Republican Tradition Research Articles

The English Republican Tradition and Eighteenth-Century France: Between the Ancients and the Moderns, by Rachel Hammersley

The English Republican Tradition and Eighteenth-Century France: Between the Ancients and the Moderns, by Rachel Hammersley

“The Moral Miasma of the Tropics”: American Imperialism and the Failed Annexation of the Dominican Republic, 1869-1871

Historians of American foreign relations have rarely paid attention to conceptual contestability in accounting for political disputes over territorial expansion; often, concepts and ideologies are treated as mere self-interested rhetoric. This essay examines an episode in the history of 19th century American imperial history from the perspective of an intellectual history keenly aware of meaning and intention. It argues that the political conflict surrounding the ratification of the Santo Domingo Annexation Treaty was defined by two contending conceptions regarding the influence that climate had on human morals. While some politicians argued that the tropics degenerated the Anglo-Saxon race, others dismissed this idea entirely. Moreover, the manifest concern with how territorial expansion affected the inner workings of the republic, suggests that this episode must be understood as part of the long republican tradition of the West. Lastly, although this paper primarily focuses on conceptual contestability, by combining some of the methodological insights of Reinhart Koselleck, Quentin Skinner and J.G.A Pocock, it also proposes a way of reconciling the history of economic structures with the contextual history of political thought.

The English republican tradition and eighteenth-century France: between the ancients and the moderns

Acknowledgements List of abbreviations Introduction 1. Real Whigs and Huguenots 2. Bolingbroke and France 3. Commonwealthmen, Wilkites and France 4. English republicans and the French Revolution Conclusion Appendix: French translations of English republican works Bibliography Index -- .

A Political Companion to Henry Adams (review)

Reviewed by: A Political Companion to Henry Adams Brooks D. Simpson (bio) A Political Companion to Henry Adams. Edited by Natalie Fuehrer Taylor. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2010. Pp. xi, 271. $40.00 cloth) Although Henry Adams may not attract quite the attention he once did, he remains a subject of interest to literary scholars, students of American studies and philosophy, and historians. Reading what these various people have to say about Adams brings to mind the story of the blind men and the elephant: everyone, it seems, has their own idea of who Adams is and why he is important or not as important as other people might think he is. This collection of essays by Natalie Fuehrer Taylor fits neatly into that pattern. She has brought together nine essays that share the assumption that Adams "was engaged in political life," although she hastens to add that the definition of politics employed is far broader than political activity (p. 1). To Adams, "the political life entailed a consideration of how human beings ought to live and what form of government would best promote human flourishing" (p. 1). In short, these essays explore Adams as a political thinker and philosopher, not as a political actor, and do so in a way that is largely admiring and very much on his own terms. Taylor's introduction alternates between praising Adams as a thinker and defending him against recent work that has explored his career in politics and how his writing reflected his political experiences and thinking. Rather than grappling with that scholarship, Taylor hastens to dismiss it nearly altogether in her eagerness to make the case that Adams's writings "reveal him to be one of our most profound political thinkers, authors, and even statesmen" (p. 8). Her selections come from like-minded scholars, carefully avoiding most recent historical scholarship (as the bibliography reveals); she rests content to reprint Henry Steele Commager's 1937 essay on Adams, a quaint artifact offering an understanding of Adams as intellectual that is no longer in vogue among most historians. The selections in this volume thus are best understood as making an argument that we should celebrate Adams much as he would have [End Page 493] wanted to be viewed by the end of his life-as a philosopher who balanced hope and skepticism as he viewed the American prospect much as he weighed faith and science in his effort to understand existence. In an essay first published in 1990, Russell L. Hanson and W. Richard Merriman explore how Adams detailed the decline of the republican tradition; in a selection that first appeared the following year, B. H. Gilley looks at how Adams explored political leadership in his 1880 novel, Democracy. Michael Colacurcio's 1967 essay on how Adams wove considerations of pragmatism into Democracy and Esther (1884) is included, as is an excerpt from James P. Young's absorbing investigation of Adams as political thinker, in this case an explication of The Education of Henry Adams (1918). The essays prepared especially for this volume include Denise Dutton's revisiting of how Democracy addressed the notion of democratic virtue through several characters in the novel as well as Taylor's treatment of how Adams explores science, art, and religion as potential threats to the ethos of American democracy in Esther. Richard Samuelson examines Adams's pursuit of a scientific approach to history as a way of understanding to help solve social problems, while Patrick J. Deneen discusses Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartes (1913) as Adams's celebration of the mindset of the Middle Ages, particularly its ability to integrate multiple themes. The volume concludes with some reflections by William Carey McWilliams on the intellectual and civic virtue as manifested through Adams. Those readers looking for sympathetic treatments of Henry Adams as political thinker will be pleased by this volume. While it offers a rather incomplete overview of how people have explored Adams as a political figure through his writings, it is a passionate case for the defense prepared by devoted admirers. [End Page 494] Brooks D. Simpson Brooks D. Simpson, ASU Foundation Professor at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona, is the author of...

Dan Edelstein . The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution . Chicago : University of Chicago Press . 2009 . Pp. xi, 337. $40.00.

Dan Edelstein's book has a challenging agenda: the ideological basis of the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution. The question of why the revolution, which began with such high‐minded idealism, descended within four years into a legalized Terror led by the Jacobins poses a fundamental problem. For some historians the primary cause lay in the “force of circumstances”—namely, the king's flight to Varennes, simultaneous war on several fronts, the threat of foreign invasion, civil war in the Vendée, factionalism, and federalist revolts. David Andress has recently reworked this view in The Terror: Civil War in the French Revolution (2005). Other historians dismiss such explanations as letting the Jacobins too easily off the hook. They look instead into the ideologies that propelled the revolution forward, and argue that there was an inherent movement toward terror in certain ideas of the Enlightenment adopted by the Jacobins. But even those historians who seek an explanation for the Terror in prerevolutionary ideologies do not necessarily agree on which idea was the “fatal” one. The concept of the “general will” as propounded by Jean‐Jacques Rousseau has long been the most popular culprit, an argument made by François Furet in Interpreting the French Revolution (1981). Yet this notion has generated at least as much contention as consensus. Keith Michael Baker has taken a contrasting view: for him the call for terror emerged out of a mutation of the discourse of classical republicanism (for this argument, see Baker's article “Transformations of Classical Republicanism in Eighteenth‐Century France,” Journal of Modern History 73:1 [2001]: 32–53). Edelstein owes a considerable debt to Baker that he readily acknowledges. Nonetheless, his own conclusions are rather different. For him the ideological source of the Terror lay neither in “forcing people to be free,” nor in the political tradition of classical republicanism, but in one of the great liberal ideologies of the eighteenth century: that of natural right theory. “It was under the aegis of natural right, not the general will, that the Montagnards brought ‘terror’ into the Republic” (p. 259). It is a bold statement, with echoes of Edmund Burke, but Edelstein has an original approach, and musters an impressive amount of evidence to support his contention.

Ceremony and the Emergence of Court Society in the Augustan Principate

Court ceremony in the Augustan Principate served to ease the underlying tension that existed between the new form of government and Republican tradition by creating a place for consuls and ex-consuls in the imperial court. In particular, Augustus seems to have established a hierarchy of military honors, reserving the ovatio and triumph proper for members of his own family, but allowing ex-consuls to earn triumphal honors. Ultimately, court ceremony, as manifested in this hierarchy of honors, showed the proximity of members of the imperial court to the center of power and thus was a dramatization of the new political culture of the Principate.

Machiavellian Democracy: An Engine for Reform

Machiavellian Democracy:An Engine for Reform Kevin O'Leary (bio) Machiavellian Democracy, a sterling effort by John McCormick to rescue the Florentine sage from a conservative civic republican tradition, is at its heart a plea to take modern democracy back to the future.1 McCormick believes the elitist procedural account of popular sovereignty, as championed by writers from Guicciardini to Schumpeter, sanctions elective oligarchy and control over public policy by the wealthy at the expense of everyone else.2 "Modern popular governments are no less vulnerable than their historical antecedents to corruption, subversion, and usurpation by the wealthy," writes McCormick.3 In the case of the United States, recent work by Larry Bartels, Jacob Hacker, Paul Pierson and David Cay Johnston, among others, documents the great success America's economic elite have enjoyed in shaping policy and tax rules to their liking since 1980.4 Given this economic and political fact, how can average citizens maintain control of the government? McCormick's scholarship on Machiavelli is exciting and valuable in several respects.5 First, he convincingly demonstrates that Machiavelli is one of the few major political philosophers who is a radical democrat and that Machiavelli went well beyond others in the republican tradition in defending and championing popular rule not by the well-bred gentry, but the people themselves. Second, along with Bernard Manin's The Principles of Representative Government, McCormick allows us to break free from the view that modern democracy is fundamentally a choice between the romantic Rousseau and the elitist Schumpeter, with a theorist [End Page 141] such as Benjamin Barber leaning toward Rousseau and a scholar such as Robert Dahl, in his early work, working in the same room as Schumpeter.6 Manin champions choice by lot and iségoria (the equal right to speak in the Assembly), while McCormick articulates Machiavelli's understanding of class-based politics as being essential to both democracy and freedom and excavates the tribune and assembly model of popular rule. Together, McCormick and Manin dramatically reframe the debate between defenders of the current democratic status quo and their critics. In the case of the United States and modern constitutional democracy, McCormick writes, "Arguably, the aristocratic character of elections and the abandonment of class-specific or directly participatory practices portended the pacification of modern democracy before its triumph."7 Stillborn. McCormick's rich account of Roman institutions as seen through Machiavelli's eyes allows us to view elective oligarchy for what it is and to consider the tribune and assembly path not taken at the Founding. Ever since Walter Lippmann's famous debate with John Dewey at the start of the twentieth century, the defenders of democracy as elections and the set of rights lumped together as polyarchy have held the upper hand over those who argue that democracy means something more than the rule of law, competitive oligarchy, and the substitution of the myth of popular sovereignty for the myth of monarchy.8 Part of the advantage held by Lippmann, Schumpeter, and early Dahl was the understanding that the scale, complexity and economic speed of modern life completely outstripped Rousseau's bucolic vision in The Social Contract.9 For those who read Rousseau closely it is clear his project is existential and utopian. Rousseau wants to know if complete moral freedom is possible while living in society. His radical project reaches beyond democracy to aspirations for an unfettered authentic life and his mental experiment leads him to the perfect city-state republic—an entity too small and too homogenous to exist in the modern era.10 Reading Manin and McCormick helps us appreciate the degree to which the American founders were conservative revolutionaries. On the one hand, the Founders rejected monarchy and opened the door to modern democracy. On the other hand, Madison and his colleagues proposed a representative structure that consciously kept the people at arms length and defined the key danger as instability from below, not corruption from above. As McCormick writes, "Madison achieved the de facto elitist results desired by [End Page 142] Machiavelli's aristocratic-republican contemporary, Guicciardini, without resorting to the overtly elitist, formal restrictions on the general populace's participation in politics that the...

“The Use of Conversation”: William Godwin’s Conversable World and Romantic Sociability

JON MEE “The Use ofConversation”: William Godwin’s Conversable World and Romantic Sociability W illiam Godwin’s diary has the following entry for november 22, 1791: “Holcroft calls: talk of the Widow. Webb calls: talk of necessity virtue & perception. Call on Jacob, fr. Sup at Hollis’s, talk ofDa­ vid, Canaanites, and the use of conversation.”1 Around a century earlier, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a newly commercial culture had begun to think of its activities across the range of human endeavors as a kind of general “conversation,” this metaphorical shift being accompanied by the promotion (in handbooks and other places) of the social practice of conversation. In this context the question of the uses of conversation be­ came, long before Godwin’s time, a key issue for inquiries into the unity of the new society and the means of its further development. My particular historical window on this conversation of culture is the Romantic period, roughly speaking 1780 to 1822. For at least one critic, “the conversable world” (the phrase is Hume’s) meets one of its ends in Romanticism, where it runs into a wall of “solitude and the sublime.” My own perspec­ tive is closer to David Simpson’s in so far as I think the conversational turn remains one of the defining shifts into modernity.2 From this perspective, Romanticism may have asked new questions about the ends of conversa1 . “Godwin’s Diary,” Bodleian Library, MS. Abinger e.4. Godwin’s diary has been edited by Mark Philp, Victoria Myers, and David O’Shaughnessy and is now available online at http://godwin.oucs.ox.ac.uk:8o8i/index2.html, last accessed June 13, 2011. I am grateful to the editors for their help. I would also like to express my gratitude to the Leverhulme Trust for the award ofa Philip J. Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship that allowed me the time to pursue the research that went into this essay. 2. See Stephen Miller, Conversation: A History ofA Declining Art (New Haven and Lon­ don: Yale University Press, 2006), 177, and David Simpson The Academic Postmodern and the Pule of Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). SiR, 50 (Winter 2011) 567 56S JON MEE tion, but it was far from signalling the end of the conversable world. Sam­ uel Taylor Coleridge’s conversation poems and William Wordsworth’s at­ tempt to reorient poetry towards “the language of conversation” in the preface to their Lyrical Ballads may serve as a provisional proof of this view, although the peculiar ends to which they put conversation are not my con­ cerns in this essay.3 My primary focus will be on the philosopher and nov­ elist William Godwin. The idea of “the conversation of culture” has, of course, become a cliche. Attempts to inaugurate various cultures ofconversation in a range of different spheres are also legion today. Governments in Britain and the United States frequently figure exercises in public consultation in terms of “conversation.” Possibly this tendency has filtered down (or up) from po­ litical theory. Certainly, theories of “deliberative democracy” (indebted more or less to Jurgen Habermas’s ideas) and also various attempts to reviv­ ify the classical republican tradition have both placed a great deal ofempha­ sis on the model of conversation.4 Both are attracted to it as a metaphor, at least, for an idea ofcommunity that is open to difference rather than the te­ leological fulfillment of prior identity. Although, strangely perhaps, he has little to say about Habermas or even developments in political theory in this regard, Simpson has recently related these cultural reflexes to various trends in academic philosophy and literary criticism, most notably in the work ofRichard Rorty and the new historicism respectively.5 Simpson sees in Rorty a tendency to make philosophy “a matter of conversations be­ tween persons rather than a matter of interaction with nonhuman reality. ”6 For Simpson, both the academic and political manifestations of this reflex ought to be understood as part of the long modern history of the “turn to the personal. ”7 At its worst, from Simpson’s point ofview, the appeal to 3. The various paratexts to the Lyrical Ballads several...

The Ferocity of Hope: Accountability and the People's Tribunate in <i>Machiavellian Democracy</i>

In Machiavellian Democracy, John McCormick elegantly highlights the “ferocious populism” inherent in Machiavelli’s writings. McCormick distinguishes his reading from that of the Cambridge School, emphasizing that interpreting Machiavelli within the republican tradition fails to do justice to Machiavelli’s anti-elitism. Whereas republicanism both in its historical and contemporary forms is in many respects compatible with aristocratic rule and hostile to popular agency, McCormick’s reading of Machiavelli affirms the importance of institutions designed to give the people—the economic lower classes in particular—a means of keeping elites accountable and an active role in political life. The book is divided into three sections. The first is largely interpretive, focusing on arguments for popular participation in the Prince and the Discourses; the second discusses Machiavelli’s analysis of the way in which institutions structure the motivational logic of citizens and elites in Rome and Florence in particular; and the third provides a normative critique of the aristocratic impulses of even contemporary republicanism, accompanied by institutional prescriptions for challenging elite domination along Machiavellian lines. Throughout the book, McCormick’s reading of Machiavelli is both careful and bracing, a rare combination. For instance, within the first third, the discussion of Machiavelli’s relationship with the two dedicatees of the Discourses, Cosimo Rucellai and Zanobi Buondelmonti, is especially interesting. There McCormick demonstrates persuasively that Machiavelli encourages the grandi to believe that the stability of the

O intelectual público, a ética republicana e a fratura do éthos da ciência

No artigo, procura-se focalizar o aparecimento do intelectual publico no curso da modernidade, tendo como locus a Franca e prototipo o pensador humanista (hommes des lettres, segundo Tocqueville, que nos serviu de fonte). Em seguida, sua associacao com a etica republicana (affaire Zola, o intelectual como cidadao do mundo) e sua coextensao as atividades cientificas, ao moldar a etica da ciencia, de acordo com a tipologia tracada por Robert K. Merton. E ainda, o desaparecimento do intelectual publico e a fratura do ethos da ciencia na atualidade, conforme mostra John Michael Ziman, ao sublinhar o surgimento do boss e o papel do business na ciencia contemporânea. No fim do estudo, ao explorar os conflitos entre as ciencias, as corporacoes e as nacoes, procura-se discutir as saidas e a possibilidade de relancar a etica republicana, de religar o ethos da ciencia e de reinventar o intelectual publico. A condicao sera a ampliacao do espaco publico, para alem da politica e da esfera do Estado, interpondo entre o publico e o privado da etica republicana tradicional a zona mais ampla da cultura e do social. Nesse quadro, o Brasil e situado e a situacao da intelligentsia brasileira e discutida.

Humanismo iberoamericano y la Independencia de México

The article maintains and argues that the principal intellectual source of the independence movement in Mexico is derived from a humanistic and republican tradition which originated in the middle of the 16th century with the principal followers of the School of Salamanca in Mexico, such as fray Alonso de la Veracruz and Bartolome de las Casas, who roundly rejected the legitimacy of the Conquest and the Spanish domination in America. From then on a tradition of thought develops which defends the right of those born in the Americas to be in charge of the government and above all to gradually consolidate a feeling of pride in American culture, including the prehispanic period, as opposed to European civilization. This line of interpretation is opposed to conceptions that give to republican French thought, North American or Spanish, or the European enlightenment in general, any determining influence in Independence.

Cicero’s Concordia Ordinum: A Machiavellian Reappraisal

It is a scholarly commonplace that Machiavelli sharply diverges from the republican tradition of political thought when he says that it was precisely “due to the disunion between the plebs and the senate” that Rome became a great republic (Disc. 1.2). To Quentin Skinner, for instance, this feature of his thinking, which “astonished” Machiavelli’s contemporaries, represents a “completely heterodox stance” (Foundations of Modern Political Thought, p 181). What Machiavelli repudiates in the Discourses, Skinner concludes, “is nothing less than the Ciceronian vision of the concordia ordinum” (“Pre-humanist origins of republican ideas,” in Machiavelli and Republicanism, p 136). This paper argues that the view of Cicero’s concordia ordinum represented here is flawed, and that a proper understanding of it sheds new light on the role of internal conflict in republics as Cicero conceived them. Cicero’s concordia ordinum is not a “theory” in the sense defined by Greek philosophers like Plato. It describes not a permanent ideal state but a temporary state of affairs in general conditions of class antagonism. If we fail to grasp the role of class conflict and popular action in Cicero’s thinking, we lose sight of what may be the most important insights of Roman political thought: that politics arises as the interruption of the effects of domination by those with dignitas, who counter-claim politics as the sphere of dignitas and thus as their proper field of action, their property; and that the institution of power, whether it privileges wealth, family, custom, or any or all of these, demands counter- practices and counter-institutions capable of disrupting the settled workings of political decision-making. We miss, too, the acute awareness at the core of Cicero’s thought that class antagonism is capable of policing elite excess and chastening elite expenditure. This is why I call my reading of Cicero a “Machiavellian” reappraisal.

Frigørelsens poetik

Jakob Ladegaard: "Frigørelsens poetik - Den franske revolution og poetisk indbildningskraft i Wordsworths The Prelude"AbstractJakob Ladegaard: “The Poetics of Emancipation – Poetic Imagination and The French Revolution in Wordsworth’s The Prelude”It has often been argued that William Wordsworth’s tribute to poetic imagination in his great epic poem The Prelude (1805/1850) should be read as the mature poet’s farewell to the historical and political world of The French Revolution to which the young Wordsworth was greatly attached. The present essay argues to the contrary that the elaboration of the concept of imagination in the poem is tied to an affirmative re-interpretation of the popular and democratic elements of the revolution in the face of its disappointing decline into elitism, terror and The Revolutionary Wars. A close reading of The Prelude’s narration of the poet’s travels to France during the revolution suggests that poetic imagination is not the exclusive property of the artistic genius, but a common principle put into democratic practice by anonymousmasses on the roads of France. The relations thus established in the poem between the poet and the people are interpreted through the lenses of the English republican tradition and recent democratic theories advanced by French philosophers like Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort and Jacques Rancière.

Homogeniteit versus diversiteit – schuivende verhoudingen

This paper starts from the thesis, recently suggested by various sociologists and historians, that the Netherlands are no longer a country of minorities, but a country with a dominant liberal majority. The aim of this paper is to reconstruct this majority ideology. This ideology can be characterized as partly liberal and partly republican (in the French tradition of republicanism). We may discern seven characteristics of this ideology: 1. a strong emphasis on liberty in the private sphere; 2. a privatization of identities; 3. a voluntaristic understanding of identities; 4. an understanding of equality as conformity with the average or standard citizen; 5. a French republican view on citizenship; 6. rising moral expectations; 7. a Protestant understanding of religion (e.g. a focus on religious texts and on orthodoxy). In this contribution the argument is put forward that the rise of this new moral majority leads to a diminishing understanding and a diminishing empathy not only for religion, but for everyone who is not similar to the standard of a white, Dutch/speaking, secular and straight male. This has implications for liberal politics, for democratic minority rights and for liberal Protestantism: their bases of support are vulnerable.

Lot and Democratic Representation: A Modest Proposal

Elections and democracy have not always been closely associated. As historians of democracy often point out, classical Athenians believed that lottery – not election – was the most democratic means of selecting magistrates. Aristotle writes, for instance, that “the appointment of magistrates by lot is thought to be democratic, and the election of them oligarchical.”1 The Athenians used elections sparingly, to choose generals and financial administrators, to fill posts that required a special measure of expertise. They expected that magistrates chosen by election would be disproportionately drawn from the social and economic elite. The Athenians have not been alone in this belief; in fact, as Bernard Manin has illustrated, it can be found throughout the modern republican tradition, from Guicciardini to the framers of the U.S. Constitution. Montesquieu argued, for instance, that “selection by choice is in the nature of aristocracy.”2 In his view, elections gave citizens the opportunity to choose men of particular merit and distinction, whom he expected to be drawn from the upper classes.3 This point of view has lately been restated by a few contemporary democratic theorists. Manin himself, in his Principles of Representative Government, devotes most of a chapter to the proposition that elections have an inherent aristocratic tendency. Elections reward people who succeed in drawing attention to themselves, he says, and both wealth and social distinction attract attention.4 More recently, John McCormick has written that “election is a magistrate selection method that directly and indirectly favors the wealthy and keeps political offices from being distributed widely among citizens of all socioeconomic backgrounds.”5 Wealthy political aspirants are able to “cultivate greater reputations,” to make themselves heard more loudly, and to develop the forms of expertise (rhetorical and other) necessary for political success.6 Such concerns are vindicated by many empirical studies of the social and economic backgrounds of elected politicians. It should come as no surprise that legislators in modern democracies tend to be “better educated, possess higher-status occupations, and have more privileged backgrounds” than their constituents.7 These findings hold true across advanced, industrialized societies as well as developing democracies; they also hold true for national, state, and local office: social and economic elites are overrepresented on city councils, not just national Senates.8 One way to summarize this finding is to say that elections fail to produce descriptively representative legislatures; that is, they fail to fill legislatures with politicians who reflect the empirical characteristics of the population at large. Certain characteristics – notably wealth and social privilege – are overrepresented, while poor, socially disadvantaged citizens are (often severely) underrepresented.9 Why should it matter that social and economic elites tend to win elections? The most pressing democratic concern is that they will write legislation that favors their own interests and neglects the interests of the less well-off. “The most obvious hypothesis,” writes Robert Putnam, “so obvious that it has rarely been scrutinized carefully – is that decision makers will favor the interests of the social groups from which they come.”10 This point need not rest on an assumption of elite self-interest. J.S. Mill observed that a Parliament of even the most altruistic noblemen would be little comfort to the working class: “yet does Parliament, or almost any of the members composing it, ever for an instant look at any question with the

Who Is French?

In recent years scholars of France have devoted a great deal of time and effort to the study of what has been called French universalism, the idea that the nation’s republican tradition, and to an important extent French culture in general, centers on certain values held to be applicable to all peoples. Explorations of this issue have emphasized not only the essential contours of this ideology but also its contradictions.1 How can adherence to a certain set of values simultaneously define both a specific national identity and the common experience of humanity? Among other things, Frenchness is a culturally expressed sense of belonging to a political state. Yet what does one make of those individuals and communities who live in France, even possess French citizenship, and yet are not regularly included in the concept of civilization—defined through education, language, culture, and morals—that normalizes acceptance?2 Moreover, if one focuses on ideas generated during a particular period (for France, especially the Enlightenment and the Revolution), do those values change over time, and how do concepts of national identity reflect those changes? Ultimately, what does it mean to be French, and to what extent does republican universalism exemplify or reify the essence of the nation? Feminist and postcolonial theories have posed fundamental challenges to the idea of France as one and unified. The two approaches, while certainly not the same, have much in common. Both antislavery and feminism have a heritage that reaches back at least to the eigh-

Caesarism, Charisma and Fate. Historical Sources and Modern Resonances in the Work of Max Weber by Peter Baehr (review)

258 Max Weber Studies at that time on '(1) the holding of views which are politically acceptable in court circles and polite society, and (2) assent to a certain minimum level of church beliefs (whether genuine or otherwise). In Germany freedom of science exists within the boundaries of political and religious acceptability - and not outside them' (pp. 67-68). Weber adds that if we adopt this 'curious concept' of academic freedom then the consequences are as follows: (1) On admission to a chair, the professor can and should be examined not only for his scientific qualifications, but also for his loyalty toward the current political rulers and ecclesiastical custom. (2) Any public protest against the prevailing political system can cost the person occupying the chair his job. 3) In contrast, in the lecture hall, which is closed to the public and hence exempt from criticism, the teacher, once appointed, may express himself as he chooses, 'independently of all authorities' (p. 70). It is here that, as Dreijmanis suggests in his introduction, a number of connections emerge with the text of 'Science as a Vocation', in which Weber draws attention to the political limits of science and to the responsibilities of professors within the lecture hall. The above passages perhaps even go beyond this by calling into question the broader institutional politics of what he elsewhere calls 'value freedom'. In sum, it is the strength of these 'articles on academia' that carry this book. These include other important statements on the transactions of the first German Confer ence of Sociologists, where Weber talks of his interest in the sociology of the press (pp. 80-98), and on the inception of the German Sociological Society, through the course of which Weber reflects on the struggle for the value of sociology to be recog nised in Germany at that time (pp. 98-103). Read together, these articles, along with a later commentary on the subsequent difficulties faced by the German Sociological Society (see pp. 147-50), give valuable insight into both the political dynamics of German universities at the outset of the Twentieth Century and the early associa tional interests of the discipline. For these reasons, I would recommend this book to experienced Weber readers in spite of its editorial shortcomings. Nicholas Gane University of York, UK Peter Baehr, Caesarism, Charisma and Fate. Historical Sources and Modern Resonances in the Work of Max Weber (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Transaction Publishers, 2008), 243pp. ISBN 9781412808132. $44.95. Peter Baehr has packed two quite different books in one volume. The first part, 'From Caesarism to Charisma' is a 'streamlined and updated form' of Baehr's previous book, Caesar and the Fading of the Roman World: A Study in Republicanism and Caesarism (1998), which in the author7s perception has been ignored by social scientists since they took it for a book on the fall of the Roman Republic (p. 1). This part of some 100 pages is supplemented by an appendix of 25 pages on 'Caesar in America' that is during the founding period of the USA. Between them is sandwiched Part 2, 'Fate and Fate Communities', 70 pages on the reaction to the SARS Emergency of spring 2003 in Hong Kong, where Baehr currently works as professor of sociology.© Max Weber Studies 2011. Book Reviews 259 Part I is an account on the genesis of the concept of Caesarism which should become one of the pillars on which Weber erected his theory of charismatic leader ship/rule/ domination. Baehr traces the debate within the tradition of so-called clas sical republicanism from Machiavelli onwards in which on the one hand Caesar was unanimously denounced as the destroyer of republican liberty and on the other Cato the Younger praised as the embodiment of republican virtue. Though mentioned shortly by Baehr, especially in his appendix on the opposition of the American Anti Federalists against a strong president being commander-in -chief of a standing army and thus suspected of seizing power like Caesar, one should stress that since the late 17th century 'Cromwell' was used interchangeably with 'Caesar7 for this spectre as should happen again in the polemics against Napoleon I. Though in retrospect he appeared...

‘No philosophy, please, we are managers’. Public Management and the common good: Euro-Atlantic convergences

Public management, as an academic discipline, has been, up to now, inspired by a managerialist approach, axiologically neutral, which cast aside the great questions regarding the ends of public life, those of the common good and of the ‘good life’ that were at the very basis of classical political philosophy. Governing has been reduced to ‘governancing’, relying on the presupposition that good means automatically leading to good ends. Based on critiques of this drift, we witness on both sides of the Atlantic the renewal of the old republicanism that makes the common good the aim of public administration. This debate has been at the very foundation of the modern democracies since the 17th century in England, to the foundation of the United States and the republican tradition stemming from the French Revolution. This article envisages how public management could rejuvenate itself to mend the broken link between the managerial and the political, putting emphasis on what would be the consequences on the training of public managers. Points for practitioners Practitioners are often stuck in a false alternative: either a state bureaucracy or the adoption of a neoliberal solution represented by the bundle of the new public management tools based on the search for efficiency. This article goes back to the roots of the debate on the role of the state in economic growth since the Renaissance and shows that the issue is not one of chosing between state or no state but to articulate appropriately the political role of the state as an institution maker and end the initiatives of the market. By drawing a comparison between the first financial crisis (the 1720 South Sea crisis) and the current crisis, it points out the central role of polity against the current predominance of economics in the mainstream ideology, and rehabilitates the role of civic virtues in ruling public affairs. A comparison is made between classical Europe and the history of the US that shows this debate has been constant in nation-building and the the present period of turbulence calls for a renewal of the role of the politics, far from the NPM hype that dominated the field of public administration for the past twenty years.

Augustine’s Contribution to the Republican Tradition

The present argument focuses on part of Augustine’s defense of Christianity in The City of God. There Augustine argues that the Christian religion did not cause the sack of Rome by the Goths in 410 CE. Augustine revised the definitions of a ‘people’ and ‘republic’ found in Cicero’s De Republica in light of the impossibility of true justice in a world corrupted by sin. If one returns these definitions to their original context, and accounts for Cicero’s own political teachings, one finds that Augustine follows Cicero’s republicanism on several key points. First, civil rule differs from mastery over slaves. Second, political life is indeterminate, so a republic could be any regime suitable for governing free human beings. Third, the prudent man may not abstain from public service. For Augustine the duty to public service is connected to his tragic portrayal of life and suffering in society after ‘the fall’. Augustine’s contribution to the republican tradition is not to be found in the concept of a natural order, but in an explanation of why that order fails.

Republicanism and Global Justice

The republican tradition seems to have a blind spot about global justice. It has had little to say about pressing international issues such as world poverty or global inequalities. According to the old, if apocryphal, adage: extra rempublicam nulla justitia. Some may doubt that distributive justice (as opposed to freedom or citizenship) is the primary virtue of republican institutions; and at any rate most would agree that republican values have traditionally been realized in the polis not in the (oxymoronic) cosmopolis. The article sketches a republican account of global non-domination which suggests that duties of distributive justice are not bounded to the institutions of a single society. In particular, it argues that republicans have good reasons to seek to curb those global inequalities which underpin what I call capability-denying domination.