Republicanism and Liberalism: Two Traditions of Modern Political Thought

It is one of the nicer ironies of intellectual history that the same generation of Englishmen produced Algernon Sidney and John Locke. Sidney was a republican who was executed for treason in 1683, his head stuck on a spike on London Bridge. Locke was a liberal who lived to write the Two Treatises and to die in his bed. They disagreed about almost everything that mattered. They agreed about the English question — they both opposed the absolute monarchy of Charles II and James II — and they agreed that political authority had to rest on consent. After that, the two traditions split, and the split has not been healed.

The split is the split between republicanism and liberalism. Republicanism emphasizes civic virtue, the common good, and active participation in self-government. Liberalism emphasizes individual rights, limited government, and the protection of personal liberty. The two traditions have, at different times, been seen as complementary and as opposed. The contemporary political world is a complex mixture of the two, and the contemporary debate about the proper relationship between them is one of the central debates of modern political thought.

J. G. A. Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment (1975) is the founding text of the modern scholarly engagement with the distinction. Pocock argued that the republican tradition is independent of and prior to liberal natural-rights theory, that it has its own intellectual lineage (Machiavelli, the English republican writers, the American founders), and that it represents a genuine alternative to the liberal tradition. Quentin Skinner, in his earlier work, was more skeptical of the distinction; in his later work, especially Liberty Before Liberalism (1998), he has come closer to Pocock. Philip Pettit has developed a contemporary version of republicanism that is, in some ways, a synthesis of the two traditions. The debate is not closed.

The republican tradition

The republican tradition has its roots in the political thought of the ancient world. The Roman Republic, with its complex system of checks and balances among the consuls, the senate, and the popular assemblies, was an important model for the republican thinkers of the Enlightenment. Cicero, in particular, was a major source of republican ideas, and his works were widely read and admired by Enlightenment writers.

The Italian city-republics of the Renaissance — Venice, Florence, Genoa, and others — provided another important model. The political thought of Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and the other writers of the Italian republican tradition was an important source of the republican ideas of the Enlightenment, and the Discourses on Livy of Machiavelli was widely read and discussed by the major political thinkers of the eighteenth century. Machiavelli is a complicated figure, because his republicanism is mixed with a hard-headed realism about the requirements of political success. The Prince is not a republican book, but the Discourses is, and the two together have made Machiavelli the most ambiguous figure in the Western political tradition.

The English republican tradition developed in the context of the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution. The major figures of this tradition were:

John Milton, the great Puritan poet, whose Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649) defended the right of the people to depose and to execute tyrants. Milton is a writer whose prose is more interesting than his political theory, but the Tenure is an important document, and the argument — that political authority is conditional on the proper exercise of power, and that the people have a right to remove a tyrant — is a foundational claim of the republican tradition.

Algernon Sidney, the republican martyr, whose Discourses Concerning Government (written in the 1680s, published posthumously in 1698) developed a comprehensive theory of republican government based on the idea of the consent of the governed. Sidney was executed in 1683 on a charge of treason; the evidence was thin, and the political motive obvious. His head was stuck on a spike on London Bridge, where it remained for several years. The Discourses were widely read in the eighteenth century, and they were an important source for the American revolutionaries.

James Harrington, the political theorist, whose Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) developed an elaborate model of a republican commonwealth, with detailed proposals for the rotation of offices, the distribution of property, and the proper organization of political life. Harrington is the most utopian of the major English republicans, and the Oceana is a strange and interesting book — a political treatise in the form of a dialogue, with elaborate constitutional proposals that read, in the twenty-first century, like a kind of seventeenth-century political science fiction.

John Locke, although not usually classified as a republican, was an important contributor to the English republican tradition. His Two Treatises of Government (1689) developed a theory of legitimate political authority that was based on the consent of the governed and that justified the right of resistance against tyranny. Locke was, in fact, a complicated case. His Two Treatises are a founding text of the liberal tradition, but they also contain a substantial republican inheritance — the appeal to the consent of the governed, the right of resistance, the principle that political authority is conditional on the proper exercise of power. The scholarly literature on Locke’s relation to the republican tradition is large and unsettled.

The French republican tradition developed in the eighteenth century, in the context of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. The major figure of this tradition was Rousseau, whose Social Contract (1762) was the most influential republican work of the century. The republican ideas of the French Revolution drew heavily on Rousseau, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789 was a direct expression of the republican commitment to popular sovereignty.

The French Revolution also illustrated the tensions within the republican tradition. The radical Jacobin phase of the Revolution, with its emphasis on the general will and its willingness to use terror in the name of the Republic, was a perversion of the republican ideal, and it has cast a long shadow over the subsequent history of republicanism. The shadow is well earned. The Terror was a republican catastrophe, and it is the source of the modern liberal suspicion of the republican tradition.

The American republican tradition was, in a sense, the most successful. The American Revolution was a republican revolution, and the American Constitution, with its system of separation of powers, its Bill of Rights, and its federal structure, was an attempt to embody the principles of republican government in a concrete political form. The Federalist Papers, written by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, provided the most systematic theoretical defence of the American system, and they remain a basic text of modern republican political thought. Madison’s contribution, in particular, drew on the republican tradition to develop a sophisticated theory of the dangers of faction and the institutional mechanisms by which they could be controlled. The Federalist Papers are a rare case in which the political theory of a working constitution is documented in real time, by the people who were designing the constitution.

The liberal tradition

The liberal tradition emphasized individual rights, limited government, and the protection of personal liberty. Drawing on Locke and the Scottish Enlightenment, the liberals held that the proper function of government was to protect the rights and interests of individuals, and that government should be constitutionally limited in its powers.

The major figures of the liberal tradition were Locke, whose Two Treatises of Government (1689) developed a theory of natural rights, of limited government, and of the right of resistance against tyranny that became the foundation of modern liberalism; Adam Smith, whose Wealth of Nations (1776) developed a theory of economic liberty, of free markets, and of the limited role of the state in economic life that became the foundation of modern economic liberalism; the American Founders, whose political practice combined the liberal commitment to individual rights with the republican commitment to civic virtue and constitutional government; and the French liberals of the nineteenth century — Constant, Tocqueville, and Guizot — who developed a liberal political theory that was influenced by the experience of the French Revolution and that was designed to provide a moderate alternative to the extremes of revolutionary and reactionary politics.

The liberal tradition was based on several common principles: the principle of individual rights, the principle of limited government, the principle of the rule of law, the principle of religious freedom, the principle of economic liberty, and the principle of constitutional government. The principles are familiar; what is worth noticing is the historical work that went into assembling them. The liberal tradition is not a single, monolithic thing. It included a wide range of positions, from the classical liberalism of the nineteenth century, with its emphasis on individual rights and limited government, to the social liberalism of the twentieth century, with its emphasis on social welfare and the active role of the state in addressing the problems of poverty, inequality, and discrimination. The classical liberalism of the nineteenth century — the liberalism of Mill, Constant, Tocqueville — is not the same as the social liberalism of the twentieth century — the liberalism of Rawls, Dworkin, Habermas. The continuity is real, but the development is also real.

The relationship between the two traditions

The relationship between republicanism and liberalism has been one of the central problems of modern political thought. The two traditions have, at different times, been seen as complementary and as opposed.

The complementary view holds that the two traditions address different aspects of the political life, and that a complete political theory must combine the insights of both. Liberalism addresses the proper relationship between the individual and the state, and it provides the principles for the protection of individual rights and the limitation of governmental power. Republicanism addresses the proper relationship between the individual and the political community, and it provides the principles for the cultivation of civic virtue and the active participation of citizens in the life of the community. This view has been defended by a number of contemporary political theorists, including Michael Sandel, Michael Walzer, and the various writers of the communitarian tradition.

The opposition view holds that the two traditions are fundamentally opposed, and that the modern debate about the proper foundations of political life is, in effect, a debate between the two. Liberalism, in this view, is based on a conception of the individual as a self-interested being with rights against the community, and it tends to produce a society of isolated individuals with no commitment to the common good. Republicanism, in this view, is based on a conception of the individual as a member of a political community, and it provides a more adequate foundation for the political life. This view has been defended by Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and the various writers of the civic-republican tradition.

The honest judgment is that neither view is fully right. The complementary view understates the real tension between the two traditions — the tension between individual rights and the common good is not a tension that can be dissolved by an appeal to the division of labor. The opposition view overstates the difference — the liberal tradition, properly understood, has its own resources for the cultivation of civic virtue, and the republican tradition, properly understood, has its own resources for the protection of individual rights. The contemporary debate is best understood as a debate about how to weight the two sets of considerations, not as a debate about which set of considerations is the right one.

The contemporary significance

The traditions of republicanism and liberalism continue to shape the political life of the modern world. The contemporary constitutional democracies are products of both traditions: the liberal tradition provides the principles for the protection of individual rights and the limitation of governmental power, and the republican tradition provides the principles for the active participation of citizens in the life of the political community.

The contemporary debate about the proper relationship between the two traditions is part of the broader debate about the foundations of modern democracy. The defenders of liberalism point to the importance of individual rights, of limited government, and of the rule of law. The defenders of republicanism point to the importance of civic virtue, of the common good, and of the active participation of citizens in the life of the community. The two traditions are not, in the end, going to be reconciled. The best we can hope for is a political order that takes both sets of considerations seriously, and a political culture that is willing to argue about the proper balance between them.

The republican tradition

The liberal tradition

The relationship between the two traditions

The contemporary significance

Further Reading