In many histories of political thought modernity appears as the inevitable triumph of liberal ideas. However, since the 1950s the academic discourse has also continuously been engaged with republican ideas and themes in various fields. The common core of the different positions usually associated with this republican revival in political and legal philosophy, in history and political science, consists in rejecting the central tenets of liberal political thought and denying their exclusive importance for modern politics. Motivated by a profound dissatisfaction with contemporary politics in the Western world the republican agenda aims to thoroughly develop a strong normative alternative to liberalism. Liberalism, in this view, is mainly identified with a certain type of possessive individualism, secured via a system of basic rights. Most of the contributors to the republican revival of the last fifty years argued that such a normative program is oblivious to the political and legal conditions necessary for peaceful, free, just and democratic coexistence. Republican – or neo-republican, as some label it – political thought, thus puts the ideas of the common good, citizenship and a revised understanding of freedom at the center of political theory again and reconsiders the sense and importance of politics, law and statehood in light of these three points of reference.

The reasons for what is nowadays labeled the republican revival are certainly manifold. From reasons that lie in the dynamics of academic discourse up to reasons that are rooted in political controversies1 the lasting interest (and correspondingly the expectation about the benefits of the republican political theory) in republicanism has various reasons. In what follows I will try to concentrate on one distinctive feature – or thesis – of republicanism that is more or less a unifying theme in the various strands of republican political theory. This “republican thesis” consists in the belief that freedom and a republican state are at least compatible or that freedom is even constituted by the republic.

The belief in the possibility of conceptualizing (and under certain circumstances even realizing) a form of an effective political order that is not per se based on a restriction of freedom becomes particularly attractive against the background of the experiences of the twentieth century. Up to the late 1970s political hope for a free society was closely connected with the state: While the national liberation movements of developing countries and colonies viewed the building of a national state as the way to end foreign domination, most progressive, social-democratic or socialist movements identified the state as the way for liberation from internal domination (mostly seen as being caused by an unequal control of the means of production). The reality of the post-colonial and socialist states led to a deep-going disillusionment, which nowadays has turned into fundamental skepticism about the relation between freedom and the state. This skepticism again fuelled a renewal of classic liberal political thought that culminated in the political movement of neo-liberalism?