Republicanism and its Legacy

European Journal of Political Theory

Volumn 4, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 453-465

  Castiglione, Dario ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF EXETER   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 34248033252     PISSN: 14748851     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1474885105055993     Document Type: Review

References (56)

1. The most important contributions comprise the following. Hans Baron's study of Florentine civic humanism at the turn of the 15th century: H. Baron (1966) The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, 2nd edn. Princeton: Princeton University Press. For the rediscovery of the influence of 'Commonwealthmen' and 'Country' opposition's ideas in early 18th-century English political history,
2. C. Robbins (1959) The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
3. Franco Venturi's analysis of the role of contemporary republican ideals and models in the Enlightenment politics of reform: (1971) Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. The transformation of the historiography of the American Revolution with Locke's idealized liberalism replaced by a more complex series of republican sources: B.
4. Bailyn (1967) The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
5. G.S. Wood (1969) The Creation of the American Republic: 1776-1787, 2nd edn 1998. Chapel Hill, NC, and London: University of North Caroline Press.
6. John Pocock's Machiavellian moment as the key aspects of a republican understanding of politics and historical time that deeply influenced the formation and transformation of English and early American political discourse: (1975) The Machiavellian Moment, 2nd edn. 2003. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Finally, and more recently, the emergence of a neo-Roman tradition that firmly, though somewhat unobtrusively, operated in different periods of political history by upholding a distinctively republican idea of liberty:
7. Q. Skinner (2002) Visions of Politics, vol. 2, Renaissance Virtues. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
8. The more communitarian reading of republicanism is evident in M. Sandel (1996) Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Charles Taylor and Alisdair MacIntyre have also developed communitarian visions closely related to the republican tradition, but less dependent on it.
9. A communitarian interpretation, but with more democratic overtones, has been used (though not necessarily shared) by B. Barber (1984) Strong Democracy. Participatory Politics for a New Age. Berkeley: University of California Press.
10. R.A. Dahl (1989) Democracy and its Critics. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
11. R.P. Putnam (1993) Making Democracy Work. Princeton: Princeton University Press. For the use of a republican approach in legal theory, cf. the work of Cass Sustein and Frank Michelman, amongst their many articles:
12. C. Sunstein (1988) 'Beyond the Republican Revival', Yale Law Journal 97(8): 1539-90, and
13. F. Michelmas (1988) "Law's Republi", Yale Law Journal 97(8): 1493-1537.
14. The work that has most promoted a "liberal" version of republicanism is P. Pettit (1997) Republicanism: A Theory of Liberty and Government. Oxford: Oxford University Press. The works on republicanism as a political theory, or on the relationships between it and its history, published in the last few years are too many to be mentioned here. Of some interest, because of its broader influence, Jürgen Habermas's own interpretation of how republicanism and liberalism interact in the relationship between law and democracy,
15. in J. Habermas (1996, original edn in German 1992) Between Facts and Norms. Cambridge: Polity Press.
16. For a discussion of this contribution within the general context of the republican literature, cf. L. Baccelli (2003) Critica del repubblicanesimo. Rome and Bari: Editori Laterza.
17. S. Ferrara and M. Rosati (eds) (2000) 'Forum: Repubblicanesimo e liberalismo a confronto', special issue of Eilosofia e Questioni Pubbliche 5(1).
18. Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (eds) (2002) Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, vol. 1, Republicanism and Constitutionalism in Early Modern Europe, vol. 2,
19. The Values of Republicanism in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
20. Although it may seem unusual for a review article, I make reference to other reviews of the same work. In the circumstances, they provide a useful test of the state of the debate on republicanism, which is the real object of this review.
21. See B. Fontana (2003) 'In the Gardens of the Republic', The Times Literary Supplement (11 July);
22. P. Zagorin (2003) "Republicanisms", British Journal for the History of Philosophy 11(4): 701-14
23. M. Albertone, Review in Rivista Storica Italiana (2003), 95(2): 800-7
24. and J. Moore, Review Note in Political Studies Review (2003), 2(1): 56-7.
25. This point is raised by Biancamaria Fontana in her review cited at n. 4, where she criticizes these volumes for providing a 'memorial garden', rather than a living image, of republicanism's heritage. As the editors say in their introduction, some of the contemporary themes were discussed in another volume partly connected to the same project:
26. C. McKinnon and I. Hampsher-Monk (eds) (2000) The Demands of Citizenship. London and New York: Continuum. It is, however, true that an enquiry on the sense in which the European republican heritage may still be active would offer an interesting perspective (though not necessarily a convincing one) on either the supposed common European identity or the values on which to foreground a European constitutional culture.
27. I have discussed the intricate relationship between contextualist interpretation and political relevance, and the epistemological and hermeneutic problems involved by this relationship, in D. Castiglione (1993) "Historical Arguments in Political Theory", Political Theory Newsletter 5(2): 89-109.
28. Wood (n. 1), 'Preface to the 1998 Edition', p. vi. Cf. also Pocock (n. 1), afterwords to the 2nd edn, and his (2004) 'Cittadini, clienti e creditori: la repubblica come critica del mutamento storico', in M. Viroli (ed.) Libertà politica e virtù civile, pp. 133-47. Turin: Edizioni della Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli. On the political relevance of historiographic reconstruction, an interesting case is the revival of liberalism in France, which presents some interesting parallels and telling contrasts with the case of republican historiography.
29. Cf. J. Jennings, "Le Retour des Émigrés"? The Study of the History of Political Ideas in Contemporary France', in D. Castiglione and I. Hampsher-Monk (eds) (2001) The History of Political Thought in National Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
30. Wood (n. 1), pp. vi-vii.
31. Cf. J.G.A. Pocock (1993) "A Discourse of Sovereignty: Observations on the Work in Progress", in N. Phillipson and Q. Skinner (eds) (1993) Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
32. Disagreement on the meaning of 'republicanism' may also depend on some confusion surrounding the meaning of 'republic' (in its vernacular variants) at different historical junctures. This is a topic interestingly developed by David Wootton in a paper on "De vera republica": The Disciples of Baron and the Counter-Example of Venturi', presented at conference on Franco Venturi's vision of Republicanism, Naples, Sept. 2004 whose proceedings are forthcoming in
33. Manuela Albertone (ed.) (2006) Il Repubblicanesimo Moderno. L'idea di repubblica nella riflessione storica di Franco Venturi. Napoli: Bibliopolis.
34. Cf. Zagorin's (n. 4). But similar impressions are discernible in all other reviews, in particular Manuela Albertone's (n. 4).
35. An often quoted place for this distinction is J. Rawls (1993) Political Liberalism, pp. 205-6. New York: Columbia University Press. But Rawls was not the first to draw such a distinction, which was previously used, among others, by
36. R. Bellamy (1992) Liberalism and Modern Society: An Historical Argument. Cambridge: Polity Press.
37. M. Viroli (1992) From Politics to Reason of State: The Acquisition and Transformation of the Language of Politics 1250-1600. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
38. With different emphasis, this is to be found in both Skinner and Viroli. See in particular Q. Skinner (1998) Liberty before Liberalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
39. M. Viroli (1999) Repubblicanesimo. Rome and Bari: Editori Laterza.
40. Q. Skinner (1978) The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
41. This is recognized in the paper on "Foundations and Moments", which John Pocock gave to the Cambridge Conference on "Rethinking the Foundations: Quentin Skinner and the History of Political Thought after Twenty-Five Years", 10-12 April 2003.
42. Cf. Baron (n. 1).
43. Cf. P.O. Kristeller (1965) Renaissance Thought II: Papers on Humanism and the Arts. New York: Columbia University Press.
44. Pocock (n. 7), p. 136.
45. Cf. Blair Worden's contribution, but also his 'Le idee repubblicane e la rivoluzione inglese', in Viroli (n. 7), pp. 109-32, 118-19 particular.
46. The impression that this collection raises as many problems in the historiography of republicanism as it answers is shared by Jim Moore (n. 4). As he says, 'perhaps (one reflects upon it with some trepidation) another round of conferences may be in order'. Indeed, the Sisyphean condition often applies to academic endeavours.
47. The volume edited by Viroli (n. 7), which reproduces the results of another international project, financed by the Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli, and whose contributors partly overlap with those of the present work, covers a larger historical span, and part of its overt intention is to provide such a missing link. However, the main focus seems to be almost exclusively on the republican idea of patriotism, while the volume as a whole is much less than its parts and appears rather haphazard in its organization.
48. Dilution and domestication had different facets: republican language and concepts became increasingly intertwined with other traditions (Bödeker, Geuna, Oz-Salzberger and Winch); republican discourse tried to accommodate discourses of manners and civility (Hampsher-Monk and Spitz); aristocratic and exclusionary elements of classical republicanism were often defended against the transformations that commerce and the erosion of social hierarchies were promoting in politics (Conti, Fauré and Larrére); finally, its constitutional principles were progressively domesticated and made more compatible with monarchical government (Armitage, Zurbuchen, Kent Wright, Pii and Sonenscher).
49. Wood (n. 1), p. viii.
50. K.M. Baker, "Le trasformazioni del repubblicanesimo classico nella Francia del Settecento", in Viroli (n. 7), pp. 149-75, p. 175 in particular.
51. G.S. Wood (2003) The American Revolution, p. 91. New York: Modern Library.
52. Examples of recent attempts to introduce a number of distinctions within the republican discourse and to put it into relation with other currents of thought, comprise J. Israel (2003) "The Intellectual Origins of Modern Democratic Republicanism", European Journal of Political Theory 3(1): 7-36
53. ; R. Whatmore (2003) "Democrats and Republicans in Restoration France", European Journal of Political Theory 3(1): 37-51
54. ; E.F. Biagini, "Virtù e Vittorianesimo: i valori repubblicani del liberalismo inglese, 1860-1890", in Viroli (n. 7), pp. 177-98
55. ; and D. Castiglione (2000) '"That Noble Disquiet": Meanings of Liberty in the Discourse of the North', in S. Collini, R. Whatmore and B. Young (eds) Essays in British Intellectual History 7750-7950, vol. 1, pp. 48-69
56. . Economy, Politics and Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.