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Republicanism is an ancient tradition of political thought that has enjoyed a robust revival in recent years. At its heart is the conviction that government is a public matter to be directed by self-governing citizens, not the domain of one ruler or small set of rulers. Dictionaries try to convey this point by defining a republic as a political system governed by elected representatives, including an elected executive officer, rather than by a monarch. Indeed, republicanism is often defined simply as opposition to monarchy.

The standard definition is misleading, however, in that it mistakes common associations for identifying characteristics. To be sure, republicans usually favor representative government and oppose monarchy, but they need not do either. The classical republican thinkers, such as Polybius and Cicero, had no clear conception of representative government, and there is nothing to prevent a republican from advocating a form of government that includes a substantial measure of direct democracy. Nor are republicans necessarily hostile to monarchy. Their objection is to unrestrained or absolute rule, whether by one person or many. This makes them hostile to absolute monarchies but not necessarily to constitutional ones. Above all, republicans want self-government under the rule of law, as the origin of the word republic itself indicates.

Classical Republicanism

Republic derives from the Latin res publica, the public thing or business. In some ways, though, republic stands between the older Greek term politeia (polity) and the newer English term commonweal (or commonwealth). In every case the emphasis is on government in the public interest, as when Aristotle defined polity as rule by the many in the interests of the whole city-state. To ensure that those who governed would promote the common good, the many, or the people, had to have a significant share of political power. But people also had to be restrained lest they tur n the government into a democracy—that is, government in the class interest of the poor and property less. To secure this restraint, republican thinkers recommended the cultivation of civic virtue and a mixed constitution.

Cultivating civic virtue was a matter of fostering the proper disposition in the citizenry, a category that did not include women, slaves, or resident aliens. Civic virtue had to be cultivated because the tendency toward corruption, or putting one’s private interest first, was so strong. The passions that corrupt citizens—especially avarice, ambition, and the love of luxury—had to be blunted or turned to the public benefit. The virtuous citizen thus would be one who lived simply, respected the rule of law, and identified his own good with that of the body politic. Citizens of this kind will have some sense of the public good or commonweal; in other words, and their business will be to govern themselves with an eye to that good rather than their private interests. In Cicero’s words, “the commonwealth [res publica] is the concern of a people, but a people is not any group of men assembled in any way, but an assemblage of some size associated with one another through agreement on law and community of interest” (1998, 18).

Some scholars distinguish between the Athenian and the Roman schools of republicanism, with the former stressing the importance of public-spirited political participation and the latter the value of independence or freedom under law, as captured in the enduring claim that a republic is the empire of laws, not of men. Allowing for such differences of emphasis should not, however, obscure the classical republicans’ agreement on the importance of the mixed or balanced government. According to this idea, developed by the Greek Polybius while a hostage in Rome, the best government is one that mixes rule by one person, the few, and the many because this mixture staves off corruption through a checks-and-balances process that makes it difficult for any element to acquire enough power to dominate the body politic.

Republicanism Revived

Many political thinkers of the Middle Ages and modern era drew on and extended the republican tradition, among them Niccolò Machiavelli, James Harrington, the Baron de Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the men who drafted a constitution that guaranteed every one of the United States “a republican form of government” (Article 4, Section 4). With the rise of liberalism, socialism, and the other modern ideologies, however, republicanism faded into the background. The increasing popularity of democracy also tended to eclipse republicanism, as the transition of the United States’ first political party from Republican to Democratic-Republican to simply Democratic indicates. In the second half of the twentieth century, though, a significant revival of interest in republicanism began.

Historians took the lead in this revival, but political philosophers such as Hannah Arendt also played an important part. The biggest boost probably came from J. G. A. Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment (1975), which combines Arendt’s praise of political activity with the historian’s interest in what Pocock called “the Atlantic republican tradition.”

By the end of the twentieth century, the republican revival was in full swing, with four themes predominating in neorepublican thought. First is an emphasis on equality that adds a belief in the equal moral worth of persons to the classical emphasis on the political equality of citizens. Second is the continuing commitment to self-government. Philip Pettit (1997) and Quentin Skinner (1998) have been particularly important in this regard because both call for a return to the republican (or “neoroman” in Skinner’s terms) conception of freedom as the absence of domination. Moreover, citizens free from domination may govern themselves in a deliberative fashion, which is the third neorepublican theme. As Cass Sunstein says, “republicans will attempt to design political institutions that promote discussion and debate among the citizenry; they will be hostile to systems that promote lawmaking as ‘deals’ or bargains among self-interested private groups” (1988, 1549). Finally, many neorepublicans share an abiding interest in civic virtue, without which debate and deliberation will be little more than a diversion from the “real” politics of bargaining for personal advantage.

The new republicans also face challenges, most notably the complaints that their theory is too nostalgic to meet the demands of an age of globalization or to shake off the biases implicit in the classical ideal of the citizen as a propertyowning, arms-bearing man. Neorepublicans are responding to these challenges, however, and the value of their revival no doubt will be judged in large part by the persuasiveness of their responses.

Bibliography:

Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. New York:Viking, 1965.
The Republic and The Laws. Translated by Niall Rudd. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Dagger, Richard. Civic Virtues: Rights, Citizenship, and Republican Liberalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Harrington, James. The Commonwealth of Oceana and A System of Politics. Edited by J. G. A. Pocock (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Honohan, Iseult. Civic Republicanism. London: Routledge, 2002.
Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince and Discourses. New York: Modern Library, 1950.
Montesquieu, Charles-Louis. The Spirit of the Laws. Translated by Ann M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller, and Harold S. Stone. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Pettit, Philip. Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Pocock, J. G. A. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975.
Rahe, Paul. Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. On the Social Contract. Translated by Judith Masters, edited by Roger Masters. New York: St. Martin’s, 1979.
Sandel, Michael. Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996.
Skinner, Quentin. Liberty before Liberalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Sunstein, Cass. “Beyond the Republican Revival.” Yale Law Journal 97 (1988): 1539–1589.

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