OVERVIEW AND CHAPTER OUTLINES
OF DISSERTATION
SERVITUDE AND INDEPENDENCE:
RETHINKING LIBERTY, VIRTUE AND THE
REPUBLICAN TRADITION
Alex Gourevitch
NB: Full chapters are available on request.
GOUREVITCH
OVERVIEW
In 1877, a major American labor reformer, George McNeill, wrote “there is an
inevitable and irresistible conflict between the wage-system of labor and the republican
system of government.”1 McNeill was not alone in drawing radical conclusions from
republican principles. Ira Steward, a famous eight-hour campaigner, felt that “a
republicanization of labor, as well as a republicanization of government”2 was needed to
complete the promise of republican liberty in an industrial society. The solution to this
irresistible conflict was “to abolish as rapidly as possible, the wage system, substituting cooperation therefore.”3 Though these cooperative ideas were common at the time, it is this
group of reformers and critics, or ‘labor republicans,’4 who most clearly formulated the
cooperative critique of wage-labor in republican terms.
In our time, there is a strong interest in reviving republicanism, especially its theory
of liberty and associated views about civic virtue. It is notable, however, that despite a now
well-developed body of theoretical literature, few have bothered to consider the implications
of republican ideas for economic life. Those few who have done so have not drawn the
kinds of conclusions briefly sketched above. Attempts to outline a “political economy of
citizenship”5 have made interesting general points about the subordination of growth and
efficiency to the requirements of liberty and virtue,6 and about the way consumerism
1
George E. McNeill, The Labor Movement: The Problem of to-Day (New York: The M. W. Hazen Co.,
1892), 459.
2
Ira Steward, "Poverty," in Fourth Annual Report of the Bureau of Statistics of Labor, ed. Massachusetts
Bureau of Statistics of Labor (Boston: Wright & Potter, State Printers, 1873), 434.
3
S.M. Jelley, The Voice of Labor (Chicago: A.B. Gehman & Co., 1887), 203.
4
I have adopted this term from labor and constitutional historians, who I discuss more fully in footnote 16.
5
Michael J. Sandel, Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1996), 200.
6
“Beginning in the late New Deal and culminating in the early 1960s, the political economy of growth and
distributive justice displaced the political economy of citizenship.” Ibid., 250.
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undermines the habits of citizenship.7 A few, more focused, forays into “freedom in the
market”8 have made a few concrete proposals, like a republican defense of ‘basic income.’9
However, none of these proposals depart in striking and original ways from existing liberal
arguments for basic income or social justice.10 Nor have they had quite the radical character,
in the sense of going to the root of things, that nineteenth century republican arguments
had. Either modern republicanism is not that different from liberalism, or there is something
about the approach of neo-republicans that misses important aspects of republican theory.
This is a puzzle worth sorting out, not just because it can help clarify whether and in what
way republicanism is a meaningful alternative to liberalism. It is also speaks directly to one of
the most pressing concerns of our moment: how we think about economic life.
This dissertation approaches this puzzle by sharing a premise with some neorepublicans:11 what makes republican political thought distinctive is the concept of
independence. It is through the concept of independence that republican thought has
understood ‘liberty,’ or the condition of being free. Moreover, independence is also
understood as the material precondition for the acquisition and exercise of civic virtue.
Hence, an understanding of independence is crucial to any attempt to revive the concepts of
republican liberty and civic virtue. What contemporary thinkers have tended to pass over, or
7
Richard Dagger, Civic Virtues: Rights, Citizenship, and Republican Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997), 104-05, Sandel, Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public
Philosophy, 222-31, 66-70. Also Benjamin Barber, Con$Umed (New York: Norton, 2007).
8
Philip Pettit, "Freedom in the Market," Politics, Philosophy & Economics 5, no. 2 (2006).
9
David Casassas, "Basic Income and the Republican Ideal: Rethinking Material Independence in
Contemporary Societies," Basic Income Studies 2, no. 2 (2007), Carole Pateman, "Why Republicanism?,"
Basic Income Studies 2, no. 2 (2007), Philip Pettit, "A Republican Right to Basic Income?," Basic Income
Studies 2, no. 2 (2007).
10
See, for instance, Philippe van Parijs, Real Freedom for All : What (If Anything) Can Justify Capitalism?
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 30-56. John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), esp. 148-80.
11
See e.g. John W. Maynor, Republicanism in the Modern World (Oxford: Polity, 2003), Chs. 1-2, Philip
Pettit, "Republican Freedom: Three Axioms, Four Theorems," in Republicanism and Political Theory, ed.
Cecil Laborde and John Maynor (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), Quentin Skinner, "Freedom as the
Absence of Arbitrary Power," in Republicanism and Political Theory, ed. Cecil Laborde and John Maynor
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), Maurizio Viroli, Republicanism (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002), 35-56.
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give short shrift to, is the way independence is understood in terms of a relationship to one’s
labor. Recall, for instance, Aristotle, for whom independence was an attribute of “those
freed from necessary tasks,” meaning slaves, vulgar craftsmen and hired labor were all unfree
dependents.12 Or better yet, Cicero, for whom “all those workers who are paid for their
labour and not for their skill have servile and demeaning employment; for in their case the
very wage is a contract to servitude.”13
The reason for thinking about independence as a relationship to one’s labor is that it
alerts us to a challenge for any attempt to revive republican thought. Republicanism must
answer the charge that it is inherently aristocratic or inegalitarian because independent
citizenship appears to presuppose dependent labor. For some to be free, independent
citizens, others must be dependent laborers or slaves. This ‘paradox of slavery and
freedom’14 is a dilemma specific to republican thought. This paradox is the reason that
republican thought is able to raise important normative questions about the role of labor in
society. Of course, what is important is not merely the way republicanism raises special kinds
of questions, but also how it responds to them. That is why this dissertation focuses on
modern attempts to re-conceive of independence as free labor rather than leisure, and what
this shift means for current thinking about republican liberty and civic virtue.
This conceptual change is a product of modern struggles for equality. Various class
challenges to the idea of independence produced a novel critique of the forms of social
domination and servitude in industrial society. This critique led to new ways of thinking
about independence as a condition that could be enjoyed by all, not merely some. In the
12
Aristotle, Politics, trans. C.D.C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 1278a10-11.
Cicero, On Duties, trans. E.M. Atkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), [I.150] 58.
14
Moses Finley, "Between Slavery and Freedom," Comparative Studies in Society and History 6, no. 3
(1964). Edmund Morgan, "Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox," The Journal of American
History 59, no. 1 (1972).
13
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United States, these class challenges to inherited views about independence came to a head
with the aforementioned ‘labor republicans.’ The historical dimension of this dissertation
thus rests on a reconstruction of their views. In doing so, I rely on the primary materials of
this group of labor reformers and social critics, but also owe a deep debt to an important
body of historical research that has not received the same theoretical attention of other
historical investigations.15 As we shall see, though the mostly skilled artisans that make up
this group of labor republicans16 are not as well known, they are of more than merely
historical interest.17 In their practical efforts to “engraft republican principles into [the]
industrial system,”18 these men of action transformed republicanism into a theory of social
freedom and egalitarian reform.
Reconstructing the views of labor republicans, especially their identification of
independence with free labor, allows this dissertation to cut across the existing republicanliberal debate. It does so by shifting theoretical and historical emphasis onto the way modern
struggles for equality transformed the concept of independence, and thus related concepts of
republican liberty and civic virtue. On the one hand, the dissertation aims to redeem the idea
15
Leon Fink, Workingmen's Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics (Urbana and
Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985). William Forbath, "The Ambiguities of Free Labor: Labor and
the Law in the Gilded Age," Wisconsin Law Review 1985, no. 4 (1985), David Montgomery, Beyond
Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans 1862-1872 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), David
Montgomery, Citizen-Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the
Free Market During the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), David
Montgomery, "Labor and the Republic in Industrial America: 1860-1920," Le Mouvement social 111, no.
Georges Haupt parmi nous (1980), James Gray Pope, "Labor's Constitution of Freedom," Yale Law Journal
106, no. 4 (1997). Sean Wilentz, "Against Exceptionalism: Class Consciousness and the American Labor
Movement, 1790-1920," International Labor and Working Class History 26 (1984), Sean Wilentz, Chants
Democratic : New York City & the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1984). For a critical appraisal of this trend see Daniel T. Rodgers, "Republicanism: The
Career of a Concept," The Journal of American History 79, no. 1 (1992).
16
For instance, of the main figures this dissertation discusses, Ira Steward and Terence Powderly were
machinists, William H. Sylvis was an iron-molder, and George McNeill was a shoemaker before
apprenticing as a journalist. Only Henry Demarest Lloyd received a full college education and came from a
wealthy family.
17
As will become clear in later chapters, I believe the one republican theorist to have taken this group
seriously – Michael Sandel – failed to identify their real contribution to modern political thinking.
18
McNeill, The Labor Movement: The Problem of to-Day, 456.
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that there is something distinctive, and potentially critical, about the republican concept of
independence. It will suggest that, if we follow through modern thinking about
independence, then we find that many liberal arguments against neo-republicanism are only
partially successful because there is, in fact, a distinctive, republican theory of liberty, with
concrete practical implications, which is consistent with the facts of modern experience. On
the other hand, the strategy for redeeming republican liberty will be different, and at times
challenge some of the claims of the republican revival itself. For instance, one important
claim will be that the ‘neo-Roman’ version of independence,19 extensively developed by
thinkers like Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit,20 is not as clearly distinct from the liberal
conception of negative liberty as its defenders claim. In showing that the existing debate is
based on artificially narrow, and sometimes over-stated, oppositions, the dissertation also
sheds new light on the insights of republicanism for the organization of economic life. In
particular, we see that the republican theory of liberty generates a concern with nondominated or ‘free’ labor, and that realizing this condition entails, among other things, equal
access to productive assets and residual rights of control over work.
CHAPTER OUTLINES
Introduction:
The introduction presents the outlines of the current republican revival, lays out the
dissertation’s basic claims, and discusses the reasons for using the method of historical
reconstruction.
On the “neo-Roman” character of this view of liberty, see Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism
(Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 5-7.
20
See also Cecil Laborde and John Maynor, "The Republican Contribution to Political Theory," in
Republicanism and Political Theory, ed. Cecil Laborde and John Maynor (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing,
2008). Maynor, Republicanism in the Modern World, 33-89, Viroli, Republicanism, 35-56.
19
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Chapter One: Republican Liberty – Positive? Negative? Universal?
This chapter first presents the distinction between neo-Aristotelian and neo-Roman versions
of the republican revival, and their relation to the distinction between positive and negative
liberty. It discusses the revival’s tacit acceptance of the belief that the modern fact of
pluralism is the reason for being concerned with the positive-negative distinction. It then
reconstructs, in greater detail, the neo-Roman argument, of thinkers like Skinner, Pettit, and
Viroli, on the grounds that they are the closest to making the relation between freedom and
slavery central to the analysis of republican liberty. The chapter gives particular attention to
their claim that republican and liberal theories of liberty are “incommensurate.”
Chapter Two: The Paradox of Slavery and Freedom
This chapter uses the paradox of slavery and freedom as a new lens through which to
interpret republican thought. The paradox is a conflict between two commitments. The first
is to republican liberty, in which the independence of free citizens presupposes the
dependent labor of others. The second is to equality, which requires that all principles be
universalizable. The chapter shows how this theoretical paradox emerges as a concrete,
historical problem only for modern republicans. The chapter does so first by using ancient
sources like Aristotle and Cicero to reconstruct the classical view that freedom presupposed
slavery. The second half then shows the modern emergence of this paradox with Jefferson
and Madison. It shows how some later Southern defenders of slavery, like Calhoun and
Fitzhugh, resolved this paradox by defending slavery as a positive good, but others, like
Lincoln, reinterpreted independence as universal ‘free labor.’
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Chapter Three: Wage-Labor, Free Labor, and Laissez-Faire Republicanism
At the very moment of the success of the Lincolnian vision, the end of the Civil War, it
faced a new challenge. The shift from agrarian to industrial capitalism rendered the peasantproprietor ideal of free labor obsolete. What could free labor mean in an industrial society?
The first half of the chapter reconstructs one answer: republican liberty as legal autonomy. It
shows how a form of laissez-faire republicanism emerges, especially in post-Civil War
jurisprudence, identifying free labor with wage-labor. This conceptual move, though in
tension with aspects of classical republicanism, stays true to a view of independence as
personal dominion. As such, the republican theory of liberty is made commensurate with a
classically liberal view, which calls into question current claims “we have inherited two rival
and incommensurate theories of liberty” (Skinner).
The second half of the chapter shows, however, that among early nineteenth century
artisanal republicans, like Thomas Skidmore and Langdon Byllesby, an alternative view,
equating wage-labor with dependent, and thus servile, labor, had emerged. These artisan
republicans, by integrating political economy and theories of cooperation into republicanism,
stand as precursors to labor republican attempts to think through what free labor might
mean in a modern economy.
Chapter Four: Freedom in a Free Society: The Cooperative Commonwealth and Human Emancipation
This chapter reconstructs the alternative path for a modern republican theory of liberty, in
which wage-labor is conceived as dependent labor, and free labor identified with cooperative
production. The key figures are a group of editors and labor leaders, especially around the
Knights of Labor, including the long-time head of that organization, Terence Powderly, as
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well as eight-hour campaigners like Ira Steward and William H. Sylvis. Their key conceptual
move is to conceive of independence not in terms of individual dominion, but as equal
interdependence. In doing so, labor republicans also expand the boundaries of politics, by
arguing that the principle of popular sovereignty should be applied to labor relations, not
just forms of government.
The chapter first reconstructs the labor republican critique of wage-labor as a form
dependent labor. The chapter shows how labor republicans use the tools of political
economy, especially the labor theory of value, to expose the peculiarly modern form of
dependence that wage-laborers face: dependence based on economic need. Labor
republicans further argued that industrial production makes the work process a cooperative,
rather individuated, activity, meaning artisanal views of free labor, and thus independence,
are inadequate to the times. It concludes by showing that labor republicans thought that
cooperative production would restore free labor by equalizing control over work, and by
increasing the amount of leisure time available to workers. For them, the cooperative
principle allowed all persons a measure of the independence that only the few had enjoyed in
antiquity.
Chapter 5: Another Kind of Virtue
This chapter first reconstructs contemporary debates about civic virtue. Two claims stand
out. First, that civic virtue is a set of dispositions citizens must possess to preserve free
institutions. Second, that virtue must be cultivated through coercive state action. Arguments
between liberals and republicans tend to be about whether it is desirable to build a political
theory around these propositions. The second part of the chapter cuts across these debates
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through a reconstruction of labor republican ideas about virtue. Labor republicans faced the
political problem of realizing their vision of a free republic in conditions of inequality and
domination, and turned to the political power of the dependent, laboring classes themselves
as agents of social transformation. The labor republicans reveal to us a way of thinking about
virtue in terms of those qualities an individual requires, not to preserve the stability of a
regime, but to transform it. The emphasis on transformative dispositions also shows us how
civic virtue need not be a question of how states cultivate dispositions but of how political
agents constitute themselves through their own processes of self-education and organization.
Conclusion: Free Labor and Neo-republicanism
The conclusion returns to the opening question of this dissertation: why has the republican
revival been so limited in its ability to generate an alternative conception of work, economy
and freedom? To answer this question, the conclusion re-presents in formal, theoretical
terms the insights of labor republicans. First, the conclusion argues that labor republicans
point us to a theoretical revision of neo-republican accounts of economic independence.
Thinkers like Pettit need a more thoroughgoing account of structural domination and should
also attend to the problem of residual control over the work activity. Contemporary
republicans, who ignore these dimensions of power and domination, possess too narrow an
understanding of what counts as economic dependence or, in the language of Philip Pettit,
‘non-dominated labor.’ Second, the conclusion supplies an argument for why the implication
of this analysis of domination means republicans ought to include equal control over
productive assets and rights of residual control over work as central principles in a neorepublican theory of free labor. This thought opens up new possibilities for thinking about a
neo-republican political economy.
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