The republic, old and new.

AuthorPettit, Philip
PositionOn the People's Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy - Excerpt

An excerpt from Philip Pettit, On the People's Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy, which will be published by Cambridge University Press in November 2012.

The project

Every philosophy of the good society starts with an account of the canonical complaint that the state should help to put right: the evil that the society should drive out by means of political organisation and initiative. The complaints targeted for political rectification come in two broad families. On the one side, personal afflictions like misery or poverty or inequality; on the other, social failures like division or disorder or perhaps an excess of customary restriction.

The more personal complaints generate a powerfully motivating agenda, since most of us would rejoice in a state that silenced them. But these complaints are liable to seem politically over-demanding. While it would be good to be rid of misery or poverty or inequality, not everyone will agree that the state could or should be given the job of dealing with them. The removal of the less personal evils is not politically over-demanding in the same way, for most people will think that the state is able to remedy such failures. But these complaints may fail to motivate appropriately: their rectification falls short of what many of us feel that we in a politically organised society can and should collectively provide for our members.

Republican philosophy identifies a complaint that is meant to be at once personally motivating and politically feasible. It indicts the evil of subjection to another's will--particularly in important areas of personal choice--as an ill that we all recognise and recoil from and at the same time as an ill that the state is well placed to deal with. I believe that such subjection can be effectively corralled and reduced, though certainly not wholly eliminated, by means of political initiative. And yet it takes only a little imagination to realise just how repellent this subjection can be.

Think, by way of exercising such imagination, of how you would feel as a student if you depended for not failing a course on the whim of an instructor. Or as a wife if you had to rely on the mood of your husband for whether you could enjoy an unmolested day. Or as a worker if you hung on the favour of a manager for whether you retained your job. Or as a debtor if you were dependent on the goodwill of a creditor for whether you had to face public ignominy. Or as someone destitute if you had to cast yourself on the mercy of others just to survive or maintain your family. Or think about how you would feel as the member of a cultural minority if you had to rely on the humour of majority groups for whether you escaped humiliation; or as an elderly person if you depended on escaping the notice of youth gangs for walking safely home; or as a citizen if you were dependent on winning the favour of some insider group for whether you or your kind ever caught the eye of government.

It is a commonplace in most cultures that such involuntary exposure to the will of others is inherently troubling and objectionable. Even when those others do not exercise their power in actual interference, the very dependency involved is something from which we naturally recoil. The possible modes of subjection are many and diverse, as these examples already testify, but it should be clear that the state is capable of curtailing them in various ways. Without assuming the cast of a Leviathan in their lives, it can assure its people of a level of protection, support and status that frees them from at least the more egregious forms that such dependency can take.

Already in classical, republican Rome, the evil of subjection to the will of others, whether or not such subjection led to actual interference, was identified and indicted as the iconic ill from which political organisation should liberate people, in particular those in the fortunate position of citizens. It was described as the evil of being subject to a master or dominus--suffering dominatio--and was contrasted with the good of libertas or liberty. The accepted wisdom was that people could enjoy liberty, both in relation to one another and to the collectivity, only by being invested with the power and status of the civis or citizen. Being a free person became synonymous with being sufficiently empowered to stand on equal terms with others, as a citizen among citizens (Wirszubski, 1968, ch. 1).

The idea that citizens could enjoy this equal standing in their society, and not have to hang on the benevolence of their betters, became the signature theme in the long and powerful tradition of republican thought. Familiar from its instantiation in classical Rome, the idea was re-ignited in medieval and Renaissance Italy; spread throughout Europe in the modern era, sparking the English Civil War and the French Revolution; and inflamed the passions of England's American colonists in the late eighteenth century, leading to the foundation of the world's first modern democracy. With citizenship becoming more and more inclusive as a category, the idea was that the state could provide for all citizens in such a measure that they would each be able to walk tall, live without shame or indignity, and look one another in the eye without any reason for fear or deference.

The recent revival of republican thought is built on this idea that there is an ideal for the state to promote--freedom understood as non-domination--that is both personally motivating and politically implementable. Freedom in this sense is not meant to be the only value in life, or the only value that ultimately matters. The claim is merely that it is a gateway good, suited to guide the governments that people form and sustain. Let government look after the freedom of citizens in this sense, so the line goes, and it will also have to look after a plausible range of other goods and do so at a plausible level of provision. It will have to guard against division and disorder and intrusive regulation and it will have to provide in a decent measure against misery and poverty, unfairness and inequality.

Three core ideas

Three ideas stand out as landmarks on the terrain of traditional republican thought. While the ideas received different interpretations and emphases in different periods and among different authors, they constitute points of reference that were recognised and authorised by almost everyone down to the late eighteenth century who has a claim to belong to the tradition.

The first idea, unsurprisingly, is that the equal freedom of its citizens, in particular their freedom as non-domination--the freedom that goes with not having to live under the potentially harmful power of another--is the primary concern of the state or republic. The second is that if the republic is to secure the freedom of its citizens then it must satisfy a range of constitutional constraints associated broadly with the mixed constitution. And the third idea is that if the citizens are to keep the republic to its proper business then they had better have the collective and individual virtue to track and contest public policies and initiatives: the price of liberty, in the old republican adage, is eternal vigilance.

The mixed constitution was meant to guarantee a rule of law--a constitutional order--under which each citizen would be equal with others and a separation and sharing of powers--a mixed order--that would deny control over the law to any one individual or body. The contestatory citizenry was the civic complement to this constitutional ideal: it was to be a citizenry committed to interrogating all the elements of government and imposing itself in the determination of law and policy. These institutional measures were taken to be essential for organising a government that would promote the equal freedom of citizens without itself becoming a master in their lives--in other words, that would protect against private forms of domination without perpetrating public.

Freedom as non-domination, the mixed constitution, and the contestatory citizenry were all represented in Roman republican thought and practice, and they were articulated in different ways amongst the many writers who identified with Roman institutions. These authors included the Greek-born historian, Polybius, the orator and lawyer, Marcus Tullius Cicero, and the native Roman historian, Titus Livius or, as we know him, Livy. While they drew freely on earlier Greek sources, including Plato and Aristotle, they were united in the belief that it was Rome that first gave life and recognition to the key republican ideas.

Leading thinkers in medieval and Renaissance Italy drew heavily on Polybius, Cicero and Livy when, more than a thousand years later, they reworked the republican ideas in seeking a political philosophy that would reflect the organisation and experience of independent city-states like Florence and Venice (Skinner, 1978). The neo-Roman framework of thought that they crafted in the course of this exercise--in particular the framework outlined in Nicolo Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy--served in turn to provide terms of political self-understanding for Northern European countries that resisted or overthrew absolute monarchs. These included the Polish republic of the nobles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the seventeenth and eighteenth century Dutch republic, and the English republic of the 1640s and 1650s.

While the English republic was the shortest lived of these regimes, it had the widest influence and the deepest impact. The republican ideas that emerged in the thought of its defenders such as James Harrington, John Milton and Algernon Sidney, became a staple of political thought in eighteenth-century Britain and America, albeit often adapted to make room for a constitutional monarchy (Raab, 1965). And they were incorporated deeply, if not always overtly, into the enormously influential work of the Baron...

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