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The history of republicanism in contemporary political theory is neither linear nor coherent. There are those who appeal to republican values but deny their republicanism, others may include many of the principles of civic humanism and/or early modern republicanism but perhaps not enough to be considered republican. Dworkin finds himself identified as a republican, but would not recognise this distinction himself. One will also find republican values in modern communitarianism, and a conciliation of liberal and republican paradigms in Pettit, Sandel and Onuf.141 What all the aforementioned authors have in common is their appeal to history as an approach to explain the order of things (res publica) and to illustrate current political arguments.

In Aristotelian times, res publica came to mean the political framework, or even constitution, that would best ensure the common good: a mixed government joining democracy, aristocracy and monarchy. This was reconsidered in Renaissance Italy, most famously by Machiavelli and again in seventeenth and eighteenth century England by the likes of Harrington and Sydney, as well as minor figures such as this thesis’ focus, Fletcher. Contemporary republicanism, as with early modern republicanism, disregards the liberal preoccupation with natural rights and unilateral behaviour of individuals in the development of society, and instead focuses on the republican values of civic virtue, public life and community, the achievement of the

common good and the eschewal of corruption.142

141 _{For these examples See Barber, B. Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age. University of}

California Press, 1984. And Dagger, Richard. Civic Virtues: Rights, Citizenship, and Republican Liberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

142

To avoid confusion, the early modern republicanism which I refer to in this thesis is a republicanism as recognised by the seventeenth and eighteenth-century political theorists such as Harrnigton, Needham, and Fletcher who have built upon the Machiavellian, neo-Roman tradition which emphasis civic virtue and participation, freedom from arbitrary rule, and the common good.

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It is recognised in modern republican theory that a strong distinction between liberalism and republicanism may be ineffective. Both approaches contain instrumental accounts of certain ideals and virtues that have the effect of enhancing the overall system of freedom for individuals.143 There are still arguments as to the shape neo-republicanism should take: Guiner attempts to reconcile human rights and popular sovereignty with a procedural democracy, offering a third way between liberalism and republicanism, whereas Pettit goes further in his attempt to integrate both paradigms more fully with his proposal of a theory of freedom as non- domination.144 Etzioni insists that society relies on a symbiotic relationship between libertarianism (his all-encompassing phrase for liberalism) and republicanism, his version of a communitarian model.145 Yet there are those who still insist that the distinction is necessary, critiquing the liberal view that there is no strong divergence between the two approaches: seeing the strong republicanism of Aristotle as incompatible with the liberal ideas of justice.146

In the western, or ‘early modern’ republican tradition associated with

Machiavelli, Harington, Sidney et al, the emphasis remains on the importance of civic virtue and political participation for the common good, the dangers of corruption and the need for a mixed constitution providing the rule of law. The early modern republican tradition promotes a conception of the good life achieved through this active political participation and civic virtue, providing the foundation for political liberty.

By contrast, contemporary, or ‘civic’ republicanism emphasises political liberty understood as non-domination (Pettit). Wheras the early modern republican model is

143

Patten, Alan. “The Republican Critique of Liberalism”. British Journal of Political Science, Vol 26, no 25, 1996: 25-44.

144

Guinier, Lani. Lift Every Voice: Turning a Civil Rights Setback into a New Vision of Social Justice. London: Simon and Schuster, 1998. Pettit, Richard. Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

145

Etzioni, Amatai. “A Moderate Communitarian Proposal”. Political Theory. Vol 24, No 2 (May 1996): 155-171. 146_{Maynor, John. “Another Instrumental Republican Approach”.}

European Journal of Political Theory. Vol 1, no 1 July 2002: 71-89.

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based on a positive conception of liberty, where political participation leads to self- government, contemporary civic republicans have misinterpreted the early modern model and argue in favour of a negative conception of political liberty that no longer sees civic virtue as an intrinsically valuable component of the human experience, but as an instrumental component for achivieing political liberty.

For both the early modern and the contemporary civic republican, the central tenet of contemporary republicanism is the notion of freedom from an arbitrary master, it can therefore be argued that there is little difference between the two canons, the only difference perhaps being the means to the end. For the early modern republicans, political participation ensures freedom from arbitrary rule, restricting the opportunity for one to gain arbitrary powers – while for contemporary republicans, the only way to ensure no-one gains arbitrary mastery is to limit his subjects dependency on him. The clearest difference, therefore, is the emphasis on the type of freedom; freedom of non-domination, or a liberal freedom of non-interference. Whereas today political liberty conjures for many the idea of protection of private interests against arbitrary acts of the government, early modern republicanism offers a different ideal of liberty, not the protection from government, but the opportunity to govern oneself: freedom as action, social and political.147 It is here that the civic-humanist version of republicanism of Andrew Fletcher comes into its own, bridging the gap between the early modern emphasis on political participation providing freedom as self- governance, and the contemporary civic republican emphasis on political liberty understood as non-domination – independence – from an arbitrary or interfering power.

In contemporary international political theory there is no single republican argument but a series of connected strategies that aim to make normative arguments proposing greater individual participation in public life, without interfering with the

147

Arendt, Hannah. Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. New York: Faber, 1961: 153- 157.

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freedoms of individuals. However, the division of the republican ‘tradition’ into restricted and partial arguments based on a limited treatment of the doctrine limits its usefulness as a conceptual framework for contemporary international thought. This chapter identifies contemporary republican international thought and the treatment of the republican tradition in history. It shows that the division of the doctrine into several themes: civic, cosmopolitan, and liberal – has undermined the value of republicanism for international relations theory. It demonstrates that the most auspicious way to treat republican theory is to reconstruct the republican tradition of the eighteenth-century; it is only by seeing the republican tradition as a whole, considering concepts of freedom as non-domination, the common good as the motivation for political action, and civic virtue as a moral and political incentive for action that we can begin to utilize republican international theory to its full potential.

This chapter outlines the early modern western republicanism as found in Machiavelli and Harrington amongst others: the history of the concept and an analysis of the seventeenth and eighteenth-century uses of the paradigm. It will summarize and critique some of the major positions on republicanism in contemporary political theory, including J.G.A Pocock’s republicanism as a paradigm, Pettit’s idea of republican theory of freedom as non-domination, and Etzioni’s communitarian model as an alternative to republicanism, as well as a looking at the value of republicanism in modern political thought – its applicability to the contemporary struggles with concepts of global justice and liberty. The chapter concludes that contemporary republicanism is not as contemporary as publicised, and that the early modern republican theories are sufficient to answer these contemporary problems without any systematic dismantling and restructuring of the paradigm.

The Foundations and Revival of the Republican Paradigm.

‘By common-wealth, I must be understood all along to mean, not a Democracy, or any Form of Government, but an independent Community which the Latines signified

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by the word Civitas, to which the word which best answers in our Language, is Commonwealth, and most properly expressed such a Society of Men, which Community or Citty in English does not, for there may be subordinate communities in a Government; and City amongst us has a different notion from Commonwealth.’148

First and foremost, the republican tradition is a discourse on liberty. From Greece and Rome to the quattrocento Florentines, political participation is seen as conducive to social harmony, political stability, and the ‘freedom’ of self-governance. Freedom is dependent on freedom from arbitrary and absolutist rule, and the freedom to participate in public life. It is not a theory of liberty from interference, but the coexistence between the absence from certain forms of constraint, and political participation. This is a theme later picked up by Rousseau in his theories on the social contract. Going against the popular versions of Hobbes, Goritus and Puffendorf, Rousseau proposes a positive conception of liberty that emphasises moral freedom - obedience to laws one has prescribed to oneself - as the key to freedom as non- dependence; the fact that one obeys only himself. Rousseau asserts that ‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Those who think themselves the masters of

others are indeed greater slaves than they’149 Self-governance and political

participation are the source of liberty, by abandoning claims to individual or natural rights and joining in civil society, individuals will have the means of both preserving themselves and their liberty. This process enables them to discover the general will that obligates them to obey the laws and it is these laws that protect the individual from being subject to the will of any other.150 Rousseau is attempting to reconcile the freedom of the individual with the necessary authority of that state. It is worth noting that Rousseau is writing this some 50 years after Fletcher wrote in his Discourse of Goverenmnet that ‘the arts of state being altogether directed either to enslave the people, or to keep them under slaveyr; it is become alost every where a crime to

148

Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. Peter Laslett (ed). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960: 355.

149

Rousseau. Jean-Jaques. On the Social Contract. R.D. Masters, (ed and trans) New York. St Martin‟s Press. 1978

150

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reason about matters of government. . . And not only that government is tyrannical, which is tyrannically excercised; but all governments are tyrannical, which have not in their constitution a sufficient security against the arbitrary power of the prince’.151

Pocock proposes that authentic traditions have a conscious timeline; adherents are aware of the beginnings and the continuous descent until their own participation in the tradition. As he puts it,

[t]he tradition in question may be referred back to Aristotle in nearly every respect, but ... so many subsequent authors restated parts of it and were influential in their own ways that, especially under Renaissance conditions, it is hard to define with certainty the particular writer exerting authority at a particular point. We are, in short, confronted by the problems of interpreting a tradition of thought’.152

Therefore, the political thinker has to be understood in terms of his linguistic time: a social being whose thoughts and actions are linguistic events; his words and concepts are inherited from shared traditions and discourses as well as languages of legitimation and discourse; and as a consequence, his ability to fully theorise is constrained by the context in which he functions as a social being.153 Man is nothing without society, or, as Pocock stipulates, the paradigm which gives his existence meaning.

Pocock defines republicanism in this way, as a language or a mode of discourse, implying a conversation or vocabulary in which political debates are conducted,

151

Fletcher. Robertson; ibid: 2-4.

152 _{Pocock The Machiavellian Moment,ibid: 67.} 153

Pocock‟s methodological proposals are not the focus of this chapter and for the sake of succinctness I will not go into detail. There are many excellent studies of Pocock‟s methodological proposals including David Boucher‟s “Language, Politics and Paradigms: Pocock and the Study of Political Thought”. Polity Vol 17 no. 4 (Summer 1985): 761-776 and Texts in Context. Revisionist Methods for Studying the History of Ideas, Dordrecht, Boston & Lancaster 1985. Robert D. Hume, Pocock’s Contextual Historicism, in D.N. DeLuna (ed.), The Political Imagination in History. Essays Concerning J.G.A. Pocock, Baltimore 2006, 27-55. Preston King, “Historical Contextualism. The New Historicism”, in History of European Ideas 21 (1995), No. 2, 209-233. Iain Hampsher-Monk, Political Languages in Time. The Work of J.G.A. Pocock, in British Journal of Political Science 14 (1984): 89-116. Mark Bevir, “The Errors of Linguistic Contextualism”, in History & Theory 31 (1992), 276-298 William Walker, “J.G.A. Pocock and the History of British Political Thought. Assessing the State of the Art”, in Eighteenth-Century Life 33 (2009), No. 1: 83-96. According to Boucher, Pocock‟s prescriptions are unsound for studying contemporary discourse. Boucher, 1985 p774.

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including ‘virtue’, ‘corruption’ and the ‘common good’.154 Within this ‘paradigm of early modern republicanism’ the conversation can only take place when certain underlying assumptions are recognised – assumptions regarding human nature – and what is good for the individual in society, how this can be achieved etc. These assumptions constitute a paradigm which must be shared by the community in which the conversation or discourse on republicanism takes place in order for it to be meaningful. Therefore, the central tenet of the ‘early modern’ republican paradigm is the assumption that human nature has a purpose that can only be fulfilled by participating in public life – there exists an objective public good that can be discovered through virtuous political debate and activity. Furthermore, these ideals must struggle to maintain themselves within a conceptual framework within the historically defined community.155

This is denied by Mark Tushnet, who in Red White and Blue: A Critical Analysis

of Constitutional Law, claims that the meaning of words would be readily understood without resorting to complicated theory: ‘In the eyes of those of the republican tradition, the limits the constitution places on the government ... [would be] readily understood by all’.156 In his version of republicanism people draw their ‘understanding of themselves and the meaning of their lives from their participation with others in a social world they actively and jointly create’, reiterating Pocock’s idea that human nature can only be fulfilled by active participation in self-government. According to Daniel Rogers, despite the concept of republicanism being one of the success stories if the 1980’s, the rise of the paradigmatic event met formidable obstacles, not least because ‘the root texts of the republican synthesis were difficult to the verge of unreadability, highly intellectualistic, and in many respects as consensual as the

154 _{Pocock. Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth}

Centuries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985: 1-34. 155

Pocock, “The Machiavellian Moment Revisited: A Study in History and Ideology,Journal of Modern History 53 (March 1981): 333-60.

156

Tushnet, Mark. Red, White and Blue: A Critical Analysis of Constitutional Law. Harvard: Harvard University Press. 1988. See also, Hexter, J. H. Republic, Virtue, Liberty and the Political Universe On Historians: Reappraisals of the Masters of Modern History 1979.

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consensus history they were designed to supplant’.157 But, because of the ‘vague and

supple’ nature of the paradigm, republicanism was both difficult for historians to define and therefore easy to manipulate for the ends its formulators and its antagonists alike.158 By the time republicanism gained its full strength in the 1980’s, it had become a massively complicated mixture of renaissance civic-republicanism, eighteenth-century liberal idealism, and twentieth-century theories of freedom. It would seem to the casual observer, that neo-republicanism is searching to recover the forgotten meaning of the term, having been lost in contemporary contributions.

Civic humanism is a theory of citizenship rather than liberty, but the citizenship provides the foundation for political liberty: the moral and rational faculties of individuals can only be fully developed if they act as citizens. It is by actively taking part in political life – performing ones civic duties – that one becomes virtuous. Pocock summarises this Aristotelian conception of the civic ideal: civic humanism denotes a style of thought in which it is argued that the development of the individual toward self-fulfillment is possible only when the individual acts as a citizen, that is, as a conscious and autonomous participant in an autonomous decision-making political community, the polis or republic.159 The civic humanist ideal originated in the reassertion of the vita active: the ultimate goal of the citizen was to assert his virtue in (political) action (for the common good) of which the republic was the frame. Machiavelli claimed that an armed people would be a politically active people, like Republican Rome – who had armed the people. But a people who bore arms only in subjection to a powerful few were not exercising their virtu, while the powerful few had lost their virtu through the corruption of their powers. Virtu could only be maintained through equality. None were to be subject to anything other than the

157 _{Rogers, Daniel T. “Republicanism: the Career of a Concept. The Journal of American History”. (79) 1. June} 1992: 12.

158

Shallhope, Robert E. “Toward a Republican Synthesis”. The William and Mary Quarterly , Third Series, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Jan., 1972): 49-80. See also Appleby, Joyce. “Republicanism in the History and Historiography of the United States”. American Quarterly. Special Issue: (37) Fall 1985: 72.

159

Pocock, J.G.A. Civic Humanism and Its Role in Anlgo-American Thought. Politics, Language and Time. New York: Atheneum, 1971: 85.

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public power.160 In this civic humanist tradition the republic appears as a mixture of a balance of three independent powers (or virtues), the one the few and the many. These were modes of political action and intelligence. In most versions, the virtues pertained to: in the one - leadership, in the few, reflective wisdom and prudence, and in the many, military.161 In the tradition of Aristotle, it was important to be able to assign to each group the political function appropriate to its virtue and cause it to

serve the common good and maintain the balance of powers (virtues). Whereas

contemporary republicanism rejects monarchy, civic humanism and early modern republicans did not reject monarchy outright. Instead, they reject tyranny in whatever form that appeared: monarchy, aristocracy, or the tyranny of the majority (democracy). The ideal form of governance for the civic humanist and early modern republicans would be a mixed government based on virtu and the pursuit of the common good