Republicanism

• 1. Introduction

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  Republicanism is a political ideology built on a radical premise: that sovereignty belongs to the people, not to a king, a dynasty, or a divine right. The word itself traces to the Latin res publica, meaning "public thing," a phrase coined to describe the system of government that took shape in Rome after Lucius Junius Brutus and his ally Collatinus expelled the kings in the 6th century BCE. From that single act of expulsion, a tradition was born that would travel across continents and centuries, shaping revolutions in France, North America, Ireland, Italy, and beyond.

  What does it actually mean to live in a republic? The answers have never been simple. Republicanism has worn many faces: a defense of civic virtue and the common good, a call for mixed government, a rejection of corruption, and a vision of freedom understood not merely as absence of restraint but as freedom from domination. John Adams, the second president of the United States and one of republicanism's most systematic theorists, described the science of politics as the science of social happiness. He believed a republic was not an ideological choice but the rational conclusion of rigorous study applied to the problem of governance.

  The story that follows asks how an idea rooted in ancient Rome became the organizing principle for modern states across six continents, what it meant in practice in places as different as Renaissance Florence, Enlightenment Corsica, and 19th-century Brazil, and why thinkers as different as Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Giuseppe Mazzini all turned to it when they tried to imagine a better government.

• 2. Ancient Roots

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  Polybius, writing in the mid-2nd century BCE, offered one of the most influential analyses of why Rome had risen so quickly to dominate the Mediterranean world. His answer was structural. In Book 6 of his histories, he described the Roman Republic as a "mixed" form of government, one that blended elements of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy in a way that allowed each to counterbalance the weaknesses of the others. The domestic stability this produced, Polybius argued, was the precondition for Roman expansion.

  The Greek concept underpinning all of this was politeia, which Roman writers translated as res publica. Plato, Aristotle, and later Polybius and Cicero each held that the ideal republic was a mixture of the three basic forms of government. In The Republic, Plato placed great weight on civic virtue, arguing in Book V that there could be no civic peace until rulers possessed the nature of philosophers or philosophers became the rulers. Aristotle went further in practice, classifying ancient Greek city-states like Athens and Sparta as classical republics because of the extensive participation they offered citizens in legislation and decision-making. He even considered Carthage to qualify, finding its political system closer to Sparta than to a tyranny.

  Cicero carried the tradition into the late Roman Republic, linking res publica explicitly to the Greek politeia in his work De re publica. But Cicero's own life illustrated the tension at the heart of republican theory. While he defended mixed government in his writings, he spent his political career opposing men such as Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, and Octavian, who were accumulating personal power in ways that made the old republican forms hollow. That opposition eventually cost him his life. Tacitus, writing a generation later, traced the moment of no return not to Julius Caesar but to Tiberius, who established power shortly after the death of Augustus in 14 CE. By that point, Tacitus observed, too many principles had been set aside for the republic to be recovered.

• 3. Renaissance Revival

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  In the late Middle Ages, a group of small but wealthy trading cities in Europe rediscovered republican government almost by accident. Florence, Genoa, Venice, and the members of the Hanseatic League were controlled not by landed aristocrats but by merchant classes, and their civic arrangements reflected that commercial base. The scholar Haakonssen observed that by the Renaissance, Europe had effectively split along this line: states run by landed elites became monarchies; states run by commercial elites became republics. One striking exception was Dithmarschen, a loosely organized group of autonomous villages in northern Europe that formed something closer to a peasants' republic.

  Niccolò Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy stands as the defining text of Renaissance republican thought. It is worth noting, however, that the same Machiavelli also wrote The Prince, a treatise on monarchy that has always been more widely read. This apparent contradiction points to a real feature of Renaissance political thinking: most early modern writers did not see the republic as universally applicable. They believed it could function only in small, highly urbanized city-states, and they did not treat monarchy as inherently illegitimate. Jean Bodin, writing in Six Books of the Commonwealth in 1576, went so far as to identify monarchy with republic outright.

  The terminology for Renaissance republicanism itself became contested. The historian Zera Fink developed the phrase "classical republicanism" in the 1940s, but scholars such as Brugger later argued this confused the Renaissance revival with the ancient original. "Early modern republicanism" has been proposed as a cleaner label, and the tradition is also sometimes called civic humanism. Whatever the label, the core ideas were consistent: mixed government, the centrality of virtue, the common good as the standard of legitimate rule, and a view of liberty that Renaissance thinkers developed into something distinct from the liberal tradition that was emerging alongside it.

• 4. The Corsican Experiment

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  In 1755, on a small Mediterranean island that most European observers would have considered an unlikely venue for political innovation, the world's first Enlightenment republic took shape. Corsica had been churning through revolts since the 1720s against its sovereign, the Italian city-state of Genoa. An early phase of rebellion from 1729 to 1736 sought merely to restore Spanish imperial control; when that proved impossible, a short-lived Kingdom of Corsica was declared from 1736 to 1740, built on the Enlightenment model of a written constitutional monarchy. That too collapsed, and a more radical group of reformers led by Pasquale Paoli pushed for something bolder.

  The Corsican Republic that Paoli built drew on Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It created a permanent national parliament with fixed-term legislatures and regular elections. It introduced universal male suffrage. More radically still, it is thought to be the first constitution in the world to grant women the right to vote, though female suffrage was limited to heads of the family. A national university was established at Corte. A standing army was organized on a popular basis. The republic lasted fifteen years, from 1755 to 1769, when combined Genoese and French forces overwhelmed it and Corsica became a province of the Kingdom of France.

  Rousseau's On the Social Contract, published in 1762, declared in chapter 10 of Book II that there was still one European country capable of making its own laws: the island of Corsica. He called that brave people worthy of a wise man who would teach them to preserve their liberty, and he volunteered to draft a constitution for Paoli's use. Voltaire affirmed in his Précis du siècle de Louis XV, published in 1769, that such bravery was found only among free peoples. The Scottish essayist James Boswell spread the Corsican story across Britain and North America through his Account of Corsica. The Sons of Liberty, who initiated the American Revolution, named Paoli a direct inspiration for their struggle against Britain. At least five American counties were named Paoli in his honor, and the son of Ebenezer Mackintosh was named Pascal Paoli Mackintosh after him.

• 5. Milton, Cromwell, and English Republicanism

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  Oliver Cromwell created what he called the Commonwealth of England in 1649, following the overthrow of King Charles I, and ruled it until his death in 1658. James Harrington was the period's leading philosophical voice for republican government. John Milton contributed a different kind of republicanism: one that expressed itself through poetry and prose as much as through political tracts.

  In his epic poem Paradise Lost, Milton used Satan's fall as an allegory for illegitimate monarchy, suggesting that unfit rulers could be removed and that the question of political legitimacy extended beyond any single nation's borders. As the scholar Christopher N. Warren has argued, Milton's epic offered a language for critiquing imperialism, defending free international discourse, and forging political bonds across national lines. Warren and other historians have traced the influence of this international Miltonic republicanism forward into the 19th century, where it shaped the thinking of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

  The Commonwealth collapsed in 1660 with the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II, and English republicanism lost its standing among the ruling classes. It survived, though, in a different form. The liberalism of John Locke, with its emphasis on rights, played a central role in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. A "country" party emerged in the early 18th century, sometimes called the commonwealthmen, that attacked the corruption of the court and elaborated a political theory that would prove enormously influential among the American colonists. The English ruling classes of the 18th century generally despised republicanism, as their attacks on John Wilkes and their hostility to both the American and French Revolutions made clear. But the ideas kept moving westward.

• 6. American and French Revolutions

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  J. G. A. Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment, published in 1975, shifted a longstanding debate about what ideas actually drove the American Revolution. For decades, scholars had agreed that Lockean liberalism was paramount and that republicanism played a secondary role. Pocock argued that republican ideas were at least as important as liberal ones, at least in the early 18th century. His view became widely accepted. Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood extended the argument, contending that the American founding fathers were more deeply shaped by republicanism than by liberalism. Cornell University professor Isaac Kramnick pushed back, arguing that Americans had always been individualistic and therefore Lockean. Joyce Appleby made a similar case.

  What is not disputed is the centrality of republican values to the founders' self-understanding. Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton all worked within this tradition. In Federalist No. 10, Madison explicitly rejected what he called "pure democracy" in favor of representative democracy, which he called a republic. John Adams insisted that government must be bound by fixed laws that the people have a voice in making and a right to defend. Jefferson warned that an elective despotism was not the government Americans had fought for.

  In France, the revolution of the 1790s followed a similar trajectory at greater speed. Republicanism, especially in the form Rousseau had given it, drove the overthrow of the French monarchy. The revolutionaries set up a republic; Napoleon converted it into an Empire. The First French Republic lasted from 1792 to 1804. Leopold von Ranke, writing in 1848, traced a direct line from American republicanism to the spread of European liberalism, arguing that when the North Americans created a new republic based on individual rights, they introduced a force into the world that made the idea of self-governance concrete in a way no previous theory had managed.

• 7. Mazzini and the Italian Thread

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  In July 1831, in exile in Marseille, Giuseppe Mazzini founded the Young Italy movement. Its aim was to transform Italy into a unitary democratic republic organized around the principles of freedom, independence, and unity, while ousting the monarchic regimes that preceded unification, including the Kingdom of Sardinia. The founding of Young Italy is considered a key moment of the Italian Risorgimento.

  Mazzini developed a concept he called "thought and action," which held that every idea must be followed by practical effort. He rejected intellectualism and the separation of theory from practice. His influence extended well beyond Italy. Among the political figures later shaped by his thought were American president Woodrow Wilson, British prime minister David Lloyd George, Mahatma Gandhi, Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, and Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. The philosopher Carlo Cattaneo extended Mazzini's ideas in a different direction, promoting a secular and republican Italy organized as a federal rather than a unitary state.

  The ambitions of both Mazzini and Cattaneo were ultimately blocked by Piedmontese Prime Minister Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, and by Giuseppe Garibaldi's own decision to set aside his republican convictions in favor of Italian unity. After conquering southern Italy during the Expedition of the Thousand, Garibaldi handed the territories to King Victor Emmanuel II of Sardinia. A plebiscite ratified the annexation, and on the 17th of March 1861 Victor Emmanuel II was proclaimed king of Italy. Many republicans accused Garibaldi of treason. The soldier Pietro Barsanti, a corporal in the Royal Italian Army, was sentenced to death and shot in 1870 for supporting an insurrectional attempt against the Savoy monarchy. He is remembered as the first martyr of the modern Italian Republic. Italy did not become a republic until the referendum of the 2nd of June 1946, a date now celebrated as Festa della Repubblica, and the first time the entire Italian peninsula had been governed as a republic since the end of the ancient Roman Republic.

• 8. Neo-Republicanism and Liberty

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  Philip Pettit and Cass Sunstein stand as the most prominent theorists of what has come to be called neorepublicanism, a contemporary effort to draw on the classical republican tradition and develop from it a public philosophy suited to the present. Neorepublicanism emerges partly as a post-socialist critique of market society.

  The key move neorepublicans make is to insist on a specific definition of freedom. Where liberalism defines liberty as the absence of interference, republicanism defines it as non-domination: freedom not merely from active coercion but from the condition of being subject to another's arbitrary will. This distinction has practical consequences. A slave whose master happens to be kind is not free in the republican sense, because the master retains the power to interfere at will. Michael Sandel, who came to republicanism from communitarianism, argued for replacing or supplementing liberalism with republicanism in his Democracy's Discontent.

  More recent neorepublican work has extended this framework in new directions. Jurist K. Sabeel Rahman's Democracy Against Domination builds a framework for economic regulation grounded in the thought of Louis Brandeis and John Dewey. Philosopher Elizabeth Anderson's Private Government traces republican critiques of private power, arguing that free market policies of the 18th and 19th centuries, intended to help workers, in practice subjected them to domination by employers. Political scientist Alex Gourevitch's From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth examines a strain of late-19th-century American labor republicanism associated with the Knights of Labor, including its troubling role in supporting the Chinese Exclusion Act. That complexity, where republican principles were used both to advance and to restrict freedom depending on who held them, is itself a measure of how far the tradition has traveled from its origins in the expulsion of the Roman kings.