Myths Concerning Republicanism 3: Republics Require Virtuous Citizens

The events of the last two weeks have brought to the fore the relationship between the individual and society. The spread of Covid-19, as well as our ability to access food and other basic necessities, depend on whether people behave in their own or the public interest. Moreover, many commentators have noted that this crisis has brought out both the best and worst in people. Though this blogpost was written before the Coronavirus situation in the UK escalated and we were confined to our homes, exploring the role that virtue can and should play in society now seems particularly pertinent.

Those who have written about the history of republicanism tend to agree that two key concepts lie intertwined at its heart: liberty and virtue. Recent scholarship has placed greater emphasis on the former. Particularly influential has been Quentin Skinner's argument that there is a distinctive understanding of liberty popular with past republican thinkers, which insists that freedom requires not just the absence of physical restraint (as the liberal understanding would suggest) but also not being dependent on another person's will. This understanding of liberty as non-dependence is central to Philip Pettit's influential attempt to establish neo-republicanism as an alternative to modern liberalism today. It is no doubt easier for current advocates of republican government to emphasise liberty, which remains a fundamental and respected value in the twenty-first century, than to try to argue in favour of virtue, a value that, aside from aficionados of virtue ethics, brings with it connotations of ancient self-sacrifice and Christian moralising.

Another myth about republican government that potentially amounts to an objection to its revival in the present, then, is that it requires the exercise of an unreasonable degree of virtue on the part of citizens. As with the other myths that have been explored in this blog, there is some justification for this.

Jacques-Louis David, ‘Brutus and the Lictors’ reproduced thanks to the Getty’s Open Content program.

The ancient philosopher Cicero did much to cement the importance of virtue within the republican tradition. In his book De Officiis (On Duties) he took from Plato's Republic two crucial pieces of advice for those taking charge of public affairs: 'first to fix their gaze so firmly on what is beneficial to the citizens that whatever they do, they do with that in mind, forgetful of their own advantage. Secondly, let them care for the whole body of the republic rather than protect one part and neglect the rest' (Cicero, On Duties, ed. M. T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins, Cambridge, 1991, p. 33). Elsewhere in the work he voiced the idea that makes such behaviour seem impossible. Noting that, of the many fellowships that bind humans together, the most precious is the republic, he went on: 'What good man would hesitate to face death on her behalf, if it would do her a service?' (Cicero, On Duties, p. 23). 

This idea that republican virtue requires the subordination of one's private interests to the public good, and that a good republican must be prepared to make immense sacrifices for the good of the whole, was reiterated in the eighteenth century. Perhaps the most powerful reflection of it is to be found in the art work of the French revolutionary painter Jacques-Louis David. His painting Brutus and the Lictors (1789) drew on a famous story from Roman history to explore the central themes of patriotism and the sacrifice of the individual for the good of the state. Lucius Junius Brutus, who had been responsible for expelling the Tarquins from Rome and thereby establishing the republic, discovered that his sons had been acting to restore the monarchy. He prioritised the good of the state over his own family by sentencing his sons to death for treason. While David's picture captures the enormous weight of Brutus's sacrifice, the message is clear that he made the right decision.

This understanding of 'virtue' is still in evidence today in the respect shown to veterans and their families. Moreover it is currently on display among those working in the NHS, care homes, supermarkets, and other essential services who are continuing to attend work despite the risks to their own health. Nevertheless few would welcome the notion, under normal circumstances, that civilian citizens should regularly be expected to put their lives or those of their family on the line for the public good.

I want to offer two thoughts in response to this myth. First that if we understand what is required in less extreme terms we can perhaps find some value in grounding our society more firmly in virtue - in a concern for the public good rather than mere private interests. Secondly, that some republican theorists were well aware that expecting human beings willingly to make huge sacrifices for the good of the public was unrealistic. They suggested, instead, that laws and systems of rewards and punishments could be used to create a situation in which people could be motivated by self-interested concerns to behave in a way that benefited the public as a whole. This approach might offer some possibilities for future policy.

To some degree those of us living in countries with a welfare state already accept the principle of sacrificing individual advantages for the good of the whole. The National Health Service in the UK, for example, is premised on the belief that free health care at the point of need is a public good and that individual citizens must sacrifice a portion of their income in order to pay for it. Similarly, here in the UK taxes ensure that free primary and secondary education is available to all children up to the age of 18, and this is paid for by all citizens regardless of whether they themselves have children, or indeed whether they choose to send their children to state schools.

We could extend this idea to other aspects of society. In an article that I linked to in last month's blogpost, George Monbiot argues that the choice we have to make is between 'public luxury for all, or private luxury for some'. He encourages us to imagine a society in which the rich sacrifice their private swimming pools and the middle class their private gym membership, reinvesting that money in high quality public sports facilities that are open to all. A society where a purpose-built public transport system provides swift, efficient, and comfortable travel for everyone, making it rational for individuals to leave their cars at home or abandon them altogether. One in which private gardens of varying sizes are exchanged for vast public parks complete with imaginatively thought out, well constructed, and properly maintained playgrounds that provide opportunities for all children to play and have fun, while in the process improving their health and wellbeing

Portrait of Pieter de la Court by Abraham Lambertsz van den Tempel (1667). Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.

The problem is how we persuade people to make such sacrifices. We can find some answers by examining republican arguments of the past. While some republicans - particularly those of a strongly religious bent such as John Milton and Algernon Sidney - insisted on the need for genuine virtue on the part of rulers and citizens alike, others - including the Dutch thinkers Johann and Pieter de la Court, the Englishman James Harrington, the Frenchman the Abbé Mably, and the American John Adams - did not have such high expectations of the human capacity for virtue. They accepted that the majority of people would not be willing to make sacrifices for the public good unless it was clearly in their interests to do so. Consequently they argued that laws should be designed so as to direct people towards virtuous behaviour or that other incentives - such as honours and rewards - could be used to induce people to act in the public interest.

Harrington's whole constitutional system was designed with this end in mind. His most famous articulation of the argument was his story of two girls dividing a cake between them. If one girl cuts the cake, but the other gets first choice as to which piece she wants, the first girl will be led by her own self-interest (in this case understood as her desire to get the largest piece of cake) to divide the cake as evenly as she possibly can. Harrington used this as a metaphor for the organisation of legislative power within the state. He insisted on a bicameral legislature and argued that the upper house or senate should make legislative proposals, but the lower house should have the final say as to whether to accept or reject them. By this means the senate would be induced only to propose legislation that was in the public interest, since if they put forward measures in their own interests, the lower house would reject them.

Portrait of Gabriel Bonnet de Mably. Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.

A different method was proposed by Mably. He insisted that human reason and virtue were too weak to act alone  and that only a small proportion of people in any society would be capable of being led by reason at all times. Yet, he believed that even some of the strongest passions, if carefully orchestrated, could become virtues by being directed towards the public good. Offering rewards for public-spirited behaviour could ensure that ambition or the desire for fame and glory could be channelled towards positive ends. There is a close link between these methods and what modern behavioural scientists call nudge theory.

It would be naïve to think that society could be transformed overnight, but it would also be wrong to think that governments are impotent in these matters. Changes can be made by those courageous enough to do so. On 29 February 2020 the government of Luxembourg introduced free public transport  across the entire country. In addition to seeing public transport as a public good, this is also a move designed to bring an even greater public benefit - that of improving the environment. There is evidence to suggest that this move alone may not be sufficient to encourage car users to make fewer journeys. But when pull factors - such as free public transport - are combined with push factors - an increase in parking fees, congestion charging, and increased fuel taxes - the desired outcome can perhaps be achieved. The pertinent question, then, is not whether citizens are virtuous enough to put the public good before their own private interests, but rather whether politicians are courageous enough to put in place the measures that would induce them to do this.

Myths Concerning Republicanism 2: Republican Government has always been Aristocratic

January's blogpost explored the myth that republican government is necessarily anti-monarchical. This month I want to consider another myth: that republican government is inherently aristocratic or élitist in character and therefore unsuited to the democratic nature of twenty-first-century states.

Print of Geneva in 1630. Image by Rachel Hammersley.

There is some justification for this characterisation. In the ancient world republican government was associated with slavery, the exclusion of women from the political sphere, and the restriction of political participation to certain groups. Indeed, the exercise of citizenship depended on the work carried out by non-citizens (including slaves, women, servants, and foreigners), which made it possible for citizens to devote their attention to political matters. Moreover, later republican governments were criticised for descending into oligarchy. Venice's Grand Council was initially composed of all male inhabitants but due to citizenship being restricted to the descendants of those original citizens, by 1581 it was accorded to just over 1% of the population. In the Genevan republic the cost of claiming citizenship became more expensive over time, restricting who could take it up. In addition, power was increasingly moved away from the General Council - comprising all citizens - and towards smaller bodies that were dominated by a few families.

Frontispiece to The Federalist Papers. Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.

The rise of the modern representative republic proved a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it undercut the need for citizens to be supported by non-citizens by making citizenship a less onerous activity. Yet, at the same time, it created a political élite distinct from the wider citizen body whose role it was to govern. For some thinkers this was a positive move. They saw representation not simply as a necessary evil in the large states of the modern world, but as a good in itself. In The Federalist Papers James Madison insisted that in a representative government 'public views' would be 'refined' and 'enlarge[d]' by being passed through 'the medium of a chosen body of citizens' who would be wiser than the rest and therefore better able to determine the true interest of the nation. He went on: 'Under such a regulation, it may well happen that the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves, convened for the purpose.' (Publius, The Federalist Papers, X).

Yet, as debates at the time make clear, this was not the only way of organising representative government. Anti-Federalists in America, and various individuals and groups in Europe, proposed representative systems that maintained a closer connection between elected delegates and those they represented. The mechanisms they advocated included short terms and regular rotation of office, powerful local assemblies, binding mandates, and even the popular ratification of laws. The way in which the modern representative republic was organised did serve to create a narrow political élite, but that was a deliberate choice rather than the only option available.

Where the Federalists chose to build on the aristocratic tendency within republican thought, an alternative more democratic strand also existed

Portrait of James Harrington from The Oceana and Other Works of James Harrington… ed. John Toland (London, 1737). Image by Rachel Hammersley.

Some republicans insisted that popular participation (rather than anti-monarchism) was the defining feature of republican government. William Walker argues that the ancient historian Sallust saw the establishment of the tribunate as more important to the Roman Republic than the displacement of the monarch by consuls (William Walker, 'Sallust and Skinner on Civil Liberty', European Journal of Political Theory, 5:3, 2006). Likewise, for James Harrington it was not the presence or absence of a single figurehead at the apex of the system that determined whether or not a regime was a commonwealth, but rather whether or not the people (via their popular assembly) had the final say over which legislation was passed and enacted (Rachel Hammersley, James Harrington: An Intellectual Biography, Oxford, 2019). Similarly, John P. McCormick has argued that Niccolò Machiavelli offered an anti-élitist critique of republican practice. In contrast to Francesco Guicciardini's "senatorial" model of politics, he favoured a "tribunate" model which embraced popular deliberation and employed extra-electoral methods to secure the accountability of those in power (John P. McCormick, 'Machiavelli Against Republicanism On the Cambridge School's "Guicciardinian Moments", Political Theory, 31:5, 2003, 615-43).

Both Machiavelli and Harrington were also advocates of the idea that extremes of wealth and poverty would pose a direct threat to the survival of the republic. Machiavelli famously argued that if the system was well-constituted the public should be rich, but the citizens poor (Machiavelli, The Discourses, ed. Bernard Crick. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970, p. 475). This idea has a modern echo in the notion that we must choose between public luxury for all or private luxury for some. Other thinkers called for balance and moderation. Harrington claimed that: 'There is a mean in things: as exorbitant riches overthrow the balance of a commonwealth, so extreme poverty cannot hold it nor is by any means to be trusted with it.' (James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana, ed. J. G. A. Pocock. Cambridge, 1992, p. 77). A similar view was endorsed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau who insisted that in order to secure civil freedom: 'no citizen [can] be so very rich that he can buy another, and none so poor that he is compelled to sell himself.' (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Social Contract, ed. Victor Gourevitch. Cambridge, 1997, p. 78). The problem with wealth and luxury, Rousseau insisted, was that they exerted a corrupting influence, encouraging the citizens to put their own private interests above those of the republic.

The Leaders of the Knights of Labour with Terence Powderly in the centre. Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.

It is also evident that even after the emergence of representative republics, the language of republicanism could be used by marginalised or excluded groups against their oppressors. As Alex Gourevitch has demonstrated, this tactic was deployed to great effect by 'The Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor', the first labour organisation in the United States of America to admit both white and black workers (Alex Gourevitch, From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth. Cambridge, 2015). Its leaders deliberately used republican arguments to criticise wage labour. George McNeill spoke of the 'inevitable and irresistible conflict' between the system of wage labour and republican governance (p. 100). The reason for this, as Terence Powderly explained, was that the wage labour system generated economic inequalities that were translated into political inequalities. Drawing directly on the understanding of liberty as non-dependence, and on arguments that had been used in the seventeenth century to insist that subjects were unfree even under a mild and gentle monarch, the Knights insisted that a worker would be a slave even if employed by 'the gentlest man in the world' 'if he must obey his commands and depend upon his will' (pp. 14-15). The solution, they argued, was to establish cooperatives so that workers could collectively own and manage the factories in which they worked. By applying the conception of liberty as non-dependence to the economic as well as the political sphere, these labour republicans succeeded in making republican arguments applicable not just to independent property owners, but to all workers - white and black, male and female.

While republicanism has taken an aristocratic form in both theory and practice in the past this was often a deliberate strategy rather than a necessity. The history of the republican tradition can provide arguments in favour of popular participation in government, warnings against excessive inequalities among citizens, and evidence of the importance of economic as well as political inequalities (and of the relationship between the two). Rather than dismissing republicanism as inherently aristocratic, then, it might be more profitable to draw on these resources to create a version of republicanism suited to the democratic states of the twenty-first century.