The republican tradition from Aristotle to Madison
The Framers drew from a deep well
Aristotle’s works have been read and interpreted continuously for over twenty-three centuries, and his influence has been enormous. In the past four posts I have focused on the works that are attributed to Aristotle himself, but to fully benefit from Aristotle’s ideas and understand their relevance for our time we must recognize that his work is part of a “tradition of enquiry” (I borrow the phrase from Alasdair MacIntyre), one that neither begins nor ends with Aristotle himself. Subsequent thinkers have clarified, modified, and developed Aristotle’s ideas. Of particular importance to this tradition are St. Thomas Aquinas (d. AD 1274), who reconciled Aristotle’s thought with Christianity, and republican thinkers such as Machiavelli (AD 1469 - 1527), whose rediscovery of Aristotelian political and ethical thought (via Roman intermediaries) led to a movement whose reverberations were felt by America’s Founding Fathers.
One branch of the Aristotelian tradition is republicanism, whose adherents have elaborated Aristotle’s theory of the republic and its citizens and sought to put that theory into practice. Here is a brief summary of some of the major milestones in republican thought (I base this summary largely on Zera Fink’s The Classical Republicans and J.G.A Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment).
An early elaboration was that of Polybius, a Greek who wrote for a Roman audience in the 2nd century B.C., whom I mentioned in my first post of this newsletter. He adapted Aristotle’s sixfold classification of governments as follows: the three genuine simple forms of government are monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy; their perversions are tyranny, oligarchy, and ochlocracy (mob rule); republic is a genuine form of government, but not a simple form--it is rather a mixed (or balanced) form of government that combines aspects of all three genuine forms of government. Polybius theorized that the simple forms of government were unstable and tended to degenerate into their corresponding perversions, which would in turn provoke revolts that would set up a different simple form, in a continuous cycle of decay and upheaval. The republican form of government provided an escape from this cycle into stability.
Cicero (106-43 BC) also wrote in favor of republics, especially the Roman republic (see his On the Commonwealth). During the centuries when most of Aristotle’s work was unavailable in Western Europe, Cicero was still read, and provided a conduit for republican ideas.
The great renewal of republican thought, however, is due to the humanists of the Renaissance and especially to Machiavelli (and to the experiences of the Italian city-states upon which he based his theories). Machiavelli’s Discourses explored republicanism in the light of the historical examples provided by ancient Rome and Greece and contemporary Florence and Venice. Machiavelli divided republics into those designed for preservation, such as Venice and Sparta, and those designed for expansion, such as Rome.
Like Aristotle, Machiavelli asserted the importance of civic virtue to a republic, but the concept of civic virtue played a somewhat different role in Machiavelli’s scheme. Machiavelli’s account of virtue valued the active life over the contemplative, and valued statesmen who were able to act decisively and overcome the vicissitudes of fortuna, that is, ones who were able to make the most of the opportunities for expansion and glory that might arise, and maintain the stability of the state in the face of unpredictable events.
Aristotle distinguished between civic virtue and human virtue; for Machiavelli the analogous distinction was between civic virtue and Christian virtue. While Aristotle used the concept of civic virtue to explain how a state could be sound even though its citizens lacked aretē, making civic virtue inferior to aretē and merely the best that could be expected under given circumstances, Machiavelli valorized civic virtue vis à vis Christian virtue. When circumstances required the citizen to choose between being a good citizen and being a good Christian, Machiavelli advocated the former.
Civic virtue was of course not antisocial, however. Republican civic virtue required a disinterested devotion to the community. The antithesis of civic virtue was corruption, which occurred when citizens allowed their private interests to usurp the public interest in their dealings with each other. This was especially dangerous when public officials became corrupted, but the concept applied to all citizens.
Machiavelli’s writings influenced English thinkers who were trying to make sense of the events of the English Civil Wars (1642 - 1651) and to work out the proper relationship between king and Parliament. The most prominent of these was James Harrington (1611-1677), whose The Commonwealth of Oceana proposed a republic of armed freeholders for England. England briefly had a nominally republican government between the execution of Charles I in 1646 and the Restoration of the monarchy under Charles II in 1660, but it quickly succumbed to the dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell. In 1688, the Glorious Revolution ended absolute monarchy in England and replaced it with constitutional monarchy.
The French political philosopher Montesquieu (1689 - 1755) was exposed to these ideas and their results during a sojourn in England, and he advanced the republican tradition in his Espirit des Lois. Montesquieu classified governments as monarchies, republics, or despotisms. He classified democracies and aristocracies as subspecies of republics; oligarchies were degenerate aristocracies that had despotical characteristics. He claimed that each form of government depended on the strength of the appropriate human passion among its people: fear for despotisms, honor for monarchies, and civic or “political” virtue (here meaning patriotic love of country) for republics. Montesquieu developed the ideas of the separation of powers among the branches of government and the checks and balances that they exercise on each other. Montesquieu’s influence on the Framers of the U.S. constitution is well-attested.
The Framers were also influenced by the classical liberalism of John Locke (1632 -1704). The extent to which Madison, Adams, Jefferson, et al. were influenced by liberalism versus republicanism is a contested issue, and one that I will not attempt to decide or even take a stand on, except to note that the influence of the republican tradition was surely felt to a significant degree, and also that the federalism of the U.S. Constitution was an innovation not found in earlier thought, republican or liberal.
There has been a resurgence of scholarly interest in republican thought in the decades after World War II. In the field of history, the way has been led by Zera Fink, J. G. A. Pocock, and Quentin Skinner. In philosophy and political science, the works of Phillip Pettit and Michael Sandel have achieved prominence. This resurgence of interest in republicanism has led to a controversial reexamination of the U.S. Constitution. R. B. Bernstein presents the issue thus in his foreword to The Federalist (ed. Wright, 2004):
Beginning in the 1950s and blossoming since 1961, a major scholarly controversy has sucked The Federalist into its gravitational field: What was its role in the great shift from republicanism to liberalism in American political thought? [. . .]
Desiring to preserve liberty and to achieve the common good, Americans established republican forms of government--in which the people held ultimate power, entrusting it to representatives responsible to them. Every previous republic, however, had collapsed into anarchy or tyranny. The precondition for a successful republic, therefore, was to maintain the people’s virtue--their willingness to sacrifice special interests in the service of the public interest. By contrast, those who espoused liberalism favored each person’s right to pursue his or her talents and abilities to the fullest extent possible. The strongest case for a republic, they argued, was precisely that it would enable each citizen to develop those talents; a republic should take the greatest possible pains not to restrain that process but to guide it so that individuals’ pursuit of their own interest would foster the public interest.
Bernstein’s own position is that “American constitutionalism embodies an ever shifting balance between these two bodies of thought; thus there was no dramatic sea- change from one to the other” (xii-xiii).