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Republicanism ONIVI C C Re PUBLICANISM ANCIENT LESSONS FOR GLOBAL POLITICS EDIT ED BY GEOFFREY C. KELLOW AND NeVEN LeDDY ON CIVIC REPUBLICANISM Ancient Lessons for Global Politics EDITED BY GEOFFREY C. KELLOW AND NEVEN LEDDY On Civic Republicanism Ancient Lessons for Global Politics UNIVERSITY OF ToronTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London © University of Toronto Press 2016 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in the U.S.A. ISBN 978-1-4426-3749-8 Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable- based inks. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication On civic republicanism : ancient lessons for global politics / edited by Geoffrey C. Kellow and Neven Leddy. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-4426-3749-8 (bound) 1. Republicanism – History. I. Leddy, Neven, editor II.Kellow, Geoffrey C., 1970–, editor JC421.O5 2016 321.8'6 C2015-906926-2 CC-BY-NC-ND This work is published subject to a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivative License. For permission to publish commercial versions please contact University of Toronto Press. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario. an Ontario government agency un organisme du gouvernement de l’Ontario Funded by the Financé par le Government gouvernement of Canada du Canada Contents Preface: A Return to Classical Regimes Theory vii david edward tabachnick and toivo koivukoski Introduction 3 geoffrey c. kellow Part One: The Classical Heritage 1 The Problematic Character of Periclean Athens 15 timothy w. burns 2 Aristotle’s Topological Politics; Michael Sandel’s Civic Republicanism 41 david roochnik 3 Living Well and the Promise of Cosmopolitan Identity: Aristotle’s ergon and Contemporary Civic Republicanism 59 michael weinman 4 Groundwork for a Theory of Republican Character in a Democratic Age 72 wendell john coats, jr 5 Ancient, Modern, and Post-National Democracy: Deliberation and Citizenship between the Political and the Universal 89 crystal cordell paris vi Contents Part Two: The Enlightenment: An Accelerated Reception? 6 Machiavelli’s Art of Politics: A Critique of Humanism and the Lessons of Rome 119 jarrett a. carty 7 Transforming “Manliness” into Courage: Two Democratic Perspectives 136 ryan k. balot 8 Montesquieu on Corruption: Civic Purity in a Post-Republican World 157 robert sparling 9 The Fortitude of the Uncertain: Political Courage in David Hume’s Political Philosophy 185 marc hanvelt 10 Sparta, Modernity, Enlightenment 205 varad mehta 11 A Master of the Art of Persuasion: Rousseau’s Platonic Teaching on the Virtuous Legislator 226 brent edwin cusher 12 Civil Religion, Civic Republicanism, and Enlightenment in Rousseau 246 lee ward 13 Mary Wollstonecraft and Adam Smith on Gender, History, and the Civic Republican Tradition 269 neven leddy 14 Pinocchio and the Puppet of Plato’s Laws 282 jeffrey dirk wilson 15 Unity in Multiplicity: Agency and Aesthetics in German Republicanism 305 douglas moggach Contributors 331 Preface: A Return to Classical Regimes Theory david edward tabachnick and toivo koivukoski On the Plural Dimensions of Politeia In politics, the term regime (derived from the Latin regere, to rule), describes a particular form of government or administration. So, we speak in terms of “democratic regimes” and “authoritarian regimes” as well as the “Obama regime” and the “Bush regime.” Used this way, the word is merely a synonym. More often, the term regime is used in the pejora- tive to indicate the rule of an illegitimate leader or organization, as in the “Gadhafi regime” or a “terrorist regime.” Here, it is a rhetorical tool used to describe a rogue or dangerous state or group, internationally irresponsible and devoid of civic obligations. In contemporary political science, “regime” has been employed as a technical mode of analysis in international relations theory, where, instead of a state, government, or rogue element, a regime is any set of norms and values coupled with mechanisms of governance and reg- ulation.1 Through the lens of social science, “regimes theory” broadens the meaning of the word to pertain to a hodgepodge of international agencies, multilateral organizations, and regulatory bodies. In this treatment, there seems almost no limit to what qualifies as a regime: everything from a collective security pact such as NATO to the Con- vention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna. Unfortunately, if the goal of this theory is to help us better understand global politics, its overly broad definition of regime seems to stand in the way. By contrast, classical political science defines “regime” in a rather specific way.T he Greek politeia denotes a particular kind of polis or a constitutional classification of a political community. Aristotle, notably, viii Preface identifies six different kinds of political regimes. Monarchy, aristocracy, and polity2 are distinguished as “natural,” because they facilitate and reflect the common good of the polis, whereas tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy are “unnatural” or deviations because they facilitate and reflect selfishness.3 For Aristotle, a regime is characterized not only by the structure or composition of government (e.g., one monarch, a few aristocrats, or many democrats ruling), but also by the way public life is practised among the citizenry as a whole. Of course, what Aristotle presents are classical archetypes that may seem irrelevant to contemporary political communities. Today, the pri- mary geopolitical actors are large and diverse modern states as well as international institutions that would be quite alien to an ancient Greek political philosopher. Perhaps surprisingly, though, the classi- cal approach to regimes can still accommodate the changing character of contemporary geopolitics. While the six regimes mentioned above are indeed archetypes, Aristotle recognizes that there may be different forms as well as a variety of mixtures of each. In turn, we can still at least see how this ancient account of regimes provides a familiar if not also exact description of present-day states. After all, the distinction between tyranny and democracy has animated much of American for- eign policy for the last decade, if not the last half-century. For contemporary political theory, this regimes approach may be useful because it provides three interrelated criteria to help distinguish various kinds of political rule and behaviour: (1) the structure of lead- ership within the regime (i.e., rule of the one, the few, or the many); (2) the level of civic engagement in the political life of the regime; and (3) whether the regime is directed towards the common good or particular aims of a few. What distinguish the variety of regimes in the classical approach are these quantitative and qualitative criteria. Accordingly, we cannot limit analysis to a study of institutions, but must also consider the common animating spirit of a political com- munity or its civic culture that links the ways people think, including what they consider to be good, and the ways they organize themselves into associations towards those things “that are in the view of those involved good.”4 So, a tyranny can be identified not only by the criterion that it is ruled by one leader but also by the tyrant’s paranoid fear of enemies, the public’s indifference to civic works, and every individual’s inter- est in personal wealth and security. Similarly, an oligarchy is sustained as much by the impetuousness leadership of the rich few as it is by Preface ix the willingness of the poor to trade their political participation for bare material need. This link between the civic mindedness of the people and the politi- cal structures of a regime is perhaps most clearly on display in the clas- sical account of republics. A republic is a type of regime where political structure and political culture are, in a sense, merged. Politeia can be taken both generically to mean any distribution of power, any regime, as well as specifically to refer to a republican constitution. This would suggest that a republic realizes the core dimensions of political life, marshalling the powers of people en masse by most fully developing the public deliberation on common goods. This is after all, and at basis, what any politeia consists of – deliberation on shared purposes and the means of political organization to achieve them. A Polity in the People Within the classical tradition the closeness of the values of a political community and the kind of government that it takes on point to a dual sense of what a politeia, or regime, is, consisting of both these elements of political culture and institutional organization, with the character of a regime inscribed into its people, their education, and what they consider the worth of public life to be. Much as in the modern forms of civic republicanism, in ancient polit- ical theory the civic spirit of a people would be considered inseparable from discussions of governance. It would take a specific kind of person, for example, inculcated into a tight network of like-minded others to devote more than a month’s service to a regular shift of council work, even sleeping and eating in the company of fellow citizens nearby to the agora; or to gather at the ecclesiastica from sunup to sundown to dis- cuss the public life of one’s city, as were the customs in Athens under its direct democracy. In all the kinds of regimes the ancients describe there is a sense of a common animus – what the contemporary social theorist might call the political culture of an age and people – that links the ways people think, how they have learned, and the ways they organize themselves into associations. The ancient Greek political thinkers recognized the interrelation- ship between these levels of a regime as key to understanding pol- itics.
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