Republicanism

• Author: Gordon S. Wood
• Pages: 2211-2213

Page 2211

Republicanism was the ideology of the AMERICAN REVOLUTION, and as such, it still influences much of what Americans believe; in recent years it has had a renewed importance in American constitutional thought. It is difficult for us today to appreciate the revolutionary character of this republican ideology. We live in a world in which almost all nations purport to be republican; even those few countries that remain monarchies, such as Britain and Sweden, are more republican in fact than some others that claim to be republican in theory. But to the monarchy-dominated world of the eighteenth century, republicanism was a radical ideology; indeed, it was to the eighteenth century what Marxism was to be for the nineteenth century. Republicanism was a countercultural ideology of protest, an intellectual means by which dissatisfied people could criticize the luxury, selfishness, and corruption of eighteenth-century monarchical culture.

Yet it would be a mistake to think of republicanism, in the English-speaking world at least, as a distinct and coherent body of thought set in opposition to monarchy or to the English COMMON LAW tradition of rights and liberties. In the greater British world, republican thinking blended with monarchy to create the mixed and LIMITED GOVERNMENT of the English constitution that was celebrated everywhere by enlightened theorists like MONTESQUIEU. Britons regarded the republican part of their constitution, the House of Commons, as the principal bulwark protecting their individual rights and liberties from encroachment by monarchical power. Thus, the sharp distinction drawn by some historians and political theorists today between the civic tradition of republicanism, often identified with James Harrington, and the common law tradition of personal and property rights, often identified with JOHN LOCKE, would not have been clear to eighteenth-century Englishmen.

Republicanism, however, was more than a form of government; it was also a form of life?a set of beliefs that infused the cultures of the Atlantic world in the age of Enlightenment. Its deepest origins were in ancient Rome and the great era of the Roman republic. The enlightened world of the eighteenth century found most of what it wanted to know about the Roman republic from the writings of the golden age of Latin literature, between the breakdown of the republic in the middle of the first century B. C. to the establishment of the empire in the middle of the second century A. D. The celebrated Latin writers of this time?Cicero, Sallust, Tacitus, and Plutarch, among others?lived when the greatest days of the republic had passed, and thus, they contrasted the growing stratification, corruption, and disorder they saw around them with an imagined earlier world of rustic simplicity and pastoral virtue. Roman farmers had once been hardy soldiers devoted to their country. But they had become selfish, corrupted by luxury, torn by struggles between rich and poor, and devoid of their capacity to serve the public good. In their pessimistic explanations of the republic's decline, these Latin writers left a legacy of beliefs and ideals?about the good life, about citizenship, about political health, about social morality?that have had an enduring effect on Western culture.

This great body of classical literature was revived and updated during the Renaissance and blended into a tradition of what has been called "civic humanism." This classical...