Republican Tradition Research Articles

An Apprenticeship for Life in Common: Jean Jaurès on Social Democracy and the Modern Republic

The standard story of republican thought stops around the end of the eighteenth century, and contemporary republican political theory based on that story—for example, the work of Philip Pettit—is ill-equipped to confront problems that have appeared in the era of capitalism. Republican theory can benefit from attention to the emergence of social democracy in the early twentieth century, and to the role of republican ideas in that emergence. Jean Jaurès, perhaps the most prominent exponent of social democracy at that time, drew on the republican tradition to defend a concept of justice that combines commitment to non-domination with worry about modern loneliness, and he derived from the republican tradition a defense of reformist political methods against their revolutionary critics. He suggests the usefulness of left political thought to republicanism, and of republicanism to thinkers on the left.

The Separation of Electoral Powers

This essay argues that the political theory of republicanism needs to be updated to take account of the distinct role that election law plays in the establishing of the government that makes and enforces the rest of the laws for society. Updating republicanism in this way requires adding a new dimension to the separation of powers, a traditionally republican idea. The new dimension is to separate the electoral powers of government from the three traditional powers: legislative, executive, and judicial. In addition, the electoral powers should be subdivided into three distinct institutions in the same way that the regular powers of government are. The essay describes the three new electoral institutions that would be created in accordance with this updating of republican theory. The essay also considers the distinctive institutional innovations that have occurred, since the development of traditional republican theory, with the rise of administrative law. Accordingly, this essay also sketches a fourth electoral institution to play an intermediary administrative role between the legislation and execution of election laws.

Reconstructing republican freedom

This article presents a critique of Philip Pettit’s concept of ‘freedom as non-domination’ and provides an alternative theory of both domination and republican political freedom. I argue that Pettit’s neo-republican concept of domination is insufficient to confront modern forms of domination and that this hampers his concept of republican freedom and its political relevance under the conditions of modernity. Whereas the neo-republican account of domination is defined by ‘arbitrary interference’, modern forms of domination, I argue, are characterized by routinization and systemic forms of control and subordination. In the end, the neo-republican account of domination is more appropriate for 17th- and 18th-century social institutions rather than those that persist under modernity. In its place, I propose a more dynamic concept of domination and rework the concept of freedom in order to place the republican tradition within the context of modernity itself. I argue that the core insight of republicanism is its emphasis on the arrangement and reformation of social institutions to enhance social freedom. From this, I argue that republicanism can take its place as a more attractive alternative to liberal theory.

Civic Engagement from UC to JC

First, this paper develops what I call a pedagogy of practice from the republican tradition of political thought. This pedagogy of practice is based on an analogy with sport, and views politics and political theory as activities first and foremost. Second, this paper details the successes and failures of three assignments inspired from this pedagogy. Using a Civic Education Internship, a Historical Research Project, and a Policy Paper, I attempt to give students personal and practical experience with the practices of politics and political theory.

Republicanism, Rights and Democratic Athens

In a recent article Paul Cartledge and Matt Edge argue that the modern republican tradition offers a useful framework for understanding the Athenian concept of freedom, and that within this framework the Athenians protected their freedoms without reference to a concept of rights. This paper agrees with both of these conclusions but identifies and corrects three assumptions behind Cartledge and Edge’s argument: that the only purpose of rights is to protect individual freedoms against the state; that rights have no place at all in the republican tradition; and that the ancient Greeks did not understand rights. In fact the Athenians did have an understanding of rights but they did not use rights to protect freedoms. The reason for this is that the protected freedom is a very modern and particularly sophisticated application of the concept of rights.

Is Neo‐Republicanism Bad for Women?

The republican revival in political philosophy, political theory, and legal theory has produced an impressive range of novel interpretations of the historical figures of the republican tradition. It has also given rise to a variety of contemporary neo‐republican theories that build on its historical themes. Although there have been some feminist discussions of its historical representatives, neo‐republicanism has not generated a great deal of enthusiasm among feminists. The present paper examines Phillip Pettit's theory of freedom as nondomination in order to assess its potential usefulness for those with feminist goals. It defends Pettit's account of interpersonal domination from certain feminist objections, but argues that his account of state domination needs to be amended if it is fully to protect the interests of women and other groups.

Von Kant zu Schlegel. Georg Forsters Republikanismus

Against the background of the recent debate on the atlantic republican tradition initiated by John G. Pocock and Quentin Skinner the essay tries to reconstruct the republican discourse in the German Empire of the 1790s. It claims that we find there the innovation of a cosmopolitan republicanism which becomes radicalized on its way from Kant to Schlegel, and that Georg Forster is the decisive catalyst for this radicalization.

Some remarks about the classical foundations and contemporary trends of reconceptualizing citizenship

The paper explores some of the key historical and theoretical traditions of thinking about citizenship, basic tensions and problems inherent to the concept itself, as well as the main contemporary challenges. After presenting key problems that stem from the classical liberal and republican traditions - complemented by a discussion of citizenship within the nation-state framework - the paper turns to an overview of the main contemporary challenges and debates aiming at reconceptualizing the concept itself and including it into novel and different political and theoretical frames.

Inquiry and Virtue: A Pragmatist‐Liberal Argument for Civic Education

Liberal democracy and virtue have an uncomfortable relationship. The republican tradition ranging from the ancient world through the Atlantic tradition of the Founding Fathers, to present-day communitarians, argues that democracy relies uniquely on the virtue of its citizens. They hold that republics are not defeated from without, but corrupted from within. There is a dire need for a shared conception of the good life. Only then are citizens willing to act together and to make the sacrifices necessary for the common weal. Liberals, however, argue that a shared conception of the good life can be bought only at the price of freedom. Within a nation-state of our size and possessing our level of freedom, differing images of the good life are inevitable and worth respecting. Therefore, the state should not craft souls, but provide the conditions for all to flourish according to their own desired ends. Liberals are not tolerant of all forms of life. Moral doctrines, communities, and traditions that do not accept liberal values of tolerance, respect, liberty, equality, and free inquiry do not have a place in the liberal public sphere (although anti-liberal beliefs may be retained in one’s private life). However, liberals are in a uniquely difficult position because, while they may possess deeply held commitments regarding the need for openness, courage, or respect in a good life, part of that life includes not imposing their image of a good life on others. Liberals must find reasons for coercing fellow citizens that do not require a prior “conversion” to liberalism. They must find impartial reasons for their partiality. More sardonically, Robert Frost defined a liberal as someone “too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.” The contest between liberalism and virtue is particularly heated in the area of public education. Because public education is coerced, both by requiring attendance by the young and by taxation of adults, it is a test case for liberalism. Seemingly, public schools must refrain from imposing an image of human excellence on children of disparate faiths and traditions since the state sanctions those who do not comply. Take the example of California’s recent mandate that the historical contribution of homosexuals be included in the curriculum.As a liberal, it is possible to believe not only that toleration and respect of homosexual citizens are inherently good and necessary for the health of our democracy, but also that imposing these virtues through a coercive system of education is intolerant and disrespectful since it violates the right of illiberal parents to raise their children bs_bs_banner

Broken Landscapes: Selected Letters of Ernie O'Malley, 1924-1957 ed. by Cormac K. H. O'Malley and Nicholas Allen (review)

Reviewed by: Broken Landscapes: Selected Letters of Ernie O'Malley, 1924-1957 ed. by Cormac K. H. O'Malley and Nicholas Allen Spurgeon Thompson Broken Landscapes: Selected Letters of Ernie O'Malley, 1924-1957, edited by Cormac K. H. O'Malley and Nicholas Allen, pp. 528. Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2011. $50; $9.99 (e-book). Amid a flurry of new editions of Ernie O'Malley's key works, from a new edition of the canonical civil war memoir The Singing Flame (2012) published this year to his Raids and Rallies (2011) and The Men Will Talk to Me: Kerry Interviews (2012), this volume of his selected letters provides a crucial anchoring context. Very little of it has been published before. With the upcoming publication in 2013 of a new edition of O'Malley's best-known work, On Another Man's Wound, O'Malley has started to receive the attention he deserves. The volume presents a selection of letters from his most creative years as a writer, scholar, husband and father. Broken Landscapes also provides a substantive essay by Nicholas Allen, whose work in Modernism, Ireland, and Civil War is the most influential current framing of O'Malley's life and work; almost a hundred pages of detailed notes; eleven uncollected critical essays, chiefly about visual art, that O'Malley wrote for a range of venues; and a brilliant intervention by David Lloyd, "Afterword: On Republican Reading," that offers a critical-theoretical framework in which to understand O'Malley's contribution to Irish life and republicanism. It is now becoming apparent that O'Malley's massive body of work, much of which had [End Page 154] been left unpublished in attics and archives, constitutes a significant contribution to Irish modernism as well as subaltern modernism globally. Broken Landscapes marks a decisive moment in O'Malley's rediscovery, and in the visibility dissident Irish republicanism has recently achieved. O'Malley is valuable in this recovery of dissident republicanism for several reasons. As Lloyd puts it, "O'Malley inhabited the republican tradition more than he reflected upon it. In many ways, he embodied its principles." This volume allows us to fully understand what this embodiment might mean. "I don't mind being called a gunman," O'Malley writes in a very diplomatic letter to Desmond Ryan in a 1936. He continues, "we were, I suppose, though we didn't use that term ourselves. And you are a pacifist, and I respect you for your beliefs, I don't see why you shouldn't use the term." O'Malley was an Irish officer during the Anglo-Irish War, and later in the civil war in some eighteen Irish counties and areas of operation; he trained hundreds of volunteers and led several key raids. His afterlife as a writer who, having emigrated to America, found himself in artist colonies from Provincetown, Greenwich Village, Carmel, Taos, Sante Fe, Mexico City, to Woodstock and Yaddo, mixing with lights of the American and international cultural left like Hart Crane, Paul Strand, and Sergei Eisenstein is mapped out in this volume in some detail. "O'Malley's transition from activist to writer" as Allen notes, "has been a transition that many of his readers have found difficult to negotiate." Broken Landscapes thoroughly contextualizes this period of transition. In the absence a full biography of O'Malley (an abbreviated one was published fifteen years ago), this collection fills a scholarly need. We can, for example, now trace O'Malley's movements in America and Mexico in the crucial years he was drafting On Another Man's Wound. In the way that only diaries and letters can offer insights, we share a young man's awe at arriving in New York in 1928, standing in skyscrapers when before he hid in fields or sniped from within the Four Courts: "At about 3.30 the sirens in the harbour gave tongue and from the windows of the 11th floor we saw aeroplanes going down the river; then they reappeared on their way up. The top of the buildings . . . was soon crowded, as was every window. Papers and streamers rained down whilst the boats continued to siren. A silvery gray cigar body...

¿Un Karl Polanyi republicano?

Both Karl Polanyi and his work have been described with various adjectives like “democratic Socialist”, “social humanist”, “left liberal”, and “left Christian”. All of these adjectives could be right because his biography was indeed influenced by all these theories.This paper seeks to contribute to this debate, suggesting that Polanyi’s work contains some elements that could be heirs of the Republican tradition and, in particular, of its most democratic and progressive side. Such relation becomes clearer when we analyze his conceptions about “liberty”, “democracy”, “justice”, and “market”. More specifically, this paper focuses on one of these coincidences, namely, a similar view about freedom and property. This link can be revealed throughout the parallelisms between the Polanyi’s work and those of other authors like Aristotle, Robespierre, Paine, and Marx. Although Karl Polanyi’s work cannot be totally placed into the tradition of Republicanism, it could be seen as a substantial contribution to this thought, offering some relevant thesis and empirical arguments to analyze the relation between markets and societies, and more precisely, pointing out some arrangements of market design that could be fruitful for the democratic Republican theory. The paper concludes with the idea that such analysis could provide us useful intellectual tools, which can be helpful for the current scientific and political debates. Key words: republicanism, Karl Polanyi, material independence, institutional design, freedom, market system.

Rethinking the Political Thought of James Harrington: Royalism, Republicanism and Democracy

Summary Traditional accounts of seventeenth-century English republicanism have usually presented it as inherently anti-monarchical and anti-democratic. This article seeks to challenge and complicate this picture by exploring James Harrington's views on royalism, republicanism and democracy. Building on recent assertions about Harrington's distinctiveness as a republican thinker, the article suggests that the focus on Harrington's republicanism has served to obscure the subtlety and complexity of his moral and political philosophy. Focusing on the year 1659, and the pamphlet war that Harrington and his supporters waged against their fellow republicans, it seeks to re-emphasise important but neglected elements of Harrington's thought. It suggests that the depth and extent of Harrington's sympathy with royalists and royalism has been underplayed, while too little attention has been paid to the fundamental differences between his ideas and those adopted by other republican thinkers at the time. In addition it brings to light, for the first time, Harrington's innovative endorsement of both the term and the concept of ‘democracy’ and draws attention to his intellectual and personal affinities with the Levellers. Finally it outlines some implications of these findings for understandings of English republicanism and the republican tradition more generally.

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

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

Property-Owning Democracy, Civic Education, and the Reasonable Surfer

Property-Owning Democracy, Civic Education, and the Reasonable Surfer

Private Incarceration – Towards a Philosophical Critique

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

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

Uma república para os modernos. Arendt, a secularização e o republicanismo

O objetivo deste trabalho é examinar alguns aspectos da relação entre a reflexão política de Hannah Arendt e a tradição republicana. Não se trata de salientar possíveis pontos de contato entre elas, mas de investigar a peculiaridade da concepção arendtiana de república presente em seu livro sobre as revoluções. Mais especificamente, o artigo visa elucidar qual a natureza do laço que Arendt estabelece entre república e secularização. Para levar a termo esse objetivo, é imprescindível deter-se sobre os conceitos de lei, poder, autoridade e Constituição.

What counts as arbitrary power?

What counts as arbitrary power? Civic republicans argue that an account of political liberty or freedom as consisting in the absence of domination best captures the spirit of the classical republican tradition, and also provides the basis for an attractive contemporary political doctrine. Domination, in turn, is usually understood as a sort of dependence on arbitrary social power. While there are many aspects of this conception of freedom as non-domination that might be regarded as controversial, this paper focuses on the specific issue of arbitrariness. It advocates a particular conception of arbitrariness that diverges from the mainstream view among civic republicans, and from the view of Philip Pettit in particular. Specifically, it argues that arbitrariness should be understood procedurally, and not substantively.

‘New dissidents are but old Provisionals writ large’? The Dynamics of Dissident Republicanism in the New Northern Ireland

This article discusses recent developments in dissident Irish republicanism and some of the arguments advanced to explain its emergence as a factor in Northern Irish politics. In particular it considers those explanations which define these new armed groups as either the latest manifestation of a historically determined Irish republican tradition or simply as ‘residual terrorist groups’ left behind by Provisional republicanism's movement into the constitutional mainstream in the 1990s. It rejects these arguments as ahistorical and schematic, and instead suggests that the dynamics and trajectory of dissident republicanism are shaped instead by the inherent tensions and structures of ‘the new Northern Ireland’. It goes on to compare the contemporary political, social and economic forces that produce the dissidents with the conditions that created the Provisionals as in the early 1970s and concludes that whilst these new groups will continue to pose a threat to the ‘normalization’ of the new dispensation they will not be successful as their republican forebears in mobilizing a significant and sustained challenge to the Northern Irish state.

The New Constitution of Hungary: Historical Narratives and Constitutional Identity

The new Hungarian Constitution manifestly strives for constituting a new constitutional identity, which does not reflect only aspirations to eliminate the traces of the communist constitution, in fact, it includes the suppression of republican tradition, in general. This has resulted in the voluntaristic exclusion of that particular historical identity tangibly present in contemporary Hungarian society, which stresses democratic autonomies. The most important expectation towards historical references in the constitution is that those should create coherent narratives that are able to relate to the principles of constitutionalism and, thereby, could contribute to the stability of constitutional identity. The historical constructions in the new constitution, nonetheless, rather increase the already existing discrepancies and dissonances between principles and actual legal practices, therefore, these constitute another source of uncertainty and instability.