REPUBLICANISM AND LIBERALISM

Anyone who sets out to study the history of republican thought will immediately be struck by the immense diversity of views to which the label “republican” has been attached. Indeed, among the major political ideologies, republicanism alone cuts across nearly all of the other categories that have been used to organize political thinking. Republicans have been democrats, aristocrats, and even monarchists; liberals and illiberals; imperialists and isolationists; slaveholders and abolitionists; feudalists, capitalists, and socialists; and ancients, medievals, and moderns. They have pursued participatory and representative, bellicose and pacific, and virtue-centered and interest-centered policies. They have been among the staunchest defenders of the status quo and among the most forceful proponents of revolutionary change. Strictly speaking, of course, it is anachronistic to use the word republican outside of the Roman and neo-Roman contexts in which it is etymologically rooted, and so there will always be disagreement about whether and how it should be applied to other cases. Furthermore, it is difficult to define the boundaries of an ideological tradition by appealing to the beliefs and practices with which it has been associated, because beliefs and practices are only loosely constrained by the ideological commitments on which they are said to rest.