In 1989 the political topology that had been in place since 1789 came to an end. This topology was structured by the idea that the French revolution was essentially a bourgeois affair advancing the claims of the rising middle classes. On this view, the revolution was undertaken by the bourgeoisie to secure itself against both the restrictive class system of the ancien regime and the organic claims of the Church. It secured itself by embracing what we could call bourgeois Liberalism—a type of Liberalism which finds its highest expression in The Declaration of the Rights of Man. [1] With the emergence of Babeuf on the Left and de Maistre on the Right, however, bourgeois Liberalism faced opponents that were created in explicit opposition to bourgeois Liberalism itself. Now we have the modern political topology of socialist Left, reactionary Right, and liberal bourgeois Center.

Although the Left was created in opposition to bourgeois Liberalism, it was, of course, dialectically intertwined with Liberalism and its fate. Indeed, the Left’s most basic question is: what in the liberal project must be kept and what must be discarded? That which needs to be discarded is discarded because Liberalism undermines its ability to achieve is own self-avowed aims of liberty and equality. It does so, of course, because it is blind to the fact that capitalism has inherent inequalities within it which overrun the ability of agents not only to be equal, but to be free. Certainly a man close to starvation and having to feed his family is not as free to enter in to a contract as US Steel. The various socialist alternatives to Liberalism developed to remedy such defects, and to restore the implicit ‘truth content’ of Liberalism itself. What has generated the current crisis on the Left is that these socialist alternatives have crumbled leaving in its wake a pale version of that which it grew out of, i.e., Liberalism. It now seems that the pale Liberalism of the ‘third way’—instead of a straight neo-Liberalism—is the only political option on the horizon for people on the Left. If one comes to the conclusion that such a Liberalism is insufficient to meet the current global aspirations for freedom, this result should not be just disheartening; rather, it should also activate a renewed search for political languages which reside outside of this pale Liberalism and which have a better chance of fulfilling the aspirations for freedom. In this article I want to examine the potential felicity of one such political language, the language of Civic Republicanism. [2]

II

Thanks to the work of historians like Bernard Bayln, Gordon Wood, and J. G. A. Pocock undertaken in the late 60s and 70s, we now know that we live in a different world than we thought we did. In a country like the USA, one which is so powerfully guided by its history yet so unaware of this guidance, this should come as no surprise. But surprising it is. [3] What these historian have told us is that the liberal (Calvinist) narrative of American politics and ideology—a narrative powerfully told by Louis Hartz and the ‘consensus school’ in general—is not the whole story. [4] In their telling, the founders, and many after them, subscribed to another ideology, namely Civic Republicanism. While it is a live historical question as to which ideology was truly dominant and decisive for the founders, it is not controversial that many elements of Civic Republicanism were vitally important throughout American history. What is interesting about this tradition is that it did not develop, as the socialist tradition did, through an interplay with bourgeois Liberalism. Instead, this tradition has its origin in antiquity, especially in the political reflections of Aristotle and Polybius. In Pocock’s telling, this tradition was reactivated by certain Renaissance thinkers like Machiavelli and Guicciardini to help explain the situation of the Italian city-state. This revival of thinking, in turn, was transmitted to the Atlantic countries through British Machiavellians like Harrington. Because of this independent lineage, Civic Republicanism gives one a vantage point that is not achievable through socialist positions alone.

What is Civic Republicanism? Lets us answer this by briefly comparing it to the pale Liberalism mentioned above. Liberalism is a creed which holds that the primary unit of value resides in the exercise of an individual’s free will. This normative thesis rests upon a prior ‘anthropological’ view about the will and its relationship to society. To have a free will for the liberal does not require cultivation, training, education, etc. Rather, the will is free in a voluntaristic manner, meaning that the freedom or spontaneity of the will is a biologically given capacity. If the will is in its essence unencumbered, it must be the case that the free will constitutes the institutions and structures of society rather then the other way around. Thus, when one shapes the institutions of any society, one should have as one’s main goal the protection of the individual’s ability to exercise themselves freely. In the political sphere this means enacting a set of rights that protect the individual from political tyranny, while in the economic sphere this means elaborating neutral contract and commercial law. Vis-a-vis agents in both spheres, the state should be neutral, safeguarding the individuals ability to operate freely within the constraints of the law.

In contrast, Civic Republicanism does not have as its highest value the exercise of the individual will. Rather, it thinks of freedom as Aristotle and Machiavelli did (at least in The Discourses), namely, as the ability for agents to determine themselves though the exercise of political power. Instead of holding freedom to be the unhindered exercise of our individual capacities—a type of freedom that does not require acting in the political sphere at all—it sees freedom as that which can only be gained through the political. The American twist on this old idea is its abandonment of the polis. For many writers in the Republican tradition it was though that republican government and the virtue necessary for such government was only possible in a small Polis or a city state like Rousseau’s Geneva.  Even at the time of the founding, the US was not fertile ground for such a polis. Republicanism had to be refashioned for a larger state. Madison achieved this though his doctrine of the division of powers. Power would be divided vertically (Federal, State, Local, etc.) and horizontally (Executive, Legislative, and Judicial). This division of power would allow for many overlapping sites of self-determination. And it would have the added benefit that  Robespierre like perversions of the Rousseauian general will would be lessened. Thus, American Republicanism, while still subject to corruption—the main problem in all republics—is more immune to the corruptions of tyranny.

Like Liberalism, Civic Republicanism also has an anthropology. It sees freedom as something that requires cultivation and education rather than as something merely given. Freedom is an achievement that is arrived at through self-governance. Self-government, however, requires public virtue, i. e, the inculcated habits and practices that allow one to participate in public deliberation. The issue of public virtue might make some on the Left squirm insofar as it brings to mind such current moralists as Bill Bennett and George Will. However, it could also bring to mind someone at the heart of the Republican project, John Dewey. Dewey saw that human agents are cultivated into certain practices and habits through education no matter what. Therefore it is incumbent upon a democratic society to attempt to fashion human agents who can use public reason creatively, resist the temptations of absolutist solutions, etc. [5] It is a testament to the Left’s drift on this issue that it has allowed Bennett and Co. to take over this discursive space without a fight.

As with Liberalism, the basis of Republican views on institutional and state design is grounded upon its prior anthropology. Institutions should be shaped with the goal of making possible the highest level of self-determination by a citizenry. This ideal has large ramification for the structure of both the political and economic spheres. In the political sphere, this would mean attempting to foster: 1) a robust public sphere in which debate and dialogue can flourish, and 2) a robust civil society in which agents can exercise their capacities in sub-political institutions which at certain times circulate into the political. To foster both of these things would obviously require radical institutional change. First, the public sphere would have to be protected from becoming oligarchic and subject to the disproportionate influence of a single faction. In a modern context this would require both ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ changes. Negatively, the existing media system would have to be radically decentralized. But this decentralization does not mean that we would need to get government out of the picture leaving the de-centralization in the hands of capital. Quite the contrary. Decentralization would also mean taking capital out of the media system as much as possible. To make this happen would require not just regulation, but the positive enactment of new centers of communication and connectivity. To really effect this requires the rethinking of such things as urban planning, transportation, environmental policy, etc.

One of the virtues of Civic Republicanism for the Left is that it sees economic institutions as not autonomous—as neo-liberals would claim—but rather as part of the civic order and thus subject to the norms and values of that order. Individuals who are economically humiliated and oppressed are not good candidates for having the virtues necessary for self-governance. Civic Republicanism thus has, as Sandel has put it, ‘a political economy of citizenship’. To get at what this means and how it could be appropriated by the contemporary Left, I must briefly trace this concept’s history—a history, as we shall see, that is not wholly congenial for a Left agenda. To see this one has merely to examine Jeffersonian ideology and its continued legacy in our political self-understanding. The ‘Jeffersonian persuasion’ is based on the Republican idea that certain economics and social conditions are inimical to the possibility of self-government. This persuasion takes the landed yeoman farmer to be best suited for the role of citizen. For the Jeffersonian, land (i.e., space) was the element that would forestall the temporal corruption to which all republics are subject. This is why the Louisiana purchase was the central event of Jefferson’s administration: it kept alive the possibility for a Republican form of life. For the Leftist, this is certainly uncomfortable and not only because the logic of continental empire is inscribed into the Jeffersonian logic. Jeffersonianism is uncomfortable for two additional reasons: 1) it originates a pastoral ideology; 2) it has no problem, in principle, with the market economy. Let us focus for now on the latter reason for discomfort. Jeffersonianism— especially after its Jacksonian modification—has no problem with the market as long as the agents in the market are self-owned small holders. On the whole, Republicanism has not been critical of the market economy per se, but only of its distortions, the prime one being the wage system instituted by industrialization. But this is significant: from Jefferson to Jackson, from Lincoln to late-19th Century populism, from the Knights of Labor to Eugene Debs, from Left Progressivism to John Dewey, there has been a vociferous critique of industrial capitalism and its wage system. The problem with this system is simple: it relegates whole segments of the population to wage slavery, a condition that is not consonant with the exercise of self-government. Why? Because the wage system creates entrenched hierarchies that are reproduced institutionally and within the self-understanding of citizens through feelings of inferiority, resentment and shame. Such entrenched hierarchy is not consonant with civic freedom because each agent in a republic must at least be able to participate in collective deliberation and self-determination. As such, each agent must recognize and be recognized by the other as equally fit to determine the collectivity. Thus, a certain notion of equality it built into Civic Republicanism. [6]

This notion of equality, which is predicated on the dignity of citizenship, is a powerful idea which can be used against the massive inequalities of American society. Indeed, this idea is the ‘rational kernel’ which informs the various critiques of the industrial system inspired by the Republican tradition. Again, while these critiques are heterogeneous and  bound up with all sorts of other ideological elements, this ‘rational kernel’ could be reactivated by the current Left. Why is the Left—and here I refer to both the Democratic party and those to its left—so reticent about reactivating this kernel? There are two interrelated reason why this is so: 1) because Republicanism as a political creed does not match modern social reality and has thus become an ideology, 2) because it was thought that Liberalism and its variants could better guarantee certain social goods under modern conditions. To understand both of these reactions we must first relate a bit of history.

III

I think that there were two key moments when Republican ideology genuinely drifted from social reality. The first was the widespread industrialization of the late 19th Century. This was a type of social organization almost wholly based upon the wage system and its attendant evils. In the early twentieth century there were two reactions to this development, both put under the name of Progressivism. One wing of Progressivism attempted to take proactive measures to combat the effects of widespread industrialization. These measures were undertaken by, for example, the anti-trust movement, the anti-department store movement (no Starbucks even back then!), the ward movement which included Dewey and Mead, and certain segments of the labor movement. These movements did not just ask the capitalist to distribute wealth a little more evenly, although this was part of the picture as well. Rather, they questioned whether certain capitalist activities were justified at all. They could ask this because for them the capitalist economy was not autonomous but intricately embedded in the overall civil society and its norms. These political actors had norms intrinsic to their political life-world which made available a critique of capitalism (at least under its industrial variant) that was not just about re-distribution. The other response was articulated by Walter Lippmann. He felt that modern societies in general were too complex for anything but technocratic control. Only trained technocrats conforming to the logic of the social sub-system they participated in could possibly succeed in controlling the massive forces that modern societies unleashed. This would mean leaving both the economy and the political realm to the ‘experts’. This also means that the values of efficiency and growth trump all other values. Things are starting to look familiar.

The second moment in which Republicanism seemingly became obsolete was with the New Deal and the rise of the US as the preeminent world power after World War II. In looking at this period we must try not to focus on the institutions created by the New Deal, but on the political self-understanding that accompanied it. The rise of the US to superpower status in 1945 was predicated upon globalism abroad (i.e., the political and economic maintenance of the capitalist block) and Keynesian economic growth at home. These goals were related insofar as they were intertwined responses to the crisis of world capitalism in the thirties. Let us look for the moment at the Kenesian liberal consensus at home. First, this consensus says that the economic sphere is autonomous. Instead of being subject to provincial norms and mores, it is now subject to ‘scientific management’. Of course, the economic realm was and is subject to political pressures, but these pressures were and are assuaged by the management of the economy which assured growth and a certain amount of re-distribution. This de-politicization of the economic was convenient for the dominant Liberalism (and today’s neo-Liberalism) because it minimized social conflict while assuring a type of (private) freedom in the face of the enormous complexity and power of the economic and political systems. Even if individuals can’t really determine themselves in the social systems that matter—in their economic and political lives—they can determine themselves in the private realm. This type of freedom does not have to be won but can be stipulated juridically through the setting of rights. The state on this model does not so much ensure democratic self-determination as ensure the neutral treatment of persons vis-a-vis their rights. To guarantee such treatment, the state cannot be tethered to contentful norms and values, but must swing free of the parochial norms and values of the agents who make up the state. Thus, the state is seen as just a procedural mechanism which neutrally adjudicates between the competing claims of its citizens. The implementation of this juridical/proceduralist conception of the political is the destruction of Civic Republicanism.

IV

The question that needs to be asked is: if Civic Republicanism has really drifted away from a realistic engagement with present realities, why is it useful or interesting at all? The first thing we must say is that even though Civic Republicanism has been overlaid with other political languages, it is still part of America’s political self-understanding. In other words, the self-understandings generated by the Republican tradition, while manifestly dormant, are still active latently. The only political party that knows this, unfortunately, is the Republican party. [7] A seemingly petty example can bring this out. Whenever the Republican party pays fealty to the virtues of ‘small business’ it is saying to the little guy: we know you don’t want to work for the man (i.e., us) but for yourself. We’ll help you achieve this by getting the liberal eastern elite (the famous new class) out of the way, etc. etc. In making this pitch the Republican party not only play to a Horatio Alger myth (something required of both parties), but also tap into the general state of powerlessness that defines the current moment. This feeling of powerlessness—which feeds both the Thoreauian dissenters on the Left and the rage and resentment of the Reagan Democrats on the Right—is generated by the feeling that the institutions of American life are not in our control. This feeling is certainly warranted considering the oligarchic state of our political system and economic systems. The problem with contemporary Liberalism is that it does not and cannot address this feeling in any way. The Democratic party, in embracing a coalition of just ethnic minorities (the ‘they have no where else to go strategy’) and wealthy suburbanites (the famous soccer moms), has totally written off the constituencies (working class and otherwise) to which such ‘populist’ rhetoric could appeal. [8] There are some good reasons for this inasmuch as populist rhetoric has often been tainted by racism in America. But the type of pale Liberalism to which the Democrats now appeal has almost no power to move the masses. This can be seen in contemporary Liberalism’s faltering defense of the New Deal and the institutions of the welfare state. One could defend the New Deal like this: many of the New Deal’s institutional innovations are important because in an advanced industrial society there is an in-built tendency to massive dislocation and inequality. These conditions are not acceptable in a community that wishes to sees its members as citizens. We do not support the New Deal for reasons of ‘compassion’—compassion being the modern equivalent of a condescending noblesse oblige—or because it is a middle class entitlement or right. We support it because we wish to see our fellow citizens reach a condition of civic virtue and freedom, a condition which is necessary for my civic virtue and freedom. In this sense, the institutions of the welfare state are not ends in themselves, but part of a larger picture of the good. The Left is losing the battle over the legacy of the New Deal because it does not articulate a broader vision into which the New Deal and its legacy fits. All it does is play to the legitimate fear of losing the support that welfare state institutions provide. But fear and a defensive politics are not enough to get it done.

For those to the Left of the Democratic party, Civic Republicanism offers the opportunity to embrace aspects of a political language which is not wholly alien to America’s political self-understanding. However, this political language is alien enough that it can serve as an immanent norm by which one can critique society. However, as was to be expected, there are major obstacles standing in the way of the Left appropriating republicanism as part of its normative structure. The first problem concerns the temporal dynamic of Civic Republicanism. Most positions on the Left, like Liberalism itself, are normative. But these norms are posited by an abstract reason. The norms of Civic Republicanism, on the other hand, are posited by history. This backward looking temporal modality is completely out of line with that of the traditional Left. The Left, again like Liberalism itself, has always privileged the future. If Civic Republicanism is to be made a relevant political language for the Left this issue will requires future attention. 

The second difficulty concerns race. Until now, the emancipation of black Americans has gone hand in hand with the strengthening of national power. This has been the case because the only way to press the claims of black Americans (and other disenfranchised groups) has been to press for their rights as individuals. Because certain ‘intermediate bodies’ (like the Southern states) would not respect the claims of black Americans—whether rights based or not—national power was required to enforce that respect. Indeed, this is America’s version of the Tocquevillian dialectic by which the advancement of formal rights of individuals goes hand in hand with the advancement of national power, both undercutting the claims of certain bodies which want to have a status between that of the individual and the national state. Clearly, Civic Republicanism wishes to augment these types of ‘intermediate bodies’ insofar as it thinks it a good to proliferate centers of democratic self determination. But it is easy to see how these decentralized centers of self-determination could be, and have been under the banner of states rights, transformed into centers of exclusion and domination. But this does not cut against Civic Republicanism insofar as it is not hostile to centralized state power per se, but only to state power that stands over against its citizens. There are many ways to undercut this possibility, one of which has been the American call for decentralization. What a Left Civic Republicanism should call for is not decentralization but pluralization. By this I mean that a thriving society should have many levels of political (and therefore economic) determination operating from the local to even the international. In mentioning the international realm, we come to Civic Republicanism’s third problem: capitalism and its relationship to economic and political globalization. One of the strengths of the socialist tradition is that it takes seriously the universalizing elements of the capitalist economy in particular and of modernity in general. Based upon an analysis of these tendencies, it attempted to formulate an intervening praxis which could harness them for liberatory purposes. The question that Civic Republicanism must face up to is whether it can accommodate these tendencies. For if it can’t, its relevance in the upcoming years is very much in doubt.