Republicanism and its ‘gentle wings’ (Ode to Joy). The Republican Dignity to be Governed, not Mastered as Founding Rational Legitimacy

Abstract

Republicanism as a term is often reduced simply to being the antithesis of monarchy. Yet republicanism has taken on different guises and forms across centuries and historical settings. Antimonarchism is not an integral element of the republic, rather the civic mastery over one’s self by consenting to self-imposed laws. This republican dignity to be governed, not mastered, translates the ideal of the res publica into a workable polity by political and legal means. It is the functional equivalence of the various modes of translation into political institutions and legal rules that serves as tertium comparationis for this comparative essay on English, American and French republicanism. In regard to the founding function of republican dignity, civic consciousness in England was framed  within the historic continuity of common law. Within this framework of customs, jurisdictions and liberties, centred around a territorial and jurisdictional monarchy, individual self-mastery evolved in the form of possession rights and properties. Conceptualizing the English public realm as a (neo-Roman) civitas, the seventeenth century ‘transition’ from kingdom to commonwealth built on Britain’s rising ‘blue-water’ commercial and colonial empire and on the presumed immemorial origin of common law as a ‘charter of liberties’. As early as Magna Carta, common law liberties addressed ‘free landed proprietors’, and property remained the linchpin of the political and legal translation of British civic consciousness. It accounted for the discursive identity of political and civil liberty, and thereby formed the peculiar congruency between the king’s and the people’s interests; the republican reading of the English ‘ancient constitution’, built on common law customs since time immemorial, orbited around the empire’s greatness by delivering ‘English liberties’ to its subjects. American independence and the practical implementation of republican ideas in an expansive union surpassed the common limitation of classical republicanism to small political communities. The specific practical American interconnection of private and civic rights, due to the wide dispersion of ownership and the settlers’ acquaintance with self-responsibility for local politics, was the basis for the ‘American translation’ of civic self-mastery into a novel connection of democratic representation with popular sovereignty. In their strife away from the paternalistic trusteeship in the British hereditary-corporative parliamentary tradition, the representative republic was the federalists’ design to keep popular sovereignty away from the turmoil of a direct, democratic tyranny. Representation was the founding fathers’ institutional tool to create legality in the consented community, and thereby the expansionism in the union enabled the republic’s success. The federalists’ translation of republican self-governance into this connection of representation with popular sovereignty created the constituent American people, and thereby grounded American independence as a nation on the civic self-mastery of the American people as individuals. Initially, and in accordance with the prevalent common law terminology, the American resistance against Westminster was focused on whether the Americans maintained the rank of brethren subjects of the same king as the English. Central to these historical roots of American republican dignity, still recognizable in the Sullivan Draft of a declaration of rights (1774), were self-mastery and sovereignty rooted in common law property rights, before the justificatory legitimization by ‘certain unalienable Rights, … among [which] are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’ in 1776 cut off the discursive community with the British common law. Consequently, republican dignity by self-determined participation in and commitment to the commonwealth of all was never equally apportioned in the American discourse. Instead, the attribution of special dignities to those who guarded the ‘genius of the people’ marked the American eagerness to keep the representative republic away from egalitarianism, but in the same way fostered an institutionalized elitism which threatens today’s American democracy in the irreconcilable duality of the current two-party system. French republicanism originated in the coincidence of res publica and civitas, both of which were royally constituted. It is the equation of republic and sovereign state that is substantiated in Bodinean legislative sovereignty and championed in the enlightened republicanization of monarchy. Whereas American republicanism designed constitutional checks and balances of institutionally separated powers, the French ‘monarchie républicaine’ from 1789 to 1792 was meant to perfect the form of (monarchical) government. The enlightened focus lay on the origin of power in the normative abstractness of the general will (Rousseau) or in national sovereignty (Sièyes). However, as far as the masterminds of the French Revolution were concerned, the republic signified unity; the legal concept of national sovereignty explained the monarchy as constituted power and the nation (which included both people and monarch) as constituent, whereby the equation of republic and sovereign state permeated into modern French constitutionalism. This republican identity lies at the heart of legal, political, and popular consciousness in contemporary France.