Classical Republicanism and Ancient Republican Models

Home , Classical republicanism, Republicanism

Introduction: Classical Republicanism and Ancient Republican Models

Wyger Velema and Arthur Weststeijn

Since the middle of the last century, and particularly since the 1970s, the early modern republics have come to occupy a central place in modern historical scholarship. Whereas previously historiography had almost exclusively fo- cused on the early modern rise of the great territorial monarchies and on the growth of the centralised state and of political absolutism, after the second world war historians slowly started to realise that throughout the early modern period an alternative tradition of republican political thought and political institutions had not only survived, but had been of enormous importance. The experiences of Renaissance Florence and the Venetian Republic paved the way for the United Provinces of the Netherlands and the Swiss Eidgenossen- schaft, confederate republican powerhouses in an allegedly absolutist age; the short-lived experiment of the English Commonwealth in the 1650s cast a long shadow over the Atlantic that eventually brought about the Unites States of America; and at the end of the eighteenth century, Revolutionary France and its “Sister Republics” remodelled the republican tradition for a modern world. Within this longstanding tradition, the ancient past always was of paramount importance: classical idioms and examples offered republicans from Niccolò Machiavelli to George Washington an endless source of inspiration. Early modern republicanism was thus in large part identical with what has come to be known in scholarship as “classical republicanism.”

The Making of Classical Republicanism: Syntheses and Controversies

The discovery of the crucial role played by early modern republicanism was a slow and complex process. In its initial phases, it was greatly indebted to the work of Hans Baron on the political thought of the Florentine Renaissance. In his The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, first published in 1955, Baron attempted to demonstrate that the early fifteenth-century Florentines, find- ing themselves under threat from increasingly tyrannical neighbouring states, developed new ways of defending their republican freedom. With Leonardo Bruni as their most important theorist, they started deploying a political

2 Velema and Weststeijn

vocabulary that Baron termed “civic humanism.” This was, briefly put, a mode of thought inspired by ancient Roman republican liberty. It held that the participation of the virtuous citizen in the political process was essential to the existence and continued survival of political liberty.1 Although Baron’s thesis was regarded as highly controversial from the very moment it was first formulated, his pioneering work nonetheless greatly stimulated research into Renaissance republicanism and was instrumental in bringing about, among other things, a renewed interpretation of Machiavelli’s political thought.2 While the importance of “civic humanism” (soon also called “classical republicanism”) for the Italian Renaissance was thus being explored, the presence of similar forms of classically inspired early modern republican discourse was being discovered for England. Already in 1945, Zera Fink had drawn at- tention to the importance of ancient republicanism to the political thought of seventeenth-century England.3 It soon became clear that such patterns of thought survived far into the eighteenth century as well.4 The next phase in the remarkable development of scholarship on early modern republicanism came when historians such as Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood started point- ing out that the American revolutionaries of the late eighteenth century, until then usually regarded as unambiguously modern, were in fact deeply indebted to the early modern—and ultimately classical—republican tradition.5 Around the same time, the Italian historian Franco Venturi emphatically pointed to the importance of the European republican tradition for the genesis and development of the Enlightenment.6

1 Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance. Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1955). 2 For subsequent scholarly discussions of the “Baron Thesis” see e.g. Ronald Witt, “The Rebirth of the Concept of Republican Liberty in Italy,” in Renaissance Studies in Honor of Hans Bar- on, ed. A. Mohlo and J.A. Tedeschi (Dekalb, 1971), 173–199; James Hankins, ed., Renaissance Civic Humanism. Reappraisals and Reflections (Cambridge, 2000); David Wootton, “The True Origins of Republicanism: the Disciples of Baron and the Counter-example of Venturi,” in Il repubblicanesimo moderno: L’idea di repubblica nella riflessione storica di Franco Venturi, ed. Manuela Albertone (Naples, 2006), 225–257. 3 Zera S. Fink, The Classical Republicans. An Essay in the Recovery of a Pattern of Thought in Seventeenth-Century England (Evanston, 1945). 4 Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman. Studies in the Transmission, Development, and Circumstance of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles ii until the War with the Thirteen Colonies (Cambridge, ma., 1959). 5 Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, ma., 1967); Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, 1969). 6 Franco Venturi, Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1971).