Republican Critique Research Articles

Converted Republic: Lemuel Haynes, Timothy Dwight, and the Anti-Racist Politics of the Republican Sermon

Abstract: This essay explores the under-examined philosophy of evangelical republicanism that preacher-reformers Lemuel Haynes and Timothy Dwight developed at the end of the eighteenth century. To demonstrate their evangelical critique of classical republicanism, Haynes and Dwight invented a new genre: the republican sermon, which allowed them to champion evangelicalism's understanding of disinterested virtue as a corrective to self-serving ambitions that dominated ancient republics. Civic republicans believed that elite white men were the only ones disinterested enough to contribute to politics and participate in the public sphere. By contrast, evangelicals transformed disinterestedness from an intellectual attribute to an affective quality available to all persons who had undergone a conversion experience. Because evangelical republicans vacate individual interests and consider all persons to be dignified and worthy of benevolence, their approach to condemning race-based injustices does not accord with the autobiographical impulse of antebellum genres like the slave narrative. Instead, evangelical republicans like Haynes protest slavery and racism by disinterestedly focusing on the suffering that all Black Americans collectively experience.

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The aim of this work is to shed light on the ideal of “another freedom” expressed by Pushkin in the poem “From Pindemonte” in the context of modern concepts of freedom. It specifically intends to argue against the view of A. Etkind, who understands “another freedom” as equivalent to Isaiah Berlin's “negative freedom.” Whether Etkind's view is valid is examined in the context of the debate over Berlin's theory of freedom in modern political philosophy. Pushkin, who belongs to liberals, shares with Berlin the position of anti-rationalism and anti-utopianism. Modern republican critique of Berlin's liberal view of freedom can also be applied to Pushkin's political ideal of “enlightened despotism” in his later years. As such, there are several valid reasons to regard Pushkin's “another freedom” as the same paradigm as Berlin's “negative freedom.” However, Pushkin's position is different from Berlin's value pluralism. Pushkin's “another freedom” is not limited to “negative freedom.” In Pushkin's poem, both ‘autonomy’ and ‘authenticity’ of “positive freedom” are embodied. In a strict sense, Pushkin's “another freedom” differs from Western liberals' understanding of freedom. “Another freedom” that Pushkin wants is ‘anarchist individualism’ in its essence. The fundamentally different attributes of Pushkin's “another freedom” and Berlin's “negative freedom” in pursuit of the universal ideal of freedom of private life raise the issue of cultural differences in understanding the concept of freedom, which will be discussed in another study.

The Memory of Colonialism in Britain and France: The Sins of Silence. By Itay Lotem

Since the mid-1990s, an ever-growing number of publications have now made it commonplace to identify France as an example of a poorly managed colonial hangover. By contrast, whilst many signs tended to indicate that there was possibly also in Britain a ‘passé qui ne passe pas’, discussions of the imperial past and colonial memory were never framed as a meaningful tool for making sense of what was happening, despite all the racial, historical, and socio-political ramifications of the situation. It is therefore highly satisfying to see a book implicitly (at least in terms of its structure and chronological articulation) using the French trajectory to examine what has remained for a long time an unspoken aspect of British cultural and political life: the memory of the Empire, and how it emerged gradually as a meaningful discussion. Such an intervention is deeply needed at a time when British politicians can often exploit the benefits of uncritical engagement with the Empire, as exemplified by Boris Johnson arguing in 2014 that ‘The UK has bonds of history, language, law, family and customs across the world and we would be foolish not to make more of these at this time of profound global economic revival’ (Foreword to Tim Hewish, How to Solve a Problem like a Visa: The Unhappy State of Commonwealth Migration in the UK (Commonwealth Exchange)). How does this compare with the French context, where Itay Lotem rightly notes that both devoir de mémoire (Chapter 3) and the use of ‘memory as Republican critique’ (Chapter 4) have prevailed, opening spaces for debates which have been unheard of in the UK, notably under the convenient cover of a ‘convivial multiculturalism’ (Chapter 7)? Lotem’s book offers a fascinating overview of the profoundly different trajectories followed by the countries that built and ran the two largest colonial empires of the contemporary period when it came to engaging with, and reflecting upon, the cultural, political, and socio-cultural legacies of their attempt to create what they often called ‘Greater Britain’ or ‘la plus grande France’. At the heart of the book is the fundamental difference between what ‘silence’ means on each side of the English Channel. This is a matter of tradition as much as political circumstances, and is associated with the socio-cultural perception of what the imperial experience achieved, itself linked to how decolonization is remembered. Lotem articulates convincingly how each country has placed a different emphasis on the weight and significance of their colonial past, with memory appearing much more closely associated to political affiliation in the French case, as opposed to Britain where empire was first de-prioritized (Chapter 6), before the ‘tale of the imperial balance sheet’ (Chapter 10) took precedence. The book encompasses a wide range of sources to engage with this Protean, and exceptionally complex, question: interviews and engagement with media sources are a useful complement to the wide range of secondary material that appears in the bibliography. The careful charting of the processes through which empire came back to the fore in public discourse — and under different terms — represents a major contribution to our understanding of how French and British societies have grappled with their imperial past, now that they can no longer rely on their colonies to claim great power status.

The Gates Foundation, global health and domination: a republican critique of transnational philanthropy

Abstract The turn of the twenty-first century witnessed a revival of interest in the role of philanthropy in the international system, especially in the fields of global poverty and health. Yet, despite an emergent critical literature in development studies and international studies, philanthropy has barely featured in the debate on global distributive justice. This article uses the republican conception of domination as an analytical framework to precisely articulate concerns of justice raised by transnational philanthropy. Using the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and its role in global health as a test case, it argues that transnational philanthropy is characterized by an asymmetric distribution of power, which is sufficient to produce dependence, and that is uncontrolled insofar as its use either rests on the will of powerful agents or on terms of social cooperation beyond contestation. This arbitrary character is particularly relevant to philanthropy because of its use of epistemic power to produce and legitimize knowledge. In short, transnational philanthropy is dominating. If individuals have the right to exercise control over the social institutions that profoundly affect their basic interests, then philanthropy has a problem of justice that cannot be dismissed.

The Desire for Enrichment as a Cause of Corruption of the Republic

This study is devoted to the problem of material enrichment in the framework of Republican political theory. The aim of the work is to determine how the private desire for wealth correlates with the republican public virtues and affects the corruptio of the republic. The fact is that the desire for enrichment is the realization of a private self-interest. At the same time, the key republican virtue for the classical period — virtu — also assumes the presence of a private interest. In this regard, the author provides a theoretical justification for the permissibility of the desire for enrichment within the framework of republicanism.The research methods are comparative, historical methods, as well as the methodology of the Cambridge school. Within the framework of the analysis of the texts of the Republican tradition, the author comes to the following results.The corruptio of the republic takes place in cases where citizens are willing to compromise with the centralized political power of the state, giving up republican freedom for the sake of security and wealth. The most striking manifestation of this compromise is the transfer to the state of the function of distributing material goods in society. Wealth itself, in accordance with the classic Republican critique of statism, becomes dangerous when it replaces virtue, or becomes the price for which a person is willing to sell his freedom.At the same time, the most dangerous form of such a deal can be called a compromise, in which republican institutions continue to function formally, but political participation in society is replaced by police state control. Corruption of morals, therefore, occurs when people are willing to give up personal freedom for the sake of material well-being and convenience. However, at the same time, there is an amazing ideological substitution, according to which the political sphere begins to be called the state apparatus, which as such suppresses politics. This is the moment at which the corruptio of the republic takes place.As a result of the study, the author concludes that an effective compromise between a deviation from republican principles and private welfare is impossible. However, the desire to enrich itself can even be useful for the republic.

What is anarchist internationalism?

AbstractThis article outlines a concept of anarchist internationalism as non‐domination. The discussion falls into two parts. The first outlines the general theory, building on the analysis of the anarchist critique of republicanism, describing anarchist internationalism as cosmopolitan and based on a permanent “right of secession.” The second part considers how this general conception was developed in the context of anti‐colonial struggle and nationalist resurgence. It examines Ananda Coomaraswamy and Rudolf Rocker's responses to the global spread of capitalism and the evolution of the European state. Their contrasting critiques of nationalism and images of international community expose shortcomings and biases in the application of non‐domination and tensions which test cosmopolitan ties and voluntary agreements. Yet their work also demonstrates that anarchist internationalism is not a failed dream of class solidarity and that, understood as a principle of non‐domination, it promotes emancipatory, transformative processes directed against static configurations of power.

No Social Revolution Without Sexual Revolution

Recent studies have revealed how workers’ movements adapted republicanism into a language of anticapitalism in the nineteenth century. Much less attention has been paid, however, to the role feminists played in this process. This essay addresses this oversight by introducing the voices of the utopian socialists under July Monarchy France. These socialists insisted that there could be no social revolution without sexual revolution. Although they are often positioned outside of the republican tradition, this essay argues that the utopian socialists are better understood as rendering the legacy of classical and French republicanism compatible with nascent workers’ movements in the 1830s. By foregrounding the feminist Flora Tristan, this essay shows how utopian socialists weaponized republican tropes to address the social question, thereby expanding what a republican critique of capitalism could look like.

Anti-racist activism and the memory of colonialism: race as Republican critique after 2005

In 2005, French public debates increasingly focused on coming to terms with the memory of colonialism. This new interest in the country’s colonial history owed a great deal to the activity of a new kind of anti-racist organisation that prioritised the need to trigger a broad public debate about issues of race and memory. This article will examine the emergence of two of these organisations: Les Indigènes de la République and the Conseil Représentatif des Associations Noires. Both organisations were founded in 2005 and established themselves as well-known actors in France’s anti-racist scene through the appropriation of different aspects of France’s memory of colonialism. Indeed, their interventions concentrated on the way colonial legacies influenced contemporary Republican discourse and especially on the role of ‘race’ in contemporary France. Simultaneously, however, these organisations differed in their goals and understandings of activism. Through their cases, this piece will argue that anti-racist activists initiated a public debate on the memory of colonialism in order to find new ways to combat contemporary discrimination in France rather than thematising memory for the sake of remembrance.

‘De gente que a ningún rey obedecen’: Republicanism and Empire in Alonso de Ercilla's La Araucana

This article explores the implications of understanding the State of Arauco in Part One of Alonso de Ercilla's La Araucana (1569) as a republican form of political community. I begin by discussing how scholastic and humanistic tropes of barbarism employed in the opening two cantos give way to a description of a non-urban society that nevertheless has certain resemblances to the mixed government of Venice. The description of the Araucanian citizen militia intersects both with contemporary calls for reform of the Spanish military at the outset of the wars in Flanders and with the militaristic model of the republican state favoured by Niccolo Machiavelli. The decline of Araucanian military fortunes and virtue is analysed according to their transition from a policy of self-defence to one of aggressive expansion. This critique of republicanism also presents certain parallels to, and an implicit interrogation of, the Spanish model of empire.

The First Translations of Machiavelli's “Prince” from the Sixteenth to the First Half of the Nineteenth Century

The First Translations of Machiavelli's “Prince” from the Sixteenth to the First Half of the Nineteenth Century

Competing for Liberty: The Republican Critique of Democracy

Freedom as non-domination has acquired a leading status in political science. As a consequence of its success, neo-roman republicanism also has achieved great prominence as the political tradition that delivered it. Yet despite the fact that liberty in the Roman mode was forged not only in direct confrontation with monarchy but against democracy as well, the relationship of republicanism to democracy is the great absentee in the contemporary debate on non-domination. This article brings that relationship back into view in both historical and conceptual terms. It illustrates the misrepresentations of democracy in the Roman tradition and shows how these undergirded the theory of liberty as non-domination as a counter to political equality as a claim to taking part inimperium. In so doing it brings to the fore the “liberty side” of democratic citizenship as the equal rights of all citizens to exercise their political rights, in direct or indirect form.

O cnotach obywatelskich na przykładzie koncepcji instrumentalnego republikanizmu Williama Kymlicki

In considering Will Kymlicka’s critique of Aristotelian republicanism and his own version of instrumental republicanism, I pay special attention to two questions that divide the liberal and republican perspectives. First of all, should we take political participation as an essential form of human life? Secondly, can we admit that virtues should be treated by the state as autotelic elements of the good life? I reach the following conclusions: First, accepting a broad understanding of the political, we need to recognize the necessity of political engagement. Paradoxically, both liberals and republicans agree on this matter. The differences between them are to a large extent a result of different definitions of the terms political, social and private. Secondly, the state’s treating some virtues as intrinsic goods may be desirable and does not have to be in conflict with liberal justice.

Montesquieu and Modern Republicanism

In this article I explore Montesquieu's discussion of republics and the constitution of England in order to question the extent to which he should be accorded a central place in a tradition of modern republicanism. This involves challenging Paul Rahe's recent thesis that Montesquieu thought both that monarchy was not at all suited to modernity and that England was a republic all along. By stressing the importance of honour and ambition I argue that the liberty that Montesquieu thought exemplified in the English constitution was, in large part, secured by its monarchical principle. Moreover, by eschewing the relevance of political virtue for modern commercial societies, Montesquieu set his own proposals out in opposition to the prevalent French republican discourse of his time; thus it is highly problematic to view him as having proposed a republic for the moderns. The article also serves to disentangle Montesquieu's understanding of political liberty from his analysis of republics in order to refute the idea that he provides support for a distinctively republican conception of liberty as non-domination. This undermines the republican critique of liberalism set forth by Philip Pettit, which is further challenged by considering the affinities between Montesquieu's and Constant's conceptions of liberty. Many commentators have argued that Montesquieu repudiated classical republicanism, yet on the reading advanced in this article it is equally problematic to view him as a modern republican.

A Ruthless Critique of Everything Existing: Frederick Douglass and the Architectonic of African American Radicalism

This study argues that Frederick Douglass articulated a distinctively radical rhetorical stance that searched for a passage through the epistemological antimonies of transcendence and immanence; the ideological antimonies of structure and agency; and the performative antimonies of the actually existing and the utopian. He did so by offering a radical critique of the dominant rhetorical traditions of his time—that of Puritan rhetoric, Lockean liberalism, and herrenvolk Republicanism. Specifically, Douglass challenged the metaphysical presuppositions of Puritanism, demonstrated the contradictions of Lockean liberalism's social contract, and offered a trenchant critique of herrenvolk Republicanism's mobocracy.

Hans Morgenthau and Republicanism

Recent scholarship has called attention to the republican dimension of Hans Morgenthau’s approach to politics in the postwar era, but the role republicanism played in his thought remains ambiguous. This essay examines that role, and explores its tensions with other aspects of his understanding of politics. It argues that he expanded and deepened his approach to politics as he developed a republican critique of American domestic politics. However, his conception of international politics remained rooted in the reason-of-state tradition, and evinces little evidence of his increasing engagement with republicanism. In this selective use of republicanism, he left its tensions with other aspects of his thinking unresolved, but this usage also suggests his recognition of the inadequacy of the original formulation of his realist approach. In considering what IR theorists today may learn from republicanism, his example is highly instructive in any effort to reconstruct the foundations of realism.

A Democratic Republican Critique on Current South Korean Educational Laws

A Democratic Republican Critique on Current South Korean Educational Laws

The Liberal Republicanism of John Taylor of Caroline (review)

The Liberal Republicanism of John Taylor of Caroline. By Garrett Ward Sheldon and C. William Hill, Jr. (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008. Pp. 263. Cloth, $54.40.)Reviewed by Johann ?. NeemThis review provides an opportunity to look back on the work of Garrett Ward Sheldon, who teaches political science at the University of Virginia's College at Wise. Sheldon has written books on the political philosophies of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, and now, with C. William Hill, Jr,. on John Taylor of Caroline.1 Taken together, Sheldon's three books make two major claims. First, they all argue that classical republican ideas were invoked as means to sustain a society, and therefore there is no theoretical tension between republicanism and liberalism. Sheldon and Hill call this framework liberal republicanism. Second, his books argue that the American ideal is local participatory democracy. John Taylor is best remembered by historians today for his republican critique of Hamiltonian federalism. He is considered a hostile critic of modernity. In contrast, the authors argue, Taylor embraced liberalism's assumption - most famously expressed by Locke - that human beings are born free, equal, and independent. To Taylor, Europe represented the past, where society remained divided into orders and one was born into one's station. The promise of the United States was to liberate the individual from this past.But this did not mean individual liberty was secure. Threats to individual liberty, to liberalism, emerged from every direction. Classical republicanism provided a language to understand this threat. To Taylor, as to Sheldon's Jefferson and Madison, the Hamiltonians sought to centralize political power in order to serve the few instead of the many. But when Jefferson, Madison, and Taylor invoked the republican language of corruption, they did so in order to protect individual rights. Their common good was the expansion of individual liberty - Lockean liberalism - even if the threats were understood in classical terms.There is a dramatic difference between Taylor's republicanism and that of Jefferson and Madison, however. As Sheldon makes clear in his earlier books, both Jefferson and Madison believed that the state must aid people in their enjoyment of their personal liberty. Madison argued that threats to individual liberty could come from local governments as well as distant ones - hence Madison's evolution from nationalist to federalist to nationalist again after the War of 1812. Sheldon and Hill's Taylor, on the other hand, does not seem to recognize the ways in which individual liberty requires active government. Hence, the authors are unable to overcome historians' long connection between Taylor's hostility to national government and his defense of states' and slavery. Lacking Madison's awareness that the states might also threaten individual liberty, Taylor actively defended the states against the nation, and actively protected slavery from federal interference.To Jefferson and Taylor, individual depend on citizens' control of their government. But Jefferson understood in ways that Taylor apparently did not that local democracy itself required cultivating the people's abilities. In his earlier work on Jefferson, Sheldon argued that Jefferson believed that before the people could govern themselves - and thus protect their natural Lockean - they needed the substantive rights necessary to enter deliberation - education, economic independence, and opportunity to shape one's destiny via participation in government. Put another way, Sheldon concludes, Jefferson's theory implies the right to be free from inadequate education, degrading poverty, and bureaucratic fiat.2 Would Taylor have agreed with Jefferson that Locke's natural man was socially cultivated? …

Bringing republican ideas back home. The Dewey–Laski connection

This article explores J.G.A. Pocock’s insight that “traces” of civic republican discourse survived within the dominant liberal paradigm of modern political thought. It does so by tracking classical republican themes in the works of American pragmatist John Dewey and English pluralist Harold Laski. The main contribution of the article is to show that the 1920s pluralist theory of the state can be interpreted as a reformulation of the classical republican critique of modern liberal conceptions of state sovereignty. In particular, I suggest that Laski can be viewed as a kind of republican pluralist inspired by Aristotle and Harrington as well as by American pragmatism, itself a late outgrowth of the republican tradition in US history.

Origins of the Dred Scott Case: Jacksonian Jurisprudence and the Supreme Court, 1837–1857 (review)

Reviewed by: Origins of the Dred Scott Case: Jacksonian Jurisprudence and the Supreme Court, 1837-1857 Kyle G. Volk (bio) Origins of the Dred Scott Case: Jacksonian Jurisprudence and the Supreme Court, 1837–1857. By Austin Allen. (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2006. Pp. 274. Cloth, $59.95; Paper, $22.95.) Austin Allen provides us with a new way to understand why United States Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney notoriously ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) that black Americans were not citizens of the United States and that Congress could not ban slavery in the territories. He suggests that our dominant interpretations, which characterize (and condemn) Taney's opinion as a work of sectional partisanship and judicial overreaching, have too closely followed the partisan Republican critique that emerged in the decision's immediate aftermath. As a result, scholars have not taken seriously other reasons why Taney issued a ruling that today strikes us as so morally problematic. Rather than seeing the decision as a judicial response to an external crisis over slavery, Allen argues that Taney's opinion was as much a product of the court resolving its own internal crisis. Allen situates Dred Scott within the doctrinal web that the Taney Court created in the previous twenty years, and he makes a solid case that Taney's ruling was an unintended consequence of a court divided by a number of issues, only one of which was slavery and some of which are surprising. This book makes an important contribution not only to our understanding of Dred Scott but also to our knowledge of the Taney Court and its relationship to antebellum American society. Allen's work comprises nine chapters arranged in three sections. The first two sections unearth the contexts he sees as vital to understanding [End Page 511] Taney's ruling, while the third discusses Dred Scott as shaped by these contexts. One of the strengths of Allen's work is his treatment of the Taney Court as an institution with an identity, and in the first section he lays out the ideological and cultural conditions shaping the court and its jurisprudence. Though attentive to the internal dissent that made the Taney Court far less unified than the Marshall Court, Allen exposes how Taney Court members—many of them partisan Democrats—collectively wrestled with the court's role in a legal and political system predicated on popular sovereignty. Allen suggests that the court conceived of itself as a facilitator of self-rule, and he distills two general manifestations. First, in constitutional cases the court strove to balance its general deference to state legislatures with the protection of the supremacy of federal authority. Second, in private law cases the court displayed concern for social order in a self-governing society and applied common-law rules to compel individuals to stand by market obligations. These two broad commitments collided in Swift v. Tyson (1842), a case that came to the court through its diversity jurisdiction by which it was authorized to hear cases involving parties from different states. In Swift, the court, led by Joseph Story, issued a highly nationalistic ruling that invented a federal common law of commerce to guide its adjudication of commercial disputes between citizens of different states. Though Swift did not involve slavery, Allen shows that it carried clear antislavery implications. It inaugurated a new trend in which the court would be less deferential to state policy and state court opinions in diversity suits. When Dred Scott reached the court through diversity jurisdiction, it was difficult for the court simply to defer to the Missouri Supreme Court that ruled that Scott remained a slave despite having traveled in free territory. Developments in diversity begun in Swift pushed the court to a more substantive ruling in Dred Scott. Allen's second section contains his most interesting contributions. First, he details the conflict-ridden development of the court's method of handling cases involving slavery outside of diversity jurisdiction. This method, which matured in Strader v. Graham (1851), was to defer to state law by asserting a lack of jurisdiction. Commentators have puzzled over why Taney opted for such a broad ruling in Dred Scott...

Liberty Beyond Neo-Liberalism: A Republican Critique of Liberal Governance in a Globalizing Age

Liberty Beyond Neo-Liberalism: A Republican Critique of Liberal Governance in a Globalizing Age. By Steven Slaughter. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 272p. $75.00.Mainstream accounts define globalization as two connected processes. The first is the relentless increase in the interrelation of economic actors. The second is growing recognition of the superiority of “market forces” over state intervention in the economy. Free markets are seen as “natural” forces or “iron laws” of economics that only the economically illiterate or perhaps the insane would limit. Among the many impressive contributions made by Steven Slaughter is the distinction between what he calls “globalization” and “economic globalization.” The former, he argues, is the growing interdependence of economic actors that appears to be an inherent aspect of capitalist development. The latter, however, denotes the contingent victory of free market ideology, or “neoliberalism” over other forms of liberalism. For Slaughter, economic globalization is not the inevitable victory of “natural” and efficient markets against the state. Economic globalization is a form of “governance” that involves state policy, relations between states, and norms and everyday practices. This governance was the creation of state policy and international agreements. Slaughter's argument constitutes an updating of Karl Polanyi's famous claim in The Great Transformation (2001) that nineteenth-century “lasissez-faire” economics was an invention.