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SKINNER Workshop Paper 1 For discussion at the Political Theory Workshop, Stanford University, 9th October 2017 Republican Liberty and Early-modern Revolution Quentin Skinner Queen Mary University of London, [email protected] This paper, very much work-in-progress, offers a preliminary sketch of an early chapter in a book I am trying to write, the provisional title of which is The Fall of the Free State. My aim is to trace the origins, the development and the eventual discrediting within Anglophone political theory of the claim that it is possible to enjoy individual liberty if and only if you live as a citizen of a ‘free state’. I should add that, because I am sure it will take me a long time to publish this work, anyone who wishes in the meantime to make any use of these preliminary observations is most welcome to do so. The discrediting of the alleged link between the upholding of individual liberty and the maintenance of a specific form of government was one of the ideological achievements of classical liberalism, the origins of which are closely connected with the rise of utilitarian legal and political philosophy towards the end of the eighteenth century. The rival contention that it is possible to live as a free person only in a free state survived as a radical ideology in the aftermath of the French revolution, and a version of the argument subsequently became embedded in Marxist social philosophy. But the claim that there is no distinction between monarchy and tyranny, and thus that individual liberty can be respected only in republics, had by that time been effectively outlawed from the mainstream of Anglophone political thought, except of course in the early years of the American republic. The subsequent emergence of democratic regimes only served to underline the extent to which the liberal theory of freedom has no necessary connection with democracy. The eventual aim of my book will be to attempt a kind of reckoning. Has anything of value in our thinking about freedom and government been lost as a result of the discrediting of republicanism by liberalism? (By the way, my answer will be emphatically yes.) Before we can engage with this question, however, we need to understand the structure of the republican theory and how it originally rose to prominence in Anglophone political thought. This brings me to my present paper, which has two linked purposes. One is mainly conceptual. I shall first attempt to trace the emergence of the republican theory, and in doing so to lay out its distinctive claims about individual liberty. My other purpose is more historical. I want to show that, once we grasp the distinctive claims of the republican theory, we can begin to appreciate the extent to which its characteristic demands underlay and served to legitimize the first revolutionary movement in modern European history, the English revolution of the 1640s. 2 I: On the republican theory of liberty The republican theory first rose to prominence in Anglophone public debate in the disputes between crown and Parliament in England during the opening decades of the seventeenth century, the disputes that culminated in the abolition of the monarchy and the proclamation of a Free State in 1649. Among leading critics of the monarchy in this period, there was broad agreement about two elements in the idea of individual liberty. The writers I shall be examining accept that everyone is by nature free from subjection to positive law. But they also agree that, even under the rule of law, it remains possible to live as a liber homo, a free person. To retain this status, two conditions must be satisfied. One is that you should be able to exercise your rights and liberties without interference. While this is a necessary condition, however, it is never sufficient, for it is always possible to enjoy your liberties to the fullest degree without being a free person. If the continuation of your liberties depends on the will of anyone else, then you are not a free person but a slave, even though you may have complete de facto enjoyment of your liberties, and may therefore be able to act entirely as you choose. The second necessary condition of living as a free person under a system of positive law is thus that your capacity to exercise your rights and liberties should never be subject to anyone else’s will, must never be a matter of grace as opposed to right.1 I need to underline two features of this argument. One is that, for the writers with whom I am concerned, the fundamental question about individual liberty is never whether you are de facto free to pursue your chosen options without interference or constraint. This is because you may always be capable of acting freely without being a free person. The crucial question is whether you can count yourself a free person, that is, someone capable of pursuing their chosen ends without there being any possibility of arbitrary interference. To enjoy personal liberty, it is never sufficient that you are free to act merely because someone who possesses the power arbitrarily to interfere with your options with legal impunity has chosen not to exercise that power. It is always necessary that you should be independent of any such power, never dependent on the mere goodwill of anyone else. The other feature I need to underline is that it is not your awareness of living in a condition of dependence on the arbitrary will of someone else that serves to limit and undermine your liberty. It is the mere fact of being dependent, of which you may or may not be aware. If you are free to act solely because there is someone who has chosen not to hinder you, then you are not a free person but a slave, someone condemned to live in at least some domains of your life in a state of servitude. As soon as critics of the British monarchy began to argue along these lines, they were vehemently denounced by supporters of the crown. As the royalists promptly responded, what freedom can I possibly be said to lack if I have complete enjoyment of my rights and liberties? Thomas Hobbes’s sparring partner John Bramhall strongly 1 For expositions and defences of this view of freedom see Pettit 1997; Pettit 2012; Skinner 1998; Skinner 2002c; Skinner 2008b. For a related discussion see Tully 1999. 3 presses the point in his Serpent’s Salve of 1643. ‘If the Libertie of the Subject be from Grace, not from pactions or agreements, is it therefore the lesse? or the lesse to be regarded? what is freer then a gift?’2 The answer given by the writers with whom I am concerned is that, if you are living in dependence on the goodwill of someone else in any domain of your life, it will not be long before you come to recognize that this is your predicament, at which point your awareness will be bound to act as a bridle and a spur. As soon as you recognize that you are subject to the goodwill of a master, you will be bound to reflect that there are many things you cannot hope to say or do, and many other things you cannot forbear from saying or doing. You will find, in other words, that you are obliged to censor yourself for fear of what might happen -- and anything might happen -- if you were to speak or act in defiance of the master on whom you depend. The critics of the British monarchy liked to illustrate this argument by reference to the place of the bishops in the House of Lords. The right of the bishops to sit in Parliament was withdrawn at the outset of the civil war in 1642. The justification for this decision stemmed from the contention that the bishops had never been capable of acting as anything other than slavish and servile hirelings of the crown. As Richard Ward explains in The Vindication of the Parliament, ‘having their dependance upon the King’, they felt constrained to ‘side with him, in any thing, though it were adjudged by the Parliament to be destructive and hurtfull to the Kingdome.’3 The author of An Honest Broker agrees that, due to their ‘total dependances’ on the king, with his right of appointment and dismissal, the bishops were inevitably committed to ‘advancing the Court by enslaving the Countrey.’4 Both writers conclude that there can be no place for such dangerous servility in a free and sovereign assembly of the people. William de Bracton in the mid-thirteenth century had opened his De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae by drawing exactly this contrast between the liber homo or free person and the servus or slave, in consequence of which the distinction had become firmly embedded in English common law from an early stage.5 For the origins of this contrast, however, we need to go back to the law of Rome, and in particular to the rubric De statu hominis at the outset of Justinian’s Digest, from which Bracton’s analysis is derived.6 There we are told that slavery can be defined as ‘an institution of the ius gentium by which someone is, contrary to nature, made subject to the dominion of someone else’.7 This in turn is said to furnish a definition of civil liberty. If everyone in a civil association is either bond or free, then a civis or free subject must be someone who is not under the dominion of anyone else, but is sui iuris, capable of acting in their 2 Bramhall 1643, p.
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