Republicanism
Renaissance republicanism – key thinkers:
Italy – Leonard Bruni (1370-1444), History of the Florentine People; Poggio Bracciolini (13801459), History of Florence; Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), Discourses, Florentine Histories;
Francesco Guicciardini (1483-1540), History of Florence.
France – Hubert Languet (1518-1581): probable author of Vindicae Contra Tyrannos; Francois
Hotman (1524-1590), Franco-Gallia; Theodore Beza (1519-1605), De jure magistratum.
England – John Milton (1608-1674), Tenure of Kings and Magistrates; Readie and Easie Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth; James Harrington (1611-1677), The Commonwealth of Oceana.
Republicanism as ‘civic humanism’:
- Human fulfilment comes from serving the public domain: man a ‘political animal’ (Aristotle).
- Didactic function of republican texts – practical guides in art of politics and government.
- Aim to restore the wisdom of the classics – key texts: Plato, Republic, Aristotle, Politics Cicero, De
Officiis; Titus Livy, Ab Urbe condita, Tacitus, Histories and Annals; Sallust, Catalinarian Conspiracy
and Jugurthine War.
- Cyclical understanding of the process of history – Machiavelli, Discourses, bk III: ‘all the things of
this world in every era have their counterparts in ancient times…this is because these actions are
carried out by men who have and have always had the same passions, which, of necessity, must give
rise to the same results’.
Ideological concern - understand rise and fall of Roman Republic and apply its lessons:
- Bruni, Panegyric of the Florentine People (1404) - ‘For who could bear that the Roman state,
acquired with the kind of virtue that Fabius, Scipio, the Catos, and countless other very honourable
and chaste men displayed, fell into the hands and under the domination of Caligula and other monsters
and vile tyrants who were innocent of no vice and redeemed by no virtue?... Has anything touched the
people of Florence more deeply than the sorrow of seeing the Roman people, its progenitor and
founder... suddenly lose their own freedom at the hands of the most criminal of men?’
- Concern with defence/ justification of Italian city states – Machiavelli, The Prince: Florence
‘overrun by Charles, sacked by Louis, outraged by Ferdinand and disgraced by the Swiss’.
- Discourses – Machiavelli urges Medici oligarchs to restore Florentine republican institutions as only
way to make the city great again.
Key tenets of republican thought:
Liberty (for people and states) = self-governance, independence, active civic participation.
Machiavelli, Discourses – only in ‘lands and provinces which live as free states’ can citizens ‘live
without fear... knowing not merely that they are born as free citizens and not as slaves, but that they
can hope to rise by their abilities to become leaders of their communities’.
- State needs active citizens in order to defend itself effectively – Machiavelli, Discourses:
government ‘will not long endure if it rests upon the shoulders of a single man’, only ‘when it is the
task of many to maintain it’.
Virtue – means ‘success’ as well as goodness.
- Consists in action – John Milton, Areopagitica: ‘I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue
unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and seeks her adversary, but slinks out of the race
where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat’.
- Virtue impossible without liberty; liberty cannot be sustained without virtue – together they enable a
state to reach grandezza.
Republican thinkers promote institutions and ordini that encourage civic participation and foster civic
virtue - promote senates, assemblies, citizen armies, art of rhetoric.
Virtue of a state more important than its constitutional form
- Potential acceptance of monarchy if princes rule in public interest and observe rule of law.
- Machiavelli, Discourses - sometimes ‘necessary to lead a state towards a monarchical rather than
towards a popular government’ to defend liberty.
But (Machiavelli): ‘princes…begin to lose the state the moment they begin to break the laws and
those ways and customs that are ancient’.
Need to remember that ‘it is the common good which makes cities great’.
Republicanism outside Italy
- Responds to weaknesses, fragility of kings – language of ‘the public good’, ‘the commonwealth’,
‘patriotism’/ ‘patria’.
Republican language in the governance of towns and cities:
e.g. Chambers of Rhetoric in the Netherlands.
Goldie – C17th England an ‘unacknowledged republic’.
Court humanism - wise counsel to make monarchs rule for ‘the common weal’.
- Erasmus, Institution of a Christian Prince (1532); Castiglione, Book of a Courtier (1508); Thomas
Starkie, Dialogue between Pole and Lupset (1532).
- Thomas More, Utopia: ‘If a king is so hated or despised by his subjects that he can rule them only
by maltreatment, plundering, confiscation and pauperisation, he’d do much better to abdicate his
throne... A king has no dignity when he exercises authority over beggars, only when he rules over
prosperous and happy subjects’.
- Collinson, ‘Monarchical Republic of Elizabeth I’.
- But anxiety among court humanism at corruption of their ideas by tyranny – registered in More,
Utopia.
Republicans and rebels
Republican doctrines support aristocratic and religious protest against kings.
- France – Huguenot Revolt 1560-1579 – Languet supports power of parlements against ‘ferocious
license of kings’; Hotman – the people = ‘true proprietors’ of a commonwealth, possess ‘supreme
dominion’ and have ‘to take up arms and fight against tyranny’, ‘not merely for the sake of our
religion, but also in the name of our health and homes’.
- Huguenot monarchomach theory influences Dutch rebels, Scottish Calvinist authors (John Knox,
George Buchanan).
- Protestant critics of Elizabeth I e.g. Philip Sidney, ‘Arcadia’ (1584): ‘public matters had been
privately governed... a notable example how great dissipations monarchal governments are subject
unto’.
- Sidney’s advice to monarchs -‘rage not beyond thy need/ Deem it no glorie to swell in tyranny/
Thou art of blood, joy not to make things bleed’.
- Republicanism in Catholic Europe – creation of Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania (1569); Holy
League revolt in France: Jean Boucher, The Just Renunciation of Henri III (1589).
Christian Republicanism
- Tensions between republican and Christian doctrines due to republican elevation of good of the city
as the highest good e.g. Machiavelli placed on Index of Prohibited Books, 1559.
- Monarchomach thinkers try to reconcile Christian and classical doctrines.
- John Milton – Divine Right of Kings a blasphemous idea: reality ‘No person is exempt by any law
of God from punishment, be he King, Queen or Emperor for God hath not placed them above others’
(Tenure of Kings).
- Milton, Of Reformation – Christ ‘obtained all honourable liberty for us’; governors have to train up a Nation in
true wisdom and vertue’.
- Milton argues that love of heaven starts with love of country.