Walter Karp: Jeffersonian Republican by Joseph R. Stromberg (via the Western Confucian).

Republicanism and Liberalism

Classical and neo-republican thought spotlights independent proprietors whose courage and dedication secure republican liberty. Civic virtue, a proper balance of property, and a mixed constitution overcome individual and institutional corruption and the vagaries of fortune. Community is prior to individuals and participation in civic life is central to genuine freedom. [7] Here are ideas potentially opposed to liberalism, which (allegedly) grounds politics on individuals and their rights and takes a republic as a mere form of government.

There have been many republics and many versions of republicanism. The primacy of community draws forth complaints that the ideal republic looks narrow, militarist, and closed. Yet a closed republic may not be oppressive and its militarism (if any) might be defensive and consciously intended to avoid the complications of empire. Friendlier-sounding commercial republics may be “republics for increase,” which build mercantilist empires and welcome foreigners, while dominating their homelands. Their oppressions, if any, take place abroad—at least until diminishing imperial returns set in and “blowback” arrives. (Meanwhile, such republics will count as great centers of liberalism.) With many possible shades of republicanism, it would seem that from inside any particular one, other republicanisms will appear as gross distortions.

Many historical actors have seen republicanism and liberalism as reasonably compatible. Historian Ralph Raico comments that “it would indeed be a mistake to hold that they are mutually exclusive in every historical incarnation of liberalism.” American revolutionaries including Jefferson appealed to both sets of ideas, as did nineteenth-century liberals Benjamin Constant in France and Eugen Richter in Germany. Indeed, it becomes increasingly difficult to separate seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European “bourgeois republicans” from proto-liberals. [8] Sticking with the American story, it seems that a broad “liberal republican” consensus long existed within which very bitter and divisive struggles took place. The two traditions—ideally separate or not—seem inextricably mingled in American practice. Arguably, liberalism as such lacked an articulated theory of government; republicanism as such lacked a theory of rights. [9] Hence the attempt on American shores to put (and keep) them together.