Classical republicanism

• 1. Introduction

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  Classical republicanism was not born in ancient Greece or Rome. It was born in Renaissance Florence, among merchants and scholars who looked back at those civilisations and saw in them the blueprint for something better than the kingdoms surrounding them. The Latin phrase at the heart of this story is res publica, which translates literally as "the public thing" or "the public affair." No single written definition from the ancient world maps neatly onto what we now call a republic, yet the essential features were already there: mixed government, civic virtue, the rule of law, and the idea that liberty depends not on being left alone, but on not being dominated by anyone.

  Why did this philosophy take hold in Florence and not somewhere else? What happened when it crossed the Alps into England, the Netherlands, Ireland, and eventually the American colonies? And why do scholars still argue today over whether the thinkers who claimed to revive classical ideals actually understood them at all? Those questions are what this documentary will trace.

• 2. Roots in Greece and Rome

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  Aristotle, in the Politics, Polybius, in the Histories, and Cicero, in De re publica and De Officiis, were the three writers whose ideas became the essential core of classical republicanism. None of them used the word "republicanism," which did not yet exist. What they shared was a conviction that the best government blends monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy so that each element offsets the weaknesses of the others.

  Plato, in The Republic, placed the need for civic virtue at the centre of any good state. In Book V he argued that until rulers have the nature of philosophers, or philosophers become rulers, there can be no civic peace or happiness. That was an extreme position, and later thinkers softened it, but the underlying premise, that personal virtue and public virtue are inseparable, ran through all of classical republican thought.

  Polybius, writing in the mid-2nd century BCE, made the Roman Republic his test case. In Book 6 of the Histories he described its constitution as a mixture of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. He argued that this balance produced a level of domestic tranquillity that allowed Rome to conquer the Mediterranean. His analysis deeply influenced Cicero, who in De re publica linked the Roman concept of res publica directly to the Greek politeia.

  Cicero himself was a complicated figure. In his theoretical works he defended monarchy, or at least a mixed monarchy and oligarchy, yet in his political life he opposed Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, and Octavian. That contradiction was not hypocrisy; it reflected a genuine tension in republican thought between ideal theory and practical power. Cicero's opposition to those men eventually cost him his life, making him, as historians have noted, a victim of his own republican ideals.

  Tacitus, writing later, was less interested in classifying governments than in watching how power accumulates quietly. He observed that the early emperors received their authority freely from a state that was still, on the surface, a republic. In Tacitus's view, the drift away from genuine republican government became irreversible only when Tiberius consolidated power, shortly after Augustus died in 14 CE.

• 3. Florence and the Renaissance Revival

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  According to the historian Hans Baron, who coined the term "civic humanism" and was for many years the foremost expert on classical republicanism's development, the ideology was a product of the long conflict between Florence and Milan. Florence was governed by its commercial elites; Milan was a monarchy controlled by its landed aristocracy. The Florentines argued that their form of government was superior because it more closely resembled those of the Greeks and the Roman Republic.

  Leonardo Bruni, who lived from 1370 to 1444, pushed this argument further. Drawing on Tacitus's Histories, Bruni asserted that republican government produced better men, while monarchy was actively harmful to human virtue.

  Niccolò Machiavelli, who lived from 1469 to 1527, is often cited as one of the first to reintroduce classical republican ideas, though scholars dispute this. His Discourses on Livy is the period's key work on republics. Yet he also wrote The Prince, a treatise on running a monarchy, which became far more widely read. The early modern writers generally did not see the republican model as universally applicable; most believed it could only succeed in small, highly urbanised city-states.

  Some scholars have argued that Machiavelli was not a classical republican at all, since he described mostly medieval political relations. A collection of scholars has dubbed his particular approach "rapacious republicanism." Others go further, arguing that Machiavelli's innovations mark a turning point, not a recovery, and that what emerged from the Renaissance is better called "early modern republicanism" to avoid the confusion of labelling a 15th-century philosophy "classical."

  The terminology itself was formalised by Zera Fink in the 1940s, and the debate it sparked has not closed. Thomas Pangle, a student of Leo Strauss, has criticised the "civic humanist" reconstruction as a distortion of both classical republicanism and Machiavelli's political science. Pangle argued that scholars like J. G. A. Pocock and Hannah Arendt threw a veil of softened, egalitarian "civic humanism" over the imperialism, ruthlessness, and warring hierarchy that genuinely characterise Machiavelli.

• 4. Liberty, Domination, and Liberalism

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  Philip Pettit, one of the leading contemporary exponents of classical republican thought, argues that republican liberty rests on a concept he calls "non-domination," while liberal freedom rests on "non-interference." This distinction matters because it changes what a government must do. A slave whose master happens to be kind still lacks republican liberty, because the master retains the power to interfere at will.

  For most of the 20th century the accepted view, associated with Isaiah Berlin, was that republicanism leaned toward positive liberty, meaning freedom to participate in self-governance, while liberalism championed negative liberty, meaning freedom from interference. Pettit's challenge to that framework has reshaped the academic conversation.

  A related difference concerns the social roots of liberty. Liberalism tends to treat liberty as pre-social, something individuals possess before they enter any community. Classical republicans saw genuine liberty as a product of society itself, created and maintained by civic institutions, laws, and active participation. Because the two traditions nonetheless both opposed absolute monarchy, they were frequently conflated during the Enlightenment. Modern scholars treat them as distinct streams, separated most clearly by their attitudes toward private property and individualism.

  The concept of the social contract, placed at the core of republicanism since Thomas Hobbes, spans both traditions but lands differently in each. French Républicanisme, rooted in Rousseau's idea of a general will, takes the contract further than Anglo-American liberalism, insisting that each citizen stands in a direct relationship with the state, with no intermediate identity based on local, religious, or racial affiliation. In theory, this makes anti-discrimination laws unnecessary, though critics argue that colour-blind laws can perpetuate discrimination in practice.

• 5. The Corsican Experiment

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  The first Enlightenment republic in Europe arose on Corsica, a Mediterranean island that had been experiencing ongoing rebellions against Genoese rule since the 1720s. The initial phase, from 1729 to 1736, sought to restore Spanish imperial control; when that proved impossible, an independent Kingdom of Corsica was proclaimed in 1736, following the Enlightenment ideal of a written constitutional monarchy. That arrangement collapsed too, and the more radical reformers, led by Pasquale Paoli, pushed for a constitutional and parliamentary republic.

  The Corsican Republic, which lasted from 1755 to 1769, was genuinely radical for its time. It included a permanent national parliament with fixed-term legislatures and regular elections, introduced universal male suffrage, and is thought to be the first constitution in the world to grant women the right to vote, though that female suffrage may not have been consistently applied. It also founded a national university at Corte and established a popular standing army.

  Rousseau, in On the Social Contract (1762), singled out Corsica as the one European country still capable of making its own laws. He even volunteered a draft constitution for Paoli's use. Voltaire, in his Précis du siècle de Louis XV (1769), wrote that such bravery was found only among free peoples.

  The republic fell in 1769 to a combination of Genoese and French forces and was incorporated into the Kingdom of France. Yet its influence outlasted its existence. The Scottish essayist James Boswell popularised the Corsican story among radicals in Britain and North America through An Account of Corsica. The Sons of Liberty, who helped initiate the American Revolution, named Pascal Paoli a direct inspiration. The son of Ebenezer Mackintosh was named Pascal Paoli Mackintosh in Paoli's honour, and no fewer than five American counties carry the name Paoli.

• 6. England, Ireland, and the Atlantic World

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  Oliver Cromwell established the Commonwealth of England in 1649, after the overthrow of King Charles I, and ruled it until 1660. James Harrington was the leading republican philosopher of that period. John Milton expressed his views across political tracts, poetry, and prose; in Paradise Lost he used Satan's fall to argue that unfit rulers should be brought to justice. As Christopher N. Warren has argued, Milton offered a language to critique imperialism, to question dictators, and to forge political bonds across national lines. Warren and other historians trace the influence of this international Miltonic republicanism forward to 19th-century radicals including Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

  The collapse of the Commonwealth in 1660 and the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II effectively discredited republicanism among England's ruling circles. Republicanism survived in the "country" party of the early 18th century, whose thinkers denounced court corruption and produced a political theory that heavily influenced the American colonists. The English ruling classes of the 18th century vigorously opposed republicanism, typified by their attacks on John Wilkes and their hostility to both the American Revolution and the French Revolution.

  In Ireland, the Society of United Irishmen was founded in 1791 in both Belfast and Dublin, inspired by the American and French Revolutions. The inaugural Belfast meeting on the 18th of October 1791 approved a declaration identifying Ireland's central grievance: rule by Englishmen whose object was the interest of another country. The declaration urged constitutional reform, union among Irish people, and the removal of all religious disqualifications.

  Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, published in February 1791, was a catalyst. Paine noted in November 1791, only eight months after its first edition, that Irish sales already far exceeded English ones, with over forty thousand copies sold in Ireland. Theobald Wolfe Tone later wrote that the controversy surrounding Paine's work and Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France changed Irish politics in an instant. The United Irishmen's uprising ran from May to September 1798, with French military support arriving in August and again in October of that year.

• 7. America and the Republican Legacy

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  J. G. A. Pocock argued in The Machiavellian Moment, published in 1975, that in the early 18th century republican ideas were at least as important as liberal ones to the American political tradition. Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood extended that argument, contending that the American founding fathers were more shaped by republicanism than by Locke's liberalism. Cornell University professor Isaac Kramnick has pushed back, arguing that Americans have always been fundamentally individualistic and therefore Lockean; Joyce Appleby has argued similarly.

  Pocock described the intellectual world the colonial leaders inhabited: the Whig canon and neo-Harringtonians, alongside Milton, Harrington, Sidney, Trenchard, Gordon, and Bolingbroke, together with Greek, Roman, and Renaissance masters as far as Montesquieu. That literature produced a political culture built around a civic ideal threatened by corruption, with government itself paradoxically seen as a principal source of that corruption.

  Leopold von Ranke, writing in 1848, argued that when the North Americans abandoned English constitutionalism and created a republic based on individual rights, they introduced a new force into the world. Ranke traced a direct line from American republicanism to European liberalism and to the revolutionary movements of the 19th century, framing the conflict between monarchical legitimacy and popular sovereignty as the defining contest of modern history.

  Classical republicanism became influential across the Enlightenment through a line of thinkers stretching from Hobbes through Locke, Giambattista Vico, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and on to Kant. Jules Ferry, Prime Minister of France from 1880 to 1885, drew on both the republican and liberal traditions when he enacted the Ferry Laws, which ended the Catholic Church's involvement in government institutions including schools, overturning the earlier Falloux Laws in accordance with the anti-clerical thinking of the Philosophes.