Liberalism and Republicanism have been in the vanguard of advancing political liberty, socioeconomic justice and democracy over the last few centuries. Both philosophies are at the heart of the turbulent changes that happened in European and American nations in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The history of liberalism stretches back to the writings of John Locke in the late seventeenth century. Although liberalism did not emerge as a self-conscious political project until the early nineteenth century, where it emerged in Spain as a political movement for radical constitutional reform during the Peninsular War. Republicanism has a much longer history stretching back as far as the Roman Republic and even further to Ancient Athens and its classical philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle.
Liberalism was born out of republican philosophy. The root of liberalism comes from the republican virtue of liberality (liberalitas). This was the virtue which concerned generosity (both personal and societal) and open-mindedness. The New York academic Helena Rosenblatt has charted the history of liberalism as a form of liberality in her 2018 book, The Lost History of Liberalism.
The two political philosophies have been closely linked together. Both were at the heart of the American Revolution in the eighteenth century and the European Spring of 1848. It is in the French Revolution that we can see the biggest contrast between the two philosophies. Initially, the French Revolution was very much a liberal revolution committed to liberty, individual rights, constitutionalism, government by consent and limited monarchy. The liberal revolution of 1789 gradually becomes more republican with France being declared a Republic in 1792. France’s republican experiment becomes most radical in 1793 with the rise of Maximilian Robespierre and the clearly illiberal ‘Reign of Terror’.
In recent decades within the academy, both liberalism and republicanism have seen a revival in the western political philosophical tradition. Starting with the publication of John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice in 1971 which gave a philosophical contractarian basis to American social liberalism, which itself has been built on by successive authors most notably by Amartya Sen in The Idea of Justice. Republicanism has also witnessed a substantial revival with the neo-republicanism of Philip Pettit. Pettit’s Republicanism (published in 1997) successfully re-conceptualises freedom as republican liberty, that is liberty as non-domination.
Looking back at history it is often difficult to distinguish two distinct political projects. Many leading liberals were also republicans and vice versa. Thomas Jefferson was a liberal political thinker who was a founding father of the American Republic. Additionally, Thomas Paine was a radical republican writer, who also drew heavily on the classical liberal political culture of his time. The great French philosopher Baron de Montesquieu was one of the leading liberal thinkers of the eighteenth century who provided the main inspiration for the republican system of government in the United States. Even John Locke’s writings have clear elements of republicanism within them. There are examples of republicans who were clearly not liberal, such as Oliver Cromwell and Robespierre; as well as liberals who were not republicans, such as the original Spanish liberals (Liberales) who strove to establish a constitutional monarchy.
The republican liberal political tradition has a long intellectual lineage in British history and politics. It stretches back long into the seventeenth century, not just to Locke’s Second Treatises of Government, but prior to that with the period of the English Civil War, or more accurately the English Revolution. The work of the republican poet John Milton is of note in this regard, as is the democratic radicalism of the Levellers, who agitated for individual liberties, equality before the law, popular sovereignty and inalienable rights.
Republican liberalism was present within the British Liberal Party. The late Victorian MP, Charles Dilke is a good example of this, as is the party’s twentieth century economic platform of ‘ownership for all’. The party of Jo Grimond advocated for the spread of wealth, asset ownership and industrial democracy throughout society, advancing a republican conception of economic citizenship. This notion would be developed further with James Meade’s concept of property-owning democracy, which itself became Rawls’ ideal version of a just society. Aspects of republican liberalism can be seen as late as 1989 in Citizens’ Britain, written by the first leader of the (Social and) Liberal Democrats, Paddy Ashdown.
A brief note on why I am referring to republican liberalism and not liberal republicanism. This is because the main object of my personal political focus are the rights and liberties of the individual within a political and economic system based on republican principles. As opposed to the object being a republican society itself (complete with commitments to virtue, the common good and liberty as non-domination), which also respects individual rights and liberties. This may be an epistemological point, but nevertheless an important one to clarify.
Liberalism and republicanism have been central to the development of progressive politics and contemporary liberal democracy. Their ideas have transformed the world. Together their ideas hold out the prospect for a radical, free and egalitarian society. In particular, they would add greater intellectual weight to contemporary calls for a universal basic income in the wake of the coronavirus crisis. In a world where the progressive left is scrambling to find a viable alternative to neoliberal hegemony, they could do far worse than rediscovering the radicalism of the republican liberal political tradition.
Bibliography
Ashdown, Paddy (1989) Citizens’ Britain: A Radical Agenda for the 1990s. London: Fourth Estate Limited.
Locke, John (1980) Second Treatise of Government. Indianapolis; Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
O’ Neill, Martin and Williamson Thad (2012) Property-Owning Democracy: Rawls and Beyond. Chichester and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Pettit, Philip (1997) Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rawls, John (1999) A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, Massachusetts; The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Rees, John (2017) The Leveller Revolution. London: Verso.
Rosenblatt, Helen (2018) The Lost History of Liberalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Sen, Amartya (2010) The Idea of Justice. London: Penguin Books Ltd.
White, Stuart (2014) “Alternative liberal solutions to economic inequality”: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/alternative-liberal-solutions-to-economic-inequality/. Accessed: 23/05/2020.
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