In the 1960s, the historians J.G.A. Pocock, Bernard Bailyn, and Gordon Wood launched the first scholarly salvo against the Hartz thesis. These historians of the founding era argued that in that seminal period at least – and, hence, perhaps in others going forward – a quite different political thought tradition, republicanism (sometimes styled “civic republican” or “classical republicanism”), had been ubitquitous for anyone who troubled to look. This challenge to the Hartz thesis launched “the liberal–republican” (or, in a slightly different guise, the “liberal–communitarian”) debate among scholars of American political thought. For a time, scholars lined up as partisans arguing for the ideological predominance of one framework or the other, either at the founding, in other periods or moments of American history, or across it, or within identifiable spaces and subcultures within the American political order.
While liberalism is a product of political modernity, republicanism’s lineage dates back to ancient Greece and Rome. “Classical” republican thought was rediscovered and revived during the Renaissance (including by the Italian political philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli in his Discourses on Livy, 1531; interestingly, Machiavelli was also the author of the proto-modern political theory masterpiece The Prince, 1532). That current of classical and Renaissance thought was then – most proximately as concerns American political thought, as revised and, in some sense, reimagined for a modern context – drafted into service in the extended seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political struggles between the English Crown and Parliament. As Englishmen, the American colonists were steeped in this politics of their mother country. That politics was the prism through which the American colonists came to understand their crescendo of grievances with the English Crown in the aftermath of the French and Indian War (1754–1763). This framing informed the political thought that fomented the American Revolution.
Instead of starting with a posited sovereign individual in a state of nature, republicans, following Aristotle, began by stipulating the social and political – the inherently communal nature – of man. (Aristotle, Politics: “Man is a political animal.”) The republican writers of ancient Greece and Rome – Aristotle, Polybius, Cicero, and others – were widely read by the North American colonial, revolutionary, and early republic elites as part of their classical educations, which often included instruction in the original ancient Greek and Latin languages of such works. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English “country” political thought had enlisted classical republicanism to challenge the authority of the English “Court” and Crown. When, not long afterward, the colonists found themselves with their own growing list of grievances against the Court and Crown (George III), they were primed by both these ancient and English predecessors to read their grievances through republican lenses.
Classical republican thought struck themes that were different from – and, in some cases, the antithesis of – individualistic liberalism. Perhaps foremost was the foundational, a priori commitment to the common good (the word “republic” itself derives from the Latin res publica – “public things”). Republicanism glorified the “free state” – the independent polity, understood as one body, indivisible, directing its own collective life and destiny, free from foreign subjugation or constraint. Liberty is of surpassing value to republicans. But the emphasis within republican thought was on the understanding that no individual within the polity was truly free unless the community of which he was a part was itself, as a body, free. Republican thought, moreover, placed surpassing value on the virtue – the “civic virtue” – of republican citizens, with virtue itself defined as involving the pursuit of the common good. Republicanism holds that the preservation of individual and collective freedom depends on the virtue of ordinary citizens, their selfless and patriotic devotion to the principles of a free republic, and the common political project. This entailed, and was evidenced by, a willingness of citizens to sacrifice their own personal or private interests for the greater good. As such, whereas liberalism valorizes individual rights, republicanism entails a strenuous, and even austere, devotion to duty. Virtuous republican “citizens” (a republican concept) are expected to directly and actively participate in public life, not to advance their private or partial interests, but to work together with their fellow citizens to advance the common good. (The reliance on elected “representatives” in deliberative bodies, or mercenaries in war, was considered by republicans to be a corruption – evidence of a want of responsibility, citizenship, and duty.) Put otherwise, citizens were understood to be directly responsible for the exercise and preservation of their own freedoms. (As such, republicans traditionally spurned standing armies in favor of citizen militias.) In this regard, many speak of liberalism being anchored in “negative” conceptions of liberty (where liberty is preserved by the limitations imposed on the powers of government) and republicanism in conceptions of “positive” liberty (where liberty is manifested as a free people’s active exercise of their power to make their own laws, to set their own collective path, and realize their own common political project).3 It is characteristic of republicans to be perpetually apprehending the freedom of their polity to be under threat, whether from internal corruption or external subversion or predation.
Republican thought holds that corruption – the worst fate that can be befall a republic – can come from diverse sources: it can be brought on by a falling away from the state’s founding principles, and from a decline in virtuousness in the citizenry, including – in a refusal of the abstemious self-denial required of republicans – when citizens’ personal or private interests come to prevail over the commitment to virtuous life and the common good. This may be evidenced by a succumbing to the spirit of party, or to the spirit of commerce, the latter of which is doubly suspect as both being based in the pursuit of private interests and for its tendency to distract citizens from their strenuous responsibilities to actively participate in public life. Subversion is enabled by weakness and selfishness, treachery, disloyalty, and treason.
Unlike liberalism, which posits that the end of the state is the preservation of individual rights, republicanism posits a moral purpose or end for the state. As such, following Aristotle, republicanism places surpassing value on establishing the conditions for the cultivation of personal or civic virtue conducive to human flourishing. In this regard, republicans value laws directed to the improvement of men’s morals, at making men good. Consequently, as per the Swiss/French political thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau, republican states will often hew to a “civil religion.”4 Many republicans understood theistic religions as instrumentally valuable in advancing the social and political order sustained by virtuous citizens in a free state – but only to the extent that they were consistent with, or lent support to, the society’s civic religion, which they privileged.
Despite their many differences, there are some commonalities among liberal and republican political outlooks. These include a commitment to limited government and the rule of law (albeit each according to its own distinctive concerns, aspirations, and idioms). Because it begins with mostly self-interested individuals, liberalism valorizes the establishment of institutional mechanisms of countervailing powers to enforce limitations on government power, to steer the exercise of the powers of government, to the extent possible, toward the best approximation of the public good. (Liberals vary in the degree to which they are sanguine about the possibility of doing so.) In its own more hopeful visions for the realization of the common good, republicanism, by contrast, places a higher value, and greater hopes, on inculcation through education and other formative practices (like patriotic exercises and military service), and on the strict adherence by a virtuous citizenry to rules and legal and institutional forms.
While it has its uses, the stark opposition often posited between the conceptual universes of liberal and republican thought – sometimes by contemporary scholars who joined one team or the other in the “Liberal–Republican” Debate – can distort the way that these different currents of thought have actually informed the American experience. Ancient, Renaissance, and modern republicanism, for one thing, were not identical. While their core preoccupations and commitments mark them as a continuation of the same family of ideas, modern republicans were more inclined to regard participation in the public sphere as an instrumental means to the achievement
