Republican Language Research Articles

The Staging of the Constitution, or, the Republican Masque of "The Federalist Papers"

In 'Great National Discussion': The Discourse of Politics in 1787, Isaac Kramnick argues that three discursive paradigms governed America in 1787: Civic Humanism and Liberalism, the language of virtuous Republicanism, and the language of Power and the State.' Kramnick, however, has missed the first act: the leading paradigm for language and action in American political life of the Constitutional period was theatre. To legitimate the power play of the new Constitution, Hamilton, Madison, and Jay played Publius on the artfully and self-consciously constructed stage of the United States of The Federalist Papers.2 In projecting the new Republican

A Bridge, a Dam, a River: Liberty and Innovation in the Early Republic

and live by them? The good patriots of Georgetown, in the new District of Columbia, for example, thought liberty insured them a right to become a rich exporting center, merchandising the produce of the Potomac Valley in the markets of the world. The equally virtuous residents of Alexandria, across the Potomac in Virginia's contribution to the federal district, believed that liberty conveyed to them much the same right. Yet as early as 1802 these sister cities in the only jurisdiction directly governed by Congress were at each other's throats over improvements in the Potomac River, which (each place argued in turn) either secured their liberty or destroyed their freedom to prosper and endure. They couched their arguments in the language of republicanism, which in the last thirty years American historians have recognized as essential to understanding the revolution. Sensitive to the rhetoric of the revolution as well as the complexity of its causes, historians of the early republic now confront, with their subjects, the working out of that legacy, the application of that language, and the resolution of conflicting interests in an experimental nation blessed

Henry David Thoreau's Political Economy

FOR those who wish to understand Henry David Thoreau's politics, his texts alone may not offer sufficient education. Heretofore, the relatively few scholars of literature and history who have examined his politics have been inclined to register Thoreau in their own modern political party or to relegate him to the camp of the ideological enemy. To lionize or dismiss him the arch-foe of modern statism, global power politics, free-enterprise politics, or militarism and war is superficial at best. To reject him an arch-duke of anarchism is to take the eighteenth-century English establishmentarian and the American Tory view. Perhaps even more severe built-in historical and contextual limitations govern the views that Thoreau is anomalous or that he is thoroughly inconsistent. Rather, one must be aware that the terms Thoreau used-such virtue, culture, law (moral well natural), corruption, liberty, power, and conspiracy-are terms and concepts he shared with his age, an age that can be characterized by its devotion to the ideology and language of Revolutionary republicanism. Republicanism not only provided the dominant language but also functioned as a kind of meta-language.... As such, the language of republicanism was so completely taken for granted that it established the very categories within which political discourse could properly-perhaps even possibly-be undertaken.'

Le champ lexical de nación dans le discours espagnol républicain (1876-1899)

THE LEXICAL FIELD OF NACIÓN IN THE REPUBLICAN LANGUAGE IN SPAIN (1876-1899) The analysis of this lexical field is carried out according to the two fundamental axis of the language: paradigmatu: and syntagmatic. Made up of words which refer to the political organisation of a community : nación, patria, pais and pueblo, this field is studied, for methodological reasons, during the period from 1876, the time of the restoration of the monarchy and the establishment of a parliamentary system, until the year following the 1898 disaster. The corpus under examination comes from partisan doctrinal texts, manifestos and political programs. Semantically, the terms considered are regrouped around the idea of «political community ». Some difficulties in the delimitation of this lexical whole arise in so far as the chosen terms are not entirely equivalent on account of linguistic and ideological factors, and in particular, affective ones. The semantic analysis of nación, which has a complex and sometimes ambiguous significance, underlines the differences between fédérales and unitarios within the Republican party. Moreover the comparison of this term with others sets off shades of meanings linked with political tendencies of different discourses and reveals partial or total identities between terms. Taking one word for another is not a commonplace problem of terminology.

The Scipionic Inscriptions

Historians and grammarians, palaeographers, and epigraphers have long employed the Scipionic inscriptions as providing accurate data for the period of about 200 B.C. A recent article, however, appearing in this journal, written by the distinguished grammarian, Professor Fay, just before his untimely death, questions the authenticity of these inscriptions, chiefly on grammatical grounds. The inscriptions are so important that it might be well to consider carefully the validity of such arguments in the light of other evidence before we surrender these landmarks of republican history and language.