Political Republican Research Articles

The Topicality of Political Republicanism

The Topicality of Political Republicanism

“Missing Link”: The Embryological Interpretation of the State of Nature by Pieter De la Court and Johan De la Court

This study examines the status and the functions of the medical (“embryological”) argument in Pieter and Johan De la Court’s treatise Considerations of State, or Political Balance. In the beginning of the second book of the treatise, the co-authors decide not to confine themselves to the Hobbesian explanation of the causes of the state of nature, setting forth their own interpretation of this phenomenon, which is the certain “impressions” or “marks” (indrukselen) the foetus receives at the moment of conception and during the mother’s pregnancy. The article primarily focuses on this striking inversion of the commonplace regarding prenatal conditions, and on the particular way of merging the political arguments with medical arguments while approaching aporia,the famous state of nature. The authors proceed by sorting out the contexts of Cartesian and Harvean embryological writings (A. Deusing), popular medical texts describing the pathologies of conception and pregnancy (J. Cats and J. van Beverwijk), and treatises on “political natural philosophy” (R. Cumberland) which illuminates the reasons of using this “anomalous” argument as an explanation of the inevitability of the state of nature. The research emphasizes the ambivalence of the De la Courts’ political republicanism. Though preserving some significant elements of the ethical-rhetorical paradigm (parrhesia, the idea of the “Batavian liberty”), this political philosophy does not manage to coherently represent the relationships between the biological and the civil orders, or between heroic ethos and “beneficial violence”.

Pettit, Philip. On the People’s Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. 347. $74.00 (cloth); $27.99 (paper).

Pettit, Philip. <i>On the People’s Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy</i>.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. 347. $74.00 (cloth); $27.99 (paper).

Star Kings and Merry Monarchs

Star Kings and Merry Monarchs Matthew Jenkinson (bio) Clare Jackson Charles II: The Star King london: allen lane, 2016 ix + 130 pages; isbn: 9780141979762 Alexander Larman Restoration: The Year of the Great Fire london: head of zeus, 2016 xv + 285 pages; isbn: 9781781851333 in may 1914 The Graphic published a cartoon by E. T. Reed titled “The Restoration of Charles II.” The cartoon features a classic, statuesque image of Charles, but he is standing within some makeshift scaffolding, on which sit five gnomish figures. Two of the figures polish and buff the king’s shoes; another brushes his hat; the fourth curls Charles’s hair; while the fifth paints the finishing touches on the king’s face. It is an image reminiscent of William Makepeace Thackeray’s photogravure “Rex, Ludovicus, Ludovicus Rex,” in which the short, paunchy Louis XIV has majesty bestowed on him by a cloak, wig, and high-heeled shoes: “Thus do barbers and cobblers make the gods that we worship.” While Reed’s cartoon plays on the word restoration and may also be concerned with contemporary labor politics (it is noted that “Fortunately there were no labour disputes at the moment, so the work was able to be carried out without interruption”), it highlights what has become a historiographical norm: early modern monarchs’ images were constructed, in much the same way that we have become used to the images of modern politicians being “spun.”1 [End Page 709] Eschewing the conventional cradle-to-grave biography, Charles II: The Star King—Clare Jackson’s contribution to the Penguin Monarchs series—focuses on the creation of monarchical imagery through the visual arts, ceremony, and literature. Jackson’s use of the sobriquet “Star King” comes from the star that shone throughout the day above London on the day of Charles’s birth, May 29, 1630, and that was then incorporated in a number of cultural artifacts related to the king’s image. It is also a neat equivalent, of course, to Louis XIV’s more famous “Sun King” epithet, though Jackson rightly admits that “Charles cannot be imagined asserting personal ownership of his kingdoms in terms of ‘l’état c’est à moi’ ” (10). “Star King” is a welcome change from “Merry Monarch,” the jaunty moniker that originated in a vicious squib by John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester, but has since more often been used to sanitize Charles’s complex and sometimes dark reign. Jackson’s biography offers a deft summary of this reign, and of Charles II’s life more generally, with a touch sufficiently light to navigate real complexities, but without losing a secure expert grasp or analytical rigor. The implication of Jackson’s exploration of Charles II is that sobriquets like “Merry Monarch” or even “Star King” do not do sufficient justice to a king who, for much of his reign, actively adopted dissimulation and multiple, sometimes inconsistent, images to survive in an extraordinarily difficult political landscape. Charles II was, Jackson notes, “keenly aware of the deep ideological fault-lines that divided his kingdoms” (21). The trauma of civil war and regicide, and the ignominy of exile during the Commonwealth and Protectorate, reverberated throughout the Restoration. The celebrations that marked 1660 also masked the persistent ideological fissures centering on the respective power and authority of king and Parliament and the long shadow of political republicanism. The nation was also divided religiously, with the Stuarts accused of plotting to return their kingdoms to the Catholic faith and the Anglican Church preoccupied with how to deal with a splintered Protestantism. The cries for persecution, toleration, or comprehension varied in intensity according to the changeable political and devotional climate and the perceived likelihood of ’41 coming again. Criticism of the restored king was also provoked by his penchant for multiple mistresses (one of whom was considered to be providing Charles with a hotline to French despotism), his siring of several illegitimate children, and his indulgence of a libertine court. The national disasters of plague and fire compounded these man-made troubles, as did military defeat against the Dutch. Plenty of commentators, especially fearless satirists, were willing to lay the blame for such disasters at the feet of the court, which...

Savonarola and Savonarolism by Stefano Dall’Aglio (review)

Reviewed by: Savonarola and Savonarolism by Stefano Dall’Aglio Nicholas Terpstra Savonarola and Savonarolism. By Stefano Dall’Aglio. Translated by John Gagné. [Essays and Studies, 24.] (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, University of Toronto. 2010. Pp. 190. $24.50 paperback. ISBN 978-0-77272-061-0.) The Dominican preacher and reformer, Girolamo Savonarola (1452–98), is known for his fiery preaching, morality campaigns, and equally fiery death. He turns up occasionally in modern popular and even educated culture as a typical example of the worst of intolerant and reactionary “medieval” religious culture: a recruiter of teenage vigilantes who turned up the heat on blasphemers, sodomites, and indulgent clerics, and turned his torches against the entire Renaissance in two Bonfires of the Vanities that consumed canvases, books, playing cards, and many more products of humanist culture in Florence’s main civic square. What is often lost in these brief depictions is any appreciation for Savonarola’s political republicanism; his opposition to absolute-power mongering in church and state; and his advocacy of political and social justice for the poor, women, and children. These [End Page 604] were in the foreground in nineteenth-century histories that cast Savonarola as a hero fit for Italian nationalists and ecumenical Protestants alike. Outside the ranks of a relatively small number of experts, they are almost entirely forgotten now, replaced by the rather more easily dismissed cardboard-cutout figure of Savonarola as the prototypical intolerant religious fanatic. Savonarola was just as polarizing in his brief heyday (1492–98) and over the century that followed. Historians like Donald Weinstein, Lorenzo Polizzotto, and Tamar Herzig have done much to recover both the career and the movement that it spawned in a series of influential English-language articles and monographs. While Italian scholarship has been even more extensive, little of it reaches English-speaking audiences. One of the most productive Italian scholars is Stefano Dall’Aglio, who has produced a number of important monographs on the reformer and his movement and editions of some key texts. This translation by John Gagné makes his brief and helpful survey of the movement available to English readers, together with an extensive bilingual bibliography of classical and recent works. Dall’Aglio’s approach resembles Polizzotto’s more than Weinstein’s in its careful discussion of the events that marked Savonarola’s time in Florence and then the series of texts that set out the movement’s evolution through the subsequent century. He writes as an intellectual historian whose firm grasp on Savonarolan literature and Florentine politics allows him to contextualize the extraordinary series of works that followed the friar’s execution. Former allies like Marsilio Ficino quickly cleared their own reputation by writing works condemning Savonarola’s errors, whereas the movement’s remaining partisans wrote boldly during those periods when Florentine republicanism held power against Medici absolutism (chiefly from 1501–12 and 1527–30). The Medici grip on power became ever firmer after establishment of the duchy in 1532, and in response the Savonarolan movement metamorphosed into something distinctly more spiritual and less political. Dall’Aglio tracks the vibrant battle for Florentine hearts and minds that dominated local intellectual life from the 1490s through the 1550s and the gradual emergence of a more disengaged and pietist Savonarolism after mid-century. His account is informed, assured, and valuable as an intellectual and political history of the Savonarolan movement. What one misses is the dynamic social dimension of the movement—particularly the work of the many laity, ranging from poor men to elite and widowed women who worked to realize the Savonarolan ideal of a holy city characterized by charitable activity. There are, in fact, almost no women in this account apart from a few nuns. This is largely the result of a decision to focus on the texts and authors defining the intellectual side of Savonarolism, rather than on the institutions and largely female figures active until the late-sixteenth century and featured more prominently in recent English-language scholarship. [End Page 605] Nicholas Terpstra University of Toronto Copyright © 2014 The Catholic University of America Press

Républicanisme et libéralisme : opposition ou complémentarité ? La question de la liberté politique

Republicanism and liberalism : opposition or complementarity ? The issue of political freedom Taking the crucial example of political freedom, the author attempts to demonstrate that the opposition between liberal and republican conceptions of citizenship are only valid for one facet of citizenship – civic humanism. On the other hand, not only can political republicanism be reconciled with liberalism, but it also constitutes an enrichment thereof. This argument would be undermined if the claim of the specificity of the republican theory of freedom as non-domination was founded. But this claim can be contested. Political republicanism must therefore be considered as a strict version of liberalism, addressed to those for whom the emancipation of dominated peoples represents a central requirement.

FLORENTINE CIVIC HUMANISM AND THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN IDEOLOGY

ABSTRACTThis article revisits the question of the modernity of the Renaissance by examining the political language of Florentine civic humanism and by critically analyzing the debate over Hans Baron's interpretation of the movement. It engages two debates that are usually conducted separately: one concerning the originality of civic humanism in comparison to medieval thought, and the other concerning the political and social function of the civic humanists' political republicanism in fifteenth‐century Florence. The article's main contention is that humanist political discourse rejected the perception of social and political reality as being part of, or reflecting, a metaphysical and divine order or things, and thus undermined the traditional justifications for political hierarchies and power relations. This created the conditions of possibility for the distinctively modern aspiration for a social and political order based on liberty and equality. It also resulted in the birth of a distinctively modern form of ideology, one that legitimizes the social order by disguising its inequalities and structures of domination. Humanism, like modern political thought generally, thus simultaneously constructs and reflects the dialectic of emancipation and domination so central to modernity itself.

EL TRATADO DE REPUBLICA DE ALONSO DE CASTRILLO. UNA REFLEXION SOBRE LA LEGITIMIDAD DE LA ACCION POLITICA

«El tratado de Republica» by Alonso de Castrillo amounts to the last and most important manifestation of political republicanism in Castile, after the Comunidades movement, which is here considered to be strictly revolutionary and constituent. Castrillo’s book was to salvage the most relevant elements of this movement and to organise them with the idea of them being adopted even by the victors of the Battle of Villalar.

Political Republicanism and Perfectionist Republicanism

In recent years, a number of political thinkers in philosophy, political theory and law have defended political theories which are deeply indebted to classical republicanism. Like classical republicans, these thinkers have claimed that a flourishing polity depends upon citizens' exercise of the civic virtues. Unlike classical republicans, some of these thinkers have defended what might be called “political republicanisms”—republicanisms which are also indebted to the methodological restraint of Rawls's political liberalism. The article argues that political republicanism suffers from a viability problem. Its list of civic virtues is too short. More worrisome, the public justifications that would be available to a political republican regime are not sufficient to motivate the development of the civic virtues. Therefore, if we are to be republicans, we should be “perfectionist republicans” instead.

Une vieillesse républicaine ? L'état et la protection sociale de la vieillesse de l'assistance aux assurances sociales (1880-1914)

DIDIER RENARD At the end of the XlXth and at the beginning of the XXth century, in France, the modes of a social protection of the old age evolved significantly. The conceptions of the old age are changing : more and more, it is defined by age, irrespective of the circumstances which accompany it. Concurrently, the strengthening of a political republican regime contributes to give a comparatively original content to the debate on the institutional shapes of social protection. The conjunction of these two elements may explain the emergence of a theoretical scheme of republican assistance to old age at the beginning of the century, which will soon disappear under the flood of the insurance logic.

I Have Don . . . much to Carrey on the Warr": Women and the Shaping of Republican Ideology After the American Revolution

"I Have Don . . . much to Carrey on the Warr" Women and the Shaping of Republican Ideology After the American Revolution* Linda K. Kerber I take my title from what I think is the most moving witness to the American Revolution left to us by a woman: the petition of Rachel Wells of Bordentown, New Jersey, to the Continental Congress.1 Wells faced the loss of the repayment of her war bonds due to a technicality. To the Honnorabell Congress 1 rachel do make this Complaint, Who ama Widow far advanced in years & Dearly have ocasión of ye Interst for that Cash I Lent the States. I was a Sitisen in ye jearsey when I Lent ye State a considerable Sum of Moneys & had I justice dun me it mite be Suficiant to suporte me in ye Contrey whear I am now. . . .Now gentelmen is this Liberty, had it bin advertised that he or She that Moved out of the Stat should lose his or her Interest you mite have sum plea against me. But I am Innocent, Suspected no Trick. I have Don as much to Carrey on the Warr as maney that Sett Now at ye healm of government. . . . god has Spred a plentif ull tabel for us & you gentelmen are ye Carvers for us pray forgit not the Poor weaklings . . . Why Not Rachel Wells have a Littel intrust? if She did not fight she threw in all her mite which bought ye Sogers food & Clothing & Let Them have Blankets. . . . Rachel Wells could not spell, but she had a high level of political consciousness. She had been deeply engaged in the war. She knew where her money had gone and for what it had been used. She had a clear sense of what was due to her. But the position she was forced to assume was that of a supplicant. The political community fashioned by the American war was a deeply gendered community, one in which all white adults were citizens but in which men's voices were politically privileged. For men, political institutions —the army, the militia, the state legislatures, the Continental Congress , organizations of artisans—facilitated collective experience. A notable male elite—its patriarchal character encoded in its identification as the Founding Fathers—articulated political republicanism and embedded it in successive manifestos and institutions, acting in the name, they said, of all Americans, though they certainly did not formally consult women of any race or class, any black men, and, only rarely, propertyless white men. There ©1990 JOURNAL OF WOMEN'S HISTORY, VOL. 1 NO. 3 (WINTER)__________________ *This is an abridged version of an essay to be included in Darline Gay Levy and Harriet Applewhite, eds, Womf« and Politics in the Age of Democratic Revolution (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990) 232 JOURNAL OF WOMEN'S HISTORY WINTER was no female counterpart of the Founding Fathers. American women shared many experiences but only occasionally formalized their collective response or articulated their reactions as a group or on behalf of more than one. It has not been easy for historians to say much that is reliable about American women in the revolutionary era—either about their behavior or about their understanding of what that behavior meant. Reading the history of the American Revolution from the perspective of women is a little like entering the world of Tom Stoppard's Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a world that has been turned inside out so that we can pay attention to voices that were present in the original telling but overpowered by the narrator's choice of central characters. There is much merit to thinking of the era as an "age of the democratic revolution" and to melding the French and American upheavals into a single set of shared events on a large scale. Lafayette's career alone may furnish all the proof we need of the merits of that approach. But there were also enormous differences between the political cultures of the two revolutions, differences that are underscored by the sharp differences in women's behavior. French women were early to claim their political tongues, beginning with the cahiers of the flower sellers of Paris and proceeding through Olympe de...