Republic

• 1. Introduction

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  Republic: the word derives from two Latin words, res and publica, meaning roughly "the people's thing" or "public matter." Of the world's 206 sovereign states, 159 include the word "republic" in their official names. Yet many of those states do not hold free elections, and many countries with elected governments never use the word at all. So what, exactly, does a republic mean? The question turns out to be one of the most contested in the history of political thought, running from ancient Athens and Rome through medieval Italian city-states, the Dutch Revolt, the French Revolution, and the founding of the United States. And the answer has never been settled. When Benjamin Franklin was asked what kind of government the Constitutional Convention had produced, his reply, preserved in the notes of James McHenry, was simply: "A Republic or a Monarchy?" The tension in that answer has driven political argument ever since.

• 2. A Roman Foundation

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  The Roman Republic, which lasted from the overthrow of the kings in 509 BC until the establishment of the Empire in 27 BC, gave the modern world its template for what a republic could look like. Its constitution rested on three pillars: a Senate of wealthy aristocrats with significant influence; a series of popular assemblies open to all free citizens, with the power to elect magistrates and pass laws; and a rotating set of magistracies holding varying degrees of civil and political authority. Two consuls, elected for a one-year term by the comitia centuriata, sat at the top of that system. The brevity of their terms was deliberate: no single person was meant to hold power for long.

  Cicero, writing during the Republic's final decades, translated the Greek word politeia into Latin as res publica. Politeia itself is a broader term that can mean simply "form of government" or "regime," without implying any particular type. Plato's most famous work on politics, known in English as The Republic, carries politeia as its original title. Aristotle, in Book III of his Politics, argued that when citizens govern for the public good it deserves the name common to all governments: politeia. Cicero's most important work in this tradition is De re publica, still regarded as the central Roman text on the subject.

  Over time the classical republics were consumed by the empires they had helped create. Most Greek republics were absorbed into the Macedonian Empire of Alexander. The Roman Republic itself expanded to the point where it conquered states such as Carthage that might themselves have been considered republics, and eventually transformed into the Roman Empire. The word, however, outlived the institutions.

• 3. Republics Before Rome

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  Republic city-states flourished in Phoenicia along the Levantine coast starting from the 11th century BC. In ancient Phoenicia, the office of Shophet functioned very much like a Roman consul. Under Persian rule from 539 to 332 BC, Phoenician city-states such as Tyre replaced their kings with a system of suffetes, or judges, who served fixed mandates of six years. Arwad, one of those Phoenician cities, has been cited as among the earliest known examples of a state where the people, rather than a monarch, are described as sovereign.

  On the Indian subcontinent, early republican institutions called gaṇasaṅghas may have existed as early as the 6th century BC and persisted in some areas until the 4th century AD. The gaṇa held regular assemblies that discussed all major state decisions; in at least some states, attendance was open to all free men. The Licchavis operated with a primary governing body of 7,077 gaṇa mukhyas, the heads of the most important families. The Mallakas, centered in the city of Kusinagara, and the Vajjika League, centered in Vaishali, are among the earliest documented examples of this form. The Greek historian Diodorus, writing two centuries after Alexander's invasion of India, noted the existence of independent and democratic states there, though he offered no detail.

  The question of how to classify these systems remains open. The Arthashastra, an ancient handbook written for monarchs, includes a chapter on dealing with the saṅghas that focuses on manipulating their noble leaders rather than the mass of citizens, suggesting the assemblies were more aristocratic than fully popular.

• 4. Medieval Merchants and Free Cities

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  In 930 AD, refugees from Norway who had fled the unification of that country under King Harald Fairhair established the Icelandic Commonwealth. The Althing, which combined the functions of parliament and supreme court, settled disputes, passed laws, and took decisions of national importance. In the year 1000, it decreed that all Icelanders must be baptized as Christians. Unusually for its era, the Commonwealth had no single official leader. Internal clan warfare during the early 13th century, combined with pressure from the Norwegian king Haakon IV, eventually led Icelandic chieftains to accept Haakon IV as king by signing the Gamli sáttmáli, or "Old Covenant," in 1262. The Althing, however, continues to function as Iceland's parliament today.

  In the late Middle Ages, small and wealthy trading states began embracing republican government across Europe. Knud Haakonssen has noted that by the Renaissance, Europe was divided between states controlled by a landed elite, which were monarchies, and states controlled by a commercial elite, which were republics. Italy had the weakest central government on the continent, and many of its cities gained considerable independence as a result. The two most powerful were the Republic of Venice and its rival the Republic of Genoa. Writers including Bartholomew of Lucca, Brunetto Latini, Marsilius of Padua, and Leonardo Bruni saw these medieval city-states as heirs to Greece and Rome.

  In the Holy Roman Empire, 51 of the largest towns became free imperial cities, holding most real power locally. The Swiss cantons secured the same rights; when the Habsburgs tried to reassert control, rural farmers and town merchants joined the same rebellion, and the Swiss Confederacy was proclaimed. Two Russian cities, Novgorod and Pskov, also adopted republican government in the 12th and 13th centuries respectively, until Muscovy conquered them at the end of the 15th and the start of the 16th century. Late medieval republics were rarely democracies: property qualifications or guild membership limited who could vote, and more than 200 risings by lower classes occurred in the towns of the Holy Roman Empire alone during this period.

• 5. Calvinism and the Northern Revolts

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  John Calvin did not call for the abolition of monarchy, but he advanced the doctrine that the faithful had the duty to overthrow irreligious monarchs. That idea proved explosive. Advocacy for republics appeared in the writings of the Huguenots during the French Wars of Religion, and Calvinism then played a central role in the republican revolts in both England and the Netherlands.

  During the Dutch Revolt, which began in 1566, the rejection of Spanish Habsburg rule did not immediately produce a republic. In the formal Act of Abjuration of 1581, the throne of King Philip was declared vacant, but the Dutch magistrates then approached Francis, Duke of Anjou, Queen Elizabeth of England, and Prince William of Orange, one after another, to fill it. It was only in 1588 that the Estates, the representative assembly, decided to vest sovereignty in themselves.

  In 1641 the English Civil War began, spearheaded by the Puritans and funded by the merchants of London. King Charles I was executed. James Harrington, Algernon Sidney, and John Milton became among the first English writers to argue for rejecting monarchy in favor of a republican form of government. The English Commonwealth was short-lived, however, and the monarchy was restored. The Dutch Republic continued formally until 1795, but by the mid-18th century its stadtholder had become a de facto monarch. Calvinists were also among the earliest settlers of the British and Dutch colonies in North America, carrying these republican ideas across the Atlantic.

• 6. Revolution and the Modern Republic

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  Jean-Jacques Rousseau admired the republican experiment in Corsica, which lasted from 1755 to 1769, and described his ideal as small, self-governing communes. Montesquieu felt a city-state should ideally be a republic but maintained that a limited monarchy was better suited to a large territory. Both thinkers believed that a state like France, with 20 million people, would be impossible to govern as a republic.

  The American Revolution began as a rejection only of the authority of the British Parliament, not of the monarchy. It was the failure of the British monarch to protect the colonies that shifted opinion. Thomas Paine's widely distributed tract Common Sense laid out the case for republican ideals to the general public. The Constitution of the United States went into effect in 1789, creating a federal republic to replace the confederation under the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union ratified in 1781. The first ten amendments, known as the Bill of Rights, guaranteed the natural rights that republican thinkers had argued justified the Revolution.

  The French Revolution was also not republican at its outset. Only after the Flight to Varennes destroyed most remaining sympathy for the king was a republic declared and Louis XVI sent to the guillotine. French military success then spread republics across Europe by force of arms. Napoleon's rise ended the French First Republic and its sister republics, replacing each with what he called "popular monarchies." During his rule, the oldest republics on the continent, including Venice, Genoa, and the Dutch Republic, were absorbed into monarchies.

  Republicanism expanded again after World War I when the Russian Empire fell in 1917, the German Empire and Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, and the Ottoman Empire in 1922. New states including Ireland, Poland, Finland, and Czechoslovakia chose republican government. The 1946 Italian institutional referendum, held on the 2nd of June, produced a vote of 54.3 percent in favor of the republic, a result celebrated annually as Festa della Repubblica. In East Asia, the Republic of China was proclaimed on the 1st of January 1912, under the leadership of Sun Yat-sen, whose Three Principles of the People combined American, European, and Chinese ideas.

• 7. Republics in Name and Practice

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  James Madison defined republic narrowly in Federalist Paper No. 10, equating it with representative democracy. That meaning was widely adopted early in United States history, including in Noah Webster's dictionary of 1828. John Adams rejected the new Jeffersonian definition and held to the older one: government where sovereignty resides in more than one person, whether through democracy, aristocracy, or a mixture of both.

  The Supreme Court, in Luther v. Borden in 1849, declined to define the republican form of government, calling it a "political question." In United States v. Cruikshank in 1875, it ruled that the "equal rights of citizens" were inherent to the idea of a republic. The term itself does not appear in the Declaration of Independence but does appear in Article IV of the Constitution, which guarantees to every state in the union a republican form of government.

  In practice, the line between a republic and a monarchy is not always clear. The constitutional monarchies of Western Europe today have almost all real political power vested in elected representatives, with monarchs holding mostly reserve powers. Such states are sometimes called crowned republics. On the other side, some self-proclaimed republics function like absolute monarchies, with power passed from father to son; North Korea and the former Ba'athist Syria are two examples cited in the literature. Malaysia's Yang di-Pertuan Agong is elected every five years by the Conference of Rulers composed of the nine hereditary rulers of the Malay states, blending monarchy and election in a single office. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had an elective monarchy with a suffrage of some 500,000 nobles, and its proponents drew on Italian Renaissance writings to call their system a rzeczpospolita, itself a translation of res publica.

• 8. The Idea That Keeps Shifting

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  J. G. A. Pocock argued in 1975 that a consistent set of republican ideals, traceable through Machiavelli, Milton, Montesquieu, and the founders of the United States, formed a distinct ideology with a history separate from liberalism. Quentin Skinner, Philip Pettit, and Cass Sunstein have since extended that argument. Bernard Bailyn, writing in the 1960s and 1970s, argued that republicanism was at least as important as liberalism in the formation of the United States, a view scholars like Isaac Kramnick reject entirely.

  The debate about what a republic is has never resolved itself because the word has always served more than one purpose. Before the 17th century it could refer to any non-tyrannical government; the Holy Roman Empire was also known as the Sancta Respublica Romana. The Byzantine Empire called itself the Roman Republic because its thinkers did not regard monarchy as incompatible with republicanism. Marat's question about the French Republic, asking what use it was to have broken the aristocracy of the nobles only to replace it with the aristocracy of the rich, has echoed across every republic proclaimed since.

  What the word carries today is both a claim about power, that it rests with the public rather than a single ruler, and a set of open questions about what that means in practice. Paul Rahe argues that the classical republics had a form of government with few real links to any modern state. Whether Rahe is right or Pocock is right, the argument itself, nearly 2,500 years old and still unresolved, may be the most distinctly republican institution of all.