Republicanism

Republicanism. Imported from the civic humanism of Renaissance Italy via the English dissenting tradition, republicanism attracted eighteenth‐century Americans who adopted the ideology as a rationale for establishing an independent republic. Americans of the revolutionary generation warmly embraced the republican ideal of civic virtue, historian Gordon Wood argued in The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (1969), so that the eventual triumph of a politics of self‐interest constituted a profound transformation of values.

While some historians have characterized quite different ideas as “republican” in order to distinguish a public‐spirited “republicanism” from a selfish “liberalism,” such characterizations are problematical. Eighteenth‐century American republicans trusted the capacity of autonomous, public‐spirited citizens to preserve civic virtue by participating in local politics, so republicanism does represent a clear alternative to the late twentieth century's emphasis on individual rights as the core value in American culture. But beyond the central commitment to civic virtue, historians have disagreed about the republican legacy. Because republicans scorned dependency, celebrated sacrifice for national glory, and feared that change meant decline, they excluded unpropertied workers, women, and slaves from citizenship, advocated military conquest, rejected interest groups of any kind, and prized austerity over economic growth—hardly a program for latter‐day American egalitarians or communitarians. But viewed historically, both republicanism and liberalism comprised multiple arguments deployed in changing contexts to solve diverse problems and articulate different ideals, and the discourses of both civic virtue and individual rights must be understood within the overarching context of America's persistent and pervasive religiosity. When the classical Aristotelian idea of man as a political animal and the Italian Renaissance conception of civic virtue are placed within the framework of Augustinian Christianity, republican ideas assume different meanings. When Samuel Adams defined the future American republic as a “Christian Sparta,” the qualifier carried enormous weight. Since the central theme of the classical republican tradition, autonomous citizens participating in public affairs, resonated with American ideals and experience and overlapped with the Lockean idea of responsible freedom and the Christian idea of the covenant formed by God's people, Americans could think of themselves simultaneously as republicans, liberals, and Christians, although the first two categories are ours rather than theirs. In the absence of entrenched traditions differentiating people by heredity, social class, or creed, diverse interpretations of these ideas could coexist and loose coalitions could form and dissolve over time.

James Madison in the Federalist Papers offered a republican justification for institutions that might produce civic virtue despite the moral and political frailties of the body politic, but Madison's foes, the Antifederalists, also sought to defend local republican public life by opposing commerce, centralized authority, and the corruption they detected in the Federalist party gentry. If Jeffersonians invoked civic virtue to legitimate their policies and accused Federalists of scheming to undermine the autonomy of independent craftsmen and farmers, Federalists understood their own call for a strong standing army, stable elites, and the suppression of selfish individualism as a straightforward republican program. As for the Jacksonians of the 1820s and 1830s, whose ranks included slaveholders, craftsmen, and frontiersmen espousing diverse programs, characterizing them simply as “republican” distorts their complex amalgamation of values. Members of the Whig party, too, considered themselves legitimate heirs of republicanism, thanks to their emphasis on duty, organic unity, and hierarchical order, but neither party succeeded in laying exclusive claim to the republican heritage.

While Republican terminology survived in the Antebellum Era, meanings and contexts changed. Some Americans began identifying virtue not with citizens as a whole, but with women safely cordoned off from the now poisonous public sphere. Further, whereas John Locke and Adam Smith had conceived of political rights and economic activity within the contexts of religious duty and ethical life, some Americans began thinking of liberty as freedom from restraint. Nevertheless, as William J. Novak shows in The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth‐Century America (1996), the states' lower courts continued to enforce the republican doctrine “salus populi”—the people's welfare—by effectively regulating economic activity.

Abraham Lincoln's Republican party succeeded in part because it was able to revitalize older republican ideals of autonomy and ethical citizenship by linking them with appeals to the property rights of free men and to biblical injunctions against injustice. Champions of the Confederacy likewise stood firmly on the republican principle of autonomous and honorable service to the public good and homage to biblically justified forms of hierarchy. Republican echoes continued to reverberate, after the Civil War, although more faintly, as champions of laissez‐faire endorsed a new ethos of greed and discarded civic virtue as quaint or counter‐productive. Workingmen's parties likewise developed laborers' sense of themselves as a distinctive group with particular interests, thereby helping transform American public life into a contest to satisfy individual desires rather than a cultural project devoted to shaping and channeling those desires toward the common good.

Republican themes persisted in twentieth‐century political rhetoric, but they fit poorly into the dominant discourse of rights. Some American progressives, such as John Dewey, Jane Addams, and Herbert Croly, worked to resuscitate the ideal of a public interest emerging from the active participation of all citizens in democratically organized communities. But in the wake of World War I, their pragmatist conception of knowledge as uncertain, and of politics as egalitarian and open‐ended, seemed to most Americans shapeless and naive. New Dealers of the 1930s preferred a coalition of different groups attracted to an ill‐defined agenda promising prosperity for all. In the late twentieth century, the Democratic party sometimes tried to refashion the republican ideal by invoking themes of justice and equality, if not civic virtue. But Democrats more often appealed in the language of rights to the interests of particular groups rather than trying to forge a united republican citizenry. Given the absence of resources in republicanism for oppressed groups like African Americans, Indians, Hispanic Americans, and women struggling for equality, such a shift from republican to liberal and religious discourse was hardly surprising.

The Republican party, by contrast, packaged itself for national consumption by incorporating classical republican themes of its own. Republican candidates denounced centralized power as a source of corruption, deprecated welfare dependency and interest groups, defended hierarchy and patriarchy, honored valor in battle, interpreted cultural (although not economic) change as decline, and claimed to find virtue in austerity—at least for those without tax shelters. Although few American politicians in either party displayed much interest in (or evident familiarity with) civic virtue as the twenty‐first century began, Republicans had as legitimate a claim to aspects of the republican tradition as did Democrats, whose vision, it often seemed, had narrowed to the demands of well‐organized interest groups.
See also Adams, John; Calhoun, John C.; Capitalism; Civil Rights; Clay, Henry; Conservatism; Constitution; Constitutional Convention of 1787; Democracy in America; Early Republic, Era of the; Gilded Age; Jackson, Andrew; Jefferson, Thomas; New Deal Era, The; Progressive Era; Religion; Revolution and Constitution, Era of; States' Rights; Suffrage; Webster, Daniel; Women's Rights Movements.

Bibliography

Drew R. McCoy , The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America, 1980.
Joyce Appleby , Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination, 1992.
Daniel T. Rodgers , Republicanism: The Career of a Concept, The Journal of American History 79 (1992): 11–38.
Lance Banning , James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic, 1995.
Michael Sandel , Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy, 1996.
James T. Kloppenberg , The Virtues of Liberalism, 1998.

James T. Kloppenberg