REPUBLICANISM

Republicanism was the ideology of the leaders of the American Revolution, and it still determines much of what Americans believe. In the monarchy-dominated world of the eighteenth century, republicanism was not simply a form of government; it was a form of life, a way by which dissatisfied people could criticize the patriarchy, luxury, and corruption of eighteenth-century monarchy.

Its deepest origins lay in the great era of the Roman republic. The world of the eighteenth century learned most of what it wanted to know about the Roman republic from the writings of the celebrated Latin writers flourishing from the middle of the first century b.c. to the establishment of the empire in the middle of the second century a.d.—Cicero, Sallust, Tacitus, and Plutarch among others. These men lived after the greatest days of the republic had passed, and they contrasted the 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, and torn by struggles between rich and poor; they had lost their capacity to serve the public good. In their pessimistic explanations of the republic's decline, these writers left a legacy of beliefs and values—about the good life, about citizenship, about political health, about social morality—that have had an enduring effect on Western culture.

This body of classical literature was revived and updated by Renaissance writers, especially the Italian philosopher Machiavelli. It was blended into a tradition of "civic humanism"—a tradition that stressed the moral character of the independent citizen as the prerequisite to good politics and disinterested service to the country. To be good citizens people had to be free of control by others and free of the influence of selfish interests.

This classical republican tradition passed into the culture of northern Europe. In England it inspired the writings of the great seventeenth-century republicans, John Milton, James Harrington, and Algernon Sidney, and was carried into the eighteenth century by scores of popularizers and translators. This republican tradition had a decisive effect on the thinking of the American revolutionary leaders.

Republicanism in 1776 meant more than eliminating a king and instituting an elective system of government; it set forth moral and social goals as well. Republics required a particular sort of egalitarian and virtuous people: independent, property-holding citizens who were willing to sacrifice many of their private, selfish interests for the res publica, the good of the whole community. Equality lay at the heart of republicanism; it meant a society whose distinctions were based only on merit. No longer would one's position rest on whom one knew or married or on who one's parents were.

Such dependence on a relatively equal and virtuous populace, it was thought, made republics very fragile and often short-lived. Monarchies were long-lasting; they could maintain order from the top down over large, diverse, and even corrupt populations through their use of patronage, hereditary privilege, executive authority, standing armies, and religious establishments. But republics, such as the American states were, had to be held together from below, from virtue, from the consent and sacrifice of the people themselves. The only republics left in the eighteenth century—the Netherlands and the city-states of Italy and Switzerland—were small and compact. Larger heterogeneous states that tried to establish republics—as England had in the eighteenth century—were bound to end up in chaos resulting in some sort of military dictatorship, like that of Oliver Cromwell. If it were too large and embraced too many diverse interests, a republic would fly apart.

The Americans' new extended republic in 1787 flew in the face of these traditional assumptions and made their experiment in republicanism a highly risky venture indeed. A national republic that encompassed a huge society of diverse interests and sprawled over half a continent demanded new explanations. Much of the originality and creativity of the Framers' political thought accompanying the creation of the Constitution in 1787-1788, including The Federalist, came from their need to justify the republicanism of the new federal government in opposition to the conventional wisdom of the day. The Founding Fathers ultimately recognized the reality of an American society composed of many conflicting private interests, but they hoped that these would neutralize themselves and allow enlightened leaders who were free of selfish marketplace concerns and local partisan interests to promote the general good. To that extent they clung to classical republicanism.

The democratic revolution of the subsequent decades, at least in the North, virtually destroyed this classical dream of republican leaders acting as disinterested umpires over the economic and political struggles of the society. Political parties emerged to reestablish patronage and to promote partisan interests, and countless individuals took off in pursuit of their private happiness. By the middle of the nineteenth century America gave as much free rein to commercial activity and the self-interestedness of the people as any society in history.

But much of the republican tradition has remained alive, even to this day. Republicanism tempers the scramble for private wealth and happiness and accounts for many of the Americans' ideas and aspirations: for their belief in equality and their dislike of pretension and privilege; for their relentless yearning for individual autonomy and freedom from all ties of dependency; for their periodic hopes, expressed, for example, in the election of military heroes and in the mugwump and progressive movements, that some political leaders might rise above parties and become truly disinterested umpires; for their long-held conviction that farming is morally healthier and freer of selfish marketplace concerns than other occupations; for their preoccupation with the fragility of the Republic and its vulnerability to corruption; and, finally, for their remarkable obsession with their own national virtue—an obsession that still bewilders the rest of the world.

J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (1975); Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (1969).

Gordon S. Wood

See also Federalist Papers; Jeffersonian Democracy; Mugwumps; Progressivism.