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Divided by a common language?
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Divided by a common language?$ D.J. Kelly University of Sheffield, Department of Politics, Northumberland Road, Sheffield 10 2TN, UK
Scholarly interest in the delineation of the history of republican political thought has surely never been more prevalent than it is today. The contemporary utility as well as the validity of attempts to resuscitate these discourses, however, is consistently challenged. Indeed, in two other assessments of the volumes under review here, both Perez Zagorin and Biancamaria Fontana have separately and quizzically wondered what the fruits of historical research into republicanism as a shared European heritage tell us. Fontana offers some wry reflections on the ways in which the predominant methodological impulses of the volume towards linguistic and discursive zones of engagement and counter-engagement are quite often mechanically implemented. There is a clear hint of broader dissatisfaction with the way in which the revolutionary methodological advances of intellectual history announced over the course of the past 30 years have become routinised almost to the point of blandness, a point also recently made more subtly by David Wootton.1 The revolutionary conflicts of European history appear in these books, Fontana argues, as a ‘surreal battlefield, where languages and vocabularies, jargons and paradigms joust strenuously against each other’. Indeed, with the ‘politics’ and contemporary import of republicanism dealt with elsewhere outside of these volumes, the editors announce that what they and the particular contributors are offering is a ‘purely scholarly’ investigation and illumination of the history of republicanism itself. Such a stance should perhaps have mollified somewhat Fontana’s bemusement as to what these contributions can possibly tell us about the possible future of Europe itself. But nevertheless these are a disconcertingly varied set of essays to try and review, with a $ A review of Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, Vol. I, Republicanism and Constitutionalism in Early-Modern Europe. Eds. Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) ISBN: 0 521 80203 2, xi+420, d45, Vol. II, The Varieties of Republicanism in EarlyModern Europe. Eds. Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) ISBN: 0 521 80756 5, xi+402, d45. E-mail address: d.j.kelly@sheffield.ac.uk (D.J. Kelly). 1 David Wootton. ‘The Hard Look Back.’ Times Literary Supplement (14 March 2003): 8–10.
0191-6599/$ - see front matter r 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.histeuroideas.2004.03.002
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bewildering variety of sources, problems and interests, but which are all located under the banner of a shared European republican heritage.2 Similarly, whilst praising the scholarly quality—praise which I wholly endorse— and geographical coverage, which extends far beyond the expertise of any single scholar, Perez Zagorin has similarly asked whether these volumes actually offer us a coherent view of republicanism.3 Surely, though, it would be incredibly surprising if they had done so. For one of the major themes here is that although there may be a broadly shared set of classical authors from which various scholars, publicists, political actors and novelists could draw upon, these were inevitably intertwined with nationally specific domestic traditions and political contexts. Put another way, anti-monarchical Dutch and Polish republicans were as divided by their contextually specific reworking of a shared European republican heritage as they were united by these common linguistic resources in the first place. Furthermore, as many recent explorations of the history of republicanism have made clear, numerous republican or republican inspired arguments in both the early-modern as well as the modern period have been compatible with some form or other of limited monarchy. Quentin Skinner’s work has done much to illustrate this particular dimension of seventeenthcentury political discourse in England. It has led him, notably, to classify those writers whom he takes to have been extending the teachings of, in particular, the great Roman moralists Sallust, Tacitus and Livy to contemporary debates between Crown and Parliament, as neo-Roman rather than republican.4 This focus on classical discussions of liberty drawn from Roman law emphasises the distinction between free men and slaves and was, he suggests, crucial to critics of both the political power over property and the ‘negative voice’ of the monarch in debates leading up to the civil war. Indeed, they remained central to the critique of Parliament after the regicide, as an institution—the Levellers argued—which was simply re-enslaving the people with its political conservatism.5 These earlier arguments and their relationship to the ‘coming of the civil war’ are the subject of a characteristically elegant essay by Skinner that opens the second volume. It restates and refines many of the arguments he has made elsewhere, but seems to focus more purposefully than previously on the importance of the notion of representation to the debates he is engaged in. This is not explicitly undertaken in terms of contrast between an ‘ancient’ republicanism and a ‘modern’ constitutional and representative republicanism. Rather, the idea of the Parliament or political rule necessitating a ‘representation’ and hence a ‘personation’ of the people as a whole, an issue prior to that of the process of electing representatives, is dissected in terms of
2
Biancamaria Fontana. ‘In the Gardens of the Republic.’ Times Literary Supplement (11 July 2003): 8. Perez Zagorin. ‘Republicanisms.’ British Journal for the History of Philosophy 11:4 (2003): 701–714, esp. pp. 713–714. 4 See Quentin Skinner. Liberty Before Liberalism. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); cf. ‘A Third Concept of Liberty.’ Proceedings of the British Academy 117 (2002): 237–268, esp. 247–255. 5 ! See also S.D. Glover. ‘The Putney Debates: Popular versus Elitist Republicanism.’ Past and Present 164 (1999): 47–80. 3
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the English debates in which neo-Roman languages were utilised for ideological polemic.6 However, Skinner’s piece appears immediately after a skilful essay from Blair Worden that ends volume one, and which subjects writing on early-modern English ‘republicanism’ that has been influenced by Skinner’s work to an important critique. Developing and modifying an earlier historiographical review, Worden suggests that in explaining the context of the English revolution, many contemporary scholars of seventeenth-century republicanism miss the point. ‘We seek in vain’, he argues, ‘evidence that imaginative literature reflected or fostered a desire for republican rule’.7 Equally, he takes issue with Markuu Peltonnen (who has a chapter in this collection on ‘Citizenship and republicanism in Elizabethan England’). In his work here, Peltonnen reassesses the urban character of public political life outlined by Elizabethan intellectuals, but notes that ‘seeing men of commerce as active citizens was not taken for granted, but demanded a public apology’.8 The problematic relationship between commerce and republicanism is shown here to have quite deep roots, which are in turn examined in a superb combative essay by Donald Winch, who illustrates the importance of writers like Smith and Hume as providing a complex bridge between early-modern and modern conceptions of republicanism. Both complicate the legacy with a lack of general concern for ‘forms’ of government and accept ‘degrees’ of freedom or liberty, whilst maintaining a central focus on relations of both dependence and also deference. And of course, their discussions are underpinned with fulsome consideration of the progress of natural liberty and the rise of a commercial ‘civilisation’.9 Peltonnen nevertheless points out the transformation from a rather general ‘active’ conception of aristocratic ‘citizenship’ (of the Commonwealth) underpinning foreign policy, and suggests that a ‘democratic republicanism’ came forward as the major way of thinking. Put crudely, this was a movement away from Sidney towards Machiavelli.10 Worden though uses the idea of republicanism here both more broadly, and more narrowly, as a constitutional principle premised on the absence of monarchy, and agrees that the resurgence of classical humanism in seventeenth6
Quentin Skinner. ‘Classical Liberty and the Coming of the English Civil War.’ Vol. II: 9–28, esp. pp. 19–23, 26. For an earlier discussion from a perceptibly different angle, see Geoffrey Elton, ‘‘‘The Body of the Whole Realm’’: Parliament and Representation in Medieval and Tudor England’ in his Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government, Papers and Reviews 1946–1972, vol. II, Parliament/Political Thought. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974) 19–61. 7 Blair Worden. ‘Republicanism, Regicide, and Republic: The English Experience.’ Vol. I: 309, 327. For the earlier critique, see Blair Worden. ‘Factory of the Revolution.’ London Review of Books 20:3 (5 February 1998): 13–15. 8 Markuu Peltonnen. ‘Citizenship and Republicanism in Elizabethan England.’ Vol. I: 89, 91. 9 Donald Winch. ‘Commercial Realities, Republican Principles.’ Vol. I: 303, 307, 309. 10 Peltonnen. ‘Citizenship and Republicanism’, p. 99, 106; cf. Jonathan Scott, ‘Classical Republicanism in Seventeenth-century England and the Netherlands’, Vol. I: 69, who notes the correspondence between English and Dutch anti-monarchism through a comparison of Sidney and De la Court, suggesting: ‘What differed was Sidney’s and De la Court’s positive republicanism. For De la Court, as for Machiavelli, the dominant political reality was the passions. Government was actually self-interested. The contrariety of interest between monarchies and republics; between private and the public interest, was not that between government by reason and passion, but between the self-interest of a single person and that of a selfgoverning community. This was skeptical Dutch republican reason of state’.
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century England provided a model for virtuous behaviour, giving sustenance to a Ciceronian inspired critique of otium. However, although the decline and fall of freedom under the Roman Empire afforded many parallels concerning the ‘evils of tyranny’, this did not necessarily require support for kingless government: ‘when the Roman republic was commended it was for the spirit of its liberty, not for its constitutional arrangements’.11 The standard issue then was of the calibre and virtue of kings, not proposals for the abolition of monarchy tout court. That being so, he suggests that ultimately, major discussions of the abolition of monarchy come about as a consequence of events, namely the regicide, rather than being their cause in the first place. Martin Dzelzainis nevertheless equally convincingly illustrates a contrasting focus on anti-monarchism in early-modern English republicanism in a finely crafted essay in the first of these volumes. He takes aim at the character of much recent revisionist historiography of the English civil wars, and notes the ways in which the events are played out in this genre as having been the preserve of a small band of (religious) fanatics. What he suggests that this misses, amongst other things, is an appreciation of the ways in which ‘scripture could be cited to secular ends’, with a reaction again Calvinist orthodoxy representing the main opinion of seventeenth-century republicans both within England and without, especially in the United Provinces. Contra Hobbes, regicide and republicanism came together particularly forcefully in the figure of Milton, and were not opposed to each other, but were instead symbiotic upon one another.12 Indeed, tracing the ‘varieties’ of anti-monarchism in earlymodern Europe is one of the major undertakings of these volumes, with several notable discussions of the varieties early-modern Dutch and Italian republicanism and anti-monarchism dovetailing with essays on Poland, Spain13 and Germany. Indeed, it is interesting to note that out of conflicts with the Teutonic order in the mid fifteenth-century through to the origins of the first Polish Parliament in 1493, we find the nobility struggling to gain political power from the senators. The focus on expanding the lower estate of the nobility, and wresting its parliamentary representation away from the upper house defined the boundaries of the political sphere through to the late sixteenth century. Indeed, in common with both earlier and later English arguments, the position of the King needed to be clarified in terms of his relationship to the estates, as did the location of deputies as representatives of particular spheres, not of the entire nobility nor of the Commonwealth.14 One of the central themes evident in several of the detailed discussions of republicanism in the early-modern context, is the way in which political writers had to reconcile various
11
Worden. ‘English Republicanism.’ p. 311. Martin Dzelzainis. ‘Anti-Monarchism in English Republicanism.’ Vol. I: 40f, cf. p. 32. 13 Xavier Gil. ‘Republican Politics in early-Modern Spain: The Castilian and Catalano-Aragonese Traditions.’ Vol. I, esp. p. 276, notes the monarchic nature of Castilian political culture, and his essay stresses the constitutional nature of debates about how to reconcile political freedom with monarchical rule, rather than highlighting an anti-monarchism explicitly. 14 Edward Opalin˜ski. ‘Civic Humanism and Republican Citizenship in the Polish Renaissance.’ Vol. I: 150ff, 156. 12
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forms of anti-monarchism, with the popular assumption that the best constitution was in fact a mixed constitution. What appears quite strongly is the idea that republican arguments had to contend with the legacy in particular of Bodin’s conception of sovereignty, unified and indivisible, and that getting around the problem of placing sovereignty in the figure of the monarch, for example, was a crucial problem. And much as Rousseau would later reinterpret Hobbes, Bodin, Grotius and Pufendorf on the issue of sovereignty and representation, in Martin van Gelderen’s illuminating comparison of Dutch and German republicanism the origins of arguments later made most famously perhaps in Book III of Rousseau’s Social Contract are elaborated. In Grotius especially, he suggests, there is a merger of ‘Va" zquez’s theory of civil power with the political language of the Dutch Revolt. This merger implies a lucid rejection of Bodin’s theory of sovereignty. The explicit use of the concept of magistratus emphasises that those who exercise civil power, be they king, princes, counts, States assemblies of town councils, are administrators’. The public power of the political commonwealth is based on the consent of private individuals, as the rights of the magistrate originate in the commonwealth itself.15 Correlatively, in Althusius’s Politica—as part of the radical Politica Christiana— the divine order and Biblical boundaries of secular government were treated explicitly. This was, however, tied to a novel development of the concept of the citizen and civic life, in which individuals were related to each other in ever expanding, overlapping and symbiotic circles of associations all based on covenants.16 Here there was also a dual relationship between citizens and magistrates, which meant that ‘the body of the populus is not only represented by its head, the supreme magistrate, but also by the assembly of its members. Following the late medieval theory of corporations, the Monarchomachs accepted that in his role of supreme administrator the summus magistratus represents ‘‘the person of the entire realm’’, ‘‘personam totius regni’’. But the assembly of its members is the true representation of the populus. Connecting themselves with French and Dutch theories of resistance, the German Monarchomachs labelled these representatives as ‘‘ephors’’ ’.17 This link between classical and early-modern writers, through the notion of representation, is itself I think critical to the development of modern republicanism based on representative political structures. And the type of work undertaken here provides one clear and important way in which the relationship of sovereignty and representation was combined with an associational conception of politics that has had a profound effect on later political thinking.
15
Martin van Gelderen. ‘Aristotelians, Monarchomachs and Republicans: Sovereignty and respublica mixta in Dutch and German Political Thought, 1580–1650.’ Vol. I: 203. See also Annabel Brett, ‘Natural Right and Civil Community: The Civil Philosophy of Hugo Grotius.’ Historical Journal 45:1 (2002): 31–51, esp. pp. 43ff. 16 van Gelderen. Ibid., p. 205. 17 Ibid., p. 207. The internal quotations van Gelderen cites are drawn from Johannes Althusius, Politica, methodice digesta et exemplis sacris et profanis illustrata, 3rd edn. [1614]. Ed. C.J. Friedrich. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932) ch. 19, no. 98: 177.
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. Hans Erich Bodeker takes van Gelderen’s analysis of the respublica mixta forward in time, to the beginning of the eighteenth century. He focuses on the transmission of the triadic debates that stemmed from earlier discussions concerning first the sovereign rights of particular groups and the balance of monarchic, aristocratic, and democratic elements. He then turns to the image of cooperation between ‘the various institutions, person and groups in the division of sovereign rights. The third image . was that of the division of power’.18 Bodeker focuses on the general decline of political Aristotelianism in the later seventeenth century, and traces Spinoza’s account of the formation of the state. This, he suggests, was primarily based on an assumption that ‘preferences and actions are not so much governed by rational ‘‘deliberation’’ as ruled by affects that result from the manifold impressions from objects in the world around us’. Thus, man’s natural power, which structures the rights of individuals in the state of nature, must similarly express itself in the development of civil power.19 Yet, one cannot derive state formation from rational self-interest on the part of the individual, so that ‘the real subject of politics in Spinoza’s view [is] not the individual but the multitudo, the multitude of all men . living in a state’.20 From this beginning, Bodeker moves on to discuss Pufendorf’s account of socialitas and obligation as developing Hobbes’s thought in various ways, and whose notion of the social pact forms a foundation for the account of the political contract that stands at the basis of the sovereign state. The state here is the well-known persona moralis composita, and the specific institutions that characterise parts of the state hold sovereignty as legal persons associated with this composite moral person.21 But if Grotius, Pufendorf and Spinoza were central not only to German and Dutch political thought in particular but also more widely, another focus of these volumes is the radical anti-monarchical republicanism of the Dutch Republic. The famous de la Court brothers are represented in several essays. But Velema specifically notes the inversion of classical arguments favouring monarchy by the brothers (likely Pieter, but the precise combination of who wrote which texts remains unclear).22 The suggestion was that hereditary succession promoted not a . Hans Erich Bodeker. ‘Debating the respublica mixta: German and Dutch Political Discourses around 1700.’ Vol. I: 219. 19 Ibid., p. 223. On this general pattern, see Horst Dreitzel, ‘Reason of State and the Crisis of Political Aristotelianism: An Essay on the Development of 17th Century Political Philosophy.’ History of European Ideas 28 (2002): 163–187. 20 . Bodekeer. Ibid., p. 225. 21 Ibid., p. 232. As Karin Tilmans, ‘Republican Citizenship and Civic Humanism in the BurgundianHabsburg Netherlands (1477–1566)’ p. 124, summarises, there was much internal differentiation to the sixteenth century humanistic assessments of citizenship that provide the background for much of these later discussions. These discussions, often drawing on the practical experience of city life, are similar to the celebration of republican citizenship, the like of which is outlined by Vittorio Conti, ‘The Mechanisation of Virtue: Republican Rituals in Italian Political Thought in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.’ Vol. II: 73–83. 22 Wyger E. Velema. ‘‘‘That a Republic is Better than a Monarchy’’: Anti-Monarchism in Early-Modern Dutch Political Thought.’ Vol. I: 16. Leo Campos Boralevi, ‘Classical Foundational Myths of European Republicanism: The Jewish Commonwealth.’ Vol. I: 253, notes the importance too of translations of the 18
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worthwhile education, but one in which the regnant monarch would rationally wish to keep the potential successor as ignorant as possible, to preserve his time on the throne. ‘Young princes were therefore brought up with useless entertainment’, so that as rulers, most monarchs simply wanted to continue to satisfy their basest passions.23 Indeed, a corollary of this was the wider critique of the slavish character of a court politics which, because dependent upon the will of the monarch for its sustenance simply failed to suggest anything remotely critical of the monarch at all. He also then discusses Lieven De Beaufort’s account of political liberty as being constrained unacceptably by absolute monarchy, but more radically developed in terms of an analytical historical schema whereby the free republic degenerated into an absolute monarchy through the ‘loss of equality and virtue through ambition and luxury. This weakening of political vigilance permitted the rise of one person to a position of great power. Should that power include military command, there was very little that could be done to prevent the eventual transition to absolute monarchy and political slavery’.24 This is, of course, a classical republican dilemma, and David Armitage devotes a carefully crafted essay to outlining the development and longevity of ‘the Machiavellian compound of Sallust’s moral account of Roman decline and Polybius’s constitutional analysis’. It was precisely this which ‘provided an enduring model for later republicans to understand the competing pressures of liberty at home and expansion abroad’. He then runs through some of the now well recognised debates in seventeenth-century England, through to the Scottish inflection given to this dilemma in terms of the relationship between politeness, commercial society and what Smith referred to as the progress of natural liberty.25 Indeed, the challenges of reconciling virtue, liberty and toleration within the aggressively independent republican tradition is discussed via consideration of John Toland in a detailed examination by Simone Zurbrechen, focusing on free thinking and true (Pantheistic) religion.26 Liberty of thought and opinion was as central to the reworking of republican themes in the writings of those like Shaftesbury, as it was to the critique of ancient notions of republican virtue premised upon independence and ‘public’ interest exemplified by d’Holbach, as Jean Fabien Spitz shows.27 Conversely, Iain (footnote continued) Bible [here authorised by the States General of the Dutch Republic] for mediating the relationship between ‘scholarly elaboration and the great public: ‘This elaboration of the Hebrew model was the work of members of the learned circles of humanists and Hebraists and took place in the great academies and universities, where it was consciously carried out as a powerful republican tool’. 23 Velema. ‘That a Republic is Better than a Monarchy.’ Vol. I: 18. 24 Velema. Ibid., p. 23. 25 David Armitage. ‘Empire and Liberty: A Republican Dilemma.’ Vol. II: 35, 45. 26 Simone Zurbrechen. ‘Republicanism and Toleration.’ Vol. II: 63, cf. p. 70: ‘It is obvious that it was extremely difficult for Toland to convince the public of his political moderation. As the contradictions between his political and his philosophical writings demonstrate, in his case the tensions between the professed loyalty to the English monarchy and the advocacy of radical reforms lead again—as at the times of the libertins e!rudits—to a form of split identity.’ 27 Jean Fabien Spitz. ‘From Civism to Civility: D’Holbach’s Critique of Republican Virtue.’ Vol. II, esp. p. 121.
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Hampsher-Monk offers an elegant consideration of the transition in British political thought, from virtue to politeness, where ‘exposure to polished wit and ridicule was thus an essential test in rendering all parts of human life sociable and fit for liberty’.28 This was the Shaftesbury who also threatened traditional religious orthodoxy with his proposal to uncouple God and morality, and certainly argued for the primacy of natural affections in the moral economy, as various other authors have noted.29 With the movement towards an increasingly commercial society, questions of the relationship between women and the republic soon became increasingly central. By inverting the traditional public dimension of private manners and family life, Rousseau, for example, separated state and family in order to encourage women to return to domesticity in order to help foster true republican virtue in what was the proper sphere of morality, the family. And as Catherine Larre" re notes, in doing this, Rousseau was inextricably bound up with the ‘demographic and public health concerns of his contemporaries’.30 Of course, the case of Rousseau’s misogynistic account of women has often been discussed, and as Judith Vega’s discussion shows, writers like Wollstonecraft would turn the Rousseauean desire for the feminine into a ‘code-word for slaveryyfor servile, unenlightened behaviour’.31 But the emphasis for Larre" re is on the radical dissociation between Rousseau’s classically republican arguments, and the discussions of representation, liberty, citizenship and delegation put forward by the Abbe! Sieye" s, for example. For it was with Sieye" s, that notions of representation and liberty, active and passive citizenship, and the basis of the social order in the division of labour came to the fore. This was done in his attempt to reconcile the constituent power of the people with the necessity of representative government under a commercial society, and the rise of commercial society illustrates the key transformation in the European republican heritage. Johnson Kent-Wright also highlights the dissociation between classical republican theorists like Rousseau, Mably and even Guillaime-Joseph Saige’s attempted reconciliation of their positions, to the account of the Third Estate given by Sieye" s and justified in the infamous Tennis Court Oath of June 20, 1789.32 Michael Sonenscher provides an alternate view on similar events, focusing on the federal structure espoused by Mably and noting in particular his idea of Charlemagne as the veritable patriot King, with Prussia as his greatest hope for 28
Iain Hampsher-Monk. ‘From Virtue to Politeness.’ Vol. II: 93f; Hampsher-Monk, ibid., pp. 100f, also notes the probable impact of Richard Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance on Burke, illustrating how his construing of politeness as related to social order would likely have been, pace Pocock’s seminal analyses, more prescient to Burke’s reflections than the philosophical writings of Smith and Millar. 29 Cf. Thomas Dixon. From Passions to Emotions. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 67; Roy Porter. Flesh in the Age of Reason. (London: Penguin, 2003) esp. pp. 138ff. 30 Catherine Larr"ere. ‘Women, Republicanism and the Growth of Commerce.’ Vol. II: 151. 31 Judith A. Vega. ‘Feminist Republicanism and the Political Perception of Gender.’ Vol. II: 169; cf. also Christian Faur!e. ‘Rights or Virtues: Women and the Republic.’ Vol. II: 133, who similarly uses the Montesquieuean refrain that ‘in republics women are free by the laws and captured by the mores.’ (Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, [1748] trans. A. Cohler, B.C. Miller and H.S. Stone. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) Bk. VII, ch. 9). 32 See Johnson Kent Wright. ‘The Idea of a Republican Constitution in Old-R!egime France.’ Vol. I, esp. pp. 298–303.
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the future of Europe.33 Yet, it was with Brissot, he suggests, that we find one of the few ‘straightforwardly republican’ attempts to solve the French fiscal crisis. It was one which was explicitly offered as a counter-position to Sieye" s’s argument, and which developed Rousseau’s account of the need to contextualise the practices of government as emissaries or deputies of the people according to circumstance. Like Sieye" s, nevertheless, the impact of the philosophical approach to historical progress most clearly associated with the Scottish Enlightenment(s) was of paramount importance to his attempt to reconstitute the relationship between human passions and the rule of law. This took concrete form in the practical policy of using public credit to help with debt reduction.34 The complex intertwining of political and economic virtue and whether ancient political prudence could be combined with modern economic prudence was precisely what Burke, as Sonenscher suggests, found deeply troubling.35 It is a theme that Istvan Hont has notably explored in several publications.36 As already indicated, Donald Winch provides a typically provocative account of the partial overlaps between the classical republican tradition and the movement towards political economy through moral philosophy by writers like Adam Smith. Marco Guena, in his contribution, focuses on Adam Ferguson. His well-known Essay on the History of Civil Society attempted, he suggests, to reconcile Scottish considerations of the progress of society from rudeness to polish, with the classical schema already discussed of the rise, greatness, and then corruption or decadence of Rome.37 This points to the problem that was of such importance to Ferguson, namely, that if wealth and commerce necessarily bring prosperity, they do not necessarily bring happiness, and it is his concern to delineate precisely how and why corruption of character can occur in civilised societies. His reasoning, of course, illustrates a traditional republican worry about standing armies, where the unhooking of the citizen from the soldier is a catalyst towards a dangerous passivity. Correlatively, the professionalisation of politics makes despotism and its unhappy relation, military invasion, much more likely. Therefore, and in a return to Machiavellian concerns, freedom can only emerge for Ferguson ‘from conflict between virtuous citizens’, where public spirit and civic alertness are the prerequisites for the maintenance of liberty.38 33
Michael Sonenscher. ‘Republicanism, State Finances and the Emergence of Commercial Society in Eighteenth-century France—or from Royal to Ancient Republicanism and Back.’ Vol. II: 281. 34 Sonenscher. ‘Idea of a Republican Constitution.’ esp. pp. 283ff; cf. also Michael Sonenscher, ‘The Nation’s Debt and the Birth of the Modern Republic: The French Fiscal Deficit and the Politics of the Revolution of 1789. Part I.’ History of Political Thought 18 (1997): 70. 35 Sonenscher. ‘Idea of a Republican Constitution.’ p. 289. 36 Istvan Hont. ‘Free Trade and the Economic Limits to National Politics: Neo-Machiavellian Political Economy Reconsidered.’ The Economic Limits to Modern Politics. Ed. John Dunn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) 41–120; ‘The Rhapsody of Public Debt: David Hume and Voluntary State Bankruptcy.’ Political Discourse in Early-Modern Britain. Eds. N. Phillipson and Q. Skinner. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) 321–348. 37 Marco Geuna. ‘Republicanism and Commercial Society in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Case of Adam Ferguson.’ Vol. II: 181. 38 Geuna. Ibid., pp. 187, 193.
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Building on certain of these themes, Fania Oz-Salzberger restates positions outlined in her earlier work pertaining to the relationship between Scottish and German Enlightenments,39 but she here focuses on the relationship between the idea of the republic and that of commerce. Observing the fact that of all their numerous academic and public inter-relationships, the political thought of eighteenth-century Scots and Germans was the least well developed, she focuses, like Geuna, on the problem of passivity for Adam Ferguson.40 Ferguson and more famously Smith were keenly translated into German. And Oz-Salzberger suggests, the ‘1770s mark a transition from early-modern German political thinking, which seldom drew on republican sources, and did not regard the remaining independent imperial towns as viable models for political theorising’. This moved towards ‘a new phase in which challenges from North America and France—and by further reflection, from Switzerland and Britain—led to an intensive and short-lived reconsideration of the idea of a republic’.41 I broadly agree. By way of a footnote, though, one might note that consideration of the federal structure implemented in the United States of America remained quite important to German political thinking at various points, most notably in debates of the Vormarz. It would reappear at various intervals in . later historical discussions, although her general conclusion here is probably correct that the Scottish reworking of classical themes remained largely irrelevant to German political thought.42 Indeed, the tradition of civic particularism in the Holy Roman Empire considerably constrained claims to princely absolutism, although the various divisions of sovereignty were, as Pufendorf had famously noted, labyrinthine to say the least. The eighteenth-century German debates attempted to reconcile, it would seem, a ‘realist’ approach to monarchical rule with a ‘spiritualist’ account of republicanism through the development of community, something most famously documented in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right with the movement from abstract right to ethical life.43 In eighteenth-century Italy, one of the main variations on the similar theme of 39
See Fania Oz-Salzberger. Translating the Enlightenment. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Fania Oz-Salzberger. ‘Scots, Germans, Republic and Commerce.’ Vol. II, esp. pp. 202f. 41 Oz-Salzberger. ‘Scots, Germans.’ p. 211. Bela Kapossy. ‘Neo-Roman Republicanism and Commercial Society: The Example of Eighteenth-Century Berne.’ Vol. II: 227–247, not only outlines the Swiss dimension to the European heritage, but also considers Berne’s position as a key creditor in Western Europe, which allowed its patrician elite to pursue a policy of low taxation but with generous public welfare programmes. He also notes the radical artisan critique of the idea that patrician rule and republican politics could be reconciled. 42 Cf. Oz-Salzberger. ‘Scots, Germans.’ p. 226; Horst Dippel. Die amerikanische Verfassung in Deutschland im 19. Jahrhundert. (Goldbach: Keip Verlag, 1994). 43 Oz-Salzberger. ‘Scots, Germans.’ p. 221; As Robert von Friedeburg, ‘Civic Humanism and Republican Citizenship in Early-Modern Germany.’ Vol. I: 135, notes, the early-modern focus on the role of the free city could often be seen as a clear challenge, nevertheless, to monarchical rule. He discusses in particular the representation of the city as civitas sibi princeps in the allegory of good government displayed in the mayoral house at Regensburg, a particularly well-known example, as well as outlining . another context for the development of the genre of politica, which Bodeker and van Gelderen also discuss. For wider reflections on this image in Regensburg, see also Kristin Eldyss Sorensen Zapalac. ‘‘‘In His Image and Likeness’’: Political Iconography and Religious Change in Regensburg, 1500–1600’. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990) esp. pp. 85–89. 40
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historical development from ancient republics, through free political re! gimes and towards monarchies, was to be found in Vico’s reflections. These transitions, well known especially from the later editions of the New Science, highlight the political struggles necessary to move forward from the heroic to the free republic. They were distilled through a wider historical cosmology of the transformation from an age of gods and heroes to the age of men. From the moment that the heroic republic was born, however, it contained within itself the seeds of its own destruction, so that much like certain readings of Machiavelli, ‘in celebrating republican heroism’ Vico nevertheless ‘furnished the counter-vailing techniques of disenchantment’.44 Vico’s theory of history would have wide ramifications for the transmission of classically republican themes into both nineteenth-century England and France, via the Liberal Anglicans in the former case, and Michelet’s historical writings in the latter.45 Tracing some of the implications of these particular eighteenth-century themes, which are themselves variations on classical republican discourses, has produced some of the most engaging work on early nineteenth-century political ideas.46 It is in this way, I think, that something of the rationale behind Donald Winch’s provocative closing piece to these volumes can be found. To put the point polemically, nineteenth-century political thought, itself so rich and complex has not been paid the same attention than that afforded to the period roughly from 1500 to 1800, and these detailed discussions might in some way help to rectify this situation. Scholars of nineteenth-century political thought have yet to take up the challenge lain down by these earlier traditions of thought. J.S. Mill’s hyperbolic autobiographical claim, that the nineteenth-century was, in nuce, a grand reaction to what had gone immediately before it, still casts a long shadow. It has led scholars such as John Morrow and Mark Francis to suggest that the kind of focus on political languages outlined by writers like John Pocock and Quentin Skinner is inappropriate to this ‘new’ period.47 Correlatively, though from a different perspective, Mark Bevir suggests that if we use the correct heuristic terms, we can trace new patterns of meaning between Romanticism and Enlightenment that structure the legacies of eighteenth-century political thought during this period, and which will allow us to capture something of the logic of the history of these ideas.48 Both these claims, it seems to me, still seek to overly compartmentalise nineteenth-century political thought. And it is one of the major virtues of these volumes that in codifying and cementing the richness, diversity and also the parallel incongruities of broadly shared political languages, they provide an illustration of the background resources necessary to trace the complex set of transformations in political language that occur 44
Eluggero Pii. ‘Republicanism and Commercial Society in Eighteenth-century Italy.’ Vol. II: 263. Duncan Forbes. The Liberal Anglican Idea of History. (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1952); Patrick H. Hutton. ‘Vico and the French Revolutionary Tradition.’ Journal of the History of Ideas 37:2 (1976): 241–256. 46 See John Burrow. Whigs and Liberals. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). 47 John Morrow and Mark Francis. A History of English Political Thought in the Nineteenth-Century. (London: Duckworth, 1994). 48 Mark Bevir. ‘English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century.’ History of Political Thought XVII:1 (1996): 113–127. 45
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in nineteenth-century political thinking. Mill himself is even one of the major figures here, particularly so in the reciprocal relationship he posits between the cultivation of character and the development of civilisation. These volumes present a wealth of material on the development and character of early-modern and modern republicanism, showing that despite the fact that republicanism is certainly a shared European heritage, there is much to be gained from locating the application of this heritage in particular national contexts. As such, it presents a vindication both of the continued interest in republican political thought, but also illustrates the virtues of a historical approach to political theory, highlighting the rich legacy of the history of European ideas. The excellent essays show the unity of the history of European ideas in context, by virtue of the shared heritage of republican ideas, values, and norms. They also, and unsurprisingly, point to the various sources of internal divisions within this perspective, for the history of political ideas is never a finished and uncontested enterprise.
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Divided by a common language?$ D.J. Kelly University of Sheffield, Department of Politics, Northumberland Road, Sheffield 10 2TN, UK
Scholarly interest in the delineation of the history of republican political thought has surely never been more prevalent than it is today. The contemporary utility as well as the validity of attempts to resuscitate these discourses, however, is consistently challenged. Indeed, in two other assessments of the volumes under review here, both Perez Zagorin and Biancamaria Fontana have separately and quizzically wondered what the fruits of historical research into republicanism as a shared European heritage tell us. Fontana offers some wry reflections on the ways in which the predominant methodological impulses of the volume towards linguistic and discursive zones of engagement and counter-engagement are quite often mechanically implemented. There is a clear hint of broader dissatisfaction with the way in which the revolutionary methodological advances of intellectual history announced over the course of the past 30 years have become routinised almost to the point of blandness, a point also recently made more subtly by David Wootton.1 The revolutionary conflicts of European history appear in these books, Fontana argues, as a ‘surreal battlefield, where languages and vocabularies, jargons and paradigms joust strenuously against each other’. Indeed, with the ‘politics’ and contemporary import of republicanism dealt with elsewhere outside of these volumes, the editors announce that what they and the particular contributors are offering is a ‘purely scholarly’ investigation and illumination of the history of republicanism itself. Such a stance should perhaps have mollified somewhat Fontana’s bemusement as to what these contributions can possibly tell us about the possible future of Europe itself. But nevertheless these are a disconcertingly varied set of essays to try and review, with a $ A review of Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, Vol. I, Republicanism and Constitutionalism in Early-Modern Europe. Eds. Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) ISBN: 0 521 80203 2, xi+420, d45, Vol. II, The Varieties of Republicanism in EarlyModern Europe. Eds. Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) ISBN: 0 521 80756 5, xi+402, d45. E-mail address: d.j.kelly@sheffield.ac.uk (D.J. Kelly). 1 David Wootton. ‘The Hard Look Back.’ Times Literary Supplement (14 March 2003): 8–10.
0191-6599/$ - see front matter r 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.histeuroideas.2004.03.002
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bewildering variety of sources, problems and interests, but which are all located under the banner of a shared European republican heritage.2 Similarly, whilst praising the scholarly quality—praise which I wholly endorse— and geographical coverage, which extends far beyond the expertise of any single scholar, Perez Zagorin has similarly asked whether these volumes actually offer us a coherent view of republicanism.3 Surely, though, it would be incredibly surprising if they had done so. For one of the major themes here is that although there may be a broadly shared set of classical authors from which various scholars, publicists, political actors and novelists could draw upon, these were inevitably intertwined with nationally specific domestic traditions and political contexts. Put another way, anti-monarchical Dutch and Polish republicans were as divided by their contextually specific reworking of a shared European republican heritage as they were united by these common linguistic resources in the first place. Furthermore, as many recent explorations of the history of republicanism have made clear, numerous republican or republican inspired arguments in both the early-modern as well as the modern period have been compatible with some form or other of limited monarchy. Quentin Skinner’s work has done much to illustrate this particular dimension of seventeenthcentury political discourse in England. It has led him, notably, to classify those writers whom he takes to have been extending the teachings of, in particular, the great Roman moralists Sallust, Tacitus and Livy to contemporary debates between Crown and Parliament, as neo-Roman rather than republican.4 This focus on classical discussions of liberty drawn from Roman law emphasises the distinction between free men and slaves and was, he suggests, crucial to critics of both the political power over property and the ‘negative voice’ of the monarch in debates leading up to the civil war. Indeed, they remained central to the critique of Parliament after the regicide, as an institution—the Levellers argued—which was simply re-enslaving the people with its political conservatism.5 These earlier arguments and their relationship to the ‘coming of the civil war’ are the subject of a characteristically elegant essay by Skinner that opens the second volume. It restates and refines many of the arguments he has made elsewhere, but seems to focus more purposefully than previously on the importance of the notion of representation to the debates he is engaged in. This is not explicitly undertaken in terms of contrast between an ‘ancient’ republicanism and a ‘modern’ constitutional and representative republicanism. Rather, the idea of the Parliament or political rule necessitating a ‘representation’ and hence a ‘personation’ of the people as a whole, an issue prior to that of the process of electing representatives, is dissected in terms of
2
Biancamaria Fontana. ‘In the Gardens of the Republic.’ Times Literary Supplement (11 July 2003): 8. Perez Zagorin. ‘Republicanisms.’ British Journal for the History of Philosophy 11:4 (2003): 701–714, esp. pp. 713–714. 4 See Quentin Skinner. Liberty Before Liberalism. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); cf. ‘A Third Concept of Liberty.’ Proceedings of the British Academy 117 (2002): 237–268, esp. 247–255. 5 ! See also S.D. Glover. ‘The Putney Debates: Popular versus Elitist Republicanism.’ Past and Present 164 (1999): 47–80. 3
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the English debates in which neo-Roman languages were utilised for ideological polemic.6 However, Skinner’s piece appears immediately after a skilful essay from Blair Worden that ends volume one, and which subjects writing on early-modern English ‘republicanism’ that has been influenced by Skinner’s work to an important critique. Developing and modifying an earlier historiographical review, Worden suggests that in explaining the context of the English revolution, many contemporary scholars of seventeenth-century republicanism miss the point. ‘We seek in vain’, he argues, ‘evidence that imaginative literature reflected or fostered a desire for republican rule’.7 Equally, he takes issue with Markuu Peltonnen (who has a chapter in this collection on ‘Citizenship and republicanism in Elizabethan England’). In his work here, Peltonnen reassesses the urban character of public political life outlined by Elizabethan intellectuals, but notes that ‘seeing men of commerce as active citizens was not taken for granted, but demanded a public apology’.8 The problematic relationship between commerce and republicanism is shown here to have quite deep roots, which are in turn examined in a superb combative essay by Donald Winch, who illustrates the importance of writers like Smith and Hume as providing a complex bridge between early-modern and modern conceptions of republicanism. Both complicate the legacy with a lack of general concern for ‘forms’ of government and accept ‘degrees’ of freedom or liberty, whilst maintaining a central focus on relations of both dependence and also deference. And of course, their discussions are underpinned with fulsome consideration of the progress of natural liberty and the rise of a commercial ‘civilisation’.9 Peltonnen nevertheless points out the transformation from a rather general ‘active’ conception of aristocratic ‘citizenship’ (of the Commonwealth) underpinning foreign policy, and suggests that a ‘democratic republicanism’ came forward as the major way of thinking. Put crudely, this was a movement away from Sidney towards Machiavelli.10 Worden though uses the idea of republicanism here both more broadly, and more narrowly, as a constitutional principle premised on the absence of monarchy, and agrees that the resurgence of classical humanism in seventeenth6
Quentin Skinner. ‘Classical Liberty and the Coming of the English Civil War.’ Vol. II: 9–28, esp. pp. 19–23, 26. For an earlier discussion from a perceptibly different angle, see Geoffrey Elton, ‘‘‘The Body of the Whole Realm’’: Parliament and Representation in Medieval and Tudor England’ in his Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government, Papers and Reviews 1946–1972, vol. II, Parliament/Political Thought. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974) 19–61. 7 Blair Worden. ‘Republicanism, Regicide, and Republic: The English Experience.’ Vol. I: 309, 327. For the earlier critique, see Blair Worden. ‘Factory of the Revolution.’ London Review of Books 20:3 (5 February 1998): 13–15. 8 Markuu Peltonnen. ‘Citizenship and Republicanism in Elizabethan England.’ Vol. I: 89, 91. 9 Donald Winch. ‘Commercial Realities, Republican Principles.’ Vol. I: 303, 307, 309. 10 Peltonnen. ‘Citizenship and Republicanism’, p. 99, 106; cf. Jonathan Scott, ‘Classical Republicanism in Seventeenth-century England and the Netherlands’, Vol. I: 69, who notes the correspondence between English and Dutch anti-monarchism through a comparison of Sidney and De la Court, suggesting: ‘What differed was Sidney’s and De la Court’s positive republicanism. For De la Court, as for Machiavelli, the dominant political reality was the passions. Government was actually self-interested. The contrariety of interest between monarchies and republics; between private and the public interest, was not that between government by reason and passion, but between the self-interest of a single person and that of a selfgoverning community. This was skeptical Dutch republican reason of state’.
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century England provided a model for virtuous behaviour, giving sustenance to a Ciceronian inspired critique of otium. However, although the decline and fall of freedom under the Roman Empire afforded many parallels concerning the ‘evils of tyranny’, this did not necessarily require support for kingless government: ‘when the Roman republic was commended it was for the spirit of its liberty, not for its constitutional arrangements’.11 The standard issue then was of the calibre and virtue of kings, not proposals for the abolition of monarchy tout court. That being so, he suggests that ultimately, major discussions of the abolition of monarchy come about as a consequence of events, namely the regicide, rather than being their cause in the first place. Martin Dzelzainis nevertheless equally convincingly illustrates a contrasting focus on anti-monarchism in early-modern English republicanism in a finely crafted essay in the first of these volumes. He takes aim at the character of much recent revisionist historiography of the English civil wars, and notes the ways in which the events are played out in this genre as having been the preserve of a small band of (religious) fanatics. What he suggests that this misses, amongst other things, is an appreciation of the ways in which ‘scripture could be cited to secular ends’, with a reaction again Calvinist orthodoxy representing the main opinion of seventeenth-century republicans both within England and without, especially in the United Provinces. Contra Hobbes, regicide and republicanism came together particularly forcefully in the figure of Milton, and were not opposed to each other, but were instead symbiotic upon one another.12 Indeed, tracing the ‘varieties’ of anti-monarchism in earlymodern Europe is one of the major undertakings of these volumes, with several notable discussions of the varieties early-modern Dutch and Italian republicanism and anti-monarchism dovetailing with essays on Poland, Spain13 and Germany. Indeed, it is interesting to note that out of conflicts with the Teutonic order in the mid fifteenth-century through to the origins of the first Polish Parliament in 1493, we find the nobility struggling to gain political power from the senators. The focus on expanding the lower estate of the nobility, and wresting its parliamentary representation away from the upper house defined the boundaries of the political sphere through to the late sixteenth century. Indeed, in common with both earlier and later English arguments, the position of the King needed to be clarified in terms of his relationship to the estates, as did the location of deputies as representatives of particular spheres, not of the entire nobility nor of the Commonwealth.14 One of the central themes evident in several of the detailed discussions of republicanism in the early-modern context, is the way in which political writers had to reconcile various
11
Worden. ‘English Republicanism.’ p. 311. Martin Dzelzainis. ‘Anti-Monarchism in English Republicanism.’ Vol. I: 40f, cf. p. 32. 13 Xavier Gil. ‘Republican Politics in early-Modern Spain: The Castilian and Catalano-Aragonese Traditions.’ Vol. I, esp. p. 276, notes the monarchic nature of Castilian political culture, and his essay stresses the constitutional nature of debates about how to reconcile political freedom with monarchical rule, rather than highlighting an anti-monarchism explicitly. 14 Edward Opalin˜ski. ‘Civic Humanism and Republican Citizenship in the Polish Renaissance.’ Vol. I: 150ff, 156. 12
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forms of anti-monarchism, with the popular assumption that the best constitution was in fact a mixed constitution. What appears quite strongly is the idea that republican arguments had to contend with the legacy in particular of Bodin’s conception of sovereignty, unified and indivisible, and that getting around the problem of placing sovereignty in the figure of the monarch, for example, was a crucial problem. And much as Rousseau would later reinterpret Hobbes, Bodin, Grotius and Pufendorf on the issue of sovereignty and representation, in Martin van Gelderen’s illuminating comparison of Dutch and German republicanism the origins of arguments later made most famously perhaps in Book III of Rousseau’s Social Contract are elaborated. In Grotius especially, he suggests, there is a merger of ‘Va" zquez’s theory of civil power with the political language of the Dutch Revolt. This merger implies a lucid rejection of Bodin’s theory of sovereignty. The explicit use of the concept of magistratus emphasises that those who exercise civil power, be they king, princes, counts, States assemblies of town councils, are administrators’. The public power of the political commonwealth is based on the consent of private individuals, as the rights of the magistrate originate in the commonwealth itself.15 Correlatively, in Althusius’s Politica—as part of the radical Politica Christiana— the divine order and Biblical boundaries of secular government were treated explicitly. This was, however, tied to a novel development of the concept of the citizen and civic life, in which individuals were related to each other in ever expanding, overlapping and symbiotic circles of associations all based on covenants.16 Here there was also a dual relationship between citizens and magistrates, which meant that ‘the body of the populus is not only represented by its head, the supreme magistrate, but also by the assembly of its members. Following the late medieval theory of corporations, the Monarchomachs accepted that in his role of supreme administrator the summus magistratus represents ‘‘the person of the entire realm’’, ‘‘personam totius regni’’. But the assembly of its members is the true representation of the populus. Connecting themselves with French and Dutch theories of resistance, the German Monarchomachs labelled these representatives as ‘‘ephors’’ ’.17 This link between classical and early-modern writers, through the notion of representation, is itself I think critical to the development of modern republicanism based on representative political structures. And the type of work undertaken here provides one clear and important way in which the relationship of sovereignty and representation was combined with an associational conception of politics that has had a profound effect on later political thinking.
15
Martin van Gelderen. ‘Aristotelians, Monarchomachs and Republicans: Sovereignty and respublica mixta in Dutch and German Political Thought, 1580–1650.’ Vol. I: 203. See also Annabel Brett, ‘Natural Right and Civil Community: The Civil Philosophy of Hugo Grotius.’ Historical Journal 45:1 (2002): 31–51, esp. pp. 43ff. 16 van Gelderen. Ibid., p. 205. 17 Ibid., p. 207. The internal quotations van Gelderen cites are drawn from Johannes Althusius, Politica, methodice digesta et exemplis sacris et profanis illustrata, 3rd edn. [1614]. Ed. C.J. Friedrich. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932) ch. 19, no. 98: 177.
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. Hans Erich Bodeker takes van Gelderen’s analysis of the respublica mixta forward in time, to the beginning of the eighteenth century. He focuses on the transmission of the triadic debates that stemmed from earlier discussions concerning first the sovereign rights of particular groups and the balance of monarchic, aristocratic, and democratic elements. He then turns to the image of cooperation between ‘the various institutions, person and groups in the division of sovereign rights. The third image . was that of the division of power’.18 Bodeker focuses on the general decline of political Aristotelianism in the later seventeenth century, and traces Spinoza’s account of the formation of the state. This, he suggests, was primarily based on an assumption that ‘preferences and actions are not so much governed by rational ‘‘deliberation’’ as ruled by affects that result from the manifold impressions from objects in the world around us’. Thus, man’s natural power, which structures the rights of individuals in the state of nature, must similarly express itself in the development of civil power.19 Yet, one cannot derive state formation from rational self-interest on the part of the individual, so that ‘the real subject of politics in Spinoza’s view [is] not the individual but the multitudo, the multitude of all men . living in a state’.20 From this beginning, Bodeker moves on to discuss Pufendorf’s account of socialitas and obligation as developing Hobbes’s thought in various ways, and whose notion of the social pact forms a foundation for the account of the political contract that stands at the basis of the sovereign state. The state here is the well-known persona moralis composita, and the specific institutions that characterise parts of the state hold sovereignty as legal persons associated with this composite moral person.21 But if Grotius, Pufendorf and Spinoza were central not only to German and Dutch political thought in particular but also more widely, another focus of these volumes is the radical anti-monarchical republicanism of the Dutch Republic. The famous de la Court brothers are represented in several essays. But Velema specifically notes the inversion of classical arguments favouring monarchy by the brothers (likely Pieter, but the precise combination of who wrote which texts remains unclear).22 The suggestion was that hereditary succession promoted not a . Hans Erich Bodeker. ‘Debating the respublica mixta: German and Dutch Political Discourses around 1700.’ Vol. I: 219. 19 Ibid., p. 223. On this general pattern, see Horst Dreitzel, ‘Reason of State and the Crisis of Political Aristotelianism: An Essay on the Development of 17th Century Political Philosophy.’ History of European Ideas 28 (2002): 163–187. 20 . Bodekeer. Ibid., p. 225. 21 Ibid., p. 232. As Karin Tilmans, ‘Republican Citizenship and Civic Humanism in the BurgundianHabsburg Netherlands (1477–1566)’ p. 124, summarises, there was much internal differentiation to the sixteenth century humanistic assessments of citizenship that provide the background for much of these later discussions. These discussions, often drawing on the practical experience of city life, are similar to the celebration of republican citizenship, the like of which is outlined by Vittorio Conti, ‘The Mechanisation of Virtue: Republican Rituals in Italian Political Thought in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.’ Vol. II: 73–83. 22 Wyger E. Velema. ‘‘‘That a Republic is Better than a Monarchy’’: Anti-Monarchism in Early-Modern Dutch Political Thought.’ Vol. I: 16. Leo Campos Boralevi, ‘Classical Foundational Myths of European Republicanism: The Jewish Commonwealth.’ Vol. I: 253, notes the importance too of translations of the 18
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worthwhile education, but one in which the regnant monarch would rationally wish to keep the potential successor as ignorant as possible, to preserve his time on the throne. ‘Young princes were therefore brought up with useless entertainment’, so that as rulers, most monarchs simply wanted to continue to satisfy their basest passions.23 Indeed, a corollary of this was the wider critique of the slavish character of a court politics which, because dependent upon the will of the monarch for its sustenance simply failed to suggest anything remotely critical of the monarch at all. He also then discusses Lieven De Beaufort’s account of political liberty as being constrained unacceptably by absolute monarchy, but more radically developed in terms of an analytical historical schema whereby the free republic degenerated into an absolute monarchy through the ‘loss of equality and virtue through ambition and luxury. This weakening of political vigilance permitted the rise of one person to a position of great power. Should that power include military command, there was very little that could be done to prevent the eventual transition to absolute monarchy and political slavery’.24 This is, of course, a classical republican dilemma, and David Armitage devotes a carefully crafted essay to outlining the development and longevity of ‘the Machiavellian compound of Sallust’s moral account of Roman decline and Polybius’s constitutional analysis’. It was precisely this which ‘provided an enduring model for later republicans to understand the competing pressures of liberty at home and expansion abroad’. He then runs through some of the now well recognised debates in seventeenth-century England, through to the Scottish inflection given to this dilemma in terms of the relationship between politeness, commercial society and what Smith referred to as the progress of natural liberty.25 Indeed, the challenges of reconciling virtue, liberty and toleration within the aggressively independent republican tradition is discussed via consideration of John Toland in a detailed examination by Simone Zurbrechen, focusing on free thinking and true (Pantheistic) religion.26 Liberty of thought and opinion was as central to the reworking of republican themes in the writings of those like Shaftesbury, as it was to the critique of ancient notions of republican virtue premised upon independence and ‘public’ interest exemplified by d’Holbach, as Jean Fabien Spitz shows.27 Conversely, Iain (footnote continued) Bible [here authorised by the States General of the Dutch Republic] for mediating the relationship between ‘scholarly elaboration and the great public: ‘This elaboration of the Hebrew model was the work of members of the learned circles of humanists and Hebraists and took place in the great academies and universities, where it was consciously carried out as a powerful republican tool’. 23 Velema. ‘That a Republic is Better than a Monarchy.’ Vol. I: 18. 24 Velema. Ibid., p. 23. 25 David Armitage. ‘Empire and Liberty: A Republican Dilemma.’ Vol. II: 35, 45. 26 Simone Zurbrechen. ‘Republicanism and Toleration.’ Vol. II: 63, cf. p. 70: ‘It is obvious that it was extremely difficult for Toland to convince the public of his political moderation. As the contradictions between his political and his philosophical writings demonstrate, in his case the tensions between the professed loyalty to the English monarchy and the advocacy of radical reforms lead again—as at the times of the libertins e!rudits—to a form of split identity.’ 27 Jean Fabien Spitz. ‘From Civism to Civility: D’Holbach’s Critique of Republican Virtue.’ Vol. II, esp. p. 121.
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Hampsher-Monk offers an elegant consideration of the transition in British political thought, from virtue to politeness, where ‘exposure to polished wit and ridicule was thus an essential test in rendering all parts of human life sociable and fit for liberty’.28 This was the Shaftesbury who also threatened traditional religious orthodoxy with his proposal to uncouple God and morality, and certainly argued for the primacy of natural affections in the moral economy, as various other authors have noted.29 With the movement towards an increasingly commercial society, questions of the relationship between women and the republic soon became increasingly central. By inverting the traditional public dimension of private manners and family life, Rousseau, for example, separated state and family in order to encourage women to return to domesticity in order to help foster true republican virtue in what was the proper sphere of morality, the family. And as Catherine Larre" re notes, in doing this, Rousseau was inextricably bound up with the ‘demographic and public health concerns of his contemporaries’.30 Of course, the case of Rousseau’s misogynistic account of women has often been discussed, and as Judith Vega’s discussion shows, writers like Wollstonecraft would turn the Rousseauean desire for the feminine into a ‘code-word for slaveryyfor servile, unenlightened behaviour’.31 But the emphasis for Larre" re is on the radical dissociation between Rousseau’s classically republican arguments, and the discussions of representation, liberty, citizenship and delegation put forward by the Abbe! Sieye" s, for example. For it was with Sieye" s, that notions of representation and liberty, active and passive citizenship, and the basis of the social order in the division of labour came to the fore. This was done in his attempt to reconcile the constituent power of the people with the necessity of representative government under a commercial society, and the rise of commercial society illustrates the key transformation in the European republican heritage. Johnson Kent-Wright also highlights the dissociation between classical republican theorists like Rousseau, Mably and even Guillaime-Joseph Saige’s attempted reconciliation of their positions, to the account of the Third Estate given by Sieye" s and justified in the infamous Tennis Court Oath of June 20, 1789.32 Michael Sonenscher provides an alternate view on similar events, focusing on the federal structure espoused by Mably and noting in particular his idea of Charlemagne as the veritable patriot King, with Prussia as his greatest hope for 28
Iain Hampsher-Monk. ‘From Virtue to Politeness.’ Vol. II: 93f; Hampsher-Monk, ibid., pp. 100f, also notes the probable impact of Richard Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance on Burke, illustrating how his construing of politeness as related to social order would likely have been, pace Pocock’s seminal analyses, more prescient to Burke’s reflections than the philosophical writings of Smith and Millar. 29 Cf. Thomas Dixon. From Passions to Emotions. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 67; Roy Porter. Flesh in the Age of Reason. (London: Penguin, 2003) esp. pp. 138ff. 30 Catherine Larr"ere. ‘Women, Republicanism and the Growth of Commerce.’ Vol. II: 151. 31 Judith A. Vega. ‘Feminist Republicanism and the Political Perception of Gender.’ Vol. II: 169; cf. also Christian Faur!e. ‘Rights or Virtues: Women and the Republic.’ Vol. II: 133, who similarly uses the Montesquieuean refrain that ‘in republics women are free by the laws and captured by the mores.’ (Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, [1748] trans. A. Cohler, B.C. Miller and H.S. Stone. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) Bk. VII, ch. 9). 32 See Johnson Kent Wright. ‘The Idea of a Republican Constitution in Old-R!egime France.’ Vol. I, esp. pp. 298–303.
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the future of Europe.33 Yet, it was with Brissot, he suggests, that we find one of the few ‘straightforwardly republican’ attempts to solve the French fiscal crisis. It was one which was explicitly offered as a counter-position to Sieye" s’s argument, and which developed Rousseau’s account of the need to contextualise the practices of government as emissaries or deputies of the people according to circumstance. Like Sieye" s, nevertheless, the impact of the philosophical approach to historical progress most clearly associated with the Scottish Enlightenment(s) was of paramount importance to his attempt to reconstitute the relationship between human passions and the rule of law. This took concrete form in the practical policy of using public credit to help with debt reduction.34 The complex intertwining of political and economic virtue and whether ancient political prudence could be combined with modern economic prudence was precisely what Burke, as Sonenscher suggests, found deeply troubling.35 It is a theme that Istvan Hont has notably explored in several publications.36 As already indicated, Donald Winch provides a typically provocative account of the partial overlaps between the classical republican tradition and the movement towards political economy through moral philosophy by writers like Adam Smith. Marco Guena, in his contribution, focuses on Adam Ferguson. His well-known Essay on the History of Civil Society attempted, he suggests, to reconcile Scottish considerations of the progress of society from rudeness to polish, with the classical schema already discussed of the rise, greatness, and then corruption or decadence of Rome.37 This points to the problem that was of such importance to Ferguson, namely, that if wealth and commerce necessarily bring prosperity, they do not necessarily bring happiness, and it is his concern to delineate precisely how and why corruption of character can occur in civilised societies. His reasoning, of course, illustrates a traditional republican worry about standing armies, where the unhooking of the citizen from the soldier is a catalyst towards a dangerous passivity. Correlatively, the professionalisation of politics makes despotism and its unhappy relation, military invasion, much more likely. Therefore, and in a return to Machiavellian concerns, freedom can only emerge for Ferguson ‘from conflict between virtuous citizens’, where public spirit and civic alertness are the prerequisites for the maintenance of liberty.38 33
Michael Sonenscher. ‘Republicanism, State Finances and the Emergence of Commercial Society in Eighteenth-century France—or from Royal to Ancient Republicanism and Back.’ Vol. II: 281. 34 Sonenscher. ‘Idea of a Republican Constitution.’ esp. pp. 283ff; cf. also Michael Sonenscher, ‘The Nation’s Debt and the Birth of the Modern Republic: The French Fiscal Deficit and the Politics of the Revolution of 1789. Part I.’ History of Political Thought 18 (1997): 70. 35 Sonenscher. ‘Idea of a Republican Constitution.’ p. 289. 36 Istvan Hont. ‘Free Trade and the Economic Limits to National Politics: Neo-Machiavellian Political Economy Reconsidered.’ The Economic Limits to Modern Politics. Ed. John Dunn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) 41–120; ‘The Rhapsody of Public Debt: David Hume and Voluntary State Bankruptcy.’ Political Discourse in Early-Modern Britain. Eds. N. Phillipson and Q. Skinner. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) 321–348. 37 Marco Geuna. ‘Republicanism and Commercial Society in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Case of Adam Ferguson.’ Vol. II: 181. 38 Geuna. Ibid., pp. 187, 193.
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Building on certain of these themes, Fania Oz-Salzberger restates positions outlined in her earlier work pertaining to the relationship between Scottish and German Enlightenments,39 but she here focuses on the relationship between the idea of the republic and that of commerce. Observing the fact that of all their numerous academic and public inter-relationships, the political thought of eighteenth-century Scots and Germans was the least well developed, she focuses, like Geuna, on the problem of passivity for Adam Ferguson.40 Ferguson and more famously Smith were keenly translated into German. And Oz-Salzberger suggests, the ‘1770s mark a transition from early-modern German political thinking, which seldom drew on republican sources, and did not regard the remaining independent imperial towns as viable models for political theorising’. This moved towards ‘a new phase in which challenges from North America and France—and by further reflection, from Switzerland and Britain—led to an intensive and short-lived reconsideration of the idea of a republic’.41 I broadly agree. By way of a footnote, though, one might note that consideration of the federal structure implemented in the United States of America remained quite important to German political thinking at various points, most notably in debates of the Vormarz. It would reappear at various intervals in . later historical discussions, although her general conclusion here is probably correct that the Scottish reworking of classical themes remained largely irrelevant to German political thought.42 Indeed, the tradition of civic particularism in the Holy Roman Empire considerably constrained claims to princely absolutism, although the various divisions of sovereignty were, as Pufendorf had famously noted, labyrinthine to say the least. The eighteenth-century German debates attempted to reconcile, it would seem, a ‘realist’ approach to monarchical rule with a ‘spiritualist’ account of republicanism through the development of community, something most famously documented in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right with the movement from abstract right to ethical life.43 In eighteenth-century Italy, one of the main variations on the similar theme of 39
See Fania Oz-Salzberger. Translating the Enlightenment. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Fania Oz-Salzberger. ‘Scots, Germans, Republic and Commerce.’ Vol. II, esp. pp. 202f. 41 Oz-Salzberger. ‘Scots, Germans.’ p. 211. Bela Kapossy. ‘Neo-Roman Republicanism and Commercial Society: The Example of Eighteenth-Century Berne.’ Vol. II: 227–247, not only outlines the Swiss dimension to the European heritage, but also considers Berne’s position as a key creditor in Western Europe, which allowed its patrician elite to pursue a policy of low taxation but with generous public welfare programmes. He also notes the radical artisan critique of the idea that patrician rule and republican politics could be reconciled. 42 Cf. Oz-Salzberger. ‘Scots, Germans.’ p. 226; Horst Dippel. Die amerikanische Verfassung in Deutschland im 19. Jahrhundert. (Goldbach: Keip Verlag, 1994). 43 Oz-Salzberger. ‘Scots, Germans.’ p. 221; As Robert von Friedeburg, ‘Civic Humanism and Republican Citizenship in Early-Modern Germany.’ Vol. I: 135, notes, the early-modern focus on the role of the free city could often be seen as a clear challenge, nevertheless, to monarchical rule. He discusses in particular the representation of the city as civitas sibi princeps in the allegory of good government displayed in the mayoral house at Regensburg, a particularly well-known example, as well as outlining . another context for the development of the genre of politica, which Bodeker and van Gelderen also discuss. For wider reflections on this image in Regensburg, see also Kristin Eldyss Sorensen Zapalac. ‘‘‘In His Image and Likeness’’: Political Iconography and Religious Change in Regensburg, 1500–1600’. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990) esp. pp. 85–89. 40
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historical development from ancient republics, through free political re! gimes and towards monarchies, was to be found in Vico’s reflections. These transitions, well known especially from the later editions of the New Science, highlight the political struggles necessary to move forward from the heroic to the free republic. They were distilled through a wider historical cosmology of the transformation from an age of gods and heroes to the age of men. From the moment that the heroic republic was born, however, it contained within itself the seeds of its own destruction, so that much like certain readings of Machiavelli, ‘in celebrating republican heroism’ Vico nevertheless ‘furnished the counter-vailing techniques of disenchantment’.44 Vico’s theory of history would have wide ramifications for the transmission of classically republican themes into both nineteenth-century England and France, via the Liberal Anglicans in the former case, and Michelet’s historical writings in the latter.45 Tracing some of the implications of these particular eighteenth-century themes, which are themselves variations on classical republican discourses, has produced some of the most engaging work on early nineteenth-century political ideas.46 It is in this way, I think, that something of the rationale behind Donald Winch’s provocative closing piece to these volumes can be found. To put the point polemically, nineteenth-century political thought, itself so rich and complex has not been paid the same attention than that afforded to the period roughly from 1500 to 1800, and these detailed discussions might in some way help to rectify this situation. Scholars of nineteenth-century political thought have yet to take up the challenge lain down by these earlier traditions of thought. J.S. Mill’s hyperbolic autobiographical claim, that the nineteenth-century was, in nuce, a grand reaction to what had gone immediately before it, still casts a long shadow. It has led scholars such as John Morrow and Mark Francis to suggest that the kind of focus on political languages outlined by writers like John Pocock and Quentin Skinner is inappropriate to this ‘new’ period.47 Correlatively, though from a different perspective, Mark Bevir suggests that if we use the correct heuristic terms, we can trace new patterns of meaning between Romanticism and Enlightenment that structure the legacies of eighteenth-century political thought during this period, and which will allow us to capture something of the logic of the history of these ideas.48 Both these claims, it seems to me, still seek to overly compartmentalise nineteenth-century political thought. And it is one of the major virtues of these volumes that in codifying and cementing the richness, diversity and also the parallel incongruities of broadly shared political languages, they provide an illustration of the background resources necessary to trace the complex set of transformations in political language that occur 44
Eluggero Pii. ‘Republicanism and Commercial Society in Eighteenth-century Italy.’ Vol. II: 263. Duncan Forbes. The Liberal Anglican Idea of History. (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1952); Patrick H. Hutton. ‘Vico and the French Revolutionary Tradition.’ Journal of the History of Ideas 37:2 (1976): 241–256. 46 See John Burrow. Whigs and Liberals. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). 47 John Morrow and Mark Francis. A History of English Political Thought in the Nineteenth-Century. (London: Duckworth, 1994). 48 Mark Bevir. ‘English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century.’ History of Political Thought XVII:1 (1996): 113–127. 45
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in nineteenth-century political thinking. Mill himself is even one of the major figures here, particularly so in the reciprocal relationship he posits between the cultivation of character and the development of civilisation. These volumes present a wealth of material on the development and character of early-modern and modern republicanism, showing that despite the fact that republicanism is certainly a shared European heritage, there is much to be gained from locating the application of this heritage in particular national contexts. As such, it presents a vindication both of the continued interest in republican political thought, but also illustrates the virtues of a historical approach to political theory, highlighting the rich legacy of the history of European ideas. The excellent essays show the unity of the history of European ideas in context, by virtue of the shared heritage of republican ideas, values, and norms. They also, and unsurprisingly, point to the various sources of internal divisions within this perspective, for the history of political ideas is never a finished and uncontested enterprise.