Radical Republicanism: Recovering the Tradition's Popular Heritage 0198796722, 9780198796725

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Radical Republicanism

Radical Republicanism Recovering the Tradition’s Popular Heritage Edited by B RU N O L E I P O L D, KA R M A NA BU L SI , and S T UA RT W H I T E

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1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2020 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2020 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2019951161 ISBN 978–0–19–879672–5 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198796725.003.0001 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Notes on Contributors Guy Aitchison is a political theorist and Lecturer in Politics and International Studies at the University of Loughborough. He completed his PhD in political philosophy at University College London before holding positions at the European University Institute, University College Dublin, and King’s College London. His main research interests are in rights, republicanism, political resistance, and migration. He has published work in Perspectives on Politics, Political Studies, European Journal of Political Theory, Raisons Politiques, Human Rights Review, CRISPP, and Social Movement Studies. Alan Coffee  teaches global ethics and human values at King’s College London. His primary interest is in republican theories of social and political freedom, with a particular focus on the recovery and reappraisal of neglected and marginalized voices within that tradition. He is the co-editor of The Social and Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft (with Sandrine Bergès, Oxford University Press, 2016) and The Wollstonecraftian Mind (with Sandrine Bergès and Eileen Hunt Botting, 2019). Dorothea Gädeke is Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Utrecht University and Research Associate at the University of Johannesburg. Her research focuses on republicanism and the notion of domination. She is particularly interested in connecting neo-republicanism with Kantian republicanism, critical theory, and literature on structural injustice. In her book Politik der Beherrschung. Eine kritische Theorie externer Demokratieförderung (2017) she develops core elements of a critical republicanism to show how democracy promotion has turned into a politics of domination. Alex Gourevitch is Professor of Political Science at Brown University. His first book, From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century (2015), showed how the republican critique of slavery developed into a critique of wage labour and defence of workers’ cooperatives. He is currently writing a book on the right to strike. Sudhir Hazareesingh  is Fellow and Tutor in Politics at Balliol College, Oxford. He has authored several works on modern French political and intellectual history and is currently completing a biography of the Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture. His most recent book is How the French Think (2015). Bruno Leipold  is Fellow in Political Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He completed his DPhil at the University of Oxford and has held postdoctoral positions at the European University Institute and the Justitia Amplificata Centre for Advanced Studies at the Goethe University of Frankfurt and the Free University of Berlin. He is currently writing a book exploring the relationship between Karl Marx and republicanism.

viii  Notes on Contributors John P. McCormick is Professor in Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Reading Machiavelli (2018), Machiavellian Democracy (2011), Weber, Habermas and Transformations of the European State (2007), and Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism (1997). He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, from the Fulbright, Mellon, and Rockefeller foundations, and has held fellowships at the European University Institute, Florence, and the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. Karma Nabulsi is Fellow and Tutor in Politics at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. She has lectured and written on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century republicanism, revolutions, and democracy, as well as on Palestine—especially Palestinian refugees and representation. Banu Turnaoğlu is Early Career Leverhulme Fellow and Research Associate of St John’s College at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of The Formation of Turkish Republicanism (2017). She received her PhD from the Department of Politics and International Studies at Cambridge. Before joining Cambridge, she obtained an MSc in Political Theory from the University of Oxford and a BA in History and International Relations from Koç University, Istanbul. Stuart White is Fellow in Politics at Jesus College, Oxford, having formerly taught in the Department of Political Science, MIT. His research is focused on democracy, republican values, and the economy, with related interests in both social policy and the political process. He is the author of The Civic Minimum (2003) and is currently working on a book exploring democratic and republican alternatives to the contemporary capitalist economy. His research also seeks to draw on these ideas to cast light on the United Kingdom’s ongoing constitutional crisis. He blogs occasionally at openDemocracy.

Introduction Radical Republicanism and Popular Sovereignty Bruno Leipold, Karma Nabulsi, and Stuart White

This volume offers a historically informed understanding of republicanism: a political tradition encompassing radical forms of democracy and popular sovereignty. In this tradition, the active and equal political participation of citizens are seen as the core guarantors of liberty, equality, and solidarity. The tradition has an extensive history of revolutionary activity to achieve these principles and of opposition to all forms of domination and oppression that undermine the free and equal standing of citizens in the republic. It lays claim to a long series of struggles against tyrants and despots, slaveholders and colonial masters, patriarchs and oligarchs, and is a tradition that stretches across the world, from Latin America to Haiti, from Asia to Africa. It has combined a commitment to revolution and insurrection with a dedication to building institutions that keep power in the hands of the citizenry, and one that is alert and resilient to oligarchical and imperial encroachments. Contemporary political theorists are informed by a somewhat distinct conception of republicanism, associated with understandings where ‘the people’ is viewed with suspicion or even something to be guarded against; where courts and expert committees are empowered to counteract possible tyranny by the majority; and where representative government, the rule of law, and the separation of powers are seen as the ultimate guarantors of liberty. Republicanism’s rich and diverse intellectual tradition has, in other words, become largely associated with concepts locating it within contemporary liberalism. This volume seeks to rectify the current absence of this tradition’s extensive history of radicalism, in the process reintroducing popular sovereignty as a driving force in republican thought. The contributions to the volume set out to retrieve republicanism’s popular and revolutionary heritage, from English Levellers to French and Ottoman revolutionaries, to American abolitionists and trade unionists. It draws on the anti-oligarchical thought of Machiavelli, the radical democratic aspects of Rousseau, and the republican dimensions of Marx’s socialism. Further, the volume explores theoretical accounts of social and structural domination and offers institutional proposals to democratize the state and the economy—from Bruno Leipold, Karma Nabulsi, and Stuart White, Introduction: Radical Republicanism and Popular Sovereignty In: Radical Republicanism: Recovering the Tradition’s Popular Heritage. Edited by: Bruno Leipold, Karma Nabulsi, and Stuart White, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198796725.003.0001

2  Bruno Leipold, Karma Nabulsi, and Stuart White citizens’ assemblies to cooperative production—that are inspired by this radical republican history. Republicanism’s trajectory is not exclusively radical: moderate and indeed conservative strains can also be traced, especially in its pre-modern incarnations. The sensibilities of Roman statesmen, Florentine ottimati, and American Federalists are an integral part of the republican tradition. Yet the rich language, defining ideas, and organizational forms of republicanism’s radical elements provide us with powerful resources for contemporary discussions about confronting injustice and domination.1 Republican theorists owe a profound debt to the scholarship and body of work developed by Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit, which has articulated a republican conception of freedom as non-domination, where citizens are only free when not subject to the arbitrary, uncontrolled power of a master.2 This conception of liberty has enormous critical potential and has rightly taken its place as one of republicanism’s defining principles. Here, we seek to help extend the concept’s application from political domination (historically the main focus of republicanism) to social and private forms of domination (which are often the most intense form of domination citizens experience),3 as well as emphasizing the structural processes that underlie them.4 Alongside this commitment to non-domination, we argue that the republican tradition is identified with the core principle of popular sovereignty. The concept of sovereignty belonging to the people is one closely tied to republicanism’s other defining commitments: the need for civic virtues in order to create, and then maintain a free republic; the idea that politics should be directed towards the common good of all; and that widespread political deliberation and participation 1  See further, Martin McIvor, ‘Republicanism, Socialism and the Renewal of the Left’, in In Search of Social Democracy: Responses to Crisis and Modernisation, eds. John Callaghan, Nina Fishman, Ben Jackson, and Martin McIvor (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), pp. 252–66; Karma Nabulsi, ‘No Maps, No Manuals: Retrieving Radical Republicanism, Restoring Popular Sovereignty’, Juncture 22, no. 2 (2015), pp. 147–52; and Stuart White, ‘Is Republicanism the Left’s “Big idea”?’, Renewal 15, no. 1 (2007), pp. 37–46. 2  For the classic statements see Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) and Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 3 On the importance of social domination, see, for instance, Alan  M.  S.  J.  Coffee, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft, Freedom and the Enduring Power of Social Domination’, European Journal of Political Theory 12, no. 2 (2013), pp. 116–35; M.  Victoria Costa, ‘Is Neo-Republicanism Bad for Women?’, Hypatia 28, no. 4 (2013), pp. 921–36; Alex Gourevitch, ‘Labor Republicanism and the Transformation of Work’, Political Theory 41, no. 4 (2013), pp. 591–617; Anne Phillips, ‘Feminism and Republicanism: Is This a Plausible Alliance?’, Journal of Political Philosophy 8, no. 2 (2000), pp. 279–93; and Melvin L. Rogers, ‘Race, Domination, and Republicanism’, in Difference without Domination: Pursuing Justice in Diverse Democracies, eds. Danielle Allen and Rohini Somanathan (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming). 4 For discussion of structural domination, see Cécile Laborde, ‘Republicanism’, in The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, eds. Michael Freeden and Marc Stears (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 521–2; Dorothea Gädeke, Politik der Beherrschung: Eine kritische Theorie externer Demokratieförderung (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2017), chap. 5; and Michael J. Thompson, ‘Reconstructing Republican Freedom: A Critique of the Neo-Republican Concept of Freedom as Non-Domination’, Philosophy and Social Criticism 39, no. 3 (2013), pp. 282–3.

Introduction  3 are necessary to achieve a common understanding of that good.5 Like ‘democracy’, popular sovereignty is an ideal which is widely endorsed, but often without any engagement with the radical challenge it presents to more traditional justifications of authority. Instituting the people as the foundational source of the republic’s legitimacy remains republicanism’s most subversive and revolutionary commitment. Our volume consequently seeks to restore the centrality of popular sovereignty to the republican tradition and show how it can inform and serve contemporary republican theorization. In the sections that follow, we indicate some of the contributions that popular sovereignty can make to three central areas of concern for republicanism: its organization in political and social movements, the design of its political institutions, and the structure of its economy. This is followed by an overview of the chapters to follow.

1.  Popular Sovereignty and Radical Republican Movements Under varying political conditions and different times and places, radical and revolutionary movements across the world struggled to achieve liberty and equality for themselves and their people, and identified themselves as republicans. They engaged in this battle with a commonality of facing unequal odds and informed by a shared approach: their reliance—indeed ardent belief—in the justice and the triumphant power of popular sovereignty. Their battle to restore popular sovereignty lay at the heart of radical republican movements’ organizing, and informed the techniques they relied on to change society, the shape their movements took, as well as the institutions they created to advance their goals. For republicans, the source of popular sovereignty lay in a continually refashioned social contract. Indeed, their goal was a return to the natural order of things: for republicans, sovereignty did not reside in the monarch or the hands of a few, but was instead the rightful possession of all. Put simply, popular sovereignty is the foundational principle underlying a just political order. People are the source of power and legitimacy, and therefore all laws and institutions created must be the reflection and outcome of their determining, and their will. Republicans understood that it was popular sovereignty’s constant location of power and authority in the people themselves, not in the state or its national institutions, that allowed these very institutions to breathe, take life, and have force. When applied, the principle of popular sovereignty ensured that the decisions of any national body were made through its people’s determining, and with their participation and consent. In this way, their general will and its expression are

5  For accounts of republicanism that see it as a cluster of concepts, see Richard Dagger, ‘NeoRepublicanism and the Civic Economy’, Politics, Philosophy and Economics 5, no. 2 (2006), p. 154 and Stuart White, ‘The Republican Critique of Capitalism’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 14, no. 5 (2011), pp. 562–4.

4  Bruno Leipold, Karma Nabulsi, and Stuart White understood as the basis for all legitimate collective political arrangements, structures, laws, strategies, and policies. In the republic they campaigned and fought to create, radical and revolutionary movements viewed popular sovereignty as performing two essential tasks to ensure the republic was sustained: that the people would participate in its institutional workings, and that they recognized the political structures that emerged from their will—where they played the primary role—as representing their desired ends. Although the principle of popular sovereignty was included (with numerous constraints), in a variety of political institutions of liberal democratic forms, throughout the ‘long nineteenth’ century its formations and expressions were predominantly found within revolutionary, socialist, and anti-colonial liberation movements. Its revolutionary and socialist expressions have a long heritage and tradition across the world; socialist frameworks of popular sovereignty have a rich history in Latin America, Africa, Asia, the Arab world, and Europe. Through a set of philosophically grounded practices, republicanism remains rooted in a common history with peoples who took up this same mission of instituting popular sovereignty—against a tyrant, a monarch, an empire, or a foreign colonial power. Tracing such common accounts furnish us with a vast reservoir of customs which republicans practised in their political associations, networks, and organizations. In the most inclusive republican imaginary, popular sovereignty can be defined as a legal status, an abstract concept, or a political principle. But it can also be understood as a tradition of action: its vast repertoire of techniques, handed on by successive republicans, provided generations with a concrete education on achieving radical change. The republicans’ goal to overturn the established order meant that their guiding eighteenth- and nineteenth-century principles of freedom, equality, and fraternity, combined with popular sovereignty, created a model of lengthy, sustained, and often successful revolutionary activity, which represented an ongoing and decisive challenge to the ordering of the international system of states between the second half of the eighteenth century and the end of the twentieth. Distinctive in many of its features from contemporary Anglo-American republican theory, republican movements had clear doctrines for mobilization that were designed specifically to confront larger, far better-equipped structural forces— notably the powerful apparatus of the imperial state. So revolutionary republicans possessed more than an innovatory language to inspire their cause: in the words of a leader of the republican movement in 1830s France, it was ‘la force revolutionnaire’,6 of mass mobilization: generous, usually national in scope, and offering useful guidelines, rules, and lessons for achieving their dreams.

6  Godefroy Cavaignac, ‘La Force Révolutionnaire’, in Paris Révolutionnaire, ed. G. Cavaignac (Paris: Guillaumin et Cie, 1848), pp. 5–46.

Introduction  5 In its manifest workings, this rich and complex tradition offers patterns of associational practices that provide a system for building a republic: for it was republicans who created republics; not republics (at least in their formation) that created republicans. Sequentially the formation of citizens came before any virtuous republic could appear; republicans’ own capacities became the prerequisite for obtaining a truly free republic, one that would be able to maintain equality and freedom against the constantly increasing power of elites. Radical republicans believed that the republic belonged to the people, that the wellbeing of a people existed in the extent of their individual and collective freedoms, and in the equality of their relations to each other as citizens. Considered in this light, republicanism as a movement comes into view: associations whose essential purpose was to create and preserve freedom for each and for all, never understood as a limited search for parliamentary democracy alone, or a gradual (and possibly temporary) enfranchising of individual rights and liberties that were prised from the encroachments of an ever expanding state. Given the strength of their opposition, along with the extensive nature of their goals, radical republicans saw themselves as engaged in a constant battle, a struggle, in a fight. The notion of the military campaign ‘in the field’ was transferred into the arena of the public realm—the battle against empire, tyranny, inequality, and colonialism, now seen as a political campaign, yet most often as the continuation of a military one in a new arena: the public space they were establishing. Equally, the histories of these republican movements illustrate that the battle to transform the body politic from absolute monarchy to free republic was neither spontaneous nor ceded by an existing power. Instead, each liberty was gained by a number of different formations and coalitions of movements over centuries of struggle and enfranchisements. Combining, developing, augmenting, then conveying the gathered understandings of mid-eighteenth-century republican thought and practice, Rousseau emphasized republicans’ duty to dedicate themselves to advancing the common good for ‘the happiness of all’, in the phrase most commonly used by republicans of the era. In his Social Contract, Rousseau shows the convergence between republican principles—fraternity, equality, liberty—and republican practice. The republic was not simply to be imagined, but was to be fashioned by republicans coming together to work purposefully for it. In this tradition, although debate, discussion, and deliberation were essential to republicans, and to republicanism, it was not often seen as useful to rely solely upon them in the stage of creating the republic, especially when facing the asymmetry of force of the king’s repressive army and when seeking an immediate end to its gross injustices. Free deliberation could only be secured once the republic protected the rights of all, especially the weak and invisible, to speak and be heard as equals. This classic republican view was captured by the editor of a nineteenth-century republican newspaper: ‘To arrive at the perfection that is possible of society, from the point

6  Bruno Leipold, Karma Nabulsi, and Stuart White of departure that we are at, there are two routes: one violent, that of revolutions; the other, peaceful education of public opinion. Both of these are popular, the Tribune accepts them both.’7 With popular sovereignty as a core principle of republicans, their movements that challenged the status quo primarily belonged to the people. Radical republicanism did not typically operate in elite domains (although radical republicans could often be found in the corridors and salons of power and played a key role in them). This subtle, intelligent, and purposive understanding of popular sovereignty created a distinct style of leadership carried by the popular class, based on a shared understanding of leadership as required in all tiers of society, and power, working together as a shared purpose, one body—if playing distinct roles. Republican culture was shared too, across the battleground of the factory, field, town square, association or underground network, and the tyrants’ prisons. Radical republicanism in its various forms, movements, and sectors was led by factory workers, artisans, peasants, prisoners, refugees, and sometimes captains or colonels, and members of the nobility. In the final days of the momentous 1834 silk workers’ insurrection in Lyon, while it was being crushed by the king’s troops, a poster went up in the popular Croix Rousse district calling for the revolution to continue. It expresses this republican adherence to popular rule, of the people’s sovereign right to the public realm, of the intelligence of the sovereignty of the people: ‘no doubt it is terrible that blood must spill in order to fight tyranny . . . but our enemies have already assassinated us before we could dream of taking up arms. We are republicans, and we know all the virtues.’8

2.  Popular Sovereignty and Political Institutions After the republic is founded, popular sovereignty expresses itself not only through citizens’ movements, but also requires a constitutional and institutional context for the making of law and policy. What kind of institutions are needed, or helpful, to give expression to the ideal of popular sovereignty? One obvious point of inspiration here is once again Rousseau’s Social Contract. Rousseau argues that the legitimacy of a state depends on reconciling freedom and authority, and that this requires a political order in which sovereignty lies with the ‘general will’. As a first approximation at least, we can say that the general will is general in terms of its source and its aims. On the one hand, it is a will that comes from the citizen body as a whole, as expressed in political participation in making the ‘laws’. On the other hand, it is a will that is properly oriented towards 7  Armand Marrast, La Tribune, 31 January 1833. 8  E. Carrier, the commander of the Croix Rousse area of Lyon, 11 April 1834, in Réquisitoire, Cours des Pairs, ‘l’Affaire d’avril 1834’ (Paris, 1835), p. 177.

Introduction  7 the interests of all, towards a common good. Rousseau’s central idea is that when laws have this origin and orientation it is possible for citizens to view the laws as an expression of their will, thereby achieving the ambitious reconciliation between freedom and state authority. For Rousseau, the institution of the general will in this sense is most obviously served by requiring that all fundamental laws be authorized by an assembly of the citizens. Some further aspects and possible implications of this conception of the polity should be noted. First, note that for Rousseau the sovereign power of the people over their basic laws is in an important sense an active power. In some social contract theories, such as that of John Locke, the people assemble to make their basic laws, but then dissolve, reassembling as a constitutional authority only in a revolutionary context. By contrast, Rousseau’s model of the periodic citizen assembly (CA) captures the idea that popular sovereignty should be institutionalized as an ongoing feature of the political system. When he insists that the CA should meet periodically, independent of the governments’ will, he is asserting that ‘We, the people’ regularly reassemble with authority over the ‘laws’. Second, given the way the general will is oriented to the common good, it is arguable that this conception also entails a central role for public argument, debate, and deliberation so that citizens are able to thrash out the nature of their common good.9 It is also very important, in this connection, that political power is not skewed towards particular social groups (e.g., defined by class or race) who are able to impose their sectional interest at the expense of the common good. As Helena Rosenblatt has argued, Rousseau’s Social Contract was in part motivated by a long-standing concern that power in the Genevan city-state had been effectively usurped by a social elite. His advocacy of the rights of the CA was supposed to be an antidote to this.10 Given this basic vision, what kind of political institutions are implied? To put the question more concretely, how adequate to this vision are the standard institutions of a contemporary representative, parliamentary democracy? Is it enough for a state to have, say, regular, open, and fair elections to legislatures which have the power to make laws and policy? To begin with, we should perhaps beware of overstating the extent to which radical republicanism necessarily takes issue with these institutions. It is helpful here to recall Bruce Ackerman’s idea of ‘dualist democracy’ in which politics operates at two levels.11 There is, first, a level of ‘normal’ politics in which citizens elect representatives to legislatures to make ordinary law and policy. But normal politics

9  There is disagreement as to how far Rousseau himself took this view. For helpful discussion, see Joshua Cohen, Rousseau: A Free Community of Equals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 75–7, 170–2. 10  Helena Rosenblatt, Rousseau and Geneva: From the First Discourse to the Social Contract, 1749–1762 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 11  Bruce Ackerman, We the People, vol. 1: Foundations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).

8  Bruno Leipold, Karma Nabulsi, and Stuart White in this sense properly works within the framework of a higher, constitutional law. This implies a second level of ‘constitutional politics’ in which, Ackerman argues, the people properly exercise a sovereign power over the constitution that sets the limits and goals of normal politics. With respect to these two levels of politics, Rousseau makes a related distinction between ‘government’ and ‘sovereign’. The people, in assembly, have sole authority to make the laws while also choosing the institutions and individuals to serve as a government, making detailed policy within the framework of the laws. If we understand ‘laws’ in Rousseau’s discussion to refer to the basic, fundamental laws of the political association, as some interpreters argue we should, then Rousseau’s conception looks very similar to the dualist democracy model identified by Ackerman.12 Within this model, the standard institutions of representative democracy have an important place. They are central to the operation of normal politics. Nevertheless, a radical republican may have reason to doubt the adequacy of these institutions by themselves. First, while these institutions might have a central place in normal politics, what about constitutional politics? This is the point (or, at least, a point) at which Rousseau’s picture of an active popular sovereign comes in. How can the people retain their authority over the basic, fundamental laws of their polity? Are the standard institutions of parliamentary democracy adequate to this, or is there a need for further institutions? Possibilities here include requirements for periodic constitutional conventions to review the basic laws and/or powers for citizens to initiate conventions or direct votes on constitutional amendments. Second, the historic record, and contemporary politics in many nations, suggests that the standard institutions of representative democracy are by no means invulnerable to capture by socio-economic elites. For example, where electoral competition requires resources, and the rich are in a better position to offer politicians resources, there is always a danger that the politicians will become overly attentive to the preferences of the rich at the expense of the common good. Radical republicanism will therefore want to see strict controls on the role of ‘money in politics’. This concern is also a further consideration in support of giving citizens the power to initiate reviews and even direct popular votes independently of the elected legislature. That said, ‘direct democracy’ undoubtedly carries its own risks from a radical republican point of view. Even if the process of direct democracy, e.g., in the form of citizens’ initiatives, can be insulated from the power of money in politics, it is possible for these processes to be used in objectionably ‘majoritarian’ ways, e.g.,

12  See Frank Marini, ‘Popular Sovereignty but Representative Government: The Other Rousseau’, Midwest Journal of Political Science 11, no. 4 (1967), pp. 451–70; Christopher Bertram, Rousseau and The Social Contract (London: Routledge, 2004); Richard Tuck, The Sleeping Sovereign: The Invention of Modern Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

Introduction  9 to oppress racial or sexual minorities.13 The radical republican response in part refers us back to the importance of social movements and the wider associational context in which institutions operate. These movements and related associations, such as trade unions, can potentially both push back against the power of money in politics and raise the voices of popular and minority groups. A further, complementary response, however, is to think further about the institutions themselves. For example, is there a role here for ‘micro-publics’, such as CAs?14 CAs are bodies of representatives chosen on a near random basis, but so as to be descriptively representative of the population along dimensions such as gender, race, and region. CAs are typically given an issue or proposal to consider, and their discussion of the issue or proposal is structured through learning, testimony, and decision phases, supported by facilitators who aim at full participation by all involved. Evidence from a number of nations suggests that they can achieve highquality deliberation.15 Placing CAs within citizen initiative processes might be one way to raise their deliberative quality and orientation to the common good. More generally, CAs direct our attention to the possible value of sortition in a radical republican perspective: of choosing representatives by lot, a practice used in many ancient, medieval, and early modern city-states.16 John  P.  McCormick has recently outlined an interesting variant of the CA which he calls the tribunate.17 Drawing on Machiavelli’s works, McCormick argues for an understanding of ‘the people’ as distinct from and standing in conflict with society’s economic and political elite (a perspective he argues is occluded by the more Rousseauian picture of the people as a unitary popular sovereign). Conventional institutions of

13  Derrick A. Bell, Jr., ‘The Referendum: Democracy’s Barrier to Racial Equality’, Washington Law Review 54, no. 1 (1978), pp. 1–29. 14 Archon Fung, ‘Recipes for Public Spheres: Eight Institutional Design Choices and Their Consequences’, Journal of Political Philosophy 11, no. 3 (2003), pp. 338–67. 15  Amy Lang, ‘But Is It for Real? The British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly as a Model of StateSponsored Citizen Empowerment’, Politics and Society 35 (2007), pp. 35–69; Graham Smith, Democratic Innovations: Designing Institutions for Citizen Participation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); David M. Farrell, ‘The 2013 Irish Constitutional Convention: A Bold Step or a Damp Squib?’, in 75 Years of the Constitution of Ireland: An Irish-Italian Dialogue, eds. Giuseppe Ferrari and John O’Dowd (Dublin: Clarus, 2014), pp. 292–305; John Grant, ‘Canada’s Republican Invention? On the Political Theory and Practice of Citizens’ Assemblies’, Political Studies 62, no. 3 (2014), pp. 539–55. 16  C. L. R. James, ‘Every Cook Can Govern: A Study of Democracy in Ancient Greece: Its Meaning for Today’, Correspondence 2 (1956), available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/ works/1956/06/every-cook.htm; Barbara Goodwin, Justice by Lottery, 2nd ed. (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2005); Oliver Dowlen, The Political Potential of Sortition: A Study of the Random Selection of Citizens for Public Office (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2008); Alexander  A.  Guerrero, ‘Against Elections: The Lottocratic Alternative’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 42, no. 2 (2014), pp. 135–78. For discussions that indicate the potential epistemic benefits of sortition, see also Hélène Landemore, Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), and Udit Bhatia, Epistocracy and Constitutions (DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 2018). 17 John P. McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 170–88.

10  Bruno Leipold, Karma Nabulsi, and Stuart White representative democracy in capitalist societies do not offer any formal or explicit representation of the people in this Machiavellian sense and, McCormick argues, this enhances the potential for effective elite control even within the framework of formally democratic institutions. As a counter, McCormick proposes (in the United States context) the setting up of a body of fifty-one citizens to be chosen at random for non-renewable one-year terms. The tribunate’s members will be chosen by lot from the general population but excluding the wealthiest 10 per cent and politicians and with provision to enhance representation members of historically oppressed groups such as African American and Native American citizens. The tribunate would have powers to veto proposals coming from other branches of government, to initiate referendums, and to initiate impeachment proceedings against political officials. Insofar as radical republicanism continues to make use of election in representation, there is also an interest in mechanisms that increase the accountability of elected officials to voters (thereby limiting the risks that they give undue preference to the preferences and interests of elites). Possibilities here include placing representatives under imperative mandates as to how they can vote. Another possibility is to give voters effective powers to recall elected representatives if they are dissatisfied with their performance. For both elected and non-elected representatives, having short terms of office might also enhance accountability, as might limits on the number of terms for which someone can sit as a representative. Radical republicanism does not offer a single set of institutional prescriptions for democratic political life. But its emphasis on popular sovereignty, and on the properly active and deliberative and contestatory quality of popular sovereignty, points to a need to think creatively about political institutions in a way that goes beyond the conventional structures of representative democracy, taking in (and perhaps integrating) proposals for things like citizens’ initiatives, micro-publics, sortition, and rights of recall. These proposals for political institutions need to be understood, however, as working in tandem with the radical republican emphasis on the value of citizens’ movements and with a radical republican agenda for the economy. There is no purely, narrowly ‘institutional’ solution to the challenge of realizing genuine popular sovereignty.

3.  Popular Sovereignty and the Economy For radical republicans, the fight for popular sovereignty in the political realm is inseparable from the struggle to emancipate citizens from relationships of domination in the economic realm. Citizens subjected to arbitrary power in the workplace and denied control over society’s principal economic institutions are unfree citizens. That unfreedom is not only a grave wrong in itself but threatens the realization and practice of popular sovereignty. An entrenched economic oligarchy can and will use its power to undermine the citizenry’s control of its

Introduction  11 government and instead direct the state towards its own narrow class interests. Republicanism thus cannot restrict itself to the political realm. That is an insight that has been crucial to those republicans who have taken economic domination seriously. The labour republican trade unionist, George E. McNeill, for instance, insisted in 1892 that ‘there is an inevitable and irresistible conflict between the wage-system of labor and the republican system of government’ and that it was therefore imperative to ‘engraft republican principles into our industrial system’.18 The idea that republican principles must be extended to include a thoroughgoing democratization of the economy is one that can also be found throughout the socialist tradition. Writing just a few years after McNeill, James Connolly, one of Ireland’s foremost socialists and republican fighters, freely and self-consciously embraced socialism’s republican inheritance, arguing that ‘A socialist republic is the application to agriculture and industry; to the farm, the field, the workshop, of the democratic principle of the republican ideal’.19 A number of republican theorists have over the last few years begun deploying republicanism’s normative and conceptual tools to analysing the multifaceted problem of economic domination. Particular attention has been focused on the arbitrary power exercised by employers and managers over their employees. Employers have wide discretion to direct and supervise their workers, the conditions under which they work, and the operation of the firm itself—all without employees having a say in the matter.20 Employers thus have significant uncontrolled power over their workers; a power exercised in innumerable cases of petty interference in the workplace, from telling workers what to wear to limiting when they can use the toilet, and even extending to the employee’s life beyond work, with employers directing them to attend political rallies and disciplining them for their private sexual choices.21 Workers have little choice but to acquiesce to these arbitrary interventions because the consequence of not doing so—losing their jobs—is so severe. Workers can, if necessary, leave their employer, but without productive assets of their own, they are forced to search for work for a different employer and thus once again put themselves in a condition of arbitrary power. In Elizabeth Anderson’s pithy formulation: ‘Workers may choose their Leviathan, but only Leviathans are in most people’s opportunity set.’22

18  Cited in Alex Gourevitch, From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 6, 116. 19  James Connolly, ‘Labour Representation’, Worker’s Republic, no. 3, 27 August 1898, p. 4. 20  Nien-hê Hsieh, ‘Rawlsian Justice and Workplace Republicanism’, Social Theory and Practice 31, no. 1 (2005), p. 122. 21  Christopher Bertram, Corey Robin, and Alex Gourevitch, ‘Let It Bleed: Libertarianism and the Workplace’, Crooked Timber, 1 July 2012, http://crookedtimber.org/2012/07/01/let-it-bleedlibertarianism-and-the-workplace/. 22  Elizabeth Anderson, ‘Equality and Freedom in the Workplace: Recovering Republican Insights’, Social Philosophy and Policy 31, no. 2 (2015), p. 59; See also Elizabeth Anderson, Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).

12  Bruno Leipold, Karma Nabulsi, and Stuart White The domination of workers thus does not simply consist in the personal domination of their individual employer, but in being subjected to the structural domination of employers, whose control over productive assets means that while workers do not have to work for a particular employer, they do have to work for an employer.23 Domination in the economic sphere is thus not limited to the workplace but extends to the vastly unequal distribution of productive assets—a reminder of the importance of analysing the structure and functioning of domination in the economy as a whole. For instance, the private control of investment in capitalist economies systematically curtails popular sovereignty, with the ever present threat of capital strikes and capital flight constraining policy choices and placing citizens at the mercy of a wealthy elite.24 Moreover, capitalism’s tendency towards economic crises undermines citizens’ robust protection against arbitrary interference,25 and it has been argued that market competition itself exposes all workers, consumers, and firms to the uncontrolled power of other economic actors.26 Republican theorists have not restricted themselves to analysing economic domination but have proposed a number of policies to rectify it. Broadly, proposals to address domination in the workplace can be divided into three strategies: (1) state regulations that constrain employers’ and managers’ power over employees (what has been called ‘workplace constitutionalism’); (2) ensuring that workers have a meaningful right to exit their workplace; and (3) structuring the workplace so that workers have a voice in its management, known as workplace democracy.27 Each of these strategies will play a role in eliminating workplace domination, the  question is to what extent we rely on each strategy and what form each strategy takes.28 State regulation—i.e., workplace constitutionalism—has unquestionably played an important part in limiting what employers can get away with; laws regulating an employer’s right to fire employees at will or impose longer working hours are 23  Gourevitch, ‘Labor Republicanism and the Transformation of Work’, pp. 601–3; Bruno Leipold, ‘Chains and Invisible Threads: Liberty and Domination in Marx’s Account of Wage-Slavery’, in Rethinking Liberty before Liberalism, eds. Annelien de Dijn and Hannah Dawson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming); Lillian Cicerchia, ‘Structural Domination in the Labor Market’, European Journal of Political Theory (forthcoming), https://doi.org/10.1177/1474885119851094; James Muldoon, ‘A Socialist Theory of Freedom and Government’, European Journal of Political Theory (forthcoming), https://doi.org/10.1177/1474885119847606. 24  White, ‘The Republican Critique of Capitalism’, pp. 568–71. 25  Alex Bryan, ‘The Dominating Effects of Economic Crises’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy (forthcoming). 26  William Clare Roberts, Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), chap.  3; Nicholas Vrousalis, ‘Workplace Democracy Implies Economic Democracy’, Journal of Social Philosophy (forthcoming). 27 Anderson, ‘Equality and Freedom in the Workplace’, p. 66; Iñigo González-Ricoy, ‘The Republican Case for Workplace Democracy’, Social Theory and Practice 40, no. 2 (2014), p. 234. 28  For arguments, however, that maintain that workplace democracy is not a necessary component in addressing workplace domination, see Dagger, ‘Neo-Republicanism and the Civic Economy’, pp. 162–3, and Daniel Jacob and Christian Neuhäuser, ‘Workplace Democracy, Market Competition and Republican Self-Respect’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 21, no. 4 (2018), p. 936.

Introduction  13 important and essential achievements. But relying solely on regulation faces the problem of enforcement, since workers are structurally disempowered relative to employers and are thus limited in their ability to enforce their rights; as well as the impossibility of regulating for all possible forms of interference, given the inherent incompleteness of labour contracts.29 Some republicans have instead argued for the importance of strengthening a worker’s ability to leave their workplace by ensuring that labour markets are perfectly competitive.30 Setting aside whether perfect labour markets are realizable in practice, workers still face significant personal and professional costs when switching between workplaces and are still only able to choose from a set of arbitrary and despotic workplaces.31 Introducing an unconditional basic income, as several republicans have proposed, could certainly make exit less costly for workers and significantly increase their bargaining power relative to employers and thus reduce their domination.32 But if the level of basic income does not allow permanent retreat from the labour market (as some of its republican defenders admit is possible), workers still have to find work for an employer.33 Another radical republican response has thus been to focus on transforming the workplace itself so that workers take an active role in the management of the firm itself. These proposals for workplace democracy span more limited calls for workers’ representation on corporate boards and works councils (as in the German co-determination system) to more fully fledged proposals for cooperative ownership and control of firms by workers.34 This kind of cooperative production, where power rests in the workforce as a whole and workers are actively involved in the running of the firm, can be seen as the realization of the radical republican commitment to popular sovereignty inside the workplace. This workplace popular sovereignty must in turn be supplemented and reinforced by economy-wide 29  González-Ricoy, ‘The Republican Case for Workplace Democracy’, pp. 246–7. 30 Robert  S.  Taylor, Exit Left: Markets and Mobility in Republican Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), chap.  3; Philip Pettit, ‘Freedom in the Market’, Politics, Philosophy and Economics 5, no. 2 (2006), p. 142. 31  González-Ricoy, ‘The Republican Case for Workplace Democracy’, pp. 240–1. 32  Philip Pettit, ‘A Republican Right to Basic Income?’, Basic Income Studies 2, no. 2 (2008); Frank Lovett, A General Theory of Domination and Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 201–3. 33 Gourevitch, ‘Labor Republicanism and the Transformation of Work’, pp. 598–603; Alex Gourevitch, ‘The Limits of a Basic Income: Means and Ends of Workplace Democracy’, Basic Income Studies 11, no. 1 (2016), pp. 17–28. See also the critique of the power to exit argument by Simon Birnbaum and Jurgen De Wispelaere, ‘Basic Income in the Capitalist Economy: The Mirage of “Exit” from Employment’, Basic Income Studies 11, no. 1 (2016), pp. 61–74, and the discussion in Stuart White, ‘Freedom, Exit, and Basic Income’, in Welfare to Work in Contemporary European Welfare States: Legal, Sociological and Philosophical Perspectives on Justice and Domination, eds. Anja Eleveld, Thomas Kampen, and Josien Arts (Bristol: Policy Press, forthcoming). 34 Keith Breen, ‘Non-Domination, Workplace Republicanism, and the Justification of Worker Voice and Control’, International Journal of Comparative Labour Law and Industrial Relations 33, no. 3 (2017), pp. 419–39; Inigo Gonzalez-Ricoy, ‘Ownership and Control Rights in Democratic Firms: A Republican Approach’, Review of Social Economy (forthcoming), https://doi.org/10.1080/00346764. 2018.1552792; Tom O’Shea, ‘Socialist Republicanism’, Political Theory (forthcoming), https://doi. org/10/1177/0090591719876889.

14  Bruno Leipold, Karma Nabulsi, and Stuart White measures, such as the strengthening of union power and public control over investment, which erode the ability of a wealthy elite to dominate and undermine the citizenry’s political will.35

4.  Volume Overview This volume provides a range of perspectives on radical republicanism, assembled in ten chapters, and divided into five thematic parts. The chapters range from historical discussions of seventeenth-century English Levellers and nineteenthcentury Young Ottomans, to theoretical investigations of the radical constitutional possibilities provided by CAs, and the organizational praxis of republican movements. Uniting these diverse topics, approaches, and authors is a commitment to radical understandings of republicanism, and to retrieving the tradition’s popular and revolutionary heritage. The topics and their conclusions show us the enormous contributions that radical republicanism can bring to existing theories of the republic, and to republicanism. We hope they will encourage further scholarship exploring the remarkable breadth of republicanism. Part I, Domination: Social and Structural, examines one of the central values of republicanism, freedom as non-domination, and how it can be reconceptualized for both political and social emancipation. In the volume’s opening chapter, Dorothea Gädeke develops an account of critical republicanism through a close engagement with Pettit’s neo-republicanism. She argues that while Pettit’s theory has greater critical potential than often assumed, three of its foundational building blocks need modification to realize its potential. The first is the normative core of Pettit’s theory, which Gädeke explains is not centrally an objection to the limitation of choice that a state of domination brings but that a dominated subject is denied the discursive status of a being worthy of equal respect. Gädeke argues that this must be extended to the idea that domination is wrong because dominated individuals are denied normative authority—that they can be the authors as well as the subjects of the moral and political norms to which they are subject. The second concerns the concept of domination itself, which Gädeke argues should be understood as a structurally constituted arbitrary capacity to interfere (as opposed to a merely interactional capacity). This arbitrary power should also be reconceptualized to refer to power that is not justifiable to those subjected to it. Third and finally, the theory’s institutional implications (in response to the previous changes) shift from a defence of a

35  Alex Gourevitch, ‘Quitting Work but Not the Job: Liberty and the Right to Strike’, Perspectives on Politics 14, no. 2 (2016), pp. 307–23; Martin O’Neill and Stuart White, ‘Trade Unions and Political Equality’, in Philosophical Foundations of Labour Law, eds. Hugh Collins, Gillian Lester, and Virginia Mantouvalou (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 252–68.

Introduction  15 mixed constitution and the contestatory citizenry, to the functional separation of powers and popular sovereignty. Taken together, Gädeke argues that these modifications transform neo-republicanism into a critical social and political theory. Alan Coffee begins his chapter with the arresting observation that, in spite of the centrality of ‘slavery’ in republican rhetoric and theory, the words and political thought of actual slaves have been almost entirely absent in contemporary theory. To remedy this absence, Coffee turns to the American abolitionist, writer, statesman, and former slave Frederick Douglass. Coffee shows that Douglass’s writings offer a crucial corrective to republican theory’s tendency to overlook the centrality of social domination. For Douglass, the legal and political emancipation of the American slaves was insufficient to secure their freedom, because former slaves continued to be subjected to public norms and social attitudes that denied their equal status, and capacity for virtue. Coffee sets out Douglass’s insistence that while American culture and public discourse remained dominated by the assumptions and prejudices of white society, black citizens were still enslaved. Douglass thus believed that a political revolution should be accompanied by a more comprehensive revolutionary transformation, in public norms and social attitudes. Part II, Popular Constitutionalism, sets out some of the ways in which radical republicanism provides constitutional resources for exploring alternatives to the main institutions of liberal representative democracy. John McCormick’s chapter extends his influential account of Machiavelli as a popular democrat to the Florentine Histories, a text often taken to represent a conservative turn in Machiavelli’s thought. McCormick argues that the Histories should be read in the light of Machiavelli’s constitutional prescriptions in The Prince and the Discourses, which institutionalize the power of the people against the nobility. McCormick shows us that the Histories are an exercise in ‘silent comparative constitutionalism’, where Machiavelli unfavourably contrasts the political and legal institutions of the Florentine Republic with those of ancient Rome. McCormick shows how Machiavelli implicitly condemned the failure of the Florentine Republic to introduce Rome’s signature popular institutions, the plebeian tribunate and large CAs for legislation and political trials. Instead it relied on small executive councils and foreign arbitrators, which were more easily swayed by Florence’s nobility and wealthy guildsmen. Further, McCormick contends that Machiavelli criticizes Florence’s key founders and reformers for failing to follow the ancient models of virtuous legislators, such as Romulus and Brutus, who had constrained or crushed the wealthy elites of the city and not hesitated to arm a civic militia of the people. McCormick thus concludes that in the Histories, Machiavelli maintains his commitment to a constitutional order that effectively channels social conflict between the people and the elites and institutionalizes the power of the former over the latter. Stuart White explores the extent to which alternative models of CAs (where near randomly selected members of the general public deliberate and make

16  Bruno Leipold, Karma Nabulsi, and Stuart White recommendations on public policy and/or constitutional issues) can help to realize the values of republican democracy (the promotion of deliberation, political equality and resiliency to oligarchy, and active popular sovereignty) in a contemporary political system. White argues that a replacement model of CAs, where they entirely supplant elected legislatures, faces the serious challenge of policymaking power being captured by the state bureaucracy and fails to promote active popular sovereignty. If all issues are decided in this way citizens not included in the assembly have no significant opportunity to participate. On the other hand, White argues that a consultative model of CAs, where they are set up by legislatures and act in an advisory and non-binding capacity, similarly fails to live up to the values of republican democracy. Here, the significant power assigned to legislatures means that the CA cannot be an effective counter-power to oligarchical influence. White instead defends a petition-assembly-referendum model of CAs, where citizens directly establish an assembly through petitions, and this assembly holding independent power to call a referendum. White shows how this model enhances deliberation, by providing a deliberative filter for referendums, increases resilience to oligarchy by giving citizens an alternative legislative route when legislatures are captured by economic elites; and promotes an active popular sovereign by providing citizens with a direct and horizontal (citizen-to-citizen) method of initiating change. White concludes that the petition-assembly-referendum model of CAs should form part of a wider package of constitutional reforms that can realize the values of republican democracy. Part III, Movement and Resistance, collects historical and contemporary perspectives on republicanism, both as a language and a tool of struggles against oppression. Guy Aitchison argues that republicans should be committed to natural or moral rights in order to convincingly ground a right to resistance. Aitchison maintains that republican approaches to rights that dismiss natural/moral rights, and instead maintain that the only rights for individuals are those institutionally enforced by the state, are left unable to defend popular resistance to the state. These approaches also fail to appreciate how the language of rights can (and has) played a crucial role in the struggles of the oppressed against arbitrary power. They also reveal an excessively statist bias in the realization and enforcement of rights. In developing this position Aitchison draws extensively on the political thought of the English Levellers. In their struggle with more moderate republicans, these radical republicans of the seventeenth century relied on the idea of natural rights, which was foundational to their understanding of the right to resist arbitrary and despotic government. Karma Nabulsi’s chapter sets out two models of French radical republicanism during the 1830 Revolution: that represented by Filippo Buonarroti and the other by Godefroy Cavaignac. Nabulsi begins her study by contrasting these two revolutionary models with the liberal republicanism of the Marquis de Lafayette, who

Introduction  17 was instrumental in installing a constitutional monarchy instead of a republic. She turns to Buonarroti, a seasoned veteran of the first French Revolution, who believed in the key role of organized secret societies for creating the republic. He thought they served as crucial sites for the inculcation of virtue, and a subordination of one’s own views for the good of the movement. In contrast, Cavaignac represented the younger generation of revolutionary republicans. Nabulsi shows that while sharing Buonarroti’s admiration for the radical nature of the French Revolution, their vision differed from Buonarotti in terms of organization and the virtues. For Cavaignac, the republic could be achieved by building from below, and not by elite revolutionaries alone. For the young generation of French revolutionaries, virtues were practices to be engaged in the struggle for equality, humanity, and liberty. Nabulsi argues that these models provide useful resources for contemporary political theorizing and for understanding republicanism not only as an intellectual body of thought but as a tradition of political mobilization and radical change. In Part IV, Socialism and Labour, we consider the relationship of republicanism to socialism and the republican response to capitalist domination. In his chapter, Alex Gourevitch takes on one of the central historical (and now neglected) values of the republican tradition: civic virtue. Gourevitch argues that some key criticisms of civic virtue—that it is geared towards the preservation of state institutions and relies on state coercion—can be answered by exploring how the labour republicans of the nineteenth century transformed the concept of civic virtue in their struggle against wage labour and capitalism. Civic virtue meant sculpting workers’ habits, needs, and desires, to make them aware of their unjust political and social order and their economic situation. It also entailed building alternative educational institutions (such as an independent labour press) to educate and stimulate workers’ capacity for judgement—a form of civic education without state coercion. Labour republicans also sought to overcome the drive towards competition amongst workers by building a culture of solidarity, where workers saw their own good as tied to the universal good of all workers—an idea institutionalized through their self-organization in workingmen’s parties, trade unions, and cooperative industries. In these ways, the labour republicans reconfigured civic virtue from a tool to preserve existing state institutions to one that could transform society. Bruno Leipold investigates the radical republican influence on Marx’s conception of the political institutions of socialism, which Marx referred to as the ‘social republic’. Leipold argues that this influence can be detected in three institutional strands. First, Leipold establishes how Marx’s criticisms of representative government and his embrace of popular delegacy echo Rousseau’s famous critique of representation, as well as his less well-known defence of mechanisms that constrain the discretion of representatives, such as imperative mandates, representative recall, and short terms of office. Second, Leipold argues that forerunners of

18  Bruno Leipold, Karma Nabulsi, and Stuart White Marx’s criticism of the separation of powers and his advocacy of legislative supremacy over the executive can be found amongst the Anti-Federalists during the American constitutional debates, as well as radical republican contemporaries during the 1848 Revolutions. Third, Leipold shows how Marx’s belief that state institutions had to be brought under popular control was inherited from classical ideas in radical republican thought, such as a citizen-militia and the deprofessionalization of public administration. Leipold concludes with the suggestion that the radical republican influence on Marx’s politics shows the importance of radical democratic institutions to achieving and maintaining socialism. In Part V, Historical Trajectories, we present two examples of traditions of radical republicanism that have been neglected in the historiography. Banu Turnaoğlu traces the history of radical republican thought in the Ottoman Empire from the mid-nineteenth century to the foundation of the Turkish Republic. She focuses on the Young Ottomans, a secret society founded in 1865 and modelled on the various Young Europe societies of the nineteenth century. As Turnaoğlu shows, its members were committed to popular sovereignty, the republican trinity of liberty, equality, and fraternity, and the revolutionary overthrow of the sultan’s despotic rule. Turnaoğlu draws attention to how they deployed traditional republican ideas (especially drawn from their experience in France), while reinterpreting them to suit the context of the Ottoman Empire. For instance, she explores their discussion of the compatibility of representation with the Islamic principles of consultation and deliberation, and their advocacy of an elected and non-hereditary caliph. Her chapter provides an illustration that republicanism is not an exclusively Western tradition and that our understanding of the tradition is greatly enriched by looking beyond canonized historical examples. Sudhir Hazareesingh closes the volume with a longue durée overview of radical republicanism in France from the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century to the French communists in the twentieth century. Hazareesingh shows how this capacious tradition took its foremost inspiration from Rousseau and was united by its commitment to popular sovereignty and to resisting political and social oppression. This was a vision of human perfectibility, opposition to tyranny, and attachment to universal fraternity. Perhaps most distinctive is the tradition’s ‘prodigious sense of imagination’. He charts the development of the tradition from the Jacobin Constitution of 1793 to the utopian plans of Saint-Simon and Fourier; from the radical egalitarianism of Philippe Buonarotti and social republicanism of Louis Blanc, to the fight for women’s inclusion in the Republic in the writings of Olympe de Gouges, Flora Tristan, and George Sand. Finally, he traces the anarchists, socialists, and communists who kept the radical and universalistic promise of republicanism alive during the conservativism and imperialism of the Third Republic. Despite its traditional historiographical prominence, French republicanism, especially its radical and revolutionary strand, has been neglected

Introduction  19 and even deliberately downplayed in the modern republican revival (especially in political theory). Hazareesingh’s account shows the contribution that French radical republicanism has made and can make to modern political thought. This volume originated at the conference ‘Reclaiming Republicanism: Recovering the Tradition’s Radical Heritage’ convened at the University of Oxford. We would like to express our appreciation and thanks to the Department of Politics and International Relations and to Jesus College for funding the event, as well as thanking all who joined us at the discussions, which continue. We are extremely grateful to a number of people for the dedication and care they have given to the book’s production. Our superb editor, Dominic Byatt, was a highly informed and enthusiastic advocate for this scholarly initiative on radical republicanism, and we were fortunate to have his intellectual engagement. We are also very grateful to the wonderful team at Oxford University Press: Sarah Parker and Olivia Wells provided crucial early support, while Céline Louasli shepherded the volume through its final stages with skill and speed. Two anonymous reviewers offered us very helpful feedback, which improved both its structure and content. Jamie Ranger kindly stepped in at the crucial moment to produce our index. We are also very grateful to Dawn Preston, for the manuscript’s excellent copy-editing, and Kayalvizhi Ganesan, for overseeing the book’s production with efficiency and encouragement, from its early stages, to the final publication. The front page of The Red Republican’s 9 November 1850 issue provides the book’s cover. This radical Chartist journal brought together democrats, socialists, feminists, refugees, revolutionaries, and internationalists in a concerted endeavour to establish the sovereignty of the people—an inspirational vision for today.

1

From Neo-Republicanism to Critical Republicanism Dorothea Gädeke

Does neo-republicanism offer a promising alternative to dominant liberal approaches in political philosophy? Does it tie in with the radical strands of the republican tradition? Or is it, ultimately, geared towards defending the status quo? Neo-republicanism, as developed most systematically by Philip Pettit, has quickly risen to become one of the most widely discussed paradigms in contemporary political thought. Its core idea of (non-)domination, originally framed as a theory of freedom, has been taken up in various other contexts, most notably as the basis for an account of social justice.1 Yet, its credentials as a resource for a comprehensive critique of social relations remain contested. While some see its power-critical thrust as a welcome amendment to the distributive focus of liberal debates on justice,2 others criticize its narrow conception of power3 or its elitist4 and anti-democratic5 leaning. Against this background, my aim in this chapter is twofold. On the one hand, I argue that Pettit’s neo-republicanism does have a powerful critical potential, too easily dismissed by some of his critics. On the other hand, I aim to show how this critical potential can be strengthened by reconceptualizing his theory of domination from a perspective inspired by the Kantian line of republican thought and contemporary Frankfurt School-style critical theory. This will pave the way for developing what I call critical republicanism.6 The assertion that neo-republicanism resonates with critical theory as put forward by the Frankfurt School, broadly conceived, has been noted before. Both Cécile Laborde and James Bohman have pointed out that the emphasis of 1  See, for instance, Frank Lovett, A General Theory of Domination and Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 2  See, for instance, Michael J. Thompson, ‘The Limits of Liberalism: A Republican Theory of Social Justice’, International Journal of Ethics 7, nos 3–4 (2011), pp. 1–21. 3  Patchen Markell, ‘The Insufficiency of Domination’, Political Theory 36, no. 1 (2008), pp. 9–36. 4 John McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), chap. 6. 5 Nadia Urbinati, ‘Competing for Liberty: The Republican Critique of Democracy’, American Political Science Review 106, no. 3 (2012), pp. 607–21. 6 For a more extensive account, see Dorothea Gädeke, Politik der Beherrschung. Eine kritische Theorie externer Demokratieförderung (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2017). Dorothea Gädeke, From Neo-Republicanism to Critical Republicanism In: Radical Republicanism: Recovering the Tradition’s Popular Heritage. Edited by: Bruno Leipold, Karma Nabulsi, and Stuart White, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198796725.003.0002

24  Dorothea Gädeke republicanism on actual institutionalized practices that realize non-domination can be reinterpreted as a methodological demand in terms of a practice-oriented critical theory.7 Following this methodological reading, a critical republicanism is less interested in articulating ideal principles. Instead, it starts from given historically and socially situated social practices, analyses the existing relations of domination inherent in these practices, politicizes them by revealing how they are socially produced and reproduced, and finally indicates how they might be transformed. However, in order to guide such a critical analysis of existing forms of domination, critical republican theory needs to provide, on the one hand, conceptual tools for critical social analysis, most notably a suitable conception of power. On the other hand, it needs to be reflexive with regard to the underlying normative ideal in order to be able to apply it critically to itself. My aim is to show how these requirements can be met so as to lay the theoretical basis for a critical republicanism. Note that I do not mean to suggest that this is the only way to recover a crit­ ic­al potential within the republican tradition; the contributions to this volume show ample evidence of radical thought within other strands of the republican tradition. Nor do I provide an independent justification for the project of developing the critical potential inherent within republicanism. I merely want to show that Pettit’s account of republicanism does indeed bear an important crit­ ic­al thrust and how it can be strengthened by bringing it in conversation with another line of republican thought. This will not only help uncover the radical potential of republicanism by providing a more compelling basis for a critique of existing power relations, including, most notably, social forms of domination in the economic or cultural realm. It will, or so I will argue, also help solve some conceptual problems of Pettit’s own account that risk weakening its claim to distinctiveness. Starting from the three most important building blocks of Pettit’s account of domination, its normative core, its conception of domination, and its institutional implications, I will show for each why it provides an appealing starting point for this endeavour, why it nevertheless falls short of meeting these requirements, and how it can be refined towards a critical republicanism that satisfies them. First, I  will highlight the discourse-theoretical core of Pettit’s account of domination and argue that this discourse-theoretical dimension needs to be strengthened in order to account for the requirement of reflexivity. I reinterpret Pettit’s idea of a discursive status, which the ideal of non-domination is meant to protect, in terms of normative authority (1). Second, I will turn to the conception of domination as

7  Cécile Laborde, Critical Republicanism: The Hijab Controversy and Political Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), chap. 1; James Bohman, ‘Critical Theory, Republicanism, and the Priority of Injustice: Transnational Republicanism as Non-Ideal Theory’, Journal of Social Philosophy 43, no. 2 (2012), pp. 97–112.

From Neo-Republicanism to Critical Republicanism  25 arbitrary power. I will argue that its power-critical content needs to be sharpened by conceiving of domination as a structurally constituted form of power, both in an interpersonal and a systemic sense (2.1). Moreover, I propose reinterpreting the notion of arbitrariness in a discourse-theoretical way so as to capture the reflexive dimension of normative authority (2.2). Finally, I will briefly sketch why this modified account of domination implies rethinking the institutions of nondomination along the lines of a Kantian model of republicanism, based on a functional separation of powers and popular sovereignty rather than the mixed constitution and contestatory citizenry, which Pettit advocates (3).

1.  Discourse Theory and the Normative Core of Domination Let me start with a fundamental question that is rarely asked: what is the normative core of the notion of domination? Neo-republican accounts of domination often start from paradigm cases, most notably slavery, and articulate a conception of domination that is able to capture them.8 However, in order to conceptualize domination in a way that allows for the analysis of new, non-paradigmatic cases, we need to have a sense of what it is that is problematic about the relationship between the enslaved person and the master. I will first suggest a reading of Pettit, which draws on his theory of free will as discursive control in order to highlight the discourse-theoretical core of his account of domination. In a second step, I will show that this discourse-theoretical dimension has to be strengthened by reinterpreting the discursive status that lies at the core of Pettit’s account of domination in terms of normative authority. Pettit himself develops his conception of non-domination in close engagement with the liberal ideal of free choice as non-interference.9 In comparison to non-interference, non-domination is less demanding in that it only refers to arbitrary interference; non-arbitrary interference may condition non-domination but does not compromise it. At the same time, non-domination is more demanding than non-interference because it covers not just actual (arbitrary) interference, but also the mere capacity to interfere. As Pettit emphasizes, this means that over and beyond the direct restriction of choice, domination also accounts for the problems of (1) the uncertainty and inability to make plans, (2) the resulting incentive to servility, and (3) the asymmetry in social standing that domination brings about.10 Most of Pettit’s critics have concentrated on the first aspect, most notably the  libertarian critics. They regard Pettit’s emphasis on a mere capacity to 8 See Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 31–5. 9  Ibid., chaps 1 and 2. 10  Ibid., pp. 85–9.

26  Dorothea Gädeke interfere as a point about the probability of interference that simply highlights the conditions for minimizing the chance of actual constraints. From this point of view, non-domination is not a distinct normative ideal; it is simply resilient non-interference.11 In response to the libertarian reading, one may point to the emphasis Pettit has put on the fact that domination is not merely based on a concern about the direct restriction of choice. Rather, it also draws attention to indirect restrictions on choice that are mediated through the effects of domination on the psyche of the dominated. The uncertainty that domination brings about induces a distinct kind of deferential or slavish mentality that leads to self-censorship.12 However, this psychological reading is just as misleading as the libertarian one because it also reduces the normative core of domination to the protection of a realm of free choice against externally induced constraints; it merely emphasizes that these constraints may work in a mediated way. From this perspective, the paradigmatic case of slavery is problematic because the enslaved suffer restrictions of choice, whether directly or indirectly. What both interpretations ignore is the third aspect Pettit emphasizes: the asymmetry in standing. The crucial importance of this third aspect comes to the fore when Pettit’s theory of domination is read against the background of his theory of free will.13 It reveals that his notion of domination is based on a discourse-theoretical reconstruction of basic practical norms that we need to presuppose when engaging in discursive practices. For Pettit, we are discursive, conversable beings, that is, beings who are able to give and to take reasons for thinking or acting in a certain way. As such, we are liable to have our judgements and actions held to relevant standards and are able to adjust accordingly. This is what it means to be treated as a free and responsible person. As conversable beings, we understand ourselves as having this capacity to be moved by reasons, even when we fail to exercise it and, hence, we also need to ascribe it to others with whom we engage discursively. The ascription of discursive control, however, implies certain practical norms, as it rules out social relations that undermine our capacity to be moved by reasons.

11  See Ian Carter, A Measure of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), chap. 8; John Ferejohn, ‘Pettit’s Republic’, Monist 84, no. 1 (2001), pp. 77–97; Matthew  H.  Kramer, ‘Liberty and Domination’, in Republicanism and Political Theory, eds. Cécile Laborde and John Maynor (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 44–50; but also Rainer Forst, ‘A Kantian Republican Conception of Justice as Nondomination’, in Republican Democracy: Liberty, Law and Politics, eds. Andreas Niederberger and Philipp Schink (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), p. 161. 12 Pettit, Republicanism, pp. 86f; see also Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 84–96. Both emphasize however that servile attitudes are not necessary for domination (Philip Pettit, ‘Keeping Republican Freedom Simple: On a Difference with Quentin Skinner’, Political Theory 30, no. 3 (2002), p. 349; Quentin Skinner, ‘Freedom as the Absence of Arbitrary Power’, Republicanism and Political Theory, eds. Cécile Laborde and John Maynor (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 93f). 13  See, for the following, Philip Pettit, A Theory of Freedom: From the Psychology to the Politics of Agency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

From Neo-Republicanism to Critical Republicanism  27 Hence, there is an ethic of commanding respect as a conversable interlocutor inscribed into our discursive practices.14 It is this discursive status of commanding respect which, arguably, provides the normative core of Pettit’s conception of domination. Domination undermines what we as participants in discursive practices necessarily presuppose, namely that we all enjoy discursive control.15 Someone who is dominated will ‘no longer have the sort of voice that can be reliably forthright’; he will be ‘under suspicion of playing to the audience of the powerful and never having anything worthwhile to say in his own right’.16 Being at the mercy of others, he will not be taken seriously as a credible speaker who warrants hearing. He may still be treated as if he was; however, any discursive standing will merely be granted by the powerful as a gift. He will not be able to command attention and respect. This is why the mere dependency on the will of others matters, over and beyond a restriction of choice: it occasions an asymmetry in standing. As Pettit puts it: ‘domination is an evil for individual human beings, restricting the extent to which they can relate to one another as persons in the common space of reasons: restricting the extent, in effect, to which they can live in a relationship of mutual respect’.17 Highlighting this discourse-theoretical core of Pettit’s notion of domination shows that the issues of whether someone who is dominated actually suffers interference or whether she actually self-censors her behaviour are not essential; what matters is that, in all the choices she makes, she depends on the goodwill of the powerful and therefore is not considered to be a trustworthy interlocutor in her own right. This is why Pettit emphasizes that the ‘terrible evil brought about by domination, over and beyond the evil of restricting choice, and inducing a distinctive uncertainty, is that it deprives a person of the ability to command attention and respect and so of his or her standing among persons’.18 In other words: the paradigmatic case of slavery is not merely problematic in terms of restrictions of choice, whether directly or mediated. Rather, the enslaved person is not recognized, as Pettit puts it, as a ‘voice worth hearing and an ear worth addressing’19 and is thus denied the discursive status of commanding respect as a person. The discourse-theoretical core of Pettit’s account of domination seems far more appealing to a critical approach than the libertarian focus on free choice, as it draws attention to the interpersonal conditions of making choices in the first place. However, Pettit does not fully develop the critical potential of a 14  See Philip Pettit, ‘Joining the Dots’, in Common Minds: Themes from the Philosophy of Philip Pettit, eds. Geoffrey Brennan, Robert Goodin, Frank Jackson, and Michael Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), pp. 279–84. 15  Note that domination only refers to the interpersonal conditions of discursive control, not the intrapersonal ones, see Pettit, Theory of Freedom, p. 127. 16  Philip Pettit, ‘The Domination Complaint’, in Political Exclusion and Domination, Nomos XLVI, eds. Melissa Williams and Stephen Macedo (New York: New York University Press, 2005), p. 103. 17  Philip Pettit, ‘A Republican Law of Peoples’, European Journal of Political Theory 9, no. 1 (2010), p. 76. 18  Pettit, ‘Keeping Republican Freedom Simple’, p. 351.    19  Ibid., p. 350.

28  Dorothea Gädeke discourse-theoretical approach to domination. In fact, the distinct appeal of ­discourse theory lies in its reflexivity: it does not merely flesh out normative ideals but rather applies them critically to itself. And it is precisely this reflexive dimension that needs to be strengthened. Discursive control is based on the idea of agents who display practical rationality. Conversable agents are able to be moved by reasons and, as such, they are responsible agents, liable to be held to relevant standards such as evidential norms or consistency. But, the idea of discursive control does not extend to challenging these standards themselves; they are taken as given. The discursive status is the status of addressees of norms and standards, but not the status of their authors. In other words: Pettit’s account of domination is based on a discourse theory of practical rationality, but not on a discourse theory of practical justification. On such a stronger account of discourse theory, as developed by Habermas,20 the discursive status that we ascribe to one another is not just a reconstruction of presuppositions of our discursive practices; at the same time, it is also taken to articulate the conditions for testing and justifying the validity of norms more generally. The idea is that ‘[o]nly those norms can claim to be valid that meet (or could meet) with the approval of all affected in their capacity as participants in a practical discourse’.21 In other words: individual agents are not only considered as free and responsible persons vis-à-vis their own actions, that is, as conversable persons who are capable of reflecting on their intentional attitudes, to hold them to standards of rationality with regard to other intentional attitudes or given norms and to adjust accordingly. A discourse theory of practical justification also  extends to the reflection on the validity of standards and norms and thus thinks of persons as free and responsible vis-à-vis the very norms in question. It  conceives of persons as addressees and as authors of the norms to which they are subjected. To be fair, Pettit obviously asks a different question. He develops the notion of  discursive control in the context of a theory of free will. Discursive status is not meant to identify the conditions of normative validity, but merely to specify under what conditions we are fit to be held responsible. This is why he is concerned with practical rationality, not with practical justification. However, for a theory of non-domination, the dimension of questioning and justifying validity claims of standards to which one is held is of crucial importance: being subjected to norms whose validity we cannot challenge means that we lack a fundamental 20 Jürgen Habermas, ‘Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification’, in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen and Christian Lenhardt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 43–115; Jürgen Habermas, ‘Remarks on Discourse Ethics’, in  Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics, trans. Ciaran  P.  Cronin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), pp. 19–112; see also Rainer Forst, The Right to Justification: Elements of a Constructivist Theory of Justice, trans. Jeffrey Flynn (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 21  Habermas, ‘Remarks on Discourse Ethics’, p. 66.

From Neo-Republicanism to Critical Republicanism  29 discursive power, namely the power to shape and interpret our relations to others and thus our own normative status.22 It means that we are denied what I propose calling normative authority. Normative authority requires not only being taken seriously as someone who reports facts about the objective world and avows beliefs and desires or makes a pledge and thus speaks authoritatively about oneself.23 It also extends to the third kind of validity claim that we raise, following Habermas, when communicating with others, namely the claim to normative rightness and thus to the decidedly intersubjective world of justification.24 The fact that this dimension of normative authority matters can easily be shown with regard to the paradigmatic case of slavery. The condition of the enslaved is neither problematic merely in virtue of possible restrictions of choice that he faces, whether direct or mediated, as the libertarian reading of Pettit claims. Nor does the fact that, given his dependence on the master, the enslaved is not taken seriously as a conversable person who can register and adapt to certain standards exhaust the problem of slavery, as the discourse-theoretical reading of Pettit suggests. Rather, the enslaved person is denied the normative power to challenge the rules of their interaction. In other words: the discretionary power of the master not only denies him the status as a legal person who is a responsible addressee of legal norms; he is also denied the status as a moral and political author of norms to which he is subjected.25 Hence, I propose conceiving of the normative core of the notion of domination in terms of the denial of the status of normative authority, instead of as the status of discursive control. This account retains Pettit’s idea that the claim against dom­ in­ation is reconstructed on the basis of normative presuppositions of discursive practices. However, it does not merely refer to the social conditions under which we can act as credible speakers and exercise practical rationality. Rather, it conceives of these presuppositions as conditions for challenging and justifying any claim to normative rightness. This means that the claim against domination is reflexively applied to the validity claims of practical norms themselves. This reflexivity of a discourse theory of practical justification is not just important for capturing the core of what is wrong about slavery. It also applies to political philosophy itself.26 Any normative theory is itself part of the very power structures it seeks to 22  See James Bohman, Democracy across Borders: From Dêmos to Dêmoi (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), p. 96 for a similar line of critique. 23  Cf. Philip Pettit, The Birth of Ethics: Reconstructing the Role and Nature of Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 24  Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1984), p. 99; see also Forst, Right to Justification. 25  A similar view is defended by Nikolas Kirby ‘Revising Republican Liberty: What Is the Difference Between a Disinterested Gentle Giant and a Deterred Criminal?’, Res Publica 22, no. 4 (2016), pp. 369–86, though he frames it in freedom theoretic rather than discourse and power-theoretic terms. 26  See Rainer Forst, Justification and Critique: Towards a Critical Theory of Politics, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), pp. 1–6.

30  Dorothea Gädeke unravel and criticize. Hence, the ideal of non-domination cannot simply be taken for granted as a normative value. Rather, it provides an account of the conditions under which justifications may generate a justified claim to normative validity— and in turn, a standard of critique for challenging the validity claims of given norms—including those articulated and defended by normative theory itself.

2.  Rethinking the Conception of Domination as Arbitrary Power Domination, I have argued, undermines the status of normative authority. Hence, a conception of domination contains two main elements: an account of power that captures the idea of a negation of a person’s status, and an account of the conditions under which this kind of power undermines normative authority. I will first argue that the relevant kind of power is a structurally constituted one (2.1). This conception better captures the idea that domination is a violation of status, strengthens its critical potential, and avoids some conceptual ambiguities which plague Pettit’s account. Second, I reinterpret Pettit’s conception of arbitrariness in discourse-theoretical terms in order to capture the reflexive dimension of normative authority (2.2).

2.1.  Power and the Structural Dimension of Domination The idea that the notion of domination describes the negation of a person’s status means that domination cannot be reduced to the mere exercise of power in discrete interactions, because a status refers to the fundamental structure of social relations. Pettit seeks to capture this idea with a dispositional account of power. In  his classic definition, domination is characterized by the ‘capacity to interfere . . . on an arbitrary basis . . . in certain choices that the other is in a position to make’.27 While interference refers to the exercise of power in particular interactions, domination describes a dispositional property of the powerful agent, which she may or may not actualize. This means that the powerful agent does not need to exercise her power; the mere capacity to do so is sufficient to constitute a power asymmetry in the relevant sense. As Pettit emphasizes, even if the master does not interfere, the enslaved is still dominated, as the master could interfere whenever she wishes.28 At first sight, such a dispositional conception of power resonates well with the status-related, interpersonal quality of domination. It describes domination as a social relation that is characterized by unequal access to resources of power.

27 Pettit, Republicanism, p. 52.    28  Ibid., pp. 31–5.

From Neo-Republicanism to Critical Republicanism  31 Everyone who lacks the relevant resources to resist the powerful is prone to interference in the same way—and thus equally subjected to the power of the dominator. In other words, individuals suffer from domination in virtue of certain vulnerability markers, which they share with others. In that sense, domination refers to a ‘vulnerability class’, even though, ultimately, it is individuals who are dominated, not the group as such.29 Moreover, as Pettit emphasizes, domination is not necessarily intended; it may be ‘unwilled’, such as in ‘relationships of in­ali­en­ able asymmetrical power, as with the husband over the wife in a sexist culture, the employer over employees in an unregulated economy, the professor over students in a traditional college’.30 How the dominator chooses to use her powers is, of course, a matter of her intentional actions. But the social reality of domination is not; it is a matter of the position of power within which she finds herself. Thus, Pettit’s conception of domination has an important structural dimension often overlooked in recent debates on structural domination:31 it casts domination as a systematic phenomenon that is not reducible to discrete interactions between particular individuals, but rather refers to their standing vis-à-vis each other. However, one reason why it may have been overlooked is that Pettit’s account of power ultimately fails to fully capture the status-based nature of domination. It remains unclear as to how to account for the social reality of domination beyond interference without drawing on discrete actions. Either Pettit’s account implies that anything that the dominator could do to others constitutes domination. However, this counterfactual reading of dispositional power, based on possible actions of the dominator, implies too wide a notion of domination, as it conceives of any capacity to interfere causally in the space of actions of others as actual domination. As Richardson has pointed out, the mere presence of a kidnapper in our neighbourhood does not imply that we are all dominated.32 Or, alternatively, the social reality of domination without interference is located in anticipating reactions of the dominated. Their attempt to escape interference through preemptive obedience may be seen as a manifestation of domination. This reading 29 Ibid., p. 122. For an account of the domination of groups, see Dorothea Gädeke, ‘On the Domination of States: Towards an Inclusive Republican Law of Peoples’, Global Justice: Theory, Practice, Rhetoric 9, no. 1 (2016), pp. 1–27. 30  Philip Pettit, On the People’s Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 62. His earlier emphasis on intentionality refers to interference, not to the capacity to interfere, i.e. domination (see Pettit, Republicanism, pp. 52 and 79; Pettit, ‘The Domination Complaint’, p. 93), a point that has often been misunderstood (see for such a misreading: Ferejohn, ‘Pettit’s Republic’, p. 87; Kramer, ‘Liberty and Domination’, p. 39f; Mark Rigstad, ‘Republicanism and Geopolitical Domination’, Journal of Political Power 4, no. 2 (2011), pp. 279–300; Amy Allen, ‘Domination in Global Politics: A Critique of Pettit’s Neo-Republican Model’, in Domination and Global Political Justice: Conceptual, Historical and Institutional Perspectives, eds. Barbara Buckinx, Jonathan Trejo-Mathys, and Timothy Waligore (New York: Routledge, 2015), pp. 122ff). 31  See, for instance, Allen, ‘Domination in Global Politics’. 32  Henry Richardson, Democratic Autonomy: Public Reasoning about the Ends of Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 34.

32  Dorothea Gädeke focuses on actions of the less powerful as manifestations of the dominator’s power. Yet, it proves too narrow, since it makes the social reality of domination depend on the subjective perception of threats of interference and corresponding reactions. But an enslaved person who proudly refuses to please his master in order to keep her good-willed will nevertheless remain dominated.33 The problem is that both interpretations of Pettit’s account of dominating power focus on particular actions, whether they are possible actions of the dom­ in­ator or actual actions of the dominated person. Implicitly, they are based on an interventional model of power34 that conceives of power as a causal nexus on the interactional level—even though they each only look at one side of such a nexus. But, if, as I have argued, the notion of domination refers to the negation of a status that would, were it realized, fundamentally restructure the power relation as a relation between equals, such an interventional model of power is misleading. It falsely suggests that the social reality of domination can be analysed as an interactional phenomenon. Thus, it misses what the dispositional account of power was meant to capture: the asymmetrical structure of interpersonal relations that denies some persons the fundamental status as a normative authority. Pettit’s dispositional account of power is not able to fully grasp this dimension because it does not specify the source of the capacity to interfere. Hence, I propose modifying his account in two respects.35 First, I maintain that interpersonal domination is best understood as a structurally constituted form of power. Second, I propose distinguishing two kinds of dominating power: interpersonal and systemic domination. Both kinds are structurally constituted; however, while interpersonal domination refers to a direct relation between dominator and dom­in­ ated, systemic domination describes a mediated, impersonal form of domination. In order to explain what I mean by structurally constituted, let me go back to the paradigmatic case of slavery. Interestingly, the case of slavery, widely referred to as the paradigmatic case of domination in neo-republican debates, is a form of power that is constituted through a legal institution.36 The power of the master to extract labour, to sell her slave, or to abuse him physically or mentally is not based on her own personal resources. Rather, it is based on legal norms that systematically empower the 33  These interpretations reflect the two interpretations of the normative core of domination discussed above. One reason for why Pettit’s account of domination has been interpreted in terms of free choice rather than as a status-based account of the free person is precisely his ambiguous conception of power. 34 Thomas E. Wartenberg, The Forms of Power: From Domination to Transformation (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1990), p. 65. 35 For a more detailed elaboration of this argument, see Dorothea Gädeke, ‘Does a Mugger Dominate?  Episodic Power and the Structural Dimension of Domination’, Journal of Political Philosophy Early view, https://doi.org/10.1111/jopp.12202, 10 Sep. 2019). 36 See also Alex Gourevitch, ‘Labor Republicanism and the Transformation of Work’, Political Theory 41, no. 4 (2013), pp. 601f.

From Neo-Republicanism to Critical Republicanism  33 slaveholder, while systematically disempowering the enslaved person. In fact, the enslaved may well outclass the slave owner in terms of physical strength, or intellectual wit. The reason why he still remains a slave is because of the legally entrenched power of ownership that his master holds. In other words: the slave master’s capacity to interfere with her slave is a legally constituted capacity. It is only through the legal institution of slavery that personal resources of power are transformed into the basis of a relationship of domination. This structure of the paradigmatic case of slavery is telling. It does not merely describe any capacity to interfere with the choices of another person. Rather, the capacity of the slave master to interfere with the enslaved is itself a robust one, in the sense that it is a durable capacity that is constituted and reproduced by norms and practices which create the very positions of power and disempowerment that we refer to as slavery. These norms do not necessarily have to be legal ones. Domination may also be based on informal social structures; in fact, often legal and informal norms work together in constituting dominating power structures. Just think of racial bias in law enforcement, as in the United States. Even though, legally speaking, Black male citizens enjoy the same rights as any other citizens, they are constantly subject to the possibility of police violence, as they are considered more likely to be criminals than other citizens. In such an interpretive scheme, merely raising their hands as a sign of peaceful surrender may be taken as a sign of the expected move to reach for a weapon—and thus serve as a pretext for the police to shoot in ‘self-defence’. Just as in the paradigmatic case of slavery, this capacity of the police to interfere arbitrarily is constituted by social norms and practices, both formal and informal, that create asymmetric positions of empowerment and disempowerment and thus deny some persons equal standing. Note that thinking of dominating power as structurally constituted in this sense is conceptually narrower than Pettit’s conception. It does not include the mere opportunistic capacity to interfere that arises as happenstance and vanishes once the circumstances change. (Think of a mugger in a park, for instance, who merely seizes the rare occasion of no one else being around for mugging me.)37 Instead, it limits the notion of interpersonal domination to a structurally constituted capacity. This narrow view of what counts as domination, however, is not a downside but rather a merit of my account. First, it solves the conceptual ambiguities about the social reality of domination over and beyond actual interference. Thinking of domination as structurally constituted means that the social reality of dominating power over and beyond its exercise lies neither in any potential action of the domination, nor in anticipatory reactions of the dominated, but rather in the power structure that puts the dominator and the dominated into asymmetrical 37  See Gädeke, ‘Does a Mugger Dominate?’ for a detailed discussion of this case and Pettit’s broad conception of domination that incorporates opportunistic, as well as robust, capacities to interfere.

34  Dorothea Gädeke positions to one another. Whether or not a mere capacity to interfere does indeed constitute domination depends on whether it is based on a system of social norms and practices that systematically empower some while disempowering others. Thus, my account unambiguously captures the idea that, at its core, domination is about a denial of status and refers to the asymmetric structure of interpersonal relations, independent of particular interactions. Second, and more importantly in the context of this chapter, it is only by narrowing the conception of domination to cases of structurally constituted power that the critical potential of the notion can be brought to bear. If the notion of domination is to serve as a concept of critical social analysis, it needs to be able to distinguish systematic forms of denial of status from mere opportunistic crime. Losing sight of this difference means that a theory of domination loses its powercritical bite. Instead of disclosing how systematic injustices, like racism or sexism, structure social realities, a broad account that includes any capacity to interfere analyses instances of racism and sexism in parallel terms to mere insulated crime—and thus runs the risk of not merely missing, but rather disguising and nat­ur­al­iz­ing the true character of society. Hence, for a critical republicanism, it is crucial to cash out domination in a structurally informed way that highlights the social production and reproduction of dominating power rather than attributing it to misbehaviour of particular individuals. In fact, with regard to analytical scope, the conception of domination as a structurally constituted form of power is broader than Pettit’s in at least two respects. First, thinking of interpersonal domination in terms of a structurally constituted capacity to interfere means that the bilateral picture often used to  analyse domination is misleading. Interpersonal domination is a relation between two or more identifiable persons who stand in asymmetrical positions of power to one another. These positions of power, however, are themselves ­co-constituted and reproduced by countless other agents who reaffirm common interpretations of, for instance, Black people as dangerous by acting upon them or implicitly accepting them. Hence, interpersonal domination is not a dyadic but a triadic relation between dominator, dominated, and what Wartenberg calls peripheral agents.38 They sustain and reproduce aligned social practices that constitute the power of the dominator. Any critical social analysis of relations of domination will need to take this dimension of how domination is socially produced and reproduced into account. It requires a contextual analysis of the power structures—especially the positions of power and disempowerment created by it—and the dynamics of their persistence in order to unravel how dominating power pervades society rather than construing it as an anomaly perpetrated by individual wrongdoers.

38 Wartenberg, Forms of Power, pp. 144f.

From Neo-Republicanism to Critical Republicanism  35 Second, such a critical social analysis of domination will also have to go beyond interpersonal relations of power. Interpersonal domination is characterized by the structurally constituted, actual capacity of the dominating agent to interfere with the dominated. It is a relation of power between two (or more) persons who stand in direct relation to one another. The structural perspective on domination, however, not only looks at the social source of the dominator’s power; it also draws attention to the systematic and socially produced disempowerment of the dominated. They are rendered powerless by the very same social norms and practices that constitute others as powerful. This disempowerment persists even when they do not stand in any direct relation to a particular dominator. Think of free Blacks in antebellum United States. They do not have a particular master in their lives who could interfere at any time. However, they are subjected to norms, both social and legal, that posit them as inferior, as dangerous, as people of lesser moral worth and limited rational capacities. And thus, they do not enjoy an equal status even though, in an interpersonal sense, they are only potentially, but not actually, interpersonally dominated. I propose to call this form of domination systemic domination. Systemic domination is impersonal but not agentless. It is based on a system of norms and practices which is reproduced by countless individuals in their everyday actions. But these agents play the role of peripheral agents: they are not themselves dominators in an interpersonal sense because they do not have an actual robust capacity to interfere with the dominated. I have argued that, for a critical republicanism, it is crucial to be able to analyse the social production and reproduction of dominating power from a decidedly structural perspective, both with regard to interpersonal and systemic dom­in­ ation. Before moving on, let me quickly point out that this view differs from other recent discussions of what is often called ‘structural domination’ in at least two respects. First, I argue that domination is structurally constituted. In this sense, even interpersonal domination has a structural dimension so that the term ‘structural domination’ as opposed to interpersonal domination is misleading. Note, however, that my point is not that domination may be enabled by structures;39 rather, it is always constituted by structures. This holds for systemic, as well as for  interpersonal, domination. Second, what I call systemic domination is not independent of interpersonal domination. In fact, systemic and interpersonal domination are constituted through the very same social structures. Systemic domination does not mean that the system as such dominates, mysteriously, over and beyond the agents acting within it.40 The impersonal, systemic form of domination emanates from the daily interactions of countless peripheral agents who do not themselves dominate a particular individual, but who reproduce 39  This is how Pettit uses the term ‘structural domination’, On the People’s Terms, p. 63. 40 This view is suggested by Clarissa Rile Hayward, De-Facing Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

36  Dorothea Gädeke disempowering norms and practices that also constitute interpersonal domination. Neither does it mean that everyone subjected to this system is dominated, including those who hold powerful positions within it, such as white men or capitalists.41 Systemic domination refers to systematic disempowerment not to mere subjection to a system. Even though systematic disempowerment renders one vulnerable to interpersonal domination (and, in this interpersonal sense, is potentially dom­in­ at­ing), it also matters in its own right.

2.2.  Arbitrariness and the Reflexive Dimension of Non-Domination I have argued that the idea of domination as a denial of status is best conceived of in terms of a structurally constituted form of power. However, not all asymmetrical power structures constitute domination; only those in which the status as normative authorities is denied. This is what the second element of a conception of domination needs to capture. In neo-republican theory, it is fleshed out in terms of the dependence on someone’s will and, that is, in terms of arbitrariness. Pettit defends a structural notion of arbitrariness.42 Whether or not a relation of power is arbitrary does not depend on how the powerful act or what consequences they bring about. Rather, it is defined in terms of the constraints—or rather, the lack of constraints—that the powerful face and, thus, on structural features of their relation to the dominated. In order to systematize the broad debate on the neo-republican conception of  arbitrariness, I distinguish two ways of thinking about (non-)arbitrariness. Formal accounts of non-arbitrariness maintain that mere formal constraints on power suffice to secure its non-arbitrariness as they bind the power holder to certain rules and thus constrain how she can use her power.43 This view, however, implies that racist rules, such as under Apartheid in South Africa, which deny status to some, may be non-arbitrary—and thus non-dominating—as long as they effectively constrain power holders. Most neo-republicans, including Pettit, therefore defend a material account of non-arbitrariness that specifies what kind of constraints may secure non-arbitrariness with regard to their content. There are three distinct ways to cash out such a material account of (non-) arbitrariness, objectivist, subjectivist, and intersubjectivist.44 In objectivist approaches, power is arbitrary when it is not forced to promote true interests or

41 For such a view see Albena Azmanova, ‘Relational, Structural and Systemic Forms of Domination: The “Right to Justification” Confronting Three Types of Domination’, Journal of Political Power 11, no. 1 (2018), pp. 68–78. 42  See Pettit, Republicanism, p. 55. 43  For a purely formal conception of arbitrariness, see Lovett, General Theory of Domination and Justice, pp. 112–19. 44  See Richardson, Democratic Autonomy, pp. 37–55.

From Neo-Republicanism to Critical Republicanism  37 the common good, objectively defined. Such an account, however, faces the charge of paternalism, as those subject to power are not able to challenge this putatively objective criterion. Subjectivist accounts are based on what those subject to power themselves conceive of as arbitrary. Yet, this view entails a status quo bias because domination can only be identified as such once those involved consider the power relation to be arbitrary themselves. Thus, subjective accounts disregard the important fact that, given their socialization into a system of dom­ in­ation or psychological mechanisms of coping with their situation, the dominated may not be aware of the condition within which they find themselves. In other words: while objectivist accounts are not reflexive enough, subjectivist accounts are not critical enough. Pettit’s solution to this problem is an intersubjective account of arbitrariness. This seems to be a promising approach if the notion of domination is to avoid the problems of objectivist and subjectivist accounts in order to remain both reflexive and critical. However, his conception of arbitrariness proves not intersubjective enough, as it were. As a result, it fails to shun both the risk of paternalism and that of a status quo bias. Pettit argues that power is arbitrary when it is not forced to track the avowable interests of those subjected.45 Avowable interests are neither objectively defined, nor subjectively given preferences. They are interests which the agent is ready to defend as her own and, thus, to submit to intersubjective standards of rationality. In this sense, they are rationally refined interests, where rationally refined refers to an intersubjective procedure of testing for practical rationality. One might think that his conception of arbitrariness also comprises a stronger, deliberative notion of mutually justifiable interests.46 After all, Pettit distinguishes between domination among private persons (dominium) and the domination of citizens by their state (imperium). While in the private realm, arbitrariness is tied to the absence of procedures that track the avowable interests of those subject to power; in the public realm, these interests are further qualified as common avowable interests.47 They are interests based on ‘co-operatively admissible considerations’, that is, on reasons ‘that anyone in discourse with others about what they should jointly or collectively provide can adduce without embarrassment as relevant matters to take into account’.48 Note, however, that co-operatively admissible

45  In reaction to critics, who reduced Pettit’s account of arbitrariness to either purely formal or moralized (objectivist or subjectivist) accounts of arbitrariness, Pettit recently reformulated the cri­ter­ ion of arbitrariness in terms of ‘uncontrolled interference’, Pettit, On the People’s Terms, p. 58. This rearticulation, however, does not imply a substantial modification of his account. 46  For such a reading, see John Christman, ‘Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government’, Ethics 109, no. 1 (1998), pp. 202–6; Henry Richardson, ‘Republicanism and Democratic Justice’, Politics, Philosophy and Economics 5, no. 2 (2006), pp. 175–200; Christopher McMahon, ‘The Indeterminacy of Republican Policy’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 33, no. 1 (2005) pp. 67–93. 47 For this distinction, see Philip Pettit, ‘The Determinacy of Republican Policy: A Reply to McMahon’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 34, no. 3 (2006), p. 280. 48 Pettit, Theory of Freedom, p. 156.

38  Dorothea Gädeke considerations are not good reasons in the demanding sense of mutually acceptable reasons. They merely identify an interest as rational against the background of a given set of common goals; all considerations, which are consistent with these goals, qualify as co-operatively admissible. Thus, it is actual rational interests and not good reasons, which are fundamental for the identification of arbitrariness and domination, in the private, as well as in the public, realm. This interpretation is in line with Pettit’s account of the normative core of domination that the notion of arbitrariness is meant to capture. However, just like the discursive status, his conception of arbitrariness proves insufficiently intersubjective. On the one hand, it threatens to collapse into a subjectivist account of arbitrariness because it fails to specify procedural criteria that could serve as a basis for demanding collective action against domination. Where, to take Pettit’s example, a widely shared religious belief supports the domination of women by their husbands, a state may not do anything about it so long as there is no common interest in addressing this kind of domination; otherwise, it would itself dominate.49 Thus, we may identify traditional marriage as an instance of private domination; but Pettit’s account leaves open the question of under which circumstances it has to be reduced through political action.50 The problem of an unauthorized state may provide, as Pettit puts it, ‘ground for republican complaints against the status quo’.51 But it remains unclear on which basis such a protest should be voiced when, in a public sense, no arbitrariness is at play. Pointing to private domination as such does not seem to constitute sufficient grounds for collective action, as long as no corresponding common interest emerges. On the other hand, Pettit’s conception also risks falling prey to the problems of objectivist accounts. He conceives of the avowability of interests in terms of their rational consistency with a set of given common or private goals and standards. Markell criticizes that this implies that social power, which is directed at turning given, subjective, arbitrary interests into rational, non-arbitrary ones, does not count as domination itself. Thus, Pettit’s account remains peculiarly uncritical of classic civilizatory justifications of imperialism that draw precisely on the concern about improving the allegedly uneducated, irrational imperial subjects.52 The deeper problem behind Markell’s concern about paternalism is that Pettit’s conception of arbitrariness reflects his account of the discursive status as the core of the notion of domination—and thus also its lack of reflexivity: it does not take into account that the very power to challenge given standards and expectations is crucial for the idea of non-arbitrariness. As Bohman emphasizes, non-arbitrariness does not merely refer to securing and defining a certain realm of choice: ‘rather 49  Pettit, ‘The Determinacy of Republican Policy’, pp. 282f. 50  For this line of criticism, see also M. Victoria Costa, ‘Freedom as Non-Domination, Normativity, and Indeterminacy’, Journal of Value Inquiry 41, no. 2–4 (2007), p. 305. 51  Pettit, ‘The Determinacy of Republican Policy’, p. 283. 52  Markell, ‘The Insufficiency of Domination’, p. 16.

From Neo-Republicanism to Critical Republicanism  39 than the capacity to control others and resist having obligations imposed by another’s will, it must be the power over the content of one’s obligations and statuses’.53 Bohman refers precisely to what I have called normative authority. Pettit’s conception of non-arbitrariness is obviously geared towards accounting for his rather thin idea of a discursive status. However, an account of domination that is sensitive to the normative authority of participants and remains critical vis-à-vis the status quo needs to strengthen the intersubjective dimension of the conception of arbitrariness. It requires a discourse-theoretical approach that accords the normative authority over what counts as non-arbitrary to those ­subjected, while still formulating procedural criteria as a standard for critique. Such a discourse-theoretical conception of arbitrariness has been fleshed out by Rainer Forst. On his view, ‘[a]rbitrary rule or domination appears where persons are subjected to actions, norms or institutions without adequate justification, while the authority to determine what a “good” justification is rests with those subjected’.54 From this perspective, arbitrariness is not a matter of a lack of structural guarantees for the consideration of certain interests. Rather, the issue of arbitrariness hinges on procedures for challenging and exchanging reasons. Hence, it is reasons, not interests, that serve as the basis of his conception of arbitrariness. In order to be able to distinguish between good and bad reasons, Forst identifies two procedural criteria, generality and reciprocity, that he develops recursively based on the validity claims of moral and political norms.55 Given that such norms claim to be valid generally and reciprocally, they need to be justifiable in general and reciprocal terms. Otherwise, they will be deemed arbitrary, as their validity claims cannot be challenged by those who are subjected to them. Forst’s stronger, procedural intersubjectivist account approaches the question of arbitrariness in a reflexive way: every claim to general and reciprocal validity needs to live up to this claim within actual, general, and reciprocal practices of justification. This account captures the idea of domination as the denial of normative authority. It conceives of arbitrary power as power, which is itself not justifiable to those subjected to it, either because there simply are no procedures of general and reciprocal justification in place, or because the actual processes and results such procedures wield are rejectable on general or reciprocal terms. Thus, it resolves the problem of paternalism, as it entrusts the people themselves with the justification of non-arbitrary power. And yet, it also avoids the status quo bias Pettit’s conception faces. While Pettit does not specify any criteria that distinguish between actually shared interests and relevant common interests, the 53 Bohman, Democracy across Borders, p. 96. 54  Forst, ‘A Kantian Republican Conception of Justice as Non-Domination’, p. 155. 55 Forst, Right to Justification, pp. 19f for moral norms and pp. 173–7 for political norms. Forst understands these criteria negatively: they refer to the reciprocal and general rejectability of reasons, not their acceptability. They provide a basis for sorting out those reasons that do not meet the criteria without anticipating a consensus on which reasons will prove to best meet them.

40  Dorothea Gädeke procedural criteria of generality and reciprocity provide a standard to which actually shared reasons can be held. In other words: the discourse-theoretical notion of arbitrariness is both critical and reflexive. The criteria of generality and reciprocity can be further specified in a way that points towards the kind of institutions required in order to set up practices of justification. On the one hand, they show in what sense mere constraints on power secure non-arbitrariness in a merely formal sense. Applied to the form of norms, generality and reciprocity require that norms be general in that they apply to all and not particular persons (formal generality) and reciprocal in that they accord the same claims and obligations to everyone (formal reciprocity). On the other hand, they also provide the criterion for material non-arbitrariness. Nonarbitrary norms or decisions need to be based on reasons that cannot be generally and reciprocally rejected. Thus, they are required to be justified through procedures in which all those who are subjected to the norm in question enjoy equal chances to take part (material generality) and in which no one projects his or her own view on others or claims to speak in their interest (material reciprocity). In other words: the requirement of non-arbitrariness in a formal sense calls for a rule of law, while non-arbitrariness in a material sense points towards a form of self-legislation. To conclude, I will briefly highlight two institutional implications of my modified account of domination with regard to these crucial elements of realizing non-domination.

3.  Kantian Institutional Implications Structurally constituted forms of power require collective action to be transformed. They cannot be changed by individual agents alone for the simple reason that they are embedded in broader social structures, which are constituted and reproduced by a wide array of peripheral agents. Hence, realizing non-domination means establishing institutions that may fundamentally restructure the relations between persons by protecting their equal status. These institutions, however, must not become a source of domination themselves. They need to provide the possibility of addressing dominating power structures in a non-arbitrary way, both in a formal as well as in a material sense. To achieve this goal, Pettit proposes two institutional measures that he takes to be central to the Italian-Atlantic trad­ ition of republicanism: the mixed constitution and the contestatory citizenry.56 While the former is meant to guarantee a core aspect of the rule of law and thus formal non-arbitrariness, the latter points towards a particular conception of 56  Philip Pettit, ‘Two Republican Traditions’, in Republican Democracy: Liberty, Law and Politics, eds. Andreas Niederberger and Philipp Schink (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), p. 171; Pettit, On the People’s Terms, pp. 220–9; see also Pettit, Republicanism, chap. 6.

From Neo-Republicanism to Critical Republicanism  41 democracy as a way of securing non-arbitrariness in a material sense. However, as I will suggest, both aspects need to be reconceived from the perspective of a more radically democratic, Kantian or Rousseauian line of republicanism so as to account for the modified conception of domination sketched above.57 The Roman idea of a mixed constitution that Pettit puts forward as a guarantee for the rule of law is based on the idea of dispersing power so as to avoid undue concentrations of power that would open the door to personal manipulations.58 The division of power allows for mechanisms of checks and balances, as various centres of power compete with one another. In this sense, the mixed constitution ‘requires separation of powers, a sharing of powers and a balancing of powers’.59 Pettit also conceives of the separation of the legislative, the executive, and the judiciary along these lines. In spite of being charged with different functions, the relation between the three branches of government is primarily characterized through the horizontal competition and mutual control between them. The mechanism that is supposed to secure formal arbitrariness is not the functional differentiation as such, but rather the division into rivalling centres of power. However, against the background of the modified conception of domination as sketched above, it seems doubtful as to whether the mixed constitution, with its central idea of a division and balance of power, may contribute to establishing an institutionalized practice of non-domination. First, a mere balance of power is unable to address structural sources of domination. It remains contingent on the fragile balance between centres of power—without ever questioning the sources of those powers. In the Ancient republics, the mixed constitution referred to a balance of power between the three constitutional models, i.e. monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, each of which was supposed to represent one social group among the population. In trying to balance these social groups, it left the social divisions on which society was based entirely unchanged. It is no coincidence that the idea of conceiving of the separation of powers along the lines of a mere balance of powers was a key idea in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century post-revolutionary England, where the model of a ‘balanced constitution’ tried precisely to appease revolutionary claims inspired by a functionalist separation of powers by integrating them in the inherited model of the mixed constitution.60 Second, the ideal of a horizontal balance of power remains itself arbitrary in a very important sense. It requires checks and balances between different centres of power, including the three branches of government, who control each other. That, however, implies compromising a crucial mechanism for securing formal 57  In what follows I will concentrate on a Kantian account as that fits directly with my argument about normative authority. 58  See Pettit, On the People’s Terms, p. 223; Pettit, Republicanism, p. 178. 59 Pettit, On the People’s Terms, p. 221. 60  See M.  J.  C.  Vile, Constitutionalism and the Separation of Powers, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1998), chap. 3.

42  Dorothea Gädeke generality: the strict separation between the application of the law in particular cases and the formulation of general norms. If all branches control each other, holding each other in check, the distinction between these different kinds of reasoning cannot be upheld. Mixing the rationale of formulating general and reciprocal laws with that of applying them to particular cases means precisely jeopardizing formal generality. Securing formal non-arbitrariness, in contrast, requires a vertical, functional separation of powers as advocated in the Kantian or Rousseauian line of republicanism.61 In this more radically democratic model (linked to the notion of popular sovereignty that I will come back to in a moment), which played a key role in the American, the French, and the Haitian revolutions,62 the executive and the judiciary are strictly bound to a mere application of general norms to particular cases, as they are not authorized to make general rules. The legislative power, in turn, is supreme in that it alone formulates the law. However, it is limited to this function and may not apply the law; otherwise, particularistic reasoning would threaten the generality of the law. Therefore, the three branches may not check each other or share and mix their powers; rather, their tasks remain strictly separate. Only then can the generality of the law be preserved and non-arbitrariness in a formal sense secured. The defence of a functional separation of powers, in turn, is closely linked to the second institutional implication I would like to highlight. It refers to material non-arbitrariness, that is to how the content of the law is determined—and thus to democracy, broadly speaking. Pettit’s account of democracy has famously highlighted the crucial role of contestation.63 For a critical approach, this em­phasis on contestation is important because it assigns the citizens a decisively critical role and draws attention to the importance of opening up spaces for protest, as well as of a citizenry that is committed to protest. This is what the notion of a ‘contestatory citizenry’ emphasizes.64 Interestingly, Pettit maintains that this crucial role of citizens does not imply a ‘romantic idea of participatory,

61  Immanuel Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace, 8: 349–53; Immanuel Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 6: 313–18 (references to volume and page number refer to the Prussian Academy Edition of Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften, I have used the translation in Practical Philosophy (The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant), ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)). For a discourse-theoretical interpretation of this rationale, see Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), chap. 4.3; and for a systematic discussion of the two models, see Peter Niesen, ‘Volkvon-Teufeln-Republikanismus: Zur Frage nach den moralischen Ressourcen der liberalen Demokratie’, in Die Öffentlichkeit der Vernunft und die Vernunft der Öffentlichkeit: Festschrift für Jürgen Habermas, eds. Lutz Wingert and Klaus Günther (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), pp. 568–604. 62  See Vile, Constitutionalism and the Separation of Powers, chaps 6 and 7. 63 Pettit, Republicanism, pp. 183–205; Philip Pettit, ‘Democracy, Electoral and Contestatory’, in Designing Democratic Institutions, Nomos XLII, eds. Ian Shapiro and Stephen Macedo (New York: New York University Press, 2000), pp. 105–44. 64 Pettit, On the People’s Terms, pp. 225–9.

From Neo-Republicanism to Critical Republicanism  43 Rousseuvian engagement’.65 Rather, it is the representative system that provides the key for securing material non-arbitrariness. It is the representatives who, incentivized through elections, are to look for relevant common interests of the citizens and to generate corresponding policy proposals.66 The contestatory citizenry merely plays the role of watchdogs who may trigger a review of this process if the suggestions of representatives go wrong.67 This somewhat modest, indirect account of contestatory democracy is perfectly in line with Pettit’s notion of the discursive status and the corresponding conception of arbitrariness; after all, all that matters is to make sure that public power is forced to track the avowable interests of those subjected. However, from the perspective of the reflexive, discourse-theoretical account of domination as proposed above, Pettit’s view falls short of securing non-domination in a material sense. In fact, it risks condoning paternalistic forms of domination: the less ­people can participate, the more arbitrary a power structure is because generally and reciprocally non-rejectable reasons can only be identified within actual practices of general and reciprocal justification. Hence, it is through bottom-up general and reciprocal participation, not through representation as such (combined with contestation), that arbitrary forms of power can be overcome. In other words, the status as normative authorities requires more than merely being able to defend a sphere of individual freedom of choice; the addressees of the law also have to be able to see themselves as authors of the law.68 That means a critical republican needs to draw on the more radical, Kantian-Rousseauian notion of popular sovereignty that is closely connected to the idea of a functional separation of powers. Pettit rejects both; he sees popular sovereignty and the functional, hierarchical separation of powers as evoking an absolutism in the tradition of Bodin and Hobbes that calls for a supreme and uncontestable power.69 But, as Maus has highlighted, in the Kantian line of republicanism, the ideas of popular sovereignty and functional separation of powers are notions in legal, not in political, theory.70 Popular sovereignty does not refer to unlimited political power but rather to the exercise of legislative power by the people. It is precisely this legislative function which is supreme—and limited because legislative power only refers to the formulation of general norms, not to their application. This is why it is indivisible and inalienable. It has to remain with the people as a whole and cannot be delegated to the executive or judiciary because they are charged with applying the law 65  Ibid., p. 227. 66  Philip Pettit, ‘Democracy, Electoral and Contestatory’, p. 125. 67  Philip Pettit, ‘Republican Freedom and Contestatory Democratization’, in Democracy’s Value, eds. Ian Shapiro and Casiano Hacker-Cordón (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 179f; Pettit, ‘Democracy, Electoral and Contestatory’, pp. 117ff. 68 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, p. 120. 69  See Pettit, ‘Two Republican Traditions’. 70  See, for this point, Ingeborg Maus, Zur Aufklärung der Demokratietheorie: Rechts- und demokratietheoretische Überlegungen im Anschluß an Kant (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992); Ingeborg Maus, Über Volkssouveränität: Elemente einer Demokratietheorie (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2011) chap. 4.

44  Dorothea Gädeke and thus concerned with particular cases rather than formulating general rules. Note that this emphasis on popular sovereignty as a legislative power does not rule out representative systems; nor does it speak against a multilevel form of legislation of a federal kind. It may be realized in various institutional forms. However, it does speak against any institutional arrangement that severs the direct link between the legislative power and its social basis. Given the discourse-theoretical underpinnings of my account of domination, this idea of popular sovereignty is to be cashed out in a participatory and deliberative sense.71 Contestatory mechanisms certainly remain crucial, but they also have to be reconceived in a participatory way. If they are to secure the normative authority of all those subject to public power, the mere power to trigger a review is not sufficient. As Bohman has emphasized, contestatory power needs to include the power to initiate new deliberations and, thus, to politicize matters that have not been on the agenda at all.72 Otherwise, certain power relations can be shielded from critical challenges and thus, by definition, remain arbitrary. In other words, both participation and contestation have to be understood in a reflexive way. The institutional implications I have highlighted, the functional separation of powers and popular sovereignty, do not provide an institutional blueprint. A practice of non-domination based on these ideas requires not so much a particular model of democracy, but rather a reflexive process of democratization, and that means creating conditions for continuously challenging the claim to non-arbitrariness.73

4.  Conclusion: Towards a Critical Republicanism To conclude, let me briefly summarize my argument. I showed that, with regard to all three most important elements of a republican theory of non-domination, its normative core, the conception of domination, and its institutional implications, Pettit’s neo-republicanism provides appealing critical potential, though it has to be modified in order to fully develop it. First, the discourse-theoretical underpinnings of Pettit’s theory of non-domination tie in nicely with a critical approach. However, the discourse-theoretical aspect needs to be strengthened so as to include not just a discourse theory of practical rationality, but also the reflexive dimension of practical justification. Second, the notion of domination articulates a crucial concern with a systematic kind of power asymmetry. However, developing this power-critical potential requires, on the one hand, highlighting

71  See Gädeke, Politik der Beherrschung, chap. 6, for a more a detailed account. 72  See Bohman, Democracy across Borders, pp. 53f. 73  Cf. ibid., p. 36; Bohman, however, emphasizes the democratic perspective, whereas I emphasize the perspective of non-domination.

From Neo-Republicanism to Critical Republicanism  45 the structurally constituted nature of both interpersonal and systemic domination. Such a structural analysis of dominating power may not only resolve a certain tension in Pettit’s own account; it also strengthens its critical potential because it provides the conceptual tools for critical social analysis, which is geared towards understanding social conditions and relations on a more structural and systemic level rather than merely in social interactions. On the other hand, the conception of arbitrariness needs to reflect the reflexive dimension of what I called normative authority. Pettit is right in suggesting an intersubjective conception, but it needs to be reinterpreted in a discourse-theoretical way in terms of general and reciprocal justification, so as to provide criteria for critically assessing given interests. Finally, Pettit’s conception of democracy opens up space for disagreement and protest, which is an important part of any critical approach that aims to transform social power. Yet, the rule-of-law component requires a strict separation instead of a mere balancing of powers, so as to reflect the structural dimension of domination while the model of contestatory democracy needs to be transformed into a more participatory approach that can account for the reflexive conception of arbitrariness. By calling this approach ‘critical republicanism’, I do not claim to do full justice to the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory, with its ambition to provide a comprehensive social theory, critique of reason, and philosophy of history. Neither do I claim to provide the best interpretation of the republican tradition. My interest is primarily systematic, not historical. I consider critical republicanism, as sketched above, to be republican, not only because it starts from Pettit’s neo-republicanism and its central concern with domination, conceived of as relations of arbitrary power; it also draws on the more radical, Kantian republican tradition, with its emphasis on normative authority, popular sovereignty, and the separation of powers that has, reinterpreted intersubjectively, crucially influenced discourse theory. At the same time, critical republicanism is critical in the broad meth­ odo­logic­al sense of pursuing a double objective; a social analytical and a normative one. It aims to analyse relations of domination in actual political and social struggles, drawing particular attention to their structural and systemic dimension in order to reveal how they are socially produced and reproduced and to identify unrealized potentials of overcoming them. Thus, it aims for a normative reflection that is socially and historically contextualized and motivated by  the striving for emancipation from dominating forms of power.74 In this endeavour it is guided by the awareness that political philosophy itself is socially situated—and thus part of potentially dominating power structures. This is why  it seeks to identify normative resources to transcend relations of dom­in­ ation  without passing over the normative authority of those engaged in these 74  Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 5.

46  Dorothea Gädeke practices. And as such, it seems well suited to tying in with the more radical strands of republicanism in order to provide the conceptual tools for a critique of contemporary forms of dominating power, whether in the political, the economic, or the cultural realm.75 75  A first draft of this chapter was presented at the ‘Critical Normativities Seminar Series’ (2014) and the international conference ‘Meanings of (Non-)Domination’ (2015), both at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, the ‘International Colloquium on Justice, Democracy and Political Emotions’ at Universidade Federal de Pernambuco (2015), and at the international conference ‘The Future of Republicanism’ at York University (2017). I am grateful to the audiences for helpful comments. Special thanks to Bruno Leipold and Stuart White for their critical reading of the manuscript.

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A Radical Revolution in Thought Frederick Douglass on the Slave’s Perspective on Republican Freedom Alan Coffee

A hallmark of the republican tradition has been its call on slaves to rise up and resist their chains. The term slave in this context goes beyond formal systems of bondage and refers to any form of subjection to arbitrary power including, for example, living under the rule of an absolute monarch. That the people were being made slaves by their rulers was the rallying call behind many of the great republican revolutions of history such as the establishment of the Roman Republic and the American War of Independence. In spite of this rhetoric, however, the reality has been less inspiring. The high standard of freedom that is promised has rarely materialized and republics have often been criticized for being hierarchical and patriarchal. We need only think of how Rome, after it had ‘gained its freedom’, in Livy’s words, by expelling the kings and establishing the Republic, nevertheless remained a slave-based society.1 The same was true of the United States. Even where institutional slavery is eventually abolished, former slaves are seldom integrated on equal terms as free citizens. Frederick Douglass, for example, described life for black Americans during the post-emancipation Reconstruction period as slavery no less than before.2 And over 150 years on, black Americans still experience systematic disadvantages as citizens that can be traced back to the legacy of the slave system. There is, then, a clear mismatch between the republican principle of equal freedom as independent citizens for all and the reality of republican society. I shall argue that this is not merely a tragic betrayal and failure by these states to apply their principles consistently, but that there is an implicit bias in the way that republican theory has traditionally been articulated that allows socially dominant 1 Livy, The Early History of Rome (London: Penguin, 1962), p. 105. 2  Douglass argues that though ‘nominally free’, the former slave ‘was still in fact a slave, a slave to society’ (‘The Blessings of Liberty and Education’, in The Frederick Douglass Papers, eds. John Blassingame and John McKivigan (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), series 1, vol. 5, p. 619 [hereafter Papers]). See also Douglass, ‘The Work of the Future’, in The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, ed. Philip Foner (New York: International Publishers, 1976), vol. 1, p. 292 (hereafter Writings). Alan Coffee, A Radical Revolution in Thought: Frederick Douglass on the Slave’s Perspective on Republican Freedom In: Radical Republicanism: Recovering the Tradition’s Popular Heritage. Edited by: Bruno Leipold, Karma Nabulsi, and Stuart White, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198796725.003.0003

48  Alan Coffee groups to control the central idea of the common good and with it to gain power over whom to include or exclude as citizens. This is not to say that republicans do not have the theoretical resources to address this problem. Indeed, there is one group of writers for whom the mismatch between rhetoric and reality has not been a surprise. This is the slaves themselves. Although republicanism is constructed around a fundamental distinction between freeman and slave and draws heavily on the classical imagery of servitude, it is notable that its theory has been entirely written by freemen. From Cicero and Livy, through Machiavelli, Milton, Harrington, and Price to, in our own time, Pettit, the canon of writers to which republicans turn does not include the voice of the enslaved. In other words, those who have stood to lose most from the wrong that republicans consider to be their biggest threat have had no influence on the shape or content of the way that wrong is understood. This omission does not merely represent a missed opportunity but is a significant loss to the field of republican enquiry. Slaves have a unique perspective not only into their own condition but into the state of liberty that freemen may very easily take for granted. In particular, they have a deeply felt appreciation of the strength and subtlety of the obstacles that prevent them from moving from slavery to freedom. Republicans have traditionally focused on political revolutions and reforms as the means to secure freedom. Revolution may initially be violent, as in the cases of Rome and the United States, but it is always then followed by institutional reform.3 The principle of popular sovereignty is integral to the republican ideal. Ultimately, it falls to the people to hold their government to ensure that it fulfils its obligations, and so republicans have traditionally emphasized the role of accessible and transparent institutions governed by public reason through which the rulers and officials can be held to account by the people in whose name they act. Each citizen should be able to make his or her voice heard in civil society and have the opportunity to appeal against any unwarranted interference with a reasonable prospect of success. For this approach to be effective, all citizens must be able to express their interests and concerns using the accepted terms of public reason. This sets a high bar for achieving freedom. Even assuming that the citizens are collectively committed to restricting their debates to what is publicly justifiable, their debates will take place within a framework of norms, values, and beliefs that influence how these arguments are understood. For the members of minority or marginalized groups, this condition cannot be taken for granted and if it is not met, the freedom or independence of those members is at best compromised and more probably negated entirely.

3  I discuss this aspect of the republican tradition in greater detail in Alan Coffee, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft, Public Reason, and the Virtuous Republic’, in The Social and Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft, eds. Sandrine Bergès and Alan Coffee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 183–200.

A Radical Revolution in Thought  49 Douglass argues that a political revolution is not on its own sufficient to secure freedom for all citizens. Merely changing a nation’s political structures and institutions, and even its form of government, will not liberate an oppressed p ­ eople where the mindset of the rest of the population remains as it was under the previous regime, and where the background social conditions prevent the new arrangements from operating effectively for everyone. In an ideologically divided and socially segregated community—such as a slave-based or formerly slave-based society—the conditions necessary for impartial and rational deliberation about the common good amongst the citizens will likely not have been met. Douglass describes the ‘mountain of prejudice’ that black Americans faced in trying to act as free individuals, adding that if anyone, whether black or white, were to stand up for African American rights, ‘he will at once open a fountain of bitterness, and call forth overwhelming wrath’.4 Simply admitting emancipated slaves into the society that had enslaved them by granting them formally equal standing as citizens does not secure their freedom. The slave system was only able to flourish because society had been organized around its acceptance and its being perpetuated. That frame of mind in the majority of citizens continued to persist long after the slave system itself officially came to an end. Before the slaves can be genuinely free, Douglass argues, the revolution must be completed. Alongside the revolution in political rights, there must be a corresponding revolution in social attitudes. The scale of what this entails should not be underestimated. What is required ‘is nothing less than a radical revolution in all the modes of thought which have flourished under the blighting slave system’.5 The task is enormous. ‘We shall,’ Douglass predicted before the end of the war, ‘have to reconstruct the whole fabric of Southern society’.6 Unlike the prosecution of a war, however, there is no shortcut to victory. Douglass warns us that ‘there is no such thing as immediate Emancipation either for the master or for the slave’. ‘Time, experience and culture,’ he concludes, ‘must gradually bring society back to the normal condition from which long years of slavery have carried all under its iron sway.’7 In referring to republicanism, I have in mind the neo-republican tradition that was so influential in shaping the course of, first, American independence and then subsequently taken up explicitly by the abolitionist movement as providing the rationale for emancipation.8 Within this tradition the central organizing principle is that of freedom defined as independence from arbitrary rule. This ideal is what makes popular sovereignty possible since only an independent citizenry is truly able to express its will with integrity and free from either coercion or the need to self-censor and appease others. Independence is understood as membership 4  Douglass, ‘Our Destiny Is Largely in Our Own Hands’, in Papers, vol. 5, p. 63. 5  Douglass, ‘The Work of the Future’, p. 292. 6  Ibid., p. 291. 7  Ibid., p. 292. 8  See Bernard Baylin, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1992), especially pp. 230–319 and Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

50  Alan Coffee within a community as an equal governed under a law created by the people or its representatives that is required to reflect fairly the shared interests of all those it represents.9 Articulated this way, freedom is itself a complex social ideal that encompasses and brings together several other political values, including equality, citizenship, membership, and the rule of law. While republican institutions are responsible for holding these separate elements together, ultimately they are dependent on the disposition and attitudes—or civic virtues—of the citizens themselves. The structure of this chapter is as follows. In Section 1, I set out some core philosophical principles of neo-Roman republicanism, focusing on its central commitment to the notions of independence, equality, and the common good. These principles give republicanism both a radical inclusive strand and a conservative strand that seek unity and stability. The tension between these strands is resolved by appeal to the concept of citizen virtue, which I discuss in Section 2. Virtue itself requires a thoroughgoing commitment to equality across all important dimensions of social life, economically, politically, and socially. An unequal or hierarchical society cannot exist for long as a free state because any substantial inequalities within a population will inevitably corrupt the virtue that is necessary for freedom to persist. Over time, Douglass argues, inequality and hierarchy will inevitably lead to the corrupting of a society’s culture as it adapts to reinforce and normalize these conditions as part of the natural order. This corrupted culture is the one that is in place both before and after a popular revolution such as the one that brought America its independence as well as the proclamation that emancipated its slaves. In Section 3 I give Douglass’s argument showing how the structure of mo­tiv­ ation in radically unequal societies leads to not only the creation of social prejudices but a complete breakdown in the public commitment to reasoned argument through the creation of a partisan propaganda war between rival factions eager to seek the advantage. In the final section we see that before there can be any hope of liberation for the formerly enslaved there must be a wholesale revolution in the thought patterns that went before. All vestiges of the former ways of thinking and prejudices must be overturned and new norms, values, and practices must be collaboratively made by both the old and new members of the citizenry. In making the argument for the importance of cultural change, I do not mean to suggest that economic and political changes are not equally necessary. Each is important both individually and in combination with the others. I make the cultural argument, rather, because it has been underemphasized by republicans and is theoretically significant. I believe that Douglass has made a significant and lasting contribution to republican thinking in this respect.

9 See also Alan Coffee, ‘Catharine Macaulay’s Republican Conception of Social and Political Liberty’, Political Studies 65, no. 4 (2017), pp. 844–59.

A Radical Revolution in Thought  51

1.  Republican Freedom The republican promise is not only of freedom but of a robust guarantee of protection against arbitrary rule. The aim is to secure individual independence within a collective system of laws and institutions in which everyone has a stake and is treated equally. The condition of equality is vital. The reason is that if any group of people are treated more favourably than others then they have an unfair advantage that can lead to them circumventing the provisions of law and usurping power. The rest of the population would then be dependent on that more powerful group and would therefore no longer be free. Republican freedom is built around the core ideal of the common good (which is the object of popular sovereignty and that which constrains its actions). This is the standard against which arbitrary power is judged. Any power which is not constrained to act only in the collective interests of all the people, as the people themselves understand it, is deemed to be arbitrary. It is a threat to freedom and therefore illegitimate. It follows, then, that the central task facing republicans is to identify what the common good is. This ideal must satisfy at least two conditions, being both inclusive and stable. This dual requirement gives republican theory both a radical and a conservative character that often pull in different directions. On the radical side, republicans must continually strive to bring into the citizenry all those who have been excluded. Historically this meant extending the franchise to include the working classes, minority religious groups, women, and ultimately slaves themselves. Inclusivity is entailed by the logic of republicanism but it also has a pragmatic basis. Anyone who is subject to the coercive power of government but whose interests are not represented in or protected by its laws is ruled arbitrarily and is thereby, in republican terms, a slave. As we shall see, the mere presence of slaves has a destabilizing effect on the freedom of all the citizens. The conservative strand in republicanism represents a principle of stability and sustainability seeking to forge unity out of diversity by a creating coherent and viable idea of the common good that will command the loyalty of the citizens. Although they may pull in different directions, the radical and conservative sides to republicanism each act as a check on the other, curbing any excesses that might destabilize the nation. To emphasize inclusivity without unity, it can be argued, would be to invite factionalism and so threaten the survival of the republic. For those republican states that have endured, however, there is a corresponding danger that the conservative strand will become too powerful imposing an ideal of unity on the population that is not reflective of its diversity and firmly resists any attempt at dissent from the prevailing outlook. From the very earliest times, republican writers have fixated on the dangers of faction to the security of the state and urged that the people must first become united, even at the cost of freedom, until such time as they are ready for freedom. ‘Premature liberty’ (from the Tarquin dynasty), says Livy, ‘would have been a disaster: we should have been

52  Alan Coffee torn to pieces by petty squabbles before we had ever reached political maturity, which, as things were, was made possible by the long quiet years under monarchical government’.10 Nevertheless, even in this case we can see that the inclusivity and unity principles were working together. What became the people of Rome began as a diverse ‘rabble of vagrants, mostly runaways and refugees’. Roman spirit and patriotism was something that this disparate group of founders developed together. When the American slaves were emancipated the same cannot be said. There had been no common culture created by both white and black Americans. Rather the black population was admitted into a white society that had already been established and whose core values and structures were not available to be discussed or challenged. Any appeal, as was often made, to the importance of unity around the common good and respect for the values of the republic must first demonstrate that those ideals are fully inclusive of the interests and perspectives of the whole population. It is at this point that Douglass begins the argument that I set out in this chapter. The enormous difference in power and influence between former slaveholders and vested interests, on the one hand, and freedmen, on the other, allows the former to create a conceptual baseline from which they can ­control how the common good is understood, and so to preserve their own interests under the guise of maintaining unity. Minority and marginalized voices come to be perpetually excluded. The result is a corrupted, reactionary form of republicanism—‘not a true democracy, but a bastard republicanism’—that belies its radical aims of giving freedom to the oppressed.11 The most fundamental task for republicans, then, is to identify what the common good of the citizens is.12 The second task is to ensure that this ideal is used in the governing of the people. For both of these tasks, republicans have traditionally placed their trust in the effectiveness of accessible and transparent institutions governed by public reason through which the rulers and officials can be held to account. So long as there is a robust institutional structure in place, the argument goes, each citizen should be able to make his or her voice heard in civil society and have the opportunity to appeal against any unwarranted interference with a reasonable prospect of success. Crucial to the success of this approach is a requirement that both the general population and those who regulate the institutions can shed their personal perspectives and judge arguments on merit according to the standards of public reason. Historically, republicans have been confident that this condition can be met. By Douglass’s time, this confidence often reflected the 10 Livy, Early History of Rome, p. 105. 11  Douglass, ‘Slavery and America’s Bastard Republicanism’, in Papers, vol. 1, p. 78. 12  From a theoretical perspective, knowing what the common good represents is of paramount importance because it is the reference point around which freedom, arbitrariness, and virtue are all understood. This much said, of course, the common good is not a static ideal but something which constantly shifts and which, therefore, must be continually both created and discovered. In that case one might say, alternatively, that the most fundamental task for republicans is to identify the processes by which the citizens can come to define or discern their common good together.

A Radical Revolution in Thought  53 strong influence of natural law thinking that had become fused with republicanism from the seventeenth century and according to which the moral principles that govern the world are understood to be available to those who apply their faculties of reason correctly.13 While Douglass himself should be regarded as a natural law philosopher he remains highly aware of the human propensity to self-deception and the uncritical way in which most of us absorb ideas from our background culture. He also emphasizes the enormous struggle minority and outsider groups have in being taken seriously when challenging prevailing attitudes. The standard required for a person to be considered independent is extremely high. Individuals must be protected against arbitrary power in any form, including not only political power but also economic, physical, and even social power in the form of a person’s standing within the community. This last form of power is very difficult to define. It is also very difficult to prove that it has been breached and still harder to enforce. Nevertheless, people without social standing have no effective voice in representing their perspectives and in defending their interests. This makes them dependent rather than independent. They must rely on other people taking a sympathetic view of their condition rather than standing on their own feet in their own right. That is not freedom. Douglass argues that this is what necessarily happens when a system of slavery is overturned. In a slaveholding society, slaves have no social standing. The mere fact of a change of government does not change that. The former masters, he says, ‘will carry into the new relation of liberty much of the insolence, caprice and pretention exercised by him while the admitted lord of the lash’.14 The risk for freedmen, therefore, is that they will simply ‘exchange the relation of slavery to individuals, only to become the slaves of the community at large, having no rights which anybody is required to respect’. If political equality is a condition for republican freedom as independence, then so too is equality of standing, for without this equality under law is made ineffective. ‘It is our lot,’ Douglass laments, ‘to live among a people whose laws, traditions and prejudices have been against us for centuries, and from these they are not yet free. To assume that they are free from these evils simply because they have changed their laws is to assume what is utterly unreasonable and contrary to facts’.15 He adds that ‘the color line meets him everywhere and in a measure shuts him out from all respectable and profitable trades and callings. In spite of all your . . . laws he is a rejected man’. The acceptance of others as equals cannot be 13  See Francois Furstenberg, ‘Beyond Freedom and Slavery: Autonomy, Virtue, and Resistance in Early American Political Discourse’, Journal of American History, 89, no. 4 (2002), pp. 1295–331. For a discussion of the role of natural law principles in Douglass’s thinking, see Peter Myers, Frederick Douglass: Race and the Rebirth of American Liberalism (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2008), p. 49. For an example of these principles at work in a republican revolutionary writer, see for example James Otis, The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (Boston, MA: J. Almon, 1764). 14  Douglass, ‘The Work of the Future’, p. 292. 15  Douglass, ‘Parties Were Made for Men, Not Men for Parties’, in Papers, vol. 5, p. 92.

54  Alan Coffee imposed.16 It relies on the character and disposition—or virtue—of the citizens, which is why virtue as well as equality is a constitutive and necessary part of the republican ideal.17

2.  Civic Virtue At its most basic, ‘virtue’ in the civic republican sense with which we are concerned simply refers to any behaviour that supports and promotes the public good, and so benefits the republic.18 There is no definitive or settled account of what specific behaviours this will include. This is not surprising given the wide range of ideals contained in the republican ideal of freedom and the diversity of temperaments and qualities that are required in a large-scale democracy. Not every citizen, of course, can be expected to demonstrate all the potential virtues in a single life. The personal characteristics associated with a radical reformer, for example, will often likely be both psychologically and politically incompatible with those that make a successful governor or democratic politician. It would be one thing to have the skills and temperament to agitate tirelessly and fearlessly for justice and reform, and quite another to have the diplomacy and tact necessary to create consensus and unity through compromise and to establish common ground. Over the course of his long career, Douglass himself has often been accused by critics of shifting from being radical to being conservative and that this demonstrates on his part, variously, a lack of conviction, a change of mind, or an intellectual inconsistency.19 Philosophically, however, there is no necessary contradiction between these dispositions as republicans are called on to be both radical and 16  A prevailing view in Douglass’s time was that ‘social equality’ could not be legislated. The fear of many white people at the time was that granting legal and political equality to black Americans would lead to demands that their social status would also be raised and that black people would, first, insist on being respected and esteemed as if they were white, and then want to mix freely amongst them in their social circles. Indeed, the phrase ‘social equality’ was often invoked as a pejorative slur to knock back progressive initiatives, rather as the term ‘political correctness’ can be used today. While Douglass is often sceptical about the notion of ‘social equality’ described in these terms, he insists that if you are to use it you must draw a clear distinction between social (attitudes) and civil equality, the latter of which must rest on a secure legal basis. (See for example, Douglass, ‘What Shall Be Done with the Negro?’, New York Times, 16 May 1863, and ‘The Civil Rights Case’, in Writings, vol. 4, p. 402.) 17  On the relationship between freedom, equality, and virtue, see Alan Coffee, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft, Freedom and the Enduring Power of Social Domination’, European Journal of Political Theory 12, no. 2 (2013), pp. 119–21. 18  See for example Machiavelli’s use of virtù in The Prince, in The Chief Works and Others, trans. A.  Gilbert (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1965), vol. 1, p. 66. I discuss this idea further in Coffee, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft, Public Reason, and the Virtuous Republic’, p. 188. 19  On Douglass’s radicalism see, for example, Leslie Goldstein (1976), ‘Violence as an Instrument for Social Change: The Views of Frederick Douglass (1817–1895)’, Journal of Negro History 61, no. 1 (1976), pp. 61–72, James Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), James Oakes, The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007). Peter Myers gives a balanced discussion of the complexities of Douglass’s career, see ‘Frederick Douglass on Revolution and Integration: A Problem in Moral Psychology’, American Political Thought 2, no. 1 (2013), pp. 118–46. On the uneasy

A Radical Revolution in Thought  55 conservative.20 Indeed, the virtue of pragmatism—doing whatever is necessary in the pursuit of freedom even at the expense of principle—is itself integral to the republican ideal.21 Douglass was always resolute in his opposition to slavery and acknowledged that slaves had the fight for their freedom. He praises Madison Washington for his rebellion and in his own showdown with his former master, Covey, Douglass himself risked death or, worse, being sold further on South into even harsher slavery.22 But slaves are not always advised to fight in this way if the expected costs in terms of reprisals and bloodshed outweigh the benefits and likelihood of success. So while Douglass admired John Brown for his unsuccessful raid at Harper’s Ferry, and conceded that someone had to do it, he did not join Brown in the attack.23 Seen through a republican lens Douglass’s stance need not represent weakness or double standards so much as belief in the division of labour required to build lasting freedom. A principle in Douglass’s thought that unifies his radical and conservative leanings is the republican idea that freedom always comes through rather than in spite of government. An example of this can be seen in Douglass’s support for General Grant’s proposal to annex Santo Domingo (now the Dominican Republic).24 relationship between Douglass’s early radicalism and later conservatism, see for example Waldo Martin, The Mind of Frederick Douglass (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1984). 20  We should be careful to distinguish Douglass’s philosophical republicanism in the sense of a commitment to freedom as independence, as I am using it in this chapter, from his membership of the Republican Party. Although it must be remembered that the Republican Party was a progressive and anti-slavery party in its origins, even during Douglass’s lifetime the lines between the parties on progressive issues were becoming murky. 21  While the republican tradition is a broad church in terms of the particular values and principles that motivate its various adherents, these are organized and given structure within the overarching goal of pursuing freedom as independence, or non-domination. To that extent, pursuing freedom is the ultimate aim that constrains and directs one’s adherence of any other values. As a pragmatic matter, if one has to set aside an important principle for the sake of freedom (e.g., to break a law to preserve freedom under the rule of law) then not only is that permitted but this pragmatic spirit may be counted as a virtue in itself. 22  Douglass, ‘The Heroic Slave’, in Harriet Beecher-Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 482–520, and Frederick Douglass, My Bondage, My Freedom (London: Penguin, 2003), pp. 190–7. 23 Douglass, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (New York: Dover, 2003), pp. 195–7. 24  Ibid., pp. 296–9. Douglass’s support for the annexation of Santo Domingo in 1871 represented a reversal of his earlier opinion which can be traced as far back as 1846 when he wrote against the plan from his tour of the British Isles. We can only speculate on the exact reasons he had for changing his mind, but certainly the decision to support the president’s plan cost him personally in his reputation as a black leader. I neither endorse nor condemn his position here but only note the republican structure of the arguments he made, couching them in terms of the importance of robust freedom from domination, or independence. The United States had long had an eye on Santo Domingo for both strategic military and commercial reasons. However, while the geo-political case had not changed in the intervening twenty-five years, Douglass’s own situation had. In 1846 he was a fugitive and freedom fighter whereas in 1871 he was a diplomat with responsibilities for government policy. Understandably, scholars differ on how and to what extent these factors influenced his thinking (for different takes on this, see Daniel Brantley, ‘Black Diplomacy and Frederick Douglass’ Caribbean Experiences, 1871 and 1889–1891: The Untold History’, Phylon 45, no. 3 (1984), pp. 197–209 and Merline Pitre, ‘Frederick Douglass and the Annexation of Santo Domingo’, Journal of Negro History 62 no. 4 (1977), pp. 390–400).

56  Alan Coffee Douglass dismisses the claim that such an act would degrade and humiliate a ­people of colour who had a right to be a sovereign nation responding that, on the contrary, such an alliance would bring genuine freedom. No nation of that size could survive let alone flourish in isolation and so to join a larger union of states as an equal under the same set of laws ‘would give it peace, stability, prosperity, and civilization’ and since the government of Santo Domingo agreed, there was no more dishonour in this arrangement than in admitting Kansas or Nebraska to the union.25 Douglass’s general view, then, is that ‘government is better than an­archy, and that patient reform is better than violent revolution’.26 But government must be legitimate if not necessarily fully republican. Before the Civil War, he argues, the American government was not legitimate but had been usurped by slave power which had distorted the constitution and was impervious to moral argument. Under those conditions, armed resistance is called for (‘power’ he says ‘concedes nothing’ without a struggle).27 Once the black population was admitted to the citizenry, even under appalling conditions, however, then there was a legal and constitutional route to justice that prevented him from ever again advocating violence. For this constitutional route to be viable there must be a commitment on the part of the citizenry. This requires two specific and general virtues that must be sufficiently prevalent amongst the population. Both virtues are hindered fatally by the biased conceptual system and framework beliefs and ideas made available under the slave system. The first is that every citizen must respect the legitimate and equal standing of one’s fellow citizens. When slaves are emancipated and admitted into the citizenry it is little wonder that this condition is not easily met, all the more so where the situation had been imposed on an unwilling population after a prolonged and bloody conflict. Most of the existing citizens were used to viewing slaves with a mixture of pity and contempt, and few had ever had to take slaves’ interests into account, make sacrifices or concessions on their account, or enter into any discourse with them. If emancipated slaves are not accepted on equal terms as citizens then they are not free no matter what their legal standing is. Douglass himself remarked how much freer he felt in England—a monarchy— than in America under its formally impeccable republican institutions.28 The reason lay in the respective levels in each country of the virtue of respect. America was divided by colour prejudice into a rigid caste system that replicated the previous slave system whereas the English, in Douglass’s experience, ‘saw in the negro a man,

My own view is that whatever impact external factors had on Douglass’s thinking, we should take seriously his commitment to the republican principles he espouses in expressing his position. 25 Douglass, Life and Times, pp. 297–8. 26  Ibid., p. 397. 27  Douglass, ‘West India Emancipation’, in Writings, vol. 2, p. 437. 28 Douglass, My Bondage, p. 271; Life and Times, p. 400.

A Radical Revolution in Thought  57 a moral and responsible being’.29 To be accepted in this way is a precondition for being socially free. Even assuming a people can accept each other as compatriots they must then govern themselves in an inclusive and representative manner. To do this, they must come together to discuss their shared interests and so to establish an idea of the common good. A second virtue, then, that is necessary for republican freedom is that individuals should possess a capacity and willingness to constrain their conduct according to the principles of public reason.30 For citizens, this is a cardinal virtue because reasoned argument represents the most fundamental defence of freedom. A condition of freedom is that it is resilient, secure against any contingency that might undermine it. To be governed by any standard less than by reason itself was held to be unreliable. If people behave justly only because they are well disposed towards each other, for example, there was nothing to say that this attitude must necessarily continue. Reason, republicans have traditionally claimed, is the only truly non-arbitrary standard by which to establish the principles of government. So long as the best reasons, considered in the light of the agreed common good, are required to carry the day then we can be sure of our freedom and are therefore independent. If this condition does not hold, we cannot be certain that our interests will be protected and so we become ­dependent on the goodwill of those with the power to decide. What Douglass shows is that in a slave society virtue, as the ability to reason impartially, has already been corrupted. ‘Prejudice,’ as he puts it, ‘sets all logic at defiance. It takes no account of reason or consistency.’31 The motivational structure of dominating relationships, he argues, makes deceit and self-interest, rather than truth and the common good, the most prudent course of behaviour. This leads to the creation of a culture of prejudices that support the slaveholding classes. It is in the nature of cultural prejudices that, eventually, they come to be accepted as the norm, and even as obvious natural truths. The process of reasoning takes place within a conceptual framework that furnishes us with the necessary intellectual and moral resources. In a slaveholding state, that framework is constructed around the central principles of slavery. The values of slavery provide the anchor point around which all other ideas, values, and beliefs must be distorted and manipulated in order to fit (‘when they assumed that slavery was right,

29 Douglass, Life and Times, p. 280 (see also James M’Cune Smith’s introduction to My Bondage). We should not make too much of Douglass’s comments about England. Although he admired England for many things, not least for its actions in ending slavery as well as for his own treatment there, he condemned England’s treatment of the Irish which often resembled slavery. Nevertheless, the difference between England and the USA is this, according to Douglass. Racism, prejudice, and self-interest can be found everywhere but uniquely in America is there a racial caste system that derives from slavery. 30  Coffee, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft, Public Reason, and the Virtuous Republic’, p. 188. 31 Douglass, Life and Times, p. 441.

58  Alan Coffee they easily saw that everything inconsistent with slavery was wrong’).32 This background remains in place even where the institutional apparatus of bondage has been dismantled. Very few people, however, are aware of the effect that their social and cultural environment has on their ability to think independently. The result is that, while debate about the common good might have seemed to the citizens involved to have been conducted in neutral and impartial terms, in reality there was an irresistible bias towards what had gone before.

3.  Power and Propaganda One of the most effective ways to prevent slaves from being liberated and joining the citizenry is to deny that they can ever possess the virtue necessary for them to become citizens. Freeing slaves would therefore be a danger to the republic as well as quite possibly an unkindness to the slaves themselves who would find themselves ill equipped to cope with their freedom. Indeed, this was a standard republican position that stretches back to its Roman origins.33 Douglass is all too aware of the self-serving nature of this argument. ‘These objections,’ he notes, ‘are often urged with a show of sincere solicitude for the welfare of slaves themselves’ while simultaneously invoking pity and stoking fear: ‘what will you do with them? they can’t take care of themselves . . . they would not work; they would become a burden upon the State, and a blot upon society; they’d cut their masters’ throats . . . they would necessarily become vagrants, paupers and criminals, overrunning all our alms houses, jails and prisons.’34 Although popular prejudice had it that people of African descent naturally lacked the requisite intellectual and moral capacities to become virtuous, this position has no basis in republican logic as I have articulated it in this chapter.35 The classical republican claim was that slaves internalized a ‘slavish’ or ‘servile’ mentality as a result of their condition. Virtue had to be learned and this required the development of a strong character, something that was incompatible with the 32  Douglass, ‘The United States Cannot Remain Half-Slave and Half-Free’, in Writings, vol. 4, p. 364. 33 On the classical roots of this idea and its place in republican history, see Quentin Skinner, ‘Freedom as the Absence of Arbitrary Power’, in Republicanism and Political Theory, eds. Cécile Laborde and John Maynor (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), p. 92. 34  Douglass, ‘What Shall Be Done with the Slaves if Emancipated?’, in Writings, vol. 3, p. 188. 35  George Fitzhugh summarizes a popular view, ‘Children cannot be governed by mere law; first because they do not understand it, and secondly because they are so much under the influence of impulse, passion and appetite, that they want sufficient self control to be governed by the distant and doubtful penalties of the law. They must be constantly controlled by parents or guardians, whose will and orders shall stand in place of law for them . . . nor will the government of mere law suffice for the individual negro. He is but a grown up child, and must be governed as a child’, Sociology for the South (Richmond: A.  Morris, 1854), pp. 82–3. Interestingly, he concedes that the this assertion is more a matter of prejudice than of reasoned argument, adding that ‘we shall not dwell on this view, for no one will differ with us who thinks as we do of the negro’s capacity, and we might argue till dooms-day, in vain, with those who have a high opinion of the negro’s moral and intellectual capacity’.

A Radical Revolution in Thought  59 condition of slavery in which individuals have no control over their situation and do not take ultimate responsibility for their decisions. Rather, slaves survive by using cunning and flattery, by lying low and staying out of trouble, or by simply obeying mindlessly. These self-serving behaviours were incompatible with the integrity demanded of citizens, which required them to stand firm on principle and to act courageously for the good of all. Over time, slaves as a class were thought to lose the capacity for virtue altogether.36 Historically, republicans have both pitied and despised slaves.37 They pitied them for the unfortunate condition in which slaves found themselves and yet despised them for what they had become. This latter reaction was very deep and there was widespread revulsion at the very suggestion that beings so degraded could one day walk among them as political, still less social, equals. Although the possibility of manumission in particular and exceptional individual cases has been recognized in republican societies from the earliest times, the prevailing view that slaves were generally incapable of acquiring virtue ruled out the idea that they could be emancipated as a class and absorbed into the citizenry. The formal argument that slavery corrupts virtue, however, does not prove what its proponents claimed. Republican theory holds that the process of corruption operates in both directions affecting both parties to a dependent relationship, dominator as much as dominated. If slaves become obsequious and servile, then masters are prone to arrogance, laziness, and complacency. Historically, some of the most damning passages in republican literature have been aimed at the degenerate aristocracy, bloated and brought down by the excesses of arbitrary power.38 Furthermore, not only does slavery corrupt both masters and slaves in equal measure but this corruption has a propensity to spread. Like rust, to use Madame Roland’s image, the process of corruption extends imperceptibly but inexorably beyond particular relationships to corrode the virtue of society as a whole as the moral community is subverted and replaced by an arena of competing private interests. And like rust, the process once started is difficult to arrest or reverse.39 Douglass does not deny that slaves lack virtue. On the contrary, he regards it as a logical truth. ‘When you have deprived man of the liberty of acting freely,’ he argues, ‘you disqualify him for obeying the law of God’, a precondition for

36  See Skinner, ‘Freedom as the Absence of Arbitrary Power’, pp. 92–3. 37  Douglass is acutely aware of the implications of this tendency. First, he notes that the ‘intense hatred of the colored man’ derives from the fact that colour has for so long been ‘coupled in the mind with the degradation of slavery and servitude’ (see ‘Prejudice against Color’, in Writings, vol. 3, p. 129). He also believes that ‘Human nature is so constituted, that it cannot honour a helpless man, though it can pity him, and even this it cannot do long if signs of power do not arise’, Douglass, My Bondage, p. 180. 38  A fine example is Mary Wollstonecraft’s analysis of the causes of the French Revolution in A Vindication of the Rights of Men. 39  ‘The rust of barbarity covers their proud masters and ruins them together. The poisoned breath of despotism destroys virtue in the bud,’ cited in Sandrine Bergès, ‘A Republican Housewife: MarieJeanne Phlipon Roland on Women’s Political Role’, Hypatia 31 no. 1 (2015), p. 111.

60  Alan Coffee virtue.40 A slave cannot have virtue because ‘his conscience, his intellect, his ­affections are all set aside by the master’,41 whose sole prerogative it is to decide ‘what is right and wrong, virtue or vice’.42 The salient matter, Douglass reminds us, is not the supposed moral failings of the slaves—moral agency has been denied them—but that of the slaveholders who are ‘every hour the violator of the just and inalienable rights of man’.43 There is another, specifically republican, reason for holding that slaves necessarily lack virtue. Virtue is by definition reserved for citizens, since it concerns the defence of their own common good from which slaves are officially excluded. Not only are slaves outside the republic, but they are violated by it. Far from being morally required to uphold the society of their oppressors, slaves have a moral reason to undermine and even to seek to destroy it.44 The fundamental problem to be addressed concerning the corrupting effect of arbitrary power was not, on Douglass’s account, the internalization of unvirtuous behaviour but the structure of motivation that domination creates. By putting slaves and slaveholders at odds with each other, a system of incentives is set in place that encourages and rewards prejudices based on self-interest and punishes rational deliberation about the common good. So powerful is this effect that, eventually, the entire population is sucked into this struggle preventing the possibility of impartial debate and, thereby, dealing a fatal blow to the possibility of a free republic. Mistrust, deception, and false appearances, Douglass shows, are central to the slave system, not just between masters and slaves, but also between slaves and eventually between all those who find themselves complicit in slaveholding society. Notwithstanding their public statements to the contrary, at the pragmatic level slaveholders knew perfectly well that they were dealing with real and intelligent people. ‘It is the interest and business of slaveholders to study human nature,’ Douglass observes, ‘and many of them attain astonishing proficiency in discerning the thoughts and emotions of slaves.’45 Slaveholders know that the threat of rebellion is real. They know that, being rational, slaves will act in just the same ways as they themselves would do in their position. ‘So much intellect as the slaveholder has around him,’ Douglass argues, ‘requires watching. Their safety depends upon their vigilance. Conscious of the injustice and wrong they are every hour perpetrating, and knowing what they themselves would do if made the victims of such wrongs, they are looking out for the first signs of the dread 40  Douglass, ‘The Relation of the Free Church to the Slave Church’, in Papers, series 1, vol. 1, pp. 189–95. 41  Douglass, ‘American Slavery, American Religion, and the Free Church of Scotland’, in Papers, series 1, vol. 1, p. 273. 42  Douglass, ‘A Simple Tale of American Slavery’, in Papers, series 1, vol. 1, p. 399. 43 Douglass, My Bondage, p. 197. 44  A common theme in the abolitionist arguments from the late eighteenth century was of slavery as a state of war, being an attack on the natural right of freedom. For the influence of this idea on Douglass and those around him, see Stauffer, Black Hearts, p. 21. 45 Douglass, My Bondage, p. 202.

A Radical Revolution in Thought  61 retribution of justice.’ The slaveholders must, therefore, stay one step ahead and continually find ‘new means to keep their slaves in subjection’.46 The stakes are high. No one can afford to relax or to take their eye off their enemy, for ‘slavery never sleeps or slumbers’.47 A complex psychological battle develops between slaves and slaveholders. Neither side reveals their true hand, each attempting to distort appearances to suit their purposes. On the slaves’ side, they must not even reveal themselves to be intelligent beings, conforming instead to a docile, compliant, and ignorant racial stereotype. Nothing they say or do must be what it appears. Slaves, for example, speak to each other in code. ‘We had several words,’ Douglass recalls, ‘expressive of things, important to us, which we understood, but which, even if distinctly heard by an outsider, would convey no certain meaning.’48 It was not only their language that slaves had to watch: ‘unusual sobriety, apparent abstraction, sullenness and indifference—indeed, any mood out of the common way—[would] afford ground for suspicion and inquiry’.49 On the slaveholders’ side, while they had the physical power to restrain their slaves, ultimately, what kept them in power was their ability to manipulate and control ideas, starting with their own slaves but eventually coming to infiltrate the whole of society. This they did with a relentless and ruthless thoroughness. ‘There they stand,’ Douglass says of the pro-slavery lobby, ‘with all their education, with all their religion, with all their moral influence, with all their means of co-operation— there they stand, sworn before God and the universe, that the slave shall continue a slave or die’.50 Slaves had none of these advantages. They were denied an education (indeed one of the few crimes that carried the death penalty for a white person was to teach a slave to write), their religious instruction consisted of one commandment, ‘slaves obey your masters’, and even where a slave might think of speaking up, there was no outlet. ‘Where may he assemble? Where are his newspapers?’ Douglass asks, concluding that ‘there comes no voice from the enslaved’.51 It was not enough, however, merely to keep their slaves quiet. The task of subjecting 4 million people—around a sixth of the United States population— required that no dissent would be possible.52 Slaveholders achieved this by infiltrating and ultimately by taking over each of the important cultural and political institutions of the state. Eventually, the interests of the slaveholders became ‘woven and interwoven with the very texture—with the whole network—of our social and religious organizations’.53 Douglass adds that ‘slavery has not only 46  Douglass, ‘International Moral Force Can Destroy Slavery’, in Papers, series 1, vol. 1, p. 184. 47  Douglass, ‘Farewell Speech to the British People’, in Writings, vol. 2, p. 215. 48 Douglass, My Bondage, p. 205. 49  Ibid., p. 202. 50  Douglass, ‘Farewell Speech’, p. 208. 51  Douglass, ‘The Nature of Slavery’, in My Bondage, p. 331. 52  Douglass refers to America’s as a ‘bastard republicanism that enslaved one sixth of the population’ (‘Bastard Republicanism’, p. 81). 53  Douglass, ‘Farewell Speech’, p. 216.

62  Alan Coffee framed our civil and criminal code, it has not only nominated our presidents, judges, and diplomatic agents, but it has also given to us the most popular commentators on the Bible in America’. With the wholehearted endorsement of the church, slaveholders were able to colonize the moral high ground and brand their opponents as troublemakers who would threaten the unity of the republic itself, thereby making the task of reform much more difficult. The success of the slaveholding powers in coming to dominate and control public opinion allowed the first kind of prejudice discussed above to flourish, namely ‘that the Negro belongs to an inferior race’. This irrational belief, made inevitable by the process he has articulated, acts as an enabler for all the social barriers erected against black people taking their place as citizens. It is, he argues, ‘the apology, the philosophical and ethnological apology for all the hell-black crimes ever committed by the white race against the blacks and the warrant for the repetition of those crimes through all times’.54 The argument that blacks deserve their treatment is, Douglass goes on to show, as unsound as it is ‘monstrous’. That the argument gained such traction, he concludes, demonstrates the profound effect of prejudice that stems from a false system of beliefs but which escalates into an intense hatred on people’s ability to think and reason with any degree of impartiality. ‘That men can resort to’ the argument that negroes are inferior, he concludes ‘shows that when the human mind is once completely under the dominion of pride and selfishness, the reasoning faculties are inverted if not subverted’.55

4.  All One or the Other While black people have the most to fear from the breakdown in public reason and the ceding of power to pro-slavery interests, Douglass emphasizes that the end result is that both races will become unfree. ‘A class of tyrants,’ he argues, will be created, ‘in whose presence no man’s Liberty, not even the white man’s Liberty would be safe. The slaveholder would then be the only really free man of the country.’56 If black people are the slaves then the non-slaveholding whites are merely their ‘miserable watch dogs’. No state, according to Douglass, can remain for long ‘half slave and half free’.57 It ‘must be all one or the other’. The logic of each side, freedom and slavery, is to undermine the other and eventually to displace it entirely (or more forcefully, liberty ‘must either cut the throat of slavery or slavery would cut the throat of liberty’).58 Douglass traces the events that led up to the Civil War, showing how the culture of slavery systematically undermined the culture of freedom up to the 54  Douglass, ‘The Present and Future of the Colored Race in America’, in Writings, vol. 3, p. 355. 55  Ibid., p. 356. 56  Ibid., p. 350. 57 Douglass, Life and Times, p. 211. 58  Quoted in Stauffer, Black Hearts, p. 21.

A Radical Revolution in Thought  63 point of war itself. In the aftermath, although the slave powers were defeated their culture was not. This meant that comparatively little had changed regarding the freedom of the nation. As we noted above, Douglass considered that the black population had merely exchanged one form of servitude for another. Just as significantly, the process of cultural and conceptual erosion continued from where it left off systematically rolling back freedom’s gains. Where slavery is legal in one part of a republic but not in the other, as in antebellum America, then the free part represents both a threat and an opportunity for the slave part. It is a threat because it represents a refuge both literally and symbolically for slaves giving them hope that a free way of life for them might exist.59 Free states give air to anti-slavery ideals while also providing a challenge to the ambitions of the slaveholders by blocking legislation that is in their interests. At the same time, the free states represent an enormous opportunity for expansion for the lucrative business of slaveholding. The free states cannot contain these conflicting pressures. While it had been tempting, as Douglass puts it, for the people of the North to ask ‘what have we to do with slavery?’, inactivity inevitably meant the steady loss of power, influence, and territory to the South.60 The repeal of the Missouri Compromise and the passing of the Nebraska-Kansas Act ceded the balance of political power to the slave states which resulted in actions such as the Dred Scott case and the passing of the Fugitive Slave Law.61 Douglass describes the latter as ‘a bill, undoubtedly more designed to involve the North in complicity with slavery and deaden its moral sentiment, than to procure the return of fugitives to their so-called owners’.62 Slavery, Douglass argues, cannot be appeased and so eventually the vying between the free and slave parts of America led to the Civil War. This, however, did not end the matter. The political system in the country may have changed but the culture and mentality that supported slavery, he argues, remained wholly intact. Douglass points to the Supreme Court’s decision in 1883 to overturn the

59  ‘To look at the map and observe the proximity of Eastern shore, Maryland, to Delaware and Pennsylvania, it may seem to the reader quite absurd to regard the proposed escape as a formidable undertaking,’ Douglass tells us, but while ‘the real distance was great enough, but the imagined distance was, to our ignorance, much greater. Every slaveholder seeks to impress his slave with a belief in the boundlessness of slave territory, and of his own almost illimitable power’ (My Bondage, p. 205, see Life and Times, p. 110). 60 Douglass, Life and Times, p. 210. 61  ‘But they understand us better than we do ourselves, and persevere until the end is gained. No, we would not have Texas—not we—but we had to take her for all that. Then Texas should not have ten millions; but Texas did get ten millions for all that. Then slavery would never go to New Mexico; but slavery is there for all that. We would never hunt slaves under the Fugitive Slave Law; but we do hunt them for all that. They should never repeal the Missouri Compromise; but they did repeal it for all that; and the fact is, history shows that the North has never been able to stand against the power and purposes of the South. Indeed, if compromise could possibly save the Union, the Union could easily be saved; but thanks to the spirit of tyrants, they want no compromise’ (Douglass, ‘The Future of the Abolition Cause’, in Writings, vol. 3, p. 83). 62 Douglass, Life and Times, pp. 199–200.

64  Alan Coffee 1875 Civil Rights Act that had given black citizens equal protection in areas such as public accommodation and transportation, declaring that even ‘the surrender of the nation’s capital to Jefferson Davis in time of war could hardly have caused greater shock’ to African Americans so great a setback was it to their ambitions of civil and political equality.63 Douglass summarizes the situation this way: While slavery was the baseline of American society, while it ruled the church and state, while it was the interpreter of our law and the exponent of our religion, it admitted no quibbling . . . But now slavery is abolished. Its reign was long, dark, and bloody. Liberty is now the baseline of the Republic. Liberty has supplanted slavery, but I fear it has not supplanted the spirt or power of slavery. Where slavery was strong, liberty is now weak.64

Liberty is weak, he concludes, because the former slave culture was not overturned at the same time as the political institutions and so former prejudices and attitudes have been allowed to creep back in and take over the institutions of state once again. A republican revolution once begun must be seen through to completion otherwise eventually someone—most likely the members of those groups that were initially dominant—will seize power and everyone’s freedom will be diminished. A political revolution alone, such as the declaration of independence in 1776 or the proclamation of emancipation in 1863, is insufficient because it does not change the conceptual framework of the society involved. This latter revolution is a much more difficult, fragile, and protracted enterprise and it requires a very different set of skills. ‘A profounder wisdom,’ Douglass argues, ‘a holier zeal, than belongs to the prosecution of war, will be required’ to rebuild the social fabric, adding that while ‘courage and patriotism are chiefly needed now [during the Civil War] . . . a deep insight into human nature will be needed then’.65 This task cannot be delegated to or assumed by the formerly dominant group but must necessarily be a collaborative effort inclusive of all social groups. Of course, race is not the only divider in society, as Douglass recognizes. ‘The spirit of caste is dangerous everywhere,’ he says, highlighting the tensions raised by religious, class, gender and ethnic differences.66 Nevertheless, while all of these groups must be fully represented in the new republic, it remains the slave whose very presence in the republic was the explicit objective of half the country to keep out and keep down. And so it is their voices that need most urgently to be heard. ‘No one man can tell the truth,’ Douglass concludes, ‘Not even two men of the same complexion, sometimes can tell it. It requires a white man and a black man—as black as he can be—to “tole” the whole truth.’67 63  Ibid., p. 395. 64  Ibid., p. 402. 65  Douglass, ‘The Work of the Future’, pp. 290–1. 66  See Douglass, ‘This Decision Has Humbled a Nation’, in Papers, vol. 5, p. 117. 67  Douglass, ‘Good Men Are God in the Flesh’, Papers, vol. 5, p. 432.

3

Republicanism, Virtuous and Corrupt Social Conflict, Political Leadership, and Constitutional Reform in Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories John P. McCormick

This chapter focuses on Niccolò Machiavelli’s analysis of social strife, institutional change, and political leadership in the Florentine Histories, demonstrating that the work continues to affirm the radical, democratic republicanism that the author expressed in works such as the Discourses and even The Prince.1 I contest prevailing interpretations which assert that the Histories signals a fundamentally conservative reorientation of Machiavelli’s political views and, moreover, I demonstrate that the book constitutes, most fundamentally, an exercise in silent comparative constitutionalism. Specifically, I show that the Histories continues to exhibit Machiavelli’s populist, political proclivities that favour the common ­people over wealthy elites within republics;2 and I show how the book functions as a tacit comparative analysis through which Machiavelli demonstrates the following: how civic discord and political leadership in ancient Rome produced admirable constitutional reforms, and how, conversely, social conflict and elite prerogative generated progressively deficient institutional innovations in medieval Florence.3 The evidence affirming Machiavelli’s consistent view of social classes across the span of his political writings, and his consistent allegiance for the people rather than the nobles, I will demonstrate, are deeply embedded within the Histories’ 1  Niccolò Machiavelli, Istorie Fiorentine, ed. Franco Gaeta (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1962 [1523]), hereafter abbreviated ‘FH’ within the text; Machiavelli, Il Principe (De Principatibus), composed circa 1513 and published in 1532, ed. G. Inglese (Turin: Einaudi, 1995), hereafter abbreviated ‘P’ within the text; and Machiavelli, Discorsi, ed. C. Vivanti (Turin: Einaudi, 1997 [1513–19]), hereafter abbreviated ‘D’ within the text. 2 See John  P.  McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and McCormick, Reading Machiavelli: Scandalous Books, Suspect Engagements and the Virtue of Populist Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018). 3 See John  P.  McCormick, ‘Faulty Foundings and Failed Reformers in Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories’, American Political Science Review 111, no. 1 (2017), pp. 204–16; and McCormick, ‘On the Myth of a Conservative Turn in Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories’, in Liberty and Conflict: Machiavelli on Politics and Power, eds. David Johnston, Nadia Urbinati, and Camila Vergara (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017), pp. 330–51. John P. McCormick, Republicanism, Virtuous and Corrupt: Social Conflict, Political Leadership, and Constitutional Reform in Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories In: Radical Republicanism: Recovering the Tradition’s Popular Heritage. Edited by: Bruno Leipold, Karma Nabulsi, and Stuart White, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198796725.003.0004

68  John P. M c Cormick narrative; they only become apparent—without explicit signalling on Machiavelli’s part—when one compares Machiavelli’s accounts of the people and the great in the Histories with those set forth in The Prince and the Discourses. I suggest that scholars who attribute a conservative turn to the late Machiavelli4 fail to take seriously the immediate context of the Histories’ composition; a context in which the addressees of the book, the Medici prelates who ruled Florence through their ‘friends’ (amici) among the Florentine aristocracy, had come to view the city’s common citizens as stalwart enemies, and the people had come to view Florence’s rulers as illegitimate tyrants. I will further demonstrate that Machiavelli’s answer to the central question posed in the Histories—why is the modern Florentine Republic so inferior to the ancient Roman one?—cannot be derived from any change in motivations or ‘humours’ that he supposedly attributes to modern peoples or nobles. Rather, I  argue, the answer to this question emerges from Machiavelli’s analysis of the different ‘modes and orders’ that characterize modern as opposed to ancient republics: modern and ancient republics, according to the Florentine, exhibit vastly different institutional-constitutional frameworks within which historically constant popular and aristocratic appetites operate and interact.

1.  Republics, Ancient and Modern The ‘nearly perfect’ Roman Republic is Machiavelli’s primary object of investigation in the Discourses (and, to some extent, The Prince), while the embarrassingly disordered, medieval Florentine Republic is the main focus of the Histories. In Rome, a prudent and virtuous founder, Romulus, armed common citizens and collected the wealthiest ones in a senate, insuring that future class conflicts, which Machiavelli deems natural and inevitable (P 9, D I.4–5), produced two salutary institutions: an office, the plebeian tribunate, dedicated to the welfare of the common people, and large citizen assemblies in which the people as a whole freely discussed and directly decided legislation and political trials. Intense but productive class conflict at home, and unprecedented territorial expansion abroad, herald, for Machiavelli, Rome’s singular greatness and its ultimate value as a model to be emulated by all subsequent republics. 4  Although they differ to varying degrees on how conservative they believe Machiavelli became, the following all agree that his views changed decidedly in that direction: Francesco Bausi, Machiavelli (Rome: Salerno, 2005); Robert Black, Machiavelli (London: Routledge, 2013); Humfrey Butters, ‘Machiavelli and the Medici’, in The Cambridge Companion to Machiavelli, ed. John  M.  Najemy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 64–79; Mark Hulliung, Citizen Machiavelli (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 75–8, 86; Mark Jurdjevic, A Great and Wretched City: Promise and Failure in Machiavelli’s Florentine Political Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); and Mario Martelli, ‘Machiavelli e Firenze dalla repubblica al principate’, in Niccolò Machiavelli: politico storico letterato, ed. Jean-Jacques Marchand (Rome: Salerno, 1996), pp. 15–31.

Republicanism, Virtuous and Corrupt  69 By contrast, in the Histories, Machiavelli demonstrates how one Florentine individual after another emerged with the prospect of assuming the role of founder or reformer, such as Giano della Bella and Michele di Lando, whose careers I will discuss in what follows. Each of these would-be founders/reformers ultimately demurred from fully arming the Florentine people civically and militarily such that social conflicts (not only between classes, but especially among families, factions, and parties) persisted in episodically destructive rather than in beneficially constructive ways. Machiavelli exhaustively chronicles how the republic’s bleakly defective ordering and chronically tepid leadership result in its gradual enfeeblement: a steady decline measured ultimately by the civic corruption typified by the rise of the Albizzi oligarchy (1382) and the Medici principate (1434), and by the geopolitical decline exemplified by French and Spanish invasions of Tuscany (in 1494 and 1512, respectively). The Florence of Machiavelli’s Histories seems to be trapped in a persistent and pernicious feedback loop within which originally deficient institutions facilitate sectarian conflicts that conclude temporarily with the establishment of defective constitutional reforms; these reforms subsequently inspire or, at least do not prevent, the proliferation of even more severe social conflict. Machiavelli declares that a ‘wise legislator’ could have imposed a proper constitutional order upon the Florentine Republic (FH III.1), which might have properly institutionalized social conflict along ‘natural’ class lines (FH II.12). Instead, the city’s either naively ‘good’ leaders like Giano and Michele, or imprudently ‘bad’ leaders like Corso Donati and Walter Brienne, permit or encourage social discord to persist in ever more chaotic and variegated ways: specifically, intense conflicts among rival family cliques; between Guelf and Ghibelline nobles (and then ‘black and white’ Guelfs); between the so-called ‘popular nobles’ of the richest guilds and middle-class citizens of the middling/lower guilds; and, finally, through conflicts between various elite groupings and the city’s plebeians, who are neither enrolled in nor represented by occupational guilds of their own. In the Discourses, Machiavelli praised Roman institutions, undergirded by a fullscale citizen military, that both resulted from, and then effectively rechannelled, class conflict: notably, the consulship and the tribunate—magistracies with yearlong tenures of office reserved for, respectively, elite and common citizens; additionally, a senate and popular assemblies that kept noble and plebeian citizens unified among themselves, and politically fixated on their class adversaries; and, finally, political trials where the entire citizenry renders judgment over individuals accused of political crimes—the closest real-world approximation, in Machiavelli’s view, to fully objective political judgment. In Machiavelli’s Florence, on the contrary, the dominant aristocratic institution is the semi-public/semi-private Guelf Party, comprised of only half the city’s nobility, which pursues domination over both rival Ghibelline nobles and common citizens. Unlike in Rome, these aristocratic parties pledged loyalty to foreign entities,

70  John P. M c Cormick respectively, the Papacy and the German emperor, who periodically reinstigate social strife within the city. The Florentine people, again, are constituted by the semi-public/semi-private institutional arrangements of the guild community, arrangements that reveal themselves to be politically deficient in two ways: the city’s merchants and artisans are dispersed among twenty-one competing major, middle, and minor guilds; and the guild community excludes (and oppresses) the vast majority of the city’s free-born, able-bodied male population, mostly employed as wool carders known as ciompi, sottoposti, or plebs. These disenfranchised and exploited workers prove amenable for cooptation by the city’s ancient nobility (the magnati or grandi) against the guilds, or by a prospective tyrant like Walter, the so-called Duke of Athens, against the city as a whole. Moreover, no Florentine leader ever exhibits the prudence and virtue that Machiavelli, in The Prince and the Discourses, attributes to ancient founders or reformers (e.g., Romulus, Moses, Hiero, Agathocles, Nabis, Cleomenes) in unifying the entire common citizenry—guildsmen (popolani) and plebs together—in one civic military force, despite being presented with many opportunities to do so. Machiavelli insists that social conflicts, which always serve as opportunities for founders/reformers to institute ‘new laws and orders’, arise in every polity, ancient and modern polities alike—conflicts characterized by ‘the rage of the p ­ eople and the insolence of the aristocrats’ (D I.16). Yet Machiavelli shows that each Florentine would-be founder/reformer ultimately balks at the prospect of behaving in the manner of their ancient counterparts; that is, by fully arming the people militarily, and by either definitively constraining or by decisively crushing the nobles, whom he often refers to as ‘the sons of Brutus’ (P 6; D III.3, III.30).

2.  Modern Constitutional Deficiencies Before further exploring the issue of political leadership, I would first like to focus on three elements of Florence’s constitutional order that Machiavelli reveals to be deeply deficient by ancient, Roman standards: (1) the short terms of office in Florence’s chief executive committee, the Signoria; specifically, the two-month terms that limited the effectiveness of the policies advanced by its members; (2) the fact that Florence’s small executive councils, ranging from eight to twenty members, were susceptible to intimidation and cooptation by powerful individuals or families; and (3) Florence’s extensive use of foreign judicial officials, such as the Podestà and the People’s Capitano: these judges or ‘rectors’, invited from other cities, were expected to provide objective, impartial judgment in civil,

Republicanism, Virtuous and Corrupt  71 criminal, and political disputes; instead, Machiavelli shows repeatedly, they became political instruments of whatever powerful faction dominated the city at any particular moment.

2.1.  Terms of Office Fear that the republic’s magistracies would be monopolized by particular families, factions, or parties led the Florentines to fix most terms of office at an ineffective two months. While Machiavelli generally adheres to the republican principle that terms of office ought to be relatively short, preferably a year, Florence’s two- or three-month terms are, he intimates, entirely too brief. The deficiency of the Signoria’s short terms of office is made plain by Machiavelli’s example of Giano della Bella (FH II.12–13). Giano increased the number of armed citizens under the command of the Signoria’s chief magistrate, the Gonfalonier of Justice; and he authored the ensemble of laws, the ‘Ordinances of Justice’, which made it easier to convict nobles accused of violently harming common citizens. But, as Machiavelli reports, Giano’s two-month term as Gonfalonier had already ended, when a prominent nobleman, Corso Donati, was, apparently, wrongly exonerated for murdering a guildsman in a street fight. The enraged people immediately appear at Giano’s house, bearing arms and begging him to insure that the laws, which he authored for the protection of the people, be properly enforced. But Giano finds himself in a bind: he wants his laws to have force and longevity, and he knows that Corso probably is guilty; but, he no longer enjoys formal authority as chief magistrate to personally oversee a retrial of Corso, and he doesn’t want to delegitimate either himself or his new laws by acting in an extra-legal fashion. So, Giano basically tells the people that there is nothing he can do. The people’s fury redoubled, they riot, burning down a public palace—an act for which Giano’s enemies blame him. Giano is forced to leave the city as an exile, and Corso Donati terrorizes Florence for the next half decade through numerous plots, coups, and wanton acts of violence. Machiavelli’s account of Giano in the Histories draws an implicit contrast with his reflections on Lucius Brutus from the Discourses (D I.16, III.1, III.3, III.5–6, III.30). As consul of Rome, Brutus established the basic institutions of the fledgling Roman Republic after the expulsion of the Tarquin kings. Machiavelli demonstrates in both the Discourses and The Prince that constitutional reforms enacted to enhance popular liberty will always be challenged by the aristocratic oppressors, whose abusive behaviour such orders are precisely designed to check (P 6, P 9; D I.16). Perhaps worse than Corso Donati, who flouted the Florentine ‘Ordinances of Justice’, Brutus’ sons conspired with other young nobles to overturn the Roman Republic and restore the monarchy, so that they

72  John P. M c Cormick could resume their oppression of the people unimpeded. However, Rome’s long, one-year, terms of office permitted Brutus, while he was still consul, to indict, try, and execute his sons and their fellow conspirators for treason—fully within legal boundaries. Machiavelli identifies the trial and execution of the ‘sons of Brutus’ as the true founding of the Roman Republic, because it put the nobles on notice that their oppressive behaviour would be swiftly and decisively punished. Put simply, Rome’s longer terms of office permit Brutus to avoid Giano’s seemingly unresolvable dilemma: given his short tenure, there was simply no way for Giano to keep from undermining the Ordinances of Justice. His new laws would be compromised in one way, if Giano chose to enforce them extra-legally, or in another way, if figurative ‘Sons of Brutus’ like Corso were allowed to effectively render them worthless—which is, in fact, what happened.

2.2.  The Size of Executive Committees The small number of officials in Florence’s public councils made each sitting magistrate an easy target for bribery or intimidation by powerful individuals or families invested in partisan policy outcomes, especially political trials. Retribution for, let alone deterrence of, political offenses was unavailable to the Florentine people under the Signoria, because, Machiavelli writes, ‘every noble managed to defend himself through family and friends against the authority of the Signoria, such that neither laws nor magistrates provided redress’ (FH II.12). Because the nobles did not fear punishment by the magistrates, Machiavelli describes how they ‘injured someone from the people daily’ (FH II.12). Machiavelli reports that the Florentine nobles fully indulged their ‘natural insolence’ once they realized how easily any ‘friend’ of noblemen who happened to be sitting on the Signoria could block, at any moment, the magistracy from acting against one of their own. Moreover, Machiavelli describes how the nobles quickly learned that they could easily intimidate witnesses, who were necessary to substantiate charges against accusers, from testifying against powerful citizens. Thus, the nobles persisted in disorderly conduct among themselves and abusive behaviour against the people because the republic’s judges proved excessively slow and lenient in exercising judicial sentences. In short, abuse by and collusion among the nobles prevented the republic’s councils from, in Machiavelli’s words, upholding freedom and justice. These instances stand in sharp contrast to Machiavelli’s description of the workings of popularly judged political trials in ancient Rome, where the large number of judges (i.e., the entire citizenry), combined with the people’s natural inclination to defend liberty, insured appropriate political convictions that deterred future offences against the republic. Among his chief examples in the

Republicanism, Virtuous and Corrupt  73 Discourses are the public indictments and trials of Manlius Capitolinus, Marcus Menenius, Scipio Africanus, and Coriolanus, to which I will return in a moment.

2.3.  Foreign Judicial Officials Machiavelli shows throughout the Histories that, unlike in Rome, political crimes in Florence were often adjudicated, not only by small committees, but also by foreign rectors, such as the Podestà and the People’s Captain. The Florentines assumed, mistakenly, that, as outsiders, such rectors would render more objective judicial sentences than would Florentine citizens. In fact, Machiavelli shows how the tyranny of the French nobleman, Walter, the Duke of Athens, can be traced to oppressive use of such foreign judges. In Book II of the Histories, Machiavelli reports how a dominant clique of traditional nobles and wealthy guildsmen were abusing their authority in the republic. In particular, these elites strictly supervised the selection of the foreigners who served as the Capitano and the Podestà, to insure that they consistently rendered judgments favourable to themselves when criminal and civil proceedings were brought against them (FH II.32). So pleased was the ruling clique with the corrupt and abusive behaviour of these foreign judges that they established a new, extraordinary rectorship, the Captain of the Guard, which exerted full authority over the entire Florentine citizenry. Machiavelli reports that the new rector injured as many individuals as pleased the dominant faction; but when he offended the Bardi and Frescobaldi families, these ‘naturally arrogant’ nobles resolved to take vengeance upon the clique, through a widespread conspiracy (FH II.32). Once Walter was invited to Florence to command its military forces, the Bardi-Frescobaldi faction ‘decided that the time was ripe to quench the fire burning within themselves by ruining the city’ (FH II.33). They soon convince Walter to take up a tyranny that overturned the Florentine Republic. Machiavelli describes how Walter stripped the public magistrates of all authority and relied exclusively on the judgments of foreign rectors, particularly, judges from Perugia and Assisi (FH II.36). Through these rectors, he despoiled and oppressed the citizenry with excessive tax assessments and unjust criminal sentences. This is, of course, precisely the mode of ruling pursued by the previous ruling clique that prompted the Bardi-Frescobaldi faction to make Walter tyrant. In effect, nothing has changed, merely the targets and intensity of the prevailing injustice committed by the foreign rectors. Machiavelli notes how Walter tortured, exiled, or killed many citizens in the city, and how he even established six rectors ‘to despoil and abuse the peasants in the countryside’. In a rare moment of unity, the various parties of the city, in particular the average guildsmen, soon rise up to expel Walter and reorder the republic’s constitution.

74  John P. M c Cormick Demonstrating just how egregious the Florentine common citizens considered rule by foreign judges, Machiavelli describes how they treated the rector from Assisi, and his young son, during the overthrow of Walter: in the middle of the Piazza della Signoria, the people violently stabbed, tore to pieces, and even devoured the flesh of the father and son in a gory spectacle that persisted long after the two were dead. Notwithstanding such outrage, the Florentines unfortunately fail to learn their lesson: the constitutional commission that reordered the city after Walter’s expulsion seemingly refuse to recognize how dangerous use of foreign rectors has been to the republic—not least, that it was among the chief causes of Walter’s tyranny. Machiavelli reports—with a deafeningly silent commentary—how the commission appointed six citizens to serve as Podestà, until a new foreign rector could be summoned to the city (FH II.37). Machiavelli’s emphatic endorsement, throughout the Discourses, of institutions through which popular assemblies rather than foreign arbitrators (or small committees) render judgments in political trials, no doubt derives from such corrupt and oppressive use of foreign judges throughout Florence’s history (D I.7–8). As the primary illustration of the utility of popularly judged trials over judgments rendered by foreign rectors or small judicial bodies, in the Discourses, Machiavelli discusses the Roman case of Coriolanus, a noble infamous for his disdain of the plebs. Coriolanus proposed that the Roman Senate withhold food stores during a famine to suppress the plebeians and compel them to forsake the recently won, anti-patrician institution of the tribunate (D I.7). Before the people could assault him outside the Senate for proposing this scheme, the tribunes intervened, publicly accusing Coriolanus, and initiating formal proceedings that required him to stand judgment before the people. The public accusation and ensuing trial before the people helped defuse a potential civil war, as Coriolanus’ murder, Machiavelli suggests, would have set in motion a disastrous chain of events resulting in the kind of excessively bloody partisan conflict that regularly plagued Florence. Machiavelli argues that when ambitious and powerful citizens are ‘crushed ordinarily’ by ‘very many judges’ (D I.7), partisans of the few cannot intimidate or bribe the entire people; moreover, they are more likely to accept the latter’s judgment as objective rather than partisan—or, at least, they have no choice but to do so.

3.  Tepid Civic Leadership That Machiavelli deems Florence’s constitutional orders inferior to Rome’s is clear; especially, his intimations that Florence’s institutions perpetuate social conflict, and his demonstrations that Rome’s orders channel it in salutary ways. Nevertheless, constitutional imperfection is not necessarily the most glaring problem with the

Republicanism, Virtuous and Corrupt  75 various institutions auditioned by the Florentine republic over the course of its history; such innovations may have proved workable had only a Florentine individual of prudence and virtue stepped forward to ‘invigorate’ them in the manner that, as Machiavelli insists, all new laws and orders require (D I.17; III.1). In the Discourses, Machiavelli declares that, ‘even well-ordered laws are useless lest they be invigorated with extreme force by one individual who insures compliance, such that those who are corrupt become good’ (D I.17, emphases added). He reemphasizes this claim later in the work when he insists that laws neither institute themselves nor become effective autogeneratively: orders and laws that ‘oppose men’s ambition and insolence must be invigorated by a virtuous citizen who runs spiritedly to enforce them against the power of their transgressors’ (D III.1, emphases added). In this sense, astute political leadership—sorely lacking in Florence and manifestly abundant in ancient polities—is the variable that determines whether, for Machiavelli, constitutional reforms arising out of social conflicts prove capable of successfully managing future social conflicts. I contend that the Histories still very much delineates the ways through which Machiavelli thought that potential founders or reformers, as described in The Prince and the Discourses, should exploit the opportunities that social conflict always presents political actors (P 9; D I.4). In this spirit, I would like to return to the example of Giano della Bella, already mentioned, and also look closely at the example of Michele di Lando. I want to suggest that Machiavelli presents Giano and Michele in the Histories as political leaders who each confronted the opportunity to become a Florentine Moses, Romulus, or Brutus, figures discussed at length in The Prince and the Discourses. Despite the fortuitous opportunities presented to them, Giano and Michele each fails to act in the manner of Machiavelli’s previously discussed founders/reformers: they fail to spiritedly invigorate new laws with necessary and salutary violence; they neglect to manage the ‘envy’ of rival peers; they each pursue a ‘harmful middle way’ between elites and the people; and they fail to militarily organize or mobilize the entirety of Florence’s common people. According to Machiavelli, the virtuous ancients understood that new laws, especially those promulgated to insure the people’s liberty, must be secured in at least two ways: by shedding the blood of ‘the sons of Brutus’, aristocratic abusers of the people and intransigent opponents of founders/reformers; and by unifying the people in an extensive civic military, as did Moses and Romulus. On the contrary, in the Histories, Machiavelli suggests that naïve notions of goodness or patriotism prompt Giano and Michele, initially, to seek conciliation with or to completely defer to prevailing elites and, eventually, to exit the city. Giano and Michele demur from imitating Romulus, Moses, or Brutus and eschew recourse to the force necessary to effectively enact their own laws and ensure the enduring welfare of their patria.

76  John P. M c Cormick Recall that Giano, because of Florence’s excessively short terms of office, is no longer Gonfalonier when Corso Donati is acquitted for murdering a guildsman. Thus, if he wishes to satisfy the people and pursue the retrial and prospective execution of Corso, Giano must necessarily act somewhat extra-legally to do so. Giano concludes that he has no choice but to accept the fact of Corso’s acquittal even if this demoralizes the people and emboldens Corso and other nobles to engage in further mischief. However, in the Discourses, Machiavelli does not rule out quasi- or extra-legal measures in the defence of new laws and orders, when strictly legal ones are not available. Consider his thoughts on the legal and extra-legal options open to Piero Soderini, Machiavelli’s former boss and patron, as Soderini faced the necessity of eliminating the young, pro-Medici nobles who opposed the 1494 republic that Machiavelli served for almost a decade: Machiavelli concedes that it would have been convenient if Soderini could have dealt with insolent young nobles through ordinary modes, but since that was not really a possibility, Soderini should have therefore employed extraordinary ones to defend the people’s liberty and secure the republic (D III.1). With this in mind, Giano could have personally led the armed people to the Signoria and insisted that they rearrest and retry Corso. Moreover, under the Ordinances of Justice, as passed by Giano, all of the nobles who were in Corso’s company on the night of the murder were eligible to be indicted and punished on the same charge, without recourse to witnesses. Therefore, Giano could have taken this opportunity to indict and prosecute many of the offending parties among the nobility, not just Corso. Nevertheless, Giano remains passive and winds up facing charges trumped up by his enemies that he was responsible for the anti-Corso riots. Upon hearing news of Giano’s indictment, Machiavelli reports that the people again arm themselves and rush to his house to offer Giano defence, not only against the Signoria, but also, Machiavelli emphasizes, against all of the city’s elites. The Florentine people spontaneously pledge support to Giano against his rich and powerful accusers, but Giano demurs. Machiavelli writes, ‘Giano wished neither to test his popular favor nor entrust his life to the magistrates, fearing the former’s instability and the latter’s malice’ (FH II.13). Like several flawed popular champions whom Machiavelli criticizes in The Prince and the Discourses—Virginius, Savonarola, and Soderini—Giano reveals himself not to fully trust the people, whose cause he supposedly promotes (D I.44, I.45, III.3, III.30). All popular champions who signal distrust of the people’s judgment and fidelity, Machiavelli notes, wind up catastrophic political failures. In his final estimation of Giano, Machiavelli does not merely intimate that the former Gonfalonier was a hypocrite and a coward. He also invokes Giano’s seemingly sincere desire to keep his supporters from ‘harming their patria’ (FH II.13). Such fears, of course, never inhibited the likes of Moses, Romulus, and Brutus.

Republicanism, Virtuous and Corrupt  77 The more reticent Giano thinks that leaving the republic improperly or incompletely ordered is more ‘patriotic’ than would be risking greater disorder in the effort to decisively set its affairs aright. So Giano ‘departs’ the city, voluntarily opting for exile. Machiavelli seems to praise Giano, deeming his efforts effective and his motivations good; he writes that Giano ‘left the city that he freed from subjection to the powerful through careful and dangerous actions’ (FH II.13, emphases added). However, entirely different conclusions are in order in light of: on the one hand, Machiavelli’s previously conveyed advice to would-be princes and, on the other, his description, in the Histories, of subsequent rampant oppression perpetrated upon the Florentine people by the nobles, including Corso Donati. Giano, in fact, did not prudently or effectively ‘free’ Florence from aristocratic oppression, nor were his actions sufficiently dangerous or audacious. Giano’s actions, in fact, left Florence worse off than before.

4.  Favouring the Nobles Rather Than the People Turning now to Michele di Lando. Few if any individuals are praised more fulsomely within the pages of the Histories than Michele. The barefoot, rag-clad Michele leads the plebeian mob that overthrows the Signoria during the Ciompi Revolt; he becomes the first Gonfalonier of Justice in the fledgling popular republic; and he then militarily suppresses the woolworkers barely a month after they had acclaimed him as their champion. Most interpreters take Machiavelli’s lavish praise of Michele largely at face value. However, Machiavelli’s assessment looks quite different once one evaluates Machiavelli’s judgment of Michele’s virtue, spirit, prudence, modest ambition, and, especially, goodness (FH III.17) in light of his analyses of new princes in The Prince and the Discourses. Michele’s initial behaviour, to a significant extent, conforms to the advice that Machiavelli offers founders and reformers in previous works: he allows the people to vent their ill humour by killing a scapegoated agent of the previous regime; he relies on no one but himself in dismissing old and appointing new magistrates; and he gives the newly established plebeian guilds more seats in the Signoria than the ciompi had requested. Ultimately, however, Michele does not go nearly far enough in acting as Machiavelli advises new princes to act—in fact, Machiavelli demonstrates, without editorializing on the fact, that Michele blatantly violates central tenets of Machiavelli’s most fundamental political lessons. Indeed, Michele takes several steps that immediately compromise his standing with the ciompi and eventually undermine his own authority vis-à-vis the city’s elite citizens, whom Machiavelli calls the ‘popular nobles’: Machiavelli reports that to avoid their envy, Michele granted to the popular nobles many gifts, including the exceedingly valuable proceeds from the shops along the Ponte Vecchio;

78  John P. M c Cormick and, moreover, that Michele assigned to himself the rectorship of a subject city, Empoli (FH III.15). In the Discourses, Machiavelli criticizes Michele’s heir in the office of Gonfalonier, Piero Soderini, for failing to appreciate a singularly brutal fact: ‘To overcome such envy the only remedy is the death of those consumed by it’ (D III.30). In short, Machiavelli declares unequivocally that the only gift that ultimately satisfies envious and oppressive nobles is ‘death’. Therefore, the gift of real estate, no matter how lucrative, will invariably prove insufficient to appease the envy of the popular nobles. Michele, by implication, is a fool to think otherwise. Furthermore, Machiavelli’s narrative begs us to ask: why does Michele assign himself such prominent and profitable authority over a foreign city like Empoli? What message does this send to his supporters among the plebs? They might reasonably ponder: Does Michele plan to continue selling out the ciompi to the wealthiest guildsmen and then move on to enjoy a luxurious retirement in Empoli? Or, more alarmingly, does he intend for this foreign city to serve as a source of military power with which Michele will tyrannize the plebs? Machiavelli previously noted how the tyrannical Duke of Athens used foreign French forces, in combination with the armed plebs, to oppress Florence’s Guild community (FH II.36). Does Michele here intend to use the richest popolani among the guilds, combined with foreign forces from Empoli, to suppress the plebs? Unsurprisingly, then, Machiavelli records that the plebs immediately start to worry that Michele’s ‘excessive partisanship’ for the upper guildsmen has jeopardized their own status within the new republic; that they do not in fact possess a role in government sufficient ‘to preserve and protect themselves’ (FH III.17). The plebs then take up arms insisting that Michele incorporate into the new Florentine constitution a tribune-like institution drawn from their guilds; a magistracy through which the ciompi could veto policies that they viewed as pernicious to the interests of the majority of the republic’s poor citizens. Rather than accept this magistracy, reminiscent of the plebeian tribunate that Machiavelli claims made the Roman republic ‘more perfect’, Michele, offended by the plebs’ presumptuousness, physically assaults their representatives, and enlists the traditional guilds and some portion of the plebs to militarily crush and disperse the majority of the ciompi. This course of action defies the main lessons of The Prince, which insists that a new prince, in order to guarantee longevity and success, must: firstly, found on the people, whose motivations for security can be satisfied, rather than on the nobles whose envy and desire for oppression cannot (P 6, 9); and, secondly, arm as many citizen-subjects as he can, rather than, like Roman emperors, French monarchs, and later Medici princes, disarm the populace (P 13, 19–20). Having had Michele do their dirty work by militarily suppressing the plebs, the popular nobles then take the opportunity of civically disenfranchising them by expelling ciompi from the magistracies and dissolving their new guilds.

Republicanism, Virtuous and Corrupt  79 Moreover, Machiavelli subtly describes how the popular nobles edge Michele out of political authority: he names the men who stood as ‘princes of the city’ within this new form of government, a list from which Michele di Lando’s name is noticeably omitted. When Machiavelli narrates Michele’s eventual exile, he laments the fact that Michele was treated with regrettable ‘ingratitude’ despite ‘all the goods that his authority had provided to his patria’ (FH III.22). But, as in the case of Giano della Bella, the empirical facts and historical details provided by Machiavelli, crossreferenced with the lessons of The Prince and the Discourses, suggest that Michele provided no goods at all. Indeed, he may be accused of having helped make conditions in the republic demonstrably worse. Under the Albizzi oligarchy and the subsequent Medici principate, Machiavelli indicates, Florence’s civic culture would succumb to unprecedented corruption; and its reliance on mercenary arms, rather than a wide-scale popular army, would leave it hopelessly vulnerable to a veritable procession of foreign invaders.

5. Conclusion In conclusion, my chapter has challenged the widely held thesis that the Florentine Histories exhibits a significant change in Machiavelli’s expectations regarding the political capacities of individual actors, and the kind of neo-Roman constitutional reordering they could have effected in Florence. I have shown that, despite some qualifications on Machiavelli’s part, the Histories still delineates the ways through which potential founders or reformers can and should take full advantage of the opportunities that social conflict always presents political actors to fundamentally reorder cities like Florence along ancient, especially Roman lines—especially in ways that establish and maintain virtuously democratic as opposed to inherently corrupt aristocratic republics (P 9; D I.4). Put simply, I have argued that just because Machiavelli never shows any individual Florentine to have successfully assumed the role of constitutional founder or reformer in the Histories, this does not necessarily mean that he thinks that such figures could not and should not have tried to reorder the city along ancient, especially Roman, lines that empower a republic’s common people as opposed to the nobles. I contend that Machiavelli indicates that, in particular, Giano della Bella and Michele di Lando, could and should have attempted to behave in the manner of the exemplary ancient founders and reformers whom he praises in The Prince and the Discourses, especially Moses, Romulus, and Brutus—leaders who successfully defended themselves against aristocratic envy and who empowered the people against aristocratic oppression. In the dedicatory letters of both The Prince and the Discourses, Machiavelli declares that each work contained ‘everything’ that he knew. Machiavelli neither

80  John P. M c Cormick explicitly repudiates these claims anywhere in subsequent writings, nor does he assert that later works such as the Histories deserve to occupy a similarly comprehensive epistemological status within his oeuvre. Therefore, I have proceeded in the foregoing under the assumption that the two earlier works continue to serve as authoritative guides for attempts to understand the arguments of all of Machiavelli’s political writings, including the Histories. By keeping the lessons of The Prince and the Discourses firmly within the interpretive frame of the Histories, as opposed to dismissing them as irrelevant to the concerns of the book, I have shown that the Histories demonstrates how modern political actors such as Giano and Michele could and should have behaved in ways consistent with his examples of ancient virtue; that is, in ways that make the vigorous constitutional reordering of modern polities like Florence a genuine possibility.

4

Citizens’ Assemblies and Republican Democracy Stuart White

A citizens’ assembly (CA) is a body of people (a) chosen by a random or near random process,1 (b) so as to be descriptively representative of the population (along chosen dimensions), and (c) set up to deliberate and make a recommendation or recommendations on a public policy issue or issues. CAs have recently been used to design electoral reform proposals in the Canadian states of British Columbia and Ontario, in the Netherlands, and to deliberate constitutional amendments and other issues in Ireland.2 The CA is an important reference point in the ongoing debate in the United Kingdom (UK) on whether and how to hold a constitutional convention.3 It has also emerged in debates over how the political system should rise to the challenges of ‘Brexit’.4 Discussion of a possible ‘Article V 1  For helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter I am grateful to audiences at the Universities of Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Manchester, Oxford, and Reading, and in particular for comments from Christopher Zurn, Eva Groen-Reijman, and Bruno Leipold. 2  See Amy Lang, ‘But Is It for Real? The British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly as a Model of StateSponsored Citizen Empowerment’, Politics and Society 35, no. 1 (2007), pp. 35–69; Mark E. Warren and Hilary Pearse, eds., Designing Deliberative Democracy: The British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Graham Smith, Democratic Innovations: Designing Institutions for Citizen Participation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 72–110; Lawrence LeDuc, ‘Electoral Reform and Direct Democracy in Canada: When Citizens Become Involved’, West European Politics 34, no. 3 (2011), pp. 551–67; David  M.  Farrell, ‘The 2013 Irish Constitutional Convention: A Bold Step or a Damp Squib?’, in 75 Years of the Constitution of Ireland: An Irish-Italian Dialogue, eds. Giuseppe Ferrari and John O’Dowd (Dublin: Clarus, 2014), pp. 292–305; Claudia Chawlisz, The Populist Signal: Why Politics and Democracy Need to Change (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015); Silvia Suteu, ‘Constitutional Conventions in the Digital Era: Lessons from Iceland and Ireland’, Boston College International and Comparative Law Review, 38, no. 2 (2015), pp. 251–76. 3  In addition to Chawlisz, Populist Signal, see also Alan Renwick, After the Referendum: Options for a Constitutional Convention (London: Constitution Society, 2014), http://www.consoc.org.uk/wpcontent/uploads/2014/05/J1847_Constitution_Society_Report_Cover_WEB.pdf, and Stuart White, ‘Parliaments, Constitutional Conventions, and Popular Sovereignty’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations 19, no. 2 (2017), pp. 320–55. 4 See Lisa Nandy, ‘Let the People Take Back Control of Brexit’, New York Review of Books, 17  December 2018, https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/12/17/let-the-people-take-back-control-ofbrexit/; Neal Lawson, ‘Brexit Citizens Assembly: Rising to the UK’s Crisis in Democracy’, openDemocracy, 9 December 2018, https://www.opendemocracy.net/uk/neal-lawson/brexit-citizens-assembly-risingto-crisis-in-democracy. A non-governmental CA on Brexit was run by the University College London

Stuart White, Citizens’ Assemblies and Republican Democracy In: Radical Republicanism: Recovering the Tradition’s Popular Heritage. Edited by: Bruno Leipold, Karma Nabulsi, and Stuart White, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198796725.003.0005

82  Stuart White convention’ to discuss political reforms in the United States (US) also features this  idea.5 CAs have become the focus of academic study, as has the related concept of ‘sortition’.6 Within this discussion, CAs have drawn attention from political theorists interested in republicanism. John Grant, notably, has argued that CAs are a means of institutionalizing a specifically republican political philosophy. Philip Pettit has argued that ‘indicative’ assemblies of the CA type have ‘surely a useful role’ while also arguing that they should not be a ‘permanent assembly to govern a society’.7 This chapter aims to develop further a specifically republican theory of CAs by looking more closely at the question raised by Pettit’s analysis, that of how CAs should fit into a wider political system. Should CAs replace elected legislatures? Should they complement elected legislatures? If so, on what terms? This chapter aims to give a partial answer to the question of the proper place of CAs by asking how some of the alternative models respectively serve a republican conception of democracy. This is a conception that values deliberation to the common good;

Constitution Unit in 2017; see Alan Renwick, Sarah Allan, Will Jennings, Rebecca McKee, Meg Russell, and Graham Smith, A Considered Public Voice on Brexit: The Report of the Citizens’ Assembly on Brexit (London: Constitution Unit, 2017), http://citizensassembly.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/ 12/Citizens-Assembly-on-Brexit-Report.pdf. 5  See Sanford Levinson, Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (And How We the People Can Correct It) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) and Lawrence Lessig, Republic, Lost: Version 2.0: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It (New York: Twelve, 2015). Other recent processes involving CA-type institutions include the Australian Citizens’ Parliament process in 2008; the Icelandic constitutional review process that ran from 2010 to 2012 (though the Constitutional Council which produced the draft of a new constitution was elected); the G1000 process organized independently of the government in Belgium in 2011; and the Estonian Citizens’ Assembly Process in 2013–14. See, respectively, Janette Hartz-Karp and Lyn Carson, ‘Putting the People into Politics: The Australian Citizens’ Parliament’, International Journal of Public Participation 3, no. 1 (2009), pp. 9–31; Hélène Landemore, ‘Inclusive Constitution-Making: The Icelandic Experiment’, Journal of Political Philosophy 23, no. 2 (2015), pp. 166–91; Chwalisz, Populist Signal, pp. 65–70; Magnus E. Jonsson, ‘Democratic Innovations in Deliberative Systems: The Case of the Estonian Citizens’ Assembly Process’, Journal of Public Deliberation 11, no. 1 (2015), http://www. publicdeliberation.net/jpd/vol11/iss1/art7. 6  See  C.  L.  R.  James, ‘Every Cook Can Govern: A Study of Democracy in Ancient Greece: Its Meaning for Today’, Correspondence 2 (1956), https://www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/works/ 1956/06/every-cook.htm; Robert  E.  Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989); Barbara Goodwin, Justice by Lottery, 2nd ed. (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2005); Lang, ‘But Is It for Real?’; Oliver Dowlen, The Political Potential of Sortition: A Study of the Random Selection of Citizens for Public Office (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2008); Warren and Pearse, Designing Deliberative Democracy; Smith, Democratic Innovations, pp. 72–110; John Grant, ‘Canada’s Republican Invention? On the Political Theory and Practice of Citizens’ Assemblies’, Political Studies, 62, no. 3 (2014), pp. 539–55; Alexander  A.  Guerrero, ‘Against Elections: The Lottocratic Alternative’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 42, no. 2 (2014), pp. 135–78; Chawlisz, Populist Signal; John Gastil and Erik Olin Wright, Legislature by Lot: Transformative Designs for Deliberative Governance (London: Verso, 2019). The final contribution listed was published after this chapter was substantially complete and so I have not had the opportunity here to give it the consideration it is due. 7  See Grant, ‘Canada’s Republican Invention?’, and Philip Pettit, On the People’s Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 195–205.

Citizens ’ Assemblies and Republican Democracy  83 political equality and opposition to oligarchy; and active popular sovereignty at the constitutional level.8 Section 1 clarifies the notion of a CA; the republican conception of democracy that guides our analysis; and outlines three different models of how CAs can fit into a political system. Section 2 discusses and rejects the replacement model under which CAs replace elected parliaments and become the sole law-making authority. Section 3 considers the consultative model. In this model, CAs are convened at the discretion of parliaments to give advice on specific issues, with their re­com­menda­ tions returning to parliament for further consideration. I reject this as an exclusive model of how to integrate CAs into a republican democracy. Following a suggestion that has previously been put forward independently by Christopher Zurn and John Ferejohn, Section 4 then elaborates a petition-assembly-referendum (PAR) scheme as a way of integrating CAs into a republican democracy.9 In this model, citizens have the power to initiate CAs independently of parliaments through popular petitions; and CAs have the power to send their recommendations to a popular ballot independently of parliament. I present three arguments for the PAR scheme based on values internal to the republican conception of democracy: deliberativeness; anti-oligarchy; and creating institutions that promote an active popular sovereign. Section 5 concludes.

1.  Opening Definitions and Assumptions A CA is an assembly of members of the general public selected in a random or near random process so as to generate an assembly that is descriptively representative of the citizen body according to stipulated criteria such as gender, race, and income. It may be established to consider a specific issue or proposal or have a wider remit. On the model recently developed in the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Ontario, the assembly meets a number of times (e.g., every weekend for six months). It has a structured deliberative process that includes an initial learning phase, which involves expert testimony; a public hearing phase, in which 8  The normative framework sketched in this chapter has much in common with Grant’s. However, I focus less on the general affinity between CAs and republican values and more on the implications of these values for the particular place they ought to have in the polity. The context I assume for the discussion is that of the nation state. But CA proposals are not necessarily limited to this context. Smith, Democratic Innovations, p. 73, notes that there are proposals for CAs to oversee global institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. He cites Bruno  S.  Frey and Alois Stutzer, ‘Strengthening the Citizens’ Role in International Organizations’, Review of International Organizations 1, no. 1 (2006), pp. 27–43. 9  See Christopher Zurn, Deliberative Democracy and the Institutions of Judicial Review (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); John Ferejohn, ‘Conclusion: The Citizens’ Assembly Model’, in Designing Deliberative Democracy, eds. Warren and Pearse, pp. 192–213; Stuart White, ‘Rousseau and the Meaning of Popular Sovereignty’, in Ideas That Matter: Democracy, Justice, Rights, eds. Debra Satz and Annabelle Lever (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

84  Stuart White options are laid out and further public testimony is given; and a deliberation phase, in which options are debated and a decision is made about what to recommend.10 Discussions at all stages are professionally facilitated to promote inclusion and engagement. The assembly’s recommendation(s) may then go back to another body, e.g., the elected legislature; or to a referendum; or, in principle, might directly become law/policy. Prime examples include the CAs in British Columbia and Ontario (2004, 2006/2007) that deliberated proposals for electoral reform that then went to referendums.11 The recent Constitutional Convention in Ireland (2013/14) had a strong CA element, and there has been a more recent CA (2016/18).12 Variations around the basic format are possible. In the case of the 2013/14 Irish Convention, two thirds of the membership was chosen in a quasi-random way from the general public, while one third was made up of members of parliament (with some representation from the Northern Irish Assembly as well as the Republic’s parliament), though the more recent CA has had a membership drawn entirely from the general public. A CA can also be structured so that certain groups, particularly those that suffer disadvantage in the wider society, are statistically overrepresented, raising their voice. Another possibility is to exclude specific elite groups, e.g., to confine the assembly to those outside the economic elite.13 Another important point is that I speak here of a citizens’ assembly, but it is possible, and may be desirable, to include non-citizen residents and non-resident non-citizens.14 In the subsequent discussion I’ll assume an assembly that follows the basic template: something like 40–200 citizen members of the general public selected on a quasi-random basis to be representative (in terms of a list of specified characteristics) of the citizen population. In evaluating the possible role of CAs in the political system I shall here draw on a specifically republican conception of democracy. The starting point for this conception is Rousseau’s theory of the state as set out in The Social Contract.15 10  Lang, ‘But Is It for Real?’; Mark E. Warren and Hilary Pearse, ‘Introduction: Democratic Renewal and Deliberative Democracy’, in Designing Deliberative Democracy, eds. Warren and Pearse, pp. 11–12; Grant, ‘Canada’s Republican Invention?’, p. 540. 11  Lang, ‘But Is It for Real?’; Warren and Pearse, ‘Introduction’; LeDuc, ‘Electoral Reform and Direct Democracy in Canada’. 12  On the 2013/14 Convention, see Farrell, ‘The 2013 Irish Constitutional Convention’; Renwick, After the Referendum; Chawlisz, Populist Signal, pp. 89–91; Suteu, ‘Constitutional Conventions in the Digital Era’. For information on the 2016/18 Citizens’ Assembly, see https://www.citizensassembly.ie/ en/About-the-Citizens-Assembly/. 13 John P. McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 14  David Owen, ‘Who Are “the People” in a People’s Constitutional Convention?’, openDemocracy, 30 September 2014, https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/david-owen/who-are-%E2%80% 98-people%E2%80%99-in-people%E2%80%99s-constitutional-convention. 15 See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. Christopher Betts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). I discuss the connection between CAs, and the PAR scheme in particular, and a theory of popular sovereignty drawn from Rousseau’s work, more fully in a companion article to this, White, ‘Rousseau and the Meaning of Popular Sovereignty’.

Citizens ’ Assemblies and Republican Democracy  85 The state is legitimate, Rousseau argues, when the laws—the basic rules of social and political cooperation—are the expression of a ‘general will’. This notion, in turn, has both procedural and substantive elements. Procedurally, it implies that laws are made by the citizen body, i.e., that the laws in general emanate from the ­people. Substantively, it requires that the laws advance a judgment about what best serves the common good, a good that all citizens can reasonably affirm in light of their own basic interests in life, liberty, dignity, and economic op­por­tun­ ity; the laws, in other words, must be general in the interests they serve (and be understandable as such). A republican democracy is a democracy structured to realize legitimacy in this sense. Drawing on this conception of democracy, we can identify at least three values or commitments that will be important to the republican democrat. Deliberation. A defining feature of republican democracy, as just outlined, is  that law making reflects collective judgments of what best serves the common good. We can and should connect this orientation to the common good to  a requirement that democratic decision making be suitably deliberative. Deliberation requires open, public discussion of alternatives, where this discussion requires reason giving.16 Such reason giving must be informed by conceptions of the common good which recognize citizens’ free and equal standing.17 Law making should reflect a process in which such reasons have been given, and in which citizens have developed towards their judgments on the basis of such a discussion. Political equality and anti-oligarchy. Second, a republican democracy must be appropriately egalitarian. The requirements of political equality include: equal rights to participate and stand for office; equal weighting of votes; and a commitment to the ‘fair value’ of these political liberties, or to what Joshua Cohen calls ‘equality of opportunity for political influence’.18 A key aspect of equal op­por­tun­ ity for political influence is that citizens do not have the fair value of their political rights undermined by the power of wealth to claim political influence.19 We may refer to this as the anti-oligarchy requirement. Active popular sovereignty. Third, a republican democracy is characterized by an empowered and active popular sovereign. Popular sovereignty refers to the 16  This notion need not be understood to imply that deliberation consists only of setting out formal arguments. There is an important role for many kinds of expression, including narratives, testimony, music, and art. For a helpful critique of overly narrow conceptions of deliberation, see Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 17  See Joshua Cohen, ‘Reflections on Deliberative Democracy’, pp. 329–34, and ‘Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy’, pp. 16–37, in Philosophy, Politics, Democracy: Selected Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 18 Joshua Cohen, ‘Money, Politics, Political Equality’, in Joshua Cohen, Philosophy, Politics, Democracy: Selected Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), pp. 270–9. 19  See John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York, Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 356–63.

86  Stuart White idea that the people have proper authority over laws, particularly at the most ­fundamental, constitutional level (arguably Rousseau’s focus of concern). One feature of a republican conception of democracy, moreover, is that this popular sovereign be an active presence in the polity. It ought not to convene at one ­historical moment, as it were, and then dissolve. In Rousseau’s imagined polity, the people reassemble regularly to consider their basic laws. This captures an important ideal of a popular sovereign that remains engaged over time with its responsibilities and with making its collective freedom to make and remake the basic structure of society a lived, present reality. Given these three values of republican democracy, CAs offer at least two ­general benefits. First, relative to conventional electoral representation, statistical representation within a CA directly affirms the principle of political equality by ensuring groups whose members are typically disadvantaged in electoral representation (at least) proportionate representation in the relevant institution.20 Second, statistical representation can also promote better deliberation by bringing greater cognitive diversity to the table in policy discussions.21 Both of these are important considerations favouring the incorporation of CAs in some form, at some place, in a republican democracy. There is, however, a range of different models of how CAs might fit into a democracy. I will consider three models here.22 20  See Alexander Zakaras, ‘Lot and Democratic Representation: A Modest Proposal’, Constellations 17, no. 3 (2010), pp. 460–2; Grant, ‘Canada’s Republican Invention?’, p. 542; Guerrero, ‘Against Elections’, pp. 168–70. For a very helpful discussion of representation and political equality, in the context of arguments for youth quotas in elected assemblies, see Juliana Uhuru Bidadanure, ‘Treating Young People as Equals: Intergenerational Justice in Theory and Practice’ (PhD thesis, University of York, 2014), pp. 171–201. 21  See Hélène Landemore, Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), pp. 97–104; Guerrero, ‘Against Elections’, p. 167; Chwalisz, Populist Signal, p. 94. 22  One notable model I set aside here, for reasons of space, is the additional chamber model. Thus, one can imagine an elected ‘first chamber’ of the legislature being complemented by a ‘second chamber’ that is either wholly or partly on the model of a CA. Anthony Barnett and Peter Carty make a proposal of this kind for reform of the House of Lords in the UK; Alexander Zakaras makes an argument for a ‘Citizens’ Senate’ along these lines in the US. John Gastil and Erik Olin Wright also make a case for a bicameral legislature which includes a standing sortation-based body. See Anthony Barnett and Peter Carty, The Athenian Option: Radical Reform for the House of Lords (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2008); Zakaras, ‘Lot and Democratic Representation’; Gastil and Wright, Legislature by Lot. McCormick’s proposal for adding a new Tribunate to the US federal government also has something in common with this model (see McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy). It is distinguished in part by the exclusion from eligibility for Tribunate office of anyone in the top 10 per cent of the wealth distribution. As a sort of half-way house between the additional chamber model and the consultative model discussed in this chapter, one can imagine a CA that does not have any legislative power (it cannot initiate or veto or revise laws), but stands in permanent session as an ongoing barometer of deliberated public opinion. See Kevin O’Leary, ‘The Citizen Assembly: An Alternative to the Initiative’, University of Colorado Law Review 78 no. 4 (2007), pp. 1489–535; and W. E. Bulmer, ‘Draft Constitution for the Commonwealth of England’, Dissenting Radical (2015), https://dissentingradical.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/constitution-of-the-commonwealth-of-england4_web1.pdf. I also set aside here the interesting idea that CA-like institutions be used within political parties, which has been put to me by Udit Bhatia and Dimitris Efthimiou.

Citizens ’ Assemblies and Republican Democracy  87 The replacement model. CAs are the legislative body in the society, replacing elected legislatures.23 A proposal close to this is Alexander Guerrero’s model of a system in which law/policy making in discrete policy areas (e.g., agriculture, defence) is turned over to ‘lottocratic’ bodies of citizens, chosen at random, to serve as legislators for three-year terms. The consultative model. Another possibility is that CAs are called into existence by elected legislatures (hereafter, ‘parliaments’), at their discretion, to offer advice on specific questions, determined by parliament, with the CA’s recommendations feeding into parliamentary debate. Claus Offe has recently argued for CAs on this model.24 The Dutch Electoral System Civic Forum (2006) fits this model.25 So too, to a considerable extent, did Ireland’s 2013–14 Constitutional Convention. The CAs in British Columbia and Ontario on electoral reform fit this model in terms of being temporary and convened at the parliament’s discretion, but differed in an important way: they could send their recommendations directly to a binding popular referendum. The PAR model. Another possibility is the PAR scheme set out and advocated by Christopher Zurn and John Ferejohn.26 Under PAR, citizens have the power to create a petition on a subject. If this petition achieves an appropriate threshold in terms of number (and, perhaps, distribution) of signatures, then this requires the establishment of a CA to deliberate the issue. The CA discusses the issue and can make a recommendation that, if it chooses, goes to a binding referendum.27 In Section 2 I will consider and reject the case for the replacement model. Section 3 will examine critically the consultative model. Section 4 will then defend the PAR scheme as a way to enhance the republican quality of democracy. 23 In addition to Guerrero, ‘Against Elections’, see John Burnheim, Is Democracy Possible? (Cambridge: Polity, 1985), and Terrill  G.  Bouricius, ‘Democracy through Multi-Body Sortition: Athenian Lessons for the Modern Day’, Journal of Public Deliberation 9, no. 1 (2013), https://www. publicdeliberation.net/jpd/vol9/iss1/art1. I am grateful to Graham Smith, Deliberative Democracy and the Environment (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 121, for pointing me to these discussions. 24 Claus Offe, ‘Referendum vs. Institutionalized Deliberation: What Democratic Theorists Can Learn from the 2016 Brexit Decision’, Daedalus 17, nos. 14–27 (2017), https://www.amacad.org/ multimedia/pdfs/publications/daedalus/summer2017/17_Summer_Daedalus_Offe.pdf. 25 Smith, Democratic Innovations, p. 75. 26 Zurn, Deliberative Democracy and the Institutions of Judicial Review; Ferejohn, ‘The Citizens’ Assembly Model’. For relevant discussion, see also Simone Chambers, ‘Constitutional Referendums and Democratic Deliberation’, in Referendum Democracy: Citizens, Elites and Deliberation in Referendum Campaigns, eds. Matthew Mendelsohn and Andrew Parkin (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 231–55; John Gastil and Robert Richards, ‘Making Direct Democracy Deliberative through Random Assemblies’, Politics and Society 41, no. 2 (2013), pp. 253–81; Graham Smith, ‘Citizens Should Have the Power to Call Constitutional Conventions’, openDemocracy, 9 January 2015, https://www.opendemocracy. net/ourkingdom/graham-smith/citizens-should-have-power-to-call-constitutional-conventions; White, ‘Rousseau and the Meaning of Popular Sovereignty’. 27  A related proposal by Ethan J. Leib is that citizens have the power to initiate CAs on issues, but that the CAs have direct legislative power, subject to a system of checks and balances between different government branches, rather than putting recommendations to a referendum. See Ethan  J.  Leib, Deliberative Democracy in America: A Proposal for a Popular Branch of Government (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010).

88  Stuart White

2.  The Replacement Model: Should We Replace Parliaments with CAs? Under the first model to be considered, elected representation is rejected in favour of selecting all representatives by lot. All power to make law will rest with ‘lottocratic’ assemblies. (Thus, not only are elections to parliaments rejected, but also referendums.) Alexander Guerrero has recently set out a very thoughtful defence of this kind of model, and it is on his version of the proposal, and his arguments for it and against electoral representation, that we will focus here.28 Guerrero’s argument starts with a critique of electoral representation. This focuses on the alleged weakness of the central accountability mechanism—the periodic, competitive election of representatives—and the alleged consequent vulnerability of the system to capture by elites. Guerrero’s critique is thus markedly republican, in our sense, in its focus on concerns around political equality and anti-oligarchy. The usual rationale for electoral representation is that (re-)election forces ­representatives to take serious account of the general public’s views, beliefs, and interests, which, in turn, promotes both ‘responsiveness’ (policy is responsive to what people want) and ‘good governance’ (policy promotes citizens’ actual interests). Guerrero argues that this rationale assumes ‘meaningful accountability’ on  the part of elected representatives to voters, which is possible only if voters monitor and evaluate elected representatives to an adequate extent. In practice, however, such monitoring and evaluation is ‘thwarted by ignorance’.29 Voters lack knowledge of what their elected representatives do and the knowledge and understanding to evaluate what they do. This renders the core accountability mechanism very weak. At the same time, however, elite groups do have the resources and capacity to monitor and evaluate elected representatives. Elite groups also have resources to give elected representatives incentives to pursue what the elite groups want (e.g., they can offer campaign funds or after-office employment). So what we  are likely to get under electoral representation, Guerrero argues, is lack of responsiveness and good governance in relation to the general public and a much greater degree of responsiveness and, so to speak, good governance from the standpoint of elites. Guerrero’s argument here echoes some recent empirical findings in US politics. Notable here, for example, is the study by Martin Gilens and Benjamin  I.  Page which finds that the policy views of the ‘average citizen’ exert no independent effect on policy making at the US federal level, while the views of the economic elite (and of organized interest groups, which are skewed towards business) do have such an impact.30 28  Guerrero, ‘Against Elections’.    29  Ibid., p. 140. 30  See Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, ‘Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens’, Perspectives on Politics 12, no. 3 (2014), pp. 564–81. For a critical reply to

Citizens ’ Assemblies and Republican Democracy  89 As an alternative, Guerrero proposes a ‘lottocratic’ system.31 Policy making is broken down into a number of discrete areas such as ‘agriculture’, ‘education’, and so on. For each ‘single issue’, a CA is convened, creating a network of ‘single-issue lottery-selected legislatures’ or ‘SILLs’. Guerrero suggests that each SILL have about 300 members, with each member serving for three years.32 Members are chosen by lot. Service is not compulsory, but there is generous financial compensation and a strong civic ethos to encourage participation.33 Each SILL develops an annual agenda for new laws, taking evidence from relevant experts, consulting with interest groups and the general public, and deliberating and drafting new pieces of legislation. In Guerrero’s view, there are many reasons to favour this system. Not least, he argues, it will be less vulnerable to elite capture. The use of expert opinion, combined with the specialization that comes from organizing assemblies around ­single issues, will produce good quality laws and policy. At the same time, the fact that the assemblies are descriptively representative of the population should ensure a degree of responsiveness to popular views (while also expressing the value of political equality in a very compelling way). There is much to agree with in Guerrero’s discussion, but his account both overstates the problems with electoral representation and, from a republican democratic perspective, understates the problems of lottocracy and, more specifically, of using lottery-based representation as a complete alternative to electoral representation. The key claim in Guerrero’s critique of electoral representation is that the voter does not have the capacity to monitor and evaluate effectively their elected representatives. There are two reasons to question the degree of Guerrero’s scepticism. First, the problem is surely bounded by voters’ concerns for certain basic interests and beliefs. Laws that frustrate the basic interests of many citizens will generally provoke an electoral response, and representatives will anticipate this and act to meet the public need. Amartya Sen’s work on the economic and political causes of  famines is highly pertinent here, showing how the electoral accountability mechanism helps explain why some polities suffer famines while others do not.34 this article, see Omar S. Bashir, ‘Testing Inferences about American Politics: A Review of the “Oligarchy” Result’, Research and Politics (2015), pp. 1–7, doi.org/10.1177/2053168015608896. Bashir uses the same data as Gilens and Page to look at who wins when the preferences of the economic elite (top 10 per cent in the income distribution) and the average voter (voter in the middle of the income distribution) differ. He finds that the elite win roughly 50 per cent of the time. While this suggests a less oligarchic picture than Gilens and Page’s study, it nevertheless indicates some degree of oligarchy: in a democracy, the average voter would presumably defeat the elite more often than 50 per cent of the time. 31  Guerrero’s model uses random selection but, in contrast to a CA, does not make a deliberate attempt at descriptive representativeness along specified dimensions. However, descriptive representativeness is addressed by combining random selection with relatively large assemblies, by having numerous assemblies, and by having norms to encourage wide participation in assemblies (thereby avoiding a lack of representativeness due to self-selection). 32  Guerrero, ‘Against Elections’, p. 156.    33 Ibid. 34  See Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 160–88.

90  Stuart White Guerrero notes Sen’s work, and offers a concessionary comment on this point.35 This is, however, surely an important concession. If electoral representative democracy works for a ‘significant subset of political problems’, such as famine prevention, then shouldn’t our overall assessment of it be reasonably positive?36 Second, Guerrero may be underestimating the degree to which voter ignorance is a function of specific institutions. Voter ignorance might be strongly affected, for example, by the associational environment in which individuals find themselves (which, in turn, is a function of public policy). If, say, the social-political convention is for the owner of a small business to join a chamber of commerce, or for the wage worker to join a trade union, then individuals may find themselves with associative support in monitoring and evaluating elected representatives. So long as the individuals find these associations generally trustworthy, they will be able to draw on associations’ assessments in making judgments about how elected representatives are doing. In their analysis of widening economic ­inequality and US politics, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson emphasize the way in which a persistent shift towards public policy favouring the rich is related to a  decline in broad-based, popular associationalism, including the decline in labour unions.37 They argue that one way this has contributed to the public policy shift is precisely by weakening the informational basis on which low- to middle-income citizens approach politics. Guerrero’s analysis arguably assumes the kind of social context for personal decision making described by Hacker and Pierson as the contemporary US reality: a somewhat isolated, atomized context. But, as Hacker and Pierson emphasize, and as associative democrats more generally would emphasize, there is nothing inevitable about this. In principle, other, more associational contexts are possible, and would perhaps alleviate the problem of voter ignorance that Guerrero pinpoints.38 Again, Guerrero goes some way to acknowledge this when he says that ‘there are some contexts in which these properties [e.g., voter ignorance] might not obtain’, in which ‘an electoral representative system might fare better’.39 On the other hand, Guerrero underestimates the problems with lottocracy. One objection is that the division of policy making into discrete policy areas each  with its own lottery-selected assembly will lead to contradictory policies. Guerrero argues that this can be handled in the detailed design of the system, but  this might underestimate the severity of the problem. A second objection 35  Guerrero, ‘Against Elections’, p. 149. 36  Clearly, the answer depends on how far there is another significant sub-set of problems that representative democracy is not good at solving (e.g., climate change?) and the relative importance of the two sets of problems. 37  See Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011), pp. 139–58. 38  For an account and defence of associational strategies for improving democracy, see Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers, Associations and Democracy (London: Verso, 1994). 39  Guerrero, ‘Against Elections’, pp. 153–4.

Citizens ’ Assemblies and Republican Democracy  91 concerns the demandingness of being on a SILL. Citizens are being asked to give up a very substantial amount of time and energy to become law makers for three years. As a commitment, this is of a quite different order to what was asked of citizens in the CAs on electoral reform in British Columbia and Ontario or in the recent Irish Constitutional Convention. A third objection concerns the state bureaucracy. Max Weber argued that parliamentary democracy is vulnerable to capture by civil servants: ‘The “pol­it­ ical master” finds himself in the position of the “dilettante” who stands opposite the “expert”, facing the trained official who stands within the management of administration.’ This might also be a particular problem in lottocracy given the initial inexperience of assembly members.40 The problem might be especially severe if we have a number of single-issue assemblies. In this situation, the role of achieving policy coherence might well be taken up, in practice, by a background civil service, giving them additional opportunity to become the effective policy drivers. Fourth, lottocracy fits poorly with the republican democrat’s commitment to an active popular sovereign. Imagine each of us serves on one SILL in the course of our lives. (Any more would surely be too disruptive of our personal lives.) This means that we participate in making laws in one policy area for a few years. But otherwise, the whole process of making law and policy is something that is done to us.41 (Of course, if some citizens never serve on a SILL, then, for them, all law making is something done to them.) Although lottocracy obviously allows for political participation in the form of campaigning and giving testimony to SILLs, there is a risk that this relative lack of opportunity to participate in authoritative decision making will discourage the citizen from taking active, ongoing responsibility for the laws.42 One might respond to this objection by pressing the distinction between ordinary law making and law making at the constitutional level and arguing for lottocracy to be confined to ordinary law making (within the bounds of the constitution). However, one would then need to supplement the account of lottocracy as a replacement for elected legislatures at the level of ordinary law making with an account of how constitutional law making is done. To meet the 40  See Max Weber, ‘Bureaucracy’, in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, eds. H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1948), pp. 196–244, specifically pp. 232–3. I owe this point to David Owen. 41  Pettit makes a related but further and important point when he claims that CA-type assemblies could end up having ‘the standing of a benevolent despot’ (Pettit, On the People’s Terms, p. 205). In Pettit’s view, their lack of electoral accountability could lead CAs/lottocratic assemblies to be relatively unresponsive to popular preferences and thereby create a situation in which law making becomes an  alien, dominating imposition. For Pettit’s critique of CAs/lottocratic assemblies, conceived as alternatives to elected assemblies, see Pettit, On the People’s Terms, pp. 195–205. 42  Zakaras, ‘Lot and Democratic Representation’, pp. 462–65, defends CAs against the objection that they do not serve political autonomy. However, he is concerned to defend the use of sortition as a complement to elected representation, not as a complete alternative to it, and it is this latter, radical position that I am rejecting here.

92  Stuart White objection, one would have to give some role to elections and/or referendums as mechanisms by which an active popular sovereign could find expression.

3.  The Consultative Model: CAs as Advisory Councils to Parliaments? On the consultative model, CAs are (a) called into existence by parliaments, (b) as temporary bodies, (c) to deliberate a topic or topics chosen by the parliament, and (d) to make recommendations which return to the parliament for consideration. As noted above, the Irish Constitutional Convention of 2013–14 had roughly this form, as did the 2016/18 CA, and a good deal of the recent discussion of a possible constitutional convention for the UK and/or England—a so-called ‘citizen-led’ convention—invokes this model. The model probably has a role to play in republican democracy, but in this relatively brief section I will explain why, from a republican democrat’s standpoint, it has its limitations. A key limitation is that this model leaves parliamentarians and/or governments with considerable power over what CAs look at and what happens to their re­com­menda­tions.43 This means that CAs will have limited ability to function as independent sites of citizens’ political initiative, and this has clear drawbacks from a republican democrat point of view because it constrains how far the CAs can serve active popular sovereignty and/or offer a site of counter-power to oligarchy (see the discussion in Section 4.2 for elaboration of this point). Indeed, through careful agenda setting and selective uptake of recommendations, CAs on this model might help political elites boost the perceived legitimacy of policies they have already largely decided upon.44 As Graham Smith notes, what was striking about the CAs on electoral reform in British Columbia and Ontario was that although these were created by state parliaments, they were empowered to put their recommendations to a binding referendum.45 In other work, Smith has also suggested that citizens might have

43  With respect to recommendations of a CA, this concern has been raised at times in the context of Ireland’s use of CAs. See David M. Farrell, ‘Constitutional Convention Brand Is in Jeopardy’, Irish Times, 26 March 2015, http://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/david-farrell-constitutional-conventionbrand-is-in-jeopardy-1.2142826. 44  See Nadia Urbinati, Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 114. Urbinati’s discussion draws a sharper distinction than I have done between governments and executives on the one hand and parliaments on the other. She argues, in general terms, that executives and administrative bodies may use citizens’ juries and assemblies to win legitimacy for their policies against elected parliaments. In this way, they will tend to undermine democracy rather than enrich or deepen it. See Urbinati, Democracy Disfigured, pp. 112–15. I share this concern, but I do not think it applies to all CA models, e.g., such as the PAR scheme set out in this chapter. For a discussion of the wider issues, see also Mark  E.  Warren, ‘Governance-Driven Democratization’, Critical Policy Studies 3, no. 1 (2009), pp. 3–13. 45 Smith, Democratic Innovations, pp. 74–5.

Citizens ’ Assemblies and Republican Democracy  93 the right to call CAs independently of parliaments using a form of citizens’ initiative mechanism.46 Now, what if we put these two kinds of empowerment together?

4.  The Petition-Assembly-Referendum Model: Three Arguments If we do put them together we get the PAR scheme, set out above. Under petition, citizens have the right to initiate a petition on a specified topic. If their petition receives sufficient signatures—and the relevant threshold or thresholds here can of course be specified in many ways—this triggers a CA to consider the relevant topic. Under assembly, a CA is duly established to deliberate the topic and, if it so wishes, to make a recommendation that goes to a popular vote.47 Under referendum, citizens then vote on the CA’s proposal, and it becomes law only if it wins sufficient support in this vote (again, the relevant threshold for success can be set at different levels).48 There is a clear case for PAR as a way of making democratic polities more like republican democracies. This case rests on the potential contribution of PAR in promoting all three of the republican democratic values sketched above: deliberativeness, political equality and opposition to oligarchy, and an active popular sovereign.

4.1.  Enhancing Deliberativeness? When they are well structured and well run, CAs can achieve a high level of deliberativeness internally. But can they contribute to improving the deliberative quality of the wider polity? One possibility here, perhaps of especial interest to republican democrats, is their contribution to improving the deliberative quality of direct democracy. Consider the citizens’ initiative mechanism. Under this mechanism, citizens must gather enough support from eligible voters and, having passed this threshold,

46  Smith, ‘Citizens Should Have the Power to Call Constitutional Conventions’. 47  One can imagine variants on the PAR scheme in which CAs are required to make re­com­ menda­tions and/or to send their proposals to a referendum. I hesitate to formulate the scheme in this way because it seems possible that a given CA might reasonably decide either not to make a recommendation, e.g., because, after deliberation, it is just too divided, or to direct its recommendation to parliament rather than a referendum, e.g., because it thinks the final proposal is not significant enough to warrant direct approval by the people. But there is a case for the alternative. Requiring a recommendation might help to motivate and focus deliberation. And requiring re­com­ menda­tions to go to referendum will prevent a CA from being unduly deferential to parliament in terms of what happens to its recommendations. 48  At the referendum stage it is possible in principle to use not only conventional ‘yes/no’ referendums but two-stage referendums and/or ‘preferendums’. See Smith, Democratic Innovations, pp. 130–1.

94  Stuart White their proposal then goes on the ballot for a popular vote.49 Some twenty-four states of the US have citizens’ initiative mechanisms of some kind in place, as do many municipalities and cities.50 Switzerland also notably has citizens’ initiative mechanisms, operating at federal, state, and more local levels.51 The citizens’ initiative mechanism clearly resonates with the radical republican tradition with its emphasis on the sovereignty of ‘We the People’. However, this mechanism has been subject to serious and weighty criticisms. It is argued that the initiative mechanism jeopardizes minority rights, producing a tyranny of the majority.52 A related criticism is that the initiative mechanism is insufficiently deliberative. As Derrick A. Bell, Jr. puts it: The emotionally charged atmosphere often surrounding referenda and initiatives can easily reduce the care with which the voters consider the matters before them . . . Appeals to prejudice, oversimplification of the issues, and exploitation of legitimate concerns by promising simplistic solutions to complex problems often characterize referendum and initiative campaigns.53

Similarly, John Gastil and Robert Richards argue that: ‘Such systems ask an underinformed and often unreflective public to choose amongst often-flawed alternatives in a campaign and media environment that foregrounds the sensational over the substantive or, in the case of low-profile ballot measures, provides little or no information’.54 Against the background of this critique of the citizens’ initiative, a number of authors have independently developed proposals like PAR. Gastil and Richards argue that deliberative quality can be enhanced by introducing various kinds of mini-publics into the initiative process.55 John Ferejohn argues that CAs on the British Columbia model offer an excellent way of improving the initiative process and sets out precisely the PAR scheme that I have sketched here.56 Similarly, Christopher Zurn argues that democratic constitutionalism will benefit significantly

49  For example, in the Californian case, a petition must get within 150 days the support of a number of citizens equal to 5 per cent of the turnout in the most recent state election to get on the ballot. See Smith, Democratic Innovations, p. 116. 50  Gastil and Richards, ‘Making Direct Democracy Deliberative through Random Assemblies’, p. 261. 51  See Jean-Francois Aubert, ‘Switzerland’, in Referendums: A Comparative Study of Practice and Theory, eds. David Butler and Austin Ranney (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1978), pp. 39–66; Smith, Democratic Innovations, pp. 111–13. 52  See Derrick A. Bell, Jr., ‘The Referendum: Democracy’s Barrier to Racial Equality’, Washington Law Review 54, no. 1 (1978), 1–29; Smith, Democratic Innovations, pp. 116–19. 53  Bell, Jr., ‘The Referendum’, pp. 18–19. 54 Gastil and Richards, ‘Making Direct Democracy Deliberative through Random Assemblies’, p.  254. See also Chambers, ‘Constitutional Referendums and Democratic Deliberation’; Zurn, Deliberative Democracy and the Institutions of Judicial Review, pp. 324, 340. 55  Gastil and Richards, ‘Making Direct Democracy Deliberative through Random Assemblies’. 56  Ferejohn, ‘The Citizens’ Assembly Model’. See also Smith, Democratic Innovations, pp. 132–3.

Citizens ’ Assemblies and Republican Democracy  95 from establishing a version of the PAR scheme.57 The PAR scheme arguably retains what is valuable in the original initiative idea, namely, the power it gives to  the citizenry to shape a legislative agenda as a direct expression of popular sovereignty. However, it also places a very significant ‘deliberative filter’ right at the heart of the process.58 Nothing gets on to the actual ballot that hasn’t been carefully discussed by a near random sample of the citizen body.59 We should be careful, nevertheless, to acknowledge the possible limits of PAR in terms of raising the deliberative quality of the polity. Even if it helps to prevent bad proposals making it to a ballot (the filter effect), it does not necessarily follow that in drawing up good proposals it will stimulate a wider public discussion of high deliberative quality, or that its proposals, however well considered, succeed in a subsequent public ballot. We will return to this point in the concluding ­section of the chapter.

4.2.  An Obstacle against Oligarchy? As noted above, one contemporary concern about real-world democracy is that electoral representative institutions are vulnerable to a problem of oligarchy. To be a realistic competitor in a US election race (e.g., for Congress), for example, a candidate has to be able to raise a significant amount of money to fund their campaign. The funds for campaigns come from a very small section of the US population that is far from representative. In Lawrence Lessig’s view, this explains why so much US public policy is geared towards the wealthy and/or corporate interests.60 In the UK, Democratic Audit’s 2012 report highlights a number of ways in which business corporations and the very wealthy exert strong influence in policy making, including ‘[e]xtensive linkages between MPs and large corporations, on a scale which is exceptional among established democracies’.61 One response to these observations is to urge reforms to limit the role of ‘money in politics’. But this begs the question of how these are to be achieved. As Lessig emphasizes, in the US many Congressional representatives are looking to join the lucrative world of Congressional lobbying when they leave Congress and so are unlikely to vote for substantial change. Similarly in the UK, while Parliament could in principle take action, many of its members do not have sufficient incentive (indeed, the incentives tend against this). In short, because the 57 Zurn, Deliberative Democracy and the Institutions of Judicial Review, pp. 323–41. 58  Ibid., p. 337. 59  On issues where the parliamentarians do not have a conflict of interest, but there is also a risk of majority tyranny dynamics, it may be appropriate also to give parliament control over whether a proposal moves to referendum. The idea is that this can provide a further deliberative filter. 60 Lessig, Republic, Lost. See also Cohen, ‘Money, Politics, Political Equality’. 61  Stuart Wilks-Heeg, Andrew Blick, and Stephen Crone, How Democratic Is the UK? The 2012 Audit (Liverpool: Democratic Audit, 2012), p. 275, http://democracyuk-2012.democraticaudit.com/.

96  Stuart White problem is within the workings of ordinary, legislative politics, it is hard to see how it can be solved through such politics. A polity with an established PAR scheme might, however, offer more potential for protection against, and correction of, this kind of oligarchic capture of elected representative institutions. If there is a serious problem at the parliamentary level around ‘money in politics’, but a PAR process exists, citizens could try to use the PAR process to tackle the issue at the parliamentary level.62 Citizens do not have to rely on parliament, the site of the alleged problem, to initiate the process, and this is appropriate given that parliamentarians may lack sufficient incentive to set a serious reform process going. The CA itself will consist mainly or wholly of members of the general public who do not have an incentive to try to maintain existing arrangements. The CA can thus deliberate more freely and impartially. Finally, when it makes its proposals, the CA has the option of sending them to a referendum, depriving parliament of the opportunity to politely consider and then shelve them. Again, we should not overstate the argument. In particular, it might be objected that the PAR scheme itself is vulnerable to oligarchic capture. For instance, the wealthy might use resources at the petition stage of PAR to buy people’s labour to collect signatures for a petition that supports the wealthy’s interests. They might have greater agenda-setting power within PAR for this reason. In addition, the wealthy will have more resources to deploy in the referendum stage of PAR, possibly using this advantage to help defeat well-considered proposals that emerge from a popularly convened CA but that conflict with their interests. This concern is reinforced by Elizabeth Gerber’s finding that, in US states, special economic interests, such as corporations, are effective at defeating referendum initiatives they don’t like.63 In reply, we can say, firstly, that there is an important difference between petitioning directly to get a proposal on a popular ballot, as is currently the case in US states, and petitioning to get a CA established.64 If the CA process has integrity there is no reason why it will necessarily result in proposals at the referendum stage that reflect the preferences of the wealthy or business. Given the deliberative quality of the CA, the process could backfire from the point of view of these interests. This might give them pause. Secondly, it may be possible to set some direct limits on pro-petition spending that constrain the power of the rich/business to petition for CAs. As Joseph Lacey has argued in the case of citizens’ initiatives, we could prohibit campaigns from paying people to work for them to collect 62  Occupy Democracy in the UK included in their list of demands both the creation of a citizen-led constitutional convention and a range of reforms to tackle the problem of ‘money in politics’. See the website of Occupy Democracy at http://occupydemocracy.org.uk/. 63  See Elizabeth R. Gerber, The Populist Paradox: Interest Group Influence and the Promise of Direct Legislation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). 64  See also Zurn, Deliberative Democracy and the Institutions of Judicial Review, pp. 337–8.

Citizens ’ Assemblies and Republican Democracy  97 signatures.65 Thirdly, there is clearly a need for effective rules to limit campaign spending in the referendum stage of the PAR process.66 Of course, no matter how careful the institutional design, there is always some possibility of oligarchic capture. But a political system that has both elected assemblies and PAR could have more overall resilience in that tendencies towards capture in one domain might be countered by action in the other.

4.3.  An Active Popular Sovereign? Republican democracy values an active popular sovereign. By this I mean that it envisages a polity in which citizens have a vivid sense of themselves as members of a sovereign people, especially at the constitutional level, and in which citizens act regularly from this self-understanding.67 A further argument for PAR, from a republican democratic standpoint, is that it may help to promote this understanding and practice of citizenship.68 How does PAR facilitate this? The petition function, firstly, allows citizens to identify issues of concern on their own terms and to make a direct appeal to fellow citizens to take up these issues. Significantly, petition posits a ‘horizontal’ relationship between citizens rather than a ‘vertical’ relationship of addressing, say, a member of parliament. In this way it pulls us into an attempt to bring ‘We the people’ into a live political presence rather than asking members of a political elite to intervene for us. The referendum function obviously calls on the whole citizen body to make a judgment on a given proposal and so reinforces the idea of collective power and direct responsibility. The assembly function is also important, and perhaps not only for the potential deliberative filtering and anti-oligarchic contributions noted above. The lottery-based and descriptively representative quality of the CA sends out a message that members of the general public properly have the right to, and responsibility for, making proposals for laws. The CA in a PAR scheme can also provide an opportunity for wider public discussion and thereby animate a sense of active popular sovereignty. As Hélène Landemore argues, the recent Icelandic constitutional convention, though not a CA, is a useful example here in that it adopted a relatively transparent way of working

65  See Joseph Lacey, ‘The Deliberative Case for Standard Direct Democracy’, paper presented at the ‘Democratic Theory beyond Deliberation: New Approaches to Representative Democracy’ conference, Department of Politics and International Relations, Oxford University, 22–23 June 2017. 66  For relevant discussion, see also Smith, Democratic Innovations, pp. 121–2, 135, 140–1. 67  White, ‘Rousseau and the Meaning of Popular Sovereignty’. 68  Zurn’s advocacy of a PAR-type scheme is rooted in a wider theory of democratic constitutionalism according to which ‘deliberative democratic legitimacy aims at a system of law where citizens can understand themselves as both subjects and authors of that law’, see Zurn, Deliberative Democracy and the Institutions of Judicial Review, p. 341.

98  Stuart White and solicited input and feedback from the general public through the internet.69 Some of the provisions of the draft constitution it produced emerged from this ‘crowdsourcing’. Social movements and campaigns such as the indignados and Occupy have recently given expression to an aspiration to popular sovereignty.70 But these movements have faced a problem in terms of accessing the political system so as to bring about desired change. A PAR scheme could offer such movements new political opportunities. In turn, this might help to stimulate and sustain initiatives of this kind.71

5. Conclusion In general terms, CAs have advantages in terms of improving the egalitarian and  deliberative qualities of a democratic political system. There are, however, multiple ways that CAs can fit into a political system. From the standpoint of a republican conception of democracy, which should we be most interested in? I have both rejected the view that CAs should replace parliaments and explained the limitations of using CAs only as consultative assemblies to parliaments, created at parliamentary discretion. More consonant with the values of republican democracy is the PAR scheme that gives citizens the ability to set up CAs to consider topics and which gives CAs the ability in turn to send their recommendations to referendum. We have seen how this scheme is promising in terms of the republican democratic values of effective deliberation; political equality, by offering a way to tackle oligarchic capture of elected legislatures; and, not least, active popular sovereignty. Of course, PAR is also subject to criticism. One concern we briefly noted above is that there might be a deliberative ‘gap’ between the CA and the follow-up referendum.72 The deliberative gap between the ‘A’ and the ‘R’ in the PAR scheme is one reason why one might argue that CAs should have direct legislative power, though I noted some objections to this above. 69 Landemore, ‘Inclusive Constitution-Making’. Zurn argues that requiring not one but three CAs to endorse a proposal before it gets onto a referendum ballot is also a way of developing a wider public debate on the proposal, see Zurn, Deliberative Democracy and the Institutions of Judicial Review, p. 338. 70  See Paulo Gerbaudo, The Mask and the Flag: Populism, Citizenism and Global Protest (London: Hurst, 2017); Stuart White, ‘Horizontalism, Public Assembly, and Republican Politics’, in Republicanism and the Future of Democracy, eds. Yiftah Elazar and Genevieve Rousseliere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). 71  See also Zurn, Deliberative Democracy and the Institutions of Judicial Review, pp. 338, 340–1. Of course, the same applies to political initiatives from the ‘populist’ right. For those worried by this (as I am), it is worth recalling the role of assembly in the PAR scheme as a deliberative filter. 72 See also Lang, ‘But Is It for Real?’, p. 36; Smith, Democratic Innovations, pp. 103–4; LeDuc, ‘Electoral Reform and Direct Democracy in Canada’, pp. 560–3.

Citizens ’ Assemblies and Republican Democracy  99 Now a CA can do something to try to stimulate wider deliberation, e.g., by organizing in ways that are relatively transparent and invite ongoing input and feedback from those outside the assembly itself.73 As Zurn suggests, the PAR scheme might also incorporate ‘Deliberation Day’ public holidays to help foster public discussion of proposals going to a referendum.74 But the wider as­so­ci­ ation­al context in terms of civil society and social movement organizing and mobilizing is probably a crucial factor in raising the saliency of an issue for the wider public and promoting constructive engagement. Thus, from the standpoint of republican democracy, this criticism perhaps helpfully indicates the importance of not expecting too much of any specific institutional mechanism in isolation from citizens’ own organizing and associational initiatives. This, in turn, raises the question of what a republican democracy can and may do to help create and sustain an associational environment supportive of deliberation to the common good, political equality, and active popular sovereignty.75

73  See Landemore, ‘Inclusive Constitution-Making’. 74 Zurn, Deliberative Democracy and the Institutions of Judicial Review, p. 338. As noted above, Zurn also suggests here that requiring a proposal to be supported by three independent CAs, reasonably stretched out over time, will help to promote public engagement with the issue. On the idea of ‘Deliberation Day’, see Bruce Ackerman and James Fishkin, Deliberation Day (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). 75 See Cohen and Rogers, Associations and Democracy; and Martin O’Neill and Stuart White, ‘Trade Unions and Political Equality’, in Philosophical Foundations of Labour Law, eds. Hugh Collins, Gillian Lester, and Virginia Mantouvalou (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 252–68.

5

Popular Resistance and the Idea of Rights Guy Aitchison

It is often said that many of the canonical rights recognized today are the ­achievement of past political struggle. The historical record is replete with iconic examples, from the early modern uprisings against ‘absolute’ government and feudal hierarchy to recent protests against racial inequality and apartheid, and struggles for the rights of women, homosexuals, the disabled, refugees, indigenous peoples, and other oppressed groups. While these struggles are typically invoked as a source of inspiration, I argue in this chapter that they are also key to understanding the nature and significance of rights as a political concept. The discussion proceeds by way of critical engagement with recent republican—or ‘neo-republican’—writings on rights with a particular focus on the ‘neo-Roman’ strand of the republican tradition systematically developed in the influential writings of Philip Pettit.1 Although republicans do not reject the idea of rights, they typically do not accord it the morally foundational role it plays for liberals and libertarians and the rhetoric of rights is sometimes held to be ‘at odds’ with core elements of republicanism.2 In particular, republicans have been critical of approaches within the natural rights tradition which see rights as the natural ‘property’ of human beings which individuals possess prior to entering political society and which set the basic terms of political association. This approach is sometimes linked to a self-regarding form of individualism that fails to see the interdependence between individual rights and the public good of the community as a whole.3 With its appeal to a primitive form of freedom, the natural rights tradition is  associated by neo-republicans with a liberal (or libertarian) conception of freedom as the absence of interference, which is a condition conceivably enjoyed by human beings alone, outside civil society. By contrast, the republican view of freedom as non-domination focuses on our standing and vulnerability in 1 See Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); On the People’s Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 2  Duncan Ivison, ‘Republican Human Rights?’, European Journal of Political Theory 9, no. 1 (2010), p. 32. 3  Quentin Skinner, ‘The Paradoxes of Political Liberty’, in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, ed. Sterling M. McMurrin, vol. 7 (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 1986), p. 243. Guy Aitchison, Popular Resistance and the Idea of Rights In: Radical Republicanism: Recovering the Tradition’s Popular Heritage. Edited by: Bruno Leipold, Karma Nabulsi, and Stuart White, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198796725.003.0006

104  Guy Aitchison relationship to others. Rather than being something that can conceivably be enjoyed in isolation, freedom as non-domination is a good that must be collectively produced in concert with fellow citizens through political institutions.4 For republicans, rights are one such institutional means of securing freedom. They are not naturally given but politically defined in the process of historical efforts by citizens to counteract relations of domination, whether it be from the state or from private sources of power. In their proposals for how the civic status of nondomination can be effectively secured, republicans have placed a strong emphasis on the institutional enforcement of rights and the empowerment of citizens with access to judicial and political channels to press their claims. For Pettit, then, what matters about rights is that they are ‘institutionally implemented and defended’.5 In this way, the republican approach brings into focus the practical and institutional character of rights as they pertain to the distribution of power within the context of a shared political order. This focus on rights as institutional claims, however, has been at the expense of the political role rights also play as a tool of critique and activism with which to  mobilize outside and against institutions. In the analysis of neo-republicans, rights themselves tend to be seen as the product of rules and procedures, suggesting that the only rights individuals may be said to have are those recognized and enforced by the state. As Cass Sunstein puts it, ‘republicans do of course believe in rights, understood as the outcome of a well-functioning deliberative process’ (emphasis mine) but they are ‘skeptical of approaches to politics and constitutionalism that rely on rights that are said to antedate political deliberation’.6 This makes it difficult to account for the way in which rights empower people against institutions precisely in those cases where they are not recognized and enforced. It thus risks losing the role of rights as a vocabulary of social criticism and transformation and a potent weapon in the ‘armoury of critical morality’.7 This is a notable departure from the historical current of revolutionary republicanism, in which the idea of rights was deployed to challenge the state, justifying uprisings against monarchical power and the propertied order in England, America, and France and then—as the discourse became appropriated and radicalized in the late eighteenth century—to resist the evils of slavery and colonial domination. In this chapter, I defend the coherence of the idea of rights as moral claims which individuals possess independently of state recognition and which need not depend on contested metaphysical claims about what is ‘naturally’ owed to human beings. While neo-republicans are correct to think that the idea of rights is associated with the possibility of political enforcement, I ague, this need not entail

4 Pettit, Republicanism, p. 99. 5  Ibid., p. 304. 6  Cass R. Sunstein, ‘Beyond the Republican Revival’, Yale Law Journal 97, no. 8 (1988), p. 1579. 7  Cited in Tom Campbell, The Left and Rights: A Conceptual Analysis of the Idea of Socialist Rights (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), p. 21.

Popular Resistance and the Idea of Rights  105 enforcement through the official channels of redress and with reference to ­established legal rights. This is because the possibility of enforcement is inherent in practices of rights claiming, even in cases of oppression and deprivation, through a fundamental moral right of resistance. In Section 1, I examine an early radical strand of natural rights thinking as articulated by the seventeenth-century Levellers who set out an ambitious agenda of economic and political rights within the context of the English Civil War. Attention to this current of thinking, I suggest, has the potential to correct the statist bias of contemporary republican accounts by highlighting the idea of rights as a vocabulary of social criticism tied to the people as a source of moral claims and collective resistance. Part of the reason for thinking of certain rights as natural, for the Levellers, was to show that they did not depend on government for their enjoyment, offering a moral basis for resistance against oppression. In Section 2 I argue that rights can serve this function without recourse to the controversial metaphysical assumptions associated with natural rights and challenge a line of argument which says that rights depend for their existence on the laws and customs in place. In Section 3 I criticize a refined version of this position which says that claiming a non-institutional right can be understood as a rhetorical way of demanding a legal right by highlighting the non-rhetorical features of moral rights. In Section 4 I show that rights are linked to the possibility of enforcement through a basic right to resistance.

1.  Radical Republicans and Rights The first recognizably modern discourse of individual rights was articulated within seventeenth-century popular movements opposed to tyrannical government and the economic dispossession and exploitation inflicted by propertied elites. During the English Civil War, the Levellers mobilized a discourse of natural rights during the course of their disputes with Parliament which they accused of reproducing the tyrannical behaviour of King Charles I following the defeat of royalist forces. The Levellers rarely feature in mainstream genealogies of the republican tradition, but their story sheds light on a radical tradition of rights politics fashioned in the struggles of popular movements. This radical group of thinkers and agitators attacked Parliament for imposing taxes without popular assent, locking up and torturing political opponents, and suppressing press freedom. Mobilizing the classical rhetoric of republican freedom they warned that such intrusions amounted to an exercise of arbitrary power which reduced the people of England to a condition ‘nearest to bondage’.8 These ideas were taken in a radical, populist direction by the Levellers whose defining demand was for 8  John Lilburne, ‘England’s New Chains Discovered’, in The English Levellers, ed. Andrew Sharp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 140.

106  Guy Aitchison regular political participation by the people to defend freedom, including outside of state institutions if necessary.9 The Levellers argued on similar grounds to those Parliament had used to attack the king, citing the need for popular assent to government on the basis of common law, historical precedent, and ‘ancient’ liberties said to predate the Norman conquest. They also made appeal to an egalitarian conception of natural rights according to which each individual possesses a fundamental right of ‘self-propriety’ to be free from arbitrary power. This idea was used by the Levellers to defend a right of resistance which could be exercised by the people themselves acting outside constitutional structures. If parliament betrayed the trust of the people by infringing their rights, they argued, the people may rightfully revoke their power and instantiate a more just political order.10 The Leveller idea of ‘self-propriety’ was influentially interpreted by the Marxist theorist C. B. MacPherson as a quasi-libertarian right to economic self-reliance appropriate to the emergent commercial society of the time. Under this reading, the Leveller understanding of natural rights is a forerunner to the ideology of ‘possessive individualism’ according to which individuals have absolute property rights over themselves and their labour which they are free to buy and sell on the market as they please.11 This reading, however, overlooks the extent to which the Levellers drew on an earlier medieval tradition of thought which did not see a fundamental tension between individual rights, social responsibilities, and the common good. The idea of ‘self-propriety’ denoted property over the self, but not in the individualistic sense according to which the individual has absolute ownership of their capacities, which they are free to dispose of as they see fit unencumbered by social obligations.12 In a traditional view of property, found in indigenous English common law, property could be held collectively by a community and accessed by different groups for their own specific purposes so long as this usage did not compromise the access and enjoyment of others.13 John Lilburne expressed this idea when he said that the ‘right of propriety which a particular man hath in his goods and lands’ may be disposed of at ‘his own discretion for his own advantage, so it be not contrary to the public good’.14 The idea of rights was morally bounded by concern for others and had an explicitly political, rather than economic, rationale. In 9  Samuel Dennis Glover, ‘The Putney Debates: Popular versus Élitist Republicanism’, Past and Present 164 (1999), pp. 47–80. 10  Iain Hampsher-Monk, ‘The Political Theory of the Levellers: Putney, Property and Professor Macpherson’, Political Studies 24, no. 4 (1976), pp. 397–422. 11 C.  B.  McPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), part 3. 12  Brian Tierney, ‘Historical Roots of Modern Rights: Before Locke and After’, Ave Maria Law Review 3 (2005), p. 23. 13  Hampsher-Monk, ‘The Political Theory of the Levellers’, pp. 402–6. 14  Cited in ibid., p. 408.

Popular Resistance and the Idea of Rights  107 its original form, the idea of ‘property’ in the self was associated not with the accumulation of material possessions, but with a right to bodily integrity, selfdefence, and resistance against oppression. In addition to protecting individual freedom of thought and conscience, the idea of self-propriety was intended to challenge the traditional view that some human beings are naturally subject to others in a social context in which the bodies of the poor might be imprisoned, tortured, enslaved, and conscripted by the authorities. Crucially, this right could not be surrendered or alienated upon entry to political society. Upon the establishment of government, for the Levellers, individuals retained a right to defend themselves so that if government exceeds its legitimate power and encroaches on the life, liberty, and estates of the people, there are grounds for resistance. Such a view rested on the Levellers’ egalitarian theory of moral agency which recognized that each individual has a subjective capacity to apprehend injustice and take action to remedy it regardless of their social rank. For the Levellers, ‘even the meanest’ had the capacity to identify their obligations according to reason and any attempt to substitute their judgment for his was an arbitrary usurpation of the individual’s authority.15 The Leveller right to self-preservation was also accompanied by a duty of solidarity to assist others in the preservation of their freedom should they come under attack. As Lilburne put it, ‘what is done to any one, may be done to every one’ and therefore he who does not assist others ‘betrays his own rights’.16 At the famous Putney debates of 1647, the Levellers demanded universal manhood suffrage based on this basic right to self-determination. For the grandees of the parliamentary side, this represented an existential threat to the propertied order. The grandees argued that the only rights are those recognized in law and that all talk of natural rights is no more than the expression of personal preferences. They also made the argument—somewhat opportunistically given their own oligarchic preferences—that equal votes would hand the rich unconstrained dominance since those with wealth would be in a position to buy the votes of the  poor. This was a troubling possibility for the Levellers and they sometimes equivocated over whether to extend the franchise to those in relations of economic dependence. The Leveller view of a natural right to ‘self-propriety’ was later used by John Locke to justify rights to private property through the ‘mixing’ of one’s labour with raw materials. However, even within Locke, we are not presented with a theory of human beings as wholly autonomous and possessive by nature.17 In the Lockean state of nature, the aim of individuals was to preserve themselves, but 15  ‘Extract from the Putney Debates’, in The English Levellers, p. 104. 16  Cited in Michael Kent Curtis, ‘In Pursuit of Liberty: The Levellers and the American Bill of Rights’, Constitutional Commentary 8 (1991), p. 388. 17  Locke claimed that ‘God . . . designed man for a sociable Creature’ and wrote of man’s ‘love, and want of Society’, cited in Tierney, ‘Historical Roots of Modern Rights’, p. 28.

108  Guy Aitchison also to assist in the preservation of others and uphold the laws of nature by ­exercising powers of judgment and punishment over those who breach them. Notably, Locke used the Levellers’ idea of reserve individual rights which could not be alienated to the state.18 While man’s natural rights to exercise control ‘as he lists’ over his ‘Person, Actions and Possessions and his whole Property’ are alienated upon entry to civil society to better protect them and resolve conflicts, self-preservation cannot be alienated in this manner. In extreme cases of interference with liberty, for Locke, the ‘whole body’ of society rises en masse to overthrow the tyrannical power of their oppressors through an ‘appeal to heaven’.19 Early modern understandings of natural rights, then, do not fit easily with later characterizations of the discourse as depoliticized and possessive. Such understandings did not necessarily presuppose an idea of human beings as fundamentally acquisitive or self-reliant by nature. In fact, the idea of a basic right to  self-propriety—or self-ownership—was first developed by grass-roots movements of the politically excluded and dispossessed as a basis to resist arbitrary incursions of power. For these radical republicans of the early modern period, rights were both natural and political. The right to resistance was a fall-back right that guaranteed the other rights one enjoyed from membership of civil society and which could be activated in exceptional circumstances through political action in solidarity with others. In Section 2, I consider what it means to think of a right as natural and whether contemporary republicans are correct to reject the type of thinking associated with this approach.

2.  Non-Institutional Moral Rights Historically, the idea of natural rights was tied to the idea of Christian natural law. This was understood as a set of binding God-given precepts which exist independently of the world of human values and experience and which are ascertainable through the exercise of human reason. Over time, the concept of natural rights became detached from its grounding in Christian theology and came to denote the idea that there are certainly fundamentally important rights which draw their authority from moral reasons or principles. These were universal rights which human beings were thought to possess qua human beings, irrespective of the laws and conventions that happened to be in place in a given society. The description of such rights as natural was intended to imply that they were not artificial in the sense that legal and conventional rights are. They could therefore

18  Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). 19  John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988 [1690]), pp. 104, 380.

Popular Resistance and the Idea of Rights  109 provide an independent basis from which to criticize and reform the existing ­political order. Today, the term ‘moral rights’ performs a comparable function in distinguishing a set of claims that do not depend for their authority on the particular laws in place.20 The rights are moral in the sense that their foundation is in morality. The term moral rights has the advantage that—unlike accounts derived from natural law—it need not entail controversial ontological or metaphysical premises. It does not seem to imply that rights ‘exist’ in the same factual sense as natural objects, such as teeth or bones, or that they are somehow woven into the fabric of the universe. The term moral rights also avoids abstract and potentially misleading debates about what individuals are hypothetically entitled to outside of political community in a primitive ‘state of nature’. It need not suppose, therefore, that the duties that correspond to an individual’s rights are those that are capable of being discharged by human beings in a primitive condition absent political institutions that can direct resources and define responsibilities. The type of moral reasons given in support of a right can be reasons that arise within an organized political community and are sensitive to the role rights play within such a context. It is difficult to make sense of the right to a fair trial, for example, as the right of pre-social individuals who lack any common authority. It becomes intelligible, however, within the context of state institutions with the capacity to both deprive individuals of their liberty and provide adjudication. As mentioned, contemporary republican theorists have been sceptical about the idea that there are rights that exist independently of their institutional recognition and enforcement. This reflects a concern that, in the absence of legal recognition, and of the political and judicial machinery that would enable citizens to enforce their claims, rights risk being little more than empty words. It is important, for republicans, that rights secure freedom as non-domination, as an enduring status that citizens have when they enjoy robust protection from arbitrary power. Maurizio Viroli, for example, writes that the idea of natural rights ‘suffers from the obvious theoretical weakness that rights are (more or less) respected only when sustained by laws and customs’. This demonstrates, he says, that rights are ‘historical, not natural, and when they are not sustained by laws and customs, they are not rights but moral claims’.21 For Viroli, then, conventional recognition (in the ‘laws and customs’ of a society) is not merely something that it would be desirable to have so that a right can be meaningfully enjoyed. It is, more fundamentally, a conceptual claim about the necessary conditions for a right to exist. Viroli is here discussing natural rights, but if conventional recognition is a 20  Rex Martin and James W. Nickel, ‘Recent Work on the Concept of Rights’, American Philosophical Quarterly 17, no. 3 (1980), p. 175. 21  Maurizio Viroli, Republicanism (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), p. 7. Iseult Honohan likewise writes that, for republicans, rights are ‘constituted and protected politically, rather than seen as natural attributes of individuals’, Civic Republicanism (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 208.

110  Guy Aitchison necessary condition for the existence of a right, then this would apply more broadly, including to moral rights that do not have the specific status imputed to natural rights. The view that rights talk should be restricted to forms of entitlement that are socially recognized and protected has a long pedigree.22 It trades off the intuitive connection between having a right to some good and having a reasonable expectation of enjoying that good with the possibility of remedy should we be denied it. This is a connection that other normative concepts, such as justice, do not have. If we call some social arrangement ‘just’, we are not ordinarily taken to imply that its justice is recognized and enforced as a matter of fact (even though this may be desirable). The ostensible connection between rights and the possibility of enforcement arises from the agent-specific character of the concept and its link to the concept of duty; the fact that one agent’s right prescribes a specific action or inaction on another agent who bears the corresponding duty. According to Viroli’s position, to say I have right to x there must be a realistic prospect of enjoying x; of the right being ‘respected’. This is stronger than the widely endorsed philosophical view that ‘ought implies can’; that normative claims about how the world ought to be should be constrained by empirical considerations of what is practically feasible. It seems uncontroversial, for example, that there cannot be a right to a life-saving medical technology when no such technology has been invented and hence no duty bearer exists who could possibly deliver it. According to the conventionalist position, advocated by Viroli, it is not simply that the duty which correlates to the right must be one that is practically feasible. It must also be the case that duty bearers are recognized by themselves and others as properly bound by that duty and that there be socially sanctioned remedies available in the event that they violate it. This is something to be ascertained not by reference to contested moral claims, but by examining the laws and social conventions actually in place in a given society. In contrast with this view, the proponent of non-institutional moral rights thinks that there are certain rights whose existence does not depend on their recognition and enforcement by political institutions. They may agree that rights can only be meaningfully enjoyed when such institutions are in place and hence they may grant the assumption that rights are ‘respected only when sustained by laws and customs’. Yet they would maintain that such rights can be identified on the basis of moral argument independently of specific laws and social conventions. There are different ways of arguing for non-conventional moral rights with different theories taking different types of normative consideration as pertinent. Any 22  This position was most famously stated by Jeremy Bentham, see Jeremy Waldron, ed., ‘Nonsense upon Stilts’: Bentham, Burke, and Marx on the Rights of Man (London: Methuen, 1987), chap. 3. For more recent versions, see Onora O’Neill, ‘Women’s Rights: Whose Obligations?’, in Bounds of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 97–111, and Susan James, ‘Rights as Enforceable Claims’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 103, no. 1 (2003), 133–47.

Popular Resistance and the Idea of Rights  111 plausible justificatory account, however, invariably has a political component to it given the potential costs involved in discharging the duty that corresponds to the relevant right. It must make reference both to the moral importance of some good, A, to the putative right holder, X, and to the permissibility and appropriateness of imposing a duty on another agent, Y, to provide X with A. My right to be free from assault, for example, has the right kind of moral weight to impose a duty on others to refrain from attacking me. It may also ground a duty on the state to provide policing and security. Political considerations thus enter the picture when it comes to reflection upon the role and identity of the duty bearer: the justification of rights must take account not only of what goods rights bearers have reason to value, but the types of cost it is reasonable to impose on other agents in securing those goods and whether they are capable of bearing those costs. Yet, for the proponent of non-institutional moral rights, it is not necessary that there be social mechanisms in place, in the form of law or social opinion, to compel the duty’s performance. Accordingly, rights can be used to assert strong moral entitlements prior to the acknowledgment of those entitlements by others. A duty bearer can be singled out—and condemned for acting unjustly—in a context of disagreement about the right’s validity. An important advantage of retaining some notion of independently existing moral rights is that we avoid the troubling implication that rights are the gift of states. An individual may have a right to something, which the state refuses to grant. This allows the vocabulary of rights to be used in appealing ways. It allows us, say, to identify a situation in which a tyrannical government is curbing free speech without breaking any specific laws or social conventions as a case in which a right to free speech is being violated rather than saying that the right itself does not exist. The alternative view, which makes legal or customary recognition of rights a condition of their existence, prevents us from making this distinctive type of evaluation. In Section 3, I consider a more refined account of the role of non-conventional moral rights, as proposed by neo-republicans.

3.  Moral Rights as Rhetoric? Whereas Pettit had previously elaborated a consequentialist moral theory that must ‘take rights seriously’, his later writings on republican government have little space for the idea that rights are binding independent of their legal enactment.23

23  See Philip Pettit, ‘The Consequentialist Can Recognise Rights’, Philosophical Quarterly 38, no. 150 (1988), pp. 42–55. For helpful exposition and critique, see Christopher Hamel, ‘Are Rights Less Important for Republicans than for Liberals? Pettit versus Pettit’, Contemporary Political Theory 16, no. 4 (2017), pp. 478–500.

112  Guy Aitchison In Republicanism, he addresses the historical role the idea of rights has played as a tool of social criticism. Pettit suggests that natural rights talk can often be understood as a rhetorical way of expressing a demand for enforceable legal rights. Again, while Pettit talks of natural rights, his discussion would have broader implications for non-conventional moral rights. He writes: [W]hen republicans spoke of natural rights . . . they generally meant to argue that certain legal rights were essential means of achieving freedom as nondomination, and that the description of such rights as natural did not have more than rhetorical significance for them. In particular, it did not imply that the rights were fundamental norms that called to be honoured in deontological fashion.24

Under this view, the claim that a right to ‘X’ is natural has no distinctive moral substance. It is, rather, a rhetorical shorthand; a way of lending illocutionary force to one’s practical efforts at achieving a legal right to X. The phrase ‘I have a natural right to X’ could therefore be translated into the phrase ‘I ought to have a legal right to X’ with no normative difference in the type of evaluation being made. It is only through the process of legal enactment that X truly becomes a right. This rhetorical reading of rights claiming attempts to accommodate some of  the most paradigmatic forms of rights talk as a challenge to the status quo. However, it does so at the expense of some degree of conceptual clarity and it cannot convincingly account for the distinctive normative situation of the rights holder. Recall the situation in which an authoritarian government prohibits any criticism of its regime. The government is a scrupulous upholder of the rule of law and so carries out its repression according to strictly lawful means with no breach of legal rights. What exactly is objectionable about this scenario? One response by protesters to the repressive government’s law, which readily suggests itself, would be to say ‘This is wrong; we have a right to free speech’. Yet, as has been pointed out, what is being referred to here is an actual (moral) right to free speech being violated and not a potential (legal) right to free speech being violated.25 The claim by protesters that they have a right to free speech is not merely a claim that in the future they ought to have a right to free speech recognized and enforced by law. It is a claim that they already have such a right and that the government is committing a serious injustice in the here and now in refusing to respect it. The state’s persecution is wrong because it intrudes on the rights they have under the flawed status quo and not those they ought to have in a reformed and improved legal system. 24 Pettit, Republicanism, p. 101. 25  See the discussion in Peter Jones, ‘Moral Rights, Human Rights and Social Recognition’, Political Studies 61, no. 2 (2013), p. 269. See also John Tasioulas, ‘The Moral Reality of Human Rights’, in Freedom from Poverty as a Human Right: Who Owes What to the Very Poor, ed. Thomas Pogge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 75.

Popular Resistance and the Idea of Rights  113 This type of assessment captures both the moral immediacy of the situation and its seriousness as the transgression of an existing entitlement. Pettit’s approach, of course, still permits us to condemn the government’s repression prior to the enactment of a legal right to free speech. It is wrong as a form of domination and unfreedom. Yet this form of condemnation arguably lacks the equivalent moral purchase. It does not capture the idea of being deprived of an entitlement— something that is rightfully one’s own—by specific wrong-doers. The distinctive significance of something being a violation of moral rights is noted by Peter Jones. He points out that the wrong involved in rights violations is not some abstract injustice, in the sense of a state of affairs being regrettable or undesirable. It is, he notes, a personal wrong done to a specific agent in the person of the rights bearer themselves. It is they, specifically, who have been wronged since the relevant duty is owed to them. This type of assessment, he points out, reflects the distinctive agent-specific character of rights and, correspondingly, the normative status associated with being a rights holder. As Jones puts it, we ‘ascribe that status only to beings to which we think that we can owe certain forms of conduct and that we believe we would wrong if we failed to treat them accordingly’.26 Yet this still leaves unanswered the question of enforcement. What is the point of proclaiming rights without established social and institutional mechanisms available to ensure they are secured? It is clear that in the absence of institutional enforcement by the state through courts and other legal avenues, rights bearers will lack the most reliable and predictable means of redress for the deprivation they suffer. However, institutional enforcement is not the only recourse available. Where official avenues fail, those whose rights are denied can take matters into their own hands and protest the injustice done to them directly. As Joel Feinberg influentially pointed out, the possession of a right is associated with a certain normative standing for rights holders why may press, insist and assert their claims against the bearer of the corresponding duty. This standing is linked to the selfrespect and assertiveness that moral agents appropriately enjoy as a ‘maker of claims’; as the source of binding normative demands upon others.27 The rights bearer is especially well placed to hold rights violators answerable for their conduct and demand what is owed to them as a matter of justice since it is they who are owed the corresponding duty. The measures they may take include speech acts that condemn the duty bearer as unjust and demand what is due to them.28 Where the state (or some other duty bearer) refuses to act, the rights bearer may also appeal to third parties to intervene in solidarity and press for enforcement, 26  Jones, ‘Moral Rights, Human Rights and Social Recognition’, p. 277. 27  See Feinberg’s seminal essay, ‘The Nature and Value of Rights’, Journal of Value Inquiry 4, no. 4 (1970), pp. 243–60; see also Stephen L. Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 28 I discuss the conflictual side of rights politics further in Guy Aitchison, ‘Three Models of Republican Rights: Juridical, Parliamentary and Populist’, Political Studies 65, no. 2 (2017), pp. 339–55.

114  Guy Aitchison including to other concerned citizens, trade unions, political parties, and even foreign governments. If necessary, the rights bearer may also be justified in taking more confrontational and coercive measures of enforcement that invoke the fundamental right to resistance.

4.  The Right to Resistance As we have seen, early modern thinkers who deployed the idea of republican freedom saw a central role for rebellion in defending the independence of the people from arbitrary power. They defended a fundamental right of resistance, which they saw as the people’s ultimate guarantee against tyranny. The right to resistance functioned as a kind of fall-back right that could be exercised in exceptional cases where other rights were being violated. Its rationale was that rights bearers themselves were, in the final recourse, the best judge of their interests with the capacity to defend themselves against intrusion. As the Leveller Richard Overton put it, ‘every man’ has ‘an undoubted principle of reason, by all rational and just ways and means possibly he may, to save, defend and deliver himself from all oppression, violence and cruelty whatsoever’.29 In the recent revival of republican thought, less attention has been given to the justification and practice of resistance and the right to oppose oppressive power through non-institutional means. Neo-republicans have largely focused on questions of constitutional design and the appropriate balance of powers between different branches of government. This has led to criticisms of ‘elitism’ with Pettit’s theory in particular being criticized for requiring that power be vested in courts, tribunals, and other depoliticized monitoring bodies overseen by judges and technocratic experts.30 In the more recent restatement of his theory, Pettit notably gives more space to popular forms of political contestation. He discusses the need for a ‘restive’, ‘agonistic’ citizenry and at various points addresses the role of popular resistance, which he sees as the ultimate guarantee of the supremacy of the ‘constituting people’ over the state.31 However, it is not clear how Pettit can make sense of the idea of popular resistance absent some notion of a fundamental non-conventional moral right to resist that people enjoy independently of government. At several points, Pettit makes reference to Locke’s argument for a ‘right of people to rise up against the government’.32 For Locke, as we have seen, the right of resistance was based on the fundamental and inalienable natural right individuals 29  Richard Overton, ‘An Appeal from the Degenerate Representative Body’, in Leveller Manifestoes of the Puritan Revolution, ed. Don Marion Wolfe (New York: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1944), p. 160. 30  See John  P.  McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 31 Pettit, On the People’s Terms, pp. 222–7, 292. 32  Ibid., p. 173.

Popular Resistance and the Idea of Rights  115 have to self-defence. It is difficult therefore to see how Pettit can accommodate this notion given his suggestion that natural rights claims are generally to be understood as a way of arguing for legal rights that secure freedom as non-domination. It seems incongruous to think of the natural right to resistance as a ‘rhetorical’ way of demanding a ‘legal right’ to resistance. The circumstances in which a right to resistance is characteristically asserted are those in which the government has already proven itself malicious and untrustworthy. An oppressive government of this kind would hardly be amenable to recognizing a constitutional basis for the people to challenge its power. Alternatively, were the right to resistance already written into the constitutional law of the state, it is difficult to imagine a scenario in which it would be enforced in a fair and impartial way. The circumstances in which resistance is necessary are those in which state institutions have proven themselves exclusionary, corrupt, or otherwise unreliable. In these circumstances, a legally enforceable right to resist would offer little prospect of success. Indeed, the very idea of a legal right to resist would appear to be self-refuting if we understand such a right as deriving its authority from the legal order then in place. By the very act of recognizing that the people could rightfully resist it, the government would be acknowledging that they lacked legitimate authority and that they could not permissibly defend themselves. But if that were the case, then the right to resist would have no basis since it would no longer command the authority of the state’s legal order. Where the right to resist appears in the constitution of a democratic state, it is most plausible to think of this as a way of affirming an independent moral right to challenge government power, rather than as a way of bringing a conventional right of this kind into being. The idea of resistance may evoke dramatic historical uprisings, but it also includes the persistent and often secretive exercise of claimed rights in defiance of state authority. It is a characteristic feature of many rights that their illegal exercise can itself constitute a form of resistance. Here, political agents act directly on their entitlements without authorization. Consider again the right to free speech under a censorious government. Through the very act of political criticism, dissidents may be said to be exercising a right to free speech that is legally denied to them by the state. This gives rights a certain performative character; the direct exercise of a moral right in the absence of its institutional enforcement frequently functions as a way of bringing the right about. Historically, a right that applies in one area may be exercised in a new area or a right that has been granted to one group of people is exercised by another in a dynamic, unfolding process. In early modern England, subterranean congregations of Catholics and Protestant dissenters practised their moral rights to practise their religion prior to freedom of religion being officially granted. The rights religious groups were eventually afforded by the state were later exercised by political groups in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to hold meetings and demonstrations long before rights to

116  Guy Aitchison political association were officially legalized.33 The history of a free press is likewise one of individuals practising the non-conventional moral rights they claimed in the face of state persecution and imprisonment. The eventual recognition of these rights in law was often a de jure acknowledgment of a de facto right that already existed as a result of popular resistance. At points, Pettit discusses resistance not as a right but as a ‘power’ and from comments he makes elsewhere it would seem that he regards this as the more theoretically appealing framework. Pettit has noted that the concept of ‘power’ is a key point of difference between republicanism and a ‘liberalism that assert[s] the importance of rights’. In contrast to liberals, he suggests, republicans do not think that rights alone are sufficient to ensure freedom and they are instead concerned to ensure people are ‘given powers which they can wield as countervailing forces against those who would otherwise dominate them’.34 He gives the example of industrial workers who combated the domination of capitalists through unionization rather than through the formal recognition of workers’ rights. What would it mean to think of resistance as a power? The notion of power calls attention to the fact resistance must be more than a mere idea to have bite: it must also be a credible possibility that can be put into practice where necessary. This requires a degree of collective capacity for protest and agitation among the people, as is typically indicated by an active civic culture, the presence of vibrant social movements, regular protests, and oppositional organizations. Yet, ultimately, it is difficult to see the concept of ‘powers’ as really an alternative to ‘rights’, rather than something we should also care about if we wish to make sure rights can be implemented, if we wish to make the right to resistance credible.35 The vocabulary of rights has the advantage that it brings us more explicitly into the domain of normative judgments that can guide the political conduct of other agents in a way that the more empirical language of powers does not. The fact an agent possesses the power to engage in resistance does not entail that they are morally permitted to do so. Powerful corporations, for example, have considerable power to resist the imposition of taxation by democratic states. However, I take it, they have no right to do so and may be legitimately opposed for their undue exercise of force against the democratic process. By contrast, where a morally justified right to resistance is being asserted, it is morally appropriate for other suitably positioned third parties to join in assistance. 33  Charles Tilly and Lesley J. Wood write that historically rights were won and bargained for by ‘pushing at the limits that attached existing rights to certain populations, activities, organisations, or places’. For example, those who enjoyed rights to assemble as taxpayers or members of a religion ‘dared to use the right to assemble’ for the ‘formulation and expression of shared demands’, Charles Tilly and Lesley J. Wood, Social Movements, 1768–2012, 3rd ed. (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2012), p. 54. 34 Pettit, Republicanism, pp. 303–4. 35  This point is made against Pettit in Hamel, ‘Are Rights Less Important for Republicans than for Liberals?’.

Popular Resistance and the Idea of Rights  117 By conceptualizing resistance in terms of a moral right we also enter the domain of normative reflection on what legitimate limits there are on the exercise of that right. As with other rights, the right to resistance is not unlimited, but rather morally constrained by obligations towards the rights and interests of others. The right to resistance may sanction a very extensive range of methods depending on the circumstances—even the use of armed violence in extreme cases—but it will not sanction every form of resistance without regard for the wellbeing of other persons. The moral right to resistance thus affords a basis to laud and criticize political conduct in a way that the more normatively neutral vocabulary of powers does not. It allows us to discriminate between forms of resistance that are justified and those that are not, as well as informing decisions about what methods are permitted in the defence of rights.

5. Conclusion Neo-republican writings on rights focus on their institutional enforcement and on the specification of legitimate institutional procedures through which rights are debated and decided. This approach addresses concerns with the depoliticized understandings of rights as self-evident moral ‘truths’ given by nature and points to the need for an ongoing civic exchange about realizing rights in response to changing historical circumstances. However, the neo-republican restriction of rights talk to legal rights risks losing the valuable critical role rights have in moral and political discourse. The strength of the early modern account of natural rights was that it valorized the idea of a strong claim to freedom held against the state and provided a basis for popular resistance. It thus captures the idea that individuals have strong moral entitlements in situations where government is acting intransigently or when institutions are corrupt, weak, and underdeveloped. If rights are the creations of government, they cannot perform this critical role. There is, I suggested, no necessary connection between the idea of natural rights and the self-regarding individualism of libertarian theory with radical republican thinkers of the early modern period using the idea of natural rights to critique social and political relations of domination. For the Levellers, ‘self-propriety’ was not moral grounds for accumulation, but a basis for self-defence and collective resistance, which they understood as the ultimate guarantor against oppression. I have sketched an account of independently existing moral rights faithful to this rebellious tradition which understands rights as claims that empower individuals with the moral standing to hold specific agents accountable. In the absence of institutional enforcement, the claiming of a moral right sanctions critique, protest, and mobilization outside and against the state. The ultimate remedy for the violation of rights, I have suggested, lies in resistance understood as a fundamental moral entitlement to resist oppressive power.

6

Two Traditions of Radical Democracy from the 1830 Revolution Karma Nabulsi

Over the long summer of 1830, young French revolutionaries battled in the streets of Paris and the provinces to win liberty for themselves, and their country. In a remarkable set of events unfolding over three days in July—Les Trois Glorieuses— they overthrew the hated Bourbon regime; establishing a republic was finally within their grasp. Large numbers of republicans had joined the National Guard and the various municipal defence volunteers across the country in previous years; in Paris they captured the capital’s Hotel de Ville, as well as the Tuileries Palace. Yet at the crucial moment—and right before their eyes—a liberal coup installed an Orleanist monarchy instead and Louis Philippe was proclaimed king. The republican moment of 1830 was stolen just as it was won, after a decade of careful planning and organizing by tens of thousands of revolutionary republicans across France. At the beginning of that decade, two quite distinct models of revolutionary republicanism were being advanced. Both offered a complete break from the monarchical system, as well as from the status quo simulacrum of republicanism being sponsored by the Marquis de Lafayette (which eventually prevailed). First was the elevated vision of Filippo Buonarroti whose revolutionary republic was wreathed in the virtue of equality. His republican catechism was a ­covenant, a dedicated adherence to the virtuous Republic of 1793-not as a mere vision to aspire towards, but as the physical manifestation of its temporal and material continuity.1 Second was the revolutionary republicanism that animated Godefroy Cavaignac and the younger generation of republicans. As with Buonarroti’s programme of faithful restoration, they also celebrated 1793, and were anchored just as firmly in all three republican virtues of liberty, equality, and fraternity. More significant for  this new generation of republicans was the pioneering application of these 1  G.  Weill, ‘Philippe Buonarroti 1761–1837’, Revue Historique 76, no. 2 (1901), pp. 241–75. For two groundbreaking biographies that emerged after World War II, see Alessandro Galante Garonne’s Buonarroti e Babeuf (Torino: De Silva, 1948), followed by Armando Saitta’s, Filippo Buonarroti: Contributi alia Storia della sua Vita e del suo Pensiero, 2 vols (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1950–1). Karma Nabulsi, Two Traditions of Radical Democracy from the 1830 Revolution In: Radical Republicanism: Recovering the Tradition’s Popular Heritage. Edited by: Bruno Leipold, Karma Nabulsi, and Stuart White, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198796725.003.0007

Two Traditions of Radical Democracy  119 principles in practice, establishing a system of political organization that was heavily reliant on mobilization ‘from below’. This republic was to be realized through the practice of republican virtues, principally fraternity in its most tangible form: forging broad-based alliances and relying on an approach grounded in popular sovereignty. Their insurgent movement counted on this particular transformative element which was characterized by Cavaignac as la force révolutionnaire, where mass mobilization produced the alchemy required for the formation of a social contract of equals, whilst generating new citizens in the process. Although their model of republicanism failed to gain power at the end of the July Revolution of 1830, its radical organizational innovations carried a hugely successful history ahead of it. This chapter sketches out the two models of revolutionary republicanism, through portraits of the main protagonists, and consideration of their organizational and methodological forms. Both can be usefully contrasted to Lafayette’s republicanism, which itself is best appreciated as an account of his character and disposition; for Lafayette, his political ideology and his persona were indissociable. Lafayette’s republicanism could tolerate establishing another monarchy instead of a republic at the moment it was possible to do the latter. His role ensuring an Orléanist line was essential to the creation of this new form of ‘liberal’ monarchical rule in France. National treasure of the 1789 revolutions in France and America, loyal friend to beleaguered Polish and Corsican revolutionaries, this ‘patriarch of liberty’ lent his vast financial resources and political patronage to the revolutionary underground from the early 1820s. It was Lafayette who betrayed republicans at the critical moment in July, once they had wrested power from the Bourbons, throwing his considerable weight behind a new royal lineage, and styling his confection ‘a monarchy surrounded by republican institutions’. Any initial assessment of the two schools of radical republicanism will be drawn first to their obvious similarities: almost identical in the desired goal for a republic of equality; both willing to sacrifice their lives for self-same principles; admiring the same revolutionary heroes, from Robespierre to St Just, with the stern if mystical traditions they evoked; both Jacobins; both Montagnards. Yet the differences between them offer us significant lessons. First, the generational cleavage reveals almost total disagreement on how to realize this republic in both strategic and ideational terms. These schools diverged sharply on the workings and structure of the party or society; the role of leadership; the organizational processes and practices of republicans; and most of all, the role of the virtues. These divergences led to the two schools’ essential contestation, and an ideological (if not entirely public) rupture by 1834. To a significant extent ­generational experiences shaped the programmes, political decisions, and the intellectual spirit guiding their philosophy. In this respect, the ebullient optimism of Cavaignac’s generation offered a striking contrast with Buonarroti’s cautious

120  Karma Nabulsi pessimism on human nature, say in viewing Lafayette’s betrayal as the mere ­confirmation of doctrine, and firmly held worldview.2 The contrast also illustrates the power individual character and persona was seen to possess. While Buonarroti and Cavaignac were charismatic figures, these two men represented markedly disparate strands of the practice and principles of revolutionary leadership: one elitist, closed, mindful of constant threats to the republican project, ideologically cautious; the other remarkably dynamic, open, inclusive, and protean. Further, the two models show how the cult of the revolutionary past—an essential feature of radical movements across the nineteenth century—could take exceptionally different forms. With Buonarroti, attachment was to the old ideal resurrected, whereas for Cavaignac and his generation’s approach, a glorious past was revered as inspiration, but seen as the pierre angulaire (foundation stone) for the necessary launch into a new future. Above all, the contrast between Buonarroti and Cavaignac illustrates the sharp divide amongst radical republicans on how republican virtues were theorized and employed. Although they were all part of the same underground, each a member of a secret society and often members of many, their organizations possessed very different rules and purposes. In one type of association, virtue was the preserve of an initiated few, providing leadership for the many. Here, any attempt to involve wider forces in planning or decision making was seen as highly counter-productive, indeed extremely dangerous to the success of a revolutionary project. For most younger republicans, the role of radical societies was to provide an arena from which to plan for the involvement of the widest sectors of republicans in mobilization, in order to increase progressive elements of society, and to create chances for revolutionary change. In this scheme, the audacity and imagination to live as free citizens while still under tyranny-many going to prison, and many losing their lives-this model or exemplar of the republican way of life was intrinsic to the aim of achieving a republic for the many. Their republicanism was neither an intellectual nor even a moral position. It was experienced as a common endeavour, embarking together upon a set of actions that created a world of being and interconnectedness. This was the basis for their practical strategy to generate the institutions of the republic that could ensure freedom and equality for all. Such lessons from previous generations provide us with organizational models that have significance for today’s left. What gets told about former sets of ideas, their context and their limitations, is also a function of their ideological framing, which highlights certain features and obscures others: all such frameworks rest on particular understandings of the possible in politics. What can be taken from

2  See Saitta, Filippo Buonarroti, vol. 2, appendix, pp. 160–9.

Two Traditions of Radical Democracy  121 the study of radical and revolutionary political movements—of their relative strength and weaknesses; the impact they did or did not have in the short and longer term; their contribution to the production of substantial structural changes to society—has encouraged scholars to explore particular thinkers (contemporary and historical), to look to tracing certain traditions of intellectual thought, movement history, social history, and the histories of class struggle. Yet revolutionary republicans give us a form of republicanism almost entirely shaped by their appreciation and understanding of mobilizational craft and collective practices of republicanism. In restoring such clandestinely created practices, carried out secretly, and of course scarcely spoken of or written down, we introduce elements of republican political culture explicitly debating the connection between the goal and the strategies to arrive at it. From all three models it is clear that the concepts and virtues that republicans held were developed in relation to each other. This combination of practice and idea, of tradition and craft, creates its own requirements when exploring such models from the past. Here two aspects of this tradition of radical republican practice and thought (especially its democratic models) will be discussed. First is Plutarch’s Lives, widely read and discussed in numerous domains in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In his Life of Pericles, Plutarch explains how the mechanism of practising the virtues can achieve a set of exceptional, and previously unattainable results. If one simply wrote about such actions, he argues, it would have the same dynamic effect as actually doing them. The key, Plutarch makes clear, is to concentrate upon specific acts of virtue, which produce in the minds of readers of them an emulation and an eagerness that lead them on to imitation . . . virtue, by the bare statement of its actions, can so affect mens’ minds as to create at once both admiration of the things done, and the desire to imitate the doers of them.

It is only the virtues which can inspire this kind of mobilization, as ‘the goods of fortune we would possess and would enjoy; those of virtue we long to practise and exercise: we are content to receive the former from others, the latter we wish others to experience from ourselves’.3 The second element with resonances for modern political culture are the stories that reveal such practices. In 1842, the distinguished politician and writer Paul Dubois wrote about the challenges of doing so. After reading an account of the revolutionary activities of Emmet and the United Irishmen in 1798, that had

3  For a discussion of the virtues in Plutarch’s Lives, including The Life of Pericles, see Tim Duff, Plutarch’s Lives: Exploring Virtue and Vice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999); Barbara Scardigli, Essays on Plutarch’s Lives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); Frederick  E.  Brenk, ‘The Dreams of Plutarch’s Lives’, Latomus: Revue d’Études Latines 34, no. 2 (1975), pp. 336–49.

122  Karma Nabulsi taken place fifty years earlier, he was reminded of his own days in the French republican underground of the 1820s: The carbonarism of 1820 to 1823 rose up before me complete with its youthful purity, its sombre mysteries, its idealistic follies, its generous or covetous ambitions, above all with its victims swept off by the storm . . . Poor young blossoms of courage and naïve faith, fallen under the knife, I saw you strewn across the green turf pressed down by my musing steps; your names like faded secret signs floated in the mists of my clouded vision, dimmed by welling tears. You, too, like Ireland’s Emmet, students, soldiers, thinkers, poets, heros, orators plighted to your country, had died for her . . . and we, forgetful survivors, peaceably seated in the pavilion of liberty which we had thought to raise together, have scarcely a fugitive shadow in our memories of you and your names which you had thought at least to bequeath to gratitude and glory. Thus does everything fade and perish here below; for history will not preserve the truth, its two or three pages devoted to these forgotten ‘fanatics’ will portray neither their spirit, their virtues, their passions, their illusions, nor their faults. Only we who, as contemporaries, dreamed the same dreams, ran the same risks, showed the same devotion, could recapture and portray them. Yet we would have to be young again, and already, we are old.4

This chapter on republicanism in 1830 aims to shed some light on the central role the virtues played in the revolutionary republicanism of the era. Explaining their operation within two dominant forms of radical republicanism in France (similar strands could of course be found elsewhere in Europe) requires a synthesis: combining the ideas of the republicans who carried them with their action, their character with their craft.

1.  Liberal Republicanism: Lafayette Although Paris was with the republicans that summer, Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Moitier, the marquis de Lafayette, possessed more than just Paris. During those fragile and fluid days of the July Revolution, he held France, the republicans, and their cause, and even the new monarch Louis Philippe tightly in his aged fist. He was himself a living monument, and one he insisted was still on the move at the grand old age of seventy-three, bent on a grand and glorious future. He dipped and bobbed along like a vast floating statue of liberty. Just below the waterline, hundreds and sometimes thousands of republicans could be 4  In Georges Weill, ‘Paul Dubois, Un intellectuel député sous Louis-Philippe’, Revue de Synthèse Historique, Bulletin du Centre International de Synthèse 46 (December 1928), p. 94.

Two Traditions of Radical Democracy  123 dimly seen rowing frantically, in order to keep the sagging and crumbling enterprise afloat. Lafayette lived in a huge aristocratic estate; by now he had become one. After the violent removal of his class from power during the French Revolution, Lafayette remained a rare relic of traditional hospitality from the ancient regime, combining enlightenment principles embedded within a codified hierarchy of patronage and stuffy convention. Effusively offering desk space and entertainment via a literary salon of the first order, he also provided essential funds, equipment, connections, and much needed political support to the array of republicans from different continents who arrived seeking assistance. The great literary, artistic, social, and liberal luminaries of the ‘Two Worlds’, France and America, gathered under his benevolent gaze, along with an assortment of younger French republicans and foreign exiles. For these republicans it was hard work. As his sonin-law Charles Rémusat described life at Lafayette’s country estate: ‘one would scarcely have dared a personal pretension or an original opinion. No noise, no movement, in essence no independence in the empire of the patriarch of liberty. It is impossible to see this interior without pleasure and even without admiration. It was entirely possible to die there of boredom.’5 This stifling system of whimsy indicates the precarious enterprise Lafayette was proving to be for young republicans. As much as he helped them, he could just as easily ruin them in his elderly, friendly, seemingly accidental way. Often revolutionaries and their plans—indeed whole networks, movements, and coalitions— would get lost for months, wandering the immense and endless corridors of mirrors, literary celebrities, and broken plaster cast of the man and his residence at la Grange, or at his Parisian headquarters: their plans mislaid, frozen, destroyed; in the end betrayed. Assessments during Lafayette’s lifetime, from his role in the French and American Revolutions and beyond, ranged from ‘utter idiot’ (pace Napoleon’s ‘il est un niais’) to Jefferson’s derision of his ‘canine appetite for affection’ in 1787, to the genuine celebration of a beloved national father of liberty.6 In July 1830 he had the chance to play both of these well-rehearsed aspects of his persona and he seized it eagerly. For the young generation of republicans, the dangers of working with Lafayette were heightened, given he was more than a living monument. They needed to build their plans around the role Lafayette sought to play in their revolutionary planning: great leader, ornamental head of the secret societies, maker of republics. In their search for a flag under which to gather a forming republican movement, to provide a banner to cover their revolution Lafayette represented a

5  Charles de Rémusat, Memoires de Ma Vie (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1960), vol. 2, pp. 226–7. 6 Lloyd Kramer, Lafayette in Two Worlds: Public Cultures and Personal Identities in an Age of Revolutions (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), pp. 8–9.

124  Karma Nabulsi nationally recognized and ‘attractive embodiment of popular sovereignty’.7 For those outside of this plan he appeared more than just a measure of cloth. Heinrich Heine, watching on the sidelines, was persuaded ‘he is not a simple flag which people follow or to which they swear allegiance; he is himself the gonfalonier who carries the banner’.8 In spite of their youth, it was appreciated that any republican tricolore placed in his trembling hand could tuck it away at the moment it was most needed—or worse, Lafayette would wrap it around yet another monarch instead. Still, their choice was to work to change things, or to wait. Right across Europe, young revolutionaries were facing the same dilemma: the time was never right, and the magic of revolutionary action ‘la force révolutionnaire’ would be the added ingredient to transform the stark analysis of the current structure of power, and inevitable pessimism about the possibilities of radical change. But it was a real risk. That summer, to the dismay but not astonishment of his republican co-conspirators, this is exactly what Lafayette did with the tricolore on the balcony in front of the masses, swathing the Orleanist Prince Louis Philippe with the flag in front of the people and, in that symbolic act, creating him king. Describing the monarch as ‘la meilleure des Républiques’, he handed over the seal of republican legitimacy to a regime which had done nothing to deserve it. During the preceding decade of Carbonari conspiracies, Lafayette had overthrow himself into various schemes to overthrow the Bourbons; liberals who also sought the Bourbons’ departure joined these initiatives during the final years. As Lafayette saw it, the secret societies ‘were a legitimate expression of the general will’.9 His approval of using such means did not extend to concerning himself about their purpose, and their reasons for secrecy, so the Bourbon regime was always well prepared, and always defeated them. Lafayette’s penchant for loose talk led to many disasters: Alan Spitzer, the historian of the Carbonari explains: ‘the government was by this time fully aware of the nature and goals of these conspiracies, thanks to the tendency of Lafayette, who was at their centre, to confide in almost anyone’.10 Lafayette viewed his person as the embodiment of the two key republican virtues of liberty and fraternity, his own historic role neatly providing a representation of liberty in an exemplar republic. This model of the virtues was of a different order from that being practised by nearly all the rising generation of republicans—and of course from Buonarrotist republicans, who loathed him, 7 Armand Carrel in Armand Carrel, journaliste. Documents inédits et textes oubliés, ed. R. G. Nobécourt (Rouen: Henri Defontaine, 1935), p. 178. 8  Heinrich Heine, De la France, 19 January 1831, in Edmond Vermeil, Henri Heine: ses vues sur l’Allemagne et les Révolutions Européenne (Paris: Editions Sociales Internationales, 1939), p. 35. 9  Cited in Etienne-Denis Pasquier, Memoires (Paris: E. Plon et Nourrit, 1895), vol. 4, pp. 389–96. 10  See François-André Isambert, De la Charbonnerie au Saint-Simonisme, étude sur la jeunesse de Buchez (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1966) and Alan B. Spitzer, Old Hatreds and Young Hopes: The French Carbonari against the Bourbon Restoration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).

Two Traditions of Radical Democracy  125 above even monarchy. Lafayette did not share young republicans’ understanding that popular associations (or even the republican secret societies) were an arena of republican virtue or the engine of political change, nor did he view the virtues as a force for political mobilization, or a set of practices to engage in, or a manifestation of republican fraternity. Lafayette believed virtues were realized through his own person, where he formed a central part of the gallery of grand Plutarchian heroes. Liberty was for the nation, which was not clearly distinguished from the republic in his mind. Interlinked with this, fraternity was the sentiment of great sympathy existing between peoples who were engaged in a concomitant battle for freedom—more specifically, it was his own affectionate feelings towards other republicans whom he wished to help. He supported, in real and substantial ways, republicans struggling for freedom in Greece, Spain, Poland, and across the Americas. This understanding of the cause of liberty, and his special role in delivering it, was demonstrated by genuine support for the new generation of republicans: ‘their enthusiasm reminded him of his own fervour in the years of his youth . . . He saw it as his duty to guide them himself; he did not want to feel that they were risking more than he was risking himself.’11 Lafayette spoke constantly of the young generation of republicans, and his role as patriarch, supporting and defending them at every opportunity: ‘this new generation is enlightened and generous, superior to the ideas of jacobinism and bonapartism. They hold, I am quite sure, the aim of pure liberty.’12 So Lafayette, despite the wide array of obvious limitations on view, represented the only oppositional figure of sufficient stature who could proclaim the principles of 1789 with recognized national authority. When visiting Lyon in the months before the July Revolution, local republican associations carefully planned ‘spontaneous’ events for him, part of the plan to foster his name as the focus for the upcoming battle. According to contemporary witnesses, as he arrived at the city’s outskirts, an immense crowd of 50,000 to 60,000 people arrived to lead him in, and followed behind his carriage. At the head of this crowd were 500 horsemen, 800 men on foot, a long train of vehicles, with a four-horse carriage for Lafayette himself. Lafayette made a speech celebrating ‘the ardour with which the Lyonnais had defended, in every era, the cause of liberty’, and happily continued on to a huge banquet of 500 people the next day in his honour. This was repeated in towns right across France. At Grenoble, for example, they gave him a crown of oak leaves made out of silver, funded by public subscription of 50 centimes each ‘as a witness of the gratitude of the people’. His statue began to be reproduced everywhere. The historian of the period Vaulabelle wrote that everywhere Lafayette went, ‘it was an almost royal welcome’.13 The Bourbons, on the other 11 Rémusat, Mémoires. 12  Cited in Pasquier, Mémoires, vol. 6, p. 93. 13 Pierre Angrand, ‘Les Tendances Egalitaires et Socialistes dans les Societés Secrètes Français 1830–1834’, in ‘1848 et les Révolutions du XIXe Siècle’, Revue d’Histoire Politique, Èconomique et Sociale 39, no. 181 (1948), p. 8.

126  Karma Nabulsi hand, did not receive any such welcome when they ventured out from their ­palace, not only because of their own unpopularity. The celebrations for Lafayette were carefully orchestrated by local republican committees, and were the result of constant and meticulous planning and mobilization: he was to be their pierre angulaire, foundation stone, of the coming revolution: ‘their job was to give consistency to this project by attaching, one by one, ever more powerful individuals’.14 Towards the end of this process of mobilization, in January 1830, six months before the planned revolution was to be launched, Lafayette was appointed leader of their Committee of Action. A call to raise his name was distributed throughout a broad network, and then used by republicans across Europe in Poland, Belgium, Italy, and Germany, just before and in the days after the July Revolution: the concussion of July had been felt in every part of Europe. The name of Lafayette served in a manner of a conductor of electric shock. It was in that name, it was to the cry of Vive Lafayette! that at Dresden, at Brunswick, at Hanover, and many other towns of Germany, that the people awoke to liberty.15

More than any wealthy aristocrat committing his purse and his person to the republican cause, his celebrity as the bold fighter for freedom, his devotion to the cause of the American Revolution, his consistent defence of national independence for all peoples; his remarkable endurance throughout the epic violence of the era of revolutions and empire; his obvious affection for young French patriots battling to free their country, his commitment to a maintenance and upkeep of his myth as father of freedom, all marked Lafayette as the only institutional address: a safe house for republican dreams. Yet, in spite of all this dedicated collective work, in a spectacular set of gaffes and betrayals during the ‘Trois Glorieuses’, Lafayette allowed himself to be outmanoeuvred by the supporters of the new king Louis Philippe. As much as myth of liberator appealed, he was equally fascinated with the role he could play as facilitator during revolutions—one which he had played so disastrously in 1789 and once again in 1830. His ‘self-understanding seemed always to rely on conceptions of himself as an indispensable go-between’.16 In the months leading up to the summer revolution, he was involved in republicans’ secret plans and their insurrectionary committees; he made critical and fateful promises to them. The leader of the students’ societies involved in the conspiracy, Robin Morhery, gives a vivid account of how Lafayette talked them out of receiving an approach from

14  Armand Carrel, Oeuvres politiques et littéraires d’Armand Carrel, mises en ordre, annotées, et précédées d’une notice sur l’auteur, ed. M. Littré and M. Paulin (Paris: F. Chamerot, 1859), vol. 5, p. 111. 15 B. Sarrans, Lafayette et la revolution de 1830 (Paris: Librarie de Thoisner Desplaces, 1832), vol. 2, p. 5. 16 Kramer, Lafayette in Two Worlds, p. 39.

Two Traditions of Radical Democracy  127 the liberals before the revolution, declaring: ‘I fear at the moment we shall succeed, they would abuse it in reconstituting a monarchy, whereas mark this well my young friends (saying this while gripping the hands of Morhery): if we triumph, it is for the Republic.’17 Lafayette led negotiations for the victorious republican side in the transition to a new regime. Whilst playing the dominant role installing Louis Philippe as new regent, ‘surrounded by republican institutions’, as Lafayette had promised, he couldn’t steel himself to obtain necessary verbal or written agreements from the king-to-be on the type of government to be established, or how these republican institutions could be developed. As the republican historian Louis Blanc explained it: ‘As for M. de Lafayette, he might have done anything in those days, and he did nothing’.18 Indeed, at the moments in the revolution where it seemed republican influence inside the negotiations was flagging, with the republican leaders ready to bring a mobilized and determined crowd straight from the street into the decision-making room to ensure improvements, Lafayette would suddenly find he could act. He would step onto the balcony, or meet the angry protestors and young republicans at his room at the Hotel de Ville, going out of his way to reassure them and soothe them, sending them home while promising he would remain true to their cause—they could count on him. He was their commander: they had to obey him—he persuaded them to make the people ‘stop protesting and go away’.19 At the moment he held supreme power, Lafayette dropped any chance of guaranteeing protections for a free press, the creation of an independent judiciary, freedom of civic associations in public space, and especially the commitment to democratic elections to determine a legitimate government. This power, delegated to him, had been won by republicans after a long, dangerous and difficult campaign, culminating in three days of popular battle with many wounded and killed. Blanc portrayed their despair on learning of Lafayette’s role: as long as a government of transition had been in question, he had been ad­equate to it, even delighted with it. Surrounded at the Hotel de Ville by a little court, the buzzing of which was pleasant to his ear, he enjoyed, with somewhat childish simplicity, the noisy veneration bestowed on his old age. In that cabinet, which was the focus of news from all points, whence proclamations issued every moment, where the business of government consisted in signing one’s name, there was much ado and little done—a condition of things exceedingly congenial 17 R. Morhery, Réponse aux outrages et aux calomnies dirigés contre moi par M. Bigrel et consorts dans un pamphlet signé Bigrel (Paris: Loudeac, 1832), p. 135. 18  Louis Blanc, The History of Ten Years: 1830–1840 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1844), vol. 1, p. 190. 19  Armand Marrast, Fastes de la Révolution française: Revue chronologique de l’Histoire de France, depuis 1787 jusqu’en 1835 (Paris: Guillaumin, 1835), p. 420.

128  Karma Nabulsi to weak minds, because unproductive bustling helps them to conceal from themselves their dread of all that bears the stamp of decision. That dread animated Lafayette in the highest degree, and it was manifest in him when the time came in which he should declare himself positively. To the danger of doing what he wished, he preferred that of doing what he did not wish.20

2.  Radical Republicans in 1830: Buonarroti As Lafayette took his fateful place on the balcony with the Orléanist prince, making himself the ‘Great Legislator’ of all France, another septuagenarian was anxiously accelerating attempts to create a different living legend from enforced exile in Brussels. Impatiently hearing the momentous story in Paris unfold, he confessed that the 1830 Revolution had come as a complete surprise: ‘the happy revolution carried out by the courage of the Parisian people has arrived like a bolt of lightning’, he wrote to his friend Charles Teste.21 Filippo Buonarroti, ‘the greatest conspirator who ever lived’, as Bakunin was to  later salute him, immediately realized that, even if a popular revolution for democracy in France was finally under way, the role of conspiracy was more important now than ever before.22 Under these new circumstances he had to prepare himself to take the vertiginous step of recasting his public role, while remaining tenaciously—and mysteriously—behind the curtains of the emerging public domain. He would not change his principles, nor his methods, as these two were inseparable—indeed his aim was to introduce these core republican principles to  a new generation of youth, who had no living memory of them. Buonarroti believed it was the absence of these principles that would cause this new revolution to fail, as had all the previous ones. He was convinced he knew the fatal outcome of this one already, for his immense experience had taught him that, above all else, ‘man is weak and his intelligence is narrow; he floats ceaselessly between hope and fear’.23 Buonarroti was determined to take a key role in shaping the unfolding epic (as Lafayette was now doing so lethally for the republic); he too wished to guide, to lead, to shape, to assume control. There was so much revolutionary activity taking place around him, with none being directed by him. He sensed these initiatives were quite doomed given ‘all revolutions fail because of the men who 20 Blanc, History of Ten Years, vol. 1, p. 191. 21 F. Buonarroti, Letter from Buonarroti to Teste, Brussels, August 1830, in Papiers Buonarroti (hereafter PB), Bibliothèque Nationale de France (hereafter BN); fonds NAF 20804, 16. Some letters from fonds NAF 20803 and 20,804 were published in Paul Robiquet, Buonarroti et la Secte des Egaux d’Àpres des Documents Inèdits (Paris: Hachette, 1910). 22  Cited in Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The First Professional Revolutionist: Filippo Michele Buonarroti (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), p. 1. 23  F. Buonarroti, ‘Loi ou Religion Naturelle’, PB, BN, fonds NAF 20803.

Two Traditions of Radical Democracy  129 directed them’.24 He expressed these sombre concerns to Charles Teste in Paris, who was involved in the republicans’ desperate attempts to wrest the revolution back from Lafayette’s slippery hands. ‘Let us hope the blood spilled was not spilled uselessly for the true liberty of all Frenchmen! It is now more than ever the moment to combine a firm resolution with a very great prudence,’ he warned.25 He could already claim to know the outcome because he, Buonarroti, was the acknowledged leader—and founder—of almost every republican secret society in Europe, from the long dark years of his exile from France, since 1796. The Loges des Amis, then the Triangle, both freemason associations for the old true revolutionaries formed in 1806 in Geneva; the Filadephi, made up of anti-Bonapartist soldiers serving inside Napoleon’s army across Europe in 1808; the mysterious Illuminati, and his secretive Sublimes Maitres Parfaits that operated as the fulcrum connecting the carbonari to the freemasons after 1809; the subsequent even more secret section of the Maitres entitled Le Monde, formed before 1828. Each of these were dedicated to the creation of a real revolution, a true revolution, a revolution to recreate the lost Republic of Virtue.26 Aristocratic descendant of Michelangelo from one of the grandest of Florentine families, precocious student radical in a stifling autocratic Italy, medium-level Jacobin functionary during the Revolution, he became known only towards its end as the co-conspirator of Babeuf ’s plot, which in 1796 had attempted to overturn the Thermidor reaction that had decapitated his beloved Robespierre. Even then, his role was little known outside certain recherché circles—he had not been a member of the famous elected convention that had proclaimed the radical version of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, as was Jean-Baptiste Cavaignac, Godefroy’s father. Instead he spent those years as an Italian bureaucrat, with newly acquired French citizenship, attempting to impose a top-down Jacobin legal regime upon an unhappy and reluctant Corsica. Preparation for this new role as leader of the revolution in Paris was set in train by the production of an extensive account of Babeuf ’s infamous conspiracy, which he published in Brussels in 1828. It was to be his calling card to the new generation of republicans. It set out to reintroduce them to the greatest of all republican virtues, that of equality. The book was not simply the device to install the importance of the virtue of equality over liberty and fraternity in their minds, it was Buonarroti’s instruction manual on the true meaning of republican virtue: how to recognize it, how it must be used and by whom, how it was to be revered

24 F. Buonarroti, Programme pour un révolution, PB, BN, fonds NAF 20803. 25 C. Teste, PB, BN, fonds NAF 20804. The collection of papers include Buonarroti’s famed Appunti Antilafayettiani, where he described Lafayette as ‘un grand criminel qu’on toujours prôné comme le plus vertueux des hommes, qui a passé sa vie à se faire idolâtrer par sa chère bourgeoisie’. 26  See Arthur Lehning, ‘Buonarroti and His International Secret Societies’, International Review of Social History 1, no. 1 (1956), pp. 111, and 120–1 for the debate on dates and origins of the societies’ formation. See also Saitta, Filippo Buonarroti, vol. 2, annexe.

130  Karma Nabulsi and adhered to. Its subject was less the trial of the conspirators (which ended with Gracchus Babeuf ’s sentence of execution and Buonarroti’s imprisonment and subsequent deportation). It was about 9 Thermidor: that moment of the greatest betrayal, the sublime nature of the glorious cause it betrayed, and a forensically detailed description of who had betrayed it, their total, absolute lack of virtue: ‘the infatuation of the atheists, the errors of the Hébertists, the immorality of the Dantonists, the humbled pride of the Girondists, the dark plots of the Royalists, the gold of England—all disappointed, on the ninth Thermidor, the hopes of the French people, and of the human race’.27 During that turbulent summer of 1830 in Paris, he was to emerge as a living, walking standard of the 1793 Revolution: ‘virtuous Buonarroti, venerable patriarch of equality, who lives in our times as a great and pious memory of the magnificent past’.28 Le Conspiration des Egaux dit Babeuf announced him as official bearer of the memory and fidelity to a fleeting phase at the height of the French Revolution, where the grandeur of Robespierre’s vision almost took hold. The last thirty years of Buonarroti’s indefatigable conspiring, from wherever he was being chased by police—Grenoble, Geneva, and finally from Brussels—was aimed solely at retrieving that regime of virtue, through operations of his multilevelled underground societies connecting, in a vast network, an unknown number of cities, agents, cells, initiation rites, charters, and grades (ranks). It was his analysis on the failures of revolutions that he sought to stamp into the republican mind. Until one absorbed this understanding, and accepted it, everything would be a failure, and anyone attempting anything in its face were, themselves, dangerous: Buonarroti loved the people, and had never ceased to conspire for them; yet with the distrust of an experienced observer, and the calmness of the philosopher, studying men before resigning himself to them, armed with a clear sightedness akin to suspicion, circumspect in his choice of allies, and reckoning for less on their number than on the sincerity of their devotion.29

Some of the new generation of republicans were indeed ready to revere him. The Italian republican Joachim Pratl declared: I made the acquaintance of the greatest man among the republicans on the Continent—yes I must say the greatest political character I ever met in all my life . . . the most amiable, talented, vigorous and devoted mind that Italy had 27  Filippo Buonarroti, Buonarroti’s History of Babeuf ’s Conspiracy for Equality: With the Author’s Reflections on the Causes and Character of the French Revolution, and His Estimate of the Leading Men and Events of That Epoch, trans. Bronterre O’Brian (London: H. Hetherington, 1836), p. 184. 28 B. Hauréau, La Montagne: Notices Historiques et Philosophiques sur les Principaux Membres de la Montagne (Paris: J. Bréauté, 1834), p. 112. 29 Eisenstein, First Professional Revolutionist, p. 121.

Two Traditions of Radical Democracy  131 produced for some centuries—I mean Philipp [sic] Buonarroti . . . Neither the success of his antagonists, the glory of Napoleon, the combined efforts of the Holy Alliance, the treachery of several of his friends, the calumnies of his enemies, neither exile nor poverty ever shook his mind, nor relented his endeavours; and I found him a man of seventy, with silver hair floating over his most prepossessing countenance, with a Prometheus-like energy, bidding defiance to the powers of the earth, arousing all far and near to break the chains of despotism.30

This combination of defiance and absolute energy for radical change attached them to him. They sought the audacity of spirit which had created the previous French Revolution to assist them in theirs. Young Louis Blanc, an ardent republican, was utterly taken by his revolutionary history, his wiseness, and his array of republican virtues, his ample brow, thoughtful look, and haughty curve of the lip, on which prudence however, had set her seal—all conspired to liken him to the sages of ancient Greece. He had their virtue, wisdom, and goodness; and his very authority was tempered by infinite sweetness. Endowed, like all men of pure conscious, with admirable serenity of mind . . . his opinions might truly be said to be of heavenly origin, since they aimed at reviving among mankind the brotherhood taught by the Gospel.31

Other young men not even republican in orientation fell under his enchanting spell. One of his young music students later wrote (while serving several years in prison for his secret activities on Buonarroti’s behalf) of life-changing encounters with the old radical: the proud and vigorous speech of this descendent of Michelangelo, his brief but weighty sentences, his strange revelations—sometimes clear and precise as if he were participating in actual events, sometimes mysterious like the oracles of the sibyls, made such an impression on me that I frequently thought of him as an occult power, whose shadowy tentacles extended over and stirred part of Europe . . . Nothing was unknown to him, science, history, literature all entered into his conversations when one was able to tear him away from his obsession: the Republic of 93.32

30  Penny Satirist, 21 March 1838. In Lehning, ‘Buonarroti and His International Secret Societies’, pp. 139–40. 31  Louis Blanc, Histoire des Dix Ans (Paris: Pagnerre, 1849), vol. 2, pp. 221–2. 32 Alexandre Andryane, Souvenirs de Génève (Brussels: Société Belge de Librarie, 1839), vol. 1, pp. 134, 147.

132  Karma Nabulsi That fierce obsession with the ‘Republic of 93’ inspired some who had never experienced its glories, but it was what made others hesitate. If the older generation of exiled revolutionary republicans in Brussels were repelled by the harsher aspects of his doctrine, Buonarroti at all times radiated a gentle, sweet soulfulness: attentive, courteous, amiable, amusing. In a Brussels then filled with exiled ‘grey hairs’ of the Revolution, daily encounters between the aged revolutionaries took place in the Café des Mille Colonnes (where they occasionally booked the public room La Blagueagerie for meetings), on a park bench, or in their homes, immersed in an endless discussion of politics. One conventionnel he befriended, the renowned revolutionary Marc-Guillaume Vadier, took to inviting Buonarroti to meals with his family, although he and the other exiles expressed mixed feelings about the old man amongst themselves: ‘I felt a bit awkward with him because I so disapprove of his system from every single point of view’. Another of the exiled revolutionaries, Marc-Antoine Baudot, found himself gripped by ‘an invincible revulsion’ for Buonarroti’s positions.33 Yet none appeared to despise him as much as Buonarroti was quietly and passionately despising them as it turns out. They found him a calm, kindly old man from a different era—a bit severe, wearing a funny little waistcoat ‘a la Robespierre’; an ambulant evocation of fastidious incorruptibility. He had given up his immense fortune and patrimony in Italy, and earned his living like his hero Jean-Jacques Rousseau (variations of whose name he borrowed over years of secret aliases), from music lessons on his old clavier, and Italian lessons to well-born young men at 15 sous apiece. This baffling combination of qualities was noted by younger charges, ‘strange character! Wherein one finds united all the virtues of a Greek sage with all the exaggerations of a Jacobin of 93.’34 Encounters sometimes had an unsettling effect: ‘Buonarroti inspired an almost fearful veneration in all those who knew him, for his distaste for worldly goods, for his devotion to the cause of equality’.35 For most, he remained an outsider, a profoundly mysterious, odd character. For some of the younger generation however, he symbolized a radical boldness from a mythical era, clearly fearless in the face of tyranny. Moreover, the fact he had never given up on the political arena, and was himself constantly and actively organizing for change, gave rise to respect. While enjoying the pleasures of old Vadier’s household in the months before the July Revolution and his move to Paris, Buonarroti was writing an almost daily devastating appraisal of his host’s politics and morals—although he kept his thoughts from Vadier, for whom he felt an affection, and from whom he was

33  Cited in A. Galante Garrone, ‘Filippo Buonarotti e i Convenzionali in Esilio (dalle carte inedite della famiglia Vadier)’, Movimento Operaio 5 (1953), annexe G, p. 48. 34 Andryane, Souvenirs de Génève, pp. 197–8 35 G. Weill, La France sous la monarchie constitutionnelle 1814–1848 (Paris: F. Alcan, 1912), pp. 34–5.

Two Traditions of Radical Democracy  133 accepting both hospitality and friendship. Vadier had entrusted him with a draft of his memoirs. Buonarroti wrote, Here I find myself tied to Vadier, and by this contre-coup in contact with Barrère, his friend. Is it because I esteem them, is it because I see in them two strong standards of Liberty, two founding sages of the Republique? I am obliged to state that in my eyes they do not merit this honour, neither one nor the other.36

He remained unimpressed in the quality of Vadier’s virtues and views on the revolution. The right to act, Buonarroti argued, is ‘only given to a small number of men, eminently virtuous, who can prescribe to their actions the creation of rules that conform to the interests of society’. He did not count Vadier and the others left behind, after the stormy epochs of the Revolution and Empire, amongst these perfect few. The virtuous few could do anything, but for the others, once divine sanction is erased from their spirit, what is left to guide them is purely personal interests. Even if laws are strict, and education well given, there is always a great number of cases where man can only be given to sacrifices and devotion by a rare virtue, or by the thoughts of a omniscient and secret judge, and a life of the future.37

The location for possible future action was in a new generation, and the most active and ardent of those were now to be found in Paris. Whilst preparing himself for his definitive move to Paris, Buonarroti was already declaring that the current political changes were, in all likelihood, doomed. While the exhilarating echoes of the July Revolution reverberating across Europe were at their peak, he was writing to a few close associates about his disappointment and profound sadness at the inevitable disillusion that was to come, and that he alone could see. He believed the vast majority of people were too weak to implement the necessary steps to change things for the good. He constantly measured the people and found them wanting: ‘if one can relieve them of fear or the hope of another life, there remains no other motive for their actions than a love of pleasure and a fear of pain. They are not capable of either the fervour of devotion, nor actions that inspire passion and real glory.’38 Only a few could be virtuous enough not to fail this standard—one must remember, all revolutions had been betrayed. He was let down by most people, and made sad. Buonarroti did not publicize these melancholic views while beginning to establish himself within the tumultuous new arena of young republican Paris—his task was to discover whom he 36  F. Buonarroti, ‘Notes sur les Memoirs de Vadier’, PB, BN, fonds NAF 20804. 37 Ibid. 38 Saitta, Filippo Buonarroti, vol. 2, appendix, p. 185.

134  Karma Nabulsi might count on, whom he could trust with such a difficult mission, whom would be loyal, and steadfast. Buonarroti’s Conspiration portrayed an individual driven by a powerful and dynamic philosophy of the republican good life, with a vision that was radically different from virtues as conceived and practised by the rising generation of republicans, and even further from Lafayette’s own vague and liberal vision. Far removed from young republicans’ current understanding of practising virtues as the mobilizing force for revolutionary change, Buonarroti believed, from his own lengthy and harsh experience of revolutions, that those permitted to act must possess what he described as a rare virtue—and it is not without reason. This virtue consists of a total selfimmolation for the good of others without any view of personal wellbeing, without any other joy that results from the contemplation of the immediate happiness, or the distant one of our fellows. It is the complete sacrifice of our affections, of our senses, and of our interests, which in perfection can only be shared by a very small number of souls of extraordinary temperament.

As for the rest they must follow those virtuous few: ‘with respect to action, whether preparatory or definitive, it is absolutely necessary that impulse comes from above and that all the rest obey’.39 He held up the infinite beauty that was Robespierre’s Republic of Virtue—he described this lost world in the exact rhetorical style and mannerisms of those who had lived through the exalted years of reign of the Jacobin clubs, and were living in its midst still. Only he could truly appreciate it, and measure what a unique and brilliant man was Robespierre. How freshly terrible the betrayal of his execution felt, and Buonarroti would cry to remember it, wiping his eyes as he sat with a music pupil. The primacy of equality as the foundation of a republic was drawn from his attachment to the writings of Jean-Jacques, ‘his master’, as he proclaimed him at his trial in 1795. A far different Rousseau from the one so beloved by Cavaignac or even Lafayette, but surely the same Rousseau so adored by the infallible Robespierre. In setting out his ‘System of Equality’ in the Conspiration, he begins by explaining: Rousseau proclaimed the inalienable rights of human nature. He pleaded for all mankind without distinction. He placed the prosperity of society in the happiness of each of its members, and its strength in the attachment of all to the laws. In his view, public riches consist in the industry and moderation of the citizens, and liberty resides in the power of the sovereign, which is the entire body of the

39 Buonarroti, Idée Generale d’une Societé Sécrète, in Saitta, Filippo Buonarroti, appendix, pp. 105, 107.

Two Traditions of Radical Democracy  135 people, and of which each element preserves in itself the influence necessary to the social body, by means of an impartial distribution of enjoyments and of intelligence . . . This social order subjects the will of the sovereign people the acts and properties of each individual . . . This social order of Rousseau is the same for . . . all true philosophers.40

By the late 1820s, Buonarroti had had to take account of the developments that had occurred since the fall of Robespierre, and the necessary organizational changes that were now both obvious and inevitable. Many things had become even clearer since the progressive failing of several false revolutions-each destroyed before they had had a chance to succeed. There was now even more evidence as to the precise reasons for their failures. Republican liberty, therefore, had to wait for real equality to be established, otherwise liberty itself could never be achieved, and would itself be betrayed: can one have liberty the morning after the insurrection? No, one can only institute the hope for it. In what does this liberty consist? In the submission of all to the will that is truly general. Many reforms are needed before the general will can be enacted or recognised. Before these reforms are enacted, the people cannot not perceive the general will nor declare it . . . It follows from this that at the start of a revolution, supreme authority cannot be delegated by a free choice of the People.41

It all still depended upon the extraordinary strength that was required by exceptional men. For to ‘undertake such a reform, and then to halt at the firmness it requires, is but to avow one’s cowardice and want of foresight. It is worse . . . it is, in fact, to want virtue.’42 Robespierre, that ‘redeemer of humanity’, understood that the establishment of a republic entailed a new way of life, and that before conferring on the people the exercise of sovereign power, it was necessary to render the love of virtue general—to substitute disinterestedness and modesty for avarice, vanity, and ambition. They knew that coercive and extraordinary measures, indispensable to operate so happy and great a change, are irreconcilable with the forms of regular organization. They know, in sum, that to establish, without these preliminaries, the constitutional order of elections, would be only to abandon their power to the friends of all abuse, and thus lose forever the opportunity of establishing general happiness.43 40 Buonarroti, Babeuf ’s Conspiracy for Equality, p. 10. 41 Buonarroti, Programme pour un Révolution, in Saitta, Filippo Buonarroti, appendix, p. 78. 42 Buonarroti, Observations sur Maximilien Robespierre, in A. Saitta, Filippo Buonarroti, appendix, p. 268. 43 Ibid.

136  Karma Nabulsi Here the importance of the role of his secret societies was revealed: they are the instrument of virtuous men who will be required to create and maintain the republic. For many younger republicans, secret societies were necessary only because all open democratic republican associations were banned under the monarchy. As for Lafayette, he ‘would have conspired on the public square’. But for Buonarroti, the secret society was everything. It was the training school of republican virtue, and its disciplines, its rules, and its methodology were all intrinsic to his purposes. The complex and confusing hierarchy was an absolute necessity, as were the grades—not simply to baffle spies and confuse police networks, but for the good of the members themselves. As poor Andryane his music student, captured in 1823 by Metternich’s police laden with a sackful of this secret materiel, was to reflect: strange mania, all these rules, statutes, ciphers, certificates to which he [Buonarroti] attaches as much importance as one used to give to titles of nobility or of knighthood, as if it were necessary to make use of all these vain formalities in order to reach an understanding and to act accordingly! But he thinks that men need, in order to form an efficient and permanent political association, to be tied to each other by signs, by mysteries that flatter their sense of self-importance, and make the society to which they belong seem important . . . he bases this on his own experience, and perhaps he is right.44

Buonarroti believed that one must baffle those individuals persuaded to join the society for their affection and attachment. The real reason for the creation of a powerful hierarchy was to preserve the ability of the virtuous to act. Leaders had to remain protected from the lower grades and to direct matters safely from the heights. In 1830 Buonarroti was faced with a disturbing predicament. The most courageous, talented, and virtuous republicans, indeed those he imagined would unerringly follow his principles, were not following these principles at all, but were instead pursuing a highly dangerous strategy that was destined to failure. More than anything he was anxious to avert yet another catastrophe. The atmosphere in the new Paris he had recently arrived into was drastically different from the careful strict republican practices he was used to, and still committed to, through long years of craft honed overcoming endless obstacles, trials, and challenges. These young republicans audaciously celebrated the Republic of 1793, but the Robespierre they cherished and admired did not bear the slightest resemblance to the one he knew and loved. This Paris possessed a vibrant and effervescent republican polity, where the strategy appeared to be to conquer and hold as much

44  Andryane, in I. Rinieri, Della Vita e delle opere di Silvio Pellico (Turin: 1899), vol. 2, p. 328.

Two Traditions of Radical Democracy  137 public space as one could, in every institution, and every social, political, and civic arena, by using a variety of tools, associations, methods, and individuals— secretly and publicly. Revolutionary force, it was asserted, would be continually ignited through mobilization, and this was the means to create a certain and triumphant future for the people. The strategy of working on a number of fronts, while employing a wide range of techniques, was what republican virtues meant for these republicans. Their ambition to fashion liberty through the virtue of fraternity developing, expanding, and reliant upon the force of popular sovereignty, and the grandeur and beauty of the general will, was bewildering to him. For Buonarroti, given his bitter and bleak experience, this new strategy was unquestionably unsound. Only a few should ever shape events and direct them, and these popular societies, the populace itself—the general will even—was now the mortal threat to the Republic. His magnificent world of republican virtue had been lost—indeed murdered—by a debased and corrupted mankind, the vanities of weak and foolish men. This could only be reversed by providential men who had, once again, to take control and redeem the Republic: he meant Robespierre; he meant himself. He was needed, that much was clear. His task was to save this new generation of republicans and their collapsing revolution by rebuilding the true remembrance of a virtuous past, of exactly what it comprised of, and by defining for them—carefully, as was his way-the virtuous path to the future.45

3.  Radical Republicans in 1830: Cavaignac In 1830 young Godefroy Cavaignac was the prince, the Dauphin, the hero of the republican movement. Born Jacques-Eléanor-Louis-Godefroy, his political lineage was impeccable—his father Jean-Baptiste Eugène was a member of the famous Convention that had proclaimed the Republic in September 1792. As a young man in Brussels where his father was exiled, he eagerly absorbed republican philosophy in the salons of David, Levasseur, Vadier, and Cambon, surrounded by old conventionnels who spoke in glorious terms of the world they had built and then lost. He listened carefully to their endless rehearsals and analyses of the mistakes and triumphs of the Revolution, and their lengthy explanations for the causes of each. Although he drew inspiration from the Great Revolution and, like the rest of his generation, from an education grounded in classical notions of republican freedom drawn from Rome and Athens, he was not bound by the limits of either. He stood at the crossroads between the past and the future—his two favourite

45  ‘Écrits de Ph. Buonarroti, Voyer D’Argenson’, Les Révolutions du XIX Siècle (Paris: EDHIS, 1974), vol. 7.

138  Karma Nabulsi watchwords were ‘faith and the future’.46 Cavaignac believed utterly in the theory of progress and in the perfectibility of man. ‘From the doctrine of progress runs this great principle that has made from man, not as a right but as a duty, to reverse with intelligence and strength all that opposes his perfectibility’.47 He represented an entirely new generation; his benign image of the rights of man was not tainted by the terror nor the violence of previous generations of republicans. He could speak boldly and without remorse about the achievements of the revolution; he made it all look effortless and natural, inevitable and seamless. He believed ardently in what he called la force révolutionnaire: ‘the reaction of man against evil by his intelligence, his virtue, and his activities’.48 He was driven by the most passionate set of republican virtues, and believed in and relied upon that of fraternity, more than upon any other, in order to achieve freedom. That summer, after the revolution failed to create the republic they had fought for, he published a declaration addressed to the citizens of France in the name of the Association Aide Toi le Ciel t’Aidera: ‘Citizens! Our first need is  to reconnect fraternally with you, to reassert the links with those of you whose devotion and patriotism had so powerfully assisted in the task we had undertaken.’49 He was hard to pigeon-hole, and broke all conventional classifications. Instead of characterizing him on the Jacobin left, radical left, or centre of the republican movement (as he somehow managed to encapsulate all three), he described himself as representing something new, yet familiar, and all embracing— the ‘tendance fraternelle’. Everyone who met Godefroy Cavaignac fell over themselves trying to describe how extraordinary he was, how special, and how touched they were by him. Friend and enemy alike were struck by his astonishing good looks, his charisma and his passion, his intellectual brilliance, his glamorous style of politics, his indefatigable energy, and above all his serene and authoritative optimism. One political enemy described him thus: Exceedingly tall and vital but slender, his eyes frequently half closed and often sad, his mouth shadowed by a thick moustache, he had the military bearing of one who knows how to go straight ahead, and in his entire being a proud intrepidity that gave the impression of—if one can combine these two words—a paladin of democracy. The role imposed upon himself did not stop one from seeing, in intimate moments, a profound tenderness and gentleness that made him loved, and his particular way of treating unimportant people with an amiable

46 Godefroy Cavaignac, ‘La Force Révolutionnaire’, in Paris Révolutionnaire, ed. G.  Cavaignac (Paris: Guillaumin et Cie, 1848), pp. 5–6. 47 Ibid. 48  Ibid., p. 14. 49  G. Cavaignac, ‘Aide-toi, le ciel t’aidera’, Circulaire de G. Cavaignac sur le programme républicain. 20 août 1830 (Paris: Imprimerie H. Fournier, 1830), p. 1.

Two Traditions of Radical Democracy  139 courtesy was so elegant, and seemed to go strangely with the implacable passions of the sectarian.50

Another political enemy, on the other side of the Channel, was equally disarmed by his singular character. The historian Carlyle, who loathed both republicans and the French Revolution, first believed Cavaignac’s writing demonstrated ‘a gloomy Satanic strength’, and that he was ‘possessed with the revolution . . . Absolutely a  kind of frightful man’—but completely changed his views once meeting him. ‘A courageous energetic man, with much free Nature and bonhomie in his composition, really a Son of Nature,’ he declared, his highest form of praise. Carlyle’s wife Jane captured their impression of Cavaignac: a man with that sort of half-savage beauty with which one would paint a fallen angel, who fears neither Heaven nor Earth for aught one can see; who fights and writes with the same passionate intrepidity, who is ready to dare or to suffer, to love or to die, without disturbing himself much about the matter.51

He was ‘endowed with the organization of an artist’ which revealed itself in the ‘original grace of his manners, the freshness of his writings, and a most sparkling conversation’.52 His ‘character, courage, his profound and passionate convictions’ made him ‘an elite among men’.53 All commented upon his ‘remarkable intelligence’, and upon his almost insolent audacity and dramatic verve. John Stuart Mill wrote how Cavaignac gave him the impression of ‘irresistible power and indomitable will’. He explained Cavaignac as being one of those ‘rare, seductive men’ who ‘drew you in with the heart, and then fastened you by his spirit and his character’.54 Mill also wrote to a friend that Cavaignac was a ‘man whose name is energy . . . full of sweetness and amiableness & gentleness he is: intense in everything’.55 It appeared Cavaignac could do anything: debate philosophy or plan secret strategies and tactics, write literary articles and books, edit a newspaper, fight as an artillery officer in the National Guard, make the most brilliant and passionate speeches at the drop of a hat. ‘He thought nothing of playing excellent music in a salon after leaving a meeting of the secret society Amis du Peuple.’56 50 P. Thureau-Dangin, Histoire de la Monarchie de Juillet (Paris: Plon, 1888), vol. 1, pp. 586–7. 51 Carlyle, letters, 20 January 1834, 2 May 1836; to Jane Carlyle, 11 September 1836, cited in F.  W.  Hilles, ‘The Hero as Revolutionary: Godefroy Cavaignac’, in Carlyle and His Contemporaries, Essays in Honor of Charles Richard Sanders, ed. John Clubbe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1976), p. 74. 52 Blanc, Histoire des Dix Ans, vol. 1, p. 178. 53  Weil, ‘Paul Dubois’, p. 95. 54 J. S. Mill, Dissertations and Discussions (London: J. S. Parker, 1859), vol. 1, p. 266. 55 Cited in C.  Ambert, Portraits Republicains: Armand Carrel, Godefroy Cavaignac, Armand Marrast, Colonel Charras (Paris, Lacroix et cie., 1870), pp. 83–4. 56  Emmanuel Gonzales, ‘Introduction’, in Godefroy Cavaignac Romans Militaire (Paris: C. Varnier, 1866), pp. x–xi.

140  Karma Nabulsi He was viewed by those who met him or knew of him as exceptionally heroic in the classic mould of a leader; inspiring, encouraging, and directing people. His virtues were located within his persona, within his own individual power: ‘arresting ideas, a generous commitment and a chivalric courage’.57 Self-deprecating and charismatic at the same time, it was the striking presence of the man himself which people admired, for he touched everyone who met him, and he was deeply revered: ‘this grand and much loved spirit, this intrepid heart, this imagination full of light, this admirable assemblage of force and grace, energy and tenderness, feminine sensibility and proud virility, of reason and of ardour, this nature of a man of State, poet, chivalric knight’.58 Yet Cavaignac saw things about himself (and especially the role he was destined to play) quite differently; he had a very decided theory of the work he was engaged upon, far removed from the classic leadership role many sought to sketch out for him. Like Buonarroti, his republicanism was drawn directly from the Revolution, and the mythical epoch of his father’s generation of the 1790s. Although he grew up obsessed with reading the classics by Plutarch ‘with a passion’, knowing the accounts of the republican heroes of Rome, Athens, and Sparta by heart, he did not seek to borrow from these ancient models for the institutional design of the republic he wished to establish.59 It was the virtues that these heroes relied on as their mobilizing machinery that he drew from these stories. What he celebrated time and time again, and brought to centre stage was the ‘laconism of the virtue’ displayed by ordinary citizens, who ‘generously’ engaged in the battle for a free republic.60 His model for a just republic was not imaginary antiquity, rather it was the one everyone in France seemed afraid under the Bourbon regime of the last fifteen years to even whisper of, and the one he saw as his duty to restore: that of the French Revolution—all of it, from dizzying and ephemeral beginnings to its bloody and chaotic end. The rights of man, of insurrection, the project of the Montagnards; above all the absolute necessity of a revolution to establish popular sovereignty and democracy in the face of tyranny and oppression: these were the core objectives. It was not the image of those revolutionary leaders he sought to emulate. He wished instead to celebrate and restore to popular imagination the possibility of doing such things—the great acts of these men, not the men themselves: ‘For it is in the great actions of man that this force deploys all its 57 I.  Tchernoff, Le Parti Républicain sous la Monarchie de Juillet: Formation et Évolution de la Doctrine Républicaine (Paris: Pedone, 1901), p. 239. 58 Alexandre-Auguste Ledru-Rollin, Augustin-Joseph Guinard, Ferdinand Flocon, and LouisBlanc Boissaye, Obsèques de Godefroy Cavaignac: Discours Prononcés sur sa Tombe (Paris: Librarie Plon, 1845), p. 9. 59  E.  Gonzales, ‘Introduction’, in Godefroy Cavaignac Romans Militaire (Paris: C.  Varnier, 1866), p. xvii. 60  G. Cavaignac, ‘Dernier avis aux Électeurs’, Aide Toi le Ciel t’ Aidera, ‘Circulaire de G. Cavaignac relative à la prochaine dissolution de la Chambre, 15 avril, 1830 (Paris: Imprimerie H. Fournier), p. 3.

Two Traditions of Radical Democracy  141 characteristics, all its progressive power’.61 This was the progressive force he believed underlay all great actions, la force révolutionnaire, and it was the essential morality of man that created it. ‘Progress is born of evil, of the horror it inspires . . . Considered in its first order, progress is evil felt, detested, combated; both in its causes and general means . . . reacting through morality . . . Morality in man is a distinct property of his being, a sui generis phenomena . . . the highest of our faculties.’62 What made him distinctive in the left of the republican party with which he was associated, the Montagnards, was his emphasis on the essential role of local, active, and popular republican associations in the battle to obtain republican liberty. He believed in forging the republic from below, by means of radical popular democracy, rather than from above, through the actions of an elite of welleducated revolutionary leaders: the crucial line of division between him and Buonarroti. For society was not ‘a hierarchy of command it is not a legion of soldiers; it is family of brothers, to whom the patrimony belongs to all equally’. Cavaignac argued that it is by association that ‘they recognise this force, and it is by contact with other men that compassion is engaged, and where common sympathies are rekindled, so that the collision of ideas brings forth a light to illuminate their rights; where the exchange of sentiments bear conscience to the equal ability to joy, to suffering’.63 For Cavaignac, the republic already existed wherever republican associations did, and it was within those associations where freedom already reigned. The necessary virtue was in having the passion to organize this great fight for liberty: to organize and to build associations was, in Cavaignac’s model, the method as well as the principle, and above all the goal itself. So for Godefroy Cavaignac, open action was the first principle and virtue, and almost everything, to his mind, was legitimate in the battle to achieve freedom. The arenas for republican struggle were to be engaged upon everywhere—in the courtroom, on the street, and especially in the newspaper, where he edited the republican paper Le Tribune. ‘The press, the elective chamber, the municipalities, the national guards, the associations: here is our terrain, our methods, our right. It is here that we must place ourselves, mobilise, gather for the good of our country, ensure local enfranchisements and individual rights.’64 A friend who had worked alongside him since their teenage years captured the essence of this understanding: ‘struggle and combat was the first principle. It was in everything he did, every principle he carried forward, every moment of his life.’65 61  Caviagnac, ‘La Force Révolutionnaire’, p. 39. 62  Ibid., p. 14. 63  Ibid., p. 27. 64 Godefroy Cavaignac, ‘Aide Toi le Ciel t’Aidera du 20 Aout, 1830’, Documents pour servir a l’Histoire des Sociétés Populaires sous la Monarchie de Juillet. La Société Aide Toi le Ciel t’Aidera, La Révolution de 1848 (Paris: EHSIR, 1914–16), p. 375. 65  Ledru-Rollin et al., Obsèques de Godefroy Cavaignac, p. 12.

142  Karma Nabulsi It was Cavaignac’s confidence in this principle that saw him accede to the c­ onstitutional monarchy of Louis Philippe the Duke of Orléans, although accepting a king was against both his republican principles and his avowed position. In a remarkable scene at the Tuileries during the revolution’s height, he refused the gratitude of the trembling delegation from the liberal Orléanist party, who attempted to thank him for accepting another king to replace the one his young troops had deposed. ‘You are quite mistaken to thank me,’ he interrupted them dismissively, ‘it is merely that we are not now in force. Later, it will be different.’66 His republicanism was not to be imposed—he did not believe in a Babouvist scheme then championed by Buonarroti for a group to seize power by force, against the inclination and expressed will of over half of the populace. Very much in tune with the spirit of the rising generation of republicans, he was a true democrat, and had utter faith in the people around him: for him liberty was the liberty to create one’s form of government. He believed organizations and associations were needed in order to achieve—and once it was achieved, to maintain—this virtuous republic: little republics, little sovereign associations, sovereign individuals, equal citizens, connected together in one great movement, one common project, right across France. This was his vision of ‘la meilleure des Républiques’, a steadfast faith in the sovereignty of the people. He was often called an artist, and this theory of mobilizing organization is indeed best seen as a work of art. In this approach to republican strategy, forging a common broad front, he was able to include several strands of a quarrelling movement, and welcome them all as part of this greater project in the most effective way. Liberty and equality were not to be measured against each other with one chosen over the other, nor were they to be fought over—although he understood only too well that other republicans saw it this way. Cavaignac was generous in this too. His idea of action was not a call to arms alone, in order to overthrow monarchy, eyes focused upon some vague revolutionary upheaval which relied upon a moment of force to achieve dramatic change, whilst directed from a back room. This work was military in design (force was not ignored here, but well understood). This was a thought-through, discussed, and measured position, one that included all streams, all currents, all strands of republicanism from left to right. The thinking and planning was shared, so the plan would be mindful of each area, to ensure common aspects and purposes were understood. This approach to mobilization could change the balance of forces, and defeat established and entrenched regimes successfully in the coming years. This pluralism defined the strength of Cavaignac’s revolutionary philosophy and his brilliance: providing a demonstration of how fraternity worked in plain and tangible terms. 66 I.  Tchernoff, Le Parti Républicain sous la Monarchie de Juillet: Formation et Évolution de la Doctrine Républicaine (Paris: Pedone, 1901), p. 233; G. Weil, Histoire du parti républicain en France de 1814 à 1870 (Paris: Alcan, 1900).

Two Traditions of Radical Democracy  143 This common understanding created a form of political life which became the hallmark of this generation of republicans across Europe. It heralded the invention of new forms of political movement and organized struggle, and of more creative and elastic types of political engagement while remaining steadfast to principles. Cavaignac translated these conceptions of the virtues so that republicans could contribute to a common endeavour where everyone played a role. These revolutionary republican groups engineered a complex mobilization process that began in the mid-1820s, and by the early 1830s had developed into a comprehensive theory of the republican good life. The central feature was in its collective design and engagement. Each member of equally committed, equally respected republicans contributing where and how they could, after lengthy discussions, clarity, and agreed points of common action. Those Cavaignac worked with went on to become his friends, and all became willing to battle together come what may, all practising republican virtues. His funeral in 1845 brought tens of thousands of workers from Paris and its outskirts to follow the cortège, the uproar from the procession leading to his grave set off a trail of mobilizational events leading to the revolutions across Europe, in 1848.67 By the last years of the 1820s, their plan for mobilization had become a shared vision, and comprised a wide number of networks, alliances, and associations across France and further afield, with republicans working in different national arenas and the full spectrum of sectoral classes. Auguste Guinard (Godefroy’s school friend from the famous St Barbe school), Charles Thomas, and Jules Bastide were at the core of this plan, which was expanded to include larger but essential circles, encompassing republicans such as Armand Marrast, Charles Trélat, Garnier Pagès, and the formidable André Marchais; all of them born within two years of each other, between 1799 and 1801. All had spent their youth in the Carbonari, the secret European underground association, many in central roles. Each belonged to different national arenas and underground societies. Their aim was to forge strong links with every sector of French institutional, economic, and social, above all workers. Each plan was tailored to the types of challenges presented in each domain and therefore the type of contribution required from each. This ever expanding group of revolutionaries possessed a plan and shared a common understanding of the work before them. They were driven by the same view of the virtues: the desire to benefit the public good, and to change the world. This young movement with Cavaignac at its head was made up for the most part of: men of brilliant intellect, of chivalric valour, and who answered more exactly than the royalist party to the ancient national type. Amongst them had taken 67  Gabriel Perreux, Au Temps des sociétés secrètes: La propagande républicaine au début de la monarchie de juillet (1830–1835) (Paris: Alcan, 1931).

144  Karma Nabulsi refuge, when banished from a society overspread with mercantilism, that tone of sarcastic levity and intelligent turbulence, that love of adventure, that impetuosity in self-abandonment, that gaiety in danger, that appetite for action, those lively ways of treating serious things, that formerly constituted the salient characteristics of the nation. Thus, with a curious contrast, an earnest care for the things of the future was found precisely amongst those whose personal qualities best recalled the most brilliant features of the past. They appeared to: ‘hark back to an older period in France, of epic heroism, of mythical knights, possessed with a sense of promise and of adventure, but equally a determination to win’.68

Their revolutionary patriotism was a reaction to the injustices people were facing without respite—extreme poverty, malnutrition, exploitation, skyrocketing infant mortality, without political franchise, and with no signs of change. The tasks in arranging the connection between associations and networks began with small groups of friends. In the weeks leading up to the July 1830 Revolution, when Paris was ablaze with excitement and secret preparations, the nascent novelist and playwright Alexandre Dumas briefly volunteered in a key Parisian National Guard artillery battalion that went on to liberate the Tuilieries and the Louvre on 29 July, which was led by that intimate group of republican comrades: Guinard, Bastide, Thomas, and Cavaignac. Dumas was utterly in awe of them— they appear as inspirational almost fairytale-like figures in his memoirs. He had not been initiated into their conspiracy for the revolution—as Dumas’ biographer put it, the ‘victory of the people took shape. Dumas played his part a little in the manner of the fly on the wheel of the coach. He saw the leaders of the movement Cavaignac and the others, and by contact with them became strengthened in his republican faith.’69 He was aware, as was every other republican that summer, that they had a plan: ‘Bastide, Guinard, Cavaignac, and Thomas: names that, since 1830, are to be found in every conspiracy that arose . . . their names have become historic’.70 Cavaignac and his friends were being portrayed and proclaimed as the ‘three musketeers of the republican movement’ by contemporaries, including the great editor of the day, Armand Carrel of Le National.71 In 1845, fifteen years after the July Revolution, Dumas went on to concoct the series Les Trois Mousquetaires, creating a near identical collective biography of group loyalty, generosity, courage, patriotism, with an exuberance for life he had already noted as the key attributes

68 Blanc, Histoire des Dix Ans, vol. 2, p. 429. 69 J. Lucas-Dubreton, La Vie d’Alexandre Dumas Père (Paris: Gallimard, 1928), p. 150. An English translation is The Fourth Musketeer, trans. Maida Darnton (New York: Cowan-McCann, 1928). 70  Alexandre Dumas, Mes Mémoires, seventh series (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1863), p. 198. For an English version see Alexandre Dumas, My Memoirs, trans. E.  M.  Walker (New York: Macmillan, 1908), vol. 5, p. 3. 71  Armand Carrel, La Tribune, 12 April 1831.

Two Traditions of Radical Democracy  145 of this small group of 1830 republicans. In his memoirs, Dumas wrote of Cavaignac’s best friend Bastide: ‘I shall have occasion to record.. the miraculous feats of courage he performed, and the deliciously cool sayings he uttered while actually under fire . . . brave without being conscious of the fact, so simple and ­natural a quality did bravery seem to his temperament and character’, and of Cavaignac ‘a noble and fair-minded character, who will remain in history as a glittering contrast to those who were to succeed him’.72 This central group viewed republican virtues as the means to create common political platforms, holding a central role for collectively planned revolutionary action. This was a more nuanced understanding of republicanism: one with an equal emphasis on both ends and means, where the only legitimate role of a republican was to help create a republic, not merely discuss its creation. Their common trust, so essential to the enterprise, emerged directly from their ideology, which created an exceptionally united vision of what a republican involved— an adherence to the same appreciation of the role of the virtues bound them to each other. It provided the glue of their common association, driven by solidarity with the powerless, the dispossessed, and the disenfranchised, with extreme courage and boldness in the battle; fortitude and steadfastness; fraternal sentiments; a common dedication to liberty, and an honest appraisal of any plan’s risks and costs. From this secure centre, different initiatives began to gather republican forces, institutions, and individuals from separate worlds in France, uniting them in a larger national plan. La force révolutionnaire required only for these links to be forged in order to ignite the plan for revolutionary change.

4. Conclusion To arrive at the point where planned local insurrectionary actions Could ­transform into a popular national revolution, Cavaignac and his friends began work several years earlier. First, linking republicans in different realms and classes: doctors, lawyers, students, workers, the military—where several secret republican societies operated within them-as well as liberal elements, and journalists for newspapers and pamphlets. Each arrangement that was crafted with these different groups and individuals was quite detailed and comprehensive; the relationships profound. This all took time and careful attention. The aim was to fashion these disparate sectors of society into a single campaign operation. La force révolutionnaire, the needed momentum generated from this unity of purpose was what they envisioned would create the revolution. Indeed, it was how the July Revolution was done.

72  Cited in Ambert, Portraits Republicains, p. 87.

146  Karma Nabulsi Here, ingenuity and originality was in their appreciation of a need to connect the broadest and most scattered array of threads together, to treat each circle, group, or person as equal, where each could and would appreciate the different role each were to play in the common endeavour. It also, in the end, came down to these republicans’ absolute commitment to carry out this plan, come what may. In the end, the essential place of republican virtues that allowed them to unite together for the public good, in order to overturn injustice and introduce equality and freedom, made them republican exemplars. Only those already possessing such virtues could locate again and again—whether soldier, editor, or silkworker—other republicans just like them, so that ‘they recognise this force, as it is by contact with other men that compassion is engaged, and where common sympathies are rekindled, so that the collision of ideas brings forth a light to illuminate their rights; where the exchange of sentiments bear conscience to the equal ability to joy, to suffering’.73

73  Cavaignac, ‘La Force Révolutionnaire’, p. 27.

7

Solidarity and Civic Virtue Labour Republicanism and the Politics of Emancipation in Nineteenth-Century America Alex Gourevitch

In June 1882, the Journal of United Labor, the official journal of the Knights of Labor, ran the following snippet: Slavery.—The weight of chains, number of stripes, hardness of labor, and other effects of a master’s cruelty, may make one servitude more miserable than another; but he is a slave who serves the gentlest man in the world, as well as he who serves the worst; and he does serve him if he must obey his commands and depend upon his will.1

To scholars of the republican tradition this quotation will be instantly rec­og­niz­ able as an extract from Algernon Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government.2 It contains the classic republican definition of slavery as ‘domination’, or subjection to the will of another. Anyone who is subject to the arbitrary interference of another, no matter if that master is ‘the gentlest man in the world’ or not, is a slave. As neo-republican scholars have noted, this definition potentially allows for the criticism of a wide range of relationships, not just slavery itself.3 Sidney, of course, used the republican theory to criticize absolute monarchy as a form of political slavery. He died for his views. The Knights of Labor, however, were concerned not with monarchy or colonial government, but with the arbitrary will of the employer. Workers were subject to ‘the caprice of he who pays the wages of his

1  Anonymous, ‘Slavery’, Journal of United Labor 3, no. 2 (June 1882), p. 248. 2 Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1996 [1698]), p. 441. 3 Cecil Laborde and John Maynor, ‘The Republican Contribution to Political Theory’, in Republicanism and Political Theory, eds. Cecil Laborde and John Maynor (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 1–28; Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Quentin Skinner, ‘A Third Concept of Liberty’, Proceedings of the British Academy 117, no. 237 (2002), pp. 237–68. Alex Gourevitch, Solidarity and Civic Virtue: Labour Republicanism and the Politics of Emancipation in Nineteenth-Century America In: Radical Republicanism: Recovering the Tradition’s Popular Heritage. Edited by: Bruno Leipold, Karma Nabulsi, and Stuart White, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198796725.003.0008

150  Alex Gourevitch servants’.4 Wage workers were ‘wage-slaves’ and therefore standing evidence that ‘there is an inevitable and irresistible conflict between the wage-system of labor and the republican system of government’.5 The Knights of Labor were the largest national organization of labour in the United States in the nineteenth century and famous for having articulated the demands of the labour movement in republican terms. Yet they, and other nineteenth-century ‘labor republicans’, have barely been incorporated into our understanding of the republican tradition. Historians of political thought have centred their energies on the humanists of Renaissance Italy and the commonwealthsmen of early modern England. Whether virtue is in conflict with commerce,6 whether republican liberty is significantly different from liberal liberty,7 whether Machiavelli and Hobbes are figures in or outside this tradition,8 are all questions that ­usually direct our attention at the period between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries. The prevailing view of the nineteenth century, when scholarship gives it any sustained attention, takes one of two forms. Some, like J. G. A. Pocock or Michael Sandel, say this is the final moment of eclipse, the ‘last great act of the Renaissance’.9 Others, Andreas Kalyvas and Ira Katznelson, argue that this is the era of ‘liberal beginnings’, when ‘liberalism as we know it was born from the spirit of republicanism, from attempts to adapt republicanism to the political, 4  Anonymous, ‘Chapters on Labor: Chapter VIII (Continued)’, Journal of United Labor 6, no. 16 (25 December 1885), p. 1153. 5 George E. McNeill, The Labor Movement: The Problem of To-Day (New York: M. W. Hazen Co., 1892), p. 459. 6 Mark Jurdjevic, ‘Virtue, Commerce, and the Enduring Florentine Republican Moment: Reintegrating Italy into the Atlantic Republican Debate’, Journal of the History of Ideas 62, no. 4 (2001), pp. 721–43; Eric Nelson, The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Quentin Skinner, ‘The Republican Ideal of Political Liberty’, in Machiavelli and Republicanism, eds. Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 292–309; J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Review: Virtue and Commerce in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 3, no. 1 (1972), pp. 119–34; Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972). 7 David Wootton, ‘Introduction: the Republican Tradition: From Commonwealth to Common Sense’, in Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 1649–1776, eds. David Wootton (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 1–41; Skinner, ‘A Third Concept of Liberty’; Maurizio Viroli, Republicanism (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002); Charles Larmore, ‘Liberal and Republican Conceptions of Freedom’, in Republicanism: History, Theory and Practice, ed. Daniel Weinstock (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 96–119; Robert E. Goodin, ‘Folie Républicaine’, Annual Review of Political Science 6, no. 1 (2003), pp. 55–76. 8  On Machiavelli, see J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Quentin Skinner, ‘Machiavelli’s Discorsi and the Pre-Humanist Origins of Republican Ideas’, in Machiavelli and Republicanism, eds. Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 121–41; John McCormick, ‘Machiavelli against Republicanism: On the Cambridge School’s “Guicciardinian Moments” ’, Political Theory 31, no. 5 (2003), pp. 615–43; Nelson, The Greek Tradition, pp. 127–54. On Hobbes see Quentin Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Daniel Kapust and B.  P.  Turner, ‘Democratical Gentlemen and the Lust for Mastery: Status, Ambition, and the Language of Liberty in Hobbes’s Political Thought’, Political Theory 41, no. 4 (2013), pp. 648–75. 9  Pocock, ‘Virtue and Commerce’, p. 120.

Solidarity and Civic Virtue  151 economic, and social revolutions of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth’.10 Few of these accounts suggest that nineteenth-century re­pub­licans had anything new or distinctive to say about familiar problems.11 There are a number of things we can learn about the republican tradition from the nineteenth century, but in this chapter I will focus on the way labour re­pub­licans transform inherited thinking about civic virtue. While the labour re­pub­licans are known to labour historians,12 they have received, with one exception, no serious treatment by historians of political thought. And that one exception, Michael Sandel, treats labour republicans as the last vestige of an earlier classical republicanism, rather than as something new.13 Yet the labour republicans are of interest precisely because they do not conform to standard interpretations of the confrontation between republicanism and modern politics. They developed a way of thinking about the virtues as qualities required to transform the state, rather than preserve it. Further, they saw the virtues as qualities that citizens cultivated in themselves, through their own organization and education, rather than as inculcated by the coercive apparatus of the state. The politics of solidarity that emerged was neither a romantic anti-capitalism that austerely counter-posed virtue to commerce, nor was it a passive accommodation to a life of private enterprise. To set up my discussion of labour republicanism, I will first briefly sketch the relevant axes of scholarly controversy regarding civic virtue in the republican tradition. Once sketched, we can then see how labour republicanism cut across the usual dilemmas that scholars identify.

1.  Republicanism and Virtue The scholarly literature on virtue and commerce is so well established that I will provide only a barebones characterization. Pocock set the terms of the debate with his famous claim that the ‘dialectic of virtue and commerce was a quarrel with modernity’.14 Subsequent scholars have successfully shown that the story is more complicated, since we can find various modern republican figures who were comfortable with the accumulation of wealth and since there is more than one republican tradition.15 Some scholars go so far as to say that a republican 10  Andreas Kalyvas and Ira Katznelson, Liberal Beginnings: Making a Republic for the Moderns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 4. 11 Gregory Claeys, ‘The Origins of the Rights of Labor: Republicanism, Commerce, and the Construction of Modern Social Theory in Britain, 1796–1805’, Journal of Modern History 66, no. 2 (1994), pp. 249–90. 12  I cite the main historical works later in this chapter. 13 Michael J. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 168–92. 14 Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, p. 546. 15  Jurdjevic, ‘Virtue, Commerce, and the Enduring Florentine Republican Moment’; Nelson, The Greek Tradition.

152  Alex Gourevitch discourse of virtue was used by figures like Smith, Constant, and Jefferson to give positive sanction to capitalist relationships.16 What is notable in this debate is that, since it has largely focused on the early modern period, the range of interpretive positions has either been that a republican commitment to civic virtue led to a romantic anti-capitalism or to a grudging acceptance of capitalist property relations. Civic virtue is either starkly opposed to self-interest or assimilated to bourgeois propriety and calculation. As we shall see, in the nineteenth century a third position arises that neither opposes virtue to commercial self-interest nor simply absorbs the bourgeois virtues into a language of civic spirit. The opposition between virtue and commerce is not the only relevant scholarly convention. Even more problematic for neo-republican scholars, especially those hoping to revive it not just as part of our historical consciousness but as a living political theory, is the long-standing thought that virtue is maintained by state coercion. Civic virtue is, after all, taken to be the set of normative attitudes, habits of mind, and spontaneous dispositions individuals must have to show equal concern for their fellow citizens and to support free institutions. These dispositions can be undermined or corrupted when institutions promote opposing attitudes or when human self-interestedness goes unchecked. As Skinner writes, ‘for the republican writers . . . the deepest question of statecraft’ is ‘how can naturally self-interested citizens be persuaded to act virtuously’.17 Republican authors have placed ‘their faith in the coercive powers of the law’, which can ‘force us out of our habitual patterns of self-interested behavior’ and ‘into discharging the full range of civic duties’.18 The problem here is that the interest in reviving republicanism as a language of emancipation stands in contrast to the emphasis on coercive state inculcation of virtue. After all, the conventional role of coercive instruction is to socialize citizens into national traditions and to develop qualities that help preserve institutions from corruption.19 This is a theory of virtue in which social agents corrode and undermine the proper functioning of institutions, such that it is only a strong, coercive state that stands over and above society that can save it. That is why, to various interpreters, the theory of civic virtue appears deeply conservative. It is potentially despotic in the coercive measures it might sanction in the name of preserving or coercively instructing the people in virtue. It is also not hard to see 16  Kalyvas and Katznelson, Liberal Beginnings; Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York: New York University Press, 1984); Isaac Kramnick, ‘Republican Revisionism Revisited’, American Historical Review 87, no. 3 (1982), pp. 629–64. 17  Skinner, ‘The Republican Ideal of Political Liberty’, pp. 304–5. 18 Ibid. 19  I am sympathetic to the thought that neo-republicans are also silent, in unfortunate ways, with respect to their implicit dependence on, but lack of theory about, a theory of founding and a ‘lawgiving’ agent. Some of what I say below about political transformation can be seen as a partial response to that problem. On the ‘lawgiver’ and neo-republicanism, see Jessica Kimpell, ‘Neo-Republicanism: Machiavelli’s Solution for Tocqueville’s Republic’, European Political Science Review 1, no. 3 (2009), pp. 375–400.

Solidarity and Civic Virtue  153 why this particular view of coercive socialization would raise concerns about using the state to promote cultural homogeneity and racial exclusion.20 The focus on ‘civility’,21 ‘concord’,22 ‘civic education’,23 as well as shared traditions and national cohesion, all smack of a theory whose aim is not a robust and self-critical political life, but rather the active preservation of existing institutions and the cele­bra­tion of past deeds.24 Above all, there is a problem for those interested either in the radical strand of republicanism or in the problem of what republicanism has to do with injustice. If actually existing society is profoundly unfree and oppressive, as most normative assessments of society from a republican (or other egalitarian) strand of thought hold, then there is something paradoxical about looking to the state to inculcate the virtue needed to act against that injustice. After all, the state is the agent enforcing those unjust laws. Its agents are committed, on the whole, to preserving that deep structure of legally protected oppression. There is therefore every reason to be worried that looking to the state to inculcate virtue through coercive socialization would only reproduce and entrench dispositions favourable to unjust institutions. Republicanism, at least insofar as it cares about virtue, looks conservative, exclusionary, and, worst of all, reactionary. It is impossible to deny that these are serious problems facing any rehabilitation of the republican tradition. They must be faced squarely. That is all the more reason to be interested in the labour republicans. They saw the virtues as qualities needed not to preserve but to transform society. In particular, they identified civic virtue with forms of solidarity and collective action that incorporated excluded groups, challenged existing inequalities, and aimed at making society more just. Moreover, and perhaps most importantly, they identified the cultivation of virtue with practices of self-education and organization, rather than with ‘statecraft’ and the ‘coercive powers of the law’. If we take labour republicanism on its own terms, as an attempt to transform the language of civic virtue into a discourse of solidarity and political reform, we can learn something new about the conceptual potential of that complex tradition.

20  Janet Coleman, ‘El concepto de república: Continuidad mística y continuidad real’ (The Concept of the Republic: Mythic Continuity and Real Continuity), Res Publica: Revista De Filosofia Politica, 15 (2005) pp. 27–48; Graham Maddox, ‘The Limits of Neo-Roman Liberty’, History of Political Thought 23, no. 3 (2002), pp. 418–31; Aziz Rana, The Two Faces of American Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 21 Pettit, Republicanism, pp. 174–202. 22 Adrian Oldfield, Citizenship and Community: Civic Republicanism and the Modern World (New York: Routledge, 1990). 23  Richard Dagger, Civic Virtues: Rights, Citizenship, and Republican Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 24  Don Herzog, ‘Some Questions for Republicans’, Political Theory 14, no. 3 (1986), p. 486; McCormick, ‘Machiavelli against Republicanism’, pp. 619–36; Richard  A.  Epstein, ‘Modern Republicanism—or the Flight from Substance’, Yale Law Journal 97, no. 8 (1988), p. 1635.

154  Alex Gourevitch

2.  Another Kind of Virtue: Solidarity and Social Transformation Labour republicanism was a nineteenth-century political tendency in which workers appropriated republican ideals to criticize modern capitalism. Beginning with the workingmen’s parties of the 1820s and 1830s, it passed through groups like the National Reform Association of the 1850s and 1860s, and culminated in the Knights of Labor in the 1880s and 1890s. Its leading lights were mostly selfeducated skilled artisans, like William Heighton and Thomas Skidmore of the workingmen’s parties; radical editors, like National Reform Association founder George Evans Hughes; and post-Civil War labour leaders like William H. Sylvis, Ira Steward, George McNeill, and Terence Powderly.25 Though well known to labour historians, labour republicans are rarely con­ sidered as having contributed anything to the history of political thought.26 I will here sketch a few general features of the tradition before focusing on its relation to the concept of virtue.27 Before proceeding it is important to clarify that I focus on American labour republicanism as an example of a wider trend in ‘red’ or

25  For biographical information on these figures see, Amos Gilbert, The Life of Thomas Skidmore (Chicago, IL: Charles  H.  Kerr, 1984); James  C.  Sylvis, ‘Biography of William  H.  Sylvis’, in The Life, Speeches, Labors and Essays of William  H.  Sylvis, ed. James C Sylvis (Philadelphia, PA: Claxton, Remsen, and Haffelfinger, 1872); Terence Vincent Powderly, The Path I Trod: The Autobiography of Terence V. Powderly (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940); Terence V. Powderly, Thirty Years of Labor 1859–1889 (Columbus, OH: Excelsior Publishing House, 1889); Mark A. Lause, Young America: Land, Labour, and the Republican Community (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2005); David R. Roediger, ‘Ira Steward and the Anti-Slavery Origins of American Eight-Hour Theory’, Labor History 27, no. 3 (1986), pp. 410–26; Richard Oestreicher, ‘Terence V. Powderly, the Knights of Labor, and Artisanal Republicanism’, in Labor Leaders in America, eds. Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1987), pp. 30–61; Louis H. Arky, ‘The Mechanics’ Union of Trade Associations and the Formation of the Philadelphia Workingmen’s Movement’, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 76, no. 2 (1952), pp. 142–76; Edward Pessen, ‘Thomas Skidmore, Agrarian Reformer in the Early American Labor Movement’, New York History 35, no. 3 (1954), pp.  280–96; Edward Pessen, Most Uncommon Jacksonians: The Radical Leaders of the Early Labor Movement (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1967); Jonathan Grossman, William Sylvis, Pioneer of American Labor (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1973). 26 Robert E. Weir, Beyond Labor’s Veil (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996); David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1999); Richard Oestreicher, ‘Socialism and the Knights of Labor in Detroit, 1877–1886’, Labor History 22, no. 1 (1981), pp. 5–30; David Montgomery, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans 1862–1872 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967); David Montgomery, ‘Labor and the Republic in Industrial America: 1860–1920’, Le Mouvement Social, no. 111 (1980), pp. 201–15; Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); William Forbath, ‘Ambiguities of Free Labor: Labor and the Law in the Gilded Age’, Wisconsin Law Review, no. 4 (1985), pp. 767–818; Leon Fink, Workingmen’s Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1985); James Gray Pope, ‘Labor’s Constitution of Freedom’, Yale Law Journal 106, no. 4 (1997), pp. 941–1031; Kim Voss, The Making of American Exceptionalism: The Knights of Labor and Class Formation in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). 27  The preceding paragraphs and the following sketch of the general features of labour republicanism condense the account that I develop in my book, see Alex Gourevitch, From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

Solidarity and Civic Virtue  155 ‘social’ republican thinking in the nineteenth century. As Karma Nabulsi and Bruno Leipold show in this volume, and as scholars like Antoni Domenech, Jean-Fabien Spitz, Genevieve Rousseliere, and Nadia Urbinati have shown elsewhere, there is a wide shift in nineteenth-century radical republicanism in which concepts like solidarity or fraternity play a major role. For instance, Antoni Domenech has demonstrated that red republicans in Spain and France saw ‘fraternity’ as the distinguishing feature of any revolutionary commitment to equal liberty in modern Europe. That was because the only way for an individual to achieve liberty was by actively replacing the hierarchical relations of the ancient regime with new bonds of equality. These were not merely legal relations but wider social relations based on respect for the equal liberty of one’s co-citizens.28 As Nadia Urbinati and Stefano Recchia have shown, we find similar thoughts emerging from figures like Mill or Mazzini, especially in the context of the national liberation struggles of Southern Europe. The nation just was the living community of those who individually valued the shared commitment to live under conditions of self-rule.29 Karma Nabulsi’s contribution to this volume reminds us that some of the original French figures of utopian socialism and revo­lu­tion­ary communism developed their conception of solidarity by starting from republican premises. In other work she has shown that this solidarity could extend into a kind of patriotic internationalism.30 And Sudhir Hazareesingh’s contribution to this volume reminds us of how the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century conceptions of fraternity on the left developed organically out of a radical republicanism traceable back to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. There is further reason to see this as a period when the concept of civic virtue became universal in a different sense: the extensive participation of women in nineteenth-century politics and society loosened the idea’s specifically masculine associations, thereby becoming more clearly ‘solidarity’ than merely ‘fraternity’.31 If anything, we have yet to grasp the full range and depth of thinking about liberty and fraternity that developed in the ferment of the nineteenth century. Domenech is right to say, in his The Eclipse of Fraternity, that with all the attention to liberty and equality, the concept of solidarity or ‘fraternity’ is the ‘missing or eclipsed third value of contemporary democratic republican theory’.32 The historical project of reinterpretation is part of the broader refertilization of our 28  Antoní Domenech, El Eclipse de la Fraternidad (Barcelona: Critica, 2004), pp. 1–160. 29  Stefano Recchia and Nadia Urbinati, ‘Introduction: Giuseppe Mazzini’s International Political Thought’, in A Cosmopolitanism of Nations: Giuseppe Mazzini’s Writings on Democracy, Nation Building, and International Relations, eds. Stefano Recchia and Nadia Urbinati (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), pp. 1–30. 30  Karma Nabulsi, ‘Patriotism and Internationalism in the “Oath of Allegiance” to Young Europe’, European Journal of Political Theory 5, no. 1 (2006), pp. 61–70. 31  R.  Claire Snyder, ‘Radical Civic Virtue: Women in 19th-Century Civil Society’, New Political Science 26, no. 1 (2004), pp. 51–69. 32 Domenech, El Eclipse de la Fraternidad, p. 11 (my translation).

156  Alex Gourevitch theoretical imagination. There is, then, a very wide potential scope of inquiry into solidarity and virtue. I focus on the labour republicans in part because they are a lesser known chapter of the story but also because focusing in depth on one example allows us to learn more about the conceptual moves and theoretical integuments of this new way of thinking about freedom and solidarity. Labour republicans have that appellation because they took the republican argument against dependence or ‘domination’ and applied it to the economic sphere, especially the labour question. Industrial wage labour was seen as a form of servitude, or ‘wage slavery’, because workers were dependent upon owners for jobs and expected to submit to the will of their employer once at work. The persistence of unfree labour was taken as evidence that ‘our rulers, statesmen and orators have not attempted to engraft republican principles into our industrial system, and have forgotten or denied its underlying principles’.33 In their quest to achieve the ‘republicanization of labour’ most labour republicans took the radical position that they had ‘to abolish as rapidly as possible, the wage system, substituting co-operation therefore’.34 An economy of interlocking producer and consumer cooperatives, owned and controlled by workers themselves, was the only way to universalize republican liberty in an industrial economy. The point of this cooperative commonwealth was that it was not just a quest for higher living standards but for a substantial transformation of control over property and work.35 Formulating the ideal of the cooperative commonwealth was easy. The hard part was putting it into practice. It was hard because of the way they had come to think about freedom: freedom just was cooperation as equals. Whereas earlier republicans thought some could be free while others were slaves, these labour republicans had come to think of independence as a universal condition in which each could be free only if everyone else was equally free, and if they were actively related as equals. This was an internally demanding conception and one that put them at odds with the extant, hierarchical, and unequal world. There was no way to think about realizing freedom without reflecting on the kinds of people who would seek that freedom and how they would act to achieve it. Labour republicans began their practical reflections with the observation that ‘history does not furnish an instance wherein the depository of power voluntarily abrogated its prerogative, or the oppressor relinquished his advantages in favour 33 McNeill, The Labor Movement, p. 456. 34 Ira Steward, ‘Poverty’, in Fourth Annual Report of the Bureau of Statistics of Labor, ed. Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor (Boston, MA: Wright and Potter, 1873), p. 434; S. M. Jelley, The Voice of Labor (Chicago, IL: A. B. Gehman & Co., 1887), p. 203. 35 I have developed some of the formal features of this view in Alex Gourevitch, ‘Labor Republicanism and the Transformation of Work’, Political Theory 41, no. 4 (2013), pp. 591–617.

Solidarity and Civic Virtue  157 of the oppressed’.36 These lines, written in 1826 by Langdon Byllesby, a printer with experience in both Philadelphia and New York workingmen’s politics, were one of the first expressions of what can be called a political theory of the d ­ ependent classes.37 This political theory inverted the classical republican doctrine, in which only independent, property-owning citizens could be counted on to act virtuously. The nineteenth-century experience with regular episodes of public and private anti-labour violence, judicial hostility, corrupt party politics, and unfavourable treatment in mainstream presses, reinforced the feeling among workers that existing property owners did not, in fact, hold republican views, and would not voluntarily expand control over work and property.38 In response, labour republicans began to argue that the dependent classes were the most likely to act virtuously. While the wealthy few had an interest in keeping the many in economic dependence, the labouring majority had a personal interest in overcoming their economic dependence. The partial, class interest of workers in achieving economic independence aligned with the general, common interest in universal republican liberty. This piece of social analysis motivated the longeststanding conviction of labour republicanism that, ‘without an effort on the part of the masses themselves, their condition must forever remain the same’.39 As the founder of the Knights of Labor, Uriah Stephens, put it, this collective effort had to take a particular shape: ‘that of knitting up into a compact and homogeneous amalgamation all the world’s workers in one universal brotherhood, guided by the same rules, working by the same methods, practicing the same forms for accomplishing the same ends’.40 Personal interest and public spirit here folded into each other, mediated by a principle of solidarity, or unity among the dependent classes. This recasting of civic virtue as solidaristic action is the pivot around which their rereading of the republican tradition hinges. In the following three subsections (2.1. Habit and Desire, 2.2. Education, 2.3. Competition and Solidarity) I show how they developed this recasting. 36 Langdon Byllesby, Observations on the Sources and Effects of Unequal Wealth (New York: Lewis J. Nichols, 1826), p. 5. 37  I develop the idea of a political theory of the dependent classes in an article on William Manning, a farmer republican in the early republic, see Alex Gourevitch, ‘William Manning and the Political Theory of the Dependent Classes’, Modern Intellectual History 9, no. 2 (2012), pp. 331–60. 38 On the extraordinary labour violence and judicial repression of the labour movement, see William Forbath, Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Philip Taft and Philip Ross, ‘American Labor Violence: Its Causes, Character, and Outcome’, in The History of Violence in America: A Report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, eds. Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1969); Ahmed White, ‘Industrial Terrorism and the Unmaking of New Deal Labor Law’, Nevada Law Journal 11, no. 3 (2011), pp. 561–628; Alex Gourevitch, ‘Police Work: The Centrality of Labor Repression in American Political History’, Perspectives on Politics 13, no. 3 (2015), pp. 762–73. 39  William H. Sylvis, ‘Address Delivered at Chicago, January 9, 1865’, in Life, Speeches, Labors and Essays of William H. Sylvis, p. 164, emphasis added. 40  Uriah Stevens, ‘Ideal Organization I’, Journal of United Labor 1, no. 2 (15 June 1880), p. 24.

158  Alex Gourevitch

2.1.  Habit and Desire At first blush, labour republican thinking about virtue looks indistinguishable from the civic tradition of the classical republics. In the words of William H. Sylvis, an iron-moulder and organizer of the National Labour Union, ‘all popular governments must depend for their stability and success upon the virtue and intelligence of the masses . . . tyranny is founded upon ignorance, and liberty upon education’.41 Here the citizen’s virtue is expressed in respect for and public commitment to those national traditions into which he is socialized. Civic education shapes each citizen to eliminate corrupting selfishness and factional tendencies. Moreover, like classical thinkers, labour republicans thought that the cultivation of virtue began with the sculpting of habit and desire. However, labour republicans turned this idea on its head by arguing that the main purpose of sculpting desires was to produce discontent rather than to socialize new citizens into the existing political order. According to Ira Steward, a major eight-hour campaigner in the 1860s and 1870s, ‘one of the first steps in reformation is, to make a man feel as keenly as possible, the meanness of his position or of his behavior’.42 While this can sound like a middle-class reformer turning up his nose at philistine workers it was something more. Steward wanted the average worker to compare his standard of living with the wealthy so that he would begin to want more. As Steward further put it, ‘The masses must be made discontented with their situation, by furnishing them with the leisure necessary to go about and observe the dress, manners, surroundings, and influence of those whose Wealth furnishes them with leisure.’43 McNeill, Steward’s protégé, put it more bluntly: the key is ‘to disturb this class of men from their sottish contentment by an agitation for more wages or less hours, is to lift them up in the level of their manhood to thoughts of better things, and to an organized demand for the same’.44 Note the connection between new desires and political action: discontent would lead to ‘agitation’ and an ‘organized demand’ for the same. This was not demagoguery aimed at stirring up a mob but rather elements of a project to forge a new organized popular agent out of new needs. Here labour republicans had taken over the long-standing republican view that passions were the product of environment, and in particular relations of power. They argued that long hours of work ‘robbed [labourers] of all ambition to ask for anything more than will satisfy their bodily necessities’.45 A Knight of Labor from Detroit complained,

41  Sylvis, ‘Address Delivered at Chicago’, pp. 129–30. 42  Ira Steward, The Eight Hour Movement: A Reduction of Hours is an Increase of Wages (Boston, MA: Boston Labor Reform Association, 1865), p. 11. 43  Ibid., 11–12. 44 McNeill, The Labor Movement, pp. 472–3. 45 Steward, The Eight Hour Movement, p. 4.

Solidarity and Civic Virtue  159 One great evil of the long hours worked is that the man, woman or child at the end of a day’s work is often physically incapable of doing anything requiring thought, and we cannot wonder if they seek silly amusements. They will read trashy novels, or go to a variety theatre or a dance, but nothing beyond amusement.46

It was unreasonable to ask the overworked to demand more, since their condition left them without time to enjoy it, and habituated them to their position. A  change in environment was necessary, which was why labour republicans argued that, ‘reducing the hours of labor acts more directly on the habits and thoughts of the people than any other measure heretofore proposed’.47 With a taste for the freedom associated with greater leisure, workers would increasingly bridle at their ongoing subjection to employers at work. They would begin to see the advantages of a life in which one enjoyed the full independence of control over all of one’s time. In other words, labour republicans hoped to denaturalize dependence by exposing the way in which relations of domination were inscribed in lived experience. The awakening of new desires was the way to generate discontent. In Steward’s pithy summation: ‘to see is to desire . . . to desire is to struggle’.48

2.2. Education But how to ensure this discontent was directed at the proper object? Here labour republicans moved from the emancipation of desire to its education. The industrial system not only stunted aspirations but also produced ignorance and prejudice. Those condemned to long hours could not read, producing ‘an aristocracy of intellect’ appropriate to ‘monarchical governments’ not free republics.49 This put the actual economy at odds with its republican form. As Terence Powderly, leader of the Knights of Labor, put it: intelligence and virtue in the sovereignty are necessary . . . as our institutions are founded on the theory of sovereignty in the people . . . it is the imperative duty of Congress to make such wise and just regulations as shall afford all the means of acquiring the knowledge requisite to the intelligent exercise of the privileges and duties pertaining to sovereignty.50

46  Gnomon, ‘ “Gnomon” and His Critics’, Journal of United Labor 4, no. 9 (January 1884), p. 631. 47 McNeill, The Labor Movement, p. 472. 48 Steward, The Eight Hour Movement, p. 13. 49 William  H.  Sylvis, ‘Aristocracy of Intellect’, in Life, Speeches, Labors and Essays of William H. Sylvis, p. 444. 50  Terence Powderly, Thirty Years of Labor, p. 88.

160  Alex Gourevitch That was why, said Powderly, ‘Congress should ordain that eight hours’ labor . . . should constitute a day’s work’.51 In fact, the defence of the eight hours law was but the starting point for a wider argument about knowledge and education. Leisure was a necessary, but insufficient, condition for the development of a citizen’s competence because, even with sufficient leisure, a proper political education was hard to come by. Political leaders showed only an instrumental interest in the labour question and often held anti-republican views. When it came to the political economy of wage labour, labour republicans distrusted existing sources: The bitter experience of the past has proven that this all important subject is not, nor can it ever, become the business exclusively of the Politician, Statesman or Legislator. But it is and forever must remain by its own peculiar terms, the business and the science of the people everywhere.52

The dominant texts of law and political economy only provided intellectual ballast for the current system of ‘wage-slavery’. The press generally treated labour organizations unfairly and was frequently seen to be a source of misinformation.53 According to Steward, this was no accident, ‘Capital, with swift enterprise, can pay for heralding to the ears of ignorance favorite catch-words, while its control of the daily press and party machinery leaves the intelligent workingman, of slender means, in a mortifying minority’.54 This was a common allegation. The author of ‘Chapters on Labor’ in the Journal of United Labor wrote: the capitalists, have made millions, with which they have monopolized the means of obtaining news, which they falsify by bogus telegrams, and use other direct means to influence public opinion. They have monopolized the channels of news as their coworkers in capitalism had already monopolized credit, exchange and production.55

In short, even if workers had time to acquire the ‘intelligence’ or education expected of virtuous citizens, there were no reliable sources of education and nobody to do the educating. If this mis-education could be summarized in a single phrase, it was that dom­ in­ant forms of knowledge failed to give the citizen-worker a ‘true sense of his 51 Ibid. 52  Robert D. Layton, ‘Salutatory’, Journal of United Labor 2, no. 6 (15 October 1881), p. 156. 53  For examples of this unfair treatment, see the discussion in Weir, Beyond Labor’s Veil, pp. 152–5, 227–30, 260–7. 54  Ira Steward, ‘A Reduction of Hours an Increase of Wages’, in A Documentary History of American Industrial Society, eds. John R. Commons et al., vol. 9 (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark Company, 1910), p. 292. 55  Anonymous, ‘Chapters on Labor VI (Cont)’, Journal of United Labor 6, no. 12 (25 October 1885), p. 1106.

Solidarity and Civic Virtue  161 surroundings’.56 Rather than promote the idea that all workers had the same ­fundamental interest in creating a cooperative commonwealth, and that they could only act on this interest if they acted together, existing forms of knowledge put workers in competition with each other and separated them by skill, party, race, and creed. Workers therefore had to educate themselves by producing their own analysis of their surroundings. Precisely because they were the only ones with an interest in change, they were the only ones with an interest in presenting to each other a ‘true sense of his surroundings’. Here the labour republicans generally, and the Knights of Labor in particular, made a major practical, not just theoretical, contribution to republican culture. In place of the state-directed civic education, worker-citizens would educate themselves through their own institutions. The most important and longest standing of these institutions was the independent labour press. As far back as the 1790s, small farmers and artisans, like William Manning, argued for a cheap magazine, published by a ‘Sociaty of Labourers’, to ensure ‘the Majority’ were ‘furnished with the meens of knowledge’ and that the machinations of the few were ‘detected & surprised’.57 The workingmen’s parties of the 1820s and 1830s created the first actual labour presses, like Philadelphia’s Mechanics Free Press and New York’s The Working Man’s Advocate. The labour press grew throughout the century such that, by the 1880s, not only did the Knights of Labor have its official Journal of United Labor, but numerous local assemblies published their own papers, like Chicago’s Knights of Labor, Detroit’s Labor Leaf, and Providence’s The People. These labour presses provided the content missing from mainstream sources. They included political news, alternative literary culture, organizing advice, official correspondence, and perhaps most relevant to the ‘true sense of one’s surroundings’, lessons on political economy. For instance, the Journal of United Labor had a recurring special section on ‘Co-operation’, which included extracts from famous cooperative thinkers, reports of producers and distributors’ cooperatives around the world, and longer serialized lectures on political economy like ‘Chapters on Labor’, ‘Sketch of Political Economy’, and ‘Industrial Ideas’.58 These papers also served as spaces for public debate and discussion, through letters and contributions by readers. They aimed not just to provide facts and theories but to stimulate and develop workers’ capacities for judgment that society otherwise did not engage. ‘The people are reading for themselves; they are reading labor papers,’ said one Knight.59 Here again, the central aim was a kind of self-development, inculcation of a new competence as a political actor. 56 Powderly, Thirty Years of Labor, p. 62. 57  William Manning, ‘The Key of Libberty’, William and Mary Quarterly 13, no. 2 (1956), p. 250. 58  ‘Sketch of Political Economy’ ran from 25 May 1884 to 25 March 1885 (although the last article says to be continued, I could find no record of another instalment). ‘Chapters on Labor’ ran from 10 June 1885 to 25 May 1886. ‘Industrial Ideas’ ran from 10 June to 25 September 1886. 59 Jelley, The Voice of Labor, p. 363.

162  Alex Gourevitch The labour press was but one among a wide range of experiments in s­ elf-­education. Reading rooms, lecture circuits, study groups, and lending libraries sprang up in numerous local and district assemblies of Knights.60 Powderly noted with pride ‘the establishment of workingmen’s lyceums and reading-rooms’ and felt they showed ‘laboring men’ that they ‘had the same right to study social, economic, and political questions that their employers had’.61 Readings and lectures tended to focus on political economy and labour questions. For instance, the announcement for the Journal of United Labor’s listing of public lectures included the statement ‘the one thing needed by the wage-workers of America is education upon labor subjects, and especially upon cooperation’.62 These various exercises in self-education provided the theoretical and practical knowledge necessary for workers to gain a sense of their social position and to develop a shared interest in cooperative production. Here was a form of civic education that did not involve the coercive instruments of republican ‘statecraft’. Standard forms of public education, and the mainstream products of this society, tended only to ‘foster prejudices rather than cultivate intelligence’.63 Workers had to provide their own educational content and create their own public spaces.

2.3.  Competition and Solidarity Yet a culture of competition, arising from the pressures of the labour market itself, rather than just from capitalist propaganda, still tended to separate workers. Labour republicans recognized they had to create a counter-culture of solidarity in order to cultivate the virtues of cooperation. The system of ‘competition’, as they sometimes called capitalism, pitted workers against each other, creating the impression that each person could realize his own fundamental interests through his own efforts alone. In developing their argument against this market ethos, labour republicans did not reject the very idea of self-interest but rather criticized the way in which culture of competition misrepresented a worker’s interests in the first place. This is important because it situates them at a particular moment in the development of republican thinking about commerce: it was not the very activity of producing and accumulating wealth that was corrupting, but the historically specific culture of the labour market. Indeed, unlike romantic anticapitalists or austere civic humanists, labour republicans were quite willing to celebrate the production of wealth and the habits of leisure, so long as all enjoyed the benefits. 60 Weir, Beyond Labor’s Veil, p. 289; Susan Levine, ‘Labor’s True Woman: Domesticity and Equal Rights in the Knights of Labor’, Journal of American History 70, no. 2 (1983), pp. 327–8. 61 Powderly, Thirty Years of Labor, p. 62. 62  Editors, ‘Our Lecture Bureau’, Journal of United Labor 3, no. 7 (November 1882), p. 248. 63  Sylvis, ‘Address Delivered at Chicago’, p. 113.

Solidarity and Civic Virtue  163 Labour republicans recognized that there was a certain truth to the culture of competition. Competition among workers was reasonable insofar as workers had no institutionalized way of pursuing their interests together. Only by participating in an organization representing workers’ interests as a whole could individual workers ever apprehend and make real to themselves their shared interest in transforming society. As Terence Powderly put it, ‘all who interest themselves in producing for the world’s good must be made to understand that their interests are identical’.64 Their interests were identical because their social position meant there was no way for all workers to obtain that independence without cooperating. No individual could pursue his own interests fully without pursuing the interests of others, ‘an effort to be [individually] successful must be a united one’.65 Of course, there were various ways in which any particular worker could escape his status as a wage labourer, but only on condition that he leave others behind, and accept the insecurity of his new social position. If each worker shared a fundamental interest in free labour then it remained the case that ‘the condition of one part of our class can not be improved permanently unless all are improved together’.66 They thus defended the principle of solidarity in the name of self-interest rather than in the name of self-sacrificing virtues. As Steward put it, ‘we must remember that by an inexorable law of self-interest, we are bound to lift up the lowest and most degraded laborer’.67 How, then, to interpret their critique of ‘the spirit of selfishness’?68 When they then argued that, ‘co-operation is based on moral science. It implies the virtues of stability, honor, and fraternity. It is also the child of intelligent self-interest’, they were distinguishing selfishness from self-interest.69 Selfishness was defined by a willingness to rise even if it meant leaving others behind, while self-interest was understood as the interest all had in rising together into a new political economy. Though they invoked the ‘virtues of stability, honor, and fraternity’ they did not do so to promote a duty to uphold a common good over and against private interest—the vestigial formula of the citizen-warrior ready to sacrifice himself for his patria. Instead, they were protesting against the market as a cultural institution, which taught an individual to conceive his fundamental interest in independence narrowly, and to see his own good as distinct from the good of all others. Where the market taught each individual that he or she could be free regardless of the status of others, their organizations taught that each could be free only insofar as everyone else was also free. As Sylvis said, 64 Powderly, Thirty Years of Labor, pp. 258–9. 65  Sylvis, ‘Address Delivered at Chicago’, p. 164. 66 Powderly, Thirty Years of Labor, p. 121, emphasis added. 67 Steward, The Eight Hour Movement, p. 18. 68  Nicholas O. Thompson, ‘ “An Important Question” ’, Journal of United Labor 2, no. 3 (15 July 1881), p. 127. 69  Henry E. Sharpe, ‘Co-Operation: The Condition of Its Success’, Journal of United Labor 5, no. 1 (25 April 1884), p. 666.

164  Alex Gourevitch I am fully imbued with the great American idea of individual independence, and much as I admire it as a characteristic of our race, yet I cannot fail to see that, if adhered to in our dealings with capitalists, it must sooner or later bring us to one common ruin.70

For Sylvis, the spontaneous understanding of the ‘great American idea of independence’ was the one created by the market, which is to say selfishness. It led to short-term calculations, and contributed to craft, sectional, and party divisions among workers, undermining their ability to act collectively to overcome their shared dependence. The culture of selfishness made itself felt in a variety of situations, for instance unplanned local strikes and participation in strike-breaking work. A special target of opprobrium was craft distinction, or the separation between skilled and unskilled workers. As Powderly put it, ‘with the craft that selfishly legislates for itself alone I have no sympathy’.71 That was why the Knights of Labor, unlike the narrower unions of the day, presented itself as open to all workers independent of skill or craft. Though it never overcame craft-based distinctions, the Knights actively organized unskilled workers, not to mention groups like blacks and women that previous labour unions had made little effort to organize—indeed their efforts would not be matched for more than a century.72 Overall, then, selfish behaviour like empty electoral partisanship, craft narrowness, racial partiality, and strike breaking was contrasted with the virtuous but still self-interested action oriented to collective advancement. Solidarity was the habit of identifying one’s own good with a universal, shared good, ‘there are certain habits, certain attributes of character without cultivation, of which there can be no individual progress, and therefore no social progress. These habits and this character is to make the man an independent being.’73 Such habits could only develop in and through organizations that stood opposed to the logic of the market. Note again that these habits were not in conflict with a citizen’s interest in independence but rather constitutive of the relations that make that independence possible. As Sylvis put it, the 70  William H. Sylvis, ‘Address Delivered at Buffalo, NY, January, 1864’, in Life, Speeches, Labors and Essays of William H. Sylvis, p. 107. 71  Terence Powderly, ‘Message to the Noble Order of the Knights of Labor of America, Philadelphia, May 3, 1886’, in Labor: Its Rights and Wrongs, ed. Terence Powderly (Westport, CT: Hyperion Press, 1886), p. 73. 72  The relationship between the Knights and craft unions is complex and much debated. See Robert Weir, ‘A Dubious Equality: Leonora Barry and Women in the KOL’, in The Knights Unhorsed: Internal Conflict in a Gilded Age Social Movement (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2000), pp. 141–60; Fink, Workingmen’s Democracy, pp. 126–30, 156–72; Norman Ware, The Labor Movement in the United States, 1860–1895: A Study in Democracy (New York: Vintage Books, 1929), pp. 155–90. On their success at organizing blacks and women see Fink Workingmen’s Democracy, pp. 150–72; Weir, Beyond Labor’s Veil, pp. 46–51; Susan Levine, Labor’s True Woman: Carpet Weavers, Industrialization, and Labor Reform in the Gilded Age (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1984). 73  Henry E. Sharpe, ‘Co-Operation’, Journal of United Labor 4, no. 7 (15 November 1883), p. 597.

Solidarity and Civic Virtue  165 results flowing from our organization is the universal and wide-spread acquaintance that has sprung up among the members: a feeling of brotherhood everywhere exists; an interest in each other’s welfare has broken down, to a vast extent, that old feeling of selfishness that used to exist among us; a feeling of manly independence has taken the place of that cringing and crawling spirit that used to make us the scorn of honest men.74

Solidarity cast off the mentality of dependence by making visible to each his power as a potential agent. And it did so by showing how the real exercise of that power was necessarily linked to others exercising that power jointly with him. But this meant solidarity could only develop if these separate workers gave institutional expression to the otherwise abstract identity of interests among all workers. These institutions had to make cooperation, rather than competition, their ruling ethos. Solidarity was therefore a virtue linked to a specific institutional practice: the self-organization of workers for achieving social and political ends. From its earliest manifestation in the workingmen’s parties of the 1820s and 1830s through to the heyday of the Knights of Labor in the 1880s and 1890s, the cultural logic of labour republicanism was organizational. Uriah Stephens, founder of the Knights of Labor, wrote in the Journal of United Labor: The work to which this fraternity addresses itself . . . enters a field occupied by no other organized effort . . . that of knitting up into a compact and homogeneous amalgamation all the world’s workers in one universal brotherhood, guided by the same rules, working by the same methods, practicing the same forms for accomplishing the same ends.75

In the name of this universal brotherhood, Stephens proclaimed ‘Creed, party, and nationality are but outward garments’.76 With the creation of these organizations through which workers could press demands and exercise their political agency, labour republicans embraced and recast the republican idea of active citizenship. Participation was not a process of maintaining existing free institutions but of conflictual engagement with current regimes of state and property. Virtuous political action was also consistent with a kind of partisanship, since the interest of the dependent classes in universal liberty was seen as consistent with the general interest in free institutions. That was the full meaning of solidarity. The ‘feeling of brotherhood’, to which labour republicans regularly referred, was something generated and maintained in the cultural activities of this counterhegemonic institution. For instance, Robert Weir’s extraordinary reconstruction of the culture of the Knights of Labor reminds us that the genesis of solidarity 74  Sylvis, ‘Address Delivered at Chicago’, p. 167. 75  Stevens, ‘Ideal Organization I’, p. 24. 76 Ibid.

166  Alex Gourevitch reached deep into the day-to-day life of sport and leisure. ‘The KOL neither ­privatized nor trivialized leisure,’ writes Weir, ‘Knights took their battles over the issue [of leisure] into the nation’s parks, streets, buildings, and public spaces.’77 The Knights developed a rich internal symbolic world of picnics, sports, emblems, and song.78 Labour historians have rightly interpreted this as a moment in the history of working-class consciousness, but here what is most relevant to us is the connection of these practices to the problem of cultivating virtue. Selforganization made tangible the bonds of cooperation that could, potentially, be generalized if the cooperative commonwealth were made real. But of course the point of organization was not just the production of sentiments but the effective exercise of collective agency. Indeed, the production of sentiments was not something that happened prior to or outside collective action but was, rather, something that this action both presupposed and generated. The Knights led a chaotic course through the labour conflicts of the late nineteenth century, never acquiring the mastery of their fate they hoped. But they led boycotts, strikes, ran organizing campaigns, advocated policies, and endorsed and ran candidates. The empirical history of these various experiments has been told elsewhere.79 What matters here is that actions like the boycott were understood as at once a test and proof of the value of collective action. They required an extensive campaign of education, development of sympathies, reorientation of daily economic practices, and willingness to sacrifice short-term interests to the longterm goal of the campaign. The experience of exercise that collective power was itself an education in the way each individual’s power was increased through cooperative organization: ‘As individual atoms, the members of our Order are helpless; as the cohering atoms of a mighty association, they become a power.’80 These practical efforts also involved breaking through ‘partisan prejudice’ that divided workers, by creating an alternative organization to carry loyalties and articulate demands.81 During the peak of political activity in the 1880s, for instance, one Knight proclaimed ‘Some of the specific aims and objects of the [Knights] are . . . to educate the members to an intelligent use of the ballot, for their own benefit and protection, free from restraint of party or undue influence of employers or monopolies’.82 The function of the Knights as a quasi-political organization was to do what those with power would not do, create vigilant

77 Weir, Beyond Labor’s Veil, p. 282. 78  See Weir’s illuminating account of the Knights’ leisure culture and approach to song, Beyond Labor’s Veil, pp. 103–44, 277–320. 79 Ware, The Labor Movement in the United States; Fink Workingmen’s Democracy; Oestreicher, ‘Socialism and the Knights of Labor in Detroit, 1877–1886’; Steven Leikin, The Practical Utopians: American Workers and the Cooperative Movement in the Gilded Age (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2004); Weir, Beyond Labor’s Veil. 80  Sharpe, ‘Co-operation’, Journal of United Labor 4, no. 6 (15 October 1883). 81 Powderly, Thirty Years of Labor, p. 76. 82 Jelley, The Voice of Labor, p. 203.

Solidarity and Civic Virtue  167 citizens in a seemingly conventional republican sense. It fell to an organization of workers, rather than the state itself, to cultivate virtue. So far, we have seen that the creation of a cooperative commonwealth depended upon the cultivation and exercise of certain virtues by workers because the in­equal­ity and domination of the existing society produced various forms of corruption. With the appropriate desires, intelligence, and sense of solidarity, it was possible for workers to assert themselves against employers and in political life. However, the virtues of cooperation mattered for one further reason—they were a precondition for the creation and maintenance of cooperatives themselves: ‘Political action cannot reorganize the industrial system. Nothing short of a re­organ­iza­tion of the industrial system can abolish poverty and give equal op­por­ tun­ity to all. Co-operation is the only means whereby the poor can obtain a just share of the profits and honors of advancing civilization.’83 Labour republicans famously disagreed with each other about the precise role of politics, and the Knights changed positions over the course of its existence.84 But one very consistent thought was that control of the state could not, on its own, produce an economy of independent producers if those producers themselves did not understand and act on the principles of cooperation. As one article in the Journal of United Labor had it, The organization of working men into societies, the amalgamation of these in a central body; the coalescence of these in turn in a trades union, are all well as far as they go. The principle, however, must be carried further, and applied in pol­it­ ical life to the ballot, representation and legislation. It must be carried further still, and applied to trade itself; the masses must institute and own their own industries.85

For the masses to ‘institute and own their own industries’ they had to be willing to engage in and relate to these enterprises in a different way from a mere job. Otherwise, the same logic of competition would undermine the very political economy they were trying to institute. A central reason why cooperatives required virtue was that they were ­voluntary. In the words of one president of the Knights’ Co-operative Board: ‘Co-operation . . . the word has come to have the special significance of voluntary working together. All that working together which is not voluntarily entered into,

83  Sharpe, ‘Co-Operation’ (15 January 1884), p. 706. 84 Leon Fink, ‘From Autonomy to Abundance: Changing Beliefs about the Free Labor System in  Nineteenth-Century America’, in Terms of Labor: Slavery, Serfdom, and Free Labor, ed. Stanley L. Engerman (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); Ware, The Labor Movement in the United States, pp. 350–70. 85  Mrs Imogene C. Fales, ‘The Organization of Labor’, Journal of United Labor 4, no. 5 (15 September 1883), p. 558.

168  Alex Gourevitch such, for instance, as that of convicts or soldiers in the ranks, is not termed ­co-operation. Co-operation is the antithesis of slavery.’86 Cooperatives were a form of free labour, in contrast to wage and chattel slavery, if its members entered it voluntarily. But if cooperatives were formed voluntarily then, for one, their formation depended on a willingness of disparate individuals to create joint enterprises, rather than assume the traditional form of capital-labour relations. Further, their success depended upon the dispositions of their members to maintain a commitment to the long-run health of the enterprise, and to consider each members’ interests equally, rather than consider his own short-term self-interest. In other words, labour republicans here transposed a familiar republican argument about free political institutions onto socio-economic ones. If free political institutions only remained free if citizens were virtuous, the same held for co­opera­tive economic enterprises, especially since these enterprises had the same basic purpose as political institutions: the independence of each member. But cooperatives could not rely on the employer’s coercion or the discipline of the labour market the way the current system did. For cooperatives to resist degenerating into internally inegalitarian or exploitative enterprises, its members needed to remain voluntarily committed to its rules and principles. For this reason, labour republicans thought cooperatives ultimately rested on the moral qualities of their members: Every lover of his fellowmen, every one who believes in education, nay, every one who understands how he is linked to the great man and how much he has himself at stake, will enter into cooperative work, not for the mere immediate gain in cash, but for that higher, permanent, moral gain which must come, which always does come, from giving man an interest in something outside of himself, which comes from the awakening of the moral and intellectual faculties in association and from practice experience in the management of property.87

Absent the ‘awakening of the moral and intellectual faculties’ cooperative work would, at best, be an external burden, and at worst, be seen just as another source of instrumental benefit for the individual. This way of thinking about virtue and cooperation was extraordinarily demanding. That is undoubtedly one reason why, though local assemblies organized thousands of producer and distributer cooperatives, the Knights had limited success with them in the long run.88 Though of course the difficulty of accumulating capital, the legal repression, and the physical coercion of the Knights were also major obstacles. That they tended to blame themselves, despite quite enormous 86  Sharpe, ‘Co-operation’ (15 October 1883), p. 580. 88 Leikin, The Practical Utopians, pp. 65–83.

87  Ibid., p. 597.

Solidarity and Civic Virtue  169 external obstacles, is a further indication of how demanding their view was. As one of the leading theorists of cooperation put it, all the failures have resulted either because the purpose was unattainable or because there was not co-operation . . . To be a true co-operator, member of a voluntary association, a man must be one of the noblest of the race; he must be truthful, honest and industrious, for he must be loyal to his promises, he must keep his contracts, and to do that without fear of punishment before him, he must be a being of higher morality than the average man.89

Phrases such as ‘noblest of the race’ and ‘higher morality than the average man’ pointed to the burden that labour-republican thinking placed on workers. This might seem peculiar, given the objective obstacles that poor workers faced. But it was a natural consequence of thinking that, on the one hand, they were wage slaves, while, on the other hand, and for that very reason, these wage slaves were the only possible agents of republican transformation. Who else could exercise true nobility, in any socially effective way, in oppressive circumstances? But the kinds of habits required to overcome all of the pressures, distractions, and limits of the present demanded something extraordinary of each individual. These h ­ abits were virtues in the sense of demanding excellence, or a high level of moral performance in the face of the many obstacles that the wage-labour system presents to the cooperative commonwealth.

3.  Conclusion: Virtue and Emancipation The labour republicans present us with a challenging and distinct conception of civic virtue. These are the habits not of individuated citizens exercising personal judgment, but of a dependent class seeking to overcome its dependence. Since this conception of civic virtue was worked out in relation to a concrete problem of injustice—‘wage-slavery’—rather than in relation to the characteristics of an ideal republic, the defining qualities of the virtuous citizen were those that transform rather than preserve the regime. Consequently, labour republicans believed that the task of cultivating virtue fell not to the state, which was illegitimate, but to the dependent classes themselves. In one sense, then, this is a theory of virtue that avoids some familiar criticisms of the politics of virtue. It does not in the first instance grant the state coercive power to enforce a particular conception of the good. Moreover, the politics of virtue is here connected not with exclusion based on ethnic culture but rather with a project of universal inclusion or solidarity. I will come back to this point in my last thought, but first one other observation. 89  Sharpe, ‘Co-operation’ (15 October 1883), p. 581.

170  Alex Gourevitch Labour republicans provide us with a way of thinking about how the concept of virtue is connected to a politics of emancipation. It does so because emancipation is difficult. It requires the exercise of collective agency in the face of oppression and repression, which demands each participant exercise greater than normal amounts of commitment and even self-sacrifice. Labour republicanism is interesting therefore not just as an historical phenomenon but as a general form of a politics of virtue whereby those who find themselves in a condition of subjection might, through their own efforts, bring society closer to its own ideals of equal liberty. Even if one does not accept their specific theory of justice, or believes that cooperatives on their own could hardly have solved the problems of the wage-labour system, their way of thinking about the politics of virtue in conditions of subjection still compels attention. While scholars are correct to say that the republican emphasis on civic virtue can lead to deeply undesirable forms of state coercion, enforced cultural homogeneity, and overvaluation of public life over personal liberty, this is not all it has to mean nor has meant historically. Even today, we can find inspiration in the idea that those who suffer from domination must be agents of their own liberation, and that to become these agents they must acquire new passions, new interests, and new organizations. They must cultivate their own virtues. My last thought addresses an inescapable risk of this solidaristic politics. There is no doubt that the Knights of Labor were not always true to their universalistic aspirations. They made racist claims about the Chinese as well as about other Southern and Eastern European groups.90 Though they were no worse than other major organizations of the time, and though in comparison with both their contemporaries and their immediate descendants, like the American Federation of Labor, the Knights were remarkably inclusive,91 they nonetheless failed to extend their republican sympathies to certain oppressed workers because of their eth­ni­city. Some see in this fact the danger of a republican politics of virtue, and a reason to look to some kind of institutional solution or independent protection from this kind of ethnic exclusion. But that is the wrong response. What we learn from the Knights of Labor on this point is that there is always a risk in politics that those seeking emancipation run the risk of violating their own commitment to universal solidarity. But that risk is inescapable. There is no way to neutralize that risk without neutralizing the very thought that the dependent can emancipate themselves. To demand that the dependent free themselves does hold them

90  Anonymous, ‘Go-Stay’, Journal of United Labor 4, no. 1 (May 1883), pp. 458–61. See also Lawrence Glickman, A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp. 86–9; Rosanne Currarino, The Labor Question in America: Economic Democracy in the Gilded Age (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2011), pp. 36–59. 91  They were the first labour organization to demand ‘for both sexes equal pay for equal work’ and the first to organize black workers on a mass scale, Terence Powderly, ‘Declaration of Principles of the Knights of Labor’, in Labor: Its Rights and Wrongs, p. 33; Fink, Workingmen’s Democracy, p. 169.

Solidarity and Civic Virtue  171 responsible for their unfreedom in a certain way, which leaves open the door to blaming the dominated for their passivity. Moreover, as we have seen, the kind of solidarity required is very demanding, so demanding that it can lead those who are fully committed to blame those who fail to stand with them. This can easily lead to the racialization or other kinds of stereotyping of groups. That, I think, was one major motivation behind the hostility that some Knights felt towards the Chinese or Hungarians who they found so difficult to organize. When some Knights saw themselves making certain sacrifices for their collective project, they could not understand why others did not spontaneously do the same, and thus blamed them for their lack of virtue. This was a form of cultural or racial prejudice, but it is one that can be criticized on its own terms, as a failure to exercise the proper sensitivity to conditions of domination. There is no escape from the risk of this kind of politics. Instead of seeing in the limitations of the Knights a reason to abandon solidarity and collective action for, say, constitutional restraints and institutional design, we should instead hope that subsequent attempts are truer to their own principles. That would be a true commitment to republican solidarity.

8

Marx’s Social Republic Radical Republicanism and the Political Institutions of Socialism Bruno Leipold

In William Morris’s epic poem, The Pilgrims of Hope (1885–6), three English communists travel to Paris to fight for the Commune—the working-class insurrection that controlled the city for seventy-two days from 18 March to 28 May 1871.1 Two of them die fighting on the barricades and the third only narrowly escapes back to England, after the Versailles government butchers the Communards during the infamous la semaine sanglante (‘the bloody week’). But in the most moving stanza of the poem, the hero describes what it was like to see the city in that fleeting moment when ‘Paris was free’: And that day at last of all days I knew what life was worth; For I saw what few have beheld, a folk with all hearts gay. Then at last I knew indeed that our world of the coming day, That so oft in grief and in sorrow I had preached, and scarcely knew If it was but despair of the present or the hope of the day was due, I say that I saw it now, real solid and at hand.2

That experience was comparable to the effect that the Commune had on Karl Marx.3 He heaped praise on the Parisian workers for ‘storming the heavens’ and

1  I am grateful to Caroline Fetscher, John Filling, Jared Holley, Steven Klein, David Leopold, James Muldoon, Luise Müller, Mirjam Müller, Karma Nabulsi, Paul Raekstad, Ross Speer, Patricia Springborg, Stuart White, Lea Ypi, and audiences at the University of Oxford, the University of Campinas, the Goethe University Frankfurt, and the Venice International University for their comments. 2  William Morris, ‘The Pilgrims of Hope’, The Commonweal, 2, no. 17 (8 May 1886), p. 45. 3  Titles of Marx’s works are given in the original language of publication and references are to the Marx Engels Werke (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1956–68), henceforth MEW; and the Marx Engels Collected Works (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975–2005), henceforth MECW. Where necessary I refer to the more authoritative but less accessible Marx Engels Gesamtausgabe (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1975–98; Akademie Verlag: 1998–), henceforth MEGA②. For other primary sources I have tried to cite both the original and an English translation. Bruno Leipold, Marx’s Social Republic: Radical Republicanism and the Political Institutions of Socialism In: Radical Republicanism: Recovering the Tradition’s Popular Heritage. Edited by: Bruno Leipold, Karma Nabulsi, and Stuart White, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198796725.003.0009

Marx ’ s Social Republic  173 ensuring that a ‘new point of departure of world-historical importance has been gained’.4 But it was not the Commune’s modest social measures that caused Marx such excitement. It was because the Commune’s popular democratic experiment, ‘real solid and at hand’, led Marx to reconsider and clarify what political institutions were necessary for achieving and maintaining socialism. As he put it, the Commune was ‘the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of Labour’.5 This political form was, as I will argue in this chapter, inherited from the republican tradition, and especially its most rad­ ical and popular elements.6 I will set out three dimensions of how Marx’s political thought was shaped by this republican inheritance.7 First, his advocacy of a system of popular delegacy to replace representative government, where representatives are constrained by imperative mandates, the right to recall, and short terms of office. Second, his preference for legislative supremacy over the executive and his criticisms of the separation of powers. Third, his support for placing the state’s administrative and repressive organs under popular control. Underlying Marx’s commitment to these popular political institutions was his confidence in the capacity of the popular classes to rule and administer themselves. Marx maintained that the Commune had revealed the ability of ‘plain working men’ to govern themselves ‘modestly, conscientiously, and efficiently’ and thereby undermined the pretension that the ‘governmental privilege’ should be reserved for the ‘upper 10,000’ of wealthy elites—their supposed ‘natural superiors’.8 It was moreover, Marx insisted, a ‘Delusion’ that ‘administration and political governing were mysteries, transcendent functions only to be trusted to the hands of a trained caste’.9 Marx thus believed that the common citizens had a greater capacity for political decision making and administration than the elitist few; a belief that places him in the company of radical republicans like Machiavelli 4  Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 12 April and 17 April 1871, MEW, vol. 33, pp. 205–6, 209; MECW, vol. 44, pp. 131–2, 137. For his later more measured assessment, see Marx to Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis, 22 February 1881, MEW, vol. 35, p. 160; MECW, vol. 46, p. 66. 5 Marx, Civil War in France, MEW, vol. 17, p. 342; MECW, vol. 22, p. 334. 6 For the relationship between republicanism and Marx’s social thought, see Bruno Leipold, ‘Chains and Invisible Threads: Liberty and Domination in Marx’s Account of Wage-Slavery’, in Rethinking Liberty before Liberalism, eds. Hannah Dawson and Annelien de Dijn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). 7  One way that Marx’s political thought might be thought to diverge from the republican tradition is his supposed belief in the disappearance of politics and political institutions once communism is properly established. The textual basis for this interpretation is, however, remarkably thin and confuses Marx’s belief in the end of class-based politics with the end of politics as such. For insightful discussion of this widespread misunderstanding, see Norman Geras, ‘Seven Types of Obloquy: Travesties of Marxism’, Socialist Register 26 (1990), pp. 25–9; and William Clare Roberts, Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), pp. 251–3. 8 Marx, Civil War in France, MEW, vol. 17, p. 343; MECW, vol. 22, p. 336; Civil War in France (First Draft), MEW, vol. 17, p. 556; MECW, vol. 22, p. 489. 9 Marx, Civil War in France (First Draft), MEW, vol. 17, p. 544; MECW, vol. 22, p. 488.

174  Bruno Leipold and distinguishes him from the more aristocratic and oligarchic strains of the republican tradition.10 Marx repeatedly referred to the kind of polity that incorporated these popular political institutions as a social republic. He argued that the Commune had shown that, a Republic is only in France and Europe possible as a ‘Social Republic’, that is a Republic which disowns the capital and landowner class of the State machinery to supersede it by the Commune, that frankly avows ‘social emancipation’ as the great goal of the Republic and guarantees thus that social transformation by the Communal organisation.11

The term social republic came to particular prominence amongst radicals during the 1848 Revolutions. It formed half of the popular slogan ‘la République démocratique et sociale’ (the Democratic and Social Republic), which became the rallying cry for socialists and republicans fighting for a republic that would both institute universal male suffrage and go beyond political reform and address the social question.12 In Marx’s analysis, the social republic (and related terms like the ‘red republic’ and the ‘Republic of Labour’) was the form of the republic sought by the working class and he distinguished it from the ‘bourgeois republic . . . the state whose admitted purpose is to perpetuate the rule of capital, the slavery of labour’.13 He argued that the underdevelopment of the working class in 1848 ensured the victory of the bourgeoisie and their bourgeois republic and meant that a ‘social republic [only] appeared as a phrase, as a prophecy’ of things to come.14 For Marx, the subsequent events of the Commune, twenty-three years later, were a striking illustration of the working class finally being in a position to take

10 John P. McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 66–7. 11 Marx, Civil War in France (First Draft), MEW, vol. 17, p. 554; MECW, vol. 22, p. 497. Marx similarly writes that the ‘ “Social Republic” . . . [was] . . . a Republic that was not only to supersede the monarchical form of class-rule, but class-rule itself ’, Civil War in France, MEW, vol. 17, p. 338; MECW, vol. 22, pp. 330–1. I have discussed Marx’s use of the term in more detail in Bruno Leipold, ‘Social Republic’, in Marx from the Margins: A Collective Project, from A to Z, special issue of Krisis: Journal for Contemporary Philosophy 2 (2018), pp. 153–4. Unfortunately, William Clare Roberts’s ‘Marx’s Social Republic: Political Not Metaphysical’, Historical Materialism (2019), doi.org/10.1163/1569206X-00001870, appeared too late for its arguments to be incorporated into this chapter. 12 Maurice Agulhon, The Republican Experiment, 1848–1850, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 164–5; Jeremy Jennings, Revolution and the Republic: A History of Political Thought in France since the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p.  56; Pamela  M.  Pilbeam, Republicanism in Nineteenth-Century France, 1814–1871 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 215–18; and Jonathan Sperber, The European Revolutions, 1848–1851, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 206–7. 13  Marx, ‘Die Klassenkämpfe in Frankreich’, MEW, vol. 7, p. 33; MECW, vol. 10, p. 69. 14 Marx, Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte, MEW, vol. 8, pp. 120, 194; MECW, vol. 11, pp. 109, 181–2.

Marx ’ s Social Republic  175 political power (however briefly) and setting about the task of creating their own social republic.15 Marx’s conception of the political structure of socialism is more usually known as the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. But despite the canonical role that this phrase has played in Marxist and anti-Marxist thought, Marx’s own usage of it is more sporadic and less definitive than its subsequent status would suggest.16 What he meant by the phrase has also been significantly distorted by subsequent linguistic and political developments. ‘Dictatorship’ has evolved from its initial identification with the Roman Republic’s constitutional provision for temporarily handing extensive (but still limited) power to an individual during state emergencies, to referring to autocratic rule that is permanent and constitutionally unconstrained.17 Moreover, the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ has become inescapably associated with one-party rule and the prohibition of democratic and civic freedoms. Using the term social republic thus has some advantage in avoiding this ideological baggage as well as preconceptions of what Marx is supposed to have believed about the political institutions of socialism. My discussion of the social republic will primarily draw on Marx’s The Civil War in France (1871), as well as two lengthy drafts of the text. Marx wrote this pamphlet (which appeared as an address of the General Council of the International Workingmen’s Association) in order to defend the Commune against the nearly universal international condemnation it faced and to push his particular interpretation of events (as such, the text should in parts be treated ‘not [as] an account of what the Commune was, but of what it might have become’18). From Marx’s discussion of the actual and potential institutional features of the Commune we can draw out the broad counters of what he thought the political institutions of socialism should look like. However, this account is only a fragmentary picture of a society’s political institutions and it is certainly not a blueprint from which one could straightforwardly derive the constitution of a socialist polity. Marx was 15  There is some disagreement about the extent to which the Paris Commune should be considered a working-class uprising, see David A. Shafer, The Paris Commune: French Politics, Culture, and Society at the Crossroads of the Revolutionary Tradition and Revolutionary Socialism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 115; Robert Tombs, The Paris Commune, 1871 (London: Longman, 1999), pp. 111–16. 16  See the exhaustive analysis in Hal Draper, ‘Marx and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat’, New Politics 1, no. 4 (1961), pp. 91–104; and Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, vol. 3 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1986), part IV. See also, Lea Ypi, ‘Democratic Dictatorship: Political Legitimacy in Marxist Perspective’, European Journal of Philosophy (forthcoming). One pertinent example of the varied and inter­change­able terminology that Marx uses to describe the political structure of socialism, is his claim that the peasant should side with the workers’ republic because the ‘social-democratic, the red republic, is the dictatorship of his allies’, Marx, ‘Die Klassenkämpfe in Frankreich’, MEW, vol. 7, p. 84; MECW, vol. 10, p. 122. 17 Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, vol. 3, pp. 11–16; Wilfried Nippell, ‘Saving the Constitution: The European Discourse on Dictatorship’, in In the Footsteps of Herodotus: Towards European Political Thought, eds. Janet Coleman and Paschalis M. Kitromilides (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 2012), pp. 29–49. 18  Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (London: Allen Lane, 2016), p. 502.

176  Bruno Leipold opposed to setting out detailed future plans of this kind, and he explicitly praised the Commune for having no ‘ready-made Utopias to introduce par décret du peuple’ (‘by decree of the people’).19 This refusal to consider the details of socialism, including its political and constitutional requirements, in the depth it deserves is one of the less convincing aspects of Marx’s thought.20 There is, however, much in his account of the social republic that is suggestive and thought provoking, and if we abandon the idea that it has to be ‘swallow[ed] . . . whole’,21 then both republicans and socialists might find something of value for thinking about how our political institutions should be structured.

1.  Popular Delegacy and Representative Government At the outbreak of the Commune, authority over Paris first passed into the hands of the Central Committee of the National Guard, an autonomous and democratic body that had emerged the month before in the turbulent aftermath of the Prussian siege of Paris. Marx enthusiastically described the Central Committee’s federative system of electing its members (from companies and battalions upwards) and claimed that ‘Never were elections more sifted, never delegates fuller representing the masses from which they had sprung’.22 Marx extended this praise to the electoral mechanisms of the Commune Council (subsequently shortened to simply Commune), which assumed control from the Central Committee after elections on 26 March 1871. Marx argued that these measures, comprising imperative mandates, representative recall, and short terms of office, transformed an unaccountable system where representatives ruled over the ­people to one where delegates were subordinated to their oversight and control. As he says in The Civil War in France, ‘[i]nstead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes’.23 The institutional mechanisms that Marx embraces to constrain representatives (or delegates) conflict with one of the core principles of representative government, which holds, as Bernard Manin identifies in his authoritative account of the topic, that representatives retain partial independence from the will of the people

19 Marx, Civil War in France, MEW, vol. 17, p. 343; MECW, vol. 22, p. 335. 20 See David Leopold, ‘The Structure of Marx and Engels’ Considered Account of Utopian Socialism’, History of Political Thought 26, no. 3 (2005), pp. 443–66; and David Leopold, ‘On Marxian Utopophobia’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 54, no. 1 (2016), pp. 111–34. 21 David Leopold, The Young Karl Marx: German Philosophy, Modern Politics, and Human Flourishing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 11. 22 Marx, Civil War in France (First Draft), MEW, vol. 17, p. 538; MECW, vol. 22, p. 483. 23 Marx, Civil War in France, MEW, vol. 17, p. 340; MECW, vol. 22, p. 333.

Marx ’ s Social Republic  177 who elected them.24 That is, once representatives are elected, they are not required to vote in accordance with the preferences of their constituents and can instead decide on legislation based on their own judgment. At the same time, Manin points out, representatives are not entirely independent of their constituents either, as they are subject to both citizen pressure during their mandate and the threat of not being re-elected at the end of their mandate. This means that representatives have both an incentive to act in accordance with their constituents’ preferences, but are not legally required to do so, giving them a certain degree of discretion. Manin outlines several constitutional mechanisms that can reduce the degree of this discretion, focusing particularly on imperative mandates and the right to recall representatives. Imperative mandates (often referred to by their French name, mandat impératif ), require representatives to carry out the instructions given to them by their constituents. The right to recall allows constituents to sanction representatives immediately rather than at the end of their mandate. Both measures thereby constrain the discretion of representatives. They have however been almost universally absent from or even explicitly banned by the constitutions of representative governments. Manin writes, ‘None of the representative governments established since the end of the eighteenth century has authorized imperative mandates . . . Neither has any of them durably applied permanent revocability of representatives.’25 In France, the imperative mandate has been expressly prohibited in all of its republican constitutions (with the exception of the never implemented 1793 Jacobin Constitution and the 1946 Constitution of the ill-fated Fourth Republic), and similar provisions can be found in the modern constitutions of countries as diverse as Germany, Korea, Senegal, and Spain.26 There was however a long radical republican tradition, from the French Revolution to the Paris Commune, which, inspired by Rousseau, contested this ultimately victorious model of largely unconstrained representation.27 Across the various republican constitutional moments we find the more radical elements of the tradition voicing a more accountable and delegative understanding of representation. One of the Revolution’s key radical participants, Jean-Paul Marat, had already advised the English people in 1774 that ‘representatives of the people ought ever to act according to the instructions of their constituents’ otherwise

24  Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 6, 163–7. 25  Ibid., p. 163. 26 Christoph Müller, Das imperative und freie Mandat: Überlegungen zur Lehre von der Repräsentation des Volkes (Leiden: A.  W.  Sijthoff, 1966), pp. 50–3; Marc Van der Hulst, The Parliamentary Mandate: A Global Comparative Study (Geneva: Inter-Parliamentary Union, 2000), p. 8. 27  Pierre-Henri Zaidman, Le mandat impératif: De la Révolution française à la Commune de Paris (Paris: Les Editions Libertaires, 2008); Marco Goldoni, ‘Rousseau’s Radical Constitutionalism and Its Legacy’, in Constitutionalism beyond Liberalism, eds. Michael W. Dowdle and Michael A. Wilkinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 227–53.

178  Bruno Leipold ‘What then are our representatives, but our masters?’28 When deputies assembled in the Estates General in 1789 they carried instructions (Cahiers) from their constituencies, which were almost immediately declared void in response to the aristocratic Second Estate’s attempt to use them to block the early constitutional process of the Revolution, and the imperative mandate was subsequently banned in the 1791 Constitution. However, as the Revolution progressed various radical groupings, including the sans-culottes, concluded that this had resulted in the ‘establishment of an unrestrained power’ which had replaced the king’s despotism with ‘legislative tyranny’, and they thus waged a campaign to legalize the imperative mandate, having some success with the Jacobin Constitution of 1793, which also included a provision for representative recall.29 These more radical ideas on representation surfaced once again with the Commune, with Commune members citing the mandat impératif given to them by their constituents in the justification of their votes.30 Even after the Commune’s demise, radical republicans waged an unsuccessful campaign for imperative mandates to be included in the constitution of the Third Republic.31 They argued that the choice for the French people lay between the ‘imperative mandate or carte blanche to our mandatories, masters or slaves, this is the alternative; nothing in between, you must choose’.32 Marx inherited this tradition of radical constitutionalism, and we find its influence expressed in his endorsement of imperative mandates and the right to recall representatives, as well as short terms of office, in his defence of the Commune. The Commune is praised for having its members ‘chosen by universal suffrage . . . responsible and revocable at short terms’, as well as its proposed plans for local and regional communes to send delegates to a national body where ‘each delegate [would] be at any time revocable and bound by the mandat impératif (formal instructions) of his constituents’.33 Marx also expresses distaste for 28  Jean-Paul Marat, The Chains of Slavery: A Work wherein the Clandestine and Villainous Attempts of Princes to Ruin Liberty Are Pointed Out, and the Dreadful Scenes of Despotism Disclosed . . . (London: 1774), p. 203. See further discussion in Rachel Hammersley, The English Republican Tradition and Eighteenth-Century France: Between the Ancients and the Moderns (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), p. 142. 29  Jean-François Varlet, Projet d’un mandat spécial et impératif, aux mandataires du peuple à la Convention nationale (Paris: Imprimerie du Cercle social, 1792), pp. 6–7; ‘Proposal for a Special and Imperative Mandate’, in Social and Political Thought of the French Revolution 1788–1797: An Anthology of Original Texts, abridged ed., ed. and trans. Marc Allan Goldstein (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), pp. 154–5. For an overview of this episode, see Nicolai von Eggers, ‘When the People Assemble, the Laws Go Silent: Radical Democracy and the French Revolution’, Constellations 23, no. 2 (2016), pp. 256–8. 30  See particularly the minutes of the session on 1 May 1871, in Les 31 séances officielles de Commune de Paris (Paris: Revue de France, 1871), pp. 140–2. 31  Daniel Mollenhauer, Auf der Suche nach der ‘wahren Republik’: Die französischen ‘radicaux’ in der frühen Dritten Republik (1870–1890) (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1997), chap. 4. 32 Anonymous [Charles Ferdinand Gambon], Le mandat impératif par un paysan et lettre du ­citoyen Félix Pyat (Genève: L’imprimerie Coopérative, 1873), p. 21. 33 Marx, Civil War in France, MEW, vol. 17, p. 339–40; MECW, vol. 22, pp. 331–2. There is some ambiguity here if ‘short terms’ is supposed to refer to the length of mandate or how quickly the elect­ or­ate can recall their representatives.

Marx ’ s Social Republic  179 representatives previously having ‘three or six years . . . to misrepresent the people’ and constituents only being able to replace them ‘once in many years’.34 This preference for short terms of office is also expressed in an 1852 article on the Chartists, where Marx voices his support for their demand for annual general elections (the only one of their six demands that remains unfulfilled today), noting that it was one ‘of the conditions without which Universal Suffrage would be illusory for the working class’.35 Marx does not dedicate much space to considering exactly how these electoral mechanisms would ensure greater democratic accountability. But he does make an intriguing comparison between voters choosing representatives and employers hiring workers. He comments that ‘universal suffrage . . . [will] serve the people’ just ‘as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for the workmen and managers in his business’.36 Marx continues the comparison by claiming that it is ‘well known’ that both individual citizens and employers have the ‘know how to put the right man in the right place’, but if they do ‘make a mistake’ they have the power to ‘address it promptly’.37 The ironic point being that just as employers can fire their employees as they please, so the people will be able to recall its representatives as it pleases. The implication of this comparison is that similarly to how workers are currently tied to the will of their employers, so representatives will be tied to the will of their electors. For if a representative diverges from the preferences of the constituents, the constituents can ‘promptly’ rectify their mistake by immediately recalling their representative, rather than having to wait for the end of the representative’s mandate to vote them out office. The representative can thus be expected to tailor their behaviour, just as a worker does, to ensuring that the constituents do not try to recall them. The outcome of the accountability mechanisms that Marx endorses would mean the transformation of representative government into a system of popular delegacy. In the former, representation is understood as the ceding of decisionmaking power by the people to representatives and the people’s role reduced to deciding whether to renew or decline their mandate at the next election. In between elections, representatives exercise their mandate with a large degree of discretion and without the formal involvement of the people. In a system of popu­lar delegacy, representation is instead understood as a form of commission, where representatives (or delegates) implement the wishes of their constituents. The people also retain the continuous power to intervene in the decision making

34 Marx, Civil War in France, MEW, vol. 17, p. 340; MECW, vol. 22, p. 333; Civil War in France (Second Draft), MEW, vol. 17, p. 544; MECW, vol. 22, p. 488. 35  Marx, ‘The Chartists’, MEW, vol. 8, p. 344; MECW, vol. 11, p. 335. The Chartists’ other demands were: universal manhood suffrage, the secret ballot, equally sized constituencies, salaries for members of parliament, and the removal of property qualifications for members of parliament. 36 Marx, Civil War in France, MEW, vol. 17, p. 340; MECW, vol. 22, p. 333. 37 Ibid.

180  Bruno Leipold of their representatives by giving them formal instructions or recalling them entirely. Through the institutions of popular delegacy, Marx thought that universal suffrage would be turned from a tool to choose between elite representatives, to one where the people remain firmly in possession of political power. That point is vividly made in the first draft of The Civil War in France, where Marx argues, The general suffrage, till now abused either for the parliamentary sanction of the Holy State Power, or a play in the hands of the ruling classes, only employed by the people to choose the instruments of parliamentary class rule once in many years, adapted to its real purposes, to choose by the communes their own functionaries of administration and initiation.38

Marx’s critique of representative government in his discussion of the Paris Commune is prefigured in some of his early political writings, particularly in his criticisms of Hegel in his Zur Kritik des Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie (Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 1843). Hegel had rejected ‘commissioned or mandated agents’ because he believed that representatives had a ‘better understanding’ of the common good than the people who elected them.39 Marx countered that unencumbered representatives ‘in reality represent particular interests’ and without the formal constraints of imperative mandates, representatives stop being delegates of the people, commenting that ‘Formally they are commissioned, but once they are actually commissioned they are no longer mandatories. They are supposed to be delegates, and they are not.’40 Marx further objected to how representative government reduced political participation, a ‘single and temporary’ event, to a ‘sensational act, [that] it is political society at a moment of ecstasy’.41 As several commentators have noticed, Marx’s critique of reducing the people’s involvement in politics to merely choosing who is to lead them every few years and his endorsement of an alternative system of popular delegacy bears a striking resemblance to Rousseau.42 Rousseau famously argued in Du contrat social (On the Social Contract, 1762) that representative government amounted to slavery punctuated by momentary freedom during elections. The English people were 38 Marx, Civil War in France (First Draft), MEW, vol. 17, p. 544; MECW, vol. 22, p. 488. 39 Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), §309, p.  478; Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen  W.  Wood, trans. H.  B.  Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), §309, p. 348. 40 Marx, Zur Kritik des Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie, MEW, vol. 1, p. 329; MECW, vol. 3, p. 123. 41 Ibid, MEW, vol. 1, p. 317; MECW, vol. 3, p. 112. 42  See for example, Lucio Colletti, ‘Introduction’, in Early Writings, by Karl Marx (London: Penguin, 1975), p. 46; Norman Arthur Fischer, Marxist Ethics within Western Political Theory: A Dialogue with Republicanism, Communitarianism, and Liberalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 63–5; Goldoni, ‘Rousseau’s Radical Constitutionalism’, p. 250; and Manin, Principles of Representative Government, p. 165. David Leopold shares this assessment but cautions against exaggerating both the broader similarity between Rousseau and Marx’s political thought and the extent of Rousseau’s influence on Marx, Young Karl Marx, pp. 262–71.

Marx ’ s Social Republic  181 thus ‘free only during the election of Members of Parliament; as soon as they are elected, it is enslaved, it is nothing’.43 Rousseau’s criticism of representation has often given rise to the interpretation that he thinks freedom is only realizable in small city-states where every citizen can participate directly and representation is unnecessary. But in his Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne (Considerations on the Government of Poland, 1772) Rousseau suggests that liberty and large modern states can in fact be reconciled. He argues that the in­ev­it­able corruption of legislators in a representative system can be avoided by two mechanisms: holding frequent elections and requiring legislators to ‘adhere exactly to their instructions’.44 Rousseau argues that without these preventative measures the legislature becomes the ‘instrument of servitude’.45 He thus observes of the unencumbered English system of representation, I can only marvel at the negligence, the carelessness, and I dare say the stupidity of the English Nation, which after arming its deputies with the supreme power, adds not a single restraint to regulate the use they might make of it during the entire seven years of their mandate.46

Marx and Rousseau thus both share a commitment to imperative mandates and frequent elections as constitutional mechanisms to keeping representatives accountable to the people who elected them. (The similarity between Marx and Rousseau on this question is not surprising, given that in the same summer that the young Marx wrote his critique of Hegel he read and took notes on Rousseau’s Du contrat social).47 Both Marx and Rousseau turn to popular delegacy as a way to realize democracy and popular sovereignty in a large modern polity, without resorting to the largely unconstrained form of representation that has today become exclusively identified with ‘democracy’. Defenders of representative government have, in contrast, tended to present their preferred regime as the only alternative to Athenian-style direct democracy and since (they maintain) we cannot go back to these small city-states, representative government wins by default. Marx and Rousseau’s advocacy of popular delegacy shows that these poles do not exhaust the possibilities for realizing democracy in a modern state. 43  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 430; The Social Contract, in The Social Contract and Later Political Writings, ed. and trans. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 114. 44  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3, p. 979; Considerations on the Government of Poland, in Social Contract and Later Political Writings, p. 201. 45 Ibid. 46  Ibid. The maximum parliamentary term was not reduced from seven to five years until the 1911 Parliament Act. 47  Marx’s notes on Rousseau can be found in MEGA②, vol. IV.2, pp. 91–101. In addition to Rousseau, Marx also took notes on Machiavelli’s Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio (Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livy, 1517) and Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois (The Spirit of the Laws, 1748), which are available in the same volume, at pp. 106–15 and 276–8.

182  Bruno Leipold

2.  Legislative Supremacy and the Separation of Powers Marx praised the Commune for having combined executive and legislative power in one body, commenting that it had been a ‘working, not a parliamentary, body, executive and legislative at the same time’.48 The council of the Commune had realized this by reserving executive administrative decisions for the council members themselves. The Commune set up ten commissions (covering familiar ministerial departments such as war, finance, justice, and education), which were made up of between five and eight assembly members and with the head of each commission chosen by the assembly. That meant that two thirds of the Commune’s ninety-odd members exercised an administrative role in addition to their legislative one (hence why Marx calls it a ‘working . . . body’).49 There were thus no president or cabinet ministers who stood outside of the legislature and executive functions were subordinated to legislative direction and control. Marx’s praise of this constitutional feature of the Commune was in accord with his long-standing suspicion of the executive. In his analysis of the 1848 French Constitution, Marx heavily criticized the power it invested in the executive, through the office of the president, at the expense of the legislature. He thought that the Constitution had thereby simply replaced ‘hereditary monarchy’ with an ‘elective monarchy’.50 He argued that the Constitution endowed the president with ‘all the attributes of royal power’, by giving him the right to pardon crim­ inals, to dismiss local and municipal councils, to initiate foreign treaties, and, most damningly, the right to appoint and dismiss ministers without consulting the National Assembly.51 Marx argues that this final feature of the Constitution meant that the legislature had ‘forfeit[ed] all real influence’ over the operation of the bloated executive bureaucracy and left it solely in the hands of the president.52 The president’s power was further enhanced, Marx maintained, by its personal nature, since though the National Assembly represented the ‘manifold aspects of national spirit’, the votes for the presidency were ‘concentrated on one individual’ so that the ‘national spirit finds its incarnation’ in his person.53 Marx thus concluded that the Constitution had created ‘two heads . . . the Legislative Assembly, on the one hand, the President, on the other’, where the latter constitutional office provided the opening for an ambitious individual to amass sufficient power to 48 Marx, Civil War in France, MEW, vol. 17, p. 339; MECW, vol. 22, p. 331. For socialist criticism of this aspect of Marx’s constitutional thought, see Karl Kautsky, Die proletarische Revolution und ihr Programm (Stuttgart: J.  H.  W.  Dietz Nachfolger/Berlin: Buchhandlung Vorwärts, 1922), pp. 127–35; The Labour Revolution, trans. H. J. Stenning (London, G. Allen and Unwin, 1925), pp. 75–83. 49  These figures are from Richard N. Hunt, The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels, vol. 2 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984), pp. 144–5. See also Tombs, Paris Commune, pp. 80–1. 50  Marx, ‘Die Klassenkämpfe in Frankreich’, MEW, vol. 7, p. 41; MECW, vol. 10, p. 77. 51 Marx, Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte, MEW, vol. 8, p. 127; MECW, vol. 11, p. 116. 52 Ibid., MEW, vol. 8, p. 150; MECW, vol. 11, p. 139. 53 Ibid., MEW, vol. 8, p. 128; MECW, vol. 11, p. 117.

Marx ’ s Social Republic  183 overthrow the legislature and impose their own autocratic rule, as Louis-Napoléon successfully did in his coup d’état of 1851.54 Marx’s analysis of the 1848 Constitution has several elements in common with that of the radical republican Félix Pyat. Pyat was a journalist, playwright, and member of both the Second Republic’s National Assembly and later the council of the Commune. During the constituent debates in 1848 he famously took to the rostrum to denounce the proposed office of the president, arguing that he would be an ‘elective king’ more dangerous than the ‘hereditary king’ he replaced.55 Pyat presciently warned that the constitution would create a dangerous rivalry between ‘two heads’, where the president would have the advantage of ‘tend[ing] to condense, to concentrate, to absorb all powers, to represent, to personify, to incarnate the people’.56 In order to avoid that outcome, Pyat urged that the ‘legislative power must . . . completely dominate the executive power’.57 Marx and Pyat’s preference for legislative supremacy over the executive places them in a tradition of radical constitutional thought that can be traced back to the Convention period of the French Revolution and the 1793 Jacobin Constitution.58 In this tradition, which is sometimes called ‘assembly government’ (gouvernement d’assemblée), the ‘legislative assembly, popularly elected, holds undisputed supremacy over all other state organs’ and ‘the executive is strictly subordinated, the servant or agent of the assembly and dismissed at the assembly’s discretion’.59 Marx’s preference for this constitutional form derives from his belief that the executive tended to develop an alien and unaccountable will, which in 54 Ibid., MEW, vol. 8, p. 127; MECW, vol. 11, p. 115. 55  Félix Pyat, Speech to the National Assembly, 5 October 1848, Compte rendu des séances de l’Assemblée Nationale, vol. 4 (Paris: Imprimerie de l’Assemblée Nationale, 1850), pp. 651–2. It is likely that Marx was aware of Pyat’s speech, since he was closely following events in France and the speech was well publicized in the French radical press (see, for instance, La Réforme, 6 October 1848, no. 277, p. 1). 56 Ibid. 57  Ibid. Pyat was immediately followed by Alexis de Tocqueville, who defended the proposed role of the president—an action he later regretted, see his Souvenirs, in Œuvres Complètes, vol. 12 (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 189; Recollections: The French Revolution of 1848 and Its Aftermath, ed. Olivier Zunz, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2016), p. 127. For this episode, see Eugene Newton Curtis, The French Assembly of 1848 and American Constitutional Doctrines (New York: Columbia University, 1918), pp. 187–8. 58  Though Marx’s preference for legislative supremacy would seem to further showcase his constitutional affinity to Rousseau, his specification that the legislature should carry out executive administrative tasks distances him from Rousseau, who believed this was properly the role of the executive. That may reflect Marx not employing Rousseau’s distinction between sovereignty and government—a feature that potentially brings Marx closer to the Jacobins than Rousseau, see Richard Tuck, The Sleeping Sovereign: The Invention of Modern Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 158–60, 254–5. I thank Stuart White for suggesting this point to me. 59 Karl Loewenstein, Political Power and the Governmental Process (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1965), p. 81. Loewenstein condemns this constitutional type as ‘arch-democratic, archrepublican, “monolithic” in the extreme’. But as Richard Hunt argues, Marx’s position can also be seen as simply deepening a commitment to ministerial responsibility and the ‘standard European practice of parliamentary rule’ in contrast to the kind of extreme separation of powers found in the American Constitution, Political Ideas of Marx and Engels, vol. 2, p. 144.

184  Bruno Leipold revolutionary situations meant that it played a reactionary role in comparison to the legislature. In his commentary on the 1848 Revolution, Marx argues that the ‘executive power, in contrast to the legislative, expresses the heteronomy of the nation, in contrast to its autonomy’;60 and in his analysis of the 1789 French Revolution he argues that it was ‘made’ by the legislature and that whenever the legislature was the ‘dominant element’ it had made the ‘great, organic, general revolutions’ because it was the ‘the representative of the people, of the will of the species’, while the executive was responsible for ‘small revolutions, the retrograde revolutions, the reactions’, because it was ‘representative of the particular will, of subjective arbitrariness’.61 Assembly government differs from regimes with a strict separation of powers, a constitutional doctrine that Marx heavily criticized.62 In a point-by-point ana­ lysis of the 1848 French Constitution, Marx commented on Article 19 (which specified that the ‘separation of powers is the first principle of a free government’): ‘Here we have the old constitutional folly. The condition of a “free government” is not the division, but the UNITY of power. The machinery of government cannot be too simple. It is always the craft of knaves to make it complicated and mysterious.’63 Read in isolation this passage can have an alarmingly authoritarian quality. Indeed, the emphasis on the ‘UNITY of power’ suggests a worrying endorsement of concentrations of power. But if we place the passage in the context of both Marx’s wider constitutional thought and the popular republican constitutionalism that we have so far discussed, then it becomes clear that his objection to the separation of powers is that it wrongly concentrates power in the executive at the expense of the legislature. That in turn was, as we saw earlier, grounded in a worry that executive power has a tendency towards independence that escapes the ­people’s control. That criticism of the separation of powers was in fact precisely what its founding defenders praised about the doctrine. Maurice Vile, in his ­classic study of the separation of powers, writes that the doctrine’s founders ‘assume[d] that the legislature will, or may, be taken over entirely by the democratic element’ and that therefore power had to be dispersed to ‘branches of the

60 Marx, Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte, MEW, vol. 8, p. 196; MECW, vol. 11, p. 186. 61 Marx, Zur Kritik des Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie, MEW, vol. 1, p. 260; MECW, vol. 3, p. 57. 62  Marx’s criticism of the separation of powers is directed towards the power it assigns to the ex­ecu­tive at the expense of the legislature and not at the independence of the judiciary. His approval of the Commune having ‘divested [the judiciary] of that shame independence’ is a reference to judges no longer being directly appointed by the government and instead being elected by the people, Marx, Civil War in France, MEW, vol. 17, p. 339; MECW, vol. 22, p. 332. Hunt notes that ‘nowhere did he [Marx] call for any merging of judicial with executive or legislative authority’, Political Ideas of Marx and Engels, vol. 2, p. 138. 63 Marx, ‘The Constitution of the French Republic Adopted November 4, 1848’, MEW, vol. 7, p. 498; MECW, vol. 10, p. 570. ‘UNITY’ is capitalized in the more authoritative version in MEGA②, vol. I.10, p. 540.

Marx ’ s Social Republic  185 government largely or wholly outside the legislature’.64 Thus though the separation of powers is today considered one of the cornerstones of democratic government, its founders explicitly believed that it would serve to limit the democratic ­influence on the constitution. The above passage by Marx on the separation of powers is also usefully read in its immediate context. Marx’s language was likely inspired by an article written a few weeks earlier by his friend, Ernest Jones, a socialist republican and prominent Chartist,65 with both of their articles appearing in Jones’s magazine Notes to the People in May and June 1851. Jones’s article explored the history of renaissance Florence, including its constitutional structure, and made the strikingly similar point to Marx that, they [the Florentines] sought safety in a complicated machinery of government, in the famous system of ‘check and countercheck’; now the fact is government cannot be too simple. If government is good, the fewer checks it has in its progress the better; if it is bad, the more complicated its machinery is, the greater is the difficulty in removing or amending it.66

Both Jones and Marx thus argue that ‘government cannot be too simple’ and criticize constitutions that make the ‘machinery of government . . . complicated’. Marx’s criticism is directed at the separation of powers, while Jones’s is directed at the closely associated (though distinct) system of checks and balances (Marx seems not to have distinguished between these doctrines).67 Marx and Jones’s preference for simple government contrasts with the contemporaneous judgment of Alexis de Tocqueville who had argued for two legislative chambers in the 1848 Constitution because he preferred a ‘somewhat complicated system of checks and balances’ to a ‘simpler theory, bestowing undivided power on a homogenous authority . . . [with] no barriers to its actions’.68 A similar divide can be found between radical and moderate republicans ­during the American constitutional debates, with Anti-Federalists advocating a simple constitution that could be easily understood by everyone against the Federalists’ complex system of checks and balances, which the Anti-Federalists 64 M. J. C. Vile, Constitutionalism and the Separation of Powers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 33. 65  For the link between Chartism and republicanism see Mark Bevir, ‘Republicanism, Socialism, and Democracy in Britain: The Origins of the Radical Left’, Journal of Social History 34, no. 2 (2000), pp. 351–3. 66  Ernest Jones, ‘History of Florence’, Notes to the People, 4 (May 1851), p. 80. 67  The ‘pure doctrine’ of the separation of powers holds that government should be split into three branches, legislative, executive, and judicial, with each branch having a single corresponding function and a complete separation of persons between branches. The theory of checks and balances adds to this that each branch should also have a limited power to intervene in the other branch’s functions. See Vile, Constitutionalism and the Separation of Powers, pp. 13, 18. 68 Tocqueville, Souvenirs, pp. 184–5; Recollections, p. 123.

186  Bruno Leipold suspected would limit democratic accountability.69 Indeed, the Federalists ­specifically designed these checks and balances with the aim of delaying and cooling the expression of the popular will through the legislature.70 They believed that the ‘greatest danger’ to representative government was that the ‘legislature will acquire the defects of a popular assembly’, and that power must therefore not only be dispersed to other branches but those branches must also have the power to intervene in its operation.71 Presidential veto power, judicial review by the Supreme Court, and the balancing power of the aristocratic Senate were thus all incorporated into the Constitution in order to limit the power of what was taken to be the more democratic element of the Constitution: the House of Representatives. Alexander Hamilton boasted that this system ‘is so complex, so skilfully contrived, that it is next to impossible that an impolitic or wicked measure should pass the scrutiny with success’.72 The Anti-Federalists rejected these aristocratic and anti-majoritarian checks on the legislature, and instead favoured a clearly delineated and transparent constitution, where (similarly to Marx) the legislature was superior to the other branches, since they believed it to be ‘more representative of the people in their diversity than the President, and more accountable to them than the judges’.73 One of the many anonymous Anti-Federalists, compared the virtue of transparent and simple forms of government to the ‘mechanic’ who ‘understands the machinery’ he works with because he can see through its entire operation, and the Anti-Federalist concludes that the ‘constitution of a wise and free people, ought to be as evident to simple reason, as the letters of our alphabet’.74 Marx’s own characterization of ‘complicated and mysterious’ government as the ‘craft of knaves’ can be seen as an echo of this older radical constitutionalism.

3.  Popular Control of the State’s Organs In The Civil War in France Marx condemns the existing state as a professional, hierarchical, and centralized body that has escaped the control of its citizens. He 69 Herbert J. Storing, What the Anti-Federalists Were For: The Political Thought of the Opponents of the Constitution (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 53–63. 70 Bernard Manin, ‘Checks, Balances and Boundaries: The Separation of Powers in the Constitutional Debate of 1787’, in The Invention of the Modern Republic, ed. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 59–61. 71  David Wootton, ‘Liberty, Metaphor, and Mechanism: “Checks and Balances” and the Origins of Modern Constitutionalism’, in Liberty and American Experience in the Eighteenth Century, ed. David Womersley (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2006), p. 264. 72  Cited in Storing, What the Anti-Federalists Were For, p. 54. 73  Manin, ‘Checks, Balances and Boundaries’, pp. 40–1. Where Marx’s thought does differ from the Anti-Federalist position (but not most French radical republican thought) is his preference for the legislature to exercise both legislative and executive functions, which the Anti-Federalists would have opposed because of their ‘one branch, one function’ doctrine. 74  Anonymous, ‘Address by Denatus’, in The Complete Anti-Federalist, vol. 5 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 262.

Marx ’ s Social Republic  187 criticizes the state’s ‘systematic and hierarchic division of labour’, its ‘trained caste’ of bureaucrats, its ‘centralized statemachinery’, and for being the ‘master instead of the servant of society’.75 Because of these features, Marx argues that the existing state is an inappropriate vehicle for working-class revolution. In perhaps the pamphlet’s most cited line, he says that the ‘working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes’.76 A phrase that in one of the drafts of the text was accompanied by the similarly pregnant statement that the ‘political instrument of their [the working-class] enslavement cannot serve as the political instrument of their emancipation’.77 Simply taking hold of the existing state machinery and directing it towards socialism was thus ruled out, and the working class would instead need to transform it into polity that lacked the objectionable features of the existing state. Marx identifies five main organs of the existing state: the bureaucracy or civil service, the army, the police, the established church, and the judiciary.78 He discusses, in varying levels of depth, how each of these state organs should be transformed. For reasons of space and in order to focus on those aspects where Marx’s radical republican inheritance is most interestingly displayed, I will only discuss Marx’s ideas on the transformation of the first two organs: the standing army and the bureaucracy. Marx believed that the standing army should be turned into a civic militia and he praised the Commune for having made its first act the ‘suppression of the standing army, and the substitution for it of the armed people’.79 (Broadly, a civic militia differs from a standing army in that it consists of part-time citizen-soldiers rather than full-time professional soldiers). Marx credits the National Guard, Paris’s civic militia, with making the Commune possible in the first place. He argues that it was only because the working class was armed and organized in a militia that it could resist the Versailles government’s troops and set up its own administration.80 The National Guard was indeed a quite unique institution that played a central role in the events leading up to and during the Commune. While it had traditionally been a bourgeois militia, its ranks had become increasingly composed of the working classes, and by 1871 was ‘widely understood to be a democratic body of citizen soldiers’ far removed from the ‘army’s authoritarian and militaristic traditions’.81 For instance, in contrast to the army, it elected its 75  Respectively, Marx, Civil War in France, MEW, vol. 17: 336; MECW, vol. 22: 328; Civil War in France (First Draft), MEW, vol. 17, pp. 544, 538, 539; MECW, vol. 22, pp. 488, 483, 484. 76 Marx, Civil War in France, MEW, vol. 17, p. 336; MECW, vol. 22, p. 328. Marx considered this point so important that he (and Engels) cited it in their 1872 preface to the Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (Manifesto of the Communist Party) (1848) and noted that this was one of the aspects on which the original manifesto had ‘become antiquated’, see Marx and Engels ‘Vorwort zum Manifest’, MEW, vol. 18, p. 96; MECW, vol. 23, p. 175. 77 Marx, Civil War in France (Second Draft), MEW, vol. 17, p. 592; MECW, vol. 22, p. 533. 78 Marx, Civil War in France, MEW, vol. 17, p. 336; MECW, vol. 22, p. 328. 79 Ibid., MEW, vol. 17, p. 338; MECW, vol. 22, p. 331. 80  Ibid., and Civil War in France (Second Draft), MEW, vol. 17, p. 595; MECW, vol. 22, pp. 536–7. 81 Shafer, Paris Commune, p. 137.

188  Bruno Leipold own non-commissioned officers and junior officers, and units were recruited and organized locally. The siege of Paris had meant that the National Guard had grown spectacularly to 340,000 men, and it became the epicentre of local social and political life, providing working-class neighbourhoods with everything from a ‘substitute workplace, provider of family income, political club . . . [and] re­cre­ ation organization’.82 The immediate context for the outbreak of the Commune was thus a situation of ‘local, democratic, armed organizations on an unprecedented scale’.83 Marx’s comments on the National Guard suggest four advantages that he sees in a civic militia over standing army. First, it is cheaper. Marx says that removing the standing army discards ‘the most fertile source of all state taxation and state debts’ and is the ‘first economical condition sine qua [non] for all social improvements’.84 Second, a civic militia makes for a better army. Marx argues that the National Guard was the ‘safest guarantee against Foreign aggression’ and suggests that if the Commune had been formed at the start of the Franco-Prussian War, it would have ‘taken the defence [of Paris] out of the hands of traitors’ and ‘imprinted its enthusiasm’ on the armed forces and turned the struggle into a real ‘war of republican France’.85 Third, a civic militia improves the character of its soldiers relative to professional solders. Marx argues that professional soldiers acquire ‘inveterate habits . . . under the training of the enemies of the working class’ (such as shooting prisoners without trial), which would eventually be remedied when they joined the workers in a civic militia.86 Fourth, and most im­port­ ant­ly, a civic militia is less prone to siding with reactionary forces against popular movements. Marx brands the standing army a ‘constant danger to government usurpation of class rule’.87 He believed that a standing army was a continual source of potential reaction, providing the ruling class, or a leader with Caesarist ambitions, with the means by which they can put an end to the turmoil of a revolution. Marx believed that a civic militia was less likely to be used in this manner because of its closer ties to the people (for instance, his specification that the militia should have an ‘extremely short term of service’ suggests a concern with ensuring that they do not develop a separate existence).88 His description of army troops as ‘French soldatesca’, as ‘mercenary vindicators’ of bourgeois society, and as the ‘iron hand of mercenary soldiery’ further presents them as a force external 82 Tombs, Paris Commune, p. 50. 83  Ibid., p. 46. 84 Marx, Civil War in France (First Draft), MEW, vol. 17, pp. 543–4; MECW, vol. 22, p. 488. 85 Ibid., MEW, vol. 17, pp. 536, 544; MECW, vol. 22, pp. 481, 488. There is a possibility that by ‘Foreign aggression’ Marx is referring to the obverse characteristic of a civic militia: that is less likely to engage in foreign wars. However, the context of the Prussian siege suggests that Marx is referring to the civic militia being better at defending the nation from foreign attack. 86 Marx, Civil War in France, MEW, vol. 17, p. 331; MECW, vol. 22, p. 323; Civil War in France (Second Draft), MEW, vol. 17, p. 585; MECW, vol. 22, pp. 526–7. 87 Marx, Civil War in France (First Draft), MEW, vol. 17, p. 543; MECW, vol. 22, p. 488. 88 Marx, Civil War in France, MEW, vol. 17, p. 340; MECW, vol. 22, p. 332.

Marx ’ s Social Republic  189 to  society, paid by the government to crush the people.89 In summary, Marx believed that the standing army ‘defend[s] the government against the ­people’, while a civic militia is ‘the people armed against governmental usurpation’.90 In this defence of the civic militia we can detect traces of the republican ­‘citi­zen-soldier’ tradition in Marx’s thought.91 From Machiavelli to Rousseau, republican thinkers in this tradition have warned of the danger of professional soldiers to the republic, either as mercenaries or as a standing army.92 They argue that professional armies stand apart from the people and can hence be used by the elites to crush them. They emphasize that arming the people allows them to defend themselves against this threat to their domestic liberty, as well as acting as a bulwark against foreign domination. Rousseau argued that a standing army is ‘good for only two purposes: to attack and conquer neighbours, or to shackle and enslave citizens’.93 Instead, he proposed that ‘Each citizen ought to be a soldier by duty, none by profession.’94 He also maintained that a militia ‘costs the Republic little’, fights better than a professional army (since ‘one always defends one’s goods better than another’s’), and does not harass the local population as professional soldiers are wont to do.95 Marx’s arguments in favour of a civic militia bear a strong resemblance to these positions. His concern with ensuring that the armed forces do not form a separate body from society reflects, as R. Claire Snyder argues, ‘one of the main principles of the citizen-soldier tradition: a military staffed by the people is less likely to fire on their own neighbors and comrades’.96 Furthermore, Marx’s defence of the National Guard as the ‘safest guarantee against Foreign aggression’ and his criticism of the army generals who, he believed, failed to properly deploy the National Guard against Prussian forces,97 was in line with the widely held belief amongst contemporary radicals that Paris could have beaten the Prussians if they had unleashed popular enthusiasm by re-enacting the legendary republican levee en masse from the French Revolution.98 Marx’s discussion of the civic militia in The Civil War in France is primarily concerned with the role it plays in defending the revolution from reactionary 89  Respectively, Marx, Civil War in France (Second Draft), MEW, vol. 17, p. 585; MECW, vol. 22, p. 526; Civil War in France, MEW, vol. 17, pp. 356, 361; MECW, vol. 22, pp. 348, 354. 90 Marx, Civil War in France (Second Draft), MEW, vol. 17, pp. 595–6; MECW, vol. 22, p. 537. 91  R.  Claire Snyder, ‘The Citizen-Soldier and the Tragedy of The Eighteenth Brumaire’, Strategies: Journal of Theory, Culture and Politics 16, no. 1 (2003), pp. 23–37. 92  R. Claire Snyder, Citizen-Soldiers and Manly Warriors: Military Service and Gender in the Civic Republican Tradition (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999); J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 199–211. 93 Rousseau, Considérations, pp. 1013–14; Considerations, pp. 233–4. 94 Ibid. 95  Ibid. The financial benefits of a civic militia are a recurrent theme of Rousseau’s advocacy of the institution. 96  Snyder, ‘The Citizen-Soldier and the Tragedy of The Eighteenth Brumaire’, p. 33. 97 Marx, The Civil War in France, MEW, vol. 17, pp. 331–2; MECW, vol. 22, pp. 323–4. 98 Tombs, Paris Commune, pp. 47–8.

190  Bruno Leipold forces, and not with the connection republicanism often makes between service in the militia and developing the virtues necessary for citizenship.99 However, that link is displayed in an earlier article discussing the Prussian government’s attempt in 1848 to create a watered-down civic militia. Marx here condemns the government’s stipulation that a serving militia member ‘may neither think nor speak of public affairs’ and must ‘relinquish his primary political rights’, arguing that this would produce citizens that mirrored the ‘passive, will-less and disinterested obedience of the soldier’.100 Marx bitterly quipped that the proposed civic militia would thus make ‘A fine school . . . to bring up the republicans of the future!’101 Turning to the second state organ: the bureaucracy. The most important change to the bureaucracy that Marx specifies is that public officials are to be elected and subject to recall. A repeated refrain in The Civil War in France and its drafts is  the specification that ‘public servants . . . were to be elective, responsible, and revocable’.102 Marx thereby transfers the same system of accountability that he applied to political representation to public administration as a whole. Just how many of the total positions in public administration are to be chosen by election is not entirely clear (we could imagine it being limited to just the most senior administrative posts or extending to most, or even all, public officials). Some of Marx’s rhetoric certainly suggests that it would indeed apply very extensively. For instance, he says it applies to the ‘officials of all other branches of the Administration’ and notes that rural public officials, like the ‘notary, advocate, [and] executor’ (who were currently ‘blood-suckers’ and ‘judicial vampires’), would all be transformed ‘into salaried communal agents, elected by, and responsible to [the peasant]’.103 The outcome of making the bureaucracy elected in this way would be a considerable and far-reaching deprofessionalization of public administration.104 Public officials would, Marx argues, no longer be a ‘trained caste’ and the ‘army of stateparasites [would be] removed’.105 Marx further believed that the outcome of making public officials revocable would be to make the bureaucracy properly accountable. He notes that it would do ‘away with the state hierarchy altogether’ and replace ‘the haughteous masters of the people into

99  For the link, see Snyder, Citizen-Soldiers and Manly Warriors, pp. 22–4, 54–5. 100  Marx, ‘Der Bürgerwehrgesetzentwurf ’, MEW, vol. 5, pp. 243–5; MECW, vol. 7, pp. 256–7. 101  Ibid. Marx’s embrace of the ‘republican’ label here was due to his and Engels’s strategy during the 1848 Revolutions of first fighting with republicans against absolute and constitutional monarchies, before they could then turn to communism. 102 Marx, Civil War in France, MEW, vol. 17, p. 339; MECW, vol. 22, p. 322. Though in the second draft, Marx speaks of public officials being ‘appointed and always revocable by the Commune’ rather than being elected by the people, Civil War in France (Second Draft), MEW, vol. 17, p. 596; MECW, vol. 22, p. 547 (emphasis added). 103 Marx, Civil War in France, MEW, vol. 17, pp. 339, 345; MECW, vol. 22, pp. 331, 337. 104 Hunt, Political Ideas of Marx and Engels, vol. 2, pp. 132–4. 105 Marx, Civil War in France (First Draft), MEW, vol. 17, p. 545; MECW, vol. 22, p. 490.

Marx ’ s Social Republic  191 its always removable servants, a mock responsibility by a real responsibility, as they act continuously under public supervision’.106 Marx likely drew these ideas from the Commune’s 19 April 1871 Déclaration au peuple français (which was ‘the closest to a summary of its programme’).107 The declaration called for the ‘permanent intervention of the citizens in communal affairs’, and gave a glimpse of its administrative ideal, by proclaiming ‘The choice by election or competitive examination, with accountability (responsibilité) and permanent right of supervision (contrôle) and dismissal (révocation), of magistrates and communal officials of every grade’.108 Marx’s repeated call for all public officials to be ‘elective, responsible, and revocable’ can be seen as a pithy formulation of this demand.109 A tangible financial dimension of the deprofessionalization of the bureaucracy is Marx’s specification that ‘[f]rom the members of the Commune downwards’ all public officials were to be paid ‘workmen’s wages’.110 In the context of the pay structure of nineteenth-century France’s bureaucracy that was an especially rad­ ical demand. From the time of Napoleon I to World War I the French state had a small number of extremely well-paid civil servants, who received fifty to one hundred times the average income (so that they could lead a similarly ‘dignified’ life to those living off inherited capital).111 In Balzac’s Cousin Bette (1846), for ex­ample, the irresponsible and philandering Baron Hulot d’Ervy earns 25,000 francs per year from his high-ranking post in the War Ministry, when day wages for workmen were, at the time, just 1 to 1.5 francs, giving them in the region of 300–450 francs a year.112 Radically cutting the salaries for these top posts would have been a powerful symbol of how public administration had been taken out of the hands of aristocratic dignitaries and placed into the hands of ordinary workers. Elite functionaries like Baron Hulot (the ‘state parasites’ Marx refers to) would no longer suck the financial resources out of the country for their own personal gain. Limiting wages to the level of workers would thus be an important part of the process whereby ‘the high dignitaries of State disappeared’.113 In fact, the Commune did not set the salaries of public officials to the level of ‘workmen’s

106 Ibid., MEW, vol. 17, p. 544; MECW, vol. 22, p. 488. 107 Tombs, Paris Commune, p. 78. Marx references the declaration in Civil War in France, MEW, vol. 17, pp. 339–40; MECW, vol. 22, p. 332. 108  A translation of the declaration is available in Tombs, Paris Commune, pp. 217–19. 109  Marx however differs from the declaration in that he makes no mention of posts being filled by elections or ‘competitive examinations’. 110 Marx, Civil War in France, MEW, vol. 17, p. 339; MECW, vol. 22, p. 331. 111  Thomas Picketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), pp. 416–17. 112  See the financial appendix in Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Bette, ed. David Bellos, trans. Sylvia Raphael (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 463–5. Balzac was one of Marx’s favourite contemporary authors and he references Cousin Bette in Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte, MEW, vol. 8, p. 206; MECW, vol. 11, p. 196. 113 Marx, Civil War in France, MEW, vol. 17, p. 339; MECW, vol. 22, p. 331.

192  Bruno Leipold wages’, as Marx claims, but limited them to a maximum of 6,000 francs a year (workers in 1871 earned about 5 francs a day, giving them roughly 1,500 a year).114 Marx was therefore deliberately exaggerating what the Commune had in fact achieved (an already radical step), in the direction of what he hoped future socialist regimes would do.115 Marx’s specification that all public posts are to be subject to election and recall and paying all functionaries the same workmen’s wages presents, what Richard Hunt calls, a ‘tantalising vision of a democracy without professionals’.116 In Marx’s conception of the social republic public functions are no longer reserved for a ‘trained caste’ but carried out by the people as a whole. This deprofessionalization of the state’s administrative and repressive functions is one of Marx’s much less appreciated political ideas. It is a vision which stands in stark contrast to the massive expansion of the state and its professional personnel since Marx’s writings. It in fact has more in common with the ancient model of democratic Athens, where nearly all public administrative officials (magistracies) were selected from the citi­zen body as a whole.117 That system was based on the principle of rotation, which held that a citizen was not simply someone with the right to choose one’s rulers but someone who rules and is ruled in turn; an idea founded on a ‘deep distrust of professionalism’ and the belief that ‘every political function was performable by non-specialists unless there were compelling reasons to think otherwise’.118 It was an ideal that had inspired the young Marx, admiringly writing that ‘in Greece, the res publica is the real private affair of the citizens’.119 These ancient republics had, in Marx’s eyes, achieved a praiseworthy ‘substantial unity between the state and people’.120 Marx similarly applauds the Commune for having achieved the ‘reabsorption of the State power by society, as its own living forces instead of as forces controlling and subduing it, by the popular masses

114 Tombs, Paris Commune, p. 86; Shafer, Paris Commune, p. 138. The pay figures for workers (1–1.5 francs and later 5 francs) are taken from the respective sources and may reflect different methods of accounting rather than rising wages or inflation. 115  We know that it was deliberate since Marx copied out a press report of the maximum salary announcement and reported the correct figures to the General Council of the International Workingmen’s Association. See, ‘Meeting of the General Council April 25 1871’, MEGA②, vol. I.22, p.  541 and Karl Marx, Notebook on the Paris Commune: Press Excerpts and Notes, ed. Hal Draper (Berkeley, CA: Independent Socialist Press, 1971), p. 36. 116 Hunt, Political Ideas of Marx and Engels, vol. 2, p. 367. 117  Though an important difference between Marx’s social republic and democratic Athens is that Marx only discusses selecting officials through elections and makes no mention of sortition, a mech­ an­ism that Athens made extensive use of. That perhaps reflects the broader eclipse, in modern political thought and constitutional practice, of selection by lot in favour of elections, see Manin, Principles of Representative Government, pp. 79–93. 118  Ibid., pp. 28–32. See also, C. L. R. James, ‘Every Cook Can Govern: A Study of Democracy in Ancient Greece and Its Meaning for Today’, in A New Notion: Two Works by C. L. R. James, ed. Noel Ignatiev (Oakland, CA: P. M. Press, 2010), pp. 136–55. 119 Marx, Zur Kritik des Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie, MEW, vol. 1, p. 234; MECW, vol. 3, p. 32. 120 Ibid.

Marx ’ s Social Republic  193 themselves’.121 Marx’s commentary on the Commune was thus in certain respects a return to the classical republican ideas of his youth.122

4. Conclusion This chapter has set out three strands of how Marx’s conception of the political institutions of socialism was inherited from the radical elements of the republican tradition: his support for replacing representative government with popular delegacy; his preference for legislative supremacy and his critique of the separation of powers; and, finally, his belief in the necessity of transforming the state’s administrative and repressive organs by placing them under popular control. Together, these make up some of the core elements of Marx’s social republic. In the introduction I suggested that, while Marx’s discussion of these political institutions often lacks the depth and detail that we might wish, his account of the social republic provides a stimulating body of ideas for socialists and republicans to draw on. One such idea is that socialism requires a particular political structure—perhaps the most important insight that Marx develops in his discussion of the Paris Commune. Marx argues that the people of Paris, have taken the actual management of their Revolution into their own hands and found at the same time, in the case of success, the means to hold it in the hands of the People itself, [by] displacing the State machinery, the governmental machinery of the ruling classes by a governmental machinery of their own.123

The Commune had thus shown not just how the people should take the revolution ‘into their own hands’ but also the ‘means to hold it’ in their hands; namely, by forging a ‘governmental machinery of their own’. Using the existing ‘governmental machinery of the ruling classes’ would mean that the revolution would slip from the people’s control. The governmental machinery of socialism would therefore have to transform the inherited political and administrative institutions into properly democratic ones. By doing so, Marx believed that the Commune had ‘supplied the Republic with the basis of really democratic institutions’.124

121 Marx, Civil War in France (First Draft), MEW, vol. 17, p. 543; MECW, vol. 22, p. 487. 122  Miguel Abensour, Democracy against the State: Marx and the Machiavellian Moment, trans. Max Blechman and Martin Breaugh (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), pp. 84–8; and Colletti, ‘Introduction to Marx Early Writings’, pp. 42–4. 123 Marx, Civil War in France (First Draft), MEW, vol. 17, p. 556; MECW, vol. 22, p. 498. 124 Marx, Civil War in France, MEW, vol. 17, p. 342; MECW, vol. 22, p. 334.

9

The Intellectual Origins of Turkish Radical Republicanism Banu Turnaoğlu

Turkish republicanism has a famously radical heritage that continues to loom large in the tradition today, but no systematic inquiry into its roots and evolution has yet been undertaken. This chapter traces the intellectual origins of radical republicanism in Turkey back to the political thought of the radical branch of the Young Ottomans in the 1860s. Like most radical republican movements in Europe at that time, the Young Ottoman radicals were a group of like-minded writers and journalists who placed the republican values of liberty, equality, and fraternity at the heart of their agenda, and conceived this republican philosophy not merely as a national project but as an international one. This chapter analyses Young Ottoman radical republicans’ involvement in revo­lu­tion­ary underground movements and their engagement with the European radical ideas of their time. It also tracks the emergence of their strategy favouring violence as a means of fulfilling revolutionary ends to transform society and pol­it­ ical structures. Young Ottoman radicals sought to make sense of political situ­ ations, evaluate institutions and policies, and guide political action as a response to what they saw as arbitrary power and oppression both at home and abroad. The press was their chief tool for transmitting their philosophy and their prime means of communication with the Ottoman public. Young Ottoman rad­icals did not remain aloof from the social changes and rising inequalities of the nineteenth century, and they oriented themselves towards the social ills both of Europe and their own country, seeking practical solutions. As the twentieth century dawned, radical republicanism shed some of its layers and adopted certain new conceptions, transforming itself and evolving into ‘Kemalism’, the founding ideology of the Turkish Republic, named after its first president Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. This ideology retains a significant living presence in contemporary Turkish social and political life. The recovery or reclaiming of the forgotten radical branch of the Young Ottoman movement by revisiting their achievements will encourage us to rethink the alternative meanings and interpretations of republicanism. These republican strands have been neglected in contemporary debates on radical republicanism, which tend to take Western Europe alone as their sphere of reference. This chapter Banu Turnaoğlu, The Intellectual Origins of Turkish Radical Republicanism In: Radical Republicanism: Recovering the Tradition’s Popular Heritage. Edited by: Bruno Leipold, Karma Nabulsi, and Stuart White, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198796725.003.0010

198  Banu Turnaoğlu should therefore be regarded as a case study on how this strand of republican tradition adapted, and as an analysis of the coherent body of thought that was the result of this adaptation. Approaching this republican history in this way allows us to think more inclusively and to take more seriously how politics, society, and international order were understood and interpreted by a cohort of thinkers whose ideologies originated outside the geographical confines of the Anglophone and Western European world, and yet whose active engagement in European debates and whose involvement in revolutionary activities in France offered different expressions of republicanism by making it compatible with Islamic prin­ ciples. A careful historical exploration of a radical republican trad­ition that developed elsewhere would help us to create a map of republicanisms, demonstrating the richness and complexity of this tradition. Appreciating this complexity is essential in apprehending the origins of, and multiple possible responses to, challenges in contemporary politics.

1.  Secret Societies and the Birth of the Young Ottomans Radicalism and republicanism began in Turkey with great intensity, as a reaction to the bureaucratic authoritarianism of the Ottoman regime during the Tanzimat (1839–76), the most extensive Ottoman modernizing movement in the nineteenth century. The authoritarian pressure exerted by the Ottoman government on liberty spurred the formation of countless underground societies throughout the Empire. Two European organizations, the Carbonari and Freemasonry, inspired Ottoman secret societies with their ideology, mobility, and political structure. The Carbonari filtered into the Ottoman Empire through successive waves of Italian refugees, Young Italy exiles, and Italian immigrants seeking shelter following the uprisings of 1820–1 and the 1848 Revolutions. These Italian groups established secret orders in Istanbul and Izmir and spread the ideals of the Risorgimento.1 Freemasonry, on the other hand, was introduced during the eighteenth century, but became widespread only towards the mid-nineteenth century. The most popu­lar lodgings in the important cities of Istanbul and Izmir were under the patronage of European masonic adherence, particularly French masons.2 The 1  Veronica Musardo, Secret Connections in Constantinople (Istanbul: Libra Kitapçılık ve Yayıncılık, 2015), p. 77. Among the Italian groups were Garibaldi, who stayed in Constantinople from 1828 until 1831, and a native of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, Adriano Lemmi, a close friend of Mazzini. 2  Towards the end of the 1860s, there were about fifteen lodges in Istanbul, all connected to various European obediences. Four were dependent on the Great Lodge of England, four on the Grand Orient de France, five on the Grande Oriente of Italy, five on the German Great Lodge of Hamburg, one on the Great Lodge of Ireland, and one or two on the Meghali Anatoli of Greece. Other lodges were located in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Cyprus, and Macedonia. Most of the lodges established in the Ottoman Empire expressed the political interests of European powers. For instance, l’Etoile du Bosphore and l’Union d’Orient were forceful advocates of French policy and finance. See Paul Dumont, ‘Freemasonry in Turkey: A By-Product of Western Penetration’, European Review 13, no. 3 (2005), pp. 481–93.

The Intellectual Origins of Turkish Radical Republicanism  199 ideological shift in French freemasonry during the 1860s towards republicanism resulted in the gradual shift of Ottoman freemasonry’s commitment in the parallel republican direction, which echoed the masonic battle cry for liberté, égalité, et fraternité. These two organizations promoted the republican spirit, secularism, and the idea of the violent overthrow of tyrannical rulers among a young revolu­ tionary generation, among which the Young Ottomans (Genç Osmanlılar) emerged as the most influential. The Young Ottomans’ emergence served as notice of the presence in Ottoman life of a new social stratum and a new politics. Formed as a secret society in 1865 by six intellectuals (Sağır Ahmed Beyzâde Mehmed, Menâpirzâde Nuri, Kayazâde Reşad, Subhî Paşazâde Ayetullah, Namık Kemal, and Refik) under the name the Patriotic Alliance (İttifâk-ı Hamiyet), it was originally modelled after Young European secret societies, reliant on international fraternity, and influenced by the Carbonari and freemasonry.3 Two of the society’s core members, Mustafa Fazıl (the former Egyptian heir apparent who had lost his position to his brother, the Khedive İsmail) and Namık Kemal, had previously been members of the Greek banker Cleanthi Scalieri’s freemasonry lodge, I Proodos (Progress).4 Like most secret societies in Europe and America at that time,5 the Alliance aimed to create a free and egalitarian society. Inspired by the Polish secret societies’ doctrinal basis, the Alliance’s regulation (nizamnâme) stated their main political goal was ‘to change absolute rule into constitutional rule’, and to restore ‘the correct implementation of Shari’a’.6 Their oath reflected a patriotism linked to activism and the practice of conspiracy, echoed in their symbolic language and in a sentiment regarding ‘a brotherhood of opinion and a kinship of the heart’.7 The Alliance’s first members were young, born in the 1830s or 1840s, and recruited from the middling ranks of Ottoman society. Sağır Ahmed Beyzâde Mehmed (1843–74), ‘the spirit and chief ’ of the Alliance,8 was the brother of

3  Most first-hand information about the origins of the society was obtained by Ebuzziya Tevfik, who joined the Alliance in 1866. In a series of articles published in his newspaper Yeni Tasvir-i Efkâr, he reported that on the first meeting of the secret society in 1856 Ayetullah Bey had brought with him books on the structure of the Carbonari and Polish secret societies to provide guidance for their own organization. See ‘Yeni Osmanlılar’, Yeni Tasvir-i Efkâr, 7 June 1909, p. 3. On the Young Ottomans, see especially Şerif Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962). 4 Paul Dumont, ‘Osmanlı Masonluğu ve Tanzimat Döneminde “Fransız Düşünceleri”  ’, in Osmanlıcılık, Ulusçu Akımlar ve Masonluk, trans. Ali Berktay (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 1999), pp. 53–4. 5  For the Society of Young Europe, see Karma Nabulsi, ‘Patriotism and Internationalism in the “Oath of Allegiance” to Young Europe’, European Journal of Political Theory 5, no. 1 (2006), pp. 61–70. 6  Ebuzziya Tevfik, ‘Yeni Osmanlılar’, 7 June 1909, p. 3. 7  Cited in Kaya Bilgegil, Yakın Çağ Türk Kültür ve Edebiyatı Üzerine Araştırmalar, I, Yeni Osmanlılar (Ankara: Baylan Matbaası, 1962), p. 392. 8  Abdurrahman Şeref, ‘Yeni Osmanlılar ve Hürriyet’, Sabah, 23 April 1918, quoted in M. Z. Pekalın, Tanzimat mailiye nazırları, vol. 2 (Istanbul Kanaat Kitabevi, 1940), pp. 32–3.

200  Banu Turnaoğlu Grand Vizier Mahmud Nedim Paşa. During his education in Paris Mehmed was captivated by republican and revolutionary ideas, which he later spread among intellectual circles in Istanbul upon his return. Nuri (1841–1906) and Reşad (1846–1902) were his passionate followers. These three members of the Alliance— Mehmed, Nuri, and Reşad—were all employees in the Translation Bureau (Bâb-ı Âlî Tercüme Odası) in the 1860s. It was during this period that they first encountered Namık Kemal (1840–88), editor of the journal Tasvir-i Efkâr (‘Description of Ideas’), Refik (d. 1865), the owner of the peri­od­ic­al Mir’at, and Ayetullah (1846– 78), the well-educated son of modernist Suphi Paşa, also a Translation Bureau employee.9 Alliance membership grew rapidly to a few hundred, among them two nephews of Sultan Abdülaziz (Prince Murat and Prince Hamit, both members of masonic lodges) and Ali Suavi (1839–78), a preacher who studied Islamic sciences at a madrasa and held various administrative and teaching posts in Istanbul and Bursa.10 After Ayetullah betrayed his companions when he exposed the organization and a coup plot, devised by Mehmed and foiled in 1867, some prominent members of the Alliance (Mehmed, Nuri, Reşad, Namık Kemal, Ziya, Ali Suavi, and Agâh) escaped from Istanbul and continued their activities in exile with the financial support of Mustafa Fazıl Paşa. They changed the name of the Alliance to the Young Ottoman Society (Genç Osmanlılar Cemiyeti, known as Jeune Turquie in France), and appointed Ziya Bey their leader.11 The Young Ottomans shared certain principles in common, such as a hatred for absolutism, provisions for a representative government, anti-corruption, and the toleration of all religions but diverged in their political visions. Consequently, three different republican positions emerged: the liberal, the Islamic, and the radical. While Namık Kemal and Ziya Bey represented the liberal wing, Ali Suavi espoused Islamic republicanism.12 The third line of thought was represented by three radical republicans, Murad, Reşad, and Nuri, who remained true to the indigenous radical principles of the Alliance. Murad, the most radical of the three, disseminated his ideas through İttihad (‘Union’), published in Paris in 1869, and later through İnkılâb (‘Revolution’)13 and its French-language bulletin,

9  Ebuzziya Tevfik, Yeni Osmanlılar, ed. Ş. Kutlu (Istanbul: Pegasus Yayınları, 2006 [1909]), pp. 67–9. 10  Erik-Jan Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), p. 69. 11  Ebuzziya Tevfik, ‘Yeni Osmanlılar’, Yeni Tasvir-i Efkâr, 26 September 1909, p. 4. 12  For the political thought of the Young Ottomans, see Banu Turnaoğlu, The Formation of Turkish Republicanism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), pp. 56–84. 13  The publication of İnkılâb was announced in Hürriyet. Its radical and revolutionary tone was criticized by Ziya Bey. In one of Namık Kemal’s letters to his father, he wrote that İnkılâb differed palp­ ably from other Young Ottoman journals of Hürriyet and Muhbir in its sharper and more critical tone of the Sultan and government, and that the newspaper was circulated widely in the Empire. See, Fevriye Abdullah Tansel, Namık Kemal’in Husûsî Mektupları (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Yayınları, 1967), p. 201. The only full collection of İnkılâb issues is in the Atatürk Kütüphanesi, Seyfettin özege Koleksiyonu (Atatürk Library, Seyfettin özege Collection) in Erzurum. Professor Kaya Bilgegil transcribed the issues and published them in his Yakın Çağ Türk Kültür ve Edebiyat Üzerinde Araştırmalar I, Yeni Osmanlılar.

The Intellectual Origins of Turkish Radical Republicanism  201 La Révolution, both published in Geneva in 1870, while Reşad and Nuri contributed to both İttihad and Hürriyet simultaneously and later to İbret.

2.  Ottoman Radical Republicanism The Young Ottomans’ radicalism entailed key features: freedom from oppression, a deep commitment to popular sovereignty, constitutionalism to safeguard rights and liberties, an emphasis on political activism and revolution, a stress on inter­ nation­al solidarity and peace, and recognition of the need for social equality. Their republicanism was antithetical to monarchy, and favoured the imposition of a republic from above if necessary. But unlike in European and American re­pub­ lic­an models, the Young Ottoman vision featured the installation of an elected and non-hereditary caliph as head of government. A republican government would embody the traditional trinity of liberty, equality, and fraternity, all of which would find their expression in an open and tolerant democracy under the rule of law.14

2.1.  Freedom, the Rule of Law, and Representation The Ottoman radical republican notion of freedom employed the classical re­pub­ lic­an definition: living freely in a free state. Liberty (hürriyet) was a natural right that no one would want to give up, even to preserve one’s own life through subjection to the arbitrary power of another. It involved the absence of state oppression and the refraining of rulers from imposing their own conception of the good life on society.15 Republican freedom consisted not only in the absence of restraints, but in the possession of certain political and moral rights, such as freedom of conscience, freedom of thought, freedom of speech and of the press, and freedom to write and to publish.16 These essential rights and liberties, Nuri complained, were curtailed by Sultan Abdülaziz and the Grand Vizier Âli Paşa. He saw the latter’s infamous regulations, Kararnâme-i Âli, which introduced censorship of the press in 1865, as the greatest obstacle to people’s freedom of expression and their right to receive information.17 Freedom, in Nuri’s view, was linked closely to the Enlightenment idea of progress and required the development and improvement of intellectual faculties and critical thinking. Ottoman people were not free, because they lived in ignorance

14  The commitment to republicanism was proclaimed in the first issue of İttihad. Mehmed, ‘untitled’, İttihad, no. 1, 15 May 1869, p. 1. 15  Nuri, ‘Kanun’, İbret, no. 2, 15 June 1872, p. 1. 16  Mehmed, ‘untitled’, p. 1. 17  Nuri, ‘Medeniyet’, İbret, no. 8, 24 June 1872, p. 2; ‘Bâtıl Zehâb’, İbret, no. 19, 27 June 1872, p. 1.

202  Banu Turnaoğlu and fear and were unable to think, decide, and act for themselves, making them vulnerable to manipulation by the ruling elite. The culprit for this predicament was the current Ottoman government, which failed to fulfil its responsibility to ensure a good quality of education for every citizen. This resulted in social, scientific, technological, political, economic, and artistic backwardness in the Ottoman Empire when compared to Europe and America.18 Freedom would be developed by the spreading of education and the wider dissemination of knowledge by the state. Public instruction (terbiye) was thus an essential element of Ottoman rad­ icals’ conception of liberty, just as it was a key to French republicanism. To public instruction, Nuri assigned two tasks. First, the government must ensure that all citizens, without gender distinction, have equal rights to education. Education must therefore be extended to women and men in equal measure. In ‘Kızlar’ (‘Girls’), he condemned successive Ottoman governments’ neglect of female education and discrimination against women, who were cloistered in homes and made commodities of the household.19 Educating women would maximize the levels of knowledge and competence available to society as a whole. It would constitute an essential investment in social progress, for women would be the ones educating future generations. This idea, revolutionary for its time in  the Ottoman Empire, fed into the second purpose of public instruction, the advancement and progression of society as a whole.20 Drawing on Turgot, Nuri argued that education would allow a person to be independent, to exercise his mind and reason, and to take on higher duties.21 He stressed the need to establish a wise plan of education, replacing the traditional upbringing which filled people’s minds with dogmatic zeal and faith. This new kind of secular education would encourage people to read and expand their knowledge, adopt a critical attitude, and encourage them to think independently and freely: ‘The more [a society] is free, the more progress will be attained’.22 These notions of freedom and ­progress were deeply impregnated with post-French revolutionary thinking and positivism. A further dimension of freedom was political liberty. The right to liberty, for Nuri, was not the right to do anything that is not injurious to others, nor did it consist merely in the absence of interference: ‘If freedom would involve the power to do whatever one desires to do, a society would cease to endure its existence due to the chaos and disorder generated by the lack of rules and regulations’.23 Political liberty meant living under a system of the rule of just law. The act of obeying a law, for Nuri, was entirely consistent with freedom, because without just laws human societies would regress into a chaotic and dangerous state of existence or 18 Ibid. 19  Nuri, ‘Kızlar’, İbret, no. 16, 5 July 1872, p. 2. 20  Nuri, ‘untitled’, p. 2.    21 Ibid.   22  Ibid., p. 1. 23 Nuri, Mebâhis-i İlm-i Servet (Istanbul: Mahmut Bey Matbaası, 1882), cited in Şemsettin Şeker, Sadık Bir Muhalif: Yeni Osmanlılar’dan Menapirzade Nuri Bey (Istanbul: Dergâh Yayınları, 2012), p. 126.

The Intellectual Origins of Turkish Radical Republicanism  203 anarchy.24 The Young Ottoman distinguished between natural and public laws. As Montesquieu suggested, Nuri wrote that there are ‘laws of nature’ rooted in the constitution of our being. These laws (kanun) are fundamental principles of rights and form ‘the most real and perfect’ orders necessitated by human existence: ‘God created all mankind to be obliged to live under the law . . . There is no power above the force of the law.’25 The overwhelming imperative of natural law (hukûk-i tabîiyye), Mehmed similarly maintained, is to ensure that men live in peace and security in civil society.26 Civil society is organized around the desire for the continuing protection and security of liberty by the public law, an account in which Montesquieu’s formulation resonates conspicuously. For Mehmed, there are natural, almost deductive principles for making laws in a free society or nation. The citizens will feel secure if the general rules and laws of their society are made by them through their representatives: ‘A nation . . . watches over its matters without restriction through collectively appointed representatives (vekiller). Each desire embodying the decision of the majority becomes the law.’27 Mehmed was clearly committed to broadly popular governance, suggesting that people must govern their public affairs freely and that the essence of a government must be based on the principle of free people: ‘The source of the power of the government is the national will (irade-î millet)’. Government institutions must not only foster a feeling of security, but serve the common good. Adopting classical republican language, Mehmed wrote that no individual or fraction can ‘exert domination (tahakküm) on the people’.28 Only a system of deliberation (usul-ü meşveret) or representative institutions could effectively safeguard against tyranny and oppression (zulüm). Representative government, for the radicals, is the ideal form of government because it is the government of the whole nation, equally represented. The great advantage of representatives is that they can discuss and deliberate on public affairs on behalf of the nation freely, an undertaking that the nation as a whole could not carry out effectively. Representation thus is a substitute of direct democracy. This principle of representative democracy must, Mehmed argued, be implemented with urgency for two reasons. It is inherent to Islam (Veşâvir-hum fi’l-emri) and must therefore be reformulated and implemented in the Ottoman Empire.29 Representation, as in all civilized nations (medenî devletler), should be institutionalized with urgency in the Ottoman Empire by a constitutional regime (meşrutî idare), a motor of progress (terakki).30 The rulers in the modern era, Mehmed contended, became the servants of the people.31 Through this form of 24  Nuri, ‘Kanun’, İbret, no. 2, 16 June 1872, p. 1.    25 Ibid. 26  Mehmed, ‘untitled’, İttihad, p. 1. 27  Mehmed, ‘Usûl-i Meşveret’, İttihad, no. 1, 15 May 1869, p. 1.     28 Ibid. 29  Mehmed, ‘Arapça Münderecâtı’, İttihad, no. 1, 15 May 1869, p. 2. 30  Mehmed, ‘Usûl-i Meşveret’, p. 1. 31  Mehmed, ‘Îrâde-i Millet’, İttihad, no. 1, 15 May 1869, p. 3.

204  Banu Turnaoğlu democratic representation, the Young Ottoman radicals transformed the doctrine underpinning the absolute sovereignty of the sultans into a doctrine of popular will or sovereignty of the people. Mehmed saw elected representation as expressing the sovereignty of the people, in contrast to some Rousseauian-inspired republican traditions, not as undermining popular sovereignty but enhancing it.

2.2.  Popular Sovereignty and Revolution Sovereignty, for Mehmed, resides in the people. As the people are the legitimate source of law and political power, they have the absolute freedom to do whatever they wish to do within the boundaries of the law.32 From this statement followed the radical implication of popular sovereignty: the idea of revolution (inkılâb), understood in a general sense as the remaking of politics, society, economics, and morality. A pronouncedly revolutionary language was taken up and developed in the journal İnkılâb and its Bulletin Français, a self-proclaimed ‘organe de la démocratie musulmane’, when Mehmed left Paris for Geneva in 1870 where he began publishing those two propaganda journals, along with Hüseyin Vasfi Paşa, Râ­tib, Emîr Abbas, and Aristidi.33 Based on the assumption that there exists an implicit contract between the people and the state by which both parties owe each other duties and re­spon­si­bil­ ities, Mehmed believed that the role of the government was limited to the execution of the national will as expressed by the people as sovereign.34 If the government usurped national sovereignty, the people had the right to disobey the rulers and to express their will without limitations, free to use violence and rebellion.35 Like their radical European counterparts, Ottoman radicals constantly invoked the interests of the people as a justification for their actions and celebrated the active role of the people in those decisive moments for Europe. The Italians, Mehmed contended, succeeded in enforcing their demand for the unification of their homeland.36 In the Spanish case, Queen Isabel was deposed by the Spanish people in a revolution, which ushered the Republic into existence.37 While stressing these examples, Mehmed insisted that sovereignty resided in the people, not in a private person or ruling elite group: ‘A nation does whatever it wishes to do. No external force is able to stop it [from doing so] . . . A nation can meet its

32  Ibid., pp. 3–4. 33  Mithat Cemal Kuntay, Namık Kemal, vol. 1 (Istanbul: Türkiye İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 2010), pp. 418–19. 34  Mehmed, ‘Matbuat-ı Efkar-ı Umumiyenin Galeyanı Mizanundandır’, İnkılâb, no. 1, 28 April 1870, pp. 1–2. 35  Hüseyin Vasfi, ‘Millet’e Hitâb’, İnkılâb, no. 1, 28 April 1870, p. 2. 36  Mehmed, ‘untitled’, İttihad, p. 1. 37  Mehmed, ‘İrâde-i Millet’, p. 2.

The Intellectual Origins of Turkish Radical Republicanism  205 aspirations . . . Every government which denies the national will and ignores public opinion will be ultimately punished.’38 This point was an obvious jibe at Sultan Abdülaziz’s efforts to restrict freedom of thought and expression, and this line of argument hinted at the right of the Ottoman nation to overthrow the Sultan if its sovereignty were usurped. Ottoman radicals were concerned about the arbitrary actions of ‘the mad sultan’ who had been ruling the country for the past decade. Attacking the Sultan, Mehmed wrote: He [Abdülaziz] never cares about the condition of his nation. Robbing the people’s money by wreaking their spirits, he is leading a life of grand splendour and unimaginable pleasures. Leaving the duty of ruling his country to two tyrants [Âli and Fuad Paşas], he entertains himself with Karagöz shadow plays and eulogy shows.39

Mehmed saw the Sultan as the real source of evil and the cause of moral, political, social, and economic decadence and corruption, a ‘tyrant’ (zalim), who stole sovereignty from the people ‘like he did their property’, aiming to exert absolute power and control over the country. Vigilantly opposing the dangers of a civic slumber, blind to tyrannical machinations, Mehmed proclaimed İnkılâb’s purpose to be the waking of a nation disabled by its experience of oppression.40 This was a call to popular insurrection against Abdülaziz, to regain the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties of the nation. Mass action was viewed as the ultimate and true aim for the transferral of sovereignty from the Sultan back to the nation.41 Hüseyin Vasfi incited all Ottomans from various ethnic groups, including Bulgarians, Armenians, Bosnians, and Serbians, to take up arms for a rapid violent political change:42 Now it is the time for the nation to wake up. Soldiers, gird yourselves with sword. Let the inglorious [ones] be dispersed. Today is the day of the valiant.43

Employing a Jacobin language of friends and enemies, the call for intense revolu­ tion­ary action was voiced as the ultimate means of purging the Ottomans of their enemies, as revealed by İnkılâb’s motto: ‘Les tyrans ver­ront bientôt par quelle révolu­tion ils seront renversés!’ (Tyrants will soon be overthrown by revolution!).44 38 Ibid. 39  Mehmed, ‘Hürriyet Gazetesine Cevap’, İnkılâb, no. 4, 13 June 1870, p. 1. 40 Ibid. 41  Ibid., pp. 1–2. 42  Hüseyin Vasfi, ‘Boşnaklara Hitâb’; Râtib, ‘Zavallı Ahâlî’, İnkılâb, no. 2, 14 May 1870, pp. 1–2. 43  Vasfi, ‘Millet’e Hitâb’, pp. 2–3. 44  This motto appeared in French on the first page of all five issues of İnkılâb and its French Bulletin La Révolution.

206  Banu Turnaoğlu A revolution was not simply the arousal of popular passions. Rather, it had deeper meanings and purposes, as Mehmed laid out: Revolution is the [act of] expelling the cruelties of immoral [rulers] from the honourable [people]. Revolution is salvation from the degradation of servitude and the attainment of the blessings of freedom and progress. Revolution is to have direct control over important matters of the nation and to enact laws that reflect all its wills. Revolution is not to be forced to obey under the dominance of an unelected party. Revolution is justice (adâlet), equality (müsâvât), and fraternity (uhuvvet). Revolution is safety (selâmet), wealth (servet), peace (sulh), and security (emniyet).45

Echoing the French revolutionary language of 1789, revolution, Mehmed hoped, would bring about a process of social and moral refashioning and rejuvenate the Ottoman nation, which had been corrupted by the arbitrary rule of the Sultan and his government. It would lead to the re­gen­er­ation of the entire Ottoman population through the revival that would spring forth immediately from the recovery of liberty. It would also mark the revelation of truth and progress and the beginning of a new harmonious, just, and lawful epoch in Ottoman history, where people would be united around common interests. This new order would be based on democracy, equality, secular values, a scientific faith in reason and progress, political equality, and the steady extension of property and art.46 The revolution would also resolve the social question by removing all class conflict and inequality. In his article ‘Köylüler’ (‘Peasants’), Râtib promoted the interests of peasants hitherto condemned to eking out a miserable existence in the obscurity of pauperism. He celebrated their role in defending the fatherland and their heroic resistance against external enemies, and saw in the rural peasantry the potential source of republican regeneration: their culture had preserved the indigenous and moral values of ‘true Ottomans’. Peasants, however, had not received the recognition they merited. Rather, they had been mistreated, overtaxed, oppressed, and ‘enslaved’ by the dominating classes for decades. Râtib fierily and vehemently called on them to unite with the revolutionaries who would rescue them from their slavish status and bestow upon them the wealth, happiness, and liberty for which they had been longing, in an approaching mass upheaval against the autocracy: ‘You [the peasantry] better know that the land is yours. This is because your ancestors bought it. The money is yours. This is because you are sowing.’47 Condemning the Sultan and the viziers for stealing the peasants’ own 45  Mehmed, ‘untitled’, p. 1. 46 Ibid. 47  Râtib, ‘Köylüler’, İnkılâb, no. 4, 13 June 1870, p. 3.

The Intellectual Origins of Turkish Radical Republicanism  207 property and brutally suppressing them, Râtib set out the task of jointly crushing and destroying the tyrannical government. A decisive victory of the revolution would convey to the entire Ottoman people respect, happiness, and justice, and unite society as a whole, abolishing the servitude arising from poverty, hunger, and economic exploitation.48 Râtib’s emphasis was here mainly on economic control, ownership, and utilization of land rather than economic reform. A new social, political, and moral republican order, Mehmed argued, was the most suitable system for the Ottoman nation because ‘nos constitutions sont toutes républicaines’ (our [Ottoman] constitutions are republican).49 The nation’s in­di­ gen­ous Islamic rule exhibited elements of direct democracy and a republic. It was also endorsed by the people on the basis of their belief in the sovereignty of truth and Qur’anic justice. Islam, for Mehmed, essentially demands a republic, because during the four caliphates all administration was based on consultation (meşveret). He believed that although a monarchy was a deviation from the true essence of early Islamic rule, the Ottoman Empire retained key republican elem­ents in its state philosophy.50 A revolution therefore would return Turkey to its indigenous republican system of the early caliphate, the system most compatible with the spirit of the Ottoman nation. In this system, the sultan had to be replaced by a just caliph elected by a representative assembly.51

2.3.  Internationalism and Peace The scope of the political, social, and moral transformations was not to be restricted but would transcend national boundaries. The Ottoman doctrine of radical republicanism aspired to offer a view of development that would dissolve transcended the geographical boundaries between the Orient and the Occident, embracing humanity as a whole. At the core of the radicals’ internationalism was the idea of peace. Reşad imagined a world in which different national regimes, each with its own general will, lived sometimes in peace, but more often in conflict with their neighbours.52 Based on the assumption that states existed within the anarchic structure of the international system, which shaped their behaviour and construction, Reşad claimed that military insecurity is the central cause of violence, and the possession of power the prime motivation of all political life. The source of conflicts and wars lay in the diverse interests, terrains, customs, and wants of each individual state, reflected in their domestic political laws and multilateral exchanges. Citing Montesquieu, Reşad wrote that ‘all countries have laws for their nation’, imposed by their spirit, revealed in the form of national diversity.

48 Ibid. 49  Râtib, ‘untitled’, La Révolution Bulletin Français, no. 1, 1 May 1870, p. 1. 50 Ibid. 51  Mehmed, ‘Hürriyet Gazetesine Cevap’, pp. 1–2. 52  Reşad, ‘Hukuk-ı Beynelümem’, İbret, no. 6, 21 June 1872, p. 1.

208  Banu Turnaoğlu This diversity has an effect on the limits and possibilities of international politics. Praising Grotius, whose On the Law of War and Peace (Hakk-ı Sulh-u Harb) established ‘the philosophical basis for the international law’ (hukuk-ı beyne’l-ümem), Reşad stressed that international struggle was a direct consequence of the international order, and he defined international law (hukuk-ı beynelümem) as ‘one of the components of jurisprudence (ilm-i hukuk) . . . and determines mutual law and duties’. This law was contractual, resulting in mutual agreements between states based on three principles: ‘equality’ (muahedât), ‘morality’ (ahlâk), and more import­ antly ‘reason and justice’ (akıl ve adâlet). Respect for these principles was a precondition to reducing the strife between nations and facilitating inter­nation­al peace.53 Concomitantly, Mehmed emphasized two conditions for the establishment of international peace. First, the divide within Eastern nations that shared the same religion, culture, language, political goals, and ideals had to be overcome. Internal peace and stability could be achieved only by eliminating threats to the East. It was the duty of Ottoman patriots to save the East from Western slavery and oppression and to foster unity among Eastern nations. Mehmed’s internationalism was prominently displayed in his consistent criticisms of the foreign policies of European powers as seen in the Eastern Question. He blamed France not only for intervening in Ottoman domestic affairs, which harmed the unity and fraternity among nations, but also for failing to respect humanity.54 The second step for establishing peace was the formation of democratic republics locally, and subsequently the unification of these republics and their inter­nation­al cooperation, uniting all patriots. A true patriot was born and flourished in his own homeland, but patriotic love was not bounded by territory, institutions, or geography. Rather, it extended to all peoples, to a broader universal citizenship. The moral duty of patriots was to wipe out enemies of republican values and republican states, indeed enemies of humanity, through war if necessary. Absolutist states like Prussia and Russia were inherently militarist, expansionist, and disrespectful of the freedom and independence of other nations. Peace would emerge only when all military monarchies were replaced by truly republican democracies. Alliances between republics all over the world would gradually spread and unite all republican people through a universal patriotic love: Brothers in Europe and America, while you struggle for progress and freedom, we join in the struggle. Let us leave behind forever the sad memories of the past and the centuries-old hatred caused by priests and tyrants. Brothers across the ocean, as through the wilderness, let us go hand in hand. Unite to conquer freedom. 53 Ibid.

54  Mehmed, ‘Şark Meselesi 1. Makale’, İnkılâb, no. 2, 14 May 1870, pp. 2–3.

The Intellectual Origins of Turkish Radical Republicanism  209 Let our love for fraternity reign on the earth. Greetings, democrat brothers.55

Driven by this conviction concerning the patriot’s duty to be active in the struggle to halt expansionist and militarist monarchies, the Ottoman radicals en­thu­si­as­tic­ al­ly wished to join the fight on the side of the French in the war against Prussia. In 1870, Reşad wrote a letter to General Louis-Jules Trochu, military governor of Paris and a key figure in the Government of National Defence, volunteering to join the French army in a vivid illustration of his internationalist commitment: Paris, 4 September 1870 General, I am Turkish, and I have not forgotten the important services that France has rendered my fatherland. [With] a lively sense of gratitude and the democratic spirit necessary for a great nation, I come to ask of you, General, to kindly accept my services as a volunteer to combat the enemies of the French Republic. Please accept, General, my devotion to the French Republic and my admiration for your patriotism.56

This request was accepted and the three radicals, Mehmed, Nuri, and Reşad, were recruited into the regular French Army under General Trochu, defending Paris during the siege of 1870–1 against Prussia. They were nicknamed ‘the Three Turks’ by the French and distinguished by their fez. After the city’s capitulation the three joined National Guard troops and fought on the barricades during the Paris Commune.57 Departing from Paris only after the Commune’s fall, they returned to Istanbul in 1872.58

2.4.  Reflections on the Paris Commune on Radicalism and Shift Towards Social Republicanism In the 1870s, the three radicals’ writings began to reveal an acute awareness of the developing interrelation of legal domination and economic exploitation. The radicals developed social democratic ideas from earlier republican 55  Râtib, ‘untitled’, p. 1. 56  A copy of the original letter in French is printed in Kuntay, Namık Kemal, vol. 1, p. 385. 57  Yuriy Aşatoviç Petrosyan, Sovyet Gözüyle Jöntürkler, trans. M. Beyhan (Istanbul: Bilgi Yayınevi, 1974), p. 78; S. Teber, Paris Komünü’nde Üç Yurtsever Türk: Mehmet, Reşat ve Nuri Beyler (Istanbul: De Yayınevi, 1986), p.75. An interesting piece of evidence that Reşad participated in the Commune appears in an article he wrote jointly with Namık Kemal: ‘the author (Reşad) was in Paris when the blood shed by the tyrannical weapons of Versailles was floating on the streets. He listened to the jurists accusing and defending the Communards. He read the newspapers advocating opposing views of both sides.’ See, ‘Reddiye’, İbret, no. 8, 12 June 1872, p.1. 58 Tevfik, Yeni Osmanlılar, p. 358.

210  Banu Turnaoğlu agendas. Their republican vocabulary condemned the economic subordination of workers and took economic democracy as foundational for a society truly capable of subduing dominating power. This turn can be observed in their writings in the journal İbret (‘Warning’) concerning the Paris Commune and the First International. The events of the 1871 Commune received wide coverage in the Ottoman press.59 Yet, the Ottoman reaction to socialism and the Commune was generally harsh and negative. In his Emirnâme-i Sâmi (1871),60 Grand Vizier Âli Paşa opposed the First International and the Paris Commune. His main concern was the conservation of the social order and unity, and he warned against the dire consequences of the rise of socialism. Criticizing socialism on theoretical and practical grounds, he stated that workers influenced by socialism entertained ‘dangerous thoughts of sharing existing properties and ambitions to equal wealth and prosperity to that of capital owners’,61 alongside a moral claim upon the state. These thoughts manifested themselves in a growth in confidence among workers’ movements in the 1860s, which ‘spread like an evil spirit all over Europe’,62 and ultimately found their physical expression in the International: the workers’ ‘hazardous demands, aspirations and delusions are contrary to the  world order’, Âli Paşa proclaimed. ‘The realization [of socialism]—God ­forbid—would lead to revolutions and conflict. We have witnessed what happened in the [Paris] Commune.’ He attacked the Communards’ radicalism and violence on grounds of having taken societies backward to savagery. Denouncing the scourge of revolu­tion­ary republicanism and socialism, he called for all ­necessary measures to be taken to prevent ‘these sinister ideas’ from ‘penetrating our borders’.63 Such fears became a major preoccupation in the Ottoman press. At the same time, Marx’s ideas also began to appear in the Turkish press for the first time. Hakayik-i Vakayi (‘The Truth about Events’) published a translation of a letter written by Marx for the Daily News.64 Terakki (‘Progress’) published a translation of another of Marx’s letters, on the Paris Commune, which had appeared in the Paris Journal, and portrayed Marx as the ‘leader of the community of rebels

59  Kerim Sadi (A.  Cerrahoğlu), Türkiye’de Sosyalizmin Tarihine Katkı, 2nd ed. (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 1994), pp. 22–36. 60  Emirnâme-i Sâmi is an order or decree emanating from the Grand Vizier. For the transcription of the original document see, Necdet Kurdakul, Tanzimat Dönemi Basınında Siyasal ve Anayasal Fikir Hareketleri (Ankara: T. C. Kültür Bakanlığı, 2000), pp. 383–4. 61  Ibid., p. 383. 62  Ibid., p. 384. 63 Ibid. 64  ‘Daily News Gazetesi’nde Münderiç Bir Mektubun Suret-i Tercümesidir’ (A Translation of a Letter published in Daily News), Hakayik-i Vakayi, no. 21, 9 February 1871, p. 2. The letter translated was ‘Letter from Karl Marx to the Daily News’, 16 January 1871, see Marx Engels Collected Works (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1986), vol. 22, pp. 274–6.

The Intellectual Origins of Turkish Radical Republicanism  211 named International’ (Enternasyonal nâm usat Şirketinin Reisi).65 Takvim-i Vakayi presented the First International as the ‘society of mischief ’ (cemiyet-i fesâdiye).66 To challenge these fears and criticisms, Nuri wrote a defence of the First International in his article ‘Medeniyet’ (Civilization), stressing that ignorance of the International’s true aims generated senseless panic and was spread throughout Ottoman society by the press.67 Drawing on his first-hand experience in Paris, Nuri aimed to enlighten Ottoman public opinion by explaining what the International actually was, where it came from, what it had accomplished, and what its aims actually were. Critical of the act of production within the labour process of the West, he pointed to the low wages and the dehumanization of the worker due to forced labour as the main reason for conflict between capitalists and the proletariat, giving rise to revolutionary movements and socialist agitation. Nuri praised the International as the first organization that united the working class of Europe and managed to rapidly attract enormous numbers from the impoverished proletariat, who had hitherto been suppressed and exploited. Its aim was not the spread of violence and anarchy but ‘the reversal of the [damaging] consequences of [Western] civilization’.68 The term civilization (medeniyet), for Nuri, conveyed the entire progress of humanity, with its modern comforts and conveniences.69 Civilization, however, did not culminate solely in Western culture and its way of life. Despite admiring certain elements of Western civilization, such as its scientific spirit and progress, he denounced the idea that there was one single civilization superior to others and that France was by providential grace its spokesman and representative. This, for Nuri, was a terrible illusion. The values underpinning his criticism opposed corruption, the individualistic, materialistic, and exploitative nature of Western society. Rather, he advocated public order (efrâdın asayişi), fair cooperation, mutual reciprocity (herkes beyninde bir rabıta-i imtizac), and equality (müsavat) in order for individuals to coordinate and unite their powers. This idea of a social union, he believed, was powerfully embraced by the International and would halt the exploitation of the workers by uniting them and creating an international union for the first time in world history. The activities of the workers’ unions were therefore of civilizational necessity.70

65 Sadi, Türkiye’de Sosyalizmin Tarihine Katkı, pp. 25–6. This might refer to a letter in the Paris Journal that was not actually written by Marx even though it was purportedly signed by him. Marx wrote to the Times calling it ‘an impudent forgery’. See, Marx and Engels, ‘To the Editor of the Times’, 22 March 1871, MECW, vol. 22, p. 285. The letter or letters in question are likely to be ‘Le Grand Chef de l’Internationale’, Paris-Journal, no. 71, 14 March 1871; ‘Lettre du Grand Chef de l’Internationale’, Paris-Journal, no. 76, 19 March 1871. 66 ‘Untitled’, Takvim-i Vakayi, no. 1289, 13 March 1872, p. 2. The journal did not specify which letter from Marx was translated. 67  Nuri, ‘Medeniyet’, p. 1.    68  Ibid., p. 2.    69  Ibid., p. 1. 70  Ibid., p. 2.

212  Banu Turnaoğlu To overcome inequality and immorality and to secure escape from the ‘darkness of oppression and bribery’, Nuri pressed for representative democracy under the rule of just law as the remedy to all socio-economic ills. He wrote that justice (adalet) entails not only respect for non-arbitrary law and established rights but the welfare of the society as a whole (istirahat-i cemiyet-i beşeriyeyi mucip), which would be achieved through social reforms, provision of public goods like transport and education, and fair distribution of resources to the people.71 The cre­ ation of an egalitarian system was possible as observed in America at that time.72 Essentially, Nuri implied what might be called a ‘social republic’. Nuri’s ideo­logic­al shift towards social republicanism was clearly influenced by his observations of the events of the 1870s in France, in conjunction with his reappraisal of his views on social issues and an ethical concern for the wellbeing of workers. Such a shift toward social republicanism was also manifest in the writings of Reşad in the 1870s, who likewise closely observed events during his stay in Paris. In his article ‘Devair-i Belediye Tarafdâra’ (To the Communards), he implicitly criticized the extant authoritarian Ottoman regime by defending a municipalist position. Addressing public confusion between Communards (Komün) and communists (komünist), he attacked and denounced the latter for favouring a communal life that contained ‘two terrible nouns, common ownership of property (îştirâk-i emval) and sharing of wives (iyâl)’.73 In contrast, the ideology of the Commune condemned those values while promoting the paradigm of a free group in a free and equal self-governing society. Such lost political freedom was regained by revolutionaries who had been oppressed under corrupt, monarchical French rule for decades. Reşad justified as a rightful action the insurrection of 1871 against the French government, arguing that the people rose up to protect their rights and liberties and for the independence of the fatherland.74 Reşad’s position was also defended in Ahmet Mithad Efendi’s ‘İbret’e Teşekkür’ (Gratitude to İbret), in which he thanked the author for correcting those commonly held misunderstandings and misperceptions about the Commune.75 Reiterating the view that the Communards had rightly stood up against the despotic government of Versailles to defend their public freedom and happiness, he argued that this ‘battle’ was fought for the sake of preserving each commune. The Communards, he continued, were ‘freedom-loving, determined, brave, and just people’.76 The properties of self-rule were hinted at but not fully developed into a political doctrine. Supporters of the Commune and the International suggested that freedom and equality were among the most precious rights enjoyed by all citizens, and that people had to be committed to defending these rights against despotic governments and external threats from across the world. The Ottoman 71  Nuri, ‘Adalet’, İbret, no. 21, 1 October 1872, p. 1. 72  Nuri, ‘Medeniyet’, pp. 1–2. 73  Reşad, ‘Devair-i Belediye Tarafdâra’, İbret, no. 3, 17 June 1872, p. 1.    74 Ibid. 75  Ahmet Mithad Efendi, ‘İbret’e Teşekkür’, Basiret, 20 June 1872, p. 1.    76 Ibid.

The Intellectual Origins of Turkish Radical Republicanism  213 Empire would not have liberty as long as it lived under the constraints of administrative centralization and the arbitrary will of the sultans.

3. Conclusion The Young Ottoman movement, nevertheless, gradually disintegrated after İbret was closed down by the Ottoman government and its members sent into exile.77 Mehmed died in 1874 in Istanbul when Nuri and Reşad were in exile. Upon their return to Istanbul, Reşad and Nuri became integrated into the state administration, Reşad becoming a public administrator and gained the title of Paşa, and Nuri, following his return to Istanbul from his exile in Akka, being appointed secretary of the Council of the State and later executive of the Ottoman Tobacco Company. The end of the Tanzimat era, however, saw their names forgotten, and to this day still little is known about their philosophy. Radicalism declined, increasingly thinning and accommodating to a wide range of ideologies like an­arch­ism or materialism. But the 1920s witnessed the rebirth of radical radicalism as the dominant state ideology. The radical re­pub­lic­an programme preserved the core principles of their Young Ottoman radical forerunners: popular sovereignty, revolution, anti-monarchism, activism, patriotism, and the attachment to liberty, equality, fraternity, and civic education. However, some of its elements, like the emphasis on the caliphate and internationalism, disappeared through its abolition by the secular Turkish government in 1924. The inter­nation­alism of the earlier Young Ottomans and the fraternal basis of the Young Europe movement more broadly, on the other hand, were abandoned and replaced by nationalist sentiments. The notion of a social republic was adopted by the founders, who emphasized certain principles of social democracy. By incorporating new elements of Darwinism, scientism, German-inspired militarism, Westernization, elitism, and Durkheimean social theory into their body of phil­oso­phy, which had been developed by the Young Turks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,78 the radicals enlarged the scope of their vision and produced an internally coherent and original ideology. Guided by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and synthesized by the intellectual founders of the Republic such as Yunus Nadi, Celal Nuri, Ziya Gökalp, and Ahmed Ağaoğlu, to name just a few, the new radical republican programme drew strength from earlier disenchantment with the Ottoman sultanate. The notion of popular sovereignty remained the foundational principle of the radical republican programme: the idea that people, understood as the Turkish nation, are the legitimate source 77 Tevfik, Yeni Osmanlılar, p. 473. 78  For the political thought of the Young Turks, see especially Mehmet Şükrü Hanioğlu, Preparation for a Revolution, The Young Turks, 1902–1908 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 289–318.

214  Banu Turnaoğlu of power and all laws should reflect their own will, not that of a particular group or sultan. But they diverged from their predecessors in their emphasis on a unitary notion of sovereign power. Sovereignty (egemenlik), for Mustafa Kemal, is a collective being (kollektif bir varlık) inhering in the people:79 ‘The [sovereign] power is one and belongs to the nation’.80 In a 1923 speech, he said ‘our government is a government created according to the principle of the unification of powers (kuvvetlerin birleştirilmesi esası) . . . Rousseau’s works are also based on this doctrine’.81 This unitary principle of national sovereignty (hakimiyet-i milliye) was institutionalized in the Turkish National Assembly. Yunus Nadi stressed that there is no common will outside the national assembly, and that the nation is united only in the collective person of its body.82 The victorious radical republican vision was named ‘Kemalism’ in the 1930s and characterized by principles of nationalism, secularism, populism, statism, and reformism.83 With the incorporation of these six principles into the Republican People’s Party’s programme as the ‘six arrows’, Kemalism became the dominant state ideology, associated with a singular party. This ideology provided an innovative language to mobilize the Turkish nation and offered useful guidelines, rules, and principles to modernize the country and construct a shared identity for citizens, until in recent decades it came to be challenged by a conservative Islamic vision. Yet its presence and prominence persist in Turkish political life. Retrieving the roots of radical republican tradition will help us better understand the richness and complexity of Turkish republicanism and offers us an ap­pre­ci­ation of the alternative meanings and histories of the radical republican tradition in general.84

79  Ziya Paşa translated Rousseau’s Le Contrat Social into Turkish in 1913 as Mukavele–i İçtimaiyye. Mustafa Kemal read it carefully, highlighted, and added notes to parts concerning the general will and sovereignty. See, Atatürk’ün Okuduğu Kitaplar, eds. Bekir Koç and Haldun Eroğlu, vol. 7 (Ankara: Anıtkabir Yayınları, 2001), pp. 288, 314. In a 1921 parliamentary speech, Mustafa Kemal recommended the deputies should read and fully grasp Rousseau’s ideas. See, Atatürk’ün Söylev ve Demeçleri, vol. 1 (Ankara: Türk İnkılap Tarihi Enstitüsü Yayınları, 1981), p. 216. 80 Gazi Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Atatürk’ün Kamutayı Açış Nutukları (Ankara: Ulus Basımevi, 1938), p. 41. 81  Atatürk’ün Resmi Yayınlara Girmemiş Söylev, Demeç, Yazışma ve Söyleşileri, ed. S.  Borak (Istanbul: Kaynak Yayınları, 1997), pp. 181–3. 82  Cited in İleri, 25 March 1924, p. 1 from Yunus Nadi, ‘Hakimiyet-i Milliye’ye İlk Vurulan Darbe’, Yeni Gün. 83  For the ideological struggle between republican groups in the early years of the Turkish Republic, see Banu Turnaoğlu, ‘A Battle of Ideologies in the Formative Years of the Turkish Republic’, Middle Eastern Studies 52, no. 4 (2016), pp. 677–93. 84  This chapter grew out of previous research, for which I acknowledge the support of Leverhulme Trust Early Career Research Fellowship (ECF-2016–624) and Isaac Newton Trust (Ref: 1608 (ag)).

10

The Utopian Imagination Radical Republican Traditions in France, from the Enlightenment to the French Communists Sudhir Hazareesingh

One of the major works of the later Enlightenment was the Histoire Philosophique des Deux Indes, edited by Guillaume-Thomas Raynal. First published in six volumes in 1770, it had gone through over forty French editions by 1788, ranking high on the chart of forbidden best-sellers. There were also twenty English editions (including several in Ireland and the United States), two rival German versions, as well as translations into Danish, Italian, Spanish, and Polish. ‘Raynal’, as the collection was commonly known, also found a significant readership among educated elites in India and the Dutch Indies, as well as in the Caribbean and in Central and South America. Its ostensible theme, Europe’s global expansion from the founding of the Iberian settlements onwards, provided the setting for a searing indictment of colonialism: its enslavement and barbaric subjugation of black and Native American peoples, and its rapacious perversion of the principles of commercialism. Yet there was an optimistic underlying message: the world had been turned into a single arena, in which human aspirations for freedom and happiness had become universal. Announcing the raising of the ‘sacred standard of liberty’ around the globe, the Histoire Philosophique predicted the overthrow of slavery, led by a ‘hero’ who would avenge the crimes committed against oppressed peoples. Shaped by the ideas of the most radical thinkers of the age, the underlying message of the Histoire philosophique represented a sharp revolutionary turn in the Enlightenment’s trajectory.1 The ‘French madness’, as Catherine the Great called it, soon spread everywhere: the Histoire Philosophique was one of the intellectual inspirations behind a global republican challenge to autocratic rule in the later eighteenth century, based on the ideals of popular sovereignty and freedom from tyranny. This revolutionary surge ushered new waves of political con­tes­ta­ tion against empires, from Pasquale Paoli’s republic in Corsica, the Tupac Amaru 1  On the distinction between ‘moderate’ and ‘radical’ Enlightenment, see Jonathan Israel, Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750–1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Sudhir Hazareesingh, The Utopian Imagination: Radical Republican Traditions in France, from the Enlightenment to the French Communists In: Radical Republicanism: Recovering the Tradition’s Popular Heritage. Edited by: Bruno Leipold, Karma Nabulsi, and Stuart White, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198796725.003.0011

216  Sudhir Hazareesingh revolt in Peru, through to Kosciusko’s Polish uprising against the Tsarist autocracy; it also brought republican regimes to power briefly in the Netherlands and Naples, and provoked a popular republican revolt in the French colony of Saint-Domingue which led to the abolition of slavery. In France, this egalitarian spirit, fundamentally at odds with the aristocratic order of the ancien régime, pervaded the pol­it­ ical culture in the later years of the Enlightenment. It created the conditions for the fall of the Bastille in July 1789, and the emergence of republicanism, which was all at once a social movement, a constitutional order, and a broad political philosophy which spawned multiple traditions.2 The philosophical roots of this revolutionary surge can be located in the radical turn in the French Enlightenment from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, notably in the writings of Diderot, Helvétius, and Holbach. In contrast with the ‘moderate’ Enlightenment, which advocated reform within the existing order, these philosophes portrayed all existing societies as plagued by superstition, corruption, and despotism, and suggested that only a resolute break from the past, and entirely novel approaches to politics and society, could overcome these problems. But, as Karma Nabulsi has illuminatingly shown, the primary in­spir­ ation for this radical reinvention of the political sphere came from the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.3 Rousseau’s thinking was quintessentially revolutionary because he regarded the imagination as the key human faculty, and his entire oeuvre was illuminated with visionary elements. His arresting style was integral to his appeal, as his great admirer Mercier observed: ‘he could not touch a question without captivating people’s minds, because he took them off beaten paths’.4 Rousseau’s major works were driven by two complementary impulses: the denunciation of the corrosive effects of society and the achievement of republican virtue through human regeneration. By likening modern civilization to a form of ‘happy slavery’, in which men ‘fling garlands of flowers over the chains which weigh them down’, his first Discourse encouraged his contemporaries to break free from the ‘servile and deceptive conformity’ induced by the modern arts and sciences.5 His second Discourse (1755), devoted to an examination of the origins of inequality, was even more radical: it drew a powerful contrast between the peace and serenity enjoyed by primitive man, and the ‘law of the strongest’ which prevailed in modern times through divisions based on wealth and property. Although he did not specifically advocate the overthrow of the existing order, Rousseau concluded that it was ‘plainly contrary to the law of nature’ that ‘the privileged few should

2  See Claude Nicolet, L’idée républicaine en France (Paris: Gallimard, 1982). 3  Karma Nabulsi, Traditions of War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 177–204. 4  Louis-Sébastien Mercier, De Jean-Jacques Rousseau considéré comme l’un des premiers auteurs de la Révolution, vol. 1 (Paris, 1791), p. 4. 5  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750), in The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. G. D. H. Cole and ed. P. D. Jimack (London: Everyman’s Library, 1993), pp. 5–6.

The Utopian Imagination  217 gorge themselves with superfluities, while the starving multitude are in want of the bare necessities of life’.6 The strength of Rousseau’s revolutionary appeal lay in the plurality of its utopian motifs.7 His ideal of an uncorrupted natural man played into the myth of the ‘noble savage’, and chimed with those who questioned the complacent urbanity of the Enlightenment, and penned vitriolic libelles about the ‘rot which was consuming French society’.8 His vision of individual moral transformation, as sketched out in his novel Emile, highlighted man’s capacity for self-mastery, transparency, and virtue through an inward journey towards greater perfectibility.9 His scheme of an idealized republican community in his Social Contract (1762), in which sovereign citizens rule themselves through the general will, inspired those who sought to design a more virtuous society through the designing of new institutions. Hence the role given to the law giver, the emphasis on civil equality, and the promotion of a more collective self (moi commun) through the inclusion of the citizen into a larger collectivity. The sheer radicalism of Rousseau’s objective shines through in this passage: he who dares to undertake the making of a people’s institutions ought to feel himself capable, so to speak, of changing human nature, of transforming each individual, who is by himself a complete and solitary whole, into part of a greater whole from which he in a manner receives his life and being; of altering man’s constitution for the purposes of strengthening it; and of substituting a partial and moral existence for the physical and independent existence nature has conferred on us all.10

This Rousseauist aspiration to regenerate society was widely shared among re­pub­ licans in the early years of the French Revolution. In the words of Condorcet: ‘the perfectibility of the human race must be seen as susceptible to indefinite progress’.11 This vision of perfectibility was central to the radical republican tradition in France, which emerged at this time. It was a loose ensemble, part of the wider

6 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, in Social Contract and Discourses, p. 117. 7  See Jean Fabre, ‘Réalité et utopie dans la pensée de Jean-Jacques Rousseau’, Annales de la société Jean-Jacques Rousseau 35 (1959–1962), pp. 181–221. The most comprehensive analysis is Antoine Hatzenberger’s Rousseau et l’utopie: de l’État insulaire aux cosmotopies (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2012). 8 Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 35. 9  Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1988), p. 15. 10  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, in The Social Contract and Discourses, pp. 195 and 214. 11  Nicolas de Condorcet, Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progès de l’esprit humain (Paris: J. Vrin, 1970), p. 236.

218  Sudhir Hazareesingh republican movement but especially driven by its commitment to resisting pol­it­ical and social oppression, and its creative aspiration to imagine a better world. It expressed itself in different sensibilities—a libertarian yearning for self-realization for some, a progressive quest for more rationally organized institutions for others, and a redistributive demand for greater equality for others still. At the same time, through its embrace of Rousseauism, this radical republican tradition was united by a common attachment to key ideals of the late Enlightenment: the concept of the sovereignty of the people, the idea of the general will as the in­­alien­able foundation of the political order, the belief in the human capacity to overcome selfishness and materialism, the vision of citizenship based on the practice of the virtues and the rejection of tyranny, and the universal sense that all humans were bound by a sense of fraternity.12 In institutional terms, these radical republican ideals were most pervasively reflected in the Jacobin constitution adopted in 1793 by the Jacobin assembly, the Convention. This revolutionary charter went well beyond the individualistic and liberal framework of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man, which was championed by the more moderate strands of the republican movement. It proclaimed a range of social and economic rights, as well as the right of citizens to resist oppression, and to rebel against despotic governments; it also asserted that humans could not sell themselves or be sold. A year later the Convention abolished slavery, and Raynal’s prophecy was accomplished in the figure of Toussaint Louverture, the ‘Black Spartacus of Saint-Domingue’, who became the majestic and enduring embodiment of the universal ambitions of the radical republican tradition.

1.  Regenerating Humankind As they attempted to take forward these republican ideals as from the late 1820s, after the regressive decades of Napoleonic and Bourbon rule, nineteenth-century French radical thinkers harked back to the revolutionary era as a founding moment of action and possibility. They took away from the 1790s the idea that a reformed humanity would not come about spontaneously, but required mobilization and collective action. Post-revolutionary reformers were in this sense ‘zealous voluntarists’.13 Especially during the first half of the nineteenth century, there was also a visionary, utopian strain to French radicalism. Saint-Simon and his dis­ ciples sought to lead humanity towards ‘the great objective of rapidly improving 12  On Rousseau’s impact on the political thought of the early Revolutionary era, see James Swenson, On Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Considered as One of the First Authors of the Revolution (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). 13  Mona Ozouf, ‘La Révolution Française au tribunal de l’utopie’, in L’Homme régénéré: Essais sur la Révolution française (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), p. 234.

The Utopian Imagination  219 the condition of the most numerous and deprived social class’; to this end they ­proposed a new temporal and spiritual hierarchy, in which power was exercised by industrialists and scientists. Saint-Simonians were also pioneers in promoting the emancipation of women and the idealization of femininity, at a time when most progressives remained silent on the issue: the first French feminist journal, La femme libre, was published by a group of Saint-Simonist women in 1832.14 Saint-Simonism was one of the key intellectual influences which shaped progressive thinking in France, notably in the cultivation of a certain mystical universalism, as expressed in the belief in the immortality of the soul: the founder of French socialism, Pierre Leroux, was a former Saint-Simonian, as were some of the leading figures in the French republican movement at the time of the 1848 Revolution, such as Hippolyte Carnot and Alphonse Esquiros.15 The greatest visionary of this era, Charles Fourier, was the first to combine all these elements in a new synthesis which created the intellectual space for the rebirth of radical republicanism. Fourier’s scheme was breathtaking both in its sweep and its imaginative creativity. ‘It is not with moderation that one accomplishes great things,’ he observed in his seminal work, The Theory of the Four Movements.16 He was true to his maxim. Forging his ‘social science’ on his twin principles of radical scepticism and absolute distance (‘écart absolu’), Fourier began, in the spirit of Rousseau, with a damning verdict on the bankruptcy of modern civilization. Political and spiritual leadership had collapsed, and the ‘social misery’ of humanity was reflected in the greed and inefficiency of commercialism, typified by English society.17 This decrepitude was compounded by the sexual misery of marriage, with its enslaved women and adulterous couples. Fourier, a stickler for numerical accuracy, distinguished nine degrees of cuck­ old­ry: his portrait of the genre included the ‘fatalist’, who was resigned to his condition; the ‘federal’, who chooses his wife’s lover, and the ‘mystic’, who surrounds his wife with priests and holy men, one of whom seduces her ‘for the greatest glory of God’.18 Fourier’s insight was that human perfectibility required not yet another grand constitutional redesign, but a focus on the human senses. Drawing on the trad­ ition of libertine thinking of the later Enlightenment (notably the works of Diderot and the marquis de Sade), he thus identified twelve passions, from simple sensual experiences to the complex psychological mechanisms governing calculation and the organization of work, concluding that ‘true happiness consists in

14  It changed its title to La femme de l’avenir, and then La femme nouvelle; the collection is held in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal in Paris (8-JO-20,530). 15  See Pierre Leroux, De l’humanité, 2 volumes (Paris, 1845); on Saint-Simonist influences on nineteenth-century republican thought, see Sudhir Hazareesingh, Intellectual Founders of the Republic: Five Studies in Nineteenth-Century French Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 16  Charles Fourier, Théorie des quatre mouvements (Leipzig, 1808), p. 283. 17  Ibid., p. 369. 18  Charles Fourier, Hiérarchie du cocuage (Paris: Les Presses du Réel, 2000).

220  Sudhir Hazareesingh satisfying all the passions’.19 This hedonistic harmony would be achieved through the regroupment of mankind in ‘phalansteries’, self-contained agricultural communities of around 1,600 members, which by pooling resources would overcome the limitations of small landholdings and lack of capital; high returns would be guaranteed to all members, thanks to greater productivity and regulated competition among the units. The phalanstery, whose architectural concept was inspired by the galleries of the Palais-Royal in Paris, would provide everything needed for the flowering of human capabilities: pleasurable and varied economic activities, commensurate with the preferences of men and women; a comprehensive system of education for all children up to the age of 16; and diverse forms of leisure, from spaces for reflective contemplation to ballrooms, operas, and meeting halls. As befitted a sensualist utopia, the phalanstery provided an abundance of food (five full meals served each day, as well as two copious snacks20). And sex, too, was in plentiful supply: conventional marriage was replaced by the ‘progressive household’, a system of free love in which women enjoyed complete sexual liberation. The advances of Fourier’s regenerated humanity were prodigious: harnessed by the liberated passions, average life expectancy rose to 144 years, and human beings grew seven feet tall. Genius was no longer limited to exceptional in­di­vid­ uals: there were 37 million Homers, and just as many Newtons and Molières; their greatest scientific and literary achievements were rewarded by the title of ‘citizen of the globe’.21 The Sahara was transformed into a fertile zone by a volunteer army of agricultural workers, and canals were pierced through the isthms of Suez and Panama.22 The phalansteries of the planet were linked together by a territorial system of governance whose leaders were democratically elected, all the way up to the ‘omniarch’, the universal emperor whose seat lay in Constantinople. This harmony was reflected (and enabled) by cosmic changes, driven by the pantheistic laws of ‘universal attraction’: as the earth entered a higher phase in its development, its original moons were restored, and the tilt of its axis was corrected. With the providential help of an aurora borealis, temperatures in the arctic pole rose, causing a melting of the ice caps and a general shift in the global environment— in turn enabling the cultivation of lands in northern Canada and Siberia, and the transformation of sea water into a form of lemonade called aigresel.23 Although this Elysium was not infinite, humans could take consolation that their souls were reincarnated, and could spend (Fourier was again precise) an average of 27,000 years on earth, and 54,000 years on other stars.24 Settlements inspired by the idea of the phalanstery were attempted in France and the United States, with disappointing results; the Brook Farm experiment outside Boston inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Blithdale Romance (1852). After 19 Fourier, Théorie des quatre mouvements, p. 116. 20  Ibid., p. 251, n.1. 21  Ibid., p. 211. 22  Ibid., p. 246. 23  Ibid., p. 66. 24 Fourier, Traité de l’association domestique-agricole (Paris, 1822), vol. 1, p. 243.

The Utopian Imagination  221 his death, Fourier’s disciples sought to maintain his intellectual legacy through pamphlets and newspapers, and annual commemorations of his birthday, which continued until the late nineteenth century; fourierist groups were particularly active in creating local producer associations, and participating in peace movements, anticlerical, and educational leagues.25 But the general view was that Fourier’s schemes, and the philosophy that underlay them, were hopelessly naïve and impractical. This was the sense in which (while acknowledging his contribution to the founding of socialist doctrine) Marx and Engels dismissed the ideas of Saint-Simon and Fourier as ‘utopian’. Yet, once stripped of their jargon and unconventional formulations, many of these ideas had a lasting impact on radical republican, socialist, and anarchist thinking. They brought these ideas, which were fundamentally anti-political, back into the realm of politics. Indeed they provided powerful anticipations of a hedonistic, anti-commercial, and anti-authoritarian sensibility which has been a consistent presence in modern French radical thought—notably through its celebration of the value of associational activity and human diversity, its desire to reconcile private property with social reform, and its intuition that the progress of a society should be measured by its treatment of women.26 Along with the SaintSimonians, the disciples of Fourier also made major contributions to the French tradition of the grand projet—perhaps none more so than the engineer Charles Bergeron, one of the early designers of that most fanciful of Franco-British schemes: the Channel Tunnel.27

2.  Visions of Equality Although they overlapped with some of the aspirations of late eighteenth-century radical republicans, the ideals for human perfectibility of Fourier and Saint-Simon departed from them in one key respect: they were not overly preoccupied with the question of equality. They paid scant attention to the issue of political representation, which was one of the primary concerns of liberal and republican ­thinkers during the first half of the nineteenth century.28 The idea that poverty should be addressed by making humans conform to a common notion of the good life was an affront to Fourier’s libertarian sensibility. Likewise, the precept that the possessions of all citizens should be shared equally did not chime with the Saint-Simonians’ commitment to industrial expansion, and their belief in 25  The definitive work on the subject is by Bernard Desmars, Militants de l’utopie? Les Fouriéristes dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle (Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2010). 26 Fourier, Théorie des quatre mouvements, p. 180. 27  Charles Bergeron, Le chemin de fer sous-marin entre la France et l’Angleterre (Paris, 1873). 28  For a comparison between republican and Saint-Simonian doctrines, see Jules Sambuc, Parallèle du Saint-Simonien et du Républicain (Grenoble, 1833).

222  Sudhir Hazareesingh legitimate social hierarchies. But powerful republican traditions of egalitarianism did emerge in nineteenth-century France. They took their cue, of course, from the French Revolution, which had emblazoned the principle of equality as the first article of the Declaration of the Rights of Man—but also, as noted earlier, from the Jacobin constitution of 1793. However while successive French regimes after 1815 had broadly observed the principle of civil equality, few citizens enjoyed full political rights, such as the right to vote; access to property ownership remained limited; and governments did little to ameliorate the conditions of the poorer sections of society. It was against this historical backdrop, and in the face of ongoing ideological efforts to justify existing social hierarchies, that arguments about promoting equality in the ideal society were propounded in France by rad­ical re­pub­ licans as from the 1820s. The mainstream view was that political equality was the cardinal principle of a just social order. Godefroy Cavaignac, in his blistering challenge to the restricted political rights enjoyed by French citizens under the system of constitutional monarchy, argued that ‘absolute equality among men’ should be the overriding goal of progressive politics.29 A pamphlet defined this principle as follows: ‘the equal participation of all citizens in civil and political matters, irrespective of their rank or fortune’.30 Republicans believed that political equality would lead to the formation of a truly democratic government, which in turn would have as its ‘rigor­ous consequence’ the ‘improvement of the physical and moral condition of the poorest and most numerous classes’.31 Seen in this light, equality was about opportunity and enablement: it was not ‘the equal possession of all things but an equal right to acquire all things’.32 The ‘monstrous disparities’ between rich and poor would not be overcome overnight, or through violence, but by means of a system of public assistance, ‘the first duty of the Republic’. Such support to the needy would be funded by progressive taxation, which would enable the state to raise general living standards.33 More radical voices challenged this vision of a republican society based on political equality. For one thing, its ‘universality’ was limited to men, which nat­ ur­al­ly provoked a strong objection among French feminists. Their rejection of the republicans’ masculine conception of citizenship was first expressed in Olympe de Gouges’s seminal Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen (1791), which preceded Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman 29 Godefroy Cavaignac, ‘La Force Révolutionnaire’, in Paris Révolutionnaire, ed. Godefroy Cavaignac (Paris, 1848), p. 9. 30  ‘Petit Catéchisme Républicain’, in Les Révolutions du XIXe siècle, 1st series (Paris: EDHIS, 1974), vol. 3. 31 ‘Association des Amis de l’Egalité. Déclaration’ [1830], in Les Révolutions du XIXe siècle, 1st series, vol. 1. 32  Adople Rion, ‘Droits et devoirs du républicain’, in Les Révolutions du XIXe siècle, 1st series, vol. 9. 33  ‘Société des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen. De l’Egalité’, in Les Révolutions du XIXe siècle, 1st series, vol. 3.

The Utopian Imagination  223 by a year. Gouges’s first article asserted: ‘women are born free and enjoy equal rights to men’.34 Such a view initially found limited echoes among the revolutionaries in France; the only major philosophe who supported feminine equality was Condorcet, who declared in a speech in 1790 that the revolution’s exclusion of women from civic life was a ‘violation of the principle of equality, and a deprivation of the rights of half of the human race’.35 Later writers such as Jeanne Deroin likewise observed that ‘to split humanity into two unequal groups, to deny women their rights to freedom and equality, is to contradict the [revolutionary] principles’.36 The advocacy of the feminine cause met with staunch opposition from the male establishment—both progressive and conservative. Yet powerful voices emerged to champion (and embody) the claims of women’s empowerment in the course of the nineteenth century: diverse figures such as Flora Tristan, who captured the progressive blind spot for feminine emancipation when she defined women as the ‘proletariat of the proletariat’, and the writer and essayist George Sand, who became an international celebrity during her lifetime, and whose ­novels offered a subtle but powerful vision of women’s self-realization (both Tristan and Sand were influenced by Saint-Simonism).37 Sand became a re­pub­ lic­an socialist, and she was blessed with a wonderful capacity to empathize even with those with views very different from her own, as her letters to Flaubert demonstrate. With her fierce hostility to violence, her soaring humanity, and her talent for appealing to people’s nobler instincts, her life and political thought bring home the tragic consequences of the exclusion of women from the French pol­it­ ical sphere.38 The most remarkable of these figures was Juliette Adam, whose first feminist pamphlet was published in 1858, and who became one of the great literary figures of the second half of the nineteenth century, as much through her prolific writings (novels, memoirs, political commentaries) as through the Nouvelle Revue, which she founded in 1879. Her Parisian home became the seat of the most influential salon of the early Third Republic, frequented by key politicians such as Léon Gambetta and Georges Clemenceau.39 Other radicals, drawing again from Rousseau’s work, were critical of mainstream French republican doctrine for its limited understanding of the economic sources of inequality. The republican socialist Louis Blanc argued that the only effective 34  Olympe de Gouges, Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne, in Œuvres (Paris: Mercure de France, 1986), p. 102. 35  Nicolas de Condorcet, ‘Sur l’admission des femmes au droit de cité’, 3 July 1790, in Œuvres de Condorcet, eds. A. Condorcet O’Connor and F. Arago (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1847), vol. 10, p. 122. 36  Jeanne Deroin, Association fraternelle des démocrates socialistes des deux sexes (Paris, 1849), p. 3. 37  Sarah Kay, Terence Cave, and Malcolm Bowie, eds, A Short History of French Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 239–41. 38  Gustave Flaubert and George Sand, Correspondance, ed. Alphonse Jacobs (Paris: Flammarion, 1981); on Sand’s politics, see the collection of her articles edited by Michelle Perrot, George Sand, politique et polémique (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1996). 39  See Anne Hogenhuis-Seliverstoff, Juliette Adam (1836–1936), l’instigatrice (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002); Aldo d’Agostini, ‘L’agency de Juliette Adam’, Rives méditerranéennes 41 (2012), pp. 101–15.

224  Sudhir Hazareesingh way of dealing with the injustices produced by economic competition was through state-sponsored ‘social workshops’, cooperative associations which would guarantee all citizens the right to work.40 More controversially, the libertarian socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon asserted that the modern system of property ownership was a violation of man’s natural rights; his conclusion became one of the slogans of modern anarchist thought: ‘property is theft’.41 Although Proudhon did not actually propose to abolish property, his ideas chimed with revolutionary re­pub­ licans who believed in a more egalitarian distribution of private property. Others, such as the radical conspirator Philippe Buonarotti, argued that the French Revolution had ultimately failed because it had entrenched pol­it­ical rights in property. The solution was to replace this enduring ‘order of egoism’ with the ‘order of equality’. Inspired by his reading of Rousseau, and the memory of Gracchus Babeuf ’s ‘Conspiracy of the Equals’, Buonarroti made the case for a community in which ‘the acts and properties of each individual were subject to the will of the sovereign people’.42 Advocating ‘absolute equality’ through the negation of private ownership of property and the establishment of a society based on the principle of ‘community’,43 this ‘babouvist’ approach revelled in its revolutionary utopianism: its aim was ‘totally to change the surface of the earth, and to bring in for all its inhabitants a completely new life, for which there is no precedent in history’.44 The most elaborate nineteenth-century vision of this republican egalitarianism was sketched by Etienne Cabet. A self-styled communist, and former member of the conspiratorial underground movement, the Carbonari, Cabet did not believe however that change could be achieved through violence. He explained that his political views were completely altered after he became convinced—again, with Rousseau’s help—‘that inequality was the real, original and primordial cause of all the vices and miseries of all societies’.45 Like many of the first generation of French socialist thinkers, Cabet’s communism was also shaped by Christian doctrine, quoting the vision from St Luke’s Gospel as a justification for his egalitarianism: ‘every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be brought low; and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways shall be made smooth’.46 Cabet described his ideal community at great length in his novel Voyage en Icarie, first published anonymously in 1839. The work proved a great popular success: it

40  Louis Blanc, L’organisation du travail (Paris, 1839). 41  Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Qu’est-ce que la propriété? (Paris, 1840). 42 Philippe Buonarroti, History of Babeuf ’s Conspiracy for Equality, trans. Bronterre (London, 1836), p. 10. 43  Almanach de la communauté (1843), in Les Révolutions du XIXe siècle, 1835–1848, 2nd series (Paris: EDHIS, 1979), vol. 8. 44 Jean-Jacques Pillot, Histoire des égaux ou moyens d’établir l’égalité absolue parmi les hommes (Paris, 1840), in Les Révolutions du XIXe siècle, 1835–1848, 2nd series, vol. 6. 45  Etienne Cabet, ‘Comment je suis communiste’, in Les Révolutions du XIXe siècle, 1835–1848, 2nd series, vol. 5. 46  Etienne Cabet, Le vrai christianisme suivant Jésus-Christ (Paris, 1847), p. 165.

The Utopian Imagination  225 was republished four times and translated into English, German, and Spanish. Cabet narrated the adventures of an English nobleman, Lord William Carisdall, to the island of Icaria. Here, in a country with the combined population of England and France, the principle of community had been fully achieved by means of a simple device: ‘the substitution of inequality by equality’.47 Cabet’s radical sensibility was indisputably collectivist. Thanks to the vision of the revolutionary dictator and founder of the new order, Icar (something of a cross between Jesus Christ and Thomas More), private property, social classes, and money had been abolished; there was also no commerce, as the Republic provided all the necessities for its citizens, from clothing, accommodation, transport, and education to food, which was delivered daily to every household by a provisions cart48 (the utopian anticipation of the supermarket delivery van). All problems of urban public hygiene and communication had been scientifically resolved. Buildings and streets were designed according to ‘perfect proportions’;49 hospitals were as beautiful as palaces, and staffed with armies of highly skilled physicians;50 and public transport was provided by a network of carriages, trains, and balloons; there were even, for those wishing to explore marine life, ‘underwater boats’.51 Power was exercised by a collegial executive, seconded by a network of national, provincial, and local institutions, elected by (male) universal suffrage; popular committees also played an active role in civic life.52 Family life was serene, happy, and joyful53 and all citizens enjoyed freedom of religious worship; the majority subscribing to a natural religion with no idols or rituals.54 Production was organized by the state, which fixed the number of workers needed annually in different sectors of industry and agriculture. Labour was no longer considered onerous, because some demeaning jobs (such as domestic service) had been abolished; working hours were rigorously fixed, and the most difficult tasks were performed by machines.55 Cabet’s communist society was highly regulated. There were no cafés or gambling houses56 and a nightly curfew was observed between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m.57 Art was controlled by the state, and was characterized by chastity and by social utility.58 Clothing was likewise designed according to ‘model plans’; citizens wore different uniforms which corresponded to their age and occupations.59 Food was abundant, with five meals served each day—but it was up to the legislature to decide which vegetables were to be grown, and ‘Nourishment Committees’ determined the composition of menus, as well as the proper ingredients to be used.60 Monogamy was the norm, and adultery was considered a crime; there was none of Fourier’s hedonistic frolicking, as there were in Icaria only ‘chaste women,

47  Etienne Cabet, Voyage en Icarie, 4th ed. (Paris, 1846), preface. 48  Ibid., p. 56. 49  Ibid., p. 42. 50  Ibid., p. 112. 51  ‘Bateaux sous-marins’. Ibid., p.73. 52  Ibid., p. 176. 53  Ibid., p. 27. 54  Ibid., p. 168. 55  Ibid., pp. 100–1. 56  Ibid., p. 45. 57  Ibid., p. 108. 58  Ibid., p. 48. 59  Ibid., p. 57. 60  Ibid., p. 51.

226  Sudhir Hazareesingh respectful men, and faithful and respected couples’.61 A form of eugenicism was practised to improve the species, under the supervison of a ‘Perfection Commission’: Cabet was fond of committees.62

3.  Ideals of Fraternity O good, strong, just, and all-powerful God, grant thy protection and support to all those who are battling for two great and noble causes: the abolition of standing armies and the advent of a general peace, that is to say the end of wars and massacres through the abolition of all monarchies, and the founding of a universal Republic. Thanks to constitution of a United States of Europe, all peoples who are brothers will be joined together, and will experience a new era of prosperity and progress such as has never been seen since the dawn of times. May all the great citizens of the world behold, with their own eyes, from the banks of the Thames to the verges of the Neva, from the Tiber to the Bosphorus, the glorious three colours and ten stars of the flag of the United States of Europe.63 Published in a local republican newspaper at the height of the Franco-Prussian war in 1870, this rousing appeal illustrates one of the resurgent themes in ­nineteenth-century French radical thinking, complementing those of the futuristic and collectivist visions previously described: the establishment of a peace-loving universal Republic. The egalitarian dreams of social reformers, which had resonated so powerfully in the French romantic imagination in earlier decades, were dealt crushing blows by the failure of the 1848 Revolution. The new Republic began auspiciously with a decree abolishing slavery, championed by Victor Schoelcher, who was a great admirer of Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution.64 However, popular aspirations for a ‘democratic and social’ order were rapidly (and violently) suppressed, and the government refused to side with insurrectionary movements launched by European republicans. Insult was added to injury when Louis Napoleon, the democratically elected president, overthrew the regime a few years later in a coup d’état, and restored the Empire in 1852. Instead of the affable dictator depicted in Cabet’s utopia, French progressives found themselves trapped under the boot of a despotic Caesar. Their cosmo­pol­itan turn was both a reflection of their predicament (along with Victor Hugo in Jersey, many republican 61  Ibid., pp. 141, 143. 62  Ibid., p. 122. 63 Crespy-Noher (pseud. for Alexis Manières), Les prières républicaines du citoyen Xiléas (Bordeaux, 1875). 64  Schoelcher later wrote what remains the classic biography, Vie de Toussaint Louverture (Paris: Éditions Karthala, 1982 [1889]).

The Utopian Imagination  227 intellectuals were in exile during the 1850s and 1860s in London, Brussels, and Geneva) and a tacit recognition of the limitations of the egalitarian perfectionism of the previous era. This universalist reverie also marked the apogee of that most enchanting, and yet elusive, of French radical republican ideals: fraternity. The idea of securing global harmony through the creation of a confederation of like-minded, peaceloving states was another legacy of Enlightenment thinking, notably in the visionary projects of the abbé de Saint-Pierre and Immanuel Kant (whose Perpetual Peace was translated into French in 1796). The French Revolution added a more combative dimension to fraternity: the expression was first used by Robespierre in a speech about the National Guard.65 From this moment on, fraternity designated a principle of active citizenship, which conditioned membership of the political community on the possession of certain moral qualities; their absence could justify the removal of civic rights.66 For the more enthusiastic republicans, fraternity also implied solidarity among the peoples of the world who were struggling against tyranny. In this scheme of things, patriotism and internationalism were mutually reinforcing principles. Commenting on the article of the 1793 Constitution that declared all men to be brothers, the republican thinker Albert Laponneraye noted in the early 1830s: ‘that a man be born at the extremities of the earth, or among us, that his skin be black or white, he is no less of a human being than us; he is our brother, and if he needs our help, we need to assist him; if he is in danger, we need to fly to his rescue’.67 The French republican struggle against the July Monarchy was thus inextricably linked to support for the Polish insurrection against Russian occupation—the great cause of its time in European progressive politics.68 In the words of Armand Marrast: the principles of morality are not enclosed by frontiers: they are common to all continents, to all humanity. Peoples are brothers, as are men. The law of nations only has as its goal the universal association of peoples. This association is already being imagined and advocated by superior minds, who on our continent are working in concert for a european republic.69

A decade later, this idea had almost become a commonplace. In the early, optimistic months of the 1848 Revolution, the titles of some Parisian newspapers bore witness to the heady appeal of this fraternal universalism: Alliance des Peuples, 65  Maximilien Robespierre, Discours sur l’organisation des gardes nationales (Besançon, 1791), p. 56. 66  On this theme see Anne Simonin’s remarkable study, Le déshonneur dans la République: une histoire de l’indignité 1791–1958 (Paris: Grasset, 2008). 67  Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, avec des commentaires par le citoyen Laponneraye (Paris, n.d.), p. 8. 68 See Karma Nabulsi, ‘Patriotism and Internationalism in the “Oath of Allegiance” to Young Europe’, European Journal of Political Theory 5, no. 1 (2006), pp. 61–70. 69  La Tribune, 31 January 1833, emphasis in text.

228  Sudhir Hazareesingh Europe Républicaine, Fraternité des Peuples, and Harmonie Universelle (there was also the robust Fraternité Cri de Guerre and, for those who still had not got the message, the even more direct Guillotine).70 Although bound by a common internationalist outlook, these radical visions were eclectic in their specific formulations. There was inevitably a touch of ethnocentrism, as with Frédéric Sorrieu’s allegorical representation, La République Universelle Démocratique et Sociale (1848). It depicted the figure of Marianne, the symbol of the Republic, on a cha­riot accompanied by four children from different continents; however, the people heading the procession are clearly French, and the city represented in the background indisputably Paris. Likewise, in Victor Hugo’s scheme for a ‘United States of Europe’, there was a common currency, and free movement of people and goods across borders; here too, the popularly elected European assembly was located in Paris, the ‘centre of the earth’.71 In fact, aspirations to greater European unity came in all shapes and sizes among republicans: there were minutely detailed schemes, imbued with a touch of religious mysticism, such as Jean-Joseph Brémond’s Plan de la confédération européenne et universelle du livre précurseur;72 visions to organize a central command for progressive parties, notably in the proclamation published in 1855 by leading European democrats from Hungary (Lajos Kossuth), Italy (Giuseppe Mazzini), and France (Alexandre Ledru-Rollin);73 radically cosmopolitan projects for universal fraternity, as with the group which claimed that ‘the idea of a Humanity superior to all nations is now accepted by all republicans’;74 and appeals to form an alliance of progressive youth across Europe.75 Out of this diverse body of internationalist thought one overriding idea began to crystallize: the universal Republic of peace and fraternity could emerge only through a concerted col­lect­ ive challenge to the despotism and militarism of monarchical rule. This was one of the major underlying factors in the creation of the International Workingmen’s Association in 1864; its French sections were active in promoting ‘universal solidarity’ among European workers.76 A wider cross-section of groups, from pacifists and liberals to Saint-Simonians, republicans, and radical revolutionaries, came together to form the Ligue de la Paix et de la Liberté in 1867. Its founding Congress was held in Geneva, with 6,000 delegates in attendance, including many

70  Gaetan Delmas, Curiosités révolutionnaires. Les journaux rouges: histoire critique de tous les journaux ultra-républicains publiés à Paris depuis le 24 février jusqu’au 1er octobre 1848 (Paris, 1848). 71  Quoted in Philippe Darriulat, Les patriotes: la gauche républicaine et la nation (Paris: Éditions du Seuil 2001), p. 239. 72 Jean-Joseph Brémond, Plan de la confédération européenne et universelle du livre précurseur (Paris, 1867). 73  Aux républicains: Appel de Kossuth, Ledru-Rollin et Mazzini (Jersey, 1855). 74  ‘Système de Fraternité’, Le Populaire, July 1850. 75  Gustave Flourens et al., Appel de la Rive Gauche à la jeunesse Européenne (Brussels, 1864). 76  See the volume of pamphlets gathered in ‘l’Association Internationale des Travailleurs’, in Les Révolutions du XIXe siècle, 3rd series (Paris: EDHIS, 1984), vol. 5.

The Utopian Imagination  229 leading lights in the French republican party.77 The final reso­lution called for the creation of a European confederation of democratic states; edited by the former Saint-Simonist Charles Lemonnier, the Ligue’s paper was entitled Les Etats-Unis d’Europe.78 The most original contribution to this vision of fraternal radical internationalism came in Jules Barni’s La Morale dans la Démocratie (1868). One of the co-founders of the Ligue, Barni elaborated a theory of democratic peace which fortified the liberal vision of Kant with elements drawn from Rousseau and the nineteenthcentury republican tradition of war. In particular, he singled out ‘Caesarism’ as the principal obstacle to a more just and humane society, and thus restated the classic republican imperative of combatting tyranny: ‘it is indeed a right inherent in every human being to resist any power which wishes to oppress him; but it is furthermore a duty of the citizen to overcome oppression by all legal means available, and in the absence of any other means, by the use of force’.79

4.  From the Communards to the Communists This expansive and robust vision of a universal Republic proved short-lived. It came to grief at the end of a short-lived revolutionary episode which would long resonate in the collective memory of French and European progressives: the Paris Commune. This revolutionary movement briefly held power in the capital between March and May 1871, just after the end of the war which saw France’s defeat by Prussia. The Commune was a patriotic and idealistic movement, which reflected the richness of the French radical republican tradition, notably in its democratic organization (its council was elected, and it had nine commissions, so had admirably digested Cabet’s work). It produced remarkable personalities: moderates such as the journalist Charles Delescluze, intellectuals such as Félix Pyat, self-taught activists such as Eugène Varlin and Benoit Malon, un­com­prom­ is­ing zealots such as the Jacobin police chief Raoul Rigault, and extraordinary feminine figures, the most celebrated of whom was Louise Michel.80 Despite Marx’s subsequent association of the Commune with the notion of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’,81 most of its elected leaders were petty bourgeois and skilled artisans—and indeed were largely unfamiliar with Marx’s works: the only

77  For the full list, see Auguste Scheurer-Kestner, Souvenirs de jeunesse (Paris, 1905), pp. 108–9. 78  Charles Lemonnier, Les Etats-Unis d’Europe (Paris, 1872). 79  Jules Barni, La morale dans la démocratie, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1885), p. 116. 80 See Claudine Rey, Annie Gayat, and Sylvie Peppino, Petit dictionnaire des femmes de la Commune: Les Oubliées de L’histoire (Paris: Le Bruit Des Autres, 2013). 81  For further discussion, see Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, vol. 3 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1986).

230  Sudhir Hazareesingh genuine ‘Marxist’ among the Communards was the Hungarian communist and member of the International, Leo Frankel.82 The Commune’s intellectual inspirations were diverse. They ranged from the conspiratorial radical revolutionism of Auguste Blanqui, driven by his dream of ‘happiness for humanity in the future’,83 to the federalist republican tradition symbolized by Proudhon, which opposed state centralization and celebrated the ideals of municipal self-government and popular spontaneity. Most of the Communards espoused a diffuse commitment to the idea of social reform, drawn from classic thinkers such as Rousseau as well as nineteenth-century republican socialists (notably, Louis Blanc).84 Even though the Commune achieved little in the latter respect (the only practical measure it adopted was the abolition of night work in Parisian bakeries), its utopian spirit was very much in the radical re­pub­ lic­an tradition, and many of its leading members expressed the ambition to ‘write a new page in history’.85 More poetically, this sensibility was manifested in a faith in the regenerative force of the people: the principal character in Julles Vallès’s novel L’Insurgé exclaims ‘it seems no longer to be mine, this heart which has been scorched by so many ugly wounds, and it is the very soul of the crowd which now has filled and swells my breast’.86 After coming into conflict with the Versaillesbased French government led by Adolphe Thiers, the Commune was violently suppressed by the French Army, in an atrocious bloodbath which lasted a week (‘la semaine sanglante’), and which saw thousands of people killed.87 Traumatized by the circumstances of its birth—the massacre of the Commune, and the loss of the provinces of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany—the republican regime which emerged in France after 1871 increasingly veered away from its rad­ ical roots, embracing nationalism and displaying from the outset a marked hostility to all forms of perfectionism in politics. Rejecting as ‘metaphysical’ his earlier commitments to cosmopolitanism and global harmony, Emile Littré defined the newly established Republic’s primary values as pragmatism, the accommodation of competing interests, and the maintenance of order—a ‘regime which best allows time to keep its just preponderance’.88 And although the Third Republic instituted a representative democracy, and traced its ideological lineage back to 1789, it reinterpreted the Revolution in an essentially depoliticized way. A major factor in this conservative drift of the Republic after 1880 was its massive expansion 82  Frankel is one of the key figures in Catherine Clément’s superb novel on the Paris Commune, Aimons-nous les uns les autres (Paris: Seuil, 2014). 83  Gustave Geffroy, L’Enfermé (Paris, 1897), p. 243. 84  On the political thought of the Commune, see Charles Rihs, La Commune de Paris 1871: Sa structure et ses doctrines (Paris: Seuil, 1973). 85  Speech by Arthur Ranc, 29 March 1871, in Procès-verbaux de la Commune de 1871, vol. 1 (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1924), p. 42. 86  Jules Vallès, L’Insurgé (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), p. 257. 87  Robert Tombs, The Paris Commune, 1871 (London: Longman, 1999). 88  Emile Littré, De l’établissement de la Troisième République (Paris, 1880), p. x.

The Utopian Imagination  231 of the French colonial empire. At its height, between 1918 and 1939, the Empire covered more than 12 million square kilometres and had a population of nearly 70 million. Particularly in its early moments, there were some visionary aspects to French imperialism. In the nineteenth century, the growth of colonial settlements had been advocated by many French socialists and Saint-Simonians in the name of progressive ideals: Cabet thus welcomed French colonialism as evidence of the ‘conquest of the ignorant universe by humankind’.89 Under the influence of social Darwinism and the emerging discipline of anthropology in the later nineteenth century, republican universalism rapidly gave way to a racialized colonial im­agin­ ary, in which notions of heredity and European supremacy played a pivotal role. In 1884 Jules Ferry justified French colonialism in terms of ‘the right of superior races over inferior races’,90 while republican education minister Paul Bert portrayed the white race as the ‘most intelligent, the most hard-working, and the most courageous’. For their part, African, Arab, and Chinese native peoples were represented in colonial literature in depreciative terms; blacks in particular were widely viewed as fatalistic, infantile, vain, and lazy.91 In its consecration of a hierarchical and differentialist order, which distinguished between subjects and citizens, and which condoned systematic violence against native populations, the elites of the Third Republic thus turned their backs on the universalism of the 1789 Declaration, and the classical republican heritage of equality and fraternity;92 this was one of the early examples of the growing disjunction between the official institutions of the Republic and its more radical egalitarian and internationalist traditions. The flame of idealism was kept alive during this period by anarchists and revolutionary elements in the French socialist movement, and in the myth of the sudden overthrow of the capitalist system, the grand soir.93 The prospect of a radical transformation of European society seemed so distant by the late nineteenth century that the novelist Paul Adam located his communist utopia (inspired by  the principles of Fourier, Saint-Simon, Proudhon, and Cabet) on a faraway Malaysian island.94 The socialist leader Jean Jaurès alluded to the remoteness of this utopian horizon in the first issue of his paper L’Humanité in 1904, when he

89  Quoted in Raoul Girardet, L’idée coloniale en France de 1871 à 1962 (Paris: La Table ronde, 1972), p. 40. 90  Speech at National Assembly, 27 March 1884, in Discours et opinions de Jules Ferry, ed. Paul Robiquet, vol. 5 (Paris, 1897), p. 159. 91  Carole Reynaud Paligot, La République raciale 1860–1930 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2006), pp. 140 and 235. 92  See Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, La République impériale: Politique et racisme d’état (Paris: Fayard, 2009). 93  Maurice Tournier, ‘Le grand soir, un mythe de fin de siècle’, Mots 19 (1989), pp. 79–94. 94  Paul Adam, Lettres de Malaisie (Paris, 1898).

232  Sudhir Hazareesingh observed: ‘humanity does not yet exist, or barely exists’.95 Jaurès challenged the rise of European militarism by offering an alternative vision of a republican community bound by the ideals of international solidarity and peace. Inspired by the anti-colonial tradition of Rousseau and Raynal, Jaurès was also sharply critical of the Third Republic’s empire, not least because of its imposition and maintenance of French rule by force. Writing about the exactions of the French army in North Africa in March 1912, Jaurès thus deplored the fact that the avidity of colonial interests (and the short-sightedness of successive republican governments) had turned the image of France in the Arab world into one of a ‘purely destructive power’.96 In a parliamentary debate in the same year, Jaurès defended Islamic ­civil­iza­tion, which ‘had made such great contributions in the fields of philosophy, science, and art, and which is full of such promise’.97 The assassination of the socialist leader at the outbreak of the First World War symbolized the demise of this irenicism, paving the way for the emergence after 1920 of the most comprehensive and powerful articulation of modern French radical republican thinking: communism. The path of the Communist International, our path, is that of the struggle to empower the working class, and of the edification of socialism. Communism is not the stuff of chimeras, dreams, or utopias. It represents the happy lives of 180 million Soviet citizens, the happiness of an ardent youth; it will be our life too, and that of our children. It will be the life of our people, the lives of all peoples who will one day be freed from capitalist slavery.98

In these lyrical sentences, party leader Maurice Thorez summed up the distinctive features of the French communist dream. Like all utopias, it promised the achievement of felicity for humankind, in this instance through the revolutionary ideals of liberating workers from the shackles of capitalism, and constructing an egalitarian and fraternal society. This vision was powerfully disseminated through Thorez’s own autobiography, Fils du Peuple, one of the best-selling works of the mid-twentieth century. First published in 1937, and re-edited after the war, it outlined the promise of communism by narrating the rise through party ranks of a humble worker (Thorez was born in a poor mining community in the Pas-deCalais). What was celebrated through this communist militant’s life was the inspiring role of the writings of Marx and Engels, both as an instrument of ana­lysis of capitalist oppression, and a representation of the collective virtues of the proletariat: its pride, its heroism, its virility, its patriotism, and its sense of 95  Cited in Gilles Candar and Vincent Duclert, Jean Jaurès (Paris: Fayard, 2014), p. 285. 96  L’Humanité, 31 March 1912. 97  Quoted in Gilles Manceron, ‘La gauche et la colonisation’, in Histoire des gauches en France, eds. Jean-Jacques Becker and Gilles Candar, vol. 1 (Paris: La Découverte, 2004), p. 543. 98  Maurice Thorez, speech at Ivry Central Committee meeting of PCF, in L’Humanité, 20 May 1939.

The Utopian Imagination  233 solidarity. Communism, the ‘purest and noblest ideal of humanity’,99 was thus shown as a practical goal, preparing the liberation of man through effectively harnessing the promethean capacities of reason.100 There was an additional twist. The global advent of the communist Elysium was inextricably linked to the fate of the Soviet state created by Lenin and the Bolsheviks after the 1917 October Revolution. Hence the particular quality of twentieth-century communism, both genuine in its universalism but at the same time indefectibly attached to the Soviet state. This was one of the paradoxical keys to the enduring appeal of the communist doctrine in France: it retained an idyllic character despite becoming institutionalized in an existing political order. Thorez’s account of his first visit to the Soviet Union in 1925 was in this sense exemplary: he found a ‘new world’, inhabited by joyful workers and emancipated intellectuals; there were vast schools, magnificent laboratories, and a ‘real’ democracy.101 Such Icaresque representations were common in reports on Soviet life in French party publications. In the late 1940s, the Soviet Union was variously depicted in the regional communist press in France as a land ‘where deserts were fertilized’, ‘bread would soon be free’, ‘the aspirations of all workers had been realized’, ‘wheat grew to unimaginable heights’, and (a striking echo of Fourier’s regeneration of temperate lands) ‘cherries and strawberries were cultivated in northern territories’.102 Why communism exercised this extraordinary fascination in France was partly, as with earlier patterns of radical thinking, a matter of context. It is not fortuitous that, although it was conceived earlier, communism was born out of the First World War, and that its apogee in France between the 1930s and the 1960s coincided with one of the most troubled periods in the Republic’s modern history, during which the ‘official’ regime was mired in colonial conflicts, weakened by endemic instability, and undermined by its entrenched defence of bourgeois interests: there was thus an undeniably bracing quality to an alternative neo-republican ideology that promised des lendemains qui chantent.103 The progressive void created by the Third and Fourth Republic was in this sense filled by communism’s millenarian properties, all the more so that communism effectively capitalized upon earlier strands of radical republican thinking. The Enlightenment’s quest for an educated citizenry, and a common secular morality; the Revolution’s Rousseauist defence of popular sovereignty, and yearning for the regeneration of man; Fourier’s aspiration to eradicate poverty, and promote greater social harmony; the Saint-Simonians’ cult of perfectibility and the unleashing of industrial 99  Maurice Thorez, Fils du peuple (Paris: Editions sociales, 1949), p. 101. 100  Ibid., p. 241, 248. 101  Ibid., p. 50. 102  Cited in Jean Marie Goulemot, Pour l’amour de Staline: La face oubliée du communisme français (Paris: CNRS, 2009), pp. 85–6. 103  See Sophie Coeuré, La grande lueur à l’est: les français et l’Union Soviétique 1917–1939 (Paris: Seuil, 1999).

234  Sudhir Hazareesingh productivity; Cabet’s benign dictatorship, and his utilitarian conception of artistic and cultural life; the universal Republic’s ideals of anti-militarism, peace, and international harmony among peoples—these age-old radical ideals all found their place in French communist doctrine. Communism departed from the radical republican tradition in its Leninist insistence on the virtues of centralized party organization, which marked a clear departure from nineteenth-century radical political cultures. But the party also revived, in a barely amended form, the civic religiosity of nineteenth-century French utopianism in its cult of humanity, its Manichaean distinction between good and evil, and its sense of sacrifice and martyrdom (notably during the Resistance, when thousands of communists died fighting the German occupation). Shortly before his death in 1964, Thorez dreamt that he was conversing with Lenin: for com­mun­ists too, it seemed, there was a heaven.104 Although twentieth-century communism was doctrinally rigid, the visions of republican perfectibility it inspired were surprisingly elastic. The Soviet Union’s allure in France varied over time: in the early years of the regime, it was the social and cultural advances of Soviet society that were appealing. Anatole de Monzie thus described the Soviet system as a ‘social Eden’, while the surrealists found an echo of their radically subversive conception of the artistic imagination in the Trotskyite ideal of the permanent revolution.105 In the 1930s, in contrast, the Soviet Union was celebrated for its imposition of a centralized order, symbolized by Stalin’s Five-Year Plans; even the brutal collectivization of countryside was welcomed in some Western circles as the ‘accomplishment of a positive utopia’.106 At the height of the Cold War, as French progressives challenged American military and economic hegemony, the Soviet state appeared as a bulwark against Western imperialism.107 And when the Soviet star began to fade in the 1960s, more exotic ideological experiments captivated the imagination of Parisian intellectuals in its place: notably the Cuban Revolution, with its heroic figures (Fidel Castro, Che Guevara) and its tropical sensualism (‘the Cubans are a rhythmic people, and hatred does not resist rhythm’108 declared the journalist Jean Daniel in 1963); states emerging from decolonization, notably in Algeria, where thousands of intellectual activists travelled after 1962 to help construct a new society; and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which drew support by dint of its mysteriousness, its austere egalitarianism, as well as its puritanism.109 104 Annette Wieviorka, Maurice et Jeannette: Biographie du couple Thorez (Paris: Fayard, 2010), p. 647. 105 Anatole de Monzie, Du Kremlin au Luxembourg (Paris: A.  Delpeuch, 1924), p. 125; Roger Vailland, Drôle de jeu (Paris: Corrêa, 1945), p. 15. 106  François Furet, Le passé d’une illusion: Essai sur l’idée communiste au XXe siècle (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1995), p. 243. 107  François Hourmant, Au pays de l’avenir radieux. Voyages des intellectuels français en URSS, à Cuba et en Chine populaire (Paris: Aubier, 2000). 108  Jean Daniel, ‘Avec Castro à l’heure du crime’, L’Express, 28 November 1963. 109  See Richard Wolin, The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution and the Legacy of the 1960s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

The Utopian Imagination  235 The potency of French communist doctrine thus rested on its capacity seamlessly to absorb the radical republican heritage into its own tradition and redeploy it to its own ends. From Enlightenment philosophes such as Diderot and Rousseau through the great Jacobin heroes of the 1790s (notably Robespierre and Saint-Just), all the way to the Paris Communards of 1871 and the memory of the martyr Jaurès, whose newspaper l’Humanité became the communist daily newspaper: all found their rightful place in the communist pantheon. Thus, in the early 1950s the poet Louis Aragon argued that Victor Hugo’s commitment to peace and European internationalism precisely foreshadowed ongoing French communist campaigns against Western imperialism.110 The most fruitful of these ideological reappropriations was the French Revolution. The Russian revolutionaries were themselves obsessed with the analogies between 1789 and 1917, and as from the 1920s the equation of Bolshevism with the ‘Jacobin’ phase of the Revolution became a common theme in French thought (notably among progressive historians such as Albert Mathiez and Albert Soboul). Romain Rolland returned from a visit in 1935 to affirm that the Soviet Union had picked up the torch of the French Revolution, and was carrying out its programme of human renewal.111

5.  The Utopian Imagination The strength, variety, and endurance of these ideals of republican perfectibility, from the Enlightenment to the communists, bring home a fundamental dimension of the tradition outlined in this chapter: its prodigious sense of imagination. French radical republicanism was in this respect a child of Rousseau, and of his burning revolt against human injustice, as well as his ambition to remove the obstacles which might prevent humanity from realizing its true nature. His oeuvre shaped this tradition and reflected its richness, both synchronically and diachronically, and its capacity to inspire hope in successive generations of men and women—especially in the darker moments in their nation’s history. Evoking his youth in France prior to the First World War, the surrealist writer André Breton credited Rousseau’s writings with keeping him away from the demons of nationalism, and instilling in him the values of humanism and international solidarity.112 Likewise, in the entry of 13 August 1944 in his wartime diary, the writer and future academician Jean Guéhenno noted: ‘In his annotation of the Social Contract, Voltaire said of Rousseau: “he was mad enough to believe that his books would cause revolutions”. Indeed so; and this is precisely why we are 110 Louis Aragon, ‘Le Parti Communiste Français et Victor Hugo’, La Pensée, May–August 1952, pp. 37–51. 111  Romain Rolland, Voyage à Moscou, juin-juillet 1935 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1992). 112  André Breton, Entretiens (1913–1952) avec André Parinaud in Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), pp. 436–7.

236  Sudhir Hazareesingh attracted to Rousseau.’113 The works of Jean-Jacques also captured the conflicting aspirations of French radical republican thinking—between the head and the heart, materialism and spirituality, freedom from economic need and intellectual liberation, personal self-realization and the integration of the individual into a greater whole. Abstract in its design, systematic in its form, and wide ranging in its goals, this radical republican sensibility has been one of France’s enduring contributions to modern political thought—and undoubtedly its most controversial. From Rousseau’s citizen who is ‘forced to be free’ to the Revolution’s ambition to regenerate humankind, all the way through to the communist vision of the ‘new man’, these schemes to effect a transformation in human nature came to be viewed as one of the most dangerous features of French radical republicanism. Echoing Edmund Burke’s denunciation of the French Revolution’s ‘new conquering empire of light and reason’, Tocqueville noted the ‘extraordinary and terrible’ influence of literary men in the eighteenth century, and lamented their disposition to ‘indulge unreservedly in ethereal and general theories’ in order to ‘rebuild society on some wholly new plan’.114 Starting from a more philosophical premise, Michel Foucault’s questioning of Enlightenment thought arrived at no less a melancholic conclusion: the liberating sweep of ‘Reason’ effectively cleared the way for new, and more perverse, forms of social and political oppression.115 To complete this sinister reputation, French radical thinking was also frequently portrayed as a prefiguration of the homogenizing despotism of ‘totalitarianism’—defined by the philosopher Claude Lefort as the temptation to fill the void of modern democratic politics with the imaginary self-identity of the people.116 How far the beliefs in human perfectibility described in this chapter contributed to these illiberal forms of thought and practice is an important question, a full engagement with which is beyond the scope of this conclusion. But radical republicanism has little to be defensive about with respect to the question of liberty— on the contrary. The men and women who were part of this tradition were always resolute in their advocacy of the cause of public freedoms, whether it was the defence of the heritage of the French Revolution, the campaign for political rights, or the promotion of the social and political interests of the working class. Radical republicans also were generally first in line when it came to standing up to the real enemies of republican freedom, whether they were monarchical tyrants, religious obscurantists, and authoritarian nationalists in the nineteenth century, or fascist agitators, Nazi occupiers, and white settler colonialists in the twentieth: the 113  Jean Guéhenno, Journal des années noires 1940–1944 (Paris: Gallimard, 2014), p. 454. 114  Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution (London, 1856), p. 172. 115 On Foucault’s critique of Enlightenment rationality, see Lois McNay, Foucault: A Critical Introduction (Oxford: Polity Press, 1994), pp. 26–31. 116 On Lefort’s political thought, see more generally Bernard Flynn, The Philosophy of Claude Lefort: Interpreting the Political (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2006).

The Utopian Imagination  237 figure who best symbolized this bracing spirit of republican internationalism was Franz Fanon, the ‘black Rousseau’ who also carried forward Toussaint Louverture’s ideals of a society governed by fraternity and racial equal­ity.117 And even when they were not engaging in political action, French radical republicans succeeded in keeping open a constant horizon of possibility—an ideal of citizenship which went beyond the individualistic limits of Cartesian reason, embracing a vision of Frenchness which was collective, generous, and outward-looking. If there is a common theme that emerges in the vast memoir literature produced by ex-communists in France, it is that Communism offered its intellectual adherents a way of experiencing ‘a real sense of fraternity’.118 Ultimately, the real strength of French radical republicanism can be seen in its enduring capacity to shape and reinforce wider modes of French thought: a contempt for materialism and economic liberalism; a penchant for defining the good life around metaphysical ideals; a thirst for novelty, and for rejecting conventional patterns of reasoning; a rejection of nationalism, and a capacity for embracing universalistic horizons; and a belief that resistance to oppression is an integral component of what it means to be human. Rousseau’s ideal of humanity as a form of rural democratic sociability was also a powerful influence on Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, one of the seminal works in modern social theory, which paved the way for the revival of the French republican tradition of social criticism during the second half of the twentieth century, as exemplified by such figures as Althusser, Derrida, Bourdieu, and Badiou. And even though it has been challenged by the rising tide of pessimism in France in the new millennium, this heritage of intellectual creativity and resistance is still very much part of the imagination of the Left in France. Evoking the distinct ‘republican horizon’ of contemporary French democratic culture, the historian Mona Ozouf described it as ‘forever carrying the hope that we are not condemned to accept the social order as it is’.119

117  On this theme, see Aimé Césaire, Toussaint Louverture: La Révolution francaise et le problème colonial (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1981). 118  Citation by Paul Noirot, quoted in Sudhir Hazareesingh, Intellectuals and the French Communist Party: Disillusion and Decline (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 181. 119 Mona Ozouf, ‘L’idée républicaine et l’interprétation du passé national’, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 53, no. 6 (1998), p. 1087.

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1.  From Neo-Republicanism to Critical Republicanism Dorothea Gädeke Allen, Amy. ‘Domination in Global Politics: A Critique of Pettit’s Neo-Republican Model’, in Domination and Global Political Justice: Conceptual, Historical and Institutional Perspectives, eds. Barbara Buckinx, Jonathan Trejo-Mathys, and Timothy Waligore (New York: Routledge, 2015), pp. 111–30.

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Bibliography  259 Les 31 séances officielles de Commune de Paris (Paris: Revue de France, 1871). Loewenstein, Karl. Political Power and the Governmental Process (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1965). Manin, Bernard. ‘Checks, Balances and Boundaries: The Separation of Powers in the Constitutional Debate of 1787’, in The Invention of the Modern Republic, ed. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 27–62. Manin, Bernard. The Principles of Representative Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Marat, Jean-Paul. The Chains of Slavery: A Work wherein the Clandestine and Villainous Attempts of Princes to Ruin Liberty are Pointed out, and the Dreadful Scenes of Despotism Disclosed . . . (London: 1774). Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. Marx Engels Werke (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1956–68) (henceforth MEW). Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. Marx Engels Gesamtausgabe (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1975–98; Akademie Verlag: 1998–) (henceforth MEGA②). Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. Marx Engels Collected Works (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975–2005) (henceforth MECW). Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. ‘Vorwort zum Manifest’, MEW, volume 18; MECW, volume 23. Marx, Karl. Zur Kritik des Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie, MEW, volume 1; MECW, ­volume 3. Marx, Karl. ‘Der Bürgerwehrgesetzentwurf ’, MEW, volume 5; MECW, volume 7. Marx, Karl. ‘Die Klassenkämpfe in Frankreich’, MEW, volume 7; MECW, volume. 10. Marx, Karl. ‘The Constitution of the French Republic Adopted November 4, 1848’, MEW, volume 7; MECW, volume 10. Marx, Karl. Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte, MEW, volume 8; MECW, volume 11. Marx, Karl. ‘The Chartists’, MEW, volume 8; MECW, volume 11. Marx, Karl. ‘Meeting of the General Council April 25 1871’, MEGA②, volume I.22. Marx, Karl. Civil War in France, MEW, volume 17; MECW, volume 22. Marx, Karl. Civil War in France (First Draft), MEW, volume 17; MECW, volume 22. Marx, Karl. Civil War in France (Second Draft), MEW, volume 17; MECW, volume 22. Marx, Karl. Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 12 April and 17 April 1871, MEW, volume 33; MECW, volume 44. Marx, Karl. Marx to Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis, 22 February 1881, MEW, volume 35; MECW, volume 46. Marx, Karl. Notebook on the Paris Commune: Press Excerpts and Notes, ed. Hal Draper (Berkeley, CA: Independent Socialist Press, 1971). McCormick, John P. Machiavellian Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Mollenhauer, Daniel. Auf der Suche nach der ‘wahren Republik’: Die französischen ‘radicaux’ in der frühen Dritten Republik (1870–1890) (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1997). Morris, William. ‘The Pilgrims of Hope’, The Commonweal, 2, no. 17 (8 May 1886). Müller, Christoph. Das imperative und freie Mandat: Überlegungen zur Lehre von der Repräsentation des Volkes (Leiden: A. W. Sijthoff, 1966). Nippell, Wilfried. ‘Saving the Constitution: The European Discourse on Dictatorship’, in In the Footsteps of Herodotus: Towards European Political Thought, eds. Janet Coleman and Paschalis M. Kitromilides (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 2012), pp. 29–49.

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Bibliography  261 Wootton, David. ‘Liberty, Metaphor, and Mechanism: “Checks and Balances” and the Origins of Modern Constitutionalism’, in Liberty and American Experience in the  Eighteenth Century, ed. David Womersley (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2006), pp. 209–74. Ypi, Lea. ‘Democratic Dictatorship: Political Legitimacy in Marxist Perspective’, European Journal of Philosophy (forthcoming). Zaidman, Pierre-Henri. Le mandat impératif: De la Révolution française à la Commune de Paris (Paris: Les Editions Libertaires, 2008).

9.  The Intellectual Origins of Turkish Radical Republicanism Banu Turnaoğlu Abdurrahman Şeref. ‘Yeni Osmanlılar ve Hürriyet’, Sabah, 23 April 1918. Ahmet Mithad Efendi. ‘İbret’e Teşekkür’, Basiret, 20 June 1872. Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal. Atatürk’ün Kamutayı Açış Nutukları (Ankara: Ulus Basımevi, 1938). Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal. Atatürk’ün Söylev ve Demeçleri, volume 1 (Ankara: Türk İnkılap Tarihi Enstitüsü Yayınları, 1981). Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal. Atatürk’ün Resmi Yayınlara Girmemiş Söylev, Demeç, Yazışma ve Söyleşileri, ed. S. Borak (Istanbul: Kaynak Yayınları, 1997), pp. 181–3. Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal. Atatürk’ün Okuduğu Kitaplar, eds. Bekir Koç and Haldun Eroğlu, volume 7 (Ankara: Anıtkabir Yayınları, 2001). Bilgegil, Kaya. Yakın Çağ Türk Kültür ve Edebiyat Üzerinde Araştırmalar I, Yeni Osmanlılar (Ankara: Baylan Matbaası, 1976). ‘Daily News Gazetesi’nde Münderiç Bir Mektubun Suret-i Tercümesidir’ (A Translation of a Letter published in Daily News), Hakayik-i Vakayi, no. 21, 9 February 1871. Dumont, Paul. ‘Osmanlı Masonluğu ve Tanzimat Döneminde “Fransız Düşünceleri” ’, in Osmanlıcılık, Ulusçu Akımlar ve Masonluk, trans. Ali Berktay (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 1999). Dumont, Paul. ‘Freemasonry in Turkey: A By-Product of Western Penetration’, European Review 13, no. 3 (2005), pp. 481–93. Ebuzziya Tevfik. ‘Yeni Osmanlılar’, Yeni Tasvir-i Efkâr, 7 June 1909. Ebuzziya Tevfik. ‘Yeni Osmanlılar’, Yeni Tasvir-i Efkâr, 26 September 1909. Ebuzziya Tevfik. Yeni Osmanlılar, ed. Ş. Kutlu (Istanbul: Pegasus Yayınları, 2006 [1909]). Hanioğlu, Mehmet Şükrü. Preparation for a Revolution: The Young Turks, 1902–1908 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Kuntay, Mithat Cemal. Namık Kemal, volume 1 (Istanbul: Türkiye İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 2010). Kurdakul, Necdet. Tanzimat Dönemi Basınında Siyasal ve Anayasal Fikir Hareketleri (Ankara: T. C. Kültür Bakanlığı, 2000). Mardin, Şerif. The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962). Marx, Karl. ‘Letter from Karl Marx to the Daily News’, 16 January 1871, Marx Engels Collected Works (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1986), volume 22, pp. 274–6. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. ‘To the Editor of the Times’, 22 March 1871, MECW, volume 22. Mehmed. ‘Arapça Münderecâtı’, İttihad, no. 1, 15 May 1869. Mehmed. ‘Îrâde-i Millet’, İttihad, no. 1, 15 May 1869. Mehmed. ‘Untitled’, İttihad, no. 1, 15 May 1869. Mehmed. ‘Usûl-i Meşveret’, İttihad, no. 1, 15 May 1869. Mehmed. ‘Matbuat-ı Efkâr-ı Umumiyenin Galeyanı Mizanundandır’, İnkılâb, no. 1, 28 April 1870.

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Index Assembly, assemblies (citizens’)  7–9, 16, 81–84, 86, 87, 90, 91, 93, 94, 97–99 Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal  197, 200, 213, 214 Basic income  13 Blanc, Louis  127, 128, 131, 139, 140, 144, 223, 224, 230 Buonarotti, Philippe/Filippo  118, 120, 128, 129–137, 140–142, 224 Cabet, Etienne  224, 225, 226, 231 Capital, capitalism, capitalist  3, 10, 12, 13, 17, 36, 151, 152, 154, 160, 162, 168, 173, 174, 191, 210, 211, 220, 229, 232 Cavaignac, Godefroy  4, 16, 17, 142–146, 222 Citizen, Citizens, Citizenry  1, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 14, 15, 16, 18, 33, 37, 42, 43, 47–52, 54, 56–60, 62, 63, 68–75, 77, 78, 81–99, 104, 109, 114, 119, 120, 129, 134, 138, 140, 142, 151–153, 155, 157, 158, 160, 161, 164, 165, 167–169, 173, 177, 179, 181, 186, 187, 189–192, 202, 203, 208, 212, 214, 217, 218, 220–222, 224–227, 229, 231–233, 236, 237 Civic militia, civic military  15, 70, 75, 187–190 Civic virtue(s)  50, 54, 149, 151–153, 155, 157, 169, 170 Colonialism, colonize, colonies, colonial, colonialists  53, 64, 215, 231, 232, 233, 236, 237 Critical republicanism  14, 34, 35, 44, 45 Constitution, constitutional  6–8, 12, 14–18, 25, 40–42, 56, 67–71, 73, 78–80, 81, 82, 91, 98, 104, 106, 107, 114, 115, 127, 134, 135, 142, 144, 154, 171, 175, 177, 178, 182–186, 199, 203, 217, 218, 222, 226, 227 Democracy, democratic, direct democracy  1–4, 7–13, 15, 16, 18, 23, 26, 29, 31, 36–39, 40–46, 52, 54, 56, 67, 79, 81–99, 103, 114–116, 136, 138, 139–142, 151, 154, 155, 164, 166, 170, 173–176, 178, 179, 181–188, 192–194, 228, 229, 236, 237 Domination  1, 2, 10, 11–15, 17, 23–41, 43–46, 54, 55, 60, 69, 103, 104, 113, 116, 117, 157, 159, 167, 170, 171, 173, 189, 203, 209 Structural, systemic  11–12, 30–36, 45 Douglass, Frederick  47, 49, 50, 52–64

Emancipation  14, 15, 45, 47, 49, 56, 64, 149, 152, 159, 169, 170, 173, 174, 187, 219, 223 English Civil War  56, 62–64, 74, 105 Equality  1, 3–5, 9, 11, 12, 14, 16, 17, 18, 50, 51, 53, 54, 64, 83, 85, 86, 88–90, 93–95, 98, 99, 118–120, 129, 130, 132, 134, 135, 142, 146, 154, 155, 164, 197, 201, 206, 208, 212, 213, 217, 218, 221–225, 231, 237 Federalists, Anti-Federalists  2, 18, 185, 186 Feminism, feminists  219, 223 Fourier, Charles  219–221, 231 Fraternity  4, 5, 18, 118, 119, 125, 129, 137, 138, 142, 155, 163, 165, 197, 199, 201, 206, 208, 209, 213, 218, 226–228, 231, 237 Freedom  4–7, 11–14, 23, 24, 25, 27, 29, 37, 38, 43, 47–59, 62–64, 72, 86, 89, 103, 104, 105–107, 109, 112–117, 120, 125, 126, 127, 137, 138, 141, 147, 156, 159, 169, 180, 181, 201, 202, 204–206, 208, 209, 212, 215, 223, 225, 236 General will  6, 7, 85, 124, 135, 137, 207, 214, 217, 218 Habermas, Jürgen  28, 29, 42, 43 Interference  11–13, 25–27, 30, 31–33, 37, 48, 52, 103, 108, 149, 202 Jacobin(s), Jacobinism  119, 125, 129, 132, 134, 138, 177, 178, 183, 205, 218, 222, 229, 235 Kant, Kantian  40–44, 45, 227, 229 Laws  6–8, 12, 42, 51, 53, 56, 70–72, 75, 76, 85, 86, 89, 91, 97, 105, 108–111, 133, 134, 153, 202, 203, 206, 207, 220 Legitimacy, Legitimate  3, 6, 51, 56, 85, 92, 97, 107, 115, 117, 125, 127, 141, 145, 175, 204, 213, 222 Legislation, Legislator, Legislature  15, 68, 69, 82, 84, 128, 160, 181, 225 Leveller(s)  105–108, 114, 117 Liberty  1–3, 5, 10–12, 17, 18, 23, 26, 29, 31, 47, 48–51, 53, 59, 62, 64, 67, 71, 72, 75, 76, 85, 103, 107–109, 118, 119, 122–126, 129, 133–135, 137, 141, 142, 145, 149, 150, 152–158, 165, 170, 173, 178, 181, 186, 189, 197, 201–203, 206, 213, 215, 236

268 Index Locke, John, Lockean  7, 106–108, 114 Louverture, Toussaint  218, 226, 237 Machiavelli, Machiavellian  1, 9, 10, 15, 23, 48, 54, 69–79, 84, 86, 114, 150, 153, 173, 174, 189, 193 Market(s)  12, 13, 106, 162–164, 168 Marx, Marxism, Marxist  1, 12, 17, 18, 172–193, 210–211, 221, 232 Mehmed, Sağır Ahmed Beyzade  199, 200, 201, 203–209, 213 McNeill, George E.  11, 150, 154, 156, 158, 159 Neo-republicanism  3, 9, 12, 14, 15, 23–25, 32, 36, 44, 46, 49, 50, 79, 103, 104, 111, 114, 149, 152, 153, 233 Non-domination  2, 10, 13, 16, 18, 25, 26, 55, 57, 62, 104, 112 Nuri, Menâpirzâde  199–203, 209, 211–213 Paris Commune  175, 177, 180, 182, 187–189, 191–193, 209, 210, 229, 230 Pettit, Philip  2, 13, 26–31, 35–46, 48, 82, 91, 103, 104, 111, 112, 114–116, 149, 153 Pocock, J.G.A.  150, 151, 189 Powderly, Terence  154, 159–164, 166, 170 Popular sovereignty  1–4, 6–8, 10, 12, 13, 15, 16, 18, 48, 49, 51, 81, 83–85, 87, 91, 92, 95, 97, 98, 99, 119, 124, 137, 140, 181, 201, 204, 213, 215, 233 ‘The people’  1–10, 15, 39, 43, 47, 48, 50, 51, 52, 63, 67, 68, 70–72, 74–79, 81, 82, 84–86, 92–94, 97, 105–107, 114–116, 124–127, 130, 133, 135, 137, 152, 159, 160, 161, 181, 183–186, 188, 189, 192, 193, 203–205, 207, 212, 214, 218, 228, 230, 236 Pyat, Félix  178, 183, 229 Race, racism, racial, racist  33, 34, 36, 53, 57, 61, 62, 64, 153, 154, 161, 164, 169, 171 Republic, republicanism  1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 11, 14, 15, 17, 18, 26, 31, 47, 48, 51, 52, 54, 57, 60, 62–64, 68, 69, 71–79, 82–99, 103–105, 109, 111, 113, 115, 117, 118–120, 124, 126, 127–129, 131, 132, 134–138,

140–143, 145, 149–163, 165, 167–171, 173, 174, 177, 178, 183–190, 193, 201, 204, 207, 209, 212–214, 215–219, 221–237 Republic Florentine  67–79, 189 Ancient, Athens, Greek, Rome  47, 50, 52, 58, 67, 68, 70, 72, 79, 175, 192 Reşad, Kayazâde  199–201, 207–209, 212, 213 Revolution, revolutionaries  48–50, 54, 56, 59, 64, 125–133, 135, 137–140, 144, 145 American  48, 64, 126, 185–86 French  123, 130, 131, 139, 177, 178, 183, 184, 189, 217, 222, 224, 227, 235, 236 Haitian  42, 226 1848  174, 184, 190, 198, 219, 222, 224, 226–228 Rights  103–117, 201–203, 205, 212 of man  129, 138, 140, 218, 222 of women  222 Rousseau, Rousseauian  1, 5–9, 17, 18, 41–43, 83, 84, 85, 87, 97, 132, 134, 135, 177, 180, 181, 183, 189, 204, 214, 216–219, 224, 229, 230, 232, 235, 236, 237 Separation of powers  25, 41–44, 173, 182–186, 193 Short terms of office  70, 71, 76, 173, 176, 178, 179 Skinner, Quentin  2, 149, 150, 152 Slavery chattel  48, 49, 52, 53, 55, 57–64, 167, 168, 215, 216, 218, 226 wage  150, 167–169, 232 Social contract  3, 5–8, 84, 119, 180, 181, 216, 217, 235 Social conditions  29, 45, 49 Solidarity  1, 17, 107, 108, 113, 145, 149, 151, 153–157, 159, 161–165, 167, 169–171, 201, 227, 228, 232, 233, 235 Sortition  9, 10, 82, 87, 91, 192 Steward, Iris  154, 156, 158, 159, 160, 163, Sylvis, William H.  154, 157–159, 162–165 Tocqueville, Alexis de  152, 183, 185 Trade Union, trade unionist  9, 11, 14, 17, 90