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The Atlantic Republican Tradition: the Republic of the Seven Provinces

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The Atlantic Republican Tradition: the Republic of the Seven Provinces The Atlantic Republican Tradition: The Republic of the Seven Provinces J. G. A. Pocock Johns Hopkins University A CONFERENCE WAS HELD AT the Clark Memorial Library in April 2009, under the title “The Limits of the Atlantic Republican Tradition.” This inescapably carried some normative implica- tions. It was assumed that participants in general agreed on what this “tradition” was and aimed to look at its “limits,” though it was less clear whether the aim was to fix them, to look beyond them, or to dissolve them. There further hung over the conference the implication—though this was affirmed by nobody—that there existed an entity, alternatively a concept, of “republican- ism,” which might be better defined, whether as a theoretical category or as a historical phe- nomenon, in some ways than in others. The conference avoided sterile disputations, but—as is common and indeed healthy on such occasions—the subject with which it had dealt was rather discovered in retrospect than agreed upon in advance. This article offers such a retrospective view and argues that the conference dealt on the whole with two historical narratives, different to the point where they might almost invite the metaphor of the elephant and the whale; but that these organisms (to continue the metaphor) shared a common evolutionary history with some comparable outcomes. “The Atlantic republican tradition” continued—perhaps in consequence of the impulse to set “limits” to it—to be defined much as it was in The Machiavellian Moment, published in 1975 with the subtitle “Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition.”1 The writer of this essay, as author of the original title, reports that he has in some ways re-narrated 1 J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975; reissued with a new afterword, 2003). Pocock, J. G. A. “The Atlantic Republican Tradition: The Republic of the Seven Provinces.” Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts 2, no. 1 (December 15, 2010): http://rofl.stanford.edu/node/72. 2 REPUBLICS OF LETTERS the history it offered in a more recent study entitled The First Decline and Fall,2 elements of which are taken up and employed here. Common to both volumes, however, is the thesis whose “limits” were to be explored at the conference: how certain narratives about Roman history, en- tailing an ideal of “republican”3 government and the historic causes of its transformation into a principate, were formulated (not originated) in Florence during the last century of its “republi- can” history; taken up in England during its brief experiment with “republican” government and elaborated into a history of west European landed property and free citizenship; restated in Eng- land and Scotland after the revolution of 1688 as a critique of the military-fiscal state and com- mercial civil society that “Britain” now became; and imported into the English colonies beyond the Atlantic, where they helped to engender a debate between “ancient” and “modern” concepts of liberty important in the foundation and history of the American federal republic. This narra- tive—which by the way supplied the word “Atlantic” with such meaning as it bears in the title of The Machiavellian Moment—has been and still is debated in American historiography. The con- ference in 2009, however, did not continue that debate so much as set up and explore another narrative of republican history, which sets “limits” to the “Atlantic tradition” simply by present- ing itself as the latter’s other. This alternative “republican” tradition (or “republicanism”)—elephant, it might be sug- gested, to the Atlantic whale—takes shape on the borders of the Hohenstaufen-to-Hapsburg medieval “empire,” as certain cities and groups of cities—Swiss, Hanseatic, and especially Dutch—claim sovereignty for themselves within or without empire. These cities encounter one of the classical problems of the city state, ancient and medieval: that of the relations between the “few” and the “many” within the citizen body; and their lay and clerical elites, steeped in the ob- sessive neoclassicism of Latin Europe, are well aware that they share a history with Greco- Roman antiquity and draw upon it. It is of far-reaching importance in the history of the Euro- pean vocabulary that the majority of these independent cities are ruled by merchant patriciates, and that these denote their sovereignty, liberty, and social power by using a set of synonyms of the French bourgeoisie. This is the source of the pre-Marxist, Marxist and post-Marxist usage that denotes mercantile, capitalist and industrial social practices as “bourgeois,” with the implication that the triumph of the economic in defining the polity is the work of the freemen of corporate towns, a thesis a little difficult to present in English where there is no collective noun equivalent to bourgeoisie and the growth of capitalism is not originally the work of such a class’s rise to power. This has to do with the problematic of “the Atlantic republican tradition”; but it was not clear, at the Clark Library conference, just how far there remained a persistent desire to repre- sent “republicanism,” “liberty,” and “enlightenment” as “bourgeois” in origin, thus setting “lim- its” to the “Atlantic” alternative. Of these leagues of post- or ex-imperial cities and their regimes a unique place belongs to that which became the quasi-federated republic of the Protestant Netherlands. Not a city-state but a confederacy of cities aware of their municipal and imperial origins, it had perhaps less need of the image of the Roman republic than we shall see was the case with Florence. More 2 J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 3, The First Decline and Fall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 3 Recent literature has raised two questions respecting the changes of meaning from res publica denoting a governed society of any kind, to denote (a) the Roman regime that preceded the establishment of the Augustan principate, (b) a form of government specifically opposed to monarchy. These changes should be historically examined, but are presupposed in the present article. See James Hankins, ed., Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflections (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). POCOCK | THE ATLANTIC REPUBLICAN TRADITION 3 immediately to the history of republics in Europe, it grew, through its alliance with the Princes of Orange, into a powerful military actor in the wars of religion and the growth of a European states system; and through the mercantile energies of Holland and Zeeland, into a maritime empire on an oceanic scale, with slave-worked colonies in the Caribbean, a small but momentous colony of settlement at the Cape of Good Hope, and an empire in Indonesia equal in extent to that the British acquired in India. None of these seems to have entered into dialogue and dialectic with the metropolis as did the English and Iberian colonies in America; the political thought of the Dutch Republic centered on its European self. In the history of “republicanism”—assuming there to be such an entity—the primary characteristic of its theory and discourse is that these are in the full sense of the word bourgeois: they assume the city to be a mercantile corporation and citizenship to be an engagement in trade.4 For a “golden age” coinciding roughly with the seven- teenth century C.E., the provinces forming the Union of Utrecht developed an urban consumer culture of extraordinary self-confidence, within which, however, they debated often bitterly the distribution of sovereignty among themselves and between themselves and the unique institu- tion of the stadholderate identified with the Princes of Orange. They also debated Calvinist the- ology and culture in ways that became involved with the former debate. The presence at the Clark Library conference of a group of scholars skilled in Dutch intellectual history caused it to become the principal alternative presented to “the Atlantic republican tradition” in the history of republican thought. At this point there arose the problem of the elephant and the whale. The two “traditions”— if that word is to be used—differed in context and ideology, if not always in vocabulary and con- tent. In the Dutch (as in the Swiss and Hanseatic) “traditions,” there was to be heard the speech of actual republics endeavoring to explain themselves to themselves and to others; whereas in the “Atlantic tradition,” the republic was increasingly—until the American Articles of Confed- eration—a concept and historical construct, employed to criticize and ultimately reorder the structures of the early modern state. It followed that concepts of property, liberty, commerce, and arms were very differently deployed in the two (if there were not more than two) cases. The Clark Library conference successfully avoided the trap of setting up a sterile competition be- tween incommensurables; but there remained the question of whether there could be found a history in which the two “traditions” diverged from shared positions and contexts. It seems possible to establish such a scenario, part historiographical and part historical. Leonardo Bruni, writing the first book of his History of the Florentine People in the early years of the fifteenth century, articulates a major theme of European historiography.5 With the expulsion of the kings, he says, the Roman people gave themselves liberty, and there followed the aston- ishing explosion of human energy that became known as virtus. This energy took a conquering form, and Roman liberty was the cause of its empire over others. Bruni, a naturalized Florentine from Arezzo, was not sure this had been beneficial; Etruscan culture had maintained many free cities and alliances, and it might have been better if these had continued to practice their several liberties, rather than the world’s becoming subject to the single virtus of Rome.
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