In July 2002, at the first Senate hearing on Iraq, then-Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair Joe Biden pledged his allegiance to Bush's war. Ever since, the blunt-spoken Biden has seized every opportunity to dismiss antiwar critics within his own party, vocally denouncing Bush's handling of the war while doggedly supporting the war effort itself. Biden carried this message into the Kerry campaign as the candidate's closest foreign policy confidant, and a few days after announcing his own intention to run for the presidency in 2008, he gave a major speech at the Brookings Institution in which he criticized rising calls for withdrawal as a "gigantic mistake."
The Democrats' speculative front-runner for '08, Hillary Clinton, has offered similarly hawkish rhetoric. "If we were to artificially set a deadline of some sort, that would be like a green light to the terrorists, and we can't afford to do that," Clinton told CBS in February. Instead, she recently proposed enlarging the Army by 80,000 troops "to respond to threats wherever danger lies." Clinton, a member of the Armed Services Committee, appears more comfortable accommodating the President's Iraq policy than opposing it, and her early and sustained support for the war (and frequent photo-ops with the troops) supposedly reinforces her national security credentials.
The prominence of party leaders like Biden and Clinton, and of a slew of other potential prowar candidates who support the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, presents the Democrats with an odd dilemma: At a time when the American people are turning against the Iraq War and favor a withdrawal of US troops, and British and American leaders are publicly discussing a partial pullback, the leading Democratic presidential candidates for '08 are unapologetic war hawks. Nearly 60 percent of Americans now oppose the war, according to recent polling. Sixty-three percent want US troops brought home within the next year. Yet a recent National Journal "insiders poll" found that a similar margin of Democratic members of Congress reject setting any timetable. The possibility that America's military presence in Iraq may be doing more harm than good is considered beyond the pale of "sophisticated" debate.
The continued high standing of the hawks has been made possible by their enablers in the strategic class--the foreign policy advisers, think-tank specialists and pundits. Their presumed expertise gives the strategic class a unique license to speak for the party on national security issues. This group has always been quietly influential, but since 9/11 it has risen in prominence, egging on and underpinning elected officials, crowding out dissenters within its own ranks and becoming increasingly ideologically monolithic. So far its members remain unchallenged. It's more than a little ironic that the people who got Iraq so wrong continue to tell the Democrats how to get it right.
It's helpful to think of the Democratic strategic class as a pyramid. At the top are politicians like Biden and Clinton, forming the most important and visible public face. Just below are high-ranking former government officials, like UN ambassador Richard Holbrooke, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Assistant Secretary of State Jamie Rubin. These are the people who devise and execute foreign policy and frame the substance of the message. Virtually all the top advisers supported the Iraq War; Holbrooke, who's been dubbed the "closest thing the party has to a Kissinger" by one foreign policy analyst, even tacked to Bush's right, arguing in February 2003 that anything less than an invasion of Iraq would undermine international law. Many of the officials held high-ranking positions in the Kerry campaign. Holbrooke, frequently mentioned as a potential Secretary of State, urged Kerry to keep his vision on Iraq "deliberately vague," the New York Observer reported. Rubin appeared on television sixty times in May 2004 alone. Nine days before the election, Holbrooke addressed the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and reiterated Kerry's support for the war and occupation, belittled European negotiations with Iran on its nuclear program and endorsed the Israeli separation wall. Hardly a Dove Among Dems' Brain Trusters, read a headline from the Forward newspaper.
Underneath the top policy officials are the anointed regional experts, who play an instrumental role in legitimizing the politicians' arguments and drumming up support inside the Beltway for impending conflicts in faraway lands. Brookings fellow and former CIA official Kenneth Pollack's book The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq played precisely that function for wavering Democratic elites in the run-up to war, turning "more doves into hawks than Richard Perle, Laurie Mylroie and George W. Bush combined," wrote Slate's Chris Suellentrop in March 2003. "In Washington, it's not uncommon to hear fence-straddlers qualify their ambivalence about an Iraq war with the sentiment, 'Of course, I haven't read the Pollack book yet.'"
The likes of Pollack are greatly bolstered by a second front of national security specialists at prestigious think tanks like Brookings, the Council on Foreign Relations, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Center for American Progress. Though they often toil in obscurity, the think-tank officials form a necessary echo chamber for the political class, appearing on television and writing issue briefs while providing, through their organizations, a platform on which candidates can appear "robust" in the national security realm. As one example, Stephen Walt, a leading foreign policy expert and academic dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, says that "Brookings was basically supportive of the war in Iraq. If Brookings is signing on to a major foreign policy initiative of a Republican Administration, that doesn't give the Democratic mainstream much room to mount a really forceful critique of the incumbent foreign policy." Much of Kerry's campaign platform--with its calls to add 40,000 troops to the military, preserve the doctrine of pre-emptive war and stay the course in Iraq--read as if it had been lifted verbatim from a Brookings strategy memo.
At the bottom of the pyramid are the liberal hawks in the punditocracy, figures like New Republic editor Peter Beinart, Time writer Joe Klein and New York Times columnist Tom Friedman. These pundits, along with purely partisan outfits like the Democratic Leadership Council's Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), help to both set the agenda and frame the debate. The journalistic hawks churn out the agitprop that the more respectable think tanks turn into "serious" scholarship, some of which eventually becomes policy, or at least talking points, when adopted by the politicians.
Central to the liberal hawks' mission is a challenge to other Democrats that they too must become "national security Democrats," to borrow a phrase coined by Holbrooke. To talk about national security a Democrat must be a national security Democrat, and to be a national security Democrat, a Democrat must enthusiastically support a militarized "war on terror," protracted occupation in Iraq, "muscular" democratization and ever-larger defense budgets. The liberal hawks caricature other Democrats just as Republicans long stereotyped them. The pundits magnify the perception that Democrats are soft on national security, and they influence how consultants view public opinion and develop the message for candidates. In that sense, the bottom of the pyramid is always interacting with the top. It matters little that people like Beinart have no national security experience--as long as the hawks identify themselves as national security Democrats, they're free to play the game.
Today, despite the growing evidence that the Bush Administration's actions in Iraq have been a colossal--some would say criminal--failure, what's striking is how much of the pyramid remains essentially in place. As the Iraqi insurgency turned increasingly violent, and the much-hyped WMDs never turned up, the hawks attempted a bit of self-evaluation. Slate and The New Republic both hosted windy pseudo-mea culpa forums. Of the eight liberal hawks invited by Slate, journalist Fred Kaplan remarked, "I seem to be the only one in the club who's changed his mind." TNR's confession was even more limited, with Beinart admitting that he overcame his distrust of Bush so that he could "feel superior to the Democrats." Pollack took part in both forums, and then earned five figures for an Atlantic Monthly essay on "what went wrong." Even at their darkest hour, the strategic class found a way to profit from its errors, coalescing around a view that its members had been misled by the Bush Administration and that too little planning, too few troops and too much ideology were largely to blame for the chaos in Iraq. The hawks decided it was acceptable to criticize the execution of the war, but not the war itself--a view Kerry found particularly attractive. A "yes, but" or "no, but" mentality defined this thinking. Having subsequently pinned the blame for Kerry's defeat largely on the political consultants or the candidate himself, the strategic class has moved forward largely unscarred.
Biden and Clinton still have more influence than antiwar politicians like Ted Kennedy or Russ Feingold. No one has replaced Holbrooke or Albright. Pollack continues to thrive at Brookings and, despite never visiting the country, has a new book out about Iran. Shortly after the election, Beinart penned a 5,683-word essay calling on hawkish Democrats to repudiate "softs" like MoveOn.org and Michael Moore; the essay won Beinart--already a fellow at Brookings--a $650,000 book deal and high-profile visibility on the Washington ideas circuit. Subsequently a statement of leading policy apparatchiks on the PPI publication Blueprint challenged fellow Democrats to make fighting Islamic totalitarianism the central organizing principle of the party. Replace the words "Al Qaeda" with "Soviet Union" and the essay seemed straight out of 1947-48; the militarized post-9/11 climate of fear had reincarnated the cold war Democrat. A number of leading specialists signed a letter by the neoconservative Project for the New American Century asking Congress to boost the defense budget and increase the size of the military by 25,000 troops each year over the next several years. The "Third Way" group of conservative Senate Democrats recently introduced a similar proposal.
"There's an approach which says, 'Let's raise the stakes and call,'" says former Senator Gary Hart, a rare voice of principled opposition in the party today. "That if Republicans want a ten-division Army, let's be for a twelve-division Army. I think that's just nonsense, frankly. It's stupid policy. Trying to get on the other side of the Republicans is folly, both politically and substantively."
If Hart is correct, then why does so much of the Democratic strategic class march in lockstep? There's no simple answer. The insularity of Washington, pressures of careerism, fear of appearing soft and the absence of institutional alternatives all contribute to a limiting of the debate. Bill Clinton's misguided political dictum that the public "would rather have somebody who's strong and wrong than somebody who's weak and right" applies equally to the strategic class.
"Everybody's on the make," says Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation, who led the fight against John Bolton from his blog, The Washington Note. "They're all worried about their next government job. People pull their punches or try to craft years in advance what sort of positions they're gonna be up for. The culture of Washington is very risk-averse." Adds Walt, "It's pretty hard to go wrong right now taking a hard-line position. There's enough places or institutions that will take care of you. Outside of academia, if you take positions on the other side, there's just nowhere near the level of institutional support."
Those insiders who doubt the wisdom of a hawkish course often get the cold shoulder if they stray too far from the strategic line. After criticizing the rush to war, Ivo Daalder of Brookings became the foreign policy point man for Howard Dean's insurgent campaign. Many of Daalder's colleagues at Brookings and elsewhere sharply criticized Dean, and afterward unnamed Democratic insiders bragged to The New Republic that Dean's advisers would never work again. That, of course, didn't happen, but Daalder and others have since tempered their opposition rhetoric. Today Daalder blames the antiwar movement for Dean's defeat and calls for more troops in Iraq.
For daring to tackle the liberal hawk consensus in his recent book America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism, Anatol Lieven, who is British and until recently a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, got lumped into the "anti-American" category by Jonathan Tepperman of the Council on Foreign Relations in the New York Times Book Review. "It is hardly an anti-American position to suggest that Americans today can learn much from the work of great Americans of the past like Reinhold Niebuhr and J.W. Fulbright," Lieven wrote in reply. He has since left Carnegie and joined Clemons at the New America Foundation, a centrist think tank that has acquired a maverick reputation. New America, along with places like the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy--an anti-imperial umbrella of thinkers on the left, right and center--now form a sort of dissident establishment.
Owing to their distinction, the Democratic strategic class, consisting of the party's leading foreign policy thinkers, could have provided a powerful check on a reckless Administration intent on rushing to war. Instead, it bears partial responsibility for the war's costs: more than 1,800 American fatalities, thousands of maimed and wounded US soldiers, many more dead Iraqi civilians, spiraling worldwide anti-Americanism, surging world oil prices, a new breeding ground for Al Qaeda, multiplying terror attacks abroad and mounting economic insecurity at home.
At the same time, talking tough on Iraq has been a disastrous moral, tactical and political miscalculation for Democrats. A recent Democracy Corps poll found that Iraq tops the list of factors motivating voter discontent toward President Bush. "This is a country almost settled on the need for change," political consultants Stan Greenberg and James Carville write. Yet Democrats will only prosper if they pose "sharp choices," something the strategic class has been unwilling or unable to do. A few small progressive think tanks, helped by the dissident establishment, have tried to pry open badly needed institutional space for a bolder national security policy. A few courageous elected officials are attempting to drum up Congressional support for withdrawal. Thus far, the hawks have drowned them out. Unless and until the strategic class transforms or declines in stature, the Democrats beholden to them will be doomed to repeat their Iraq mistakes.
Ari Berman, based in Washington, DC, is a contributing writer for The Nation, a contributor to The Notion and a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute.
Ari Berman | Elections are decided by message, money and mobilization. The Democrats' choice of tactics for the latter may determine not only the outcome of the '06 elections but the party's future.
Ari Berman | After years of vacillation, John Kerry has gone bold, finding his voice on Iraq and national security and thinking hard about running for President. But his future cannot be separated from his past.
Dave Zirin | War hero and former NFL star Pat Tillman was not the GI Joe icon created by Pentagon spinmeisters. He was a fiercely independent thinker convinced that the war in Iraq was illegal. Bereaved military families, also angered at Pentagon exploitation of their loved ones, are joining the critical chorus.
Tom Hayden | Peace sentiments are rising among the American public and even in the much-divided Democrats. What does this mean for electoral politics and for the course of a war that seems to have no end in sight?
The Editors | Americans know it's time to end the US presence in Iraq. They will reward the party that offers a plan for leaving before more American soldiers--and countless Iraqis--are killed.
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Republicanism was the ideology of the leaders of the American Revolution, and it still determines much of what Americans believe. In the monarchy-dominated world of the eighteenth century, republicanism was not simply a form of government; it was a form of life, a way by which dissatisfied people could criticize the patriarchy, luxury, and corruption of eighteenth-century monarchy.
Its deepest origins lay in the great era of the Roman republic. The world of the eighteenth century learned most of what it wanted to know about the Roman republic from the writings of the celebrated Latin writers flourishing from the middle of the first century b.c. to the establishment of the empire in the middle of the second century a.d.--Cicero, Sallust, Tacitus, and Plutarch among others. These men lived after the greatest days of the republic had passed, and they contrasted the 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, and torn by struggles between rich and poor; they had lost their capacity to serve the public good. In their pessimistic explanations of the republic's decline, these writers left a legacy of beliefs and values--about the good life, about citizenship, about political health, about social morality--that have had an enduring effect on Western culture.
This body of classical literature was revived and updated by Renaissance writers, especially the Italian philosopher Machiavelli. It was blended into a tradition of "civic humanism"--a tradition that stressed the moral character of the independent citizen as the prerequisite to good politics and disinterested service to the country. To be good citizens people had to be free of control by others and free of the influence of selfish interests.
This 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 was carried into the eighteenth century by scores of popularizers and translators. This republican tradition had a decisive effect on the thinking of the American revolutionary leaders.
Republicanism in 1776 meant more than eliminating a king and instituting an elective system of government; it set forth moral and social goals as well. Republics required a particular sort of egalitarian and virtuous people: independent, property-holding citizens who were willing to sacrifice many of their private, selfish interests for the res publica, the good of the whole community. Equality lay at the heart of republicanism; it 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 parents were.
Such dependence on a relatively equal and virtuous populace, it was thought, 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 religious establishments. But republics, such as the American states were, had to be held together from below, from virtue, from the consent and sacrifice of the people themselves. The only republics left in the eighteenth century--the Netherlands and the city-states of Italy and Switzerland--were small and compact. Larger heterogeneous states that tried to establish republics--as England had in the eighteenth century--were bound to end up in chaos resulting in some sort of military dictatorship, like that of Oliver Cromwell. If it were too large and embraced too many diverse interests, a republic would fly apart.
The Americans' new extended republic in 1787 flew in the face of these traditional assumptions and made their experiment in republicanism a highly risky venture indeed. A national republic that encompassed a huge society of diverse interests and sprawled over half a continent demanded new explanations. Much of the originality and creativity of the Framers' political thought accompanying the creation of the Constitution in 1787-1788, including The Federalist, came from their need to justify the republicanism of the new federal government in opposition to the conventional wisdom of the day. The Founding Fathers ultimately recognized the reality of an American society composed of many conflicting private interests, but they hoped that these would neutralize themselves and allow enlightened leaders who were free of selfish marketplace concerns and local partisan interests to promote the general good. To that extent they clung to classical republicanism.
The democratic revolution of the subsequent decades, at least in the North, virtually destroyed this classical dream of republican leaders acting as disinterested umpires over the economic and political struggles of the society. Political parties emerged to reestablish patronage and to promote partisan interests, and countless individuals took off in pursuit of their private happiness. By the middle of the nineteenth century America gave as much free rein to commercial activity and the self-interestedness of the 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' ideas 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, expressed, for example, in the election of military heroes and in the mugwump and progressive movements, that some political leaders might rise above parties and become truly disinterested umpires; for their long-held conviction that farming is morally healthier and freer of selfish marketplace concerns than other occupations; for their preoccupation with the fragility of the Republic and its vulnerability to corruption; and, finally, for their remarkable obsession with their own national virtue--an obsession that still bewilders the rest of the world.
Bibliography:
J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (1975); Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (1969).
The Republican form of government is the highest form of government: but because of this it requires the highest type of human nature, a type nowhere at present existing. — Herbert Spencer (1820-1903)
Note: click on a word meaning below to see its connections and related words.
The nounrepublican has one meaning:
Meaning #1: an advocate of a republic (usually in opposition to a monarchy)
The adjectiverepublican has 2 meanings:
Meaning #1: relating to or belonging to the Republican Party
Pertains to noun: Republican Party (meaning #1)
Meaning #2: having the supreme power lying in the body of citizens entitled to vote for officers and representatives responsible to them or characteristic of such government
Republicanism is the idea of a nation being governed as a republic. A republic is a state in which sovereignty is invested in the people, rather than in a hereditary elite. A republic is the opposite of a monarchy, or of a dictatorship, or of rule imposed by an outside group. Thus the term republicanism is most used to describe any movement that is opposed to monarchies and aristocracies.
More broadly "republic" means any state that follows the principles of republicanism -- that is has a system of law (as in a constitution or bill of rights) that protects individual liberty from the forces of tyranny with elected representatives governing according to such law. Republicanism emphasizes civic duty and strongly opposes corruption (the use of public office for private profit). Republicanism refers to both the advocacy for this form of government and the ideology of this movement. This is specifically known as a constitutional republic.
Republicanism can also refer to the ideologies of any of the many political parties that are named the Republican Party. Some of these are, or have their roots in, anti-monarchism. For most parties, republican is just a name, and these parties and their corresponding platforms have little besides their names in common.
Anti-monarchial republicanism
One meaning of republicanism is the opposition to monarchies. Republic comes from the Latin phrase res publica and one meaning of this term is the form of government that began with the expulsion of the last King (Rex) of Rome. Creating the Roman Republic. While this government was much lauded by its contemporaries, once it was replaced with the empire, republicanism became all but nonexistent throughout Europe for several centuries. Outside of Europe, opposition to monarchy before the modern period is not generally termed republicanism. Islam, for instance, is opposed to monarchies seeing the ideal state as one where the ummah, caliph, and sharia all play a role in governance. This concept shares some of the same classical roots as European republicanism and in modern times this form of government is called "republican" in English, but in pre-modern times it is not generally called republicanism.
Early history
In Europe republicanism was revived in the late Middle Ages when a number of small states embraced republican system of government. These were generally small, but wealthy, trading states in which the merchant class had risen to prominence. Haakonssen notes that by the Renaissance Europe was divided with those states controlled by a landed elite being monarchies and those controlled by a commercial elite being republics. These included Italian city states like Florence and Venice and the members of the Hanseatic League.
Classical Republicanism
At this period the school of thought known as classical republicanism or civic humanism came into being outlining how best to run a republic. These authors, most prominent among them being Niccolò Machiavelli, based republicanism on the states of the classical world, such as Athens, Sparta, and the Roman Republic as well as the ancient works of political philosophy such as Aristotle, Polybius and especially Cicero. In the Renaissance the classical states were dubbed republics, and are today still sometimes referred to as classical republics.
While many Renaissance authors spoke highly of republics they were rarely critical of monarchies. While Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy is the period's key work on republics he also wrote The Prince on how to best run a monarchy. One cause of this was that the early modern writers did not see the republican model as one that could be applied universally, most felt that it could only be successful in very small and highly urbanized city-states.
Dutch Republic
Anti-monarchism became far more strident in the Dutch Republic during and after the Eighty Years' War. This anti-monarchism was less political philosophy and more propagandizing with most of the anti-monarchist works appearing in the form of widely distributed pamphlets. Over time this evolved into a systematic critique of monarchies written by men such as Johan Uytenhage de Mist, Radboud Herman Scheel, Lieven de Beaufort and the brothers Johan and Peter de la Court. These writers saw all monarchies as illegitimate tyrannies that were inherently corrupt. Less an attack on their former overlords these works were more concerned with preventing the position of Stadholder from evolving into a monarchy. This Dutch republicanism also had an important influence on French Huguenots during the Wars of Religion.
England
In the other states of early modern Europe republicanism was more moderate. In England a republicanism evolved that was not wholly opposed to monarchy, but rather thinkers such as Thomas More and John Milton saw a monarchy firmly constrained by law as compatible with republicanism. The small minority that was actively opposed to all monarchy was largely discredited by the regicide of Charles I and later republicans strove to distance themselves from that act. The "country" party of the early 18th century denounced the corruption of the "court" party, producing a political theory that heavily influenced the American colonists.
Republican ideology in America
The Americans in the late 18th century were heavily influenced by the "country" party in English politics, which roundly denounced the corruption surrounding the "court" party in London. This approach produced a political ideology called "republicanism" that was widespread in America by 1775--and was even held by most Loyalists. Benjamin Franklin exemplified the idea of republican simplicity as American minister to France in the late 1770s. The emphasis was on the duty of the citizen to be virtuous, and to fight for his country as needed. Corruption was associated with aristocracy, which Americans increasingly condemned. For women, "Republican Motherhood" became an ideal, as exemplified by Abigail Adams; the first duty of the republican woman was to instill republican values in the children, and to avoid luxury and ostentation. All the "Founding Fathers" were strong advocates of republicanism, especially Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, George Washington, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Another stream of thought, distinct from republicanism, was the liberalism of John Locke. It also had a major impact, emphasizing the rights of citizens. Much of the rhetoric was an insistence on Lockean rights to life, liberty and property (or in Jefferson's version, "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.) Historians have determined that Jean-Jacques Rousseau's ideas played little or no role in America. First and last it was a republican revolution, as historians such as Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, Lance Banning and many others have demonstrated. Republicanism (along with liberalism) became the defining ideology of the United States, and continues so into the 21st century. Major developments include the Constitution of 1787, and its interpretations by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Marshall. In the 19th century John C. Calhoun developed a theory of minority rights that became integrated into the ideology. Abraham Lincoln gave a visionary interpretation of republicanism in the Gettysburg Address, while Woodrow Wilson redefined it in international terms. In the 20th century, pluralism became incorporated into the republican world view, especially regarding the integration of ethnic and racial groups as stimulated by the Civil Rights Movement.
Poland
In Poland moderate republicanism was also an important ideology. In Poland republicans were those who supported the status quo of having a very weak monarch and opposed those who felt a stronger monarchy was needed. These Polish republicans such as Lukasz Gornicki, Andrzej Wolan, and Stanislaw Konarski were well read in classical and Renaissance texts and firmly believed that their state was a Republic on the Roman model and called their state the Rzeczpospolita. Unlike in the other areas Polish republicanism was not the ideology of the commercial, but rather of the landed aristocracy who would be the ones to lose power if the monarchy was expanded.
In the Enlightenment anti-monarchism stopped being coextensive with the civic humanism of the Renaissance. Classical republicanism, still supported by philosophers such as Rousseau and Montesquieu, became just one of a number of ideologies opposed to monarchy. The newer forms of anti-monarchism such as liberalism and later socialism quickly overtook classical republicanism as the leading republican ideologies. Republicanism also became far more widespread and monarchies began to be challenged throughout Europe.
Modern history
Anti-monarchial republicanism remains an important political force in many states especially in the Commonwealth nations such as Scotland, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Jamaica and Barbados. In these countries, republicanism is largely about the post-colonial evolution of their relationships with the United Kingdom.
In the surviving European monarchies, such as the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Sweden there has not been much contemporary popular support for republicanism, though in most cases it nonetheless commands a significant minority position. In such states republicanism is usually motivated by decreasing popularity of the Royal Family, who may be increasingly embroiled in scandal or conflict. However the classical argument against monarchy versus the egalitarian aspects of republicanism will often remain prominent as well.
A different interpretation of republicanism is used among political scientists. To them a republic is the rule by many and by laws while a princedom is the arbitrary rule by one. By this definition despotic states are not republics while, according to some such as Kant, constitutional monarchies can be. Kant also argues that a pure democracy is not a republic as the unrestricted rule of the majority is also a form of despotism.
Classical antecedents
Ancient India
Vaishali in what is now Bihar, India was the first republic in the world, similar to and preceding those later found in ancient Greece. It continues to be inhabited today and is a major pilgrimage center for the Jains and the Buddhists.
Ancient Greece
In Ancient Greece several philosophers and historians set themselves to analysing and describing forms of government. There is no single expression or definition from this era, written down in Greek, that exactly corresponds with a modern understanding of the term "republic". However, most of the essential features of the modern definition are present in the works of Plato, Aristotle, Polybius, and other ancient Greeks. These elements include the idea of mixed government and of civic virtue. It should be noted that the modern title of Plato's dialogue on the ideal state (The Republic) is a misnomer when seen through the eyes of modern political science (see Republic (Plato)). Some scholars have translated the Greek concept of "politeia" as "republic", but most modern scholars reject this idea.
A number of Ancient Greek states such as Athens and Sparta have been classified as classical republics, though this uses a definition of republic that was developed much later.
Ancient Rome
Both Livy (in Latin, living in Augustus' time) and Plutarch (in Greek, a century later) described how Rome had developed its legislation, notably the transition from kingdom to republic, based on Greek examples. Probably some of this history, composed more than half a millennium after the events, with scant written sources to rely on, is fictitious reconstruction - nonetheless the influence of the Greek way of dealing with government is clear in the state organisation of the Roman Republic.
The Greek historian Polybius, writing more than a century before Livy, was one of the first historians describing the emergence of the Roman Empire, and he had a great influence on Cicero, when this orator was writing his politico-philosophical works in the 1st century BC. One of these works was De re publica, where Cicero links the Latin res publica concept to the Greek politeia concept. As explained in the res publica article, also this concept only exceptionally links to the modern term "republic", although the word "republic" is derived from res publica.
Among these many meanings of the expression res publica, it is only most often translated to "republic" in the case where the Latin expression refers to the Roman state with the form of government it had between the era of the Kings and the era of the Emperors, which was the Roman Republic. This Roman Republic would in a modern understanding of the word still be qualified as a true republic, even if not excelling in all the features Enlightenment philosophers saw for an ideal government system, for example there was no systematic separation of powers in the Roman Republic.
Occasionally Romans could still refer to their state as "res publica" in the era of the early emperors. The reason for this is that on the surface the state organisation of the Roman Republic had been preserved without the slightest alteration by the first emperors. They only had several offices, that in the era of the Republic were reserved to separate persons, accumulated in a single person, and had been successful in making some of these offices permanent, and thus had gradually built sovereignty in their person. Traditionally such references to the early empire as "res publica" are not translated as "republic".
As for Cicero, his description of the ideal state in De re publica is more difficult to qualify as a "republic" in modern terminology, it is rather something like enlightened absolutism - not to say benevolent dictatorship - and indeed Cicero's philosophical works, as far as available at that time, were very influential when Enlightenment philosophers like Voltaire developed these concepts. Cicero related however with some ambiguity towards the republican form of government: in his theoretical works he defended monarchy (or a monarchy/oligarchy mixed government at best); in his political life he generally opposed to those trying to realise such ideals, like Julius Caesar, Mark Antony and Octavian. Eventually, that opposition led to his death. So, depending on how one reads history, Cicero could be seen as a victim of his own deep-rooted republican ideals too.
Tacitus, a contemporary of Plutarch, was not concerned with whether on an abstract level a form of government could be analysed as a "republic" or a "monarchy" (see for example Ann. IV, 32-33). He analyses how the powers accumulated by the early Julio-Claudian dynasty were all given to the representants of this dynasty by a State that was and remained in an ever more "abstract" way a republic; nor was the Roman Republic "forced" to give away these powers to single persons in a consecutive dynasty: it did so out of free will, and reasonably in Augustus' case, because of his many merits towards the state, freeing it of civil wars and the like.
But at least Tacitus is one of the first to follow this line of thought: analysing in which measure such powers were given to the head of state because the citizens wanted to give them, and in which measure they were given because of other principles (for example, because one had a deified ancestor) — such other principles leading more easily to abuse by the one in power. In this sense, that is in Tacitus' analysis, the impossibility to return to the Republic is only irreversible when Tiberius establishes power shortly after Augustus' death (AD 14, much later than most historians place the start of the Imperial form of government in Rome): by this time too many "untouchable" principles had been mingled in to keep Tiberius away from power, and the age of "sockpuppetry in the external form of a republic", as Tacitus more or less describes this Emperor's reign, began (Ann. I-VI).
The idea of the Republic is drawn from Ancient Greece, Ancient India, and Rome but it was truly created during the Renaissance when scholars built upon their conception of the ancient world to advance their view of the ideal government. The usage of the term res publica in classical texts should not be confused with current notions of republicanism. Despite its name Plato's The Republic also has little connection. The republicanism developed in the Renaissance is known as classical republicanism because of its reliance on classical models. This terminology was developed by Zera Fink in the 1960s but some modern scholars such as Brugger consider the term confusing as it might lead some to believe that "classical republic" refers to the system of government used in the ancient world. "Early modern republicanism" has been advanced as an alternative term.
Also sometimes called civic humanism, this ideology grew out of the Renaissance writers who developed the idea of the republic. More than being simply a non-monarchy the early modern thinkers developed a vision of the ideal republic. It is these notions that form the basis of the ideology of republicanism. One important notion was that of a mixed government. Both Plato and Aristotle saw three basic types of government, democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy. First Aristotle, and especially Polybius and Cicero developed the notion that the ideal republic is a mixture of these three forms of government and the writers of the Renaissance embraced this notion. Also central the notion of virtue and the pursuit of the common good being central to good government. Republicanism also developed its own distinct view of liberty, though what exactly that view is much disputed.
Enlightenment republicanism
From the Enlightenment on it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between the descriptions and definitions of the "republic" concept on the one side, and the ideologies based on such descriptions on the other.
Up till then the situation had been different: even those Renaissance authors that spoke highly of republics were rarely critical of monarchies. While Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy is the period's key work on republics he also wrote The Prince on how to best run a monarchy. One cause of this was that the early modern writers did not see the republican model as one that could be applied universally, most felt that it could only be successful in very small and highly urbanized city-states.
In antiquity writers like Tacitus, and in the renaissance writers like Machiavelli tried to avoid to formulate an outspoken preference for one government system or another. Enlightenment philosophers, on the other hand, always had an outspoken opinion.
However, Thomas More, still before the Age of Enlightenment, must have been a bit too outspoken to the reigning king's taste, even when coding his political preferences in a Utopian tale.
French Enlightenment thinkers such as Rousseau and Montesquieu expanded upon and altered the ideas of what an ideal republic would be: some of their new ideas were scarcely retraceable to antiquity or the Renaissance thinkers. Among other things they contributed and/or heavily elaborated notions like social contract and separation of powers. They also borrowed from and distinguished it from the ideas of liberalism that were developing at the same time. Since both liberalism and republicanism were united in their opposition to the absolute monarchies they were frequently conflated during this period. Modern scholars see them as two distinct streams that both contributed to the democratic ideals of the modern world. An important distinction is that while republicanism continued to stress the importance of civic virtue and the common good, liberalism was based on economics and individualism. While liberalism developed a view of liberty as pre-social and sees all institutions as limiting liberty, republicanism sees some institutions as necessary to create liberty.
It has long been agreed that republicanism, especially that of Rousseau played a central role in the French Revolution. In recent years a debate has developed over its role in the American Revolution and in the British radicalism of the eighteenth century. For many decades the consensus was that liberalism, especially that of John Locke, was paramount and that republicanism had a distinctly secondary role. A revisionist school was pioneered by J.G.A. Pocock who argued in The Machiavellian Moment that at least in the early eighteenth century republican ideas were just as important as liberal ones. Pocock's view is now widely accepted, but there is still fierce debate over the ideas of those who have tried to extend his thesis. Bernard Bailyn, for instance, pioneered the argument that the American founding father's were more influenced by republicanism than they were by liberalism. This thesis has been fiercely attacked. Kramnick, for instance, argues that it is a baseless right wing plot to undermine the importance of liberalism in American history.
Eventually, the French Revolution, which was to throw over the French monarchy at the end of the 18th century, installed, at first, a republic. Only a few decades later also kingdoms, like the Belgian state emerging in 1830, would start to adopt some of the innovations of the progressive political philosophers of the Enlightenment too.
This new school of historical revisionism has accompanied a general revival of republican thinking. In recent years a great number of thinkers have argued that republican ideas should be adopted. This new thinking is sometimes referred to as neo-republicanism. Engeman referred to republicanism as "an intellectual buzzword" that has been applied to a wide range of theories and postulates that have little in common in order to give them a certain cachet.
The most important theorists in this movement are Philip Pettit and Cass Sunstein who have each written a number of works defining republicanism and how it differs from liberalism. While a late convert to republicanism from communitarianism, Michael Sandel is perhaps the most prominent advocate in the United States for replacing or supplementing liberalism with republicanism as outlined in his Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy. As of yet these theorists have had little impact on government. John W. Maynor, argues that Bill Clinton was interested in these notions and that he integrated some of them into his 1995 "new social compact" State of the Union Address.
This revival also has its critics. David Wootton, for instance, argues that throughout history the meanings of the term republicanism have been so diverse, and at times contradictory, that the term is all but meaningless and any attempt to build a cogent ideology based around it will fail.
Joyce Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (1992)
Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Harvard University Press, 1967.
Lance Banning. The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology (1980)
Brugger, Bill. Republican Theory in Political Thought: Virtuous or Virtual? Basingstoke: St. Martin's Press, 1999.
Fink, Zera. The Classical Republicans: An Essay in the Recovery of a Pattern of Thought in Seventeenth-Century England. Evanston: Northwestern university Press, 1962.
Martin van Gelderen & Quentin Skinner, eds., Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, v1, Republicanism and Constitutionalism in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2002
Martin van Gelderen & Quentin Skinner, eds., Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, v2, The Values of Republicanism in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2002
Haakonssen, Knud. "Republicanism." A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy. Robert E. Goodin and Philip Pettit. eds. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995.
Kramnick, Isaac. Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth-Century England and America. Cornell University Press, 1990.
Maynor, John W. Republicanism in the Modern World. Cambridge: Polity, 2003.
Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government Oxford U.P., 1997, ISBN 0198290837
Pocock, J.G.A. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975.
Gelderen, Martin van, and Quentin Skinner, eds. Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage (2002)
Wood, Gordon S. The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1993)
American History information about republican The Reader's Companion to American History, Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, Editors, published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. More from American History
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Republic (government) (Latin res publica, literally “the public thing”), form of state based on the concept that sovereignty resides in the people, who delegate the power to rule in their behalf to elected representatives and officials. In practice, however, this concept has been variously stretched, distorted, and corrupted, making any precise definition of the term republic difficult. It is important, to begin with, to distinguish between a republic and a democracy. In the theoretical republican state, where the government expresses the will of the people who have chosen it, republic and democracy may be identical (there are also democratic monarchies). Historical republics, however, have never conformed to a theoretical model, and in the 20th century the term republic is freely used by dictatorships, one-party states, and democracies alike. Republic has, in fact, come to signify any form of state headed by a president or some similarly titled figure, and not a monarch.
Much of the confusion surrounding the concept of republicanism may be traced to the writings of Plato and Aristotle. Plato's Republic presents an ideal state or, more accurately, an ideal Greek polis (“city-state”). Plato constructed his republic on what he considered the basic elements or characteristics of the human soul: the appetitive, the spirited, and the philosophical. Accordingly, his ideal republic consisted of three distinct groups: a commercial class formed by those dominated by their appetites; a spirited class, administrators and soldiers, responsible for the execution of the laws; and the guardians or philosopher-kings, who would be the lawmakers. Because Plato entrusted the guardians, a carefully selected few, with the responsibility for maintaining a harmonious polis, republicanism is frequently associated with ends or goals established by a small segment of the community presumed to have a special insight into what constitutes the common good.
Aristotle's Politics provides another republican concept, one that prevails in most of the Western world. Aristotle categorized governments on the basis of who rules: the one, the few, or the many. Within these categories he distinguished between good and perverted forms of government—monarchy (good) versus tyranny, aristocracy (good) versus oligarchy—the main difference being whether the rulers governed for the good of the state or for their own interests.
Most relevant to republicanism in the Western world, however, is Aristotle's distinction between democracy, the perverted form of rule by the many, and its opposite polity, the good form. He believed that democracies were bound to experience turbulence and instability because the poor, who he assumed would be the majority in democracies, would seek an economic and social equality that would stifle individual initiative and enterprise. In contrast, polity, with a middle class capable of justly adjudicating conflicts between the rich and poor, would allow for rule by the many without the problems and chaos associated with democratic regimes.
James Madison, often called the father of the U.S. Constitution, defined a republic in terms similar to those of Aristotle's polity. In his view, republics were systems of government that permitted direct or indirect control by the people over those who govern. He did, however, warn against the effects of “majority factions” and emphasized the rights of minorities.
The Madisonian concept of republicanism parallels Aristotle's vision of polity in many important dimensions, and both are essentially different from Plato's. Madison and Aristotle were concerned with the means by which just and stable rule by the many could be secured. To this end Aristotle relied on a predominant middle class, Madison on an “extended” republic, in which varied interests would check and control one another. Madison also emphasized election of representatives by the people. These representatives, he believed, would be less likely to sacrifice the “public good” than the majority of the people. “Pure democracies,” in which the people ruled directly, Madison wrote, “have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention.”
Some scholars regard the ancient confederation of Hebrew tribes that endured in Palestine from the 15th century bc until a monarchy was established about 1020 bc as an embryonic republic. That would make the ancient Israelite commonwealth the earliest republic in history and one of the oldest democracies; except for slaves and women, all members of the community had a voice in the selection of their administrators and were eligible for political office. For several hundred years after the early 8th century bc many of the city-states of Greece were republican in form. Carthage was likewise a republic for more than 300 years until its destruction by the Romans in 146 bc. For nearly 500 years Rome itself was a republic in which virtually all free males were eventually franchised.
The oldest extant republic is the state of San Marino on the Italian Peninsula, about 225 km (about 140 mi) north of Rome. According to tradition, it was established as a republic in the second part of the 4th century ad.
In medieval times the Icelanders established (930) a republic with a more or less democratic form of government that lasted for more than 300 years. The powerful and independent commercial city-states of northern Italy, ruled by the rising bourgeoisie, also found the republican form a more suitable political instrument than the monarchic state controlled by the feudal nobility and the Roman Catholic church. These Italian republics were for centuries disturbed by power struggles between the aristocracy and the commercial bourgeoisie, in which the latter represented the cause of democratic government and the former that of feudal conservatism. A parallel process took place in the commercial and handicraft communes of the Low Countries. The Hanseatic League was nominally a form of international republican government and a limited democracy. Republican elements were also characteristic of the league of Swiss cantons that eventually formed the Swiss state; the founding of the Swiss republic may be dated in 1291.
Republican sentiments were cherished by many leaders of the Reformation. Geneva, under the rule (1541-64) of John Calvin, was republican in form, although virtually a theocratic state. Reformist religious and antimonarchic doctrines were also contributory factors in the establishment of the Dutch Republic of the United Provinces (1648-1747) and the short-lived Commonwealth (1649-60) of England, Scotland, and Ireland under Oliver Cromwell.
The era of modern republicanism began with the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789. Elements of republican government were present in the administrative institutions of the English New World colonies, but republicanism did not become dominant in American political thinking until the colonists declared their independence. The establishment of the United States as a federal republic with a government made up of three coordinate branches, each independent of the others, created a precedent that was subsequently widely emulated in the western hemisphere and elsewhere.
The French Revolution also created a republic based on suffrage—the first national republican state among the powers of Europe—and like its American predecessor it enunciated fundamental principles of liberty. Although this first French republic was short-lived, its impact on French and European society was virtually continuous. In the view of many historians the Napoleonic Wars that followed were essentially a military extension of the political assault on the remnants of the Continent's feudal structure and eventually resulted in a new era of republicanism.
During the 19th century republics were established in most instances where revolutionary struggles were waged outside Europe. Thus, all the Latin American republics were products of revolutionary struggles for national independence; many of these governments, however, became military dictatorships. Two African republics, the South African Republic (1852) and the Orange Free State (1854), were finally annexed by Britain after the Boer War (1899-1902). Both in the United States and other republics, however, the passage of the century was generally marked by democratization of the electoral process through the enlargement of the electorate.
Two waves of new-state formations occurred in the 20th century—the first one after World War I, the second after World War II. Most of the newly independent states established themselves as republics, although some of those created in the first wave began as monarchies.
A new chapter in the history of republicanism began with the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent transformation of the Russian Empire into the USSR. The development of the Soviet Union into a one-party totalitarian state demonstrated once more that republic and democracy are not synonymous, a fact that became even more obvious after World War II, when all the republics of Eastern Europe were fashioned in a similar mold as one-party “people's republics” under the tutelage of the Soviet Union.
Of the dozens of new republics that have come into being since World War II, most have, in fact, displayed a definite trend away from democratic ideals and instead assumed the nature of oligarchies, single-party states, or military dictatorships. The many economically and politically developing nations that emerged from the liquidation of European colonial empires posed profound problems for democratic republicans. One was whether truly representative governments could be elected by nonliterate, ill-informed voters. Another was how to establish majority rule in a fundamentally tribal society. The hold of ingrained traditions on the one hand and the introduction of new doctrinaire ideologies on the other added a further element of chaos. The result, most often, was an authoritarian one-person, one-party, or military rule. Thus, in the last quarter of the 20th century, although some three-fourths of the nations in the world styled themselves republics, only a very few could be described as democracies.
