selling labour and the proletarian selling alienated labour power and the nostalgia for the medieval artisan of soft British Marxists such as William Morris (1970). But Marxists and trade unionists had to be more sensitive to the actuality

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of mass industrial capitalism and the new stress on liberal voluntarism. In the United States of the 1890s the republican ideal of the independent productive artisan, prominent among the Knights of Labor, gave way to the trade unionism of the American Federation of Labor which focused not so much on the qualities of the republican artisan but the inequity of the labour contract. Similarly the eight hour day, which had been fought for and justified according to the republican notion of allowing adequate time for the development of citizen qualities, was gradually eroded by legal decisions also based on freedom of contract (Sandel 1996: 168–200). Anti-trust legislation, moreover, justified according to the republican notion that the small firm had a much greater capacity to generate citizen competence, gave way in the twentieth century to anti-trust arguments based entirely on consumer interests (Sandel 1996: 231–49). Similarly the anti-chain store movement of the 1920s, which focused on the threat to local communities, petered out by the late 1930s in the face of forceful utilitarian argument (Sandel 1996: 227–31). While utilitarianism was not a term much used in the early American republic, there is no doubt that utilitarianism, fused with pre-social liberalism, eventually triumphed over republican civic virtue, though, we have noted, while classic utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham had little time for virtue, early modern republican virtue had not always been hostile to considerations of utility. Bentham’s views should not blind us to the observation that republican virtue enjoyed a place in the early United States. That virtue may not have been ‘classical’ in the sense of a received stereotype but there were continuities with the past. Chapter 4 will consider recent attempts to revive considerations of virtue in the United States. Much of that revival draws upon arguments canvassed in this and preceding chapters and is quite refreshing. But some late twentieth-century recourse to early American republican values may be seen as distorting the spirit of that time. Consider the importance in early modern republicanism of the virtues sustained by an armed citizenry organized into militias. That idea persisted in the early United States and was enshrined in the famous Second Amendment to the Constitution – ‘A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed’. Nowadays many republicans regard that amendment as an embarrassment since it has been used by the ‘gun-lobby’, often

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in the name of private frontier values which have nothing in common with the republican tradition (Williams 1991: 586–8). The amendment, however, refers to the connection between arms and a universal militia. No universal militia exists; but the idea of a universal militia as a republican ideal is by no means excessively utopian and has been implemented in some measure in some other countries. Articles still appear in United States law journals arguing that the Second Amendment constitutes an important regulative ideal and should not be a source of embarrassment for republicans (for example Williams 1991). Perhaps that is the case but in the meantime Americans often have to deal with distortions of that ideal in the hands of the unvirtuous and with self-organized ‘militias’ which may be seen as a threat to rather than a pillar of what aspires to be a free state.

LIBERTY Liberty, of course, has always been one of the most frequently used words in the American political vocabulary. There was little difference between the writings of most of the framers of the American Constitution and earlier republicans. Consider Jay’s definition of civil liberty: ‘an equal right to all the citizens to have, enjoy, and to do . . . whatever the equal and constitutional laws of the country admit to be consistent with the public good’ (cited in Lerner 1987: 100). Jay here was articulating what was described earlier as a resilient notion of liberty. That view gave priority to institutional guarantees, ‘personal security and private rights’ (Hamilton, Madison and Jay 1961: XLIV, 282). It was, moreover, what I consider to be a horizontal form of liberty. By that I mean it was a type of liberty which might not be assigned to people in various portions. Put another way, it rejected all forms of partial liberty. That theoretical point, of course, was often violated in practice but was later very important among those who objected to all forms of slavery (Bailyn 1967: 234). In common with the liberty of early modern republicans, it was not a vertical form of liberty which knew no limits. The earlier view that liberty could be endangered by its own excess still remained. In support of the proposition that the liberty of the American Revolution was largely a manifestation of liberty as non-domination, consider the argument that the revolution did not occur because

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British interference had been great. In fact, British taxation had been quite small and, according to the proposition that liberty is freedom from interference, British taxation might be seen as a minor ‘infringement of liberty’ which any subject could expect. In fact some utilitarians did just that, in the spirit of that one-time opponent of the American Revolution – Bentham who thought he had invented the quantitative view of negative liberty. The fact that he did not see that the term could be traced back to Hobbes, Pettit (1997: 41–4) argued, was evidence of the dominance of the notion of freedom as non-domination which had been salient in England after Harrington. In short the American Revolution was not about actual interference but the potential evils of British domination. The problem was not taxation itself but the fact of exposure to the capacity for arbitrary taxation (Pettit 1997: 35). But right from the time of the formation of the United States, liberal views on natural rights as a source of liberty were evident. That was bound to be the case as the rapid growth of commerce found theoretical justification in abstract natural laws of the market which had been unavailable to the early modern republicans. Commerce had been assimilated into early modern republican views from their very beginning and had been increasingly evaluated positively. Chapter 1 noted that the description of early modern republicans as generally reactionary and anti-commercial is quite wrong. But a new form of commerce seemed to require a form of natural law more intrusive than that used sparingly or referred to with reluctance by the early moderns. With that new natural law – the laws of political economy, a new form of economic liberty became salient. The liberty required by commerce in the mercantile tradition had applied largely to an aristocracy; and the American Revolution was in large part a reaction against mercantilism. The new natural laws of political economy, as they were propagated in the second half of the eighteenth century and gradually absorbed into America, saw the wealth of nations best served by extending downwards natural economic activity and the freedoms which went with it (Appleby 1992: 48–57). Those freedoms were quite real, as Smith insisted, while pointing to their contribution to corruption and Marx insisted while pointing to their alienating consequences. Using Pettit’s language, described earlier, the consequences were alienating precisely because those freedoms were liberal and not enjoyed resiliently. The way in which the framers of the United States Constitution

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responded to the new political economy, therefore, affected their views on the nature of liberty. Here, Appleby (1992: 316) argued, there was a difference in emphasis between the Federalists and the Jeffersonians. The former tended to focus on liberty as referring to constitutional protections while the latter focused more on ‘individual self-assertion, tamed by a new conception of human progress’. Both, of course, insisted on the connection between property rights and liberty but Jefferson was more interested in interpreting political liberty as equality of opportunity – an area, less governed by natural laws of political economy and one where the state needed to do something. Governments, he insisted at one point, did not exist to protect property but to promote access to property (Appleby 1992: 304). The same kind of division manifested itself in the response to those French revolutionaries who, by means of a perversion, or inversion, of Rousseau, claimed that by the use of Reason the social order could be made to correspond to the natural order. The particular association of liberty and equality to which that gave rise was a major element in the split between Federalists and some of their republican opponents, with the former maintaining the old aristocratic view of the early modern republicans and the latter toying for a time with the new French ideas (Appleby 1992: 203–04). In the end the early modern republican view paled before a liberal quantitative view as the nineteenth century progressed. There is no need to repeat Sandel’s arguments here.

CONCLUSION This chapter has noted some continuities and some changes in the four features of the early modern republican version of the idealtype mapped out in preceding chapters. The United States, of course, had no divinely-inspired law-giver, though the ‘founding’ has been invested with much the same kind of values as earlier republican versions of such events. But the resulting view of sovereignty had new features. In the early United States, delegated popular sovereignty was prized apart from the old idea of the mixed constitution, giving rise to a rationale based on the representation of an undifferentiated people, a new conception of federalism and a mechanical system of checks and balances. That mechanical republicanism was different from the prescriptions of Kant though we

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have noted a strong element of ‘virtual’ representation, especially in what Ackerman has called the ‘semiotic’ representation of the judiciary. The new Constitution accelerated a process whereby the balance of powers came no longer to refer to the source of power but focused on the mechanisms for its exercise. The need for very complex mechanisms, however, were but dimly seen, as was the enormous power to be exercised by the judiciary. History, of course, was now increasingly portrayed in terms of progress, though the fear of degeneration, prominent in early republicanism and a significant element in the American Revolution, remained a feature of the early United States. The salience of corruption, however, could increasingly be seen as simply the dark side of the Enlightenment and not tied to some cyclical historical pattern. Virtue often remained important though we have discerned a wide spectrum of views on its changing meaning. Whatever views on virtue may have been present, however, they were rarely seen as legitimately defined by a clerical establishment. The anti-clerical tradition remained which resulted in the alteration of some state constitutions. The qualitative view of liberty, which defined that word in terms of avoiding dependence on particular others, also persisted, though it was increasingly challenged by a quantitative approach. Recourse was still made to Greece, Rome, the British constitution before the days of its corruption and the work of early modern republican writers from Machiavelli onwards. Nevertheless the heritage of Harrington had to contend with the heritage of Locke and Enlightenment thinkers who had dispensed with classical models. This chapter has shown that, despite the condemnation of ‘aristocracy’, an aristocratic definition of the republic remained. That view was still coupled with some advocacy of mass political participation though the scope of that participation was qualified. Federalists were seen as confining it to constitutional as opposed to normal politics. The lukewarm view of participation exhibited in the Federalist Papers, however, does not appear new when, for example, we remember Guicciardini’s affirmation of the necessary connection between popular participation and self-government while exhibiting distrust at its exercise. But that aristocratic view was increasingly challenged by a democratic one. Patriotism was also a major theme and, as in the works of early modern republicans, might be linked to an expansionist tendency. The chapter has considered explanations of America’s expansionist mission in terms of

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maintaining virtue and avoiding corruption, though a powerful republican argument against expansion was also noted. The idea of an armed citizenry organized into militias, moreover, which in early modern republican writing was justified both for republics aiming at expansion and those which were not, persisted but may recently have been perverted. Above all the American version of republicanism had to respond to a rapidly growing commerce which after the eighteenth century received justification according to abstract principles of political economy very different from the more concrete principles which had inspired mercantilism. As some commentators see it, the new political economy suggested a revised conception of liberty or at least a supplementary one. On that question polemic has raged. As Chapter 2 argued, Montesquieu may be interpreted as heralding a new form of republicanism with a new form of liberty which celebrated commerce and was thus eagerly incorporated into American thinking. But this chapter has cast doubt on the novelty of his views on liberty. Smith was likewise incorporated, for obvious economic reasons but his thought contained some traditional republican orientations. Rousseau on that score was usually considered to be irrelevant. Kant was ignored for different reasons but, we have seen, a view of progress and liberty similar to that of Kant was by no means absent from United States thinking. Recent debate has revolved around the relative importance of liberalism and republicanism in the early United States. Many of the alleged differences have been excessively magnified. It is probably the case, however, that a liberal discourse achieved dominance in the second half of the nineteenth century. But saying that is not to concede that what Wood calls ‘classical politics’ actually ended.

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4 Contemporary Republicanism in What Used to be Called the ‘First World’ At first sight the model mapped out in earlier chapters seems out of date. On all four of the topics covered – sovereignty, the shape of history, virtue and liberty, dramatic changes seem to have occurred. In this globalized age, some people argue, the idea of sovereignty is very weak and sovereignty of the people is often treated as meaningless rhetoric or, in postmodern terms, a residue of a lost battle over political language.1 In the discipline of public administration we hear constantly the refrain that government is giving way to ‘governance’ – control by ‘self-steering interorganizational networks’ which result in a ‘hollowing out of the state’ (Rhodes 1997: 4–5, 15–9, 46–53, 57–8), the replacement of citizens celebrated in republican theory by customers and, as Ferguson (1966: 225) predicted in 1767, the replacement of statesmen and warriors by clerks and accountants. What remains is a regulator state which collides with and often destroys the old world of checks and balances. In so far as checks and balances exist, they consist in the countervailing powers of parties to corporatist arrangements. Political history, moreover, is sometimes treated as the progressive victory within waves of a bloodless ‘democracy’ cast simply in procedural terms, sometimes portrayed as a terrain of ‘clashing civilizations’ (Huntington 1996) or, from a postmodern view, sometimes considered as a dangerous ‘essentialist’ account which privileges particular forms of domination. For many people, ‘virtue’ is old-fashioned twaddle, incompatible with industrial society (Gellner 1994: 163), the preserve of dangerous monomaniacs or, more ridiculously, something associated with the powerless as in ‘womanly virtues’. The idea of a specifically civic virtue seems to have disappeared. For many observers of market society, human nature is simply taken as plastic and the nature of politicians not simply as corruptible, as in the old republican tradition, but as intrinsically corrupt. 118

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Freedom, moreover, is seen largely in terms of non-interference. But how much have things changed? How different in kind is contemporary globalization from the milieu within which ‘sovereignty’ emerged – the internationalized milieu of the sixteenth century (if I may use an anachronistic term)? Can there be any modern equivalent of the old republican anti-clericalism which, in some countries, might be seen as an affirmation of sovereignty in the face of that internationalization? Should we discard the notion of sovereignty, as Arendt thought had happened in America, or can we recast it in popular terms in accordance with a republican spirit? Do the old republican ideas about controlling factions apply to corporatist arrangements where the mixed constitution – the balanced rule of one, the few and the many – has been replaced by the compromise-informed rule of what may be seen as three, or sometimes only two, kinds of few – big bureaucratic government, big business and a peak labour organization?2 Is the utilitarian regulator state, moreover, necessarily hostile to republicanism? After all, the early infusion of utilitarian elements into republican thought, which was consequentialist to a significant degree, could be seen as prefiguring a regulator state. While in many respects those utilitarian principles were inimical to republican thought, republicans sought to refashion them by constitutional measures and the invocation of civic virtue. Is that possible now? The world of the late 1990s, reacting against the frenzied assault on regulation in the past decade, has seen new advocacy of principles to govern regulation which might recall earlier republican thought. Sunstein (1990: 171) has argued most forcefully for such principles aimed, among other things, ‘to promote deliberation in government, to furnish surrogates for it when it is absent, to limit factionalism and self-interested representation, and to help bring about political equality’. Is his modern republicanism credible? Should one, moreover, persist in the assumption of extreme human plasticity, which has sustained many psychologists and the advertising industry, and of the inevitably corrupt nature of politicians, which has sustained much of the media and public choice theory? Those assumptions are under considerable attack by scholars who, while not denying that people exhibit plasticity at times and that politicians are often corrupt, are not convinced by assertions of inevitability. Finally is there much satisfaction in a simple notion of freedom as non-interference? As the actual possibilities for the exercise of democratic life seem to recede in Western ‘democracies’, many observers have not found

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much solace in popular interpretations of Francis Fukuyama’s (1992) ‘end of history’, world-wide. They might agree with Samuel Huntington (1996: 301) that ‘societies that assume that their history has ended . . . are usually societies whose history is about to decline’. Nor have they been content to jump to the other extreme of abandoning history altogether and to disentangle ‘genealogies’ forged by particular configurations of power. Some of them have indeed made recourse to the old ideas of republicanism. They have sought to adapt the republican idea of popular sovereignty to the new situation, to flesh out a new conception of citizenship according to what was once called civic virtue and to operationalize the idea of freedom as non-domination? Their prescriptions have differed according to how they have seen the heritage of liberalism which they seek to correct and how they have evaluated the nature of ‘democracy’. Previous chapters have discussed Pettit’s (1997) weak republican position, which criticized forms of liberalism for their insistence on freedom as non-interference and their colourless view of political life but, in the spirit of many of the republican thinkers discussed in Chapter 1 and the authors of the Federalist Papers, did not see democracy as an end in itself, but only as a means to further freedom as non-domination. Pettit affirmed the value of political participation but echoed the early modern theorists in not pushing the idea very far. Strong republicans, on the other hand, have emphasized the idea of participation. Aware that their espousal of democratic participation goes far beyond their early modern forebears, Barber has preferred the name ‘strong democrat’ to republican, perhaps idealizing Jefferson rather than Madison. I do not intend to discuss once again the complex Jeffersonian legend. Suffice it to repeat that Pettit’s conception of the republican tradition as only weakly democratic in a participatory sense is probably correct. He and various critics listed in previous chapters have been cogent in pointing to the fact that the role of participation in that tradition has been greatly overstated. But that is no reason for not evaluating positively some of the arguments for strong democracy in recent formulations. With notable exceptions, historians and political philosophers/ scientists seem to approach republicanism from different directions. The former have been preoccupied with demonstrating that early modern republicanism was not particularly democratic. Many of the latter, on the other hand, have been preoccupied with demonstrating that its advocacy was too democratic in the early-modern

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sense of the word. Thus Schmitter, in an influential collection of articles in The Journal of Democracy entitled ‘Democracy’s Future’, argued that of the three possible futures of democracy – ‘more liberal democracy’, ‘pre-liberal democracy’ and ‘post-liberal democracy’, the second was the least likely. That ‘pre-liberal’ democracy is what we have called civic republicanism. Strangely, Schmitter (1995: 22n) felt, ‘its most complete and consistent statement by a contemporary theorist’ was that of Barber. Barber (1984: 118), in fact, repudiated republican nostalgia and offered a participatory model of politics as an end in itself rather than a means to nondomination which was radically different from the treatment of that subject discussed in the preceding three chapters. He put forward a pragmatic view of politics for which some earlier republicans might have been groping but which hardly any articulated in any full sense. In contrast, Schmitter’s post-liberal scenario was a faint gloss on existing liberal democracy and even that, he believed, is less likely than the first scenario – ‘more liberalism and [implicitly] less democracy’. I do not wish here to endorse all of Barber’s analysis and recommendations but his ideas must be taken seriously. They must certainly not be consigned to the category of ‘out-of-date’.

POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY Chapter 1 noted the opinion of some scholars that the term sovereignty, which refers to the existence of only one supreme authority in a society, dates only from the sixteenth century. Is its life coming to an end? In a globalized environment, various political economists have argued that states can no longer exercise supreme authority over many important issues. They lack, for example, the coercive power to tax much of big business and lack the infrastructural power to tax many small businesses which operate according to ‘the cash economy’. Harrington was certainly correct in arguing against Hobbes’ reduction of authority to power. But authority without power, as exhibited by many contemporary states, is a source of much frustration and the attempt to regain power might have consequences worse than coming to terms with relative powerlessness. As William Connolly (1991: 24) observed: No state can be inclusive enough to master the environment that conditions it; but the ideal of the modern democratic state, as

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the consummate agency of collective freedom, is predicated on the assumption of this capacity. As long as this gap is treated as a deficiency to be rectified, the drive of late modern states to close it will constitute a danger to global survival. Leaders of many modern states, however, do see the dangers of trying to close the gap. Autarchy is no solution but solace might be found in corporatist arrangements which mitigate class struggle and prepare a state for a flexible response to global vulnerability. Such corporatist arrangements concern what Kant called the mode of government and not sovereignty. But surely under corporatism popular sovereignty is made increasingly virtual to the extent that the formal representatives of the people are eclipsed by the representatives of the most powerful interests. With that in mind, it is worth remembering Condorcet’s criticism of the system adopted by the early United States which was noted in Chapter 3. The normal defence of corporatist arrangements is usually utilitarian. Corporatism seems highly correlated with less disruptive taxwelfare backlash, ‘governability’ and low unemployment. Austria, once celebrated as the most corporatist country of all, has been noteworthy in all those aspects and was marked by extraordinary economic success. That observation is insufficient to convince a republican of the value of corporatism but there may be a weak republican defence to the effect that some corporatist states have reduced the level of non-domination of capital over labour. On the other hand, they may have increased the degree of domination over those not party to the corporatist arrangements. As Alan Cawson (1986: 145) put it: Those whose interests are protected by powerful corporatist organisations have in effect two votes, whereas those excluded from corporatist intermediation have as their democratic safeguard only the devalued currency of electoral representation and a very indirect voice in parliament or in a local authority increasingly subject to central direction. Those whose primary allegiance is to a constituency which cannot be organized by corporatist means are in effect second-class citizens, victims of a process of social and political marginalisation. Since the 1980s, however, enthusiasm for corporatism has waned, not so much because of republican or democratic objections but

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because of the problems besetting those social democratic states in which it was held to be the most successful. Confidence in the ability of any state to maintain sovereignty while rolling with the tide of global economic developments has been shaken. One pessimistic scenario is the development of a new feudalism – the growth of a new hierarchy of diffused and overlapping authorities, each reverting to a greater or lesser extent to the behaviour of protection rackets – a form of political power which antedated the modern international system (Tilly 1985). If that scenario is correct and the international system becomes characterized by dependency, there seems to be little prospect for the emergence of republican régimes and, if any do emerge in the interstices of networks of control, they might be short-lived. But the above was the kind of world against which theorists of sovereignty, both monarchist and republican, rebelled. A more optimistic scenario in the contemporary world has been provided by those who attempt to recast sovereignty in accordance with the principle that the authority to do things should be located where best they may be done in the context of new forms of federalism. That is the view of many exponents of the European Union who see the authority of component states being disaggregated and shifted variously upwards and downwards – the general principle being that of subsidiarity – the notion that authority should be given to institutions covering a wider area only if it cannot effectively be exercised by units covering a smaller area. Their critics, however, have envisaged a repetition of the old clumsy compromises worked out among federating units, which I have criticized elsewhere in the context of Australia (Brugger and Jaensch 1985: 164–95). Feeling that the notion of subsidiarity is simply too difficult to implement, they have envisaged general disempowerment. An old-fashioned republican might argue that the European Union could never become a republic. There was no ‘founding’; and Jean Monnet could hardly compare with Lycurgus or George Washington. Indeed Europe’s constitution is constantly being re-configured and its scope altered. How can there be a republic without a certain population and a certain territory (Manent 1997)? Nor is Europe a free state in the old republican sense. It is very difficult to discern a sovereign people delegating its authority. Nor is there a mixed constitution nor even a mixed government, both the representative legislature and the executive elements being very weak and highly constrained. In the various regulations

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which emanate from Brussels, critics have seen arbitrary decisions clothed in the language of bureaucratic rationality. Europe, moreover, is shaped not by common bonds nor Hegelian ‘organic unity’ nor by a nationalism based on a dominant high culture (see Gellner 1983) but by utilitarian concerns. A rebuttal must emphasize the fact that the ‘founding’ myth was always questionable; who, I have asked, founded Florence? In the European Union, a referendum process governs entry and parliamentary forms may be expected to strengthen and eventually replace a system which is now ‘federative’ in the old pre-American revolution sense or perhaps more than federative in the sense discussed by Rousseau (1990a) in his ‘Summary’ of the Abbé de Saint-Pierre’s Project for Perpetual Peace or advocated by Kant (1991: 102–5) in his ‘Perpetual Peace’. Rousseau (1990b:) believed that princes would not agree to an effective European confederation, but we are now not really dealing with ‘princes’ and Margaret Thatcher and Charles de Gaulle, who may have aspired to that role, are no longer obstacles. A republic, moreover, no longer relies on the old idea of a mixed constitution. It certainly does not depend on organic unity which is precisely what the politics of multiculturalism, or more broadly what Connolly (1991) has called the principle of ‘agonistic respect’, seek to demonstrate. Furthermore, a republic may be constructed on at least some utilitarian grounds as we saw in the case of the United States. The same may be said for the Swiss Republic which was put together out of widely different groups and cultural orientations. While the existence of an American people had a surer ontological basis in the late eighteenth century than the European people today, it was obviously not the case that the scope of the people at that time was fixed and the territory certain – a factor which, it will be remembered, unduly worried some contemporary republicans. Current anti-European sentiment also echoes anti-federalist sentiment in late eighteenth-century America in some other respects but it clear that not all the fears of the latter were confirmed. It is clear also, in this age of Contingency, that the ‘iron cage’ of bureaucratic rationality is increasingly under challenge. It is surely possible to strengthen and create anew institutions which may foster accountability and political deliberation, as opposed to purely administrative decisionmaking. If the challenges facing contemporary republicans are similar to those facing earlier republicans a minimalist strategy is to carve out republican niches in globalized structures in Renaissance manner.

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A more inclusive strategy must return to the concern of the framers of the American Constitution – how to deal with the question of size. Their answer was a complicated system of essentially territorial representation. Barber has pointed to problems with that formulation. While some people may have severe reservations about what they see as the Rousseauesque vein of his analysis and may wish to retain a firmer structure of representation, they might agree with his contention that modern technology offers possibilities for new forms of accountability if not democracy which are not so tightly tied to territory (Barber 1984: 247). It is not beyond human imagination to work out measures to control supra-state, inter-state and trans-state régimes, to use a word recently fashionable in international relations theory, nor indeed to furnish appropriate norms which may bind territorial actors. Rousseau, in fact, saw that; and came to deny that there was any contradiction between sovereignty and a general plan for peace. For him, confederation depended only on the will and hard work of sovereign actors, not the march of history, not Reason and certainly not commercial imperatives (Roosevelt 1990: 104, 108–9). The process of binding territorial actors is, of course, going on. It is not unreasonable to envisage Pettit’s (1997: 150–3) extension of republican liberty as non-domination to foreign policy which, he has argued, should mirror domestic policy. The idea that constitutionalism should replace reciprocal power applies to international relations – an area where bargaining rather than dialogical reason has traditionally reigned. Pettit’s formulation is, of course, very far from the position of early modern republicans. I am sure Machiavelli would have been appalled at his conflation of politics and statecraft, that Harrington and the neo-Harringtonians would be alarmed at the renunciation of empire and that Sidney (1996: 205–6) would discern that ‘mortal error’ he found in the Venetian constitution – ‘too great’ an ‘inclination to peace’. More seriously, I detect a very ‘un-American’ flavour in his proposals. They would shock not simply some right-wing American populists whom some might wish wrongly to call ‘communitarians’ but also respectable ‘realist’ middle Americans who have deeply imbibed the old association of liberty with strict sovereignty implicit in the Constitution and the even older republican association of liberty with well-meaning aggression. It is difficult to dislodge the idea that decent bourgeois ‘republics’ were imposed on Germany and Japan by force of United States arms and the Cold War was won by military preparedness plus a

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few threats, as in the Strategic Defense Initiative, and that such behaviour should continue (see Dunn 1994: 215, 218). Pettit’s argument about international relations is discordant with early republican thought but not, as I have suggested (following Roosevelt 1990), with some ideas of Rousseau, nor with the republicanism of Kant (1991: 93–130) which Pettit does not discuss. Kant, of course, came to have some influence on twentieth-century United States thinking but was usually considered to be too unredeemably ‘idealist’. The dominant paradigm in United States thinking on international relations has oscillated between what is crudely labelled ‘neo-realism’ and ‘neo-liberalism’. When we consider the military orientation of many early modern republicans, the former, at first sight, would seem to sit better with their ideas. But we might come to a different conclusion if we bear in mind an aspect of the Enlightenment republican tradition, with credentials at least as good as Machiavelli’s interpretation of virtu`, which holds that constitutive dialogical reason is superior to simple bargaining backed up by force. That dialogical reason, as Pitkin has reminded us, is, of course, further than anything proposed by Machiavelli at his best; he having favoured what she has called ‘multivocal and impersonal’ political deliberation (Pitkin 1884: 310). We have surely moved far from the early modern republican position that republicans have to choose between affirming the liberty plus grandezza of a ‘republic for expansion’, with all its sexist connotations (Pitkin 1984: 305–6), or simply carving out a republican niche and attempting to ward off inevitable corruption.

THE SHAPE OF HISTORY Contemporary views on the shape of history are many and varied. At a very broad level there appears to be the same range of opinion as two hundred years ago, from Condorcet in his more optimistic mood to Thomas Malthus at his most pessimistic (Kennedy 1993). At one end of the spectrum is a set of views which holds that history is going somewhere in the Kantian sense of the march of Reason, in a quasi-Hegelian sense of a story with an ending or in some deterministic sociological sense. A second set of views maintains that history has no clear direction; it will depend upon a ‘clash of civilizations’ (Huntington 1996) or, from a postmodern perspective, that is going only where ascending and constantly changing

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sources of power may determine that it will go. Both positions have been bent in a direction which is claimed to be ‘democratic’; but very little in the relevant literature is said about republicanism. The idea that history is going somewhere in Enlightenment fashion must always be qualified by the dialectic of Enlightenment discussed in previous chapters. Some observers might maintain that in recent years the aims of the Enlightenment have been fulfilled. But that view, it will be remembered, is most un-Kantian. Kant did not see history as a story with an end. Nor on close examination did Fukuyama despite the first part of the title of his most famous book The End of History and the Last Man. Fukuyama’s (1992) ‘end of history’ was presented simply as the end of all credible contenders to ‘liberal democracy’, though there was always the possibility that we might plunge back into ‘history’. Some commentators, wrongly I feel, have interpreted his view as a form of ‘liberal triumphalism’. It might well turn out that the apparent ‘end of history’ could lead to the dark side of the Enlightenment – to banal politics and routinized boredom, where, as Ferguson (1966: 219–20) foretold, the members of a community will ‘be made to lose the sense of every connection but that of their kindred and neighbourhood and have no common affairs to transact but those of trade’; in such a situation there may be ‘connections’ or ‘transactions’ but the ‘national spirit . . . cannot be exerted’. Nietzsche (1911: 11–4), who inspired part of the title of Fukuyama’s book, went further; there was no spirit at all in the world of the ‘last man’. For Weber (1970) also, where there is ‘alienation from the means of administration’, there is no way out. Charismatic leaders might still arise and might even try to institute new ordini; but the rule of the charismatic leader would soon be routinized and bureaucratized. In that case liberalism might just wither away and die despite the lack of an ideological competitor. An alternative scenario might follow the predictions of Schmitter in seeing liberalism continuing to flourish but at the expense of republican civic virtue and freedom as non-domination. Consider the United States, economically the most developed country on earth. Over the past two centuries, the extension of liberal rights and values, including freedom from interference, has been phenomenal and economic development has assisted that transformation. But how much have we seen the growth of freedom as nondomination? Though there is still much scope for dissatisfaction, there have been appreciable moves in that direction in ethnic and gender relations. But the same cannot be said for many other aspects

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of life. What Dwight D. Eisenhower called the ‘military industrial complex’ is a somewhat out-of-date term; but that is not because it has disappeared but because corporate power has extended far beyond the military and industry. Have we, moreover, seen a diminution of political corruption? What we can say with confidence is that there has been a deterioration of what Robert D. Putnam (1995) calls ‘social capital’. There is less civic engagement, less social trust and a huge decline in support for the government. Would Tocqueville recognize what has become of the United States in which he praised the level of civic engagement? Is the United States less republican than it used to be? That is the thrust of Sandel’s (1996) complaint. Republicans, therefore, might entertain doubts about the progressive nature of politics in what used to be called the ‘first world’. If they do see history as going somewhere, moreover, they might reflect on both sides of the dialectic of Enlightenment and search for elements in republican thought which may blunt history’s sharp edges and moderate its cunning. One such element is the old republican idea of the relative autonomy of the political. Of course, public choice theorists, instrumental Marxists and others insist that the autonomy of the political is impossible to maintain. After reading the writings of the Progressive School of American historians, we may look askance at Arendt’s (1963) idealization of the American Revolution which she thought was relatively successful, as opposed to the French which collapsed politics into economics and much else. Indeed, in a revolutionary situation it is almost certainly the case that the autonomy of the political cannot be maintained. Nor, I suspect, can it be sustained in any full sense in normal politics. But an impossible state of affairs can serve as a worthwhile ideal. I am thinking here of Hume’s arguments about the ‘social contract’ rather than Kant’s ‘as ifs’ or a prioris. Kant’s radical separation of the pure from the practical could not entertain impossibilities as guides for action. His endorsement of the ‘social contract’ was not that it was a useful impossibility but that it was real simply as an idea of Reason. Mill’s defence of the self-regarding act is usually seen in terms of his utilitarian orientation but more commonly perhaps it is also taken as real by virtue of Reason. I prefer, however, to call it a ‘necessary fiction’ – an impossibility which has served legislation well. A belief in the autonomy of politics is similar. Albeit partly fictitious, it offers a counter to those perversions of socialism, liberalism and ecologism – respectively Stalinism, public choice theory and what is sometimes called eco-fascism.

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The second set of views, which maintains that history is merely going where ascending and conflicting views of power dictate, can be both frightening and liberating. What is frightening to those people brought up to believe in the bright side of the Enlightenment is a revival of something like the old republican notion of Fortuna. Nowadays it is called ‘Contingency’. That term, referred to earlier, must now be spelt out. In Connolly’s (1991: 27) words: I can often do what I want or what I think will promote my long-term advantage, but my implication in an organized system of available life projects means that one or another institution might itself fall under pressure to transform the standards I have striven to meet; we can act together in a state to domesticate local contingencies, but the cumulative effect of such actions by a variety of states generates global contingencies resistant to mastery; late modernity replaces acceptance of blind fate with the mastery of contingency, but it creates global contingencies that haunt us with a new fatefulness. I have spelt Contingency here with a capital ‘C’ to distinguish it from the contingencies which we have always confronted. The heritage of the Enlightenment which buried Fortuna has been that we often cannot think beyond contingencies with a small ‘c’. That way of thinking is characteristic of economists who cast factors which can lead to global disaster simply as ‘externalities’. Contingency with a capital ‘C’ disturbs all forms of Enlightenment thinking – even the dark side. We may as a consequence even feel nostalgia for the alienating ‘iron cage’ of bureaucratic rationality which at least made sense. Now it seems the certainty of iron has gone. We are left with what Connolly (1991: 22) has called ‘dependent uncertainty’ which results in generalized resentment. The result may be irrational outbursts which have taken on ugly, often racist, forms. Can anyone build a republic out of that? Optimist postmodernists believe that we can celebrate the demise of the iron cage. We may be inspired by the liberating aspect of a postmodern position which, like that of the earlier pragmatists, insists that the ‘real world’ determinants of many historical facts are simply ideological obfuscations of what are essentially the products of human action; and human action may change them. But note I say many. Postmodernism becomes ludicrous once it replaces many by all social determinants. I do not intend here to

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go into the more extreme postmodern arguments about history. Suffice it to claim that some of the arguments about unpacking genealogy and history are immensely salutary as were earlier, and more modest, pragmatist positions, which were concerned less with empirical truth than the contemporary consequences of having a belief. Barber has affirmed the latter, maintaining that political action itself defines the political and the autonomy of the political. Arguments about impossibility are redundant in his formulation because they stem from a pre-political understanding. I cannot see, however, how a pre-political understanding can be avoided if moral judgments across cultures are to be made. All I can say is that, in less than crisis situations, the pretence that political life has the potential to enjoy a certain autonomy may have consequences beneficial to contemporary republicanism as many early modern writers, discussed in Chapter 1, thought it had in their day. The consequences of that fiction may be more acceptable than those of the liberal fiction of the neutral state.3 My argument is clearly un-Kantian in affirming untruths but not pragmatic nor postmodern in affirming a pre-political understanding. Here I may be saying no more than that the belief that politics has the potential to generate disinterested deliberation in the search of a common good will further that common good.

THE PLACE OF VIRTUE I have argued that a typical early modern republican position held that commercial activity was conducive to corruption but not inevitably corrupt. More broadly, it saw human nature itself in the same light. After all, the assumption of intrinsic corruption could be used to justify monarchical coercion. Moreover, Pettit (1997: 211) observed, the assumption that people are intrinsically corrupt creates problems in the face of virtue. The result may be that the institutions created in the face of corruption actually serve to corrupt the uncorrupt. For example, institutions designed to protect the police against corruption may foster a ghetto mentality – us versus them – which actually fosters corruption within the force. The same goes for mechanisms designed to protect local government. Those mechanisms may reinforce selfish parochialism. Most of us probably do not assume the intrinsic corruption of ordinary people; but nowadays there is a widespread assumption

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of inevitable corruption in politics. As alluded to above, that assumption underlies much of contemporary public choice theory. According to one branch of that theory, persons who seek to regulate in the name of the common good turn out to be ‘rent-seeking’. There is no doubt that some politicians are doing precisely that, as Sunstein (1990: 69–71, 137–41) has pointed out in the case of United States banking regulation which protects banks from competition. But the argument of some public choice theorists that all new forms of regulation are corrupt privileges the existing distribution of property and entitlements. The notion that all redistribution is rentseeking dismisses politics as unproductive; it reduces the judicial function simply to adjudicating ‘deals’ and tends to consider citizenship as an obstacle. This was the basis of Sunstein’s (1990: 71) argument that public choice theory is a perverse reversal of liberalism which, in Mill’s eyes, saw political behaviour as ‘an important arena for education, for deliberation and discussion about the nation’s direction, for the development of the faculties, and for the cultivation of feelings of altruism’. Certainly, public choice theory does contradict an important element of social liberalism but an argument may made that, while traditional liberals did not go so far as to see people as actually corrupt in the manner of those who see regulation as rent-seeking, that view might well be congruent with a darker form of liberalism which distrusts ‘the common good’. In contrast, we can say with confidence that the view that all regulation is rent-seeking is the very antithesis of republicanism. The alternative offered by public-choice theorists is greater market regulation. People in politics might be corrupt but the market is neutral. That view has been challenged by the observation that markets are to a large extent products of the law which creates property rights. Their ‘real world’ status is a consequence of human action, as pragmatists ceaselessly remind us and we noted in the above discussion about the shape of history (Sunstein 1993a: 5–6, 51–61). Laissez faire is the product of a decision ‘to let’ – laisser. There are, moreover, many kinds of market and arenas for personal choice which operate according to different principles. Treating all arenas of choice as being of one piece demands considering all preferences to be exogenous. To a large degree, however, preferences are ‘endogenous to, or a function of, existing information, consumption patterns, legal rules and social pressures most generally’ (Sunstein 1990: 44; 1993, 90–1, 162–94). Put starkly, they are shaped by wealth or poverty. The republican tradition does not talk simply

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about people acting according to effective demand – wants backed up by purchasing power – or even just deciding what they want. It is concerned with a view of political autonomy where people’s collective self-determination is concerned primarily with ‘who they are – what their values are and what those values require’ (Sunstein 1990: 35; 1993: 178). We return to the virtue-centred approach discussed in Chapter 1. The central question in a virtue-centred approach is not ‘what should I do?’ but ‘what sort of person am I to be’ (Schneewind: 1990)? Thus ‘the choices people make as political participants are different from those they make as consumers’ (Sunstein 1990: 57; 1993: 179). That is not to argue that political choices are always ‘better’ than market choices (Sunstein 1993a: 180–1). It is to insist that we are dealing with two different spheres of activity. Corruption, in the old republican tradition, was a very loose term being often simply synonymous with degeneration. Now it is perhaps treated in a more precise manner. It consists in Michael Walzer’s (1983) terms in the domination of one sphere of human activity with its own configuration of justice by another. Corruption, for example, results from selling political power, divine grace or other goods which belong to different spheres. Public choice theorists might agree with that statement. They would probably disagree, however, that politics has the capacity to maintain its autonomy. I have said enough above about the need for that valuable fiction, crucial to a republican agenda. If we assume that people are corruptible rather than inevitably corrupt in the political sphere, what measures may be taken to forestall that tendency? The American answer, as we have seen, focused on institutional or mechanical ones. Among institutional measures, Pettit (1997: 206–40) included sanctions, both negative and positive, to prevent corruption and mechanisms to screen-out opportunities for its exercise and screen-in suitable officials. A republican régime, Pettit argued, must extend sanctions according to a hierarchy of seriousness, including the old provisions for impeachment which in many parliamentary régimes has fallen into disuse. The establishment of screens, however, takes priority over the imposition of sanctions, since an excessive reliance on sanctions leads to ‘deviant-centred regulation’ which disregards public spiritedness and can be counter-productive, as in the growing workplace practice of ‘clocking-in’. Rather than focusing on deviantcentred regulation, a republican has to devise mechanisms for ‘compliant-based regulation’, which relies on considerations of

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honour, esteem and face discussed in Chapter 1. The implication here is that a mechanical approach is insufficient. We return inevitably to the discussion of virtue and honour discussed in previous chapters. Despite Montesquieu’s criticism of honour, previous chapters have noted much in earlier republican theory to support Pettit’s (1993b: 175–9; 1997: 222–9) views on honour and ‘face’. In the typical liberal view, Pettit argued, politicians, like voters in general, express preferences; and success depends on how well they aggregate the preferences of others with their own preferences or engage simply in horse-trading. In the typical republican view, on the other hand, politicians are required to exercise judgment as to the common good and in doing so are particularly concerned with their reputation. For liberals, the equivalent of Smith’s (1937: 423) invisible hand aggregates and transforms the self-interest of many to form the common good. For republicans, however, an ‘intangible’ hand aggregates and transforms the judgment of many in conformity with a system of honour. Today that intangible hand is evident in most deliberative bodies, from the jury, which in many ways was exalted as a republican ideal, to Parliament. After all, deliberative bodies accord esteem to people ‘for arguing faithfully to what are perceived as shared interests’ (Pettit 1997: 232). Of course, there may be problems with screening-in, as was evident in extreme form in the Soviet Nomenklatura and in more moderate form in our own education systems which sometimes award credentials to people who swallow crude propaganda; but it could complement the currently common practice of screening-out, exemplified in the selection of juries. While the intangible hand of honour is evident in most societies, there is a tendency among administrators to ignore it. They often remain locked into the regulation versus market model discussed above. Much literature pits the ‘invisible hand’ of the market against the ‘iron hand’ of command and treats them as the only alternatives (Pettit 1997: 255–6). A conceptualization of socialism in those terms has done a considerable amount of harm to the socialist cause. Much of the discipline of management is still caught up in that way of thinking. The result has been demoralization, with deleterious effects on productivity. Consider also the academic profession, subject, on the one hand, to crude forms of planning and, on the other, to the sacrifice of educational standards according to considerations of market demand. The assumption that esteem is something

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conferred either by the iron hand of administrative agencies, as in the case of many grants, or by the invisible hand of the market, by student demand or grants which are ‘competitively’ awarded, is one of the root causes of academic demoralization. An excessive faith in either is a source of corruption in the old entropic sense of systemic decay more than the liberal sense of administrative unfairness, and is felt to be so. The question of what institutions may best foster esteem is an empirical one and depends on particular cultural settings. Suffice it to say that it will not be fostered by institutions regulated by something else. Nor are institutional measures sufficient to tackle corruptibility, as is argued by some people believing themselves, one-sidely as we have seen, to be in the Madisonian tradition. Normative measures are needed – measures which promote what used to be called virtue. Nowadays, communitarians talk much about the loss of civic virtue (MacIntyre 1984). They rarely see that the recent burgeoning concern with values in civil society meshes in with the old republican discussion of virtue. The concern for civility is a concern for virtue. It is probably also the case that postmodernists who stress ‘the politics of difference’ are demanding a form of virtue. No insistence on the ‘politics of difference’ (Young 1990) is going to produce a better society unless respect for those differences depends on common norms of civility. Respect for difference depends on a degree of identity but difference itself produces a flexible identity – it results in multiple patterns of identification. ‘Civility is not just a matter of denying the personal self. It is also a matter of letting other identities take over in your person’ (Pettit 1997: 259). Citizen identification, therefore, is an active concept, as opposed to the more passive communitarian notion of identity deriving from a milieu into which Martin Heidegger insisted we are ‘thrown’ (see Barber 1984: 226). It is surely that passive notion which Gey (1993: 834–41) mistakenly attacks as characteristic of ‘civic republicanism’ – a notion which is supposed to reduce dialogue to consensus and to cancel out difference in the name of positive freedom. Republican norms based on non-domination, moreover, are crucially concerned with patterns of citizen identification in a manner that liberal norms are not. At most the latter cast citizenship either as a highly abstract category or as a function of passive agreement in the form of ‘contract’. As Pettit (1997: 259) remarked, a standard communitarian complaint about liberal views on the state is that

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they shut down the possibilities of identification. Some postmodernists have gone on to argue that liberalism, despite all its pluralist claims, contains a homogenizing tendency. It reduces people to a colourless identity (Young 1990: 166–7). It suffers from the same defect that Rawls (1972: 27–9) argued was characteristic of utilitarianism – the tendency to fuse the identity of separate people into one. The same complaints, Pettit felt, cannot be levelled against republican views which are norms of solidarity. That solidarity is no longer based on homogeneity as it was felt to be by some early modern republicans and as is still advocated by some communitarians today. A republican stress on active non-dominating solidarity can not be accused of fostering a colourless identity. Considering Pettit’s argument that a republican affirmation of difference stems from the cardinal norm or principle of nondomination, the question arises as to how that republican norm might be different from the liberal one, made famous by Ronald Dworkin (1977) – equality of care and respect. If the latter norm is taken as a procedural device for adjudicating clashes of principles from which rights are derived, then there is not much difference. Both modern liberals, such as Dworkin, and modern republicans realize that traditional positive law is inadequate. Sidney (1996: 465), it will be remembered, pointed out that ‘no law can be so perfect, to provide exactly for every case that may fall out, so as to leave nothing to the discretion of the judges’. The exercise of ‘discretion’, in fact, often involves actually making law and in that case judges need to evaluate or reconcile clashing principles. They might seek a lexically-ordered hierarchy of principles to decide priority (Rawls 1972) and a set of principles to achieve harmonization (Sunstein 1990: 186–9) or they might seek a master principle. Equality of care and respect is one candidate though, after reading Carol Gilligan’s (1982) In a Different Voice and the literature which that book spawned, I am not sure what equality of care can mean. Nor am I clear what equality of respect can mean in the context of republican virtue which demands much more than procedural principles. We saw earlier that the civic virtue advocated by many republicans includes psychological states which liberalism does not. Those psychological states are empirical and require more than the advocacy of Kant who, despite his republican credentials, has been seen as relegating virtue, as Chapter 2 noted. Kant’s equality of respect was a ‘genuinely moral motivation which in principle differs from all empirical motives’ (Bielefeldt 1997: 538). A consideration

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that all moral motivations have an empirical aspect, however, leads to a different view of respect and considerations of its relation to esteem which is radically contextual and depends on complex patterns of identification. While self-confidence and non-manipulatable selfrespect (see Barber 1984: 236–7) are desirable psychological qualities which connote equality, substantive equality of esteem is probably impossible and certainly undesirable. There is a hierarchy of esteem. The point is that hierarchy should be based on legitimate honour, as discussed earlier, and that it be non-dominating. Republicans, following Cicero, would surely maintain that whatever hierarchy there is should be built on trust as ‘confident mutual reliance’. Nowadays we usually look askance at the fostering of an explicit political religion to further that trust despite the fact that indoctrination is often still pervasive. The major argument against political religion is that it relies on affective institutions and ‘the more effective such affective institutions are, the less need there will be for democratic politics, and the more likely it is that a community will take on the suffocating unity character of totalistic states’ (Barber 1984: 243). Political religion, moreover, concentrates on expressive (that which is displayed) rather than substantive trust (that which is deeply felt). Considerations along those lines are crucial when we ask whether there might be a contradiction between trust and an essential norm fostered by republican institutions – eternal vigilance in the face of corruptibility. Pettit (1997: 263–5) has argued in the negative. A republic, he maintained, depends on expressive mistrust even though substantive trust obtains. A republican, committed to non-domination and faced with human corruptibility, ideally should always maintain the ‘body language of mistrust’ while actually feeling no distrust. Before accepting the notion of trust as a key element in civility, we have to consider whether trust necessarily involves dependence and vulnerability. At a public level, if suitable institutions are in place that need not be the case (Pettit 1997: 265–7). Trust at a personal level, however, must involve vulnerability. Indeed joy in the presence of such vulnerability is one of the crucial elements of love. Nevertheless, while republicanism is sensitive to psychological states, it is not about personal love. It stresses the conditions for impersonal trust. Thus those forms of patriotism which project personal love on to a national symbol are suspect. Who could criticize a republican patriotism which insists on ‘my country for the values it realizes’ (Pettit 1997: 260)? But who, committed to non-vulnerability,

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can deny the destructive potential which an expressive commitment to a patriotic ideal often implies. Patriotism, strong in the republican tradition, is dangerous.

LIBERTY Perhaps the most serious question any modern republican notion of liberty has to confront is the contemporary insistence that every individual is to count for one and only one. That stipulation was hardly honoured among early modern republicans who were often very restrictive in who qualified as citizens. It was affirmed but hardly actualized by Kant in his devaluation of dependent people and treated in a similar manner by the republicans of the early United States. Since its inception utilitarianism has given pride of place to the principle but again its actualization has left much to be desired. In response Pettit (1997: 110–13) claimed that his republican conception of liberty as non-domination can achieve the ideal better than considerations of utility. A simple consideration of utility suggests that those who are ‘difficult to make happy . . . are systematically ignored in the political allocation of utility-increasing resources’. A utilitarian logic applied to the doctrine of liberty as noninterference, moreover, suggests that maximum non-interference is achieved if those more likely to interfere are deprived of that option and may in an extreme case be incarcerated; that action ‘fails to invest resources in the protection of those who are more likely to be victims’. Liberty as non-domination, however, is hardly likely to result in selective internment or selective underprotection – actions which represent an arbitrary exercise of power in not considering the interests of those affected. In arguing thus, Pettit, who often used utilitarian reasoning to criticize utilitarian logic, has gone further than most utilitarians. He has also gone much further than the proposals of early modern and Enlightenment republicans. As he categorized it, non-domination applies to children, women and many others (Pettit 1997: 119–20, 122–4). Non-domination in the modern context must appeal to socialists, environmentalists, feminists, and advocates of multiculturalism. Let us first consider the appeal to socialists. Pettit (1997: 140–3) argued that, despite the fact that almost all early modern republicans had close connections with the propertied élite, their emphasis on

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non-domination can be seen to fit well with the traditional socialist denunciation of wage-slavery. A focus on non-domination is better than liberal arguments in justifying the strike which is clearly a form of interference and on that ground is often opposed by liberal talk of freedom of contract. There are implications also for workplace democracy. Many socialists, however, would regard that way of thinking as inadequate. A major concern of socialists is exploitation which, some have argued, could occur even in the absence of domination (Roemer 1982). They might consider Pettit as simplistic but, from their perspective, Barber (1984: 253) is positively perverse: In their wars over which contradictions are decisive, which institutions most conducive to productivity, and which classes most exploited or misunderstood, capitalists and their socialist critics have not noticed that they share one deterministic and antidemocratic assumption: namely that communities are incapable of making their own histories through common talk and action. In rebuttal socialists might point to Marx’s (1969: 398) oft-quoted beginning of the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. We return to the argument about free-will and determinism discussed in previous chapters. Machiavelli and a long line of early modern republicans, despite their predisposition to give weight to the relative autonomy of the political, would surely agree with Marx. In Marxian language, the past and the present configuration of a mode of production impose structures which condition political action and shape the parameters of dialogue. Marxists, however, do not take those structures only to be the result of pre-political givens presented in a Newtonian manner. They are the product of past politics and may be changed by political action. But that action depends on resources, including democratic forums, which the structures themselves are designed to weaken and distort. A socialist strategy, therefore, has to rely on measures which go beyond a reliance on deliberative action by assemblies committed to the common good.

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Indeed some socialists would maintain that no action by assemblies within a rule of law which maintains class dominance through the provision of equal rights for unequal people can ever achieve liberty. That argument, advanced amongst others by some Marxists, is, in fact, not particularly Marxian. Marx saw the need to establish the rule of law over arbitrary rule and Friedrich Engels ‘administration by things’ rather than people need not be read just as an apologia for managerialism but could refer to the rule of law. How indeed might it be possible to transcend the alienated state except by instantiating the rule of law? Many anarchists, whose very raison d’être was opposition to the state, saw that point. But I do not want to engage in textual exegesis nor rehearse the arguments of Soviet legal theorists such as Evgeny Pashukanis and his critics.4 Suffice it to underline the socialist concern with the ubiquity of structural class domination. Consider Fred Block’s (1977) argument. In a modern capitalist state, when any government restricts the ability of businesspeople to make money, they disinvest and invest overseas. This is not a ‘capital strike’ in the sense of any organized attempt to bring down a government but the normal rational activity of businesspeople. In so far as dominant groups have the capacity to create serious disinvestment and invest overseas they constitute a dominant class. That class can always be expected to prevail in the long run in that political parties, seriously intent on achieving office, depend electorally on business confidence. Domination of a class of people therefore, is built into the system. To insist on the latter point, however, is to suggest that the rule of law is only possible in a classless society. Socialists, however, whether they accept that view or not, still have to decide what to do now, to evaluate what has been done and to estimate the possibilities in a world of global capitalism. When socialists think of the possibilities for action, it is difficult to deny that the law can be, and has been, used to advance working class interests and that capitalism is not as lawless as it was a century ago, though it could become so. In the current situation socialists demand global initiatives to combat the dangers of capitalist domination. With Barber (1984: 257) they may believe that in the end democracy must defeat the transnational corporations. In the meantime, however, they are faced with more practical tasks. They may support endeavours to design transnational laws which limit transnational corporations – and, as we have noted, some effective ones do exist. In republican vein, moreover, they may also try to fashion institutions to keep

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business as separate from politics as may be possible (Pettit 1997: 194). They will surely fail to an extent but the surety of that relative failure should not consign them to ‘realist’ inaction. Many socialists, therefore, do not accept the proposition that nothing short of an overthrow of the system will advance the cause of liberty. But they do insist that at the root of the problem are considerations of social structure. Pettit (1997: 113–17) agreed that a republican view of equality must be structural. A person’s power to resist domination ‘is not just a function of the powers that enable the person to resist or deter arbitrary interference by others. It is also a function of the powers at the disposal of those others’. Theories based on non-interference lack that systemic quality. But there the agreement probably ends. Many socialists would not concur with Pettit’s views on material equality which reflect the utilitarian logic noted earlier. As Pettit (1997: 118) saw it: There is no reason to think that by equalizing holdings, and by equalizing extent of undominated choice, the state may expect to maximize the overall level of non-domination in the society; even supposing that its equalizing initiatives do not have a dominating character – and this of course is quite controversial – they may well have the effect of imposing more limits than they remove. In order for the state to provide one person with extra resources, and thereby to extend their undominated choices, it must deprive another person of those resources, and must thereby reduce the extent of that person’s undominated choices. There is no reason to think that the transfer will make for a gain. On the contrary, the costs of state intervention will almost certainly mean that less is given to the second person than is taken from the first and that the transfer makes for a decrease in the extent of dominated choice overall (Pettit 1997: 161). Pettit’s advocacy recalls Rousseau’s (1968: II, II, 96) appeal to equality, which required a degree of material equality but only to the extent that it furthered non-domination. ‘No citizen shall be rich enough to buy another and none so poor as to be forced to sell himself’. The aim was not material equality but countering socioeconomic subservience. But there is surely more to the pursuit of material equality than that. Reflecting on the above quotes from Pettit, consider R. H. Tawney’s (1964: 120–4) famous criticism of the cost-benefit analysis of equality. Rebutting the idea that measures

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to equalize incomes were like attempting to raise the surface level of the earth by demolishing the Himalayas, he argued that equalization measures may yield enormous psychological returns with a direct impact on productivity. Amongst other psychological benefits, one crucial factor is augmenting trust. Many socialists, therefore, would usually require commitment to equality more far-reaching than that advocated by Pettit. They might concede, however, that elements in republican thinking about handling conflict could be superior to approaches manifested by many of their number. Barker (1984: 119, 151) was critical of those socialists who suppress conflict in the Soviet manner, those who tolerate it in the manner of the minimalist strand in liberal democracy or those who avoid it, as in its legalist strand which declares much conflict ‘non-political’. Better by far is that republican stream of advocacy, from Machiavelli through to Madison, which sought to capitalize on conflict. Barber went further: the point is to transform conflict by democratic dialogue. But both Barber and Pettit allowed for measures which extend beyond a reliance on deliberative action by assemblies committed to the common good. Barker saw the need for some direct action. Pettit also allowed for direct action when, in the manner of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States some three decades ago, it is committed to nondomination. Problems arise, however, as to how comprehensive such direct action might be. Barber insisted that direct action must be comprehensive but, in fact, it rarely is. For example, the direct action of the Civil Rights Movement was only geared to certain forms of non-domination and, as feminist critics of the New Left were later to complain, it might have reinforced a different form of domination. A standard criticism of many forms of socialism is similar; they focus overwhelmingly only on one form of domination. But how in practical politics is it possible not to be selective when it comes to countering domination? Now consider the appeal to those of a ‘green’ persuasion. The language of republicanism, Pettit (1997: 135–8) maintained, while at one time deeply enmeshed in anthropocentrism, can be extended to a focus on how assaults on the environment affect the degree of undominated choice. The result, however, is still anthropocentric in the spirit of Kant’s (1963b: 239–41) limited consideration of the animal world and, Pettit agrees, would not satisfy deep-green ecologists. Consider their attack on Tom Regan’s (1983) application of rights to non-humans. Regan was charged with extended

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anthropocentrism and surely the same attack might be launched against republican arguments. The basic objection is that deep green concerns are outside the ambit of debates between liberalism and its critics. They concern domination to be sure but go further than domination of humans over humans. More modest environmentalists, on the other hand, might use the language of republican nondomination at least to secure a foothold for establishing a debate. But that is not saying very much. What is the appeal to feminists? Despite the fact that almost all of the early modern republicans were patently sexist and used extreme macho imagery, Pettit (1997: 138–40) maintained that republican non-domination – applied to feminism – is perhaps of more use than liberal views which concentrate simply on non-interference. For example, in countering sexual-harassment it does better than liberal approaches which fail to address structural domination. A consideration of structural domination, moreover, might be of use in exploring the public–private divide which has concerned feminists for several decades. As noted earlier, for many feminists and others, the existence of a private sphere is a vital source of value but is debased when the parameters of the private sphere are defined by a gendered state and the resulting boundaries reinforce gender domination. The point is to define our own private sphere (Young 1990: 119–20). The sum total of those self-definitions might minimize domination. But here we come to a difficult problem also touched on earlier. One defence of the state’s definition of the private is that it provides an effective means of removing irresolvable questions from the public agenda and thus contributing to the better functioning of public life (Holmes 1988a). That rationale sounds republican. It may be used to defend consociationalism, to keep religious issues off the agenda, to avert civil war or at least postpone it in the manner of the 1836 United States ‘bracketing’ of slavery, but it cannot tackle questions such as abortion and a whole raft of reforms sought by feminists – to which problems we shall return. The basic problem, many feminists would argue, is that nondomination is not a condition sufficient for non-gendered citizenship. Consider marginalization which for Young (1990: 53–5) was a crucial element of injustice. Marginalization on the basis of gender or gender preference is often a matter of domination but not necessarily so. The lack of freedom experienced by gays, for example, is a concern much broader than their simple domination by ‘straights’. With that in mind, I prefer a conception of freedom not as simple

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non-domination but as inclusive non-domination – non-domination without marginalization. Now consider the appeal to advocates of multiculturalism. While most early modern republicans were exclusivist defenders of mainstream culture as we saw in the case of Milton’s views on Roman Catholics, Pettit (1997: 143–6) argued that his view of republicanism as non-domination can embrace policies of multiculturalism, particularly since its focus on structure directs attention to what holds society together. A focus on non-domination, moreover, helps republicans to embrace the question of group-rights which has always been difficult for liberals (Kymlicka 1989: 135–61). Huntington (1996: 305–8) would surely object along the lines that to affirm multiculturalism is to sell the pass in the struggle to maintain Western values in the face of ‘clashes of civilizations’. But I do not wish to explore that bleak and, in Young’s (1990) terms ‘unerotic’, ghetto mentality. More to the point here, as considered above, I doubt whether Pettit’s approach deals adequately with the problem of marginalization which, I repeat, need not be a case of domination. It is a sad fact that many marginalized ethnic groups would initially actually prefer domination to being considered irrelevant to mainstream culture. Some are relatively free from domination but not free to exercise a potential they know themselves to possess. Here we are back to considerations of positive freedom much wider than self-mastery and return to the question of inclusiveness. Despite its limitations, I have argued that the republican focus on non-domination, as expounded by Pettit, has profound implications for the formulation and implementation of public policy. Public policy, Pettit (1997: 147–50) insisted, should not be the product of a dominating bureaucracy pursuing a partial or manipulated view of what it takes ‘public opinion’ to be but should be the product of a public service committed to promoting the idea of non-domination. Since the focus is on non-domination rather than non-interference, republicans tend to be less hostile towards the role of the state in, for example, imposing taxation. Non-domination provides a yardstick to assess the relationship between the enabling characteristics of the welfare state and its reduction of welfare recipients to dependency. A republican, moreover, has to acknowledge that the state must have a wide range of powers but not arbitrary powers. We return to the rule of law – a law which is relatively resilient to majority will and which maintains dispersed legal powers (Pettit 1997: 174–83). The argument that the law should be relatively resilient to majority

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will recalls the old republican view that democracy contains no guarantees against domination, not to mention Kant’s view that direct democracy actually enhances it. Whereas a democratic legislature may change the law readily, many republicans maintain, it should be much more difficult to change fundamental ordini. Few nowadays would endorse the role of a law-giver to change those ordini but many would endorse referendum procedures constrained by formidable procedural obstacles. Even Barber (1984: 281–9), a strong advocate of participatory democracy and a firm advocate of citizen initiative and referendum, has built safeguards into his advocacy of that process. I am not sure, however, whether any safeguards would be sufficient to satisfy the late eighteenth-century objection of Jacques Brissot against the proposals of Condorcet that a ‘yes’ ‘no’ answer ‘did not in reality deliver the decision to the electors’, but to those who had the ability to ‘present the question in terms most favourable to their interests’ (Gueniffey 1994: 97). As for normal government decisions, many republicans would endorse the checks imposed by a bicameral system with houses elected on different bases, allowing perhaps for a degree of cultural or functional representation; although they might concede that functional representation might actually increase the level of domination by business interests as is clearly the case in Hong Kong. They might endorse a Bill of Rights, which need not be legitimated in a purely liberal way as ‘trumps’ which secure individual claims against society but as republican safeguards of entitlements to secure nondomination. All these are constraints on democracy and there is a wide spectrum of opinion, exemplified by the vastly different advocacy of Barber and Pettit, on the validity of those constraints. Though Barber might have reservations, most contemporary republicans tend to argue that, whilst democratic action is a necessary condition for the rule of law,5 it is not a sufficient one. Pettit put it bluntly: the law has to be legitimated by factors additional to majority support (Pettit 1997: 182). Considerations of non-domination can be more effective than liberal appeals to procedural fairness though, of course, those criteria need not be in contradiction. The argument for dispersed legal powers implies, once again, an affirmation of federalism, discussed above, and the traditional balance of powers – legislative, executive and judicial – rather than a rigid separation of powers. Such rigidity is impossible as the authors of the Federalist Papers obviously felt in not worrying particularly about the possibility that a separate judiciary would undermine

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democracy (Pettit 1997: 180). Nevertheless the crucial question, raised in the preceding chapter, remains: what are the limits of the power of judicial review? There is no a priori answer. Suffice it to say that recent Australian High Court ‘interpretations’ of the Constitution concerning native title can be seen as clear examples of applying the rubric of non-domination. Many Australians would not agree with them but that is not to say that an overwhelming majority would not agree with the principle of non-domination which could perhaps be spelt out as one of the most important ordini in any constitutional revision. Was the action of the Australian High Court what Ackerman meant by ‘semiotic representation’? Or was it an Australian equivalent of what Michelman (1986: 66) and many Australian conservatives consider to be ‘the migration of self-government from the people to the Court’? Pettit, consistent with the republican tradition, therefore, has defined republican democracy as limited democracy. Democracy remains a means to the end of non-domination rather than an end in itself. The main thrust of Barber’s argument has been that democracy is its own end; in places, however, he also suggested that it is both a means and an end (Barber 1984: 120). But if it is a means, to what is it a means? Open ended pragmatism is precluded from offering a final answer because process provides it own series of ends. Barber (1984: 132) defined his ‘strong democracy’ as: politics in the participatory mode where conflict is resolved in the absence of an independent ground through a participatory process of on-going, proximate self-legislation and the creation of a political community capable of transforming dependent, private individuals into free citizens and partial and private interests into public goods. Is there not here an implicit end – the creation of a systemic capacity for freedom which seems to be similar to Pettit’s freedom as non-domination? However Barber’s formulation may be evaluated, it is surely more coherent than those views of democracy which smuggle into it ideals which are not necessarily democratic, such as the liberal stress on rights as trumps. Among old-style modern liberals, Friedrich Hayek (1979: 35) was one of the more honest: Although there is good reason for preferring limited democratic government to a non-democratic one, I must confess to preferring

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non-democratic government under the law to unlimited (and therefore essentially lawless) democratic government. Government under the law seems to me to be the higher value, which it was once hoped that democratic watch-dogs would preserve. A liberal, committed to a law which protects pre-social rights may make such a statement. A republican, committed to nondomination, could not argue in that way because a republican, even if only partially a democrat, must affirm a democratic element in government if not according to the old idea of a mixed constitution then certainly according to the principle of non-domination. A republican, such as Pettit, nevertheless could agree with Hayek that democracy is instrumental to a higher end. Doubtless, many readers will find Hayek’s statement distasteful. They might remember Mao Zedong’s (1977: 388) insistence that democracy is not an end – it is merely instrumental to socialism – and sympathize with contemporary Chinese writers who try to distance themselves from that conclusion (Liao Gailong 1981: II, 81). If we replace the word ‘socialism’ with ‘republicanism’, however, our fears about democracy may be softened. We may understand Crick’s (1970: 27) preference for the word ‘republican’ over ‘democracy’ in his Introduction to Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy. Unlike liberalism which can exist in the absence of democracy, as was evident in Hong Kong until very recently, republicanism demands a degree of democracy. What are the factors which go to make up that democratic element? Pettit (1997: 183–205) insisted that there must be popular forums which allow for contestability. These are forums in which every government action may legitimately be challenged. He emphasized the word contestability as opposed to the liberal doctrine of consent about which volumes have been written. Carole Pateman (1979) has reminded us that political obligation based on tacit consent fails since obligation must depend on a promise rather than simple lack of protest. A focus on consent, moreover, tends to reduce considerations of democracy to electoralism and spurious ideas about the ‘mandate’. Forums which facilitate contestability include both the formal and the informal. Obvious informal forums are provided by social movements which are not merely pressure groups but are bodies which impart a sense of identity and can transform ‘preferences’ (Sunstein 1993a: 182). Responsiveness to those social movements constitutes the contemporary instantiation of the ‘politics of difference’ (Young

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1990). Of course, recourse to those movements frequently fails and, in that case, republicans might argue that there should be formal mechanisms for conscientious objection to particular laws. Current formal institutions must be restructured. In a manner totally unforeseen by the early modern republicans, in a society where each person counts for one, it is clear that a bureaucracy has to correspond to the ethnic divisions of society. The principle of contestability, moreover, requires specific formal channels of contestation such as the office of Ombudsman, public bodies to monitor the activities of the police or consultative committees which allow for deliberation with a degree of quietude unavailable in parliamentary bodies. To be sure, committees are humdrum and not formally (though perhaps in a Kantian sense virtually) representative but, Pettit (1997: 239) has insisted, they are the ‘enzyme of the body politic, at least in the republican conception of that body’. A degree of quietude may be necessary but quietude does not mean secrecy. Pettit insisted that the organs which ensure accountability should enjoy maximum visibility. Publicity, Kant would agree, is crucial in the broad interests of non-domination but also in the narrower interest of free speech. Not all speech, however, can be free and, Pettit (1997: 194) has asserted, a case can be made for banning political advertising. Such a ban probably cannot find much liberal justification; republican justification is sought in terms of furthering non-domination and dialogical reason. The same goes for many other arguments about free speech. Sunstein (1993a: 12–3, 197–256) has been at pains to point out that the purpose of the United States First Amendment was to further dialogical reason among political equals, not to legitimate inequality through the free marketization of instruments of domination. A broadcasting policy which fosters the idea that ‘people are permitted to speak . . . only if other people are willing to pay enough to allow them to be heard’ is a travesty of republicanism (Sunstein 1993a: 212). Republicanism, moreover, is ill-served by treating ‘freedom of speech’ as a negative right measured against a status-quo baseline: The idea that government should be neutral among all forms of speech seems right in the abstract, but as frequently applied it is no more plausible than the idea that it should be neutral between the associational interests of blacks and those of whites under conditions of segregation, or between freedom of employers and

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workers under conditions in which market pressures drive hours dramatically up and wages dramatically down (Sunstein 1993a: 212). Freedom of speech, therefore, is not just a ‘negative right’ but requires government action, not in the sense of ‘positive liberty’ but in the sense of creating the conditions for non-domination and political deliberation (Sunstein 1993a: 209). Such considerations led Sunstein (1993a: 233–9) to put forward a two-tier doctrine of freedom of speech. He argued that political speech must enjoy greater liberty than other forms of speech. The problem here is that almost any speech may be seen as ‘political’. A distinction, therefore, must be made between speech capable of enhancing informed deliberation and speech defined simply as political because of its sources or consequences. I am not sure whether Sunstein has offered sufficient guidelines for making that distinction; and perhaps no guidelines, but only experience, will suffice. But, at least, the effort to work out guidelines is worthwhile if we are not to throw out all libel laws and let anything go on the grounds that everything is ‘political’. Freedom of speech invariably takes priority but the principle of non-domination extends to areas which may or may not be ‘speech’. Here Sunstein (1993a: 257–90) has been particularly concerned with pornography, abortion and surrogacy. Pornography (sex with violence), he argued, should not be permitted because of some status quo right as claim nor controlled because of some status quo notion of ‘obscenity’. It should be controlled to the extent that it devalues the objects of pornography. Abortion should not be permitted nor prohibited because of some individual right as claim or putative claim. Its legal status is preferred because anti-abortion legislation imposes a discriminatory responsibility on only one section of people – women. After all, the law does not demand that fathers be responsible for dedicating their bodies to their children such as in kidney donation and the like. Surrogacy, moreover, should not be seen as a right to sell a child any more than abortion should be seen as a right to kill a child. Surrogacy is to be controlled because it legitimates a process where the reproductive capacities of one group of people are treated as objects for other people’s use. The fact, however, that gender-specific responsibilities, such as traditionally applied on the one hand to cases of abortion and on the other to military conscription, reflect simply status quo domination, should not be seen as a total rejection of gender-specific

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responsibilities. The demand is merely that they should be evaluated according to whether they constitute a source of domination.6 How far gender-specific responsibilities should be recognized by the law cannot, of course, be settled a priori. It must be the product of dialogical reason. I return to a constantly-reiterated point: dialogical reason – reasoning based on debate which, of course, depends on a minimum of understanding – is crucial in a republic. It stands in direct contrast to that common tendency in formal institutions for decisionmaking to be confined simply to bargaining among the powerful where the parties simply negotiate from unchanging initial positions. That was one of the criticisms of corporatism. The internal politics of the republic depends on political logic as opposed to a projection downwards of the logic of statecraft, discussed earlier in connection with Machiavelli. We see here a salient contrast with the ‘politics’ of interest-group pluralism where groups pursuing simply their own self-interest, with a government concerned with maximizing its capacity for remaining in office by response to those groups, is supposed to achieve the public interest. In Pettit’s (1997: 278) words, republicanism ‘argues for a fore-grounding of reason’ whereas interest group pluralism sees ‘reason backgrounded’. That reason is dialogical reason rather than that extension of Kantianism which, in monological vein, uses arguments about Reason to legitimate the virtual. In a republic dialogical reason can reshape the orientation of groups which do not have to operate in a market-like situation. The market analogy of public choice theory is faulty but, I repeat, that is no argument against the market itself which is the best mechanism known to us for imparting information to consumers and reconciling the interests of producers and consumers (Pettit 1997: 202–5). The point is that politics is not just about production and consumption. The above is very general and might be prone to Gey’s (1993: 865) criticism that it is very difficult to work out what specific policies follow from civic republican principles. How, he asked, would republicans deal with criminal law? Writing a few years later Pettit has told us. The criminal law should be directed not to what Montesquieu called the ‘tyranny of avengers’ but should exercise parsimony in criminalization since criminal laws reduce the scope of undominated choice of the innocent as well as the guilty. The police, moreover, the modern equivalent of the standing army against which early modern republicans inveighed, rather than being replaced

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by a popular militia, must be bound by very tight constitutional provisions geared to countering arbitrary power (Pettit 1997: 154– 5). The criminal law should be concerned above all with rectifying the effect of crimes. Sentencing policy should be geared to: recognition by the offender of the status of the victim as nondominated and free; recompense – restitution, compensation or at least reparation – from the offender for the harm done to the victim and/or the victim’s family and a reassurance for the victim and the community at large that the offender will not continue to be the threat that they proved to be in committing the crime (Pettit 1997: 156–7). The above shows that Pettit’s conceptualization of liberty as nondomination is not just an abstract principle but has very concrete contemporary applications. Many more may be worked out, applying to a wide spectrum of public life beyond criminal law. Of course, as we have seen, Pettit may not be able to convince many socialists with a wider view of exploitation nor deep-green ecologists, feminists and multiculturalists who are concerned with oppression much wider than domination. Neither he nor Sunstein, a major target of Gey’s (1993) criticism, will convince those who believe that anyone who defines liberty in terms of altering power differentials according to a notion of practical reason must be paternalistic and élitist. No over-arching principle can capture all of their concerns.

CONCLUSION This chapter has noted that the contemporary world has been described as facing a crisis of sovereignty. We could see the recrudescence of a new but technologically-sophisticated form of feudalism, based not on land but highly mobile assets. Modern views on sovereignty and republicanism, however, both arose out of a reaction against earlier feudalism and there is no reason why something similar should not happen again. The task for republicans is not just to create republics in the interstices of global power as happened in the Renaissance but to forge new large republics. The United States may perhaps provide a mechanical model. But that model is nowadays hardly inspiring. The alternative, a virtual model, is probably worse. Developments in the European Union might

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overcome the shortcomings of both though it is too early to say. The chapter has also discussed contemporary views of history which are far from the early modern cyclic pattern. The Enlightenment view of progress still remains; but the dark side of its dialectic is the one which most people notice and has been analyzed by large numbers of sociologists. The positive side of the Enlightenment view is most noticeable in the contemporary celebration of ‘the end of history’ but such thinking provides little solace for those people who see an erosion of freedom as non-domination. Counterposed to Enlightenment views is a postmodern orientation which can be either exciting, in its belief that history may be made to go where we want it to go, or frightening, in the view that it will go where ‘ascending’ sources of power dictate and we cannot say what they are. The latter position has led to a revival of something like the old pre-modern republican idea of Fortuna. Close to postmodern views, however, is the more modest pragmatist position which, we have observed, refines many of the older pre-modern republican principles and might offer the prospects of a more humanized history. Chapters 2 and 3 discussed views which saw the Enlightenment and United States liberalism either killing off or relegating virtues. MacIntyre has been convinced that what remains are only fragments or simulacra. Yet, of late, there has been a revival of interest in civic virtues and, as we have noted here, an attempt to apply them to public policy. That attempt might offer alternatives to the ‘iron hand’ of bureaucracy or the ‘invisible hand’ of the market, neither of which seem to have been connected to a human body. The chapter has also devoted much attention to the application to contemporary concerns of Pettit’s view of republican freedom as non-domination. The assessment has been positive though we have noted powerful socialist, ecological, feminist and multicultural objections. The chapter observed that no over-arching principle will satisfy the manifold and vital concerns of those who object on those grounds. They will surely not even be satisfied by ‘strong democracy’ and the belief that politics generates its own ends. Strong democracy is always vulnerable to the argument that it can only produce what a media-manipulated society allows. Strong democracy may eventually defeat a media oligopoly but structures which control information are there for the foreseeable future. We cannot wish structures away; but at least a time-honoured republican awareness of the interrelation of freedom and institutions and a

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‘fictional’ autonomous politics can help us overcome a situation where, recalling Kant, we feel we are free as human beings, equal as subjects but are not independent as citizens. There is much in republican thought which can help us unmask a situation where we are socialized to think ‘as if’ we were. But, I have insisted, we cannot blame Kant for the subsequent trend toward ‘virtual republicanism’, the victory of which was celebrated in 1989–91 according to a very modern and rather cold conception of ‘democracy’.

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5 Prospects for Republicanism Elsewhere The preceding chapter noted some difficulties concerning the attractiveness and relevance of republican ideas to socialists, feminists and environmentalists in what used to be called the ‘first world’. This chapter will inquire into the attractiveness and relevance of republican ideas in a much wider geographical context. Reference will still be made to what are usually considered to be ‘first world’ countries by way of comparison – for example, Switzerland – or because they defy classification according to the old rubric – for example, countries which were once in the ‘socialist camp’ or the newly industrializing economies of Asia. Due to the diversity of societies, the account will inevitably be impressionistic and sketchy but a brief discussion of a few republican themes may stimulate further inquiry. At first sight, it seems that there can be very little attraction outside a Western core. Republicanism, in its early modern form, was defined in terms of the city state in opposition to rural-based feudalism. Indeed, it will be remembered, Harrington premised the development of republicanism on the demise of feudal landholders. In that vein, the leaders of early United States, while affirming agriculture and what some consider to have been ‘country’ values derived from England, were hostile to feudalism, defining the situation in the South as something else. Can republicanism have any relevance to those parts of the world which are still said to be characterized by feudalism? Early modern and Enlightenment republicans, moreover, in orientalist fashion, were even more hostile to ‘despotisms’. These, it will be remembered, Montesquieu characterized as massive in area and supposedly governed by fear. Will republican ideas have any resonance in those countries which appear to sustain the residues of ‘oriental despotism’? Put in that ethnocentric way the negative answers are presupposed in the questions. But when we consider the enormous opposition in developing countries to what its citizens perceive as ‘feudalism’ and the fact that what are often criticized as ‘feudal values’ can represent a powerful public morality, which is sometimes 153

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urban in origin – for example in Islam – and which can oppose feudal dependency, we begin to qualify our negative answers. Our doubts are increased when we consider the argument that ‘oriental despotism’, at one time anchored in the spurious notion of an ‘Asiatic mode of production’ (see Anderson 1974: 462–549), is an incoherent concept and, Karl August Wittfogel (1957) notwithstanding, has not much contemporary relevance. When we broaden our scope and remember the earlier comparison between late eighteenth-century America and France, we might also ask about the relevance of republicanism to countries which appear not to have a developed civil society. That early modern concept has recently become fashionable once again; and scholars go around looking for it in former socialist and what used to be called ‘third world’ states.1 In liberal mode they are usually searching for something which is supposed to have pre-dated the state or which may be forged anew out of elements outside the state. They often seek an amoral structure which serves as a buffer between the individual and the state (Gellner 1994: 137). Frequently they are blinded by a neo-liberal ideology which is hostile to the state, seeing it simply as a patrimonial rent-seeking structure. That ideology, applied in particular to Africa, deserves the title ‘neo’, in the light of the fact that two or three decades ago liberals held out great hope for the ‘developmental state’ (Beckman 1993: 21–2). In neoliberal ideology the influence of public choice theory is evident. That theory can be seen as a narrow, and for Sunstein perverted, form of liberalism and as the antithesis of republican views, as Chapter 4 observed. Neo-liberal hostility to the state, however, does not imply an endorsement of any kind of intermediate structure between the state and the individual. Many of what used to be called ‘third world’ states are clearly replete with structures which insulate the individual from the state and which are often much more powerful than intermediate structures in Western societies, to the point that their presence sometimes results in governments hardly being able to operate. Liberals, however, maintain that most of those structures do not constitute civil society. They consist in segmentary communities which are said to engulf the individual (Gellner 1994: 8). Our perspective on civil society, however, might be somewhat different if we shift our focus from structures which frustrate freedom as non-interference to those which display the potential for non-domination. The extent to which intermediate structures reduce

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domination of the individual by those who control the state at the expense of enhancing their own domination over the individual varies from society to society. The situation in contemporary Algeria is clearly vastly different from that in late eighteenth-century America described in earlier chapters. The United States today is also different from the America of that time. In the modern United States, C. Wright Mills (1959: 245–56) argued, intermediate structures might actually enhance the domination of those who control the state. The domination of a non-accountable power élite over citizens may be strengthened by pluralist structures which allow for liberal freedom within them but which insulate the state from those citizens. Since the relationships among the state, intermediate structures and individuals vary, republicans might feel that the answer to empirical problems in different countries will not be best served by sweeping hostility to all states and all intermediate structures which do not satisfy the norms of liberal freedom. They might seek a republican notion of civil society which in part might precede the formation of the state but which also might in part be forged by the state and by intermediate structures which may promote and guarantee aggregate non-domination. Republicans tend to see the state as helping to forge not only a new civil society out of pre-existing structures but also an ideology conducive to civic virtue out of pre-existing value orientations. Observing the various political religions which have emerged in many new states, republicans might despair of those states ever having the potential to develop what they consider to be specifically republican values. The result might be ethnocentric contempt, so common amongst early modern republicans. Considerations of guilt, on the other hand, might lead them to abandon the crucial republican commitment to critique and to embrace ‘third worldism’ – an uncritical affirmation of submerged subaltern values (Kiely 1995). Or perhaps they might sink into simple value relativism which abandons the republican principle of affirming the universal in the particular. Doubtless various readers will detect in this chapter ethnocentrism, ‘third worldism’ or relativism, depending on their ideological predispositions. I can only hope that some balance will be struck as I explore both questions of structure and of values according to the four headings examined previously.

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POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY Chapter 4 considered arguments about the decline of sovereignty in the contemporary world under the pressure of globalization. I shall not repeat the arguments here except to note that sovereignty is probably much more precarious in states outside what used to be called the ‘first world’. This is especially the case where international financial institutions impose structural adjustment programmes, legitimated by neo-liberal ideology which is bent on weakening what it sees as the state, though probably strengthening a new form of less than sovereign state (Bienefeld 1995; Beckman 1993). With that in mind, I shall consider the prospects for what republicans cherish as popular sovereignty in various parts of the non-first world. Let us first consider states where ‘the people’ are manifestly the artefact of a constitution and not so much a consciously pre-existing entity. That situation is not an insuperable obstacle for developing popular sovereignty in a relatively underdeveloped economic situation as Switzerland has demonstrated. Here Anderson’s (1991: 135–9) comments are most stimulating. Far from being in reality an ancient republic dating from 1291, Switzerland was largely invented in the nineteenth century among lines nearer to 1960s patterns in what used to be called the ‘third world’. Until World War II Switzerland was a relatively underdeveloped rural state but its phenomenal transformation has masked that fact. Switzerland may still be deficient in terms of the ideal-type of republicanism constructed earlier but it has been celebrated for adopting many republican features and, most significantly, is not ridden with ethnic conflict. Most African countries reveal a very different picture. Popular sovereignty is widely celebrated but almost always treated in what I have described as a virtual sense. The people or the nation are not only defined but also frequently re-defined in terms of changing constitutions. In most African states and many other states in what used to be called the ‘third world’, a post-colonial ‘nation’ or a people had to be constructed, since the state bore no relation to anything except the residue of colonial sub-divisions. Recourse to peoples unified by tradition was rarely available in the context of the inherited borders and there seemed little scope for national imagination. Virtual representation was a defect of the post-colonial situation but there seemed to be no alternative. That is not to say, however, that nation-building could result in nothing but rent-seeking,

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patrimonial states which claim to represent a fictitious people. Many states demonstrated those features to a marked degree but it was by no means the case that the state and politics were always reduced to rent-seeking. As Björn Beckman (1993) pointed out, there is a need to analyze the uses to which ‘rent’ were put and the class configuration of particular states. Rather than bemoaning the fact that most African states are artificial constructs, however, we might recall Rousseau and others to the effect that all republics are artificial. The point is that the constructs are colonial constructs in a way the United States, which was born in revolution and did not include all English-speaking inhabitants of North America, was not. Rather than criticizing their artificiality we should concentrate on the heritage of their colonial construction and the elements out of which they have been constructed. Those states were usually created out of a predatory structure inherited from colonial times. That predatory structure was often usurped by the military at the expense of the weak constitutional edifice bequeathed by colonial powers at the time of ‘independence’. With a monopoly of force and a predominance of educated personnel, the military developed an expressive nationalism which had usually been designed originally to mobilize people behind anti-colonialism. It was now used to produce an ascriptive cohesion which did not have the resources nor the time to produce an effective imagined community nor the popular trust needed to forge a republic. A similar process occurred in states which avoided military rule. Most attempts to create an autonomous political sphere were crushed, since any area outside élite control had to be seen as ethnically or religiously particularistic. Without the resources for nation-building the resulting nationalism was as fragmentary as religion since it divided people according to their proximity to the ethnos (Addi 1997: 112–13). Thus the military or civilian government itself usually, though not invariably, came to reflect ethnic particularism and, in a worsening economic situation, to be bent to the service of external economic influences. By the 1990s, however, with the demise of the Cold War, when the strategic importance of African states became negligible, fears about the instability which might be caused by foreign insistence on liberalization dissipated, giving rise to externally-imposed antistatist ‘democratic’ prescription and attempts to replace government by a managerial notion of ‘governance’ which has little room for politics (Schmitz 1995: 67–79). But, given a weakened state,

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the back-staging of the military in the 1990s and the curtailment of one-party rule could not be expected to alter a situation where representation remained ethnically-slanted and far from the trustee model discussed in earlier chapters. It is an open question whether the introduction of multiparty elections in the 1990s has made any difference to this situation and, in some cases, elections may have simply exacerbated ethnic cleavages and offered a further avenue for manipulation, sometimes by criminal means. While there have been variations on the above theme and some notable attempts to forge a common good, the scope for all sub-Saharan African countries to chart a relatively autonomous course has declined considerably. Nothing could be further from the republican ideal of popular sovereignty. It is difficult to envisage the long-term viability of policies aimed at imposing a liberal ‘civil society’ on African states from outside, rationalized according to the dubious claim that it was there all along. But perhaps there should not be too much pessimism. There remain some intermediate structures, autocratic sometimes but often containing participatory elements, which might be bent in a republican direction so long as their inhabitants are not forced into a ghetto mentality by those who consider them antithetical to ‘civil society’. A Swiss solution is not impossible. At the opposite end of the spectrum from the manifest creation of a people by a constitution are states which consist in residues of an old, but largely still intact, multiethnic empire. Such empires were once the norm and enjoyed a remarkable degree of stability, usually collapsing only as a result of war. There are probably only three left. Russia is obviously one and perhaps India and China also fall into that category. The inclusion of India, however, is problematic since today’s India is less the residue of the Mogul empire than the result of British expansion and consolidation after the 1857 Mutiny. The inclusion of China is also problematic since officially its population is 92 per cent Han, but official designations of ethnicity probably mask quite significant regional cleavages. The Russian empire is, of course, disintegrating, though not as a result of external war as in the case of old multiethnic empires, and the effective sovereign status of its component parts is constantly changing. Fourteen ‘republics’ have hived off, some of which are hastily re-inventing an ethnic history while others are in a situation analogous to African states, with inherited frontiers dating from Joseph Stalin’s time which do not seem to make sense. There, and in the Russian heartland, few mechanisms exist to articulate

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popular sovereignty and autonomous political spheres hardly exist. With that in mind, it is not unreasonable to anticipate a military reaction in Russia, imposing a new nationalism to restore cohesion. That, however, has not yet occurred and, if it does, it is hardly likely to constitute a republican founding, putting forward new and lasting ordini. As things stand, we see a plethora of nationalist advocacy, the appearance of protection rackets and the advent of sectarian military forces or simple condottieri in the various ‘republics’. An old-style republican might look at that situation and wonder whether the very idea of the militia has been even more discredited than it has in the United States; but equally that republican might remember that a similar situation pertained in Europe at the time of Machiavelli. Some version of popular sovereignty might emerge but I suspect it will take decades before there can be any agreement on who constitutes the people or peoples. India, notwithstanding its ever-recurrent communal troubles, is much more stable. One reason perhaps is that it probably preserves some of the more benign features of what wrongly used to be called ‘oriental despotism’. India, of course, is not despotic and maintains what many would call some good ‘democratic’ credentials, but it has preserved a crucial feature of some of the old empires which used to be placed under that rubric. Power is formally more centralized than in most federations, as has been manifested in the occasional use of presidential rule, though it is normally in substance very decentralized. That situation explains how easy it was both to establish and then get rid of what to all intents and purposes was a formal dictatorship in the mid-1970s without significantly altering very much for very long.2 It explains, moreover, how the central government can pass all sorts of laws for moral effect without expecting them to be carried out. While the central government acts according to a constitution and procedures which might well be described as ‘democratic’ according to the loose definition currently employed by most mainstream celebrants of that term, a lot of politics has always been communal and occasionally violent. In that situation I am not certain what ‘the people’ means, any more than I know what it meant in the old Turkish or AustroHungarian empires – the main difference being that in India ‘the people’ is occasionally conjured into existence to vote and has the capacity to remove the government. The Indian National Congress conducted a national liberation struggle on behalf of a people which turned out to have a different constituency once it took power. It

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made some attempts to break down a caste system and to stimulate panchayati (village council) democracy, only to yield power in a situation where many peoples strive for recognition and sometimes independence within a context where the ‘Indian people’ seems largely an administrative category. That is not to say that Indian popular sovereignty can never be realized. Such a conclusion would be rash in the light of the remark of B. R. Ambedkar, the drafter of the Indian Constitution, that there had been a time when India had been ‘studded with republics’ (Mehta 1997: 92). But it is to say that an all-Indian republican constituency is difficult to envisage. China, formally a unitary state, is also extremely stable, indeed to the point where in the 1980s some critics saw the root of its problems lying in its ‘superstable’ character. There have been many violent changes but these were like Australian bushfires which provided conditions for the same sort of regrowth (Brugger and Kelly 1990: 29–30). The source of that stability lies in China’s pervasive orthopraxy (James Watson’s [1993: 84] term) – identity derived from doing the right ‘Chinese’ thing regardless of initial belief, though in the confidence that behaviour will change thought. Thus, after a half century of socialist aspirations and initially very radical socialist policies, we are witnessing the appearance of a much more successful, more modernized but equally corrupt Guomindang-type state. That state will probably metamorphose in a corporatist manner similar to the original Guomindang state which found refuge on Taiwan though we must not underestimate the possible deleterious effects of regional imbalances and ethnic tension. If I am correct, a greater degree of popular sovereignty is possible. Nevertheless, as subsequent sections will show, the very persistence of orthopraxy makes me much less confident about the realization of other features of what I have identified as a republican ideal type. What then are the prospects for popular sovereignty in countries where a recent constitution did not constitute the people, where the people were not simply defined in terms of an old empire and where a distinct sense of national identity pertains, such as various countries in Spanish-speaking Latin America.3 In Latin America, corporatism has been described as the best of a weak selection of options (Weyland: 1995);4 But such corporatism, always inequitable, is much more inequitable than in what used to be called the ‘first world’. Organized labour, for example, might represent a relatively privileged stratum and exclude the vast majority of the unorganized and underemployed poor. Business tends to be more externally-

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oriented and less conscious of the common good. Social movements tend to lack organizational strength outside the cities and seem to achieve success only by being persuaded to join a corporatist arrangement which subverts their aims. In most cases there is a powerful military which may have exercised dictatorial rule in the past in the name of ‘the constitution’ and is often protected from its former misdeeds by those very corporatist arrangements. There are few checks and balances, merely a corporatist truce which may be undermined by populists who can appeal to the excluded. Those populists, however, nowadays can rarely bring about arrangements which secure the inclusion of the poor, often because of the external constraints they confront when attaining office. Indeed, faced with the possibility of new coups, they may combine their populism with dry economics which lower inflation (Weyland 1995). Republican popular sovereignty seems remote. My typological approach could have been extended to cover archipelagos with arbitrarily-defined borders, for example Indonesia and the Philippines, where Montesquieu’s arguments might still seem relevant in that simple geography seem to militate against popular sovereignty. I might have speculated on the prospects for popular sovereignty in Middle Eastern countries where considerations of Arab unity surface from time to time only to be brushed aside. My analysis might have been extended to consider Huntington’s (1996: 246–98) approach which presents a frightening picture of war at fault-lines between clashing civilizations and which currently seems exemplified in the former Yugoslavia where cultural atavism or perhaps simply nationalist imagination have involved the recrudescence of what were once religious wars. But space is insufficient. Suffice it to say that the overall prospects for popular sovereignty seem unfavourable.

THE SHAPE OF HISTORY To some people of an orientalist bent, many non-Western views of history are cyclic. In an Islamic context, Abu Zaid Ibn Khaldun is still referred to. Cohesive political power, according to him, depends on an effective religion to hold together urban life. But that cohesion may only be maintained for a limited time and periodically external tribes invade the city and attempt to impose a new order. For those of an extremely fertile imagination, contemporary

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Afghanistan might be interpreted in those terms but, however much Muslims might wish to denounce the corruption of the city, most people consider the idea of the tribe giving order to the city in a cyclic manner to be well and truly defunct. The same goes for the traditional view concerning the Chinese ‘mandate of Heaven’. According to that perspective, peasant uprisings against corruption lead to the appearance of a law-giver who, contrary to the old republican view, establishes a dynasty. Over time, however, virtue dissipates and peasants rebel once again against corruption. A more sophisticated economic version of the cycle adds the argument that the founder of a dynasty rectifies peasant complaints by land reform but over time land concentration occurs and landless peasants display an increasing incentive to overthrow the dynasty. The Guomindang régime has sometimes been seen in that light despite the fact that its founder Sun Yat-sen was never in office long enough to do very much. A similar diagnosis has been made of the régime led by Mao Zedong which may still be seen as continuing on its path to corruption or may be considered to have come to an end on Mao’s death in 1976 and have been replaced by a new régime which is nonetheless in a state of decline. There are certainly people who still believe in dynastic cycles, seeing for example the Tangshan earthquake of 1976 as foreshadowing the end of the dynasty. But it is much more difficult to find a serious scholar or leader in China with a view of history less uncompromisingly unilinear than that held by their counterparts in the West. That unilinear view, of course, includes both a bright and a dark side.5 In China and elsewhere many people consider progress in Western terms. But the West has been seen as declining for a long time; in fact the decline started long before Oswald Spengler (1926–8) popularized the idea eighty years ago. From an East Asian perspective that decline is now more visible than ever. The result is a somewhat schizoid view of progress where a Western future is alternately embraced and rejected. Huntington (1996), as noted, has predicted the result in terms of a clash of civilizations; but I am not so sure. Cyclic views seem everywhere to have given way to linear conceptions. The crucial difference among various parts of the world, however, rests, as ever, on views concerning the exploitative relationship between the ‘first world’ and the rest. That relationship, of course, affects how the interaction of economy and polity in each state is seen. Enlightenment optimism has been generally

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displayed by those legions of scholars who are bent on tracing the growth of ‘democracy’ though various ‘waves’ (Huntington 1991). Normally there are said to have been three – 1828–1926, 1943–64 and after 1974 – but, according to the modern equivalent of the ‘cunning of Reason’, since 1991–2 the third wave may have been receding and we may anticipate a fourth (Diamond 1996: 28–35). The analyses are useful but a republican will surely want more. What democratic wave theorists take to be ‘democracy’ might include features I have identified as ‘republican’ but those theorists frequently devote primary attention to specifically liberal elements, as in the Freedom House criteria which assigns evaluations to various states. More narrowly they concentrate on formal institutions or, even more narrowly, on the existence of electoral mechanisms according to Joseph Schumpeter’s famous definition of democracy.6 The expressive nature of elections is often glossed over. Consider, for example, the fact that the 1994 South African election was less about the content of choice than belonging (Moss 1995: 206) in a manner similar to the advent of universal manhood suffrage in France in 1848 which was discussed in Chapter 1. In other places, of course, elections have revealed the extent of non-belonging and cynicism. Criticizing what he called ‘Orwellian democracy’, Manfred Bienefeld (1995: 114) has complained about a situation where ‘we all may be asked to “make do” with purely formal democracies, in which global élites manipulate electoral processes that protect their power’. In general the literature on democratization is conceptually confusing, running together concepts which this book has tried to separate. By way of illustration consider the following quote from an article in a recent edition of the Journal of Democracy, a periodical which has done much to propagate the idea of democratic waves. That article, on the contemporary evaluation of Kant’s ideas, is by no means atypical. ‘In this essay the terms “republican”, “liberal,” and democratic are used interchangeably to refer to political systems in which power is vested in representative institutions and individual rights are sufficiently protected to make those institutions effective’ (Gaubatz 1996: 137). The much theorized contradiction between liberalism and democracy is glossed over, the differences between liberalism and republicanism, discussed at length in this book, are not addressed and the Kantian problem of actual or virtual representation is not considered. The celebrants of democratic transition often maintain that economic development causes ‘democracy’. Some evidence has been

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assembled to show that the growth of a well-to-do bourgeoisie can sustain liberalism. So far, however, economic development has not been shown universally to lead to robust formal democracy as is obvious in the case of Hong Kong. Indeed some scholars have denied that there is any causal relationship between the emergence of that form of ‘democracy’ and economic development. Once a ‘democratic’ régime is established, however, ‘the chances for the survival of democracy are greater when the country is richer’ but even that is not decisive (Przeworski and Limongi 1997). Whatever the case might be concerning ‘democracy’ in the various ways it may currently be understood, the connection between economic development and the various republican values mapped out in previous chapters is much less clear. Chapter 1 went to great pains to argue that early modern republicanism was not anti-commercial. But neither can it be seen to be the product of the interests of a growing bourgeoisie which, in Marxist terms, could be seen as bent on extending the scope of commodification to engulf human relationships. That is not to say that early modern republicans saw no connection between political change and economic development. Almost all the early modern republican thinkers, and many of the Enlightenment ones, saw economic development entailing political corruption. They disagreed, it will be remembered, on how to deal with it and whether or when their respective régimes would collapse. My argument above still finds a place for economic determinants. Marx is cogent in pointing out that capitalism has contributed to particular types of freedom while restricting and destroying others. Environmentalists are cogent in their insistence on a new form of determinism which must be taken seriously. The point is that a republican would insist that determinism must always be tempered by that necessary republican belief in the autonomy of politics – for without that fiction it becomes very difficult even to define corruption. In the present situation, we see widespread corruption. In the 1980s, corruption began to be considered as especially worrisome in dynamic parts of Asia because there it could not be explained away as some sort of pre-development residue. By the time of the speculative orgy of the late 1980s that worry became acute as it became clear that systemic corruption was worldwide. Contemporary corruption was conceptualized in terms different from the early modern republican entropic view in that it was usually, though not always, discussed in atemporal manner; the problem was instances

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of corruption not a tendency towards corruptibility. For obvious ideological reasons that corruption was not linked to the basic dynamics of capitalism which some republican critics saw as enhancing corruptibility. Corruption, it was widely believed, could be dealt with narrowly by punitive measures and more widely by the development of a free market where miraculously there are no protected monopolies. Thus the Japanese crisis of 1997–8 has been seen in terms of Japan being forced to ‘face up to capitalism’, to terminate the state’s protection of weak corporations and thus end corruption. The message is simple: there is no need to worry about developing a new normative ethic. Such thinking stands in stark contrast to the old republican message which demanded that economic development be supplemented by civic virtue. A common Enlightenment view, discussed in Chapter 2, was that economic development produces both well-being and corruption. It also can result in both freedom and dependence. In recent years in Asia we have seen both to a marked degree. But that freedom has not inevitably been freedom from domination. Economic development in some countries has actually accompanied a decline in freedom as non-domination. Compare Indonesia in the mid-1950s and in the mid-1990s.7 A republican, in the spirit of the early modern theorists, therefore, might be cautious about the recent celebration of ‘democratic waves’. Modern republicans would no doubt reject the old cyclic view of corruption but they might see, in the very process of economic development, systemic elements which may enhance human corruptibility. That being the case they might want to intervene in a free market which defines freedom in terms of ‘non-interference’.

THE PLACE OF VIRTUE Despite the onslaught of neo-liberal arguments to the effect that the very idea of public virtue is no more than rent-seeking pretension, which have been ably criticized by Bienefeld (1995: 115), public virtue remains extremely important in many non-Western states. That is clearly evident in many Islamic countries where dignity, equality, justice and virtues stemming from a contract between rulers and ruled enjoy a long tradition. The sad fact, however, is that those virtues have been subverted by most régimes in the Islamic world, acting as autocracies and introducing forms of rule which

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render their subjects passive and cynical. Those régimes have been legitimated by what some Muslim scholars call later perversions of the Koran or nowadays by the tendency to pass off autocracies as ‘virtual republics’. Islamic public virtues are also confounded by the palpable corruption sustained by patron–client networks. In that situation public virtue rarely takes the form of civic virtue which depends on a relatively autonomous and uncorrupt political sphere. According to Bernard Lewis (1996), current Islamic régimes might be traditional such as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf sheikdoms or modernizing such as Jordan, Egypt and Morocco and perhaps Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Indonesia. There are two régimes, Iraq and Syria, which he has called ‘fascist dictatorships’ but which I prefer to label simply as ‘despotisms’ according to Montesquieu’s rubric discussed earlier.8 There are a number of central Asian republics which are difficult to classify at this point and at least two radical régimes, Iran and Sudan. Lewis has also entertained the possibility that Afghanistan and Algeria could become radical Islamic régimes but has seen the prospects for the latter receding. Most of those régimes have maintained an Islamic high culture which has always been essentially urban and sophisticated while still reflecting ‘tribal’ divisions. That culture is far from the populist folk culture romanticized since the days of T. E. Lawrence (see Gellner 1994: 15–29). Of course a folk culture still exists in all Islamic countries, and for hundreds of years Islamic high culture has sought to purify it in what Ernest Gellner (1994: 20) called a process of ‘Permanent or Recurrent but ever-reversed Reformation’. There also exist Islamic fundamentalists in a sense similar to that used to describe Christian fundamentalists, who display extravagant faith in spiritual leaders, as was shown most graphically in the recent Iranian Revolution. Nevertheless most of today’s Islamic revivalists are wrongly labelled ‘fundamentalists’. They, in fact, bear a striking resemblance to the Puritans of the sixteenth century described in earlier chapters. Both forms of religion have been noted for their suspicion of ‘saints’. In England ‘saints’ incurred the ire of Harrington. They have been similarly condemned by Muslims together with other ‘superstitions’ at the folk-end of Islam. An obvious difference between revivalist Islam and the seventeenth-century English republican mood lies in my earlier comment that Christian republicans, at a theoretical level, tended to affirm natural law from which civic virtues were derived while, in practice, affirming their separateness. The republicans’ attack on

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clericalism was in part based on clerics’ inability to affirm the separation. That attitude is rarely found among contemporary Islamic revivalists for the obvious reason that there is no separation between ‘church’ and state. Though there have been massive protests in the past against a religiously-inspired establishment, there has been no explicitly clerical enemy, allied with the state, to oppose. Thus the ‘rule of law’ remains that of the interpreters of God who are neither the servants of the state nor, in reaction, the citizens as their own enthusiastic priests. In Islam the rule of law is the rule of lawyers privy to an intricate system of meaning, long ago criticized by Ferguson (1966: 263). Those lawyers, who may or may not be what Antonio Gramsci called ‘organic intellectuals’, might affirm the traditional political virtues of Islam but have not been interested in a separate realm of civic virtue which centres on the notion of a citizen who is a potentially active participant in politics. After all, the term ‘citizen’ is not a traditional Islamic term. Where a separate political realm has developed it has been under the influence of the West, not known for its successful importation of citizen ethics and has often been articulated by politicians whose utterances have been belied by their corruption. A republican political sphere is hardly evident in Islamic countries. Nor is a liberal civil society which Gellner saw as amoral. Such a society, he argued, became possible because of the privatization of virtues. England was able to achieve a liberal civil society because Puritanism, unsuccessful in demolishing clericalism, was effectively countered by an Anglican Church which was more concerned with curbing enthusiasm than infidelity. In that situation, Puritans became content to keep their virtues private for the sake of survival and eventually came to practice tolerance (Gellner 1994: 77–8). For their part, Anglicans, having countenanced infidelity, were not anxious to rock the boat. Civility was achieved by a clergy, the enemy of early modern republicans, impiously perhaps, accommodating itself to some republican demands. Due to the lack of a clergy,9 there could be no Islamic equivalent and no real desire to forge privatized nor non-emotional virtues. A liberal civil society was not on the agenda but that is not to say that a republican civil society which does not seek to privatize virtues cannot be realized. Thinking along those lines, I wonder what early modern republicans might have thought of the 1997 Iranian elections which were concerned passionately with public virtues and did result in the election of a non-official candidate. Those virtues were filtered

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through the lens of a segmented society, which from a liberal point of view disqualified it from being ‘civil’. The elections, moreover, did not conform to the formal ‘democracy’ of Freedom House since a party system was non-existent due to something like the old republican contempt for ‘factions’. Liberal safeguards, moreover, were glaringly absent and there was not much republican freedom which might be enjoyed resiliently. Nor was the overt public virtue the civic virtue of the Western republican tradition which depended on a relatively autonomous political sphere. It had a lot to do with holiness, in the manner of Lincoln’s wartime virtues discussed in Chapter 3, and displayed a charismatic flavour, characteristic of Shi’ism, which probably went further than the old republican idea of heroism. But, while it was not what I have described as the old republican virtue, it perhaps might become so. At least it was nearer to the early modern republican tradition than to liberalism. With that in mind, I offer the hypothesis that so long as modern Islam subscribes to a régime of public virtue which cannot be privatized, that public virtue is more likely to metamorphose into a specifically republican civic virtue than to give rise to a liberal civil society. Interestingly in that regard, among Islamic states, the government of the United States, seems to prefer the one with the least republican potential – Saudi Arabia – a country which seems corruptly orthodox in the manner of the targets of the republicanism of earlier centuries. China, often caricatured in terms of ‘oriental despotism’, on the contrary, has perhaps the longest tradition of public virtue of all, though once again that virtue has not been civic in the sense of virtue appropriate to an autonomous political sphere. Confucianism consisted of a highly protean set of virtues which fitted together in different ways according to the exigencies of a particular situation. It thus provided the framework for political religion. At state level where it formed the basis of what was called the ‘great tradition’, it was the ideology of a scholar-élite stratum based on loyalty, deference to authority and patron-client relationships which tolerated and sometimes encouraged folk religions without necessarily believing in them in a manner in which Machiavelli might have approved; though certainly he would not above approved of the Confucian contempt for martial values. At another level known as the ‘little tradition’, however, Confucian values could shore up family and communal ties and act as a counterweight to the state. At that level folk religions provided a refuge for those who sought a sacred element which rational Confucianism could not supply.

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The protean nature of Confucianism was such that at various times it absorbed and softened elements of legalism which believed in stern rule and ensuring external conformity by adherence to the sovereign’s commands and Daoism which was a doctrine not of rule but of escape and harmony with nature. In the nineteenth century some Confucians tried to import elements of utilitarianism by drawing on the old idea of separating essence (ti) from function or more strictly usefulness (yong). At the end of the century some Confucian reformers sought to weld Confucianism to Western ideas of progress. In the early twentieth century the educator Cai Yuanpei attempted to recast the ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ of the French Revolution in terms of the Confucian virtues of yi (righteousness), shu (reciprocity) and ren (benevolence) – terms which traditionally carried very different meanings (Levenson 1965: I, 111). Later, Chiang K’ai-shek endeavoured to give Confucianism a military and nationalistic cast. In the Chinese People’s Republic Confucianism was sometimes viciously attacked and at other times dusted off, slotted into an orthodox Marxist view of progress, according to the argument that Confucius’ ‘feudal’ ideas were considered progressive in the fifth century BC, or just celebrated as a national asset. In Singapore Confucian values were used as a counter to Western ‘decadent’ values and a prop to authoritarianism whereas on Taiwan, after being pressed into the service of anti-communist propaganda, they, together with other values, were hailed by President Lee Tenghui (1995) as supports for ‘democracy’. It seems that Confucianism could be used to justify almost anything. Here Confucianism may seem to be much the same as Christianity or Islam. The crucial difference, however, is that Confucianism is more flexible. Christianity and Islam were less tolerant of other major religions and of folk religion which might provide a bolt hole for what Christians and Muslims considered to be the ‘superstitious’ (Gellner 1994). Against clerical Christianity and High Islam, folk religion provided a refuge for those who sought a more magical faith; but folk religion was always insecure. By and large, under Confucianism, folk religion was much more secure. Such a situation could have resulted in a sharp separation between spiritual virtues and public virtues which might have become specifically civic virtues. But that did not happen. Since the ‘great tradition’ tended to monopolize public virtues, those virtues depended upon the viability of that tradition. For centuries the ‘great tradition’ remained strong and there was no challenge to the hierarchical ordering of

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its set of virtues – ren, yi, shu, zhong (loyalty), li (propriety), xiao (filial piety), he (harmony) and so on, which formed part of a Confucian way (dao). After the corruption and collapse of the imperial system which embodied the ‘great tradition’, however, the ‘little tradition’ could not be bent in the direction of republican virtues because what virtues it maintained were defined in particularistic terms, often at the expense of the common good. Loyalty and reciprocity were often seen exclusively in terms of kinship, quasi-kinship or the relationship between clients and patrons. Patron-client relationships, of course, have been prevalent in Christian and Islamic states but, ideally at least, they have always been constrained by a commitment to something higher. That was also the case in the Chinese imperial ideal, but the centre of commitment disappeared along with the empire. The leaders of the People’s Republic of China attempted to revive a centre of commitment and for a time succeeded in recreating an impressive public morality. It was, however, harsh in its pursuit of a less than inclusive view of the common good. In furthering that view of the common good, moreover, leaders fell back on patriarchal means. The Cultural Revolution was in many ways a patriarchal-inspired reaction against patriarchy and the reaction to that Cultural Revolution seems to have exploded the very idea of public virtue. One major problem in China seems to have been the existence of a political religion which defined a modern equivalent of righteousness in excessively expressive terms. This may have something to do with the old Confucian idea of the ‘rectification of names’ – crudely the idea that while the nature of things determine names, names determine the nature of things – which places undue faith in the proposition that an expressive commitment could lead to a substantive one. We return to the argument in the preceding chapter about separating expressive and substantive trust. Pettit, it will be remembered, argued that a republican, committed to non-domination and faced with human corruptibility, ideally should develop the ‘body language of mistrust’ while actually feeling no distrust. Observing China over three to four decades, I am convinced that in the first two decades of the People’s Republic the opposite occurred. At first there seemed to be expressive trust and a good deal of substantive trust. When considerable misuse of power occurred, there developed a culture of expressive trust accompanied by substantive mistrust. The Cultural Revolution was so traumatic because it allowed

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that substantive mistrust to break through the culture of expressive trust. China never recovered. Chaos resulted in ineffective measures to re-impose a culture of expressive trust through virtues which had lost most of their meaning and the development of a state weak in all but coercive power. If only the initial substantive trust had been buttressed by expressive mistrust of state institutions to ensure accountability, the record of the Chinese state would have been very different and it may have developed in a republican direction. Now neither the widely-held socialist values of the past nor commitment to expressive mistrust pertain and substantive trust in what there is of civil society is displaced on to business networks and the like which are often enormously successful but relatively unaccountable. In such a situation I have little confidence in the development of republican virtues in China in the foreseeable future. Even if they do develop I suspect they will fall foul of orthopraxy, defined above. Consider the fact that state officials, the heirs of the ‘great tradition’, could go through a profound identity crisis while producing only temporary instability because the ‘little tradition’ would revert to time-honoured behaviour. Mao Zedong’s tragedy lay in his attempt to replace one orthodoxy by another only to fail in the face of resilient orthopraxy. Many of the major movements of yesteryear may have touched many people to their hearts, as the slogan went, but the heart was an inappropriate target, in contrast to what it might have been in the United States of F. Scott Fitzgerald. In China the old set of rites kept appearing, based on different commitments and with different rationales. Evidently, though, a belief in public virtue is promoted throughout that part of the world outsiders define as ‘Confucian’. I wonder how much that may be due to the influence of tradition, how much to the need of authoritarian élites for a legitimating ideology which cashes in on the growing belief in a ‘clash of civilizations’ and how much due to the crying need for some counter to growing corruption. Contrary to the liberal orthodoxy noted above, I consider the financial crisis of 1997 as evidence for the view that that corruption has to be seen as systemic, in the old republican sense. I noted above that one of the merits of rational Confucianism was that it offered an escape for the superstitious. As Gellner (1994: 30–43) pointed out, Marxism did not. One of its great attractions was its unmasking of religion but one of the greatest failings of official Marxism was the sacralization of ordinary life. A philosophy

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which sought to discredit the sacred was turned into an official ideology which offered no escape from its version of sacred values. In such a situation public virtues were themselves sacred virtues about which people could be enthusiastic in spite of terror but not when the supposed fountainhead of virtue was the banal Brezhnev régime or for that matter Gorbachev’s reformist régime, the leaders of which appeared to Soviet citizens not to know what they were doing. Liberals criticize the Soviet régime for its destruction of civil society. A republican criticism might be a little different. The Soviet political religion promoted public virtues which were the antithesis of civic virtues stemming from some adherence to the autonomy of the political from at one level the sacred and at another the economic. When the sacred collapsed, the successor régimes and the ex-socialist East European régimes had nothing on which to fall back and even lacked the capacity to generate expressive trust. The saddest case of all was Poland, the one socialist country in which ‘civil society’ was more than an intellectual consideration. In Poland ideas about ‘a self-governing republic’, perhaps in the spirit of Rousseau (1953) who had drafted prescriptions for that country in 1770, offered a vision radically different from either official ‘socialism’ or Western liberalism. The Poles, however, seemed to abandon all their republican aspirations once the régime to which the advocates of civil society were opposed collapsed (Smolar 1996: 26–9). Now the prospect of any kind of civic virtue seems remote. There is insufficient space to go into the fate of public virtue in all the other ex-socialist states so let me just consider one – the Czech Republic which is considered by many to have made the smoothest transition to ‘post-socialism’. There we see a clear example of the determination of technocratic Westernizers in exsocialist countries to keep civic virtue off the agenda. The former Czech Prime Minister Václav Klaus, for example, saw such advocacy as a refusal to accept ‘man’ as ‘an autonomous rational individual fighting for his own interests’, an opposition to ‘standard social science’ and ‘opposition to the political economy (and the moral impulses) of Adam Smith and to the legal ethics of Immanuel Kant’. Advocates of civic virtue, he maintained, are throw-backs to the ideas of Aristotle (Havel, Klaus and Pithart 1996: 16). Klaus was suspicious of the term civil society, maybe with Thatcher’s famous statement in mind that ‘there is no society, only individuals and their families’ (Smolar 1996: 33), but certainly because it had been affirmed by the Czech President Václav Havel who

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represented the very affirmation of the civic virtues which Klaus opposed. Havel, however, has defended civil society not just according to the need for a buffer between state and society but because civil society supposedly ‘encourages ordinary people to participate in government, thereby strengthening relations between citizens and their state’ (Havel, Klaus and Pithart 1996: 18). Havel’s advocacy of civic virtues, I believe, demonstrates a real awareness that the vacuum left by the collapse of socialist public virtues needs to be filled by new civic virtues. But, I suspect, the views of people such as Klaus will prevail: avoid considerations of civic virtue because all that is needed is to free up the economy and set up appropriate institutions. Such a view could lead to a very ‘dry’ liberal form of ‘democracy’, in a Thatcherite sense, or could provoke a violent reaction and the invocation of saintly virtues or ultra-nationalist virtues, to which the popular rhetoric of civil society in the late 1980s was opposed in measure equal to its opposition to official ‘socialism’ (Smolar 1996: 24–5). The least likely scenario is that the civic republican views of Havel will be generalized. The tradition of political virtue manifested in socialist states is perhaps the very opposite of the Hindu tradition. Socialist statism, with which the Indian government toyed for a time, was diametrically opposed to what can only be described as Hindu anarchism. That rich strand in Indian political thought identified virtues not simply as separate from politics as in the liberal tradition but in fundamental opposition to political life. While the Indian state has been preoccupied with developing a central administration to integrate what seems to an impossibly disparate country, political theorists have captured a pervasive apolitical mood. Writing in the early 1980s, Dennis Dalton (1982: 179) could not think of one major Indian writer who had theorized the emerging centralized representative state. Western democratic theorists have been delighted that ‘the largest democracy in the world’ has survived, that military coups have been avoided, that the ‘glorious emergency’ of the mid-1970s dissipated very easily and they may now be worried once again about vicious sectarianism which has caused Freedom House to reconsider India’s political credit rating. But somehow, according to Hindu tradition, political ‘reality’ is unreal. Politics is always corrupt and real virtue is anti-political. Here Dalton (1982) was persuasive. In the late nineteenth century, Swami Vivekananda, recalling India’s ‘spiritual genius’, decried politics as ‘Western vanity’. The rule of law was artificial and entirely

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subordinate to the goodness of people which might demand breaking law in the interest of freedom. Sri Aurobindo Ghose pursued the same argument, attacking the Western state and the falsity of representation. Rabindranath Tagore and Mohandas Gandhi followed suit, with the former denouncing the concept of power in all its forms and the latter constantly having to excuse himself for engaging in politics. Those arguments cannot be explained away simply as protests directed against the British since they were repeated long after independence. Vinoba Bhave continued to demand freedom from government which inevitably violates swaraj (self-rule) and, as Dalton saw it, Jayaprakash Narayan eloquently articulated that anarchist tradition in his opposition to the untheorized régime of Indira Gandhi. Narayan and the tradition he represented affirmed a view of virtue totally antithetical to politics and thus to civic virtue. In that context how are we to interpret the Bharatiya Janata Party which at the time of writing is trying to form a government? Logically, in that Hindu system, political parties have the option of rejecting politics or rejecting Hinduism, a subject about which Mohandas Gandhi was troubled and the assassin of Gandhi probably saw too well. It is not surprising, therefore, that Congress Party politics have infuriated traditional Hindus and have resulted in the present crisis. But perhaps the efforts of the Bharatiya Janata Party are equally infuriating to many Hindus on the same grounds. Indeed, there is constant criticism of the Hindu politics of that party to the effect that they cannot possibly be ‘Hindu’. Republicanism, as mapped out above, cannot be envisaged in the context of an anarchist ideological framework. When we consider that the thinkers considered above have tapped a very strong popular tradition there can be little confidence in the development of republican civic virtue in India. The above cursory survey suggests that the prospects for republican civic virtue are not good. But an observer might have came to the same conclusion about civic virtue in Italy at the time of the Renaissance.

LIBERTY When we come to consider the prospects for republican liberty, the democratization debate of the 1990s is of little use. That debate rarely focuses on the development of states in terms of freedom as

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non-domination. At its broadest level, it is sensitive to the ‘spirit of the laws’ or more generally to culture (Fukuyama 1995), particularly that of rapidly developing ‘Confucian’ states, but the focus is usually on institutions which are supposed to cause liberty rather than institutions, specific to time and place, which actually constitute, and are constituted by, liberty. Here one thing seems certain: liberty will not be constituted by institutions which depend upon a generalized condition of poverty and are incapable of realizing Rousseau’s (1968: II, II, 96) limited criterion for republican equality – ‘no citizen shall be rich enough to buy another and none so poor as to be forced to sell himself’. A common pattern in so many countries is for the poor to attempt to alleviate their condition by entering into clientelist relations with a patron – to enter into a relationship of subordination. ‘First world’ academics have devoted much attention to exposing the corruption of the élites of ‘third world’ régimes, defined simply in behavioural terms, without considering Rousseau’s structural point that an institutional situation where people are led to sell themselves into a form of slavery is the worst form of corruption. Even more depressing is the fact that selling oneself into a dependent relationship is often considered a better option than remaining simply marginalized – a criterion which was once used to separate the ‘third world’ from the ‘fourth’. We return to the need to expand Pettit’s criterion of republican freedom. Selling oneself into a dependent relationship is perhaps a liberal way of looking at things. It assumes the primacy of an individual who makes choices. An older and more pervasive tradition sees society in functional terms where a person’s functional role is not something the individual takes up but is something into which that person is born and which shapes the individual. Communitarians have recognized, but have sought to modernize, that tradition. Yet the fact remains that in much of the world an old-style functional hierarchical view is dominant. It will remain so long as an hierarchical view of fixed functions based on an overriding principle – logos in the Aristotelian tradition, dao in the Chinese and purity in the Hindu – are the primary source of identity. The republican tradition, however, as we have seen, was capable of bracketing off logos and developing practical reason from which a distinct view of political liberty and individual political efficacy could emerge, eventually to expand beyond what had conventionally been considered to be ‘natural’. Can the same be done elsewhere?

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The Confucian tradition poses problems because the dao has always been less fixed. Confucianism was always hostile to hereditary fixed functions and has developed a more fluid view of relationships. In fact, in the Chinese system as a whole, ontological priority has been accorded to shifting relationships – that ‘loose sheet of sand’ about which Sun Yat-sen complained. Here Taylor’s typology of individual and holist ontology and advocacy is inadequate because the basic ontological unit is neither the individual nor the collective but the particularistic relationship. As noted above, a specific construction of dao could for a long time provide an ideology for officialdom but could neither provide the basis for a hereditary system nor generate sufficient opposition to a logocentric view to create a relatively autonomous political sphere with its own notion of political liberty. Ideology in China maintained a ‘superstable’ state because it could modernize in the sense of adapting itself to new patron– client relationships without violating some persistent equivalent of the logos and having to develop a new sense of political liberty. A viable state could develop, but hardly one conducive to republican liberty based on non-dependent relationships. I am arguing here that flexibility might be more of a problem than rigidity. Compare China with India. Hinduism is much more holist than Confucianism. Its functional view of society sees dependent relationships as more fixed and more as necessary products of the system than vice versa. The liberty associated with liberal individualism is, of course, absent; but so is the adaptability associated with the Chinese view which has accorded ontological priority and a great degree of legitimacy to flexible relationships. If there was freedom in India it had to be outside politics. Recognition of that way of thinking explains why most notable modern Hindu political theorists have been anarchists. Is it too orientalist to suggest that the possibility of an Indian republicanism – which is not purely a Western import – depends upon something like a Protestant reformation? That indeed may occur because there remains the equivalent of a rigid logos to reform. In China, on the other hand, the possibility of a decisive reformation appears more remote, because the dao has always been reforming itself along the same ontological lines which are neither individualist not collectivist. In China it seems that both liberalism, while attractive to many, and socialism, while powerful as a mobilizing ideology, were unsustainable. There has been, moreover, no basis for the republican tradition which started from either an individualist or collectivist ontology

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and did not give ontological primacy to relationships per se. The Hindu tradition, on the other hand, which seems the most premodern and which maintains the residues of a caste system which is the most inimical to any notion of freedom as non-domination, offers the prospect of a fundamental rupture which could lead to a republican position. But that prospect is hardly visible at present. We have so far considered the Christian case of an inflexible logos which was countered by Renaissance or Protestant republicanism. That opened the possibilities for a this-worldly civic liberty but went to the non-republican extreme of privatizing liberty as non-interference. We have considered the Hindu case of what may be seen as an inflexible logos but as yet no effective indigenous equivalent of the above reformation. The result has been politics which have been ineffectively secularized on unstable Western terms and have always been open to convincing refutation by the powerful theorists of other-worldly liberty. We have considered a Chinese case where the dao or logos was always more worldly and more flexible. The result has been the absence of a reformation and the pursuit of modernization without the development of an autonomous sphere of specifically civic virtues and explicitly political liberties. What then of Islam? Islam manifests a powerful logos which, in Gellner’s words, was always subject to a ‘Permanent or Recurrent but ever-reversed Reformation’, as we have noted. The Islamic reformation and the counter-reformation have been part of a continuing dialectic which spectacularly from time to time energizes politics in what appear to be collective exercises of freedom. Those outbursts draw upon a long-held tradition of Islamic public virtue which did not collapse with the demise of an equivalent of the Chinese ‘great tradition’. But such efforts have rarely been sustained since, for reasons outlined above, they cannot depend upon nor produce a relatively autonomous political sphere and thus cannot develop what I have outlined as republican liberty. Normally there is recourse to clientelism but that clientelism is less secure than its Chinese counterpart. Islam, for the same salvationist reasons as Christianity, cannot accord relationships the ontological legitimacy they enjoy in the Chinese system. Rather they are the product of a mundane world which is seen to violate public virtue. Thus they can provoke reaction in the name of greater freedom as nondomination; but that reaction never seems to be decisive and will not be so long as reformation and counter-reformation are seen as recurrent and in a strange way mutually supporting.

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The politics of clientelism, of course, can offer a significant degree of freedom from interference. But so can successful protection rackets. We return to the point that freedom as inclusive non-domination has to be enjoyed resiliently. That depends on the existence of political institutions which are felt to guarantee it even if no recourse is made to those institutions. But those institutions are not going to come into existence so long as clientel networks convey a sense of security. They are not going to occur so long as segmental structures based on those relationships, intermediate between the state and the individual or family, offer the prospects of security greater than some vague and untested notion of liberal civil society – which in many cultures is an alien concept. But, I repeat, that is not to say that those intermediate structures are an insuperable obstacle to a republican civil society. Political, economic and cultural factors, therefore, suggest that the prospects for republican liberty as inclusive non-domination are limited in much of the world. Once again an observer might have come to a similar conclusion about Italy at the time of the Renaissance where there was widespread poverty, pervasive patron–client relations and no Protestant Reformation. That conclusion would have been wrong. We should be wary of such reductionism now.

CONCLUSION As noted at the beginning of this chapter, it would be easy to dismiss the chapter on simple relativist grounds. To inquire into the prospects for republicanism, which derived from the European Renaissance and Reformation, to other parts of the world is arguably about as stupid as inquiring into the prospects for Confucianism in New York. Cultures are different and economies are different. Insofar as a mode of political thinking may seek the universal in the particular and shape the particular in its light, however, the exercise is useful. Republicanism, of course, is only one of several streams of thought which attempts that task but, I argue, the modesty of its universals is such that it can escape the charge of cultural imperialism better than most other streams of thought. From a political economic perspective the prospect for realizing republican values in the greater part of the world is bleak. Sovereignty is becoming weaker, especially in areas outside what used to be called the ‘first world’. Republicanism, adapted to structures

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wider than the state, is remote. Economic developments, moreover, might have convinced some that waves of ‘democratic’ change are continually swelling, though the general democratization debate has not usually focused directly on crucial elements of the republican agenda such as citizen efficacy, virtue and non-domination. Most important of all, the persistence of widespread poverty perpetuates patron–client relations which are not conducive to republican political liberty. At a cultural level, this chapter has noted the obstacles for republican values posed by the fact that many states are obvious artefacts of colonial constitutions and do not as yet provide a focus for citizen identity. It has discussed also the existence of religious and ideological obstacles to republican values. It argued that Confucianism has been too protean and successful in adaptation to circumstances to provoke an effective civic opposition out of which republican values might grow. Islam, with a highly developed set of public virtues, maintained simultaneously a reformation and a counter-reformation in a non-clerical society which prevented the growth of any oppositional focus out of which specifically civic virtues might be formulated. Hindu society, by contrast holist in a sense in which Confucian and Islamic societies were not, was too otherworldly and rigid to develop political virtue. Virtue was outside politics. At the moment we see the moderately ‘democratic’ if unreal régime which is modern India faced with Hindu revivalism articulated by a party the very existence of which contradicts Hinduism. Conceivably that revivalism could metamorphose in the same way as England’s Puritan Revolution and produce an alternative to characteristically Hindu other-worldly anti-politics and a political style imported from elsewhere. Another alternative is, of course, communal violence and disintegration. This chapter has said little about other major world religions due to limitations of space and knowledge. It has, however, commented on the prospects for republican values in what used to be the Soviet Union and its client states. Where politics has dissolved into protection rackets we might see the development of a modern form of feudalism similar to that which Machiavelli beheld in the world of sixteenth-century condottieri. A republican solution, however, does not seem to be on the agenda. In more stable parts of Eastern Europe, republican values seem to pale before an economic rationalism which has little time for values and anything but freedom as formal non-interference.

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When exploring an idea, however, there is not much point in saying ‘the world is not like that’. That is what modern ‘realists’ have done and, in the process, have devalued much that is best in liberalism, socialism and, of course, republicanism. Machiavelli, celebrated by many as an arch realist, was probably a better theorist than modern realists. He denounced some values but still remains at the centre of a stream of thought which seeks the particular expression of certain other values in a shifting international environment.

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Conclusion The conclusion has already been stated in the preceding two chapters and little more need be said beyond a repeated defence of some republican positions. Republican theory, like many other modes of thinking, seeks the universal in the particular and shapes the particular in its light. As outlined in this book, its distinctive feature is a view of political life which affirms popular sovereignty, is sensitive to corruptibility, asserts the value of civic virtue and upholds a view of liberty as non-domination. Its universals are modest and may escape the charge of radical contextualists that affirmation of universals leads to a normalizing tyranny. My argument will not satisfy adherents to the performative contradiction characteristic of postmodernists which posits the universal statement that there are no universals. Suffice it to say that most postmodernists, who are not strictly Nietszchean, do seem to be looking for the universal values of self-determination and strategies which might realize inclusive non-domination. Considering the four elements of my ideal-type, sovereignty is as precarious as it was in early modern times but is something which can be bent in a republican direction. A republican orientation does promise citizen empowerment greater than many others. Now that progress is once again seen as problematic, moreover, we may sense a parallel between the contemporary concern with handling Contingency and the early modern confrontation of virtù and Fortuna. But the idea of what Arendt calls ‘history as process’ remains and, in that situation, civic virtue has acquired a new urgency in the face of an ideology of greed which its proponents consider to be inevitable. Finally it is clear that republican liberty has achieved a new relevance as people lose confidence in the security of their position in a world of half-understood structural domination. To many people either liberalism or communitarianism offers sufficient diagnoses of and remedies for our present malaise. There is much worthwhile in both, and the strength of a republican position, as outlined in this book, is that it can draw elements from both. Republicans might see the liberal–communitarian debate providing alternatives which are too stark. They might reject the attempt by political theorists to assimilate them to one camp or the other 181

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and might resent a broad definition of liberalism or communitarianism being used to move them into a position with which they are uncomfortable. Why should republicans have to choose between Hegel and Constant? Why should they have to choose between a metaphysical theory of the state and anti-statism? Why should they demand that virtue be privatized lest it be seen as ‘totalitarian’? Why do they have to choose between negative and positive liberty? In considering republican answers to questions such as the above, the book has marked out the changing contours of the republican approach – or, in Pocock’s terms, the republican ‘language’. On the way bits of the approach have been discarded. Notable here is the militarism of Machiavelli’s ‘republic for expansion’. But political theorists are reluctant to let us forget that aspect of political thought as was evident in one review of Pettit’s Republicanism which criticized him for having little to say about it (Newey 1997). Was militarism an essential part of republicanism and is its abandonment on a par with the efforts of those ‘Marxists’ who have abandoned the proletariat? To that question postmodernists might say ‘so what’, as they invent their own Aristotle minus logos, Kant minus Reason and whomever minus whatever. That is not my position. I prefer to think that a cogent tradition may be traced out of the idea of a ‘republic’ not aimed at expansion. Another element to be discarded must surely be the idea of the law-giver. Recall Pitkin’s (1984: 295) comment that while ‘meant to comfort the self, the [image of the] Founder is actually a fantasy of self-denigration’. In fact, few early modern republics had one and candidates for that role such as Cromwell were frequently attacked by their one-time supporters. Yet the idea persists in the United States where reference to the constitutional framers is constantly made and where the Federalist Papers have become pseudocanonical. The idea also persists in many other parts of the world not in the least associated with memories of Rome or Moses. A third element to be discarded must be political religion – the one element of Rousseau’s thought from which most, but not all, of his admirers distance themselves. Yet political religion has remained salient in many countries. Lincoln’s political religion represented a continuing and frightening element in United States political life. The subsequent late-1940s and early-1950s notion of being ‘un-American’ did enormous harm to the American republican tradition – almost as much harm as Soviet and Chinese obsession with political apostasy.

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Political religion in the United States might be explained in terms of a necessary supplement to what some see as the rather arid mechanical republicanism constructed in 1787. Chapter 3 has indicated that I am not certain that it was all that arid, at least compared with contemporary Australian debates on republicanism. American answers to Montesquieu’s problems with size are still valid and I look with interest, if not too much hope, at the European experiment in creating a new mechanical model. Some sort of mechanical model is necessary but not simply one with a political religion and a few virtual elements tacked on to it. Indeed a typology of modern ‘republics’ may be created in terms of the relative importance of those three elements – mechanical controls, political religion and virtual representation. The United States model assigned priority to the first element though the other two were not absent. The People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union assigned priority to political religion which, I have argued, was inimical to the development of civic virtues which depend on a relatively autonomous political sphere. Many other states have given priority to virtual representation. Much of the modern republican story may be seen as a search for the appropriate mix of the mechanical, the religious and the virtual. Civic virtue attempted to link all three. It tried to humanize the mechanical, turn the religious in civic directions and bring the virtual back to within the tangible limits of an autonomous political sphere. But the eclipse of civic virtue, to varying degrees in different countries, saw a glorification of a cold version of the mechanical, the privatization of religion and the triumph of the virtual at the expense of an older view of politics. Many people have welcomed the demise of civic virtue, not the least feminists who see it as overtly macho when translated along the lines of vis (strength) or Machiavelli’s virtù. But we are currently seeing a revival of interest in civic virtues which may not incur feminist criticism. Will that revival of civic virtue survive in a world dominated by the mechanical and the virtual? The virtual representation of the virtual republic seems to make all things possible but in fact has made all rationalizations possible. It seems that nowadays a republic can mean almost anything. This book has endeavoured to examine what it did mean and to make what is left of it more substantive. But the virtual cannot be totally eliminated. The virtual as a filtered facsimile of the real is ever present and how we consider it depends on how the filters are arranged. We can never remove filters in a

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non-autistic state but we can surely modify them and map out a republicanism amenable to feminists, socialists, multiculturalists and ecologists? I am not certain Pettit and Sunstein have succeeded in that task but I have been greatly indebted to their efforts. Since we cannot eliminate the virtual we must be wary of simply reaffirming the real against the virtual in the manner of those who might focus on Machiavelli’s no-nonsense view of power, appreciate the English republicans’ contribution to the ‘bourgeois revolution’, dismiss the idealist elements of Rousseau but not his repudiation of what became known as the alienation of liberty and categorize Kant as an ideologist of the French Revolution. Idealism cannot be dismissed too lightly. Machiavelli was concerned with the ‘real world’ but to focus only on that concern is to neglect the enormous ‘idealist’ contribution republicans have made in developing ideas about an autonomous political realm which must to some extent be fictional. Of course, some of the early republicans reflected elements of the world view of an aristocratic leisured class but never politics which rationalized the interests of a landed hierarchy. Others reflected ‘bourgeois’ ideals but they were as opposed as Marx to the capitalist process of commodifying everything. Kant’s ideas, moreover, may have contributed to dubious rationalizations but to see him merely as the ‘whitewashing spokesman’ of the German middle class (Marx and Engels 1976: 195) is a travesty. Recourse to the ‘real world’ is often made by those who wish to damn republicanism and to damn radical thought in general. Its latest manifestation has been the Thatcherite attempt to appropriate the radical language of the ‘real world’ to promote reactionary idealism. At the same time international relations scholars have used the term ‘realism’ to promote power-centred idealism (Berki 1981: 17–20). Of course, republicans must centre their thought on the real world. After all, the etymological origin of ‘real’ is res (the objective thing) which is half of res publica. But, a republican would say, the res should always be seen through the filter of the public gaze and altered accordingly. The public cannot define the res at will, as Machiavelli demonstrated, but it alone must be its interpreter – not God, nor natural law, nor monarchs. All three have been pressed into republican theory at various times but in the end all three are irrelevant.

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Notes INTRODUCTION 1. One approach was to add Christian virtues to the ‘four cardinal virtues’, though rule-oriented critics maintain that those Christian virtues cannot be virtues at all because an important principle of virtue-centred theory – the doctrine of the mean determining the appropriate point between excesses – cannot apply to them. See the classic refutation of Aristotle by the pre-eminent seventeenth-century natural law theorist Hugo Grotius (1925: Prolegomena, 43–5, pp. 25–6). We shall return to this point in Chapter 1. 2. As Taylor (1989b) has reminded us, in the words of Joseph Hall, the Puritan revolution convinced us that ‘God loveth adverbs’. And now God is supposed to be dead, pragmatists and postmodernists reveal the same love. 3. Skinner (1998: 82–4), noting early modern republican diagnoses of unfreedom as the result of either coercive interference or dependence, remained unconvinced about Pettit’s argument for what Skinner called an alternative ‘neo-Roman’ ideal of liberty. With Pettit, however, he agreed that, the ‘neo-Roman’ persuasion differed from classical liberalism which argued ‘to the effect that force or the coercive threat of it constitute the only forms of constraint that interfere with individual liberty’. 4. Sunstein (1993a: 126–7) has drawn a distinction between postmodernists, who appear to ‘reject the process of reason-giving altogether, and to put in its place, play, power and conventions’, who (quoting Jürgen Habermas) ‘can give no account of the normative foundations of their [own] rhetoric’ and the pragmatic heritage which ‘consists in the critique of metaphysical realism, that is, the view that human beings have unmediated access to the world without the aid of their own interpretive filters’. Pragmatism, he maintained ‘hardly calls for a general attack on the efforts of human beings to develop baselines by which to distinguish between partisanship and neutrality. On the contrary it helps to orient that effort’. Postmodernists, no doubt, would detect here a modernist tendency to reject a ‘code of paradox’ by reference to a ‘code of integration’ which it seeks to challenge; (see Connolly 1991: 60). The weakness of Sunstein’s dismissal of postmodernism can perhaps be seen in his observation that the most valuable postmodernist claims turn out not to be postmodern at all but are really ‘pragmatist’. 5. Few went so far as Rousseau’s (1964: 103) famous statement in his ‘Second Discourse’ which has often outraged historians: Let us therefore begin by setting all the facts aside, for they do not affect the question. The researches which can be undertaken concerning

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this subject [the foundation of society] must not be taken for historical truths, but only for hypothetical and conditional reasonings better suited to clarify the nature of things than to show their true origin, like those our physicists make every day concerning the formation of the world. 6. For a more balanced view see Seyla Benhabib 1996. 7. There was dispute on the translation of this clause. Two versions occur in different editions of Milton. Nevill (1968: 128–9) noted the argument between those who interpreted the oath in terms of ‘shall have chosen’ and ‘shall choose’; the interpretation had important policy implications. CHAPTER 1 1. Milton (1847: 442–8) advocated a franchise limited to the most qualified and a successive sifting process to select ‘men of breeding’. 2. See Harrington’s (1977: 839–43) constitutional proposals. 3. On the necessity of claiming divine inspiration, see Machiavelli (1970: I, XI, 139–42), noted by Rousseau (1968: II, VII, 87). 4. Bodin (1955: I, VIII, 33–4) argued that the prince was bound by natural justice (human and divine) but not by civic laws which were simply useful. 5. Venice, ‘the most serene republic’, which many historians considered to be a closed oligarchy, was idealized not only by its own propagandists, such as Gasparo Contarini (Pocock 1975: 320–30), but by critics of the tendency towards absolutism in England. See also Fink 1962: 28–51. 6. This was His Majesty’s Answer to the Nineteen Propositions of Parliament. Pocock (1975: 361–5, 1977: 19–20) observed that the king probably did not like that document very much, since it challenged the whole basis of the traditional thesis of descending authority (Ullmann 1965) and presented England in republican terms. He certainly died affirming other principles. 7. See Pocock’s (1977: 1–152) insightful introductory remarks on this and Harrington’s other writings. 8. Pitkin (1984: 257–9, 272–3) argued that it was because Rome had been a ‘republic for expansion’ that Machiavelli preferred it to a Tuscan model which might have displayed better republican credentials. 9. The theme of beneficial imperialism was developed by the neoHarringtonians. See, for example, Walter Moyle’s (1968: 253) comment in 1699: ‘the subjects of the Romans lived under the mildest administration, and the gentlest yoke in the world; which engaged them in a willing obedience and voluntary submission to a nation of greater virtues than their own, without those frequent tumults and rebellions with which oppression and tyranny are always attended’. 10. At times Machiavelli (1970: I, X, 137) conceived of the wicked possessing virtù. Yet he criticized the successful exercise of wickedness which does not win honour. Agathocles, the Sicilian, was successful

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11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

19. 20.

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due to audaciousness and physical courage, but in killing fellow citizens, betraying friends and being treacherous, pitiless and irreligious he ‘could not be honoured among eminent men’ and thus was said to lack virtu`; (Machiavelli 1961: VIII, 63). Interestingly Rousseau (1968: III, VI, 118) observed that ‘Machiavelli’s Prince is a handbook for republicans’. This is the political message Arendt (1963: 79) derived from Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, an ‘angel of God’ executed by a virtuous sea captain for killing an evil fellow crewman; ‘Virtue – which perhaps is less than goodness but still alone is capable “of embodiment in lasting institutions” – must prevail at the expense of the good man as well’. Diggins (1984: 286–96) has provided an interesting criticism of her reading. Harrington here was contradictory. He argued that ‘the far greater part of the people is never able in matters of religion to be their own leaders’. Then, two chapters later in the same work, he argued that the major part of the people can be their own leaders in matters of religion (Harrington 1977: 838, 845). Venice had a collective body, The Council of Ten, to perform the same function. The Venetian body, however, was permanent. Harrington (1977: 254–5) preferred the collective model but wished to bind it with more restrictions than in Venice. It might be the case that Hume’s distinction between natural and artificial virtues derived from the natural law distinction between imperfect and perfect duties; but that was not intended as a concession to a rule-centred approach, since ‘what underlies justice is not our ability to form habits of compliance with rules but our ability to extend our sense of self so that self-interest comes to include the interests of others with whom we form a co-operating society’ (Schneewind 1990: 51, 54). ‘The most useful institution to have in a state which enjoys freedom is one that keeps the citizens poor’ (Machiavelli 1970: III, XXV, 475). See also Machiavelli 1970: I, XXXVII, 201. Consider this in opposition to Gey’s (1993: 888–90) characterization of ‘civic republicanism’ as being fundamentally opposed to conflict. On Machiavelli’s stress on the importance of diversity as a source of ‘manly strength’, see Pitkin (1884: 82–3). This distinction, it will be remembered, was popularized in Berlin’s (1969) famous inaugural lecture of 1958. Deeply hostile to positive liberty, he criticized not only early modern republicans such as Montesquieu (when he forgot ‘his liberal moments’) but also ‘metaphysical liberals’, conservatives, socialists and rationalists in general. I am conscious here of the enormous controversy concerning the origins of nationalism. Paul James (1996) has offered an interesting critique of nineteenth century and recent theorizing. Fink (1962: 188–9) argued that in England, that imperialist mission was taken over by Whigs who had transformed the republican mixed constitution into a monarchical version. England was seen as the new ‘Rome of the West’.

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21. Harrington considered the ancient English constitution always to have been unstable whereas Milton at times looked back to a golden age, since corrupted.

CHAPTER 2 1. Bodin (1955: II, VII, 74–5), noted that a commonwealth can be popular while the government is aristocratic. He described Aristotle as ‘falling into a maze of errors’. 2. On the necessity of claiming divine inspiration, see Machiavelli (1970: I, XI, 139–42), noted by Rousseau (1968: II, VII, 87). 3. ‘Artificial’ here is used in the sense of the product of human artifice, as used in Chapter 1, not in the sense of fraudulent, though in various places in his writings Rousseau uses the term in both senses (Dent 1992: 36–8). 4. Note the word ‘ideal state’. When recommending a government for Poland, Rousseau (1953a: 193–4) did allow for representatives within the existing constitutional framework with an insistence on a delegate rather than a trustee model. His ‘Considerations on the Government of Poland and its Proposed Reformation’ revealed a sensitivity to practical exigencies. 5. To understand fully that fear, see Rousseau’s (1968: III, II, 151–4) comments on the suffrage. 6. As Viroli (1988: 160n) pointed out, there are two Aristotelian definitions; (Aristotle 1952: III, VI–VII, 112–14). Rousseau sometimes employed one and sometimes the other. On the one hand, a polity (politeia), translated as ‘republic’, referred simply to a true constitution. On the other, it referred to the form of government (sic) ‘when the masses govern the state with a view to the common interest’ (Ernest Barker’s translation [not that in Viroli 1988: 114]). The former is referred to here. On the problems of translating politeia and the confusion of the term with a narrower conception of ‘government’, see Gerald Stourzh (1988: 35–8). 7. I take this to be a general statement though it is put forward in the context of commuting service for money. 8. This is reminiscent of Grimsley’s (1961: 77) observation of Rousseau: ‘Much of his moral idealism remained merely potential and never went beyond the realm of intention; too often he claimed credit for intentions that were never carried out, thus seeming to suggest that his admiration for virtue was by itself enough to justify him’. 9. The term ‘corporatist’ here is not used in the contemporary sense, discussed later in this book, signifying the integration of the state, labour and capital, but simply in the sense that society was characterized by very strong corporate bodies (corps). 10. I refer here to a ‘Kantian’ approach which may not be faithful to the ideas of Kant. A significant body of literature on Kant has defended him against Hegel’s charge of ‘empty formalism’; See Henry Allison’s comments on Wood (1990: 184–91).

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11. Anderson’s (1991) work has been concerned with the inevitable imagination involved in the construction of the ‘nation’. Imagination is also involved in the construction of the ‘people’ (which may sometimes be synonymous). Many of the huge ontological problems have been explored by James (1996) who found the notion of invention somewhat inadequate. 12. The place of natural law in Rousseau’s thought is extremely complex; (see Viroli 1988: 118–48; Roosevelt 1990: 49–52). 13. The four revolutions identified by Beck are: 1. the ‘Copernican revolution’ where ‘the knowing subject can understand any phenomenon in the world . . . only if he takes into account his own contribution’ (p. 19); 2. (as noted) the ‘Rousseauistic revolution’ which sharply separates morality (‘adherence to a maxim out of respect for its status as a law for rational beings’) from prudence and the moral law from positive law (pp. 22–5); 3. the ‘aesthetic revolution’ which emancipates art from ‘extra-artistic criteria, whether of factual truth or moral value’ (p. 27); and 4. the ‘Promethean revolution’ which celebrates ‘man as creator’, where the ‘prerogative of the gods’ is seized and given to humankind’ (p. 28). 14. Here Kant could not mean what we usually understand by ‘devils’ since he held that one cannot will evil as a universal maxim. ‘Devils’ are simply people who secretly exempt themselves from the moral law (Arendt 1982: 17–18). 15. Recall here the earlier point that alienation was not the same as the early modern republican concept of corruption. 16. In the case of Marx she confused the Marxian notion of praxis, oriented towards an emancipatory telos with pragmatism, oriented towards a more diffuse notion of usefulness.

CHAPTER 3 1. Note that while Madison invoked classical precedent in discussing the Constitutional Convention, he departed from the classics in seeing the law-giver as collective (Hamilton, Madison and Jay 1961: XXXVIII, 231–3). 2. This may be seen simply as a convenient political rationale when we consider President Jackson’s widespread movement of partially assimilated ‘civilized Indians’ (Lerner 1987: 172–3) and when we consider that the rationale for owning property was divorced from labour in the South. 3. See for example Pangle (1988: 16–24), who criticized the stress on Calvinism in the famous work of Weber (1930) and the recent work of Diggins (1984). 4. As Pasquale Pasquino (1994: 111–12) pointed out, Sieyès was not the originator of this distinction. 5. On Wood’s reading of Adams, see Ralph Lerner (1987: 16–29). 6. In 1849 a translation appeared entitled The Republic of the United

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7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

States of America and its Political Institutions Reviewed and Examined. The periodization of the change in American conceptions of democracy was similar to that in France (Ronsanvallon 1995). An exception seems to have been James Wilson who, according to Garry Wills (1988), used arguments concerning popular sovereignty from the Social Contract (1764, English edition) in the ratification debates. The early modern republican distrust of factions and political parties, condemned by Madison for giving rein to passion (Hamilton, Madison and Jay 1961: L, 319), was such that it was not until the 1830s, due to the efforts of people such as Martin van Buren, that the idea of a competitive party system was seen as congruent with republicanism (Hanson 1985: 111–20). Contrast Paine (1970: 39) who argued that ‘no nation ought to be without a debt’, after praising America for being without a national debt (Kramnick 1990: 151). On Publius’ treatment of virtue (or virtù) compared with that of Machiavelli and Montesquieu, see Howe (1988: 125–8). A liberal rebuttal of that interpretation of the Democrat position might simply be that liberal ideology had produced an entrenched mentality which could blame the state for the excesses of capitalism. See Hartz (1955: 136). Consider the following quote from Hartz (1955: 232): ‘The truth is, the trust in America was in significant part an intellectual technique for defining economic problems in terms of a Locke noone dared to transcend. If the trust were at the heart of all evil, then Locke could be kept intact simply by smashing it. It was a technique whereby a compulsive “Americanism” was projected upon the real economic world’.

CHAPTER 4 1. Barker (1984: 193), from a pragmatist perspective, following Charles Sanders Peirce, accepted the view that popular sovereignty consists in democratic control over language, though, of course, he did not concede defeat. 2. Corporatism here, of course, is used in a sense different from the earlier discussion of the French ancien régime. 3. Patrick Neal (1985: 674–5) argued that Dworkin’s (1977, 1978) position seems to be that whereas neutrality among preferences is strictly impossible, the state should act as though it were possible. As a deontological liberal, however, Dworkin could not offer a consequentialist defence. 4. Pashukanis (1989) maintained that the essence of all law was contract in commercial exchange. Thus it reached its apogee in capitalism and with the demise of capitalism would be transcended. He was fiercely criticized by other Soviet theorists. 5. An argument might be made to the contrary when we consider the recent history of Hong Kong.

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6. Note here that feminist objection which insists that all gender-specific responsibilities reflect domination.

CHAPTER 5 1. The term ‘third world’ is falling out of favour due the demise of the ‘second world’ (the old ‘socialist camp’) and because, in the age of newly industrializing economies, it does not describe adequately the wide range of countries included in its rubric. Postcolonial theorists, moreover, regard the term as insulting (Dirlik 1994). 2. The term dictatorship here is used in its modern sense and not in the old republican sense since Indira Gandhi’s emergency enacted some important self-seeking constitutional changes. 3. Portuguese-speaking Brazil, of course, can be seen as the residue of an old empire; it is significant that it still has a monarchist movement. 4. Kurt Weyland (1995) discussed the prospects of four models in Latin America. What I have called corporatism he referred to as ‘concertation’ which he felt has been most successful in Chile. He distinguished this from liberalism, populism and basismo (change based on social movements). 5. The dark side was most marked among some members of the ‘Towards the Future School’. 6. ‘that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of competitive struggle for the people’s vote’ (Schumpeter 1950: 269). 7. I am grateful to Colin Brown for this example. 8. As I see it, following the examples of Germany and Italy, a fascist régime is one which can rely on a capacity to mobilize a high degree of popular support behind not only a cult of hatred but also welfarism. I cannot see Iraq and Syria in that light. 9. Lewis (1996: 62) has made the interesting point that the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini actually departed significantly from the Islamic tradition by creating a quasi-clergy. In that regard note the recent trend of governments to set up official bodies to interpret the scriptures in order to preempt political opposition. Those developments, however, do not alter my argument.

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Index abortion, 142, 148 accountability, 27, 124–5, 146–7, 155, 171 Ackerman, B., 94, 96, 106, 116, 145 Adams, J., 88–9, 94, 103–4, 189 Adorno, T., 61 Afghanistan, 162, 166 Africa, 154, 156–8 see also South Africa Agathocles, 186–7 Alger, H., 111 Algeria, 155, 166 alienation, 58, 75, 111, 114, 127, 129, 139, 184, 189 Allison, H. E., 188 Ambedkar, B. R., 160 anarchy and anarchism, 23, 52, 139, 173–4, 176 Anderson, B., 87, 156, 189 Appleby, J., 86, 89, 99–100, 115 Aquinas, St. T., 4 arbitrariness, 6, 9, 13, 20, 26–7, 32, 46, 52–3, 67, 90, 114, 124, 137, 139–40, 143, 150, 161 Arendt, H., 12, 15, 17, 53, 62, 64, 76, 81, 93, 119, 128, 181, 187 Argentina, 87 aristocracy, 23–5, 29, 31, 45, 47, 50, 53, 88–92, 108, 114–6, 184, 188 Aristotle, 4, 16, 29, 50, 73, 90, 172, 175, 182, 185, 188 Aron, R., 56, 63, 68, 75 Athens, 13, 41, 45 Augustan Age, 32 Australia, 123, 145, 160, 183 Austria, 122, 159 autocracy, 32, 53–5, 65, 158, 166 Bacon, F., 86 Bailyn, B., 79 Bangladesh, 166

Banning, L., 96, 99, 105–06 Barber, B., 5, 7–8, 13, 16, 19, 38, 120–1, 125, 130, 138–9, 141, 144–5 Beard, C., 85 Beck, L. W., 71, 189 Beckman, B., 157 Benhabib, S., 186 Bentham, J., 112, 114 Berlin, I., 2, 187 Bhave, A. V., 174 bicameralism, 24–6, 91, 144 see also parliament Bienefeld, M., 163, 165 Block, F., 139 Bodin, J., 23, 26, 28, 50, 53, 186, 188 Bonaparte, L., 138 bourgeoisie, 45, 81, 83, 85, 125, 164, 184 Brazil, 191 Brezhnev, L., 172 Brissot, J., 144 bureaucracy, iron cage of, 124, 129 Buren, M. van, 190 Burke, E., 37, 92 Cai Yuanpei, 169 Cartesianism, 5 Cawson, A., 122 Chapman, J., 71 Charles I, 30 Chiang K’ai-shek, 169 China Confucianism, 168–71, 175–9 Cultural Revolution, 170–1 dynastic cycles, 162 essence and function, 169 Guomindang, 160, 162 orthopraxy, 160, 171 People’s Republic, 162, 169–71, 176, 183

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Index Cicero, 3, 38, 40, 57, 136 citizens, armed see militia citizenship, political economy of, 99, 109 clientelism, 166, 168, 170, 175–9 commerce, 32, 38–9, 47, 50, 56–63, 70, 77, 98–100, 114–5, 117, 125, 130–2, 164, 190 communitarianism, 1–5, 11–7, 19, 52, 59, 72–3, 107, 125, 134–5, 175, 181 Condorcet, M. J. A. N. de Caritat, Marquis de, 32, 60, 94, 122, 126, 144 conflict, management of, 28, 38, 46, 91, 141, 145, 187 Confucius see China Connolly, W., 121–2, 124, 129 Constant, B., 2, 52, 71, 182 Constantinople, 41 constitution, mixed, 13, 20, 23–5, 28, 44–5, 52, 59, 86, 88–9, 92–3, 115, 119, 123–4, 146, 187 Contarini, G., 186 contestability, 146–7 Contingency, 20, 29, 124, 129, 181 contract, freedom of, 112, 138, 190 social, 39, 46, 51–2, 54–5, 70–1, 74–5, 83, 88, 90, 95, 128, 134, 165 corporations, transnational, 128, 139 corporatism, modern, 118–9, 122, 128, 149, 160–1, 165, 188, 190 old, 63, 188, 190 ‘country’ and ‘court’, 32, 79, 86, 98–100, 111, 153 Crick, B., 56, 146 Cromwell, O., 25–6, 35, 44, 47, 85, 182 Culpepper, J., 30 culture, folk, 166, 168–9 high, 124, 166, 169 multiculturalism, 124, 137, 143, 150–1, 184 Czech Republic, 172–3

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Dalton, D., 173 democracy, 9, 13–15, 20, 24, 29, 36, 41, 45, 50–4, 89–91, 116, 118–23, 125, 127, 136, 138–40, 144–6, 151, 157–60, 163–5, 167–9, 173–4, 179, 190 and development, 163–4 ‘waves’ of, 118, 162–5, 179 despotism, 6, 50, 53–5, 59–60, 68, 78, 90, 94, 153–4, 159, 166, 168 dictator, 28, 37, 46, 159, 161, 166, 191 Diderot, D., 53, 56 Diggins, J., 82–3, 95, 100, 103–4, 110–11, 187, 189 Downs, A., 1 Dworkin, R., 135, 190 Egypt, 166 Eisenhower, D., 128 Engels, F., 139 England, ancient constitution, 31–2, 44–5, 65, 79, 91, 116, 188 Enlightenment, dialectic of, 60–2, 97, 102, 104, 108, 127–8, 151, 162, 191 environmentalism and ecologism, 21, 137, 141–2, 150, 153, 164, 184 equality, 5, 9–10, 32, 46–8, 50, 66–8, 74–5, 79, 94, 100, 105, 113, 115, 119, 135–6, 139–41, 147, 152, 165, 169, 175 of care and respect, 66, 135–6 of opportunity, 9, 110, 115 European Union, 123–4, 150 Fabians, 15 factions, 1, 24, 38, 46, 80, 90–1, 119, 168, 190 Falkland, L., 30 Farr, J., 109 Federalist Papers, 1, 63, 87, 89–91, 103, 116, 120, 144, 182 Feminism see gender domination Ferguson, A., 49–51, 57–60, 62–3, 75, 77–8, 80, 104, 118, 127, 167

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Filmer, R., 24, 46, 82 Fink, Z., 22, 186–7 Fitzgerald, F. S., 80, 171 Florence, 25, 28, 38, 42, 62, 103 Fortuna, 29–30, 33, 36, 46, 59, 61, 129, 151, 181 ‘fourth world’, 175 France, 43, 49, 53, 63–6, 69, 80, 87–9, 91, 115, 154, 163, 190 revolution of 1789, 49, 52–3, 60–6, 73, 87, 90, 111, 115, 128, 169, 184 Frederick II, 53–4 Freedom House, 163, 168, 173 Friedman, M., 98 Fukuyama, F., 120, 127 Gandhi, I., 174, 191 Gandhi, M., 174 Gaulle, C. de, 124 Gay, P., 49 Gellner, E., 166–7, 171, 177 gender domination, 12, 29, 33, 42, 46, 74–5, 105, 118, 126, 137, 141–3, 148–9, 153 Geneva, 74 Germany, 39, 44, 65, 125, 184, 191 see also Prussia Gey, S. G., 14, 16, 29, 38, 60, 134, 149–50, 187 Ghose, A., 174 Gierke, O., 55 Gilligan, C., 135 globalization, 20, 118–9, 121–26, 129, 139, 150, 156 Gorbachev, M., 172 Gordon, T., 32, 79 governance, 118, 157 Gramsci, A., 65, 72, 167 Greece, 22, 44, 49, 79, 84, 116 see also Athens, Sparta Green, T. H., 2, 15 Grimsley, R., 72, 188 Grotius, H., 185 Guicciardini, F., 25–6, 34, 38, 42, 45, 56, 68, 116 Habakkuk, 85 Habermas, J., 185

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Haefele, E., 80 Hall, J., 185 Hamilton, A., 63, 86–7, 95, 99, 103–4, 106 Hanson, R., 97 happiness, pursuit of, 103–4, 136 Harrington, J., 24–6, 29–31, 34–7, 41, 47, 56, 69, 85–6, 92, 101, 105, 108, 114, 116, 121, 125, 153, 166, 186–8 neo-Harringtonians, 29, 45, 125, 186 Hartz, L., 82–4, 93, 111, 190 Havel, V., 172–3 Hayek, F., 145–6 Hegel, G. W. F., 13–6, 32, 52, 59, 61–2, 65–7, 124, 126, 182, 188 Heidegger, M., 134 Henry VII, 31 Higonnet, P., 63–4, 87 Hirschman, A. O., 38, 57, 70 history, as ‘moments’, 16, 20, 28–9 as process, 64–5, 181 as progress, 20, 31–2, 57–8, 60–2, 64–7, 77, 82, 85–6, 97–100, 102, 115–8, 126–8, 151, 162–3, 169, 181 ‘end of’, 61–2, 67, 120, 126–7, 151 shape of, 28–33, 56–67, 97–102, 126–30, 161–5 speculative, 11, 16, 185–6 Hobbes, T., 24, 28, 39–41, 46, 114, 121 homosexuality see gender domination Hong Kong, 144, 146, 164, 190 honour and esteem, 42, 49–50, 68–9, 133–4, 136, 186–7 Horkheimer, M., 61 Houston, A. C., 39, 82 Howe, D. W., 105, 190 humanism, civic, 1–2, 16, 90 Hume, D., 12, 31, 37–8, 55, 59, 64, 69–70, 73, 82, 93, 103, 105, 109, 128, 187 Huntington, S., 120, 143, 161–3

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Index Ibn Khaldun, A. Z., 161 imperialism, 20, 30, 46, 63, 100–2, 116–7, 126, 158, 178, 182, 186–7 see also colonialism, republic for expansion India, 158–60, 173–7, 179 Bharatiya Janata Party, 174 Mogul Empire, 158 National Congress, 159–60, 174 individualism, 2–3, 9, 11, 14, 40, 43, 52, 56, 63, 72, 74, 83, 85, 100, 104, 109, 115, 144, 148, 172, 175–6 Indonesia, 161, 165–6 international relations, 28, 56, 66, 119, 123–6, 156, 180, 184 Iran, 166–8, 191 Iraq, 166, 191 Israel, 25, 36 Italy, 29, 39, 174, 178, 191 see also Florence, Lucca, Rome, Venice Jackson, A., 89, 109, 189 James, P., 187, 189 Japan, 125, 165 Jay, J., 87, 103, 113 Jefferson, T., 82–3, 86, 89, 94, 97–100, 103, 109, 115, 120 ‘agrarian myth’, 86, 98–100, 109 Jordan, 166 judicial power, 46, 59, 94, 96, 100, 116, 131, 144–5 jury, 67, 133 justice, 3–4, 11, 34, 38, 40, 47, 52, 57, 70, 72–3, 103, 132, 142, 165, 186–7 Kant, I., 4–5, 8, 12, 16, 18–9, 32, 49–50, 53–6, 59–67, 71–3, 75–8, 81–2, 85, 87–8, 90, 96, 102, 104, 107, 109, 111, 115, 117, 122, 124, 126–8, 130, 135, 137, 141, 144, 147, 149, 152, 163, 172, 182, 184, 188–9 Khomeini, R., 191 Klaus, V., 172–3

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Kramnick, I., 45, 58, 81, 98 Kuhn, T., 17, 94 Labor, American Federation of, 112 Labor, Knights of, 112 laissez faire, 109, 131 Latin America, 87, 160–1, 191 law criminal, 149–50 giver, 25–6, 35–6, 42, 47, 51, 95, 115, 144, 162, 182, 189 natural, 4, 8, 11, 16, 24, 37–9, 43, 47, 67–8, 70–1, 114–5, 166, 184–7, 189 rule of, 7, 20, 26–7, 37, 42, 46, 52–3, 67, 96, 139, 143–4, 167, 173–4 Lawrence, T. E., 166 Lee Teng-hui, 169 Lerner, R., 189 Levellers, 35 Lewis, B., 166, 191 liberty as feeling, 42–3 as non-domination, 6–8, 10, 12–5, 17, 21, 41–3, 45–7, 73–4, 78, 88, 90, 107, 113–4, 120–2, 125, 127, 134–51, 154–5, 165, 170, 174–5, 177–9, 181 horizontal and vertical forms, 113 ‘negative’, 5–6, 10, 40–1, 74, 114, 132, 147–8, 182 ‘positive’, 2, 5–7, 10, 17, 40, 73, 78, 134, 143, 148, 182, 187 Lincoln, A., 102, 110–1, 168, 182 Livy, 22, 28, 37, 45, 146 Locke, J., 4, 58, 79, 81–6, 95, 103, 108, 110, 116, 190 Lolme, J. L. de, 88 Lowell, Massachusetts, 109–10 Lowi, T., 94 Lucas, J. R., 11 Lucca, 41 Lycurgus, 25, 80, 123

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Index

208

Machiavelli, N., 1, 22, 25–6, 28–38, 40, 45–7, 56–7, 62–3, 68, 70–1, 73, 77, 80, 84, 89–91, 100, 103, 109–11, 116, 125–6, 138, 141, 146, 149, 159, 168, 179, 182–4, 186–8, 190 MacIntyre, A., 17, 73, 84, 151 Madison, J., 87, 89–93, 95–6, 98, 100, 103–5, 120, 134, 141, 189–90 Malaysia, 166 Malthus, T., 126 Mao Zedong, 146, 162, 171 marginalization, 8, 21, 122, 143, 175 market, as regulator, 47, 51, 119, 131–2 natural laws of, 114 Marx, K., 31, 37, 58, 63–5, 67, 75–6, 81–2, 85, 111, 114, 138–9, 164, 184, 189 Marxism, 58, 65, 67, 75, 81–2, 111, 128, 138–9, 164, 169, 171, 182 mean, doctrine of, 34, 185 Melville, H., 187 mercantilism, 84, 114, 117 Michelman, F., 17, 40, 78, 145 military standing army, 32, 80, 149 mercenaries, 30 militia, 30, 32, 46, 80, 112–3, 117, 150, 159 Mill, J. S., 9, 128, 131 Mills, C. W., 155 Milton, J., 18, 23–4, 26, 31, 35, 38, 43–4, 46–7, 85, 96, 143, 186, 188 monarchy, 2, 18, 23–6, 28–32, 35, 37, 39, 42, 44, 46, 50, 53–5, 59, 65, 67–8, 90, 96, 106, 123, 130, 184, 186–7, 191 Monnet, J., 123 Montesquieu, C de S, baron de, 2, 6, 14, 19, 49–51, 56–9, 63, 67–71, 73, 75, 77–8, 80–1, 85–6, 88, 93–4, 96–7, 100, 105, 108–9, 117, 133, 149, 153, 161, 166, 183, 187, 190

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Moore, B. Jr., 20 Morocco, 166 Morris, W., 111 Moses, 25, 80, 182 Moyle, W., 186 Murrin, J., 99 Narayan, J., 174 nature, state of, 51, 83 Neal, P., 190 Netherlands, 39 Nevill, H., 45, 186 newly industrializing economies, 153, 191 Newton, I., 5, 71, 86, 138 Nietzsche, F., 73, 127 Nippel, W., 45, 93 Nisbet, R., 11 Nussbaum, M., 12 ordini, 25, 31, 36, 47, 127, 144–5, 159 organic unity, 14, 52, 124 orientalism, 46, 62, 68, 153–4, 159, 161, 168, 176 Orwell, G., 163 Paine, T., 89, 94, 97–8, 103, 190 Pakistan, 160 Pangle, T., 81–3, 103, 107, 189 parliament, 23–6, 90, 122, 124, 132–3, 147, 186 House of Lords, 24, 26 participation, political, 6, 9, 13–5, 20, 28, 41–2, 45, 51–2, 54, 91, 95–6, 116, 120–1, 132, 144–5, 158, 167, 173 parties, political, 46, 139, 158, 168, 174, 179, 190 Pashukanis, E., 139, 190 Pasquino, P., 189 passions, 32, 37–8, 57, 71–2, 105, 190 Pateman, C., 146 Peirce, C. S., 190 Pennsylvania, Constitution, 91 Peru, 87 Pettit, P., 5–15, 17, 19, 20, 26, 40–3, 45, 53, 69, 73, 77–8, 90, 114,

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Index 120, 125–6, 130, 132–8, 140–7, 149–51, 170, 175, 182, 184–5 Philippines, 101, 161 Pitkin, H., 25, 34, 46, 80, 126, 182, 186–7 Plato, 41, 81 plebiscites/referendums, 13, 124, 144 pluralism, 1, 2, 76, 91, 135, 149, 155 Pocock, J., 16, 22, 28, 32, 35, 59, 79–81, 86, 97, 100, 182, 186 Poland, 69, 172, 188 police, 130, 147, 149–50 politics and statecraft, 28, 57, 95, 110, 125, 149 autonomous sphere of, 4, 12, 20, 35, 58, 64, 70, 111, 128, 130, 132, 138, 152, 158–9, 164, 166–8, 172, 176–7, 183–4 constitutional and normal 28, 95–6, 98, 106, 116, 128, 144 Polybius, 13, 29, 58 populism, 12–3, 53, 125, 161, 166, 191 pornography, 148 postmodernism, 8, 11, 118, 126, 129–30, 134–5, 151, 181–2, 185 poverty, 10, 38, 47–8, 51, 75, 109, 131, 160–1, 175, 178–9, 187 powers, balance of, 14, 46, 59, 88–9, 93–4, 96, 116, 144 pragmatism, 2, 5, 8, 10–1, 13, 15–6, 19, 76, 78, 121, 129–31, 145, 151, 185, 189–90 preferences, 9, 131–3, 146, 190 property, 8, 30–2, 35, 45, 47, 57, 64, 74–5, 79, 83, 90, 100, 108, 115, 131, 150, 153, 162, 184, 189 prudence, 3, 31, 40, 44, 50, 69, 189 Prussia, 53 psychology, 5, 15, 29, 43, 57, 94, 98, 104–5, 118–9, 130, 135–6, 141

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209

public choice theory, 5, 119, 128, 131–2, 149, 154 Putnam, R. D., 128 Rawls, J., 2, 10–11, 106, 135 realism, 24, 26, 28, 39, 125–6, 140, 180, 184–5 reason, dialogical, 125–6, 149 march of, 61–2, 84, 88, 97–102, 126–8 Regan, T., 141 religion anti-clericalism, 36, 43–4, 47, 71–2, 116, 119, 166–7, 169 Daoism, 169 fundamentalism, 166 Hinduism, 173–7, 179 Islam, 154, 161, 165–70, 177, 179, 191 political, 36, 44, 71, 73, 82, 110–1, 136, 155, 168, 170–2, 182–3 Protestantism, 33, 35, 39, 72, 79–80, 85, 103, 166–7, 176–9, 185, 189 Roman Catholicism, 44, 72, 143 Shi’ism, 167 Renaissance, 19, 22, 29, 38, 76–7, 79–80, 124, 150, 174, 177–8 rent-seeking, 131, 154, 156–7, 165 representation delegate or trustee, 13, 92, 158, 188 mimetic and semiotic, 96, 116, 145 rejected, 51–2, 78, 91, 96, 173–4 virtual, 12, 18, 48, 51, 54–5, 71–2, 78, 84, 87, 92, 94, 96, 116, 122, 147, 149, 156, 163, 183 see also republic, virtual republic ‘classical’, 1, 13, 22, 39, 79, 81, 84–6, 91, 95, 99, 103, 107–10, 112, 116–7, 189 commercial, 50, 56–7, 63 for expansion, 30, 63, 100–2, 116–7, 126, 182, 186 see also imperialism

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Index

210

republic – continued ideal size, 50, 93, 100–1, 125, 150, 183 mechanical, 18–21, 48, 64, 87, 93–5, 97, 102, 109, 115, 132–3, 150, 183 procedural, 99, 110 virtual, 12, 19–21, 23–4, 50–1, 54–6, 71–2, 78, 97, 149–50, 152, 156, 166, 183–4 see also representation, virtual rights, 8–9, 21, 39–40, 43, 45, 66, 82–4, 87, 90–2, 94–5, 97, 106–8, 110, 112–5, 127, 131, 135, 139, 141, 143–8, 163 Rome, 13, 16, 18, 22, 25, 29, 34, 36–7, 44–5, 77, 116, 182, 185–7 Romulus, 80 Roosevelt, T., 100–2 Rousseau, J. J., 2, 11, 14, 18–9, 25, 49–57, 60, 63, 65, 69–75, 77–8, 80, 87, 90–2, 96, 115, 117, 124–6, 140, 157, 172, 175, 182, 184–90 rule-centred theory, 3–4, 34, 42, 46, 67–8, 72, 77, 185, 187 Russia, 102, 133, 139, 141, 158–9, 172, 179, 182–3, 190 Saint-Pierre, C. I. C., 124 saints, rule of, 36, 166, 173 sanctions, 132 Sandel, M., 11, 19, 91, 99–100, 107, 109–11, 115, 128 Satan, 35 Saudi Arabia, 166, 168 Savonarola, G., 30 Schmitter, P., 15, 121, 127 Schneewind, J. B., 3, 73 Schumpeter, J., 163 Schwartz, J., 74 screening, 132–3 security Sen, A., 12 sexism see gender domination Shklar, J., 56, 70 Sidney, A., 23–4, 26–7, 31, 36, 39, 41–2, 46, 67, 82, 92, 125, 135

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Sieyès, E. J., 53, 65, 87, 95, 189 Singapore, 169 Skinner, Q., 5–6, 40, 185 slavery, 6–7, 41–2, 57, 71, 102, 110–1, 113, 142, 175 Smith, A., 50–1, 57–8, 75, 80, 84, 86, 96–8, 114, 117, 133, 172 socialism, 15, 19, 47, 67, 128, 133, 137–41, 146, 150–1, 153–4, 160, 171–3, 176, 180, 184, 187, 191 see also Marx sociology, 30, 51, 56, 59–60, 63–4, 66, 71, 73, 75–7, 80, 85, 102, 126, 151 South Africa, 163 South Sea Bubble, 32 sovereignty, 23–8, 50–6, 86–97, 121–6, 156–61 Soviet Union see Russia Sparta, 13, 25, 45 Spengler, O., 162 Stalin, J., 158 Stalinism, 128 state, neutrality of, 8–12, 44, 130, 147–8, 190 welfare, 122, 143 Stedman-Jones, G., 72 Steuart, J., 57 Stourzh, G., 188 subsidiarity, 123 Sudan, 166 Sun Yat-sen, 162, 176 Sunstein, C., 8–9, 12–3, 16, 19, 28, 119, 131, 147–8, 150, 154, 184–5 surrogacy, 148 Switzerland, 124, 153, 156, 158 Syria, 166, 191 Tagore, R., 174 Taiwan, 160, 169 Tawney, R. H., 140 taxation, 99, 114, 121–2, 143 Taylor, C., 3, 12, 176, 185 Thatcher, M., 124, 172–3, 184 Theseus, 80 Tocqueville, A. de, 58, 63, 76, 85, 89, 109, 128 totalitarianism, 1, 47, 56, 61, 71, 75, 182

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Index Trenchard, J., 32, 79 trust, 13, 37–9, 45, 57, 89, 95–6, 103–4, 116, 128, 131, 136, 141, 157, 170–2 trusts, 110, 112, 190 Turkey, 41, 46, 159 Turner, F. J., 101 tyranny, 2, 24, 26, 29, 52–3, 71, 78, 90, 92, 149, 181, 186 Ullmann, W., 18 United States anti-federalists, 86, 91, 94, 100, 106, 109 Bill of Rights, 106–7 Civil Rights Movement, 141 civil war, 99, 101–2, 107, 111 Constitution, 80, 86–98, 103–7, 112–4, 116, 182–3; First Amendment, 147; Second Amendment, 112–3; Fourteenth Amendment, 107 Declaration of Independence, 85, 97, 103, 110 Democratic Party, 110, 190 executive, 88–9, 94, 96, 144 Federalists, 86–92, 94, 98, 108–9, 115–6 ‘Great Society’, 107 ‘New Deal’, 107 revolution, 49, 63–4, 79–82, 85–8, 90, 92–7, 99, 103, 110, 113–4, 116, 128 South, 84, 99 Supreme Court, 96, 145 westward expansion, 100–2, 111 Whigs, 110–111 utilitarianism, 6, 9, 16, 64, 69, 73, 82, 103–4, 109, 112, 114, 119, 122, 124, 128, 135, 137, 140, 169

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Venezuela, 87 Venice, 16, 25, 29–31, 38, 42, 44, 46, 125, 186–7 Viroli, M., 52–3, 73, 189 virtù, 29–30, 33–4, 36–9, 44–5, 47, 68, 98, 101, 103, 126, 181, 183, 186, 190 virtues, artificial, 4, 37–8, 47, 69–71, 104, 187 centred theory, 3–4, 34, 42, 77, 132, 185 civic and moral, 17, 34–5, 68, 70–2, 104 ‘four cardinal’, 3, 34, 40, 185 political economy of, 106 privatized, 20, 72, 167, 182–3 Vivekananda, Swami, 173 Walpole, R., 32 Walzer, M., 132 Washington, G., 123 Watson, J., 160 Weber, M., 17, 39, 76, 107, 127, 189 Webster, N., 108 Weyland, K., 191 Whigs, 31–2, 187 see also United States will, general, 52, 54–6, 65, 70, 74 Wilson, J., 190 Winch, D., 58 Wittfogel, K. A., 154 women’s liberation see gender domination Wood, A., 76, 188 Wood, G., 85, 99, 108, 117, 189 workplace, 10, 132, 138 Young, I. M., 8, 142 Yugoslavia, 161

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Index

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01/27/99, 3:04 PM

Republican Theory in Political Thought: Virtuous or Virtual

Artificial Morality: Virtuous Robots for Virtual Games

Artificial Morality: Virtuous Robots for Virtual Games

The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought

Civic Virtues: Rights, Citizenship, and Republican Liberalism (Oxford Political Theory)

British Political Thought in History, Literature and Theory, 1500-1800

Political Theory In Transition

Medieval Islamic Political Thought

Shia Political Thought

Socio-Political Thought Gandhi

History of Political Thought

Coleridge's Political Thought

Greek Political Thought

Serbian Political Thought

The Intellectual Foundations of Chinese Modernity: Cultural and Political Thought in the Republican Era

Political Reconciliation (Routledge Innovations in Political Theory)

Power and Politics in Poststructuralist Thought: New Theories of the Political (Routledge Innovations in Political Theory)

Power and Politics in Poststructuralist Thought New Theories of the Political (Routledge Innovations in Political Theory)

Virtuous Lady

The Virtuous Daughter-In-Law

Post-Liberalism: Studies in Political Thought

Western Political Thought in Dialogue with Asia

Epic in Republican Rome

Marriage in Seventeenth-Century English Political Thought

Vergil's Empire: Political Thought in the Aeneid

Political Essays (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought)

Political Theory of Global Citizenship (Routledge Innovations in Political Theory)

Republican Treason: Republican Fascism Exposed

Pareto and Political Theory (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought)

Political Development Theory: The Contemporary Debate (International Series in Social & Political Thought)

Reappraising Political Theory: Revisionist Studies in the History of Political Thought

Republican Theory in Political Thought: Virtuous or Virtual

Artificial Morality: Virtuous Robots for Virtual Games

Artificial Morality: Virtuous Robots for Virtual Games

The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought

Civic Virtues: Rights, Citizenship, and Republican Liberalism (Oxford Political Theory)

British Political Thought in History, Literature and Theory, 1500-1800

Political Theory In Transition

Medieval Islamic Political Thought

Shia Political Thought

Socio-Political Thought Gandhi

History of Political Thought

Coleridge's Political Thought

Greek Political Thought

Serbian Political Thought

The Intellectual Foundations of Chinese Modernity: Cultural and Political Thought in the Republican Era

Political Reconciliation (Routledge Innovations in Political Theory)

Power and Politics in Poststructuralist Thought: New Theories of the Political (Routledge Innovations in Political Theory)

Power and Politics in Poststructuralist Thought New Theories of the Political (Routledge Innovations in Political Theory)

Virtuous Lady

The Virtuous Daughter-In-Law

Post-Liberalism: Studies in Political Thought

Western Political Thought in Dialogue with Asia

Epic in Republican Rome

Marriage in Seventeenth-Century English Political Thought

Vergil's Empire: Political Thought in the Aeneid

Political Essays (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought)

Political Theory of Global Citizenship (Routledge Innovations in Political Theory)

Republican Treason: Republican Fascism Exposed

Pareto and Political Theory (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought)

Political Development Theory: The Contemporary Debate (International Series in Social & Political Thought)

Reappraising Political Theory: Revisionist Studies in the History of Political Thought

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