Prospects for a Contemporary Republicanism

Abstract

My discussion of the prospects for a contemporary republicanism will revolve around, primarily, Philip Pettit's Republicanism and, secon darily, J?rgen Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.1 Pettit and Habermas may be understood as describing how the conceptions of certain central concepts in political philosophy, in particu lar, conceptions expressing ideals associated with the republican tradition, were transformed with the expansion of the citizenry in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Their interest in the matter is more than historical. For both Pettit and Habermas, the pre-transformation world espoused attractive ideals which were lost in the post-transformation world, and indeed are lost in our contemporary world. Beyond their his torical interest is a concern for the viability of reinstating republican conceptions of those ideals in our contemporary political culture. In this paper, I would like to ask and answer the following two sets of questions, mostly as they pertain to Pettit's republicanism.2 First: what are the prospects for a contemporary republicanism, given the sources of the modern demise of traditional republicanism? Have these ideologies been relaxed or intensified in our contemporary culture and political phi losophy? If they have not been relaxed, how will a contemporary repub licanism succeed where its traditional counterpart failed? Second: what does it mean to say that a contemporary republicanism is able to cope with an expansion of the citizenry, in a way that its traditional counterpart could not? How do different understandings of this idea bear on the prospects for a contemporary republicanism?