Republicanism

views updated

REPUBLICANISM

Republicanism was the ideology of the american revolution, and as such, it still influences much of what Americans believe; in recent years it has had a renewed importance in American constitutional thought. It is difficult for us today to appreciate the revolutionary character of this republican ideology. We live in a world in which almost all nations purport to be republican; even those few countries that remain monarchies, such as Britain and Sweden, are more republican in fact than some others that claim to be republican in theory. But to the monarchy-dominated world of the eighteenth century, republicanism was a radical ideology; indeed, it was to the eighteenth century what Marxism was to be for the nineteenth century. Republicanism was a countercultural ideology of protest, an intellectual means by which dissatisfied people could criticize the luxury, selfishness, and corruption of eighteenth-century monarchical culture.

Yet it would be a mistake to think of republicanism, in the English-speaking world at least, as a distinct and coherent body of thought set in opposition to monarchy or to the English common law tradition of rights and liberties. In the greater British world, republican thinking blended with monarchy to create the mixed and limited government of the English constitution that was celebrated everywhere by enlightened theorists like montesquieu. Britons regarded the republican part of their constitution, the House of Commons, as the principal bulwark protecting their individual rights and liberties from encroachment by monarchical power. Thus, the sharp distinction drawn by some historians and political theorists today between the civic tradition of republicanism, often identified with James Harrington, and the common law tradition of personal and property rights, often identified with john locke, would not have been clear to eighteenth-century Englishmen.

Republicanism, however, was more than a form of government; it was also a form of life—a set of beliefs that infused the cultures of the Atlantic world in the age of Enlightenment. Its deepest origins were in ancient Rome and the great era of the Roman republic. The enlightened world of the eighteenth century found most of what it wanted to know about the Roman republic from the writings of the golden age of Latin literature, between the breakdown of the republic in the middle of the first century b. c. to the establishment of the empire in the middle of the second century a. d. the celebrated latin writers of this time—cicero, sallust, tacitus, and plutarch, among others—lived when the greatest days of the republic had passed, and thus, they contrasted the growing stratification, corruption, and disorder they saw around them with an imagined earlier world of rustic simplicity and pastoral virtue. roman farmers had once been hardy soldiers devoted to their country. but they had become selfish, corrupted by luxury, torn by struggles between rich and poor, and devoid of their capacity to serve the public good. in their pessimistic explanations of the republic's decline, these latin writers left a legacy of beliefs and ideals—about the good life, about citizenship, about political health, about social morality—that have had an enduring effect on western culture.

This great body of classical literature was revived and updated during the Renaissance and blended into a tradition of what has been called "civic humanism." This classical republican tradition stressed the moral character of the independent citizen as the prerequisite of good politics and disinterested service to the country. To be good citizens, men had to be free of control by other men and free of the influence of selfish interests.

The classical republican tradition passed into the culture of northern Europe. In England it inspired the writings of the great seventeenth-century republicans john milton, James Harrington, and Algernon Sidney. And it was carried into the eighteenth century by scores of popularizers and translators. By the late eighteenth century, being enlightened was nearly equivalent to believing in republican principles; many Englishmen even described the English monarchy as being a republic in fact. This republican tradition had a decisive effect on the thinking of the American revolutionary leaders.

Republicanism meant for the American revolutionaries in 1776 more than eliminating a king and instituting an elective system of government; it meant setting forth moral and social goals as well. Republics required a particular sort of independent, egalitarian, and virtuous people, a simple people who scorned luxury and superfluous private expenditure, who possessed sufficient property to be free from patronage and dependency on others, and who were willing to sacrifice many of their selfish interests for the res publica, the good of the whole community. Republican equality meant a society whose distinctions were based only on merit. No longer would one's position rest on whom one knew or married or on who one's father was.

Such dependence on a relatively equal, uncorrupted, and virtuous populace that had a single perceived public good made republics very fragile and often short-lived. Monarchies were long-lasting; they could maintain order from the top down over large, diverse, and even corrupt populations through their use of patronage, hereditary privilege, executive authority, standing armies, and an establishment of religion. But republics, such as the American states, had to be held together from below, from virtue, from the consent and sacrifice of the people themselves. Consequently, as Montesquieu and other theorists had warned, republics necessarily had to be small in territory and homogeneous and moral in character. The only republics existing in the eighteenth century—the Netherlands and the city-states of Italy and Switzerland—were small and compact. Large heterogeneous states that had tried to establish republics—as England had in the seventeenth century—were bound to end up in chaos, resulting in some sort of military dictatorship, like that of Oliver Cromwell. If it was too large and composed of too many diverse interests, a republic would fly apart.

It was little wonder, then, that the Americans in 1776 embarked on their experiment in republicanism in a spirit of great risk and high adventure. Nothing resembling their confederation of thirteen independent republican states had existed since the fall of Rome.

By 1787, however, American leaders had lost some of their earlier confidence in the American people's capacity for republicanism. Experience with popular government in the 1770s and 1780s, especially in the democratic state legislatures, had increasingly cast doubt on the people's virtue and disinterestedness. Selfish and local interests had captured majority control of the popularly elected legislatures and had used their lawmaking authority to promote their partial interests at the expense of the general good and minority rights. Such abuses of power by democratic state legislatures, wrote a concerned james madison in 1787, had brought "into question the fundamental principle of republican government, that the majority who rule in such governments are the safest guardians both of public good and of private rights." Suddenly the people's civic liberty, their participation in government, which lay at the heart of republicanism, seemed incompatible with their personal rights and liberties.

Such a conflict between majoritarian republicanism and minority rights had not been anticipated by the revolutionaries. The Americans of 1776 had thought that the people's republican participation in government was the best guarantee of the people's personal rights. They had assumed, said Madison in a series of 1780s letters, speeches, and working papers, culminating in his essays in the federalist, that the people composing a republic "enjoy not only an equality of political rights, but that they have all precisely the same interests and the same feelings in every respect," which was why republics were supposed to be small in size. They had thought that in such small republics "the interest of the majority would be that of the minority also; the decisions could only turn on mere opinion concerning the good of the whole of which the major voice would be the safest criterion; and within a small sphere, this voice could be most easily collected and the public affairs most accurately managed."

Now, however, to Madison and other national leaders, with a decade's experience behind them, these assumptions about republicanism seemed "altogether fictitious." No society, no matter how small, "ever did or can consist of so homogeneous a mass of citizens." All "civilized societies" were made up of "various and unavoidable" economic distinctions and marketplace interests: rich and poor, creditors and debtors, farmers and manufacturers, merchants and bankers, and so on.

In a small republic, such as each of the thirteen states, it was sometimes possible for one of these competing factions or partial interests to exploit the popular electoral process and gain majority control of the legislature and pass laws oppressive of other groups and interests and contrary to the common interest of the community. This problem of tyrannical and factious legislative majorities, the contradiction between public and private liberty, was precisely what had troubled most of the states since 1776, and it was the principal cause of the crisis that had led to the formation of the new national Constitution. "To secure the public good and private rights against the danger of such a faction, and at the same time to preserve the spirit and the form of popular government," wrote Madison, was "the great object to which our inquiries are directed."

Madison and other Framers solved the problem in 1787 by standing the body of conventional assumptions about the size of the republics on its head. Instead of trying to keep the republic small and homogeneous, Madison seized on, and ingeniously developed, David Hume's radical suggestion that a republican government operated better in a large territory than in a small one. The republic, said Madison, had to be so enlarged, "without departing from the elective basis of it," that "the propensity in small republics to rash measures and the facility of forming and executing them" would be stifled. In a large republican society "the people are broken into so many interests and parties, that a common sentiment is less likely to be felt, and the requisite concert less likely to be formed, by a majority of the whole." Madison and the other Framers, in other words, accepted the reality of diverse competing partial interests in American society and were quite willing to allow them free play in the society.

But not, it was hoped, in the new national government. Madison was not a modern-day pluralist. He did not expect the new federal government to be neutralized into inactivity by the competition of these numerous diverse interests. Nor did he see public policy or the common good emerging naturally from the give-and-take of these clashing interests. He did not expect the new national government to be an integrator and harmonizer of the different interests in the society; instead, he expected it to be a "disinterested and dispassionate umpire in disputes between different passions and interests in the State." And it would be able to play that role because the men holding office in the new central government would by their fewness of number and the largeness of the electoral districts most likely be "men who possess the most attractive merit, and the most diffusive and established characters." Thus, the Founding Fathers hoped that the new extended national republic would be led by enlightened men who were free of local constituent pressures and selfish marketplace concerns and who would deliberate in a disinterested manner and promote the general good. To this extent, the Framers clung to the tenets of classical republicanism.

But they clung even more firmly to the tenets of their belief in personal rights and liberties, whether defined as common law protections like habeas corpus and trial by jury or as natural rights like a free conscience in matters of religion. Indeed, protecting these personal rights, including the individual's right to pursue happiness and property, was increasingly regarded as the principal end of government, to which republicanism was only a means, and not a very adequate one at that. Hence, separation of power, checks and balances, bills of rights, the independent judiciary, and judicial review all worked to limit the power of government and to undermine the classical republican reliance on the general will of a united people.

The democratic revolution of the decades following the creation of the Constitution further transformed the tradition of classical republicanism. In the North at least, it virtually destroyed the classical republican dream of an enlightened aristocracy acting as disinterested umpires over the economic and political struggles of the society. political parties emerged to reestablish patronage and to promote the partisan local interests of people, and countless individuals took off in pursuit of their private happiness. By the middle of the nineteenth century, America gave as free a rein to commercial activity and the self-interestedness of people as any society in history.

But much of the republican tradition has remained alive, even to this day. Republicanism tempers the scramble for private wealth and happiness, and accounts for many of the Americans' ideals and aspirations: for their belief in equality and their dislike of pretension and privilege; for their relentless yearning for individual autonomy and freedom from all ties of dependency; for their periodic hopes that some political leaders might rise above parties and become truly disinterested umpires and deliberative representatives, hopes expressed, for example, in the election of military heroes and in the mugwump and Progressive movements; for their long-held conviction that farming is morally healthier and freer of selfish marketplace concerns than other activities; for their preoccupation with the fragility of the Republic and its liability to corruption; and, finally, for their remarkable obsession with their own national virtue—an obsession that still bewilders the rest of the world.

Gordon S. Wood
(1992)

Bibliography

Pocock, J.G.A. 1975 The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Wood, Gordon S. 1969 The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Encyclopedia of the American Constitution