Dictionary:
re·pub·li·can (rĭ-pŭb'lĭ-kən)  |
| 5min Related Video: republican |
| Political Dictionary: republicanism |
(1) The belief that one's country ought to be a republic rather than a monarchy;
(2) specifically, in Ireland, support for the militant (armed) branch of Irish nationalism.
| British History: republicanism |
After the only British experience of a republic, the Commonwealth of 1649-60, republicanism did not have its own party. Nevertheless, republican sentiment was common among British radicals in the late 18th and 19th cents. Supporters of the American and French revolutions and admirers of Thomas Paine were usually republicans, as also were the plebeian radicals of the 1820s and 1830s, notably the followers of Richard Carlile, who published the Republican from 1819 to 1826. Some chartists were openly republican, as witness two late chartist journals, C. G. Harding's Republican (1848) and W. J. Linton's English Republic (1851-5). Periods of monarchical unpopularity stimulated republicanism. This was so during the Regency and again in the late 1860s and early 1870s, when a group of Liberal MPs, including Sir Charles Dilke and Joseph Chamberlain, revived there publican cause, fuelled by Queen Victoria's withdrawal from public life. At the same time popular republicanism was spread by Charles Bradlaugh and the secularist movement; and a short-lived journal, the Republican, appeared in 1870. The labour and socialist movements of the 1880s and 1890s were republican in principle. But republicanism was only one of the constituents and not a major part of the programme.
| French Literature Companion: Republicanism |
Republicanism [see also Republics]. Support for the republic and republican values. In France, the word is often applied specifically to a set of values which crystallized under the Third Republic and can be seen as a particular interpretation of the French
Before 1789 the word ‘republic’ could be used to mean either res publica, the common weal, whatever the regime, or, by contrast, a specifically non-monarchical constitution. Thus Rousseau could write that ‘tout gouvernement légitime est républicain’; but Montesquieu that ‘le gouvernement républicain est celui ou le peuple en corps, ou seulement une partie du peuple, a la souveraine puissance’. The first sense carried over into the 19th c.: coins minted in 1805 carried the legend ‘République française, Napoléon Empereur’. But the second sense prevailed, and is now linked to the founding event, the destitution of the monarchy on 10 August 1792, followed by the declaration of the republic on 22 September. A republican constitution, of which Condorcet was a leading architect, was voted in 1793 (though never applied). During the 19th c. republicanism gradually acquired its identity as a philosophy looking back to the Revolution and opposed to the royal or imperial regimes of the day. Michelet's lectures helped inspire the short-lived Second Republic and the republican opposition under the Second Empire, a political training-ground for the leaders of the Third Republic.
The Third Republic commissioned the Eiffel Tower to commemorate the centenary of 1789, and it is in the years before 1914, when a positive reading of the Revolution dominated, that historians see republicanism as taking root as a shared ideology among the regime's defenders. Its central principle was freedom from arbitrary or privileged rule, whether hereditary or feudal, whether based on wealth or on spiritual influence. The preferred regime was parliamentary and bicameral, with a government responsible to the assembly, a president with little power, and an independent judiciary. Political rights were identified as freedom of belief, speech, and the press, the right to a fair trial, equality before the law, and the right of the male citizen to choose representatives at fair and regular elections. Positivism, with its essentially progressive notion of political evolution and its faith in empirical science [see Comte], was enlisted as the philosophy of the modern republic, and Comte, Littré, Lavisse, Larousse, and Alain were its organic intellectuals. A powerful set of symbols became attached to the Republic: its anthem ‘La Marseillaise’ [see Rouget De L'isle], its flag the tricolour, its motto Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, and its personification Marianne (la gueuse to her enemies), whose bust adorns many a town hall and who often bears a resemblance to Delacroix's ‘Liberty’.
Michel Winock has argued that the ‘founding myth’ of the republic was really the Dreyfus Affair of the 1890s, the classic confrontation between raison d'état and the rights of the individual. As well as the issues of antisemitism and the claim of the army to be above the law, the Affair raised the spectre of the overthrow of the republic as a regime, thus inspiring its supporters to rally to its defence. The tensions exposed by the Affair also identified the Catholic Church as the irreconcilable enemy of republican values—and it is no coincidence that Church and State were separated soon afterwards, in 1905.
Education was the battleground of clerical and republican values. One of the Third Republic's most celebrated acts was the provision in the 1880s of ‘l'école Jules Ferry’: free, compulsory, and secular primary education for all children. Its aim was to educate citizens and to counter the influence of the Church over the young. Instituteurs and institutrices, trained in state colleges where a secular philosophy dominated, became ‘the hussars of the republic’, dispatched into every village of France to bring enlightened rational values to its children and to do battle with the local curé. Although la querelle religieuse has abated, its memory remains green, and passions can be roused even in the late 20th c. over state policy towards Church schools. The more extreme feelings of the turn of the century are vividly—if not objectively—evoked in Pagnol's portrait of his instituteur father in La Gloire de mon père (1957).
In the late 20th c. republicanism is still a meaningful term. Indeed, since the decline of Marxism as an intellectual tradition there has been a revival in the rhetoric of the republic, though the historical references have changed. The golden legend of Zola's ‘J'accuse’ and the école Jules Ferry is not forgotten, but is today fitted into a defence of human rights where the enemy is likely to be identified as the threat to individual freedom from authoritarian regimes or racial or religious intolerance in a multicultural society. In post-war years the Vichy regime [see Occupation And Resistance] has been identified as the ‘anti-republic’, and the aspect of it most severely condemned is its antisemitism. It has been argued that the Fifth Republic—which was seen by some as running counter to the republican tradition and having certain affinities with Bonapartism, namely a strong president and use of the referendum—has as a result successfully identified its own founding myth in the Resistance.
Republicanism has not always been viewed positively. The Third Republic version has sometimes been regarded as having stifled the development of liberal philosophy, while from a Marxist position, Guesde suggested that its only merit was to render more visible the economic oppression of capitalism. And feminists have pointed out that the universalism of the republican tradition broke down when it came to gender. It could be argued that the republic was constructed not so much without women as against them. Republican rhetoric speaks proudly of ‘universal suffrage’ being introduced as early as 1848, but republican politicians blocked women's suffrage until 1944, and French women did not acquire full civil rights on a par with men until the 1980s. An illustration of change within continuity, as well as uncertainty within the contemporary republican tradition, was provided by the ‘affaire du foulard’ of 1989. In the furore over Muslim school-girls who chose to cover their heads with scarves for religious reasons when attending class, both the religious neutrality of the state school and the rights of women were claimed as republican ideals.
— Sian Reynolds
Bibliography
| Philosophy Dictionary: republicanism |
An ideal of government that emphasizes the role of the active, participating citizen in government, often looking back to the role of the citizen in ancient Rome or Athens. Institutionally it aims at checks and balances to prevent the emergence of faction and majority tyranny, but also to the town-hall politics whereby decision-making has a bottom-up rather than a top-down structure.
| US Government Guide: republicanism |
Republicanism is the belief in the worth of a republic, a type of government that is based on the consent of the governed and is conducted by elected representatives of the people. In a republican government, the people are sovereign, or supreme, because their representatives serve at their pleasure for the common good. Today, people tend to use the terms republic and representative democracy interchangeably. In contrast to a republic, a pure or direct democracy is a form of government in which the people govern directly—in a town meeting, for example—instead of through representatives whom they elect.
In The Federalist No. 39, James Madison presented the idea of republicanism that is embodied in the U.S. Constitution:
What, then, are the distinctive characters of the republican form?… If we resort for a criterion… we may define a republic to be… a government which derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people, and is administered by persons holding their offices during pleasure for a limited period, or during good behavior. It is essential to such a government that it be derived from the great body of the society, not from an inconsiderable proportion or a favored class of it…. It is sufficient for such a government that the persons administering it be appointed, either directly or indirectly, by the people; and that they hold their appointments by either of the tenures just specified.
See also Constitutional democracy; Constitutionalism; Liberty under the Constitution
Sources
| US History Encyclopedia: Republicanism |
Republicanism is a term historians use to encompass the bundle of beliefs held by early Americans as they made the ideological transformation from loyal colonists to rebels and Patriots. Commonly applied to members of the elite, this protean word is easily adjusted to describe the ideological changes within the minds of common white men, Native Americans, African Americans, and women. Whether republicanism affects the structure of society from the top down or the bottom up is a matter of fierce debate. There is a consensus that republicanism infused the revolutionary generation and steered the debate over the writing of the Constitution—and the meaning of citizenship in the early republic.
The Basis of Republicanism
Classical republicanism insisted that civic virtue—the capacity to place the good of the commonwealth above one's own interest—became the key element of constitutional stability and liberty-seeking order. Only men who had a stake in society, preferably freeholder status of some magnitude, who were literate and familiar with major classical and Enlightenment thinkers, could lead society. Other people, including women, younger men, and the enslaved, had to depend on the elite's virtue to protect them against tyranny, conquest, and natural disasters. Americans understood that their newly arising state was part of history and thereby needed careful surveillance against the corruptions of time and excessive liberty. Ultimately, the American republican vision rested on four interlocking concepts. First, the ultimate goal of any political society should be the preservation of the public good or commonwealth; second, the citizens of a republic had to be capable of virtue, or the subordination of one's private interests in service of public needs; third, to be virtuous, citizens had to be independent of the political will of other men; fourth, citizens had to be active in the exercise of their citizenship.
Looking to the past for instructive examples, American thinkers searched the humanist legacies of Aristotle, Cicero, Tacitus, Plutarch, and others to bolster their beliefs that a simple, agricultural world nurtured civic humanism. Self-interest and patronage corrupted the simplicity of virtue and destroyed such past civilizations and would, if unchecked, ruin American society as well. While the American elite landed gentry and small farmers understood the advancing concept of capitalism and its concomitant qualities of self-interest, greed, and luxury, they believed that a hierarchical society led by the best men could curb excesses and preserve liberty for all.
A Struggle Over Definition
As Joyce Appleby has noted, American scholars took to theories of republicanism as a chemist would to the discovery of a new element. For scholars, republicanism offered a solution for the divisive debate over the character of the revolutionary generation. One view, articulated during the Progressive Era by Charles and Mary Beard, was that interest groups were the "pistons in the engine of change," and that the Revolution was as much a conflict, as Carl Becker put it, over who shall rule at home as over who shall rule. Opposing this version of American exceptionalism were scholars who noted the preponderance of English folkways. Moreover, Perry Miller and then Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood favored taking American writings seriously and accentuating their wrangling over their place in the British Empire. By the era of the American Revolution (1775–1783), this dissension had reached, as J. G. A. Pocock reported, a "Machiavellian moment," in which a new republican comprehension of history among the Patriots produced a powerful anxiety over English corruption. The biggest problems were the new moneymakers in London, their "corrupt and venal ministry," and a desire to enslave Americans.
Once Bailyn and other scholars started looking at the pamphlet wars in late colonial America, they found much to bolster their beliefs. In words and in symbols, early Americans articulated their themes and ideology. Bailyn showed how colonial Americans felt their virtue stemmed from the country faction of English politics and identified with its anxieties over court corruption, luxury, degeneration, and fear of enslavement. They felt a kinship with the country faction's critique of merchants and lawyers who set up international networks that ensnared the needy and unaware small producers, enslaved them, and weakened their civic humanism. As the revolutionary crisis of the 1760s and 1770s picked up steam, colonists argued about these anxieties in newspaper articles and pamphlets that were distributed widely along the Atlantic Coast. As subjects of the Crown, they had to be careful about identifying themselves and made plain their convictions through a series of pseudonyms. About half of the writers adopted monikers borrowed from republican Roman thought such as Publius, Brutus, and Cato. Two other significant groups took names from English Commonwealth heroes such as Harrington and Sidney or from such Greeks as Lycurgus, Solon, and Timeon. These ideas were expanded upon during the constitutional debates of the 1780s. Republican themes may also be found in the paper money, coins, state seals, and membership certificates of the era.
Further complicating these debates were the advents of modernization, population growth, and capitalism. Americans, like their European counterparts, were changing rapidly. Yeoman and gentry farmers, the prize proponents of republican ideology, were becoming capitalists and individualists by the 1750s. Because of this, republicanism might be construed as the last, nostalgic beliefs of a dying class of agrarian traditionalists. The American Revolution ensured that there would be wider distribution of land for common white males, who could offer greater support for their gentry leaders. Tradition-bound republicans adhered to a hierarchy of power. Noble birth, refinement, and money enhanced the dignity and purity of politics.
A Change in Power
Scholars of republicanism disagree sharply about when its power dissipated. Gordon Wood has contended that the defeat of the AntiFederalists in the constitutional vote of 1787 was the last gasp of classical republicanism. Disagreeing with Wood are such scholars as Lance Banning and Joyce Appleby, who have uncovered the resurgence of classic ideals among the Jeffersonian republicans of the 1790s. While the Jeffersonians, Appleby contends, were capitalist and liberal, they used classical republicanism as a reaction to the more aristocratic forms of republicanism practiced by Alexander Hamilton and other Federalists.
Whenever republican power faded, its shadow fell across many people that Charles Beard might consider interest groups. One of the big tasks of social historians who have reacted to Bernard Bailyn's sweeping thesis has been to prove that ordinary Americans held ideologies as well and considered themselves fit to share power or displace the older elites. The Revolution did unleash greater expectations among the middling ranks of Americans. Because republicanism demanded more than mere mechanical exploration of the changes in power, scholars needed to identify the ideological power seeking of the middling and lower orders. Jesse Lemisch began this by showing how seamen in New York City felt grievances against the Crown as surely as did Virginia landowners. Richard Hofstedter argued that the Revolution actually produced a "status shift" in power, a concept used expertly by Edward Countryman in his A People in Revolution: The American Revolution and Political Society in New York, 1760–1790 (1981) , about the change in political power in post revolutionary New York. Sean Wilentz subsequently showed how artisans added equality to the four precepts of republicanism listed earlier. The American Revolution instilled in common Americans the liberal idea that all citizens, at least all white male citizens, should be entitled to their natural civil and political rights under a representative, democratic system of laws. Artisan republicanism, as Wilentz described it, set off a generation of conflicts between elite politicians and ambitious mechanics over office holding, suffrage, and patronage. As capitalism transformed the craft traditions, these battles reared up between masters and journeymen as well.
Even groups who might be considered targets of enslavement or guided by the heavy hand of patronage, and thereby lacking in virtue, were capable of their own brand of republicanism. Consider the sturdy cartmen of New York City, who gained a monopoly on their semiskilled position by a bond of attachment via a freemanship with city officials. Throughout the colonial period, the carters, who gained the vote under the freemanship, exerted sizable political power alongside such brethren as butchers, bakers, and tavern keepers. After the Revolution, when the Federalist Party tried to channel the carters' votes, they rebelled because they believed that their stake in urban society came from their long-standing residence and their status as licensed workers.
Similar brands of republicanism could be found among African Americans. Republican-minded Americans often mentioned their fears of enslavement. The real slaves of early America responded with frustration over the lack of interest in their status displayed by republicans. African Americans found throughout the American Revolution and the constitutional period that conservative or radical republicans rarely gave much thought to the plight of enslaved Africans. Accordingly, they transferred their loyalties to the Crown. This does not mean that blacks were clients of the British. Rather, during the American Revolution, just as their white brothers did, African Americans sought participation in politics and demanded citizenship. When their hopes were rebuffed, several thousand of them sailed away with the departing British army in 1783, headed first to Nova Scotia, then to Sierra Leone to form a new nation in which they were the republican elite. Those left behind tried valiantly to persuade republicans in power to end the moral corruption of slavery and admit African Americans into the republican society. That they failed to convince speaks more about the sins of the founding fathers than of black inadequacies.
White American women were bound to a lesser status in the United States by their sex. During the American Revolution and its constitutional aftermath, little attention was paid to the political hopes of women. For many years, the colonial concept of the feme covert limited female political aspirations. As scholars have recently shown, however, women, in the same ways as African Americans, learned to exert their republicanism in churches, benevolent societies, schools, and above all, as the mothers of republicans. Their ideology stemmed perhaps from a protopsychology or from morals, but by the early nineteenth century, American women, white or black, were prepared to demand greater leadership.
Outside of European American society and well before the American Revolution, Native Americans created a unique brand of republicanism. In the Middle Ground, situated in the present-day upper Midwest, Indian republics coalesced from the migrations of survivors of war and plague. Outside of the French alliance and well beyond the shards of English power, Native American republicans in the 1740s and 1750s established an egalitarian political power that helped them defend against European incursions.
What these examples demonstrate is that republicanism is a protean concept with almost limitless possibilities. Early in the discussion about republicanism, scholars were delighted at its consensual potentials to explain Revolutionary and constitutional politics. The separateness of the examples described does not deny that consensual quality. Rather, each group, as American politics always does, requires the respect and understanding of its position.
Bibliography
Appleby, Joyce. Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Hodges, Graham Russell, ed. The Black Loyalist Directory: African Americans in Exile after the Revolutionary War. New York: Garland, 1996.
———. New York City Cartmen, 1667–1850. New York: New York University Press, 1986.
Pangle, Thomas L. The Spirit of Modern Republicanism: The Moral Vision of the American Founders and the Philosophy of Locke. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
Pettit, Phillip. Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.
Pocock, J. G. A. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975.
Sellers, M. N. S. American Republicanism: Roman Ideology in the United States Constitution. New York: New York University Press, 1994.
White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Wilentz, Sean. Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.
| History 1450-1789: Republicanism |
Broadly defined, republicanism means a preference for nonmonarchical government and a strong dislike of hereditary monarchy. Narrowly defined, and in its early modern context, it means self-government by a community of citizens in a city-state.
Republicanism is a prominent concept in the history of political thought. Republican ideology claimed that citizens of republics enjoyed a liberty unknown to the subjects of monarchies because they were bound by laws that they themselves had made, not the personal whim of an individual monarch. In the early modern period, republicanism had special relevance in Italy (where Florence and Venice became the most famous republics in early modern history), Switzerland (a federation of autonomous rural and urban cantons that had never been effectively governed by a monarch), Germany (where many free imperial cities maintained a high degree of autonomy within the Holy Roman Empire), the Netherlands (where a new state, the Dutch Republic, was born in the sixteenth century out of a revolt against the Spanish monarchy), England (where, in the mid-seventeenth century, a revolt against the monarchy led to a short period of kingless government that paved the way for parliamentary government under a constitutional monarchy), and the United States of America (which revolted against the British monarchy and became a federal congressional republic in the 1770s). Early modern theorists whose writings are relevant to republicanism include Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), Francesco Guicciardini (1483–1540), Thomas More (1478–1535), Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), John Milton (1608–1674), John Locke (1632–1704), Algernon Sidney (1622–1683), Charles-Louis de Secondat de Montesquieu (1689–1755), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). What follows is an introduction to republics and republicanism, not a survey of thinkers or their ideas. Three institutional levels within republican government will be distinguished: the voting assembly, the intermediate council, and the executive magistracies. The differences between three models will also be emphasized: direct democracy, republicanism, and parliamentary representation.
Ancient and Medieval Background
Greek city-states, when not ruled by tyrants, governed themselves by some form of direct democracy: an assembly of all the adult male citizens, meeting and voting frequently to pass legislation, make decisions, act as a high court, and elect (from their own ranks) the short-term members of the intermediate councils and holders of magistracies and military commands. The Greek model of direct democracy was replicated in European history only at the village level, notably in Switzerland, and in the imaginations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the proto-Romantics.
In contrast, the Roman republican model became prominent in later European history. Compared to direct democracy, it was marked by greater social stratification and the dominance of (largely hereditary) elites. Livy's history of the early Roman republic depicted the foundation of the republic in 753 B.C.E. as a revolt in the name of liberty by members of leading families against a primeval monarchy. The earliest group of ruling families, and the clans they spawned, called themselves "patricians" and formed a hereditary status group that attempted to monopolize political power against the rest of the population—the plebeians. Livy records and dramatizes bitter social and political conflict between the patricians and the plebeians, but the latter succeeded over several centuries in breaking the patrician monopoly on the political institutions, so that the political elite included members of both groups.
Instead of a simple voting assembly, Rome had a complicated system of assemblies in which individual preferences were combined into bloc votes, with preponderant weight given to the blocs in which men of higher status and higher socioeconomic class were enrolled. There was a semi-formal nobility consisting of families whose members, past and present, patrician or plebeian, had competed successfully in the annual elections of magistrates in the assembly, and entry by "new men" (ones without an office-holding ancestor) into the nobility was possible, though never easy. The nobility governed the republic through an intermediate council that had no real precedent in Greek history and became one of the most famous political institutions of all time: the Roman Senate. All former magistrates were senators, and though they often stood for election and left the Senate for a year to hold a magistracy or a military command, they always returned to it at the end of their term: membership was for life. The Senate was the locus of debate and decision making in Rome. Many of Cicero's most famous works are political speeches delivered during deliberations in the Senate or prior to a vote in one of the assemblies.
Social conflict never disappeared from the Roman republic, but that did not prevent its armies of citizen-soldiers from making it the greatest conquest state in European history. The Roman republic ended in chaos and was transformed into an empire ruled by a monarchical emperor, but the Senate survived for as long as the empire did; its members, though, became a hereditary status group, no longer the winners of electoral contests held in a voting assembly. The historian Tacitus (c. 55–c. 117 C.E.) vividly described the despotic behavior of the early Roman emperors, the corrupt courts that surrounded them, the servile and fearful behavior of the Senators, and the decline of free debate in the Senate.
The European cities of the medieval and early modern periods were born as communes: sworn associations of male heads of households who collectively claimed freedom from feudal overlordship. The primordial institution of the commune was the assembly of all the citizens, as in the ancient Mediterranean cities. Each commune was a small republic, and the story of republicanism in Europe is largely the story of Europe's cities. Europe was the only area of world civilization in which so many and such autonomous city republics emerged. In every communal city of Europe, as in the ancient Mediterranean, citizenship was a privileged hereditary status to which newcomers were not granted easy or automatic access. In each city, families belonging to the earlier strata tried to monopolize political power, like the Roman patricians, and were challenged from below by ambitious families and rising status and socioeconomic groups. In each there was a complex structure of councils and executive committees, but the primitive communal institution, the voting assembly of all the citizens, ceased to be summoned regularly in most cities.
The European cities were the motor of a dynamic European economy based on free rather than slave labor; this was a fundamental difference between the city-states of the ancient world and the European cities. In Italy a number of cities (Milan was an example) went from republican (or "communal") government to monarchical rule by a princely family at the close of the Middle Ages, but in others, like Florence and Venice, republican structures persisted. Florence and Venice were not the only republican city-states in Italy, but they were the only ones to conquer not just the adjacent countryside but many other smaller cities as well, thereby building up large territorial states.
Elsewhere in Europe, and even in some parts of the Italian peninsula, the feudal system was giving birth to a type of political institution unknown to the ancient world or the republican tradition: the feudal parliament or meeting of the Estates, an assembly of representatives delegated by the various social strata and localities in the lands of a monarch to represent them. But the conquered subjects of Florence and Venice were not represented in any parliament, and thus had no institutional recourse against harsh exploitation. Parliamentary government in nation-states was the way of the future; republican government in city-states had, by the close of the early modern period, come to the end of its historical course.
Florence
Florence was one of the centers of Renaissance humanism, a movement that began in the late thirteenth century and flourished in the fifteenth, aiming to revive the use of classical Latin and knowledge of all aspects of Greek and Roman antiquity. The Roman writers with the greatest prestige and influence had lived in the late republic (Cicero, Sallust) or under the early empire (Livy, Tacitus), and this gave a superficial republican ethos to Renaissance humanism, which is seen in the realms of political thought and artistic imagery. The city of Florence took particular pride in regarding itself as the daughter and heir of the Roman republic and Roman liberty.
There are objective parallels between the history of the Roman republic and empire in the ancient world and Florence in the early modern period. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Florence, despite its wealth and control of much of Tuscany, was made turbulent by the struggle for political power between older and more recent factions of powerful families and their clienteles. Only adult male guild members were entitled to hold office, and the complex guild-based constitutional machinery of Florence produced the same result as the machinery of the Roman republic: a steep stratification of political power based on status and socioeconomic class. There was rapid rotation through the small executive committees in which the power of government was concentrated, and individuals were chosen to hold office randomly, through a lottery (the drawing of names from a bag of eligible candidates). Legislation was ratified in a couple of intermediate councils that also had rotating membership.
From the 1430s to 1494, the Medici family controlled Florence, although formally their status was no different from that of any other great family. They manipulated the constitution in at least three ways: by controlling the lottery process so that names were no longer drawn at random; by the abuse of emergency powers; and by creating new, smaller, more permanent councils whose members were carefully screened for loyalty to the Medici. The Florentines called this "narrow government." From a favorable standpoint (that of the Medici, their clientele, and the top families allied to them), narrow government was more efficient and consistent than the "wide government" of the past, in which many more citizens had rotated through the offices, ruling and being ruled in turn. But "wide government" was traditionally seen as the essence of Florentine liberty, so from an unfavorable standpoint (that of the rival families excluded from power, as well as the many families of middling status whose ambition to participate in government was being frustrated), the Medici regime was an assault on Florence's traditional republican liberty.
In the revolution of 1494 the Medici were driven from Florence. There followed a political struggle over the constitution, with the leading families striving to keep it as narrow as possible (aristocratic, but not princely), and a popular movement led by Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498) that demanded a return to wide government. The latter prevailed, and thus there began a unique eighteen-year period in the history of Florence (and republicanism): the republic of 1494–1512. This republic was ended by the return of the Medici, who set about establishing princely rule. The Florentines revolted against them and revived the republic between 1527 and 1530, but after that the Medici proceeded to make themselves hereditary grand-dukes of Florence and Tuscany, in a historical parallel to the establishment of the Roman Empire on the ruins of the Roman republic. Niccolò Machiavelli, the first great political thinker of modern times, had all of his direct experience of political and military affairs as a senior administrator and diplomat for the republic of 1494–1512, and many other Florentines also participated in political life and composed political treatises (long and short, practical and theoretical) between 1494 and the 1530s. At no other place or time in Europe did political thought about republics (and the alternative form, monarchy, or as Machiavelli called it, "principality") flourish with the same intensity.
In the Florentine republic of 1494–1512 and 1527–1530, the direct voting assembly of all the citizens was revived. Over 3,000 male scions of families whose members had held office in the past became permanent members of the assembly; although this was still only a fraction of the entire population, it represented an extraordinarily high degree of political participation in the context of Europe at that time. (The members of the Florentine voting assembly were not modern liberal democrats though, and like virtually every other status group that won political entitlement in the history of ancient and modern republics, they wanted admission to the assembly in the future to be limited to their own male descendants.) There was also an intermediate council, which in Florence had little importance, and the typical array of small executive committees. Throughout the period 1494–1512 the families of high status never ceased to press for more narrow government, in which their putative expertise and insight would prevail over the inexperienced and inept majority; their ideal was to govern aristocratically, like Roman senators. Many of these families defected from the republic and supported the return of the Medici in 1512, and again in 1530.
The internal politics of republican Florence were not Machiavelli's main concern when, in forced retirement after 1512, he became a writer on politics. Machiavelli did not believe that the Florence he had served, or any other modern republic, was a model for imitation, because all had been corrupted by Christianity. His model for analysis and imitation in his major work, the Discourses, was the Roman republic, where there had been a fruitful tension between the competitive drive of a small number of individual nobles to dominate their rivals and win glory, and the opposing desire of the mass of the citizens to enjoy the spoils of conquest and check the imperiousness of the nobles. It was this tension, directed outward against neighboring peoples, that had made Rome the greatest of all conquest states. Since Machiavelli believed that the same two conflicting impulses were present and active in all societies, whether they were governed as principalities or republics, his basic vision of political life was republican, even in his famous short treatise The Prince.
Many other Florentines did ponder the problems and fate of their own republic more closely than Machiavelli. One was Francesco Guicciardini (1483–1540), and another was Donato Giannotti (1492–1573), a strong proponent of wide government who wrote the treatise Republica Fiorentina in the 1530s to describe what had gone wrong with the Florentine republic and how it could have been preserved. Giannotti was also the author of an influential description of the Venetian system of republican government.
Venice
Venice was the clearest example of the explicit hierarchical correlation between social status and political participation that differentiated republicanism from ancient (and modern) democracy, and was considered a miraculous example of social and political stability. In 1297 a group of Venetian families achieved what the patricians of ancient Rome and the politically active families of Florence had always dreamed of: a constitutional limitation of political participation to themselves and their male descendants. These families also came to be called "patrician," and although new families were admitted in every generation, the Venetian patriciate was essentially composed of the same families for centuries. Not all of them were rich and powerful, but all enjoyed the same exclusive right to have their sons admitted to the voting assembly, which was roughly the same size as the one in Florence.
The offspring of the political elite, a small number of rich and powerful families, sought to ascend through elections held in the assembly to membership in the intermediate council, the Senate—a locus of prestige and power comparable to the Roman Senate itself—and from there to the array of small committees that made up the executive. The head of state and government, the doge, was elected for life but did not have what we would call presidential powers, for the Venetian leadership was essentially collective. The most feared and powerful committee of the Venetian executive was actually the Council of Ten, which attended to state security. They worked in secret, received anonymous denunciations, had, or were believed to have, informants everywhere, and could make "enemies of the state" disappear. Hence there arose a "black legend," a negative image of life in Venice that contrasted with the positive image of Venetian republican liberty.
Patrician Cities
Florence and Venice were exceptional because they were fully sovereign and were capitals of territorial states. But there were many other cities in Europe, especially in Italy and Germany, which never conquered large territorial states of their own, but which continued to govern themselves as republics while retaining a high degree of autonomy within larger (and by later standards, looser) state frameworks. Over the span of time from the Middle Ages to the early modern period, social and political mobility gradually dwindled in all these cities, and they evolved into patrician republics governed by narrow oligarchies. The families whose male members had a claim to a seat on the city council became a hereditary, and largely closed, status group, visibly distinguished by their style of dress, their titles, and their membership in exclusive dining and drinking clubs. Frankfurt, Augsburg, Nuremberg, and Hamburg were renowned patrician city-states in the Holy Roman Empire. There is a vast literature on these and many other European cities, tracing the social and political history of each in detail, and seldom making any reference to republicanism as a concept, although it is in these cities that republicanism lived out the last phase of its history. Internally there was little or no republican liberty left (no more freedom to participate in politics, that is, except for the patrician elite) but externally the patricians were adept at defending another kind of republican liberty (the local autonomy of their cities) against centralized control by the larger state structures into which their cities were integrated.
The city of Bologna, which was part of the large Papal State of central and northern Italy, is a good example: its liberty was based on the pact it made with Pope Nicholas V (reigned 1447–1455) when it submitted to the papacy in 1447. This was a contract that bound both parties and was renegotiated with every new papacy. The Bolognese patriciate used it to protect their autonomy for the next three hundred years, in what can be seen from one standpoint as stubborn particularism, preserving entrenched local privilege against the bureaucratic rationalization of the modern state, and from another as the proud defense of local tradition, local jurisdiction, and control of the local treasury against arbitrary centralism.
It was in defense of similar contractually protected local rights that the northern provinces of the Netherlands rebelled against Spain in the late sixteenth century and formed a new state, the Dutch Republic, that became a beacon for opponents of monarchy (republicans in the broad sense) during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Netherlanders repeatedly fended off attempts by the house of Orange to establish a new regal dynasty, and adopted a confederal system of government with strong local autonomy and weaker authority at the higher levels. Towns governed by local patriciates dominated the provinces, there was a parliament (an "Estates") for each province attended by local delegates, and there was an Estates-General for the whole federation, attended by provincial delegates. Thus the Dutch Republic was a fusion of the republican and the parliamentary-representative models.
England and the United States of America
Because the English civil war between parliamentary and royalist forces in the mid-seventeenth century led to regicide and ten years of kingless government, and because the United States of America was an antimonarchical offshoot of the civilization of the British Isles, there is a large scholarly literature attempting to trace the influence of republicanism in Britain and its rebellious colonies. Controversy and debate abound in this field, for in Britain there had never been an actual republican city-state, so scholars are left to deal with language, concepts, and ideas. Britain actually led European civilization down the road to a different destination: government by parties holding parliamentary majorities, with loyal opposition from opposing parties—a structure of government foreign to the republican tradition. It also led Europe in the development of liberalism as a set of political and economic ideas, especially through the influence of John Locke. In eighteenth-century Britain and its American offshoot, republican ideas formed a counterpart to liberal ones in political thought, and republicanism and liberalism are seen as conflicting intellectual influences on the founders of the American republic. The values of liberalism include economic individualism and constitutional limitation on the power of government to invade the sphere of private life, while republicanism (in this context) stands for the disinterested devotion of individual citizens to the common good, and their willingness to set aside private concerns and participate in public debate and decision making.
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Chambers, David, and Brian Pullan, eds. Venice. A Documentary History, 1450–1630. Oxford and Cambridge, Mass., 1992.
Giannotti, Donato. Republica fiorentina. Edited by Giovanni Silvano. Geneva, 1990.
Guicciardini, Francesco. Dialogue on the Government of Florence. Edited by Alison Brown. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1994.
Harrington, James. The Commonwealth of Oceana and a System of Politics. Edited by J. G. A. Pocock. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1992.
Kohl, Benjamin G., and Ronald G. Witt, eds. The Earthly Republic. Philadelphia, 1978.
Kraye, Jill, ed. Cambridge Translations of Renaissance Philosophical Texts. Volume 2: Political Philosophy. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1997.
Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince. Edited by Quentin Skinner and Russell Price. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1988.
Machiavelli, Niccolò, and Francesco Guicciardini. The Sweetness of Power: Machiavelli's Discourses and Guicciardini's Considerations. Translated with introduction by James B. Atkinson and David Sices. De Kalb, Ill., 2002.
More, Thomas. Utopia. Edited by George M. Logan and Robert M. Adams. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 2002.
Sharp, Andrew, ed. The English Levellers. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1998.
Sidney, Algernon. Court Maxims. Edited by Hans W. Blom, Eco Haitsma-Mulier, and Ronald Janse. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1996.
van Gelderen, Martin, ed. The Dutch Revolt. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1993.
Wootton, David, ed. Divine Right and Democracy. An Anthology of Political Writing in Stuart England. Harmondsworth, U.K., 1986.
Secondary Sources
Berengo, Marino. L'Europa delle città. Il volto della società urbana europea tra Medioevo ed Età moderna. Turin, 1999. See especially ch. 4, "I cittadini e la vita pubblica," and ch. 5, "Patriziato e nobiltà."
Blickle, Peter. Obedient Germans? A Rebuttal. A New View of German History. Translated by Thomas A. Brady. Charlottesville, Va., 1997.
Bock, Gisela, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli, eds. Machiavelli and Republicanism. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1990.
Bouwsma, W. J. Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty. Berkeley, 1968.
Burns, J. H., ed. The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1991.
Cooper, Roslyn Pesman. "The Florentine Ruling Group under the Governo Popolare." Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 7 (1985): 71–181.
De Benedictis, Angela. Repubblica per contratto. Bologna: una città europea nello Stato della Chiesa. Bologna, 1995.
Fasano Guarini, Elena. "La crisi del modello repubblicano: Patriziati e oligarchie." In La Storia, vol. 3, L'Età moderna, i quadri generali. Edited by Nicola Tranfaglia and Massimo Firpo, pp. 553–584. Turin, 1987.
Finlay, Robert. Politics in Renaissance Venice. London and New Brunswick, N.J., 1980.
Gelderen, Martin van. The Political Thought of the Dutch Revolt 1555–1590. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1992.
Gelderen, Martin van, and Quentin Skinner, eds. Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage. 2 vols. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 2002.
Grendler, Paul F. "The Leaders of the Venetian State, 1540–1609: A Prosopographical Analysis." Studi Veneziani 19 (1990), pp. 35–85.
Guidi, Guidubaldo. Lotte, pensiero, e istituzioni politiche nella repubblica fiorentina dal 1494 al 1512. 3 vols. Florence, 1992.
Hankins, James. "Humanism and the Origins of Modern Political Thought." In The Cambridge Companion to Renaisance Humanism, edited by Jill Kraye, pp. 118–141. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1996.
Koenigsberger, Helmut, ed. Republiken und Republikanismus im Europa der frühen Neuzeit. Munich, 1988.
Lane, Frederick C. Venice. A Maritime Republic. Baltimore, 1973.
Mansfield, Harvey C. Machiavelli's Virtue. Chicago, 1996.
Mc Cuaig, William. Carlo Sigonio: The Changing World of the Late Renaissance. Princeton, 1989. Chapters 2 and 3 deal with the Roman republic as it was understood in Europe from the sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries.
Pangle, Thomas L. The Spirit of Modern Republicanism: The Moral Vision of the American Founders and the Philosophy of Locke. Chicago, 1989.
Pocock, J. G. A. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton, 1975.
Rahe, Paul A. Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1992.
Rössler, Helmuth, ed. Deutsches Patriziat 1430–1740. Limburg, 1968.
Rubinstein, Nicolai. "Politics and Constitution in Florence at the End of the Fifteenth Century." In Italian Renaissance Studies, edited by E. F. Jacob, pp. 148–183. London, 1960.
Silvano, Giovanni. La "Republica de' Viniziani." Ricerche sul repubblicanesimo veneziano in età moderna. Florence, 1993.
Stephens, J. N. The Fall of the Florentine Republic, 1512–1530. Oxford, 1983.
Stolleis, Michael, ed. Recht, Verfassung, und Verwaltung in der frühneuzeitlichen Stadt. Vienna, 1991.
von Albertini, Rudolf. Das florentinische Staatsbewusstsein im Übergang von der Republik zum Prinzipat. Bern, 1955. Italian translation, Turin, 1970.
Wootton, David, ed. Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 1649–1776. Stanford, 1994.
—WILLIAM MCCUAIG
| Politics: Republican |
| Word Tutor: republican |
The Republican form of government is the highest form of government: but because of this it requires the highest type of human nature, a type nowhere at present existing.
— Herbert Spencer (1820-1903)
| Quotes About: Republican |
Quotes:
"We all have the republican spirit in our veins, like syphilis in our bones. We are democratized and venerealized."
- Charles Baudelaire
"A Republican by principle and devotion, I will, until my death, oppose all Royalists and all enemies of my Government and the Republic."
- Jean Baptiste Bernadotte
"The king-times are fast finishing. There will be blood shed like water, and tears like mist; but the peoples will conquer in the end. I shall not live to see it, but I foresee it."
- Lord Byron
"People think they have taken quite an extraordinarily bold step forward when they have rid themselves of belief in hereditary monarchy and swear by the democratic republic. In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy."
- Friedrich Engels
"The republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind."
- Thomas Jefferson
"The republic, as I at least understand it, means association, of which liberty is only an element, a necessary antecedent. It means association, a new philosophy of life, a divine Ideal that shall move the world, the only means of regeneration vouchsafed to the human race."
- Giuseppe Mazzini
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| Wikipedia: Republicanism |
Republicanism is the ideology of governing a nation as a republic, where the head of state is appointed by means other than heredity, often elections. The exact meaning of Republicanism varies depending on the cultural and historical context. The sometimes contrary definitions are all covered in this article.
Contents
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Radicalism emerged in European states in the 19th century. Although most radical parties later came to be in favor of economic liberalism (capitalism), thus justifying the absorption of radicalism into the liberal tradition, all 19th century radicals were in favor of a constitutional republic and universal suffrage, while European liberals were at the time in favor of constitutional monarchy and census suffrage. Thus, radicals were as much Republicans as liberals, if not more. This distinction between Radicalism and Liberalism hasn't totally disappeared in the 20th century, although many radicals simply joined liberal parties or became virtually identical to them. For example, the Left Radical Party in France or the (originally Italian) Transnational Radical Party which exist today have a lot more to do with Republicanism than with simple liberalism.
Thus, Chartism in the UK or even the early Republican, Radical and Radical-Socialist Party in France were closer to Republicanism (and the left-wing) than to liberalism, represented in France by the Orleanists who rallied to the Republic only in the late 19th century, after the comte de Chambord's 1883 death and the 1891 papal encyclicalDe Rerum Novarum. Radicalism remained close to Republicanism in the 20th century, at least in France where they governed several times with the other left-wing parties (participating in both the Cartel des gauches coalitions as well as the Popular Front).
Discredited after the Second World War, French Radicals split into a left-wing party – the Left Radical Party, an associate of the Socialist Party – and the Radical Party "valoisien", an associate party of the conservative Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) and its Gaullist predecessors. Italian Radicals also maintained close links with Republicanism as well as Socialism, with the Partito radicale founded in 1955 which became the Transnational Radical Party in 1989.
Anti-monarchial republicanism remains a political force of varying importance in many states. In the European monarchies, such as the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Sweden there has not been much contemporary popular support for republicanism. In such states republicanism is usually motivated by decreasing popularity of the Royal Family, who may be increasingly embroiled in scandal or conflict. However the classical argument against monarchy versus the egalitarian aspects of republicanism will often remain prominent as well. There are also republican movements of varying size and effect in the Commonwealth nations Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Jamaica and Barbados. In these countries, republicanism is largely about the post-colonial evolution of their relationships with the United Kingdom.
A different interpretation of republicanism is used among political scientists. To them a republic is the rule by many and by laws while a princedom is the arbitrary rule by one. By this definition despotic states are not republics while, according to some such as Kant, constitutional monarchies can be. Kant also argues that a pure democracy is not a republic, as it is the unrestricted rule of the majority. For some, republicanism meant simply the lack of a monarchy, while for others monarchy was compatible with republicanism.
In Ancient Greece several philosophers and historians set themselves to analysing and describing forms of government of classical republicanism. There is no single written expression or definition from this era that exactly corresponds with a modern understanding of the term "republic". However, most of the essential features of the modern definition are present in the works of Plato, Aristotle, Polybius, and other ancient Greeks. These elements include the ideas of mixed government and of civic virtue. It should be noted that the modern title of Plato's dialogue on the ideal state (The Republic) is a misnomer when seen through the eyes of modern political science (see Republic (Plato)). Some scholars have translated the Greek concept of "politeia" as "republic", but most modern scholars reject this idea.
A number of Ancient Greek states such as Athens and Sparta have been classified as classical republics, though this uses a definition of republic that was developed much later.
A serious claim for early democratic institutions comes from the independent "republics" of India, sanghas and ganas, which existed as early as the sixth century BC and persisted in some areas until the fourth century AD. The evidence is scattered and no pure historical source exists for that period. In addition, Diodorus (a Greek historian at the time of Alexander the Great's excursion of India), mentions that independent and democratic states existed in India.[1]
Both Livy (in Latin, living in Augustus' time) and Plutarch (in Greek, a century later) described how Rome had developed its legislation, notably the transition from kingdom to republic, based on Greek examples. Probably some of this history, composed more than half a millennium after the events, with scant written sources to rely on, is fictitious reconstruction - nonetheless the influence of the Greek way of dealing with government is clear in the state organisation of the Roman Republic.
The Greek historian Polybius, writing more than a century before Livy, was one of the first historians describing the emergence of the Roman Empire, and he had a great influence on Cicero when this orator was writing his politico-philosophical works in the 1st century BC. One of these works was De re publica, where Cicero links the Latin res publica concept to the Greek politeia." As explained in the res publica article, this concept only partly correlates with the modern term "republic," although the word "republic" is derived from res publica.
Among the many meanings of the term res publica, it is most often translated "Republic" where the Latin expression refers to the Roman state and its form of government between the era of the Kings and the era of the Emperors. This Roman Republic would by a modern understanding of the word still be defined as a true republic, even if not coinciding in all the features. Enlightenment philosophers saw it as an ideal system; for example there was no systematic separation of powers in the Roman Republic.
Romans still called their state "Res Publica" in the era of the early emperors. The reason for this is that on the surface the state organisation of the Republic had been preserved by the first emperors without great alteration. Several offices from the era of the Republic held by individuals were combined under the control of a single person. These forms were accorded "permanent" status and thus gradually placed sovereignty in the person of the Emperor. Traditionally, such references to the early empire are not translated as "republic".
As for Cicero, his description of the ideal state in De re publica is more difficult to qualify as a "republic" in modern terms. It is rather something like enlightened absolutism--not to say benevolent dictatorship--and indeed Cicero's philosophical works, as available at that time, were very influential when Enlightenment philosophers like Voltaire developed these concepts. Cicero expressed however reservations concerning the republican form of government: in his theoretical works he defended monarchy (or a monarchy/oligarchy mixed government at best); in his own political life he generally opposed men trying to realise such ideals, like Julius Caesar, Mark Antony and Octavian. Eventually, that opposition led to his death. So, depending on how one reads history, Cicero could be seen as a victim of his own deep-rooted republican ideals, too.
Tacitus, a contemporary of Plutarch, was not concerned with whether on an abstract level a form of government could be analysed as a "republic" or a "monarchy" (see for example Ann. IV, 32-33). He analyzes how the powers accumulated by the early Julio-Claudian dynasty were all given to the representants of this dynasty by a State that was and remained in an ever more "abstract" way a republic; nor was the Roman Republic "forced" to give away these powers to single persons in a consecutive dynasty: it did so out of free will, and reasonably in Augustus' case, because of his many services to the state, freeing it from civil wars and the like.
But at least Tacitus is one of the first to follow this line of thought: asking in what measure such powers were given to the head of state because the citizens wanted to give them, and in which measure they were given because of other principles (for example, because one had a deified ancestor) — such other principles leading more easily to abuse by the one in power. In this sense, that is in Tacitus' analysis, the trend away from the Republic was irreversible only when Tiberius established power shortly after Augustus' death (AD 14, much later than most historians place the start of the Imperial form of government in Rome): by this time too many principles defining some powers as "untouchable" had been implemented to keep Tiberius from exercising certain powers, and the age of "sockpuppetry in the external form of a republic", as Tacitus more or less describes this Emperor's reign, began (Ann. I-VI).
In classical meaning, republic was any established political community with government above it. Both Plato and Aristotle saw three basic types of government, democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy. However an ideal type was considered mixed government. First Plato and Aristotle, and especially Polybius and Cicero developed the notion that the ideal republic is a mixture of these three forms of government and the writers of the Renaissance embraced this notion.
In Europe, republicanism was revived in the late Middle Ages when a number of small states embraced a republican system of government. These were generally small, but wealthy, trading states in which the merchant class had risen to prominence. Haakonssen notes that by the Renaissance Europe was divided with those states controlled by a landed elite being monarchies and those controlled by a commercial elite being republics. These included Italian city states like Florence and Venice and the members of the Hanseatic League.
Building upon political arrangements of medieval feudalism, the Renaissance scholars built upon their conception of the ancient world to advance their view of the ideal government. The usage of the term res publica in classical texts should not be confused with current notions of republicanism. Despite its name Plato's The Republic (Πολιτεία) also has little to no connection to the Latin res publica from which derives the more recent historical phenomenon of republicanism.
The republicanism developed in the Renaissance is known as classical republicanism because of its reliance on classical models. This terminology was developed by Zera Fink in the 1960s but some modern scholars such as Brugger consider the term confusing as it might lead some to believe that "classical republic" refers to the system of government used in the ancient world. "Early modern republicanism" has been advanced as an alternative term.
Also sometimes called civic humanism, this ideology grew out of the Renaissance writers who developed the idea of the republic. More than being simply a non-monarchy the early modern thinkers developed a vision of the ideal republic. It is these notions that form the basis of the ideology of republicanism. One important notion was that of a mixed government. Also central the notion of virtue and the pursuit of the common good being central to good government. Republicanism also developed its own distinct view of liberty, though what exactly that view is much disputed.
Those Renaissance authors that spoke highly of republics were rarely critical of monarchies. While Niccolò Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy is the period's key work on republics he also wrote The Prince on how to best run a monarchy. One cause of this was that the early modern writers did not see the republican model as one that could be applied universally, most felt that it could be successful only in very small and highly urbanized city-states. Jean Bodin in Six Books of the Commonwealth identified monarchy with republic.
In antiquity writers like Tacitus, and in the Renaissance writers like Machiavelli tried to avoid formulating an outspoken preference for one government system or another. Enlightenment philosophers, on the other hand, always had an outspoken opinion.
However, Thomas More, still before the Age of Enlightenment, must have been a bit too outspoken to the reigning king's taste, even when coding his political preferences in a Utopian tale.
In England a republicanism evolved that was not wholly opposed to monarchy, but rather thinkers such as Thomas More and Sir Thomas Smith saw a monarchy firmly constrained by law as compatible with republicanism.
Anti-monarchism became far more strident in the Dutch Republic during and after the Eighty Years' War, which began in 1568. This anti-monarchism was less political philosophy and more propagandizing with most of the anti-monarchist works appearing in the form of widely distributed pamphlets. Over time this evolved into a systematic critique of monarchies written by men such as Johan Uytenhage de Mist, Radboud Herman Scheel, Lieven de Beaufort and the brothers Johan and Peter de la Court. These writers saw all monarchies as illegitimate tyrannies that were inherently corrupt. Less an attack on their former overlords these works were more concerned with preventing the position of Stadholder from evolving into a monarchy. This Dutch republicanism also had an important influence on French Huguenots during the Wars of Religion. In the other states of early modern Europe republicanism was more moderate.
In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth republicanism became an important ideology. After establishment of the Commonwealth of Two Nations republicans were those who supported the status quo of having a very weak monarch and opposed those who felt a stronger monarchy was needed. These mostly Polish republicans such as Łukasz Górnicki, Andrzej Wolan, and Stanisław Konarski were well read in classical and Renaissance texts and firmly believed that their state was a Republic on the Roman model and started to call their state the Rzeczpospolita. Unlike in the other countries, Polish-Lithuanian republicanism was not the ideology of the commercial class, but rather of the landed aristocracy, who would be the ones to lose power if the monarchy was expanded - what led to oligarchisation by great magnates.
From the Enlightenment on it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between the descriptions and definitions of the "republic" concept on the one side, and the ideologies based on such descriptions on the other.
Oliver Cromwell set up a republic called the Commonwealth of England (1649-1660) and ruled as a near dictator after the overthrow of King Charles I. A leading philosopher of republicanism was James Harrington. The collapse of the Commonwealth of England in 1660 and the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II discredited republicanism among England's ruling circles. However they welcomed the liberalism and emphasis on rights of John Locke, which played a major role in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Nevertheless republicanism flourished in the "country" party of the early 18th century. That party denounced the corruption of the "court" party, producing a political theory that heavily influenced the American colonists. In general the ruling classes of the 18th century vehemently opposed republicanism, as typified by the attacks on John Wilkes, and especially by the American Revolution and the French Revolution.[2]
French and Swiss Enlightenment thinkers such as Montesquieu and later Rousseau expanded upon and altered the ideas of what an ideal republic would be: some of their new ideas were scarcely retraceable to antiquity or the Renaissance thinkers. Among other things they contributed and/or heavily elaborated notions like social contract, positive law, and mixed government. They also borrowed from and distinguished it from the ideas of liberalism that were developing at the same time. Since both liberalism and republicanism were united in their opposition to the absolute monarchies they were frequently conflated during this period. Modern scholars see them as two distinct streams that both contributed to the democratic ideals of the modern world. An important distinction is that while republicanism continued to stress the importance of civic virtue and the common good, liberalism was based on economics and individualism. It might be argued that while liberalism developed a view of liberty as pre-social and sees all institutions as limiting liberty, republicanism sees some institutions as necessary to create liberty. It is most vivid in the issue of private property which may be maintained only under protection of established positive law. On the other hand, liberalism is strongly committed to some institutions e.g. the Rule of Law. Jules Ferry, the prime minister of France from 1880 to 1885, also followed these schools of thought and eventually enacted the Ferry Laws which intended to overturn the Falloux Laws, by embracing the anti-clerical thinking of the philosophs. These laws ended the Catholic Church's involvement with many government institutions in late 19th-century France, including education.
In recent years a debate has developed over its role in the American Revolution and in the British radicalism of the eighteenth century. For many decades the consensus was that liberalism, especially that of John Locke, was paramount and that republicanism had a distinctly secondary role.[3]
The new interpretations were pioneered by J.G.A. Pocock who argued in The Machiavellian Moment (1975) that, at least in the early eighteenth-century, republican ideas were just as important as liberal ones. Pocock's view is now widely accepted.[4]. Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood pioneered the argument that the American Founding Fathers were more influenced by republicanism than they were by liberalism. Cornell University Professor Isaac Kramnick, on the other hand, argues that Americans have always been highly individualistic and therefore Lockean.[5]
In the decades before the American Revolution (1776), the intellectual and political leaders of the colonies studied history intently, looking for guides or models for good (and bad) government. They especially followed the development of republican ideas in England.[6] Pocock explained the intellectual sources in America:[7]
The commitment of most Americans to these republican values made inevitable the American Revolution, for Britain was increasingly seen as corrupt and hostile to republicanism, and a threat to the established liberties the Americans enjoyed.[8]
Leopold von Ranke 1848 claims that American republicanism played a crucial role in the development of European liberalism,[9]:
It has long been agreed that republicanism, especially that of Rousseau, played a central role in the French Revolution as turning point to modern republicanism. The French Revolution, which was to throw over the French monarchy in the 1790s, installed, at first, a republic; Napoleon turned it into an Empire with a new aristocracy. In the 1830s Belgium adopted some of the innovations of the progressive political philosophers of the Enlightenment too.
Républicanisme is a French version of modern Republicanism. It is a social contract concept, deduced from Jean-Jacques Rousseau's idea of a general will. Ideally, each citizen is engaged in a direct relationship with the state, obviating the need for group identity politics based on local, religious, or racial identification.
The ideal of républicanisme, in theory, renders anti-discrimination laws needless, but some critics argue that colour-blind laws serve to perpetuate ongoing discrimination.[10]
In the Enlightenment anti-monarchism stopped being coextensive with the civic humanism of the Renaissance. Classical republicanism, still supported by philosophers such as Rousseau and Montesquieu, was just one of a number of theories not opposed directly to monarchy, however putting some limitations to it. The new forms of anti-monarchism such as liberalism and later socialism quickly overtook classical republicanism as the leading republican ideologies. Republicanism also became far more widespread and monarchies began to be challenged throughout Europe.
An important influence of republicanism was expressed when Turkey formed a new democratic state in 1923 after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. In the Ottoman Empire an inherited aristocracy and sultinate suppressed republican ideas until the successful republican revolution of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in the 1920s. Atatürk preched six basic principles. His Six Arrows were Republicanism, Populism, Secularism, Reformism, Nationalism, and Statism).
In the 21st century Turkey has sought admission to the European Union on the grounds that it shares common political values with the nations of Europe. This concept shares some of the same classical roots as European republicanism and in modern times this form of government is called "republican" in English, but in pre-modern times it is not generally called republicanism.
Republicanism became the dominant political value of Americans during and after the American Revolution. The "Founding Fathers" were strong advocates of republican values, especially Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, George Washington, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton.[11]
In some countries forming parts of the British Empire, and later the Commonwealth of Nations, republicanism has had very different significance in various countries at various times, depending on the context.
In South Africa, republicanism in the 1960s was identified with the staunch supporters of apartheid, who resented what they considered British interference in the way they treated the country's black majority population, despite the fact that the country was by that point an independent state with its own legally distinct monarchy.
In Australia, the debate between republicans and monarchists is still a controversial issue of political life.
This new school of historical revisionism has accompanied a general revival of republican thinking. In recent years a great number of thinkers have argued that republican ideas should be adopted. This new thinking is sometimes referred to as neo-republicanism. Engeman referred to republicanism as "an intellectual buzzword" that has been applied to a wide range of theories and postulates that have little in common in order to give them a certain cachet.
The most important theorists in this movement are Philip Pettit and Cass Sunstein who have each written a number of works defining republicanism and how it differs from liberalism. While a late convert to republicanism from communitarianism, Michael Sandel is perhaps the most prominent advocate in the United States for replacing or supplementing liberalism with republicanism as outlined in his Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy. As of yet these theorists have had little impact on government. John W. Maynor, argues that Bill Clinton was interested in these notions and that he integrated some of them into his 1995 "new social compact" State of the Union Address.
This revival also has its critics. David Wootton, for instance, argues that throughout history the meanings of the term republicanism have been so diverse, and at times contradictory, that the term is all but meaningless and any attempt to build a cogent ideology based around it will fail.
Republicanism is a system that replaces or accompanies inherited rule. The keys are a positive emphasis on liberty, and a negative rejection of corruption.[12] In the late 20th century there has been so much convergence between democracy and republicanism that confusion results. As a distinct political theory, republicanism originated in classical history and became important in early modern Europe, as typfied by Machiavelli. It became especially important as a cause of the American Revolution and the French Revolution in the 1770s and 1790s, respectively.[13] Republicans in these particular instances tended to reject inherited elites and aristocracies, but the question was open amongst them whether the republic, in order to restrain unchecked majority rule, should have an unelected upper chamber, the members perhaps appointed meritorious experts, or should have a constitutional monarch.[14]
Although conceptually separate from democracy, republicanism included the key principles of rule by the consent of the governed and sovereignty of the people. In effect republicanism meant that the kings and aristocracies were not the real rulers, but rather the people as a whole were. Exactly how the people were to rule was an issue of democracy – republicanism itself did not specify how.[15] In the United States, the solution was the creation of political parties that were popularly based on the votes of the people, and which controlled the government (see Republicanism in the United States). Many exponents of republicanism, such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson were strong promoters of representative democracy. However, other supporters of republicanism, such as John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, were more distrustful of majority rule and sought a government with more power for elites. There were similar debates in many other democratizing nations.[16]
In contemporary usage, the term democracy refers to a government chosen by the people, whether it is direct or representative.[17] The term republic has many different meanings, but today often refers to a representative democracy with an elected head of state, such as a president, serving for a limited term, in contrast to states with a hereditary monarch as a head of state, even if these states also are representative democracies with an elected or appointed head of government such as a prime minister.[18]
The Founding Fathers of the United States rarely praised and often criticized democracy, which in their time tended to specifically mean direct democracy; James Madison argued, especially in The Federalist No. 10, that what distinguished a democracy from a republic was that the former became weaker as it got larger and suffered more violently from the effects of faction, whereas a republic could get stronger as it got larger and combats faction by its very structure. What was critical to American values, John Adams insisted,[19] was that the government be "bound by fixed laws, which the people have a voice in making, and a right to defend." Also, as Benjamin Franklin was exiting after writing the U.S. constitution, a woman asked him Sir, what have you given us?. He replied A republic ma'am, if you can keep it[20]
Initially, after the American and French revolutions, the question was open whether a democracy, in order to restrain unchecked majority rule, should have an upper chamber – the members perhaps appointed meritorious experts or having lifetime tenures – or should have a constitutional monarch with limited but real powers. Some countries (such as the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Scandinavian countries, and Japan) turned powerful monarchs into constitutional ones with limited or, often gradually, merely symbolic roles. Often the monarchy was abolished along with the aristocratic system, whether or not they were replaced with democratic institutions (such as in the US, France, China, Russia, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Greece and Egypt). In Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Papua New Guinea, and some other countries, the monarch is given supreme executive power, but by convention acts only on the advice of his or her ministers. Many nations had elite upper houses of legislatures, the members of which often had lifetime tenure, but eventually these houses lost power (as in Britain's House of Lords), or else became elective and remained powerful (as in the United States Senate).[21]
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| Translations: Republican |
Dansk (Danish)
adj. - republikansk
n. - republikaner
idioms:
Nederlands (Dutch)
republikein, republikeins
Français (French)
adj. - républicain
n. - républicain
idioms:
Deutsch (German)
n. - Republikaner
adj. - republikanisch
idioms:
Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - Ρεπουμπλικανός, δημοκράτης
adj. - ρεπουμπλικανικός, Ρεπουμπλικανός, δημοκρατικός, δημοκράτης
idioms:
Italiano (Italian)
repubblicano
idioms:
Português (Portuguese)
n. - republicano (m)
adj. - republicano
idioms:
Русский (Russian)
республиканец, республиканский
idioms:
Español (Spanish)
adj. - republicano
n. - republicano
idioms:
Svenska (Swedish)
n. - republikan
adj. - republikansk
中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
共和国的, 共和主义的, 共和政体的, 拥护共和政体者, 共和党人士, 共和主义者
idioms:
中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
adj. - 共和國的, 共和主義的, 共和政體的
n. - 擁護共和政體者, 共和黨人士, 共和主義者
idioms:
한국어 (Korean)
adj. - 공화국의, 공화당의, 떼지어 사는
n. - 공화주의자, 공화당원, 제비의 일종
日本語 (Japanese)
adj. - 共和国の, 共和党の, 群生する, 共和主義の
n. - 共和党員, 共和政論者, 共和主義者
idioms:
العربيه (Arabic)
(الاسم) المؤيد للنظام الجمهوري (صفه) جمهوري
עברית (Hebrew)
adj. - רפובליקני, קיימת כרפובליקה, אופייני לרפובליקה
n. - רפובליקני, דוגל ברפובליקה
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