REPUBLIC

REPUBLIC. The word republic derives from the Latin res publica; res means "thing" or "affair," and publica means "public," as opposed to "private." The word thus denotes government in which politics is a public affair and not the personal prerogative of a single ruler. There have been aristocratic republics and oligarchic republics, but, as applied to the United States government, this term usually connotes a democratic republic, one in which elected representatives carry out the functions of government. This conception of the terms derives both from classical philosophy and eighteenth-century liberal thought. In the context of the debate over the Constitution of the United States in 1788, federalists refined the concept further so that the term republic referred to a particular kind of democracy.

James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay articulated this conception of a republic in their 1788 essays that were later compiled as The Federalist Papers. These essays, intended to support the ratification of the federal Constitution in New York, distinguished a republic from a pure democracy, describing the latter as "a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person." In the context of The Federalist Papers, a republic differed from a pure democracy only in that it was "a government in which the scheme of representation takes place." According to this interpretation, a republic was a representative democracy. As Madison pointed out, the representative principle militates against the irresponsible exercise of majority power, for it makes a large republic possible, and it is difficult in a large republic for any faction to become a majority. According to these authors, a large republic would foster the formation of many factions, and this sheer multiplicity of interests in turn would create shifting coalitions, which would hinder the formation of an oppressive or irresponsible majority. Furthermore, because of the checks and balances and separation of powers between different branches and levels of government, any upstart tyrannical faction would encounter many legal and institutional roadblocks.

Europeans had established partly or wholly representative governments before the American Revolution, but none was both wholly representative and wholly democratic. The republic of the United States achieved that novel combination. A danger remained, however, according to Alexis de Tocqueville, in its representative institutions: if representatives are little better than their constituents, he argued, the hoped for improvement in the government of democracy might come to nothing.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992.

Banning, Lance. The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995.

Hamilton, Alexander, John Jay, and James Madison. The Federalist Papers. ed. Gary Wills. New York: Bantam Books, 1981.

Morton J.Frisch/s. b.

See alsoAntifederalists ; Citizenship ; Constitution of the United States ; Federalist Papers ; Liberalism ; Political Theory ; Republicanism .