Civic Republican Tradition Research Articles

Constitutionalism in the periphery: revisiting the roots of self-rule movements in Ireland and India

This article re-examines the constitutionalism that underlay moderate self-rule movements in Ireland and India. We argue that early self-rule movements in India and Ireland were rooted in the same civic republican tradition that also influenced Anglo-American political thought but developed it in ways that have no counterparts in English political thought. These developments left a lasting legacy on constitutional thought in India and Ireland and present a contrast with nineteenth-century British political and constitutional thought. Through an examination of Mill and Dicey’s views on empire, we show that constitutional thought in the UK saw a shift away from older republican traditions of politics towards an interests-based constitutionalism, which saw government as being justified by its efficiency in promoting particular interests. We conclude by considering some of the broader implications of our work for the manner in which the British Empire is treated in constitutional scholarship in the present day.

Brexit and Two Roles for Referendums in the United Kingdom

The 2016 referendum on the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union is a textbook example of how not to conduct a referendum. Further, the Brexit referendum was not an isolated democratic failing. It reflects a deeper structural weakness in the use of referendums in the United Kingdom. For decades in the United Kingdom before Brexit, referendums were used in an ‘unplanned’ and ad hoc way when it was politically convenient. This paper will argue that the unprincipled use of referendums in the United Kingdom, at least in part, reflects an underlying disagreement about what referendums are for and their relationship with democracy. There are, broadly, two different accounts of the relationships between referendums and democracy in the United Kingdom. On the first view which I will call the ‘referendums as limits’ approach, referendums are a way for voters to act as a check on the actions of their representatives. This is the view taken by Dicey, Qvortrup, and Bogdanor. The second approach is to see referendums as a way of temporarily substituting voters for representatives. On this view, drawing on the civic republican tradition, referendums are deliberative processes of expressing popular sovereignty. I will call this latter view ‘referendums as substitutions.’ This latter view of referendums is presented in its most effective form by Tierney. It is also the view of referendums that is increasingly reflected in law in the United Kingdom. I will argue here that the ‘referendums as limits’ approach is the better view both in theory and in practise. The practical argument will focus in particular on the 2016 Brexit referendum. I will show that there were numerous failings with the Brexit referendum, but many came back to the same root: the attempt to use the referendum as a substitute for representatives rather than limits on the action of representatives. This attempt to use referendums to replace rather than guide representatives led to failings of process, content, execution, and accountability. I will show that I do not think these failings would have occurred if referendums been used as limits on the actions of representatives to approve the Maastricht and Lisbon treaties, or if the 2016 Brexit referendum was clearly connected to new legislation or proposals for reform.

Vulnerability and non-domination: a republican perspective on natural limits

ABSTRACT A politics that affirms natural limits – either ecological limits or limits posed by the human constitution – is subject to certain criticisms. One of these suggests that a focus on natural limits unduly constrains politics, crowding out deliberation and self-government in favour of expert management. This paper considers how the civic republican tradition approaches the concept of natural limits. The republican tradition offers two arguments for affirming natural limits, one emphasizing the value of vulnerability and the other emphasizing the ideal of liberty as non-domination. However, the two arguments are in tension with one another. An emphasis on vulnerability suggests a natural, pre-political set of constraints on politics (thus seemingly validating the very criticism levelled at a politics of limits), whereas an emphasis on non-domination suggests a more open-ended, contested politics. This tension points to deeper tensions between the communitarian and Italian-Atlantic strands of the republican tradition. In the end, the paper tries to address these tensions by showing that an egalitarian approach to vulnerability actually supports the ideal of non-domination and that a respect for natural limits is consistent with a robust, deliberative republican politics emphasizing contestation and self-government. In developing the concept of vulnerability, the paper draws upon not only republican thought, but also feminist theory.

The Friendless Republic: Freedom, Faction, and Friendship in Machiavelli'sDiscourses

AbstractCivic republicans have traditionally appealed to friendship as a means of preserving popular liberty, but Machiavelli is a notable exception to this rule. In fact, I argue, he views efforts to reconcile friendship and politics as (1) philosophically dubious, because grounded in false conceptions of person and society, and (2) practically harmful, because they perpetuate patterns of asymmetric dependence that are inconsistent with a free way of life. Machiavelli's neglected skepticism about the political potential of friendship deepens his critique of the Ciceronianconcordia, reveals a diminished idea of the common good, and distances him from the civic republican tradition to which he is so often said to belong.

A civic republican analysis of mental capacity law

AbstractThis paper draws upon the civic republican tradition to offer new conceptual resources for the normative assessment of mental capacity law. The republican conception of liberty as non-domination is used to identify ways in which such laws generate arbitrary power that can underpin relationships of servility and insecurity. It also shows how non-domination provides a basis for critiquing legal tests of decision making that rely upon ‘diagnostic’ rather than ‘functional’ criteria. In response, two main civic republican strategies are recommended for securing freedom in the context of the legal regulation of psychological disability: self-authorisation techniques and participatory shaping of power. The result is a series of proposals for the reform of decisional capacity law, including a transition towards purely functional assessment of decisional capacity, surer legal footing for advanced care planning, and greater control over the design and administration of decision making capacity laws by those with psychological disabilities.

Environmental citizenship: What can political theory contribute to environmental education practice?

Environmental citizenship is a concept that captures one's imagination and adds credibility to the sustainability imperative. While environmental citizenship has been theorized at length, it is still unclear what such citizenship actually looks like in practice or by which methods it can be cultivated. Drawing form the literature in green political theory, this critical essay attempts to identify how we might create environmental education programs and approaches whose goal is to promote environmental citizenship. The essay argues for an environmental citizenship conceived along the civic republican tradition and civic environmentalism tradition, whereby individuals participate in working collectively toward the common good. Place-based education provides a compelling educational approach that provides promise toward cultivating such citizenship.

Civic Competence of Youth in Europe: Measuring Cross National Variation Through the Creation of a Composite Indicator.

This article develops a composite indicator to monitor the levels of civic competence of young people in Europe using the IEA ICCS 2009 study. The measurement model combines the traditions in Europe of liberal, civic republican and critical/cosmopolitan models of citizenship. The results indicate that social justice values and citizenship knowledge and skills of students are facilitated within the Nordic system that combines a stable democracy and economic prosperity with a democratically based education systems in which teachers prioritise promoting autonomous critical thinking in citizenship education. In contrast, medium term democracies with civic republican tradition, such as Italy and Greece gain more positive results on citizenship values and participatory attitudes. This is also the case for some recent former communist countries that retain ethnic notions of citizenship. In a final step we go on to argue that the Nordic teachers’ priority on developing critical and autonomous citizens perhaps facilitates 14 years olds qualities of cognition on citizenship and the values of equality but may not be the most fruitful approach to enhance participatory attitudes or concepts of a good citizen which may be better supported by the Italian teachers’ priority on civic responsibility.

By right of service: the military as a pathway to earned citizenship

In this article, I use the civic republican tradition as a theoretical lens to examine how Mexican-Americans in a transnational community have drawn on their wartime service to demand equal treatment as citizens and legal residence as immigrants. I interpret this account through a frame of “Tejano republicanism” originating in the historical experience of civil rights groups led by South Texas veterans. Originating as Texas-based US citizen-only groups, the League of United Latin American Citizens and the American G.I. Forum's struggle for equal rights evolved to include a broader nationwide pan-Latino constituency including unauthorized immigrants by the 1970s. Today, both groups support military service as a pathway to citizenship for all unauthorized immigrants in the spirit of their founding generation's struggle for civil rights. But unauthorized immigrants who want to follow this pathway to citizenship can no longer do so, as they are barred from enlisting. To respond to this new challenge, I apply my historical and normative account of earned citizenship to analyze and critique current US policies governing immigrant enlistment and the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act's military service provision. As a whole, this article serves as a work of applied political theory with implications for the contemporary US immigration reform debate.

Struggle and solidarity: civic republican elements in Pierre Bourdieu’s political sociology

Pierre Bourdieu developed a theory of democratic politics that is at least as indebted to civic republicanism as to Marxism. He was familiar with the civic republican tradition, and it increasingly influenced both his political interventions and sociological work, especially late in his career. Bourdieu drew above all on Niccolo Machiavelli’s version of republicanism, though the French republican tradition also influenced him via Durkheimian social theory. Three elements of Bourdieu’s work in particular—his concept of field autonomy, his view of interests and universalism, and his understanding of how solidarity is generated and sustained—may be understood, at least in part, as sociological reformulations of republican ideas. By drawing attention to these republican influences, the article aims to show that the conceptual resources which some critics, including Jeffrey C. Alexander, consider indispensable to an adequate theory of democracy are not entirely absent in Bourdieu’s work. On the basis of this reassessment, the article concludes that Bourdieu and Alexander are not as opposed in their thinking about democratic politics as it might first appear.

“Producing a Reconciliation of Disinterestedness and Commerce”: The Political Rhetoric of Education in the Early Republic

One of the vexing ambiguities in the historiography of the civic republican tradition has been just when and how republicanism ended. The American Revolution itself, according to Gordon Wood and J. G. A. Pocock, was waged for republican principles, but the government established in its wake represented what Wood called “the end of classical politics,” abandoning virtue in the name of commerce and liberal individualism. By the close of the eighteenth century, Pocock writes, “A condition of thought … in which a bourgeois ideology, a civic morality for the market man, was ardently desired but apparently not to be found.” Later historians sought to extend republicanism's life into the nineteenth century, identifying figures and institutions who held fast to the tradition against the prevailing commercial and industrial winds, while others have taken the ambiguity of republicanism's end to suggest that no such coherent worldview existed in the United States, which was from the outset a liberal project employing only an occasional and misleading republican vocabulary. Even Wood, whose Radicalism of the American Revolution specifically set out to narrate the transformation of American political ideology from the Revolution to the ascent of the Jeffersonians, offers a general account of shifting rhetorical emphases—from virtue to equality, the common good to self-interest—but not the contours of this shift in any specific realm of American life.

Private Incarceration – Towards a Philosophical Critique

On November 19, 2009, Israel’s High Court of Justice (HCJ) ruled, by an eight to one majority, that Amendment 28 to the Prison Ordinance (2004), which authorized the construction of the first privately-run prison in the country, was unconstitutional. The main reason given by the Court for its globally unprecedented decision was that the very fact of being incarcerated by a private, for-profit corporation, regardless of the quality of service provided by that private institution, was an excessive violation of the prisoners’ rights to freedom and to human dignity and thus contradicted the provisions of Basic Law: Human Dignity and Freedom. The main opinion in the case, written by Supreme Court President Dorit Beinisch, has been criticized as incoherent, in that it confused the institutional argument – based on the non-delegation doctrine – with the argument from human rights. Beinisch explicitly stated that the concern that prisoners’ rights are more likely to be infringed in a private than in a public prison was not sufficiently strong to warrant the finding that the amendment was unconstitutional. Still, she concluded that the very fact that the power to deprive a person of her liberty rested with a private for-profit entity was, in and of itself, an excessive violation of the prisoners’ rights to freedom and to human dignity. She also argued that this finding rendered considering the issue of the delegation of core governmental functions to a private entity superfluous in this case.1 The Court’s liberal critics have pointed out that the president failed to provide a persuasive argument for her decision. An argument from human rights, they claimed, should have been able to show some reason to believe that the prisoners’ rights were more likely to be infringed in a private than in a public institution. Alternatively, the president could have argued against the delegation of core governmental functions.2 Having declined to take either of these courses, her decision amounted to no more than an unsubstantiated assertion. Moreover, while the Supreme Court spoke its lofty rhetoric, prisoners were languishing in public prisons in awful conditions. To the extent that these prisoners may have preferred to be housed in a more comfortable private prison, the Court could also be said to have violated their rights of free choice and personal autonomy.3 In this paper, we argue that while Beinisch’s decision was indeed incoherent and unjustified when viewed from a liberal perspective, which was her avowed perspective, it is perfectly coherent and justified from a civic republican perspective. We further argue that, in general, a coherent moral argument against private incarceration must necessarily rest on civic republican foundations. The question of the relations between liberalism and civic republicanism, especially between their respective conceptions of freedom, has become salient over the last three decades following the renewal of interest in the civic republican tradition. An argument heard with increasing frequency in recent years, however, claims that the differences between the two conceptions of freedom are minor in reality and that every worthy moral position

‘Think globally, act locally’: sustainable communities, modernity and development

This article sets out to explore the political relationship between the global and the local through the prism of the sustainable development. The ideal of sustainable communities is explored in the context of evolving political fictions that define alternative conceptions of modernity. While the article uses Ireland (reputedly the most globalised society in the world) as a microcosm of development, the context is firmly located within the wider sphere of European and planetary politics. It is argued that the ideal of sustainable communities offers the opportunity of reviving the civic republican tradition of democracy (the Ancient Greek agora) as a metaphor for the public sphere in the conditions of late modern society. The agora in Ancient Greece provided a site of political assembly, based upon participation (citizens’ engagement in decision-making) and deliberation (a process of reached argument). Today, concepts such as ‘participatory civility’ and ‘discursive democracy’ seek to revive these classical ideals, as the basis for building sustainable communities in a transforming modernity that searches for a new logic of development.

Newspaper Competition and Public Spheres in New Hampshire in the Early Revolutionary Period

This monograph is a case study of newspaper competition in New Hampshire between the province's official newspaper and an upstart Whig challenger in the period marked by contention over the Stamp Act (1765-1766) and over the tight oligarchical reign of the Wentworth family. The case study is grounded in the civic republican tradition articulated by Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood as well as the revisionist scholarship since the 1960s that takes the role of the “little people” seriously. It maintains that the competition between the two newspapers contributed to, and opened up, the public spaces in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to a wider compass than might have been predicted if one follows the standard Habermasian argument for the develop of a bourgeois public sphere. In part, these more diverse public spheres grew out of a staple of ritualized communication in the form of effigy demonstration reports and stamp master resignation speeches at both the local and intercolonial levels. The paper traces the provenance of these reports to the rough music of the colonists' English ancestors so beautifully articulated by E.P. Thompson. The Whig challenger also championed a rollicking and irreverent, rhetorical epistolary form that involved status reversals and mocked deference in a highly amusing, yet serious, manner.

Hannah Arendt, 1906–1975

AbstractThis essay provides an overview of the life and theoretical concerns of Hannah Arendt. It traces the way her experience as a German Jew in the 1930s informed her analysis of totalitarianism in The Origins of Totalitarianism and her idea of the “banality of evil” in Eichmann in Jerusalem. The essay takes issue with those of Arendt's critics who detect a lack of “love of the Jewish people” in her writing. It also traces the way Arendt's encounter with totalitarian evil led to a deeper questioning of the anti-democratic impulses in the Western tradition of political thought—a questioning that finds its fullest articulation in The Human Condition and On Revolution. Throughout, my concern is to highlight Arendt's contribution to thinking “the political” in a way friendly to the basic phenomenon of human plurality. I also highlight her recovery and extension of the main themes of the civic republican tradition.

Embracing a Civic Republican Tradition in Natural Resources Decision-Making

Public participation processes in agency decision-making are commonplace today and they consume substantial portions of agency budgets. But agencies often struggle to design processes that meaningfully engage the public. The lack of meaningful engagement is often excused as the fault of the other side. The agency faults the public for comments that lack specificity or that fail to account for the factual and legal constraints underlying the proposal, and the public faults the agency for ignoring its comments or failing to take them into account in making its final decision. Public frustrations with agency process often exacerbate public disenchantment with agency decisions.This paper offers a prescription for making public processes more meaningful in the context of policy decisions impacting natural resources. It begins by tracing the history of public participation in government action. It then reviews the arguments that support public participation, as well as several reasons that may counsel against it. Participation processes will surely endure, but a better appreciation of the challenges that participation processes present can help agencies tailor their processes to be more meaningful. The chapter then analyzes the theoretical foundations for public participation, concluding that the civic republican tradition offers the only viable approach for meaningfully engaging the public in natural resources decision-making. Various modes of participation are then evaluated in light of the civic republican model, with suggestions for modifying these processes to enhance their utility in engaging the pubic. Finally, the chapter discusses some of the ongoing problems with current public processes and suggests possible reforms.

Civic Virtue in the Modern World: The Politics of Young Ireland

This article examines Young Ireland’s strong links with a civic republican tradition of politics. It shows how the group set out to revive a neo‐classical ideal of an ethical community in a modern setting. The object of political association for these patriots was not to secure basic securities or peaceful co‐existence between competing parties, but to provide an enabling context for the good life. A life of active citizenship was a fundamental constituent of the good. While Young Ireland’s positive conception of freedom was drawn from civic republican sources, the article demonstrates that the group’s criticisms of faction, collective slavery and corruption are also related to their republican vision of politics. The article concludes by outlining the difficulties Young Irelanders faced in harmonising their political ideals with the institutional realities of the modern state and the basic organisation of a commercial age. While Young Ireland proposed a variety of measures to resuscitate civic virtue in the modern world, this article shows that the group struggled to overcome the individualism that modern societies seemed structurally disposed to produce.

Welfare Polls: A Synthesis

Welfare polls are survey instruments that seek to quantify the determinants of human well-being. Currently, three welfare polling formats are dominant: contingent-valuation surveys, QALY surveys, and happiness surveys. Each format has generated a large, specialized, scholarly literature, but no comprehensive discussion of welfare polling as a general enterprise exists. This Article seeks to fill that gap. Part I describes the trio of existing formats. Part II discusses the actual and potential uses of welfare polls in government decisionmaking. Part III analyzes in detail the obstacles that welfare polls must overcome to provide useful well-being information, and concludes that they can be genuinely informative. Part IV synthesizes the case for welfare polls, arguing against two types of challenges: the revealed-preference tradition in economics, which insists on using behavior rather than surveys to learn about well-being; and the civic-republican tradition in political theory, which accepts surveys but insists that respondents should be asked to take a citizen rather than consumer perspective. Part V suggests new directions for welfare polls.

TOWARD GLOBAL REPUBLICAN CITIZENSHIP?

The re-energizers of the civic republican tradition claim that its ideas can enhance contemporary political theory as well as politics. This essay focuses on the benchmark of the republican tradition, the notion of citizenship, and explores the viability of such claims. I argue that serious limitations make the republican conception of citizenship unable to satisfy the stipulations of the ongoing global transition. The models of “the republican citizen” and “the citizen of the world” are essentially inconsistent. Some traditional ideas of civic republicanism—the high demands of public service and strong patriotic identity, the rhetorical approach to individual rights, and the multiple functions of the republican state—are not adjustable to the global reality. When new republicans attempt to incorporate the elements of contemporary political theory into republican thought, their hybrid concepts fly in the face of the old tradition.

What’s An “Anomaly”? Or, How and How Much Theoretical Traditions Matter

I appreciate that Professor Uslaner has taken my research and arguments seriously, to point of penning a formal response. He makes several claims and criticisms. With respect to my paper specifically, I think two points are relevant; others seem to me to be more directed at other scholarship. I shall address criticisms. In general, I suggest that I see critique as not so much wrong as misdirected or beside point. Let me begin by saying that Uslaner's critique addresses but a part of larger concerns my study seeks to illuminate. As I hope is clear in original paper, purpose of my article (Hero 2003a) is to examine and compare multiple theoretical traditions, in this case three traditions defined and developed in some prominent works (e.g., Smith 1993). Uslaner directly considers indicators of only two of those. One indicator, his central focus, is generalized trust, a leaner and purportedly better benchmark than capital (and is obviously associated with civic republican tradition). The second is indicator (drawn from my data), suggestive of ascriptive hierarchy tradition. Thus, Uslaner's locus is somewhat different, and is arguably more limited in some ways than my analysis, but in other ways perhaps more extensive. Beyond that, my major response is that critique does not actually challenge my argument as much as it inadvertently undertakes an analysis that is inadequate or inappropriate to understanding of significance and measurement of black/minority (in)equality (associated with ascriptive hierarchy). The orientation of Uslaner's generalized trust or community thesis leads to an examination rooted in those assumptions, which is hardly a surprise. But those assumptions and measurements are not apposite for examining alternative perspectives, including, or particularly, policy disparities between racial groups. This is most conspicuous in what I take to be central empirical criticism Uslaner levels at my article. The most pointed criticism Uslaner makes concerns an alleged anomaly in findings of my article compared to his findings, which follow from his recalculation and reanalysis of certain data. Specifically, drawing on my data (Hero 2003a), Uslaner . . . recalculated black/white suspension ratio, using total numbers of African-Americans suspended for 1992 divided by total number of suspensions . . . and made a similar calculation for whites for each slate and then divided black ratio by white. The results-compared to Hero 2003a-changed dramatically. (Uslaner 2004). I read Uslaner's assertions to imply that my findings are inaccurate, not merely an anomaly. But do these findings really suggest findings of my article are an anomaly, and perhaps inaccurate? From standpoint of Uslaner's assumptions and measurement, they may be. However, from standpoint of social diversity perspective they are not. The findings are different because assumptions and measures in my article are different. In my study (Hero 2003a), dependent variable is calculated differently; black students suspended is divided by black students in student body (not by all suspensions), which is in turn divided by white students suspended divided by white students in student body (again, not by all suspensions). Uslaner's calculation may be consistent with certain conceptions of (in)equality, but in not taking account of proportion of student population that is black or minority, and white, it systematically, often dramatically overstates extent of parity. From social diversity perspective, Uslaner's recalculation does not differentiate or disaggregate racial group outcomes appropriately to fully specify racial disparity relative to size of a given group. Thus, to say, for example, that the original ratios (for 1998) and recalculated ratios are not strongly related (Uslaner, pp. …

Who Speaks for the Poor?: National Interest Groups and Social Policy By R. Allen Hays. 277p. New York: Routledge, 2001. $75.00. Declarations of Dependency: The Civic Republican Tradition in U.S. Poverty Policy By Alan F. Zundel. 178p. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. $50.50 cloth, $17.95 paper.

The new monographs by R. Allen Hays and Allen F. Zundel are welcome additions to our effort to understand the processes by which Americans make social welfare policy. Hays's work looks at the set of interest groups that testified before Congress on poverty policy during the 28-year period from 1970 to 1997, a period characterized by both incremental change and major upheaval in poverty policymaking. Zundel's work examines the rhetorical frames that have driven major social welfare reform efforts over the past century and a half.