Against reviving republicanism

Politics, Philosophy & Economics

Volumn 5, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 221-252

  Brennan, Geoffrey ^a   Lomasky, Loren ^b  

^a AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

^b UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA   (United States)

Author keywords

liberalism; political participation; republican freedom; republicanism; social goods

Indexed keywords

EID: 34248037438     PISSN: 1470594X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1470594X06064224     Document Type: Article

References (22)

1. Among the significant tellings of this tale are Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Richard Dagger, Civic Virtues: Rights, Citizenship, and Republican Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Phillip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975); Michael Sandel, Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); Quentin Skinner, ‘The Idea of Negative Liberty: Philosophical and Historical Perspectives’, in Philosophy in History, edited by R. Rorty, J.B. Schneewind and Q. Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 193–221; Quentin Skinner, ‘The Republican Ideal of Political Liberty’, in Machiavelli and Republicanism, edited by G. Bock, Q. Skinner and M. Viroli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 293–309; Quentin Skinner, ‘The Paradoxes of Political Liberty’, in Liberty, edited by D. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 183–205; Quentin Skinner, ‘On Justice, the Common Good and the Priority of Liberty’, in Dimensions of Radical Democracy, edited by C. Mouffe (London: Verso, 1992), pp. 211–24; Charles Taylor, ‘What's Wrong with Negative Liberty’, in Liberty, edited by D. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 141–62.
2. How best to designate this convergence of lines of political thought is itself controversial. If ‘republicanism’ has any primary signification in contemporary discourse, it is as a view in opposition to established monarchy. Because that is not the sense intended in the political philosophy literature, the rubric is sometimes altered to ‘civic republicanism’. That, however, may be taken to refer to the politics of a particular era, especially that of Renaissance humanism, which in turn raises questions about distinguishing civic republicanism from civic humanism. That distinction may have become philosophically important because of Rawls classifying the former as compatible with political liberalism, while rejecting the latter as a comprehensive theory. See John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 205–6. In what follows, we adopt the simplifying locution of ‘republicanism’ and do not attempt to differentiate between versions that do and do not conflict with Rawlsian political liberalism.
3. So even Pettit, whose theory is pitched around a putatively reclaimed conception of freedom rather than a theory of value, introduces his republicanism as an attractive alternative to a libertarianism that, in his rendering, tends to ‘think of the people as an aggregate of atomized individuals - an aggregate without a collective identity - and they represent the state as ideally nothing more than an apparatus for accommodating individuals in the pursuit of their atomized concerns’. See Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, p. 9.
4. John Locke, Second Treatise, in Two Treatises of Government, edited by P. Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960 [1690]), Section 13.
5. Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1981 [1776]), V.i.c., p. 723.
6. See Charles Taylor, Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 188.
7. That case is, of course, made surpassingly well by Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Books VIII and IX.
8. See Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, footnote 4. A seminal source of the indictment is C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: From Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969).
9. Robert Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000).
10. Michael Sandel maintains that ‘given our nature as political beings, we are free only insofar as we exercise our capacity to deliberate about the common good, and participate in the public life of a free city or republic’. See Sandel, Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy, p. 26. Other influential pleas along republican lines on behalf of appreciably enhanced citizen participation are offered by Hannah Arendt, Benjamin Barber, Richard Dagger, Quentin Skinner, and Charles Taylor. Although we recognize that their platforms differ substantially, no attempt is made here to categorize the arguments of individual theorists along the instrumental-intrinsic dimension.
11. Some accounts make an exception for those of an exceptionally theoretical or pious wont.
12. Although here too opportunity cost considerations are relevant.
13. See Geoffrey Brennan and Loren Lomasky, ‘Is There a Duty to Vote?’ Social Philosophy and Policy 17 (winter 2000): 62-86.
14. Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958).
15. Benjamin Constant, Political Writings, edited by B. Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
16. Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government.
17. See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 22–3.
18. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), Ch. 4, pp. 54–87.
19. See Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, pp. 85–90.
20. The anthem of worker mobility is Johnny Paycheck's country classic, ‘Take this Job and Shove it!’ A somewhat more nuanced treatment of the subject is offered by Albert Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970).
21. Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, p. 67.
22. Even this has to be qualified because some theorists advocate a republicanism that is, they maintain, also liberal. See, for example, Dagger, Civic Virtues: Rights, Citizenship, and Republican Liberalism.