Our unfinished republics |
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Across the democratic world, citizens describe a growing sense of powerlessness. Governments rise and fall, but the power to shape daily life now flows elsewhere – through markets, corporations and data systems untouched by democratic oversight. A recent international survey found that, in almost every major country, most people believe the economy is rigged to benefit the rich and powerful; many say their societies are ‘broken’. Discontent has fuelled a turn toward authoritarian politics, which promises control while entrenching new forms of oligarchic rule. One reason the authoritarians are winning may be because liberals and progressives have a deep unease with power.
It’s always the case in history that much about the present moment is unprecedented, and no single perspective is complete, but we don’t have to go very far into history to find a very popular and powerful politics organised around an ideal of freedom that made people fierce opponents of political and economic powerlessness. Economic republicanism was one of the great traditions of 19th-century Western thought, and it appealed to those who felt unable to influence the world around them.
The relationship between freedom and power is at the heart of the republican tradition. For centuries, republican thinkers argued that liberty required institutions capable of restraining arbitrary power. Niccolò Machiavelli’s Discorsi (1531) held that only a populace able to check elites could remain free. James Harrington’s Oceana (1656), written during England’s brief republic, helped articulate the link between independence and ownership. In the American and French revolutions, republican ideas became state-forming principles: Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract (1762) radicalised demands for popular sovereignty, while John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and the authors of The Federalist Papers (1787-88) argued that only constitutional checks and balances could secure freedom.
James Harrington’s Oceana (1737 edition). Courtesy of the University of Alabama, Rare Books Collection
Economic republicanism in the 19th century applied these older concerns to the new industrial economies of the West. Its ideals shaped some of the era’s most important political and social conflicts: driving British trade unionists to fight for collective bargaining and shorter hours, energising the revolutions of 1848, and propelling land reform and anti-monopoly struggles later in the century.
To make sense of the term ‘economic republicanism’, it helps to understand how the long history of republican political theory views power. This goes back to the world of classical Greece and Rome, and was not always necessarily anti-monarchical. Its deeper commitment is to society organised as a res publica – a public thing – so that power is regulated in such a way as to secure the liberty of its citizens. As scholars such as Quentin Skinner, Philip Pettit and others have shown, republican liberty is best understood as the absence of domination. A person is unfree whenever they live at the mercy of another’s will without effective recourse. What compromises liberty and leads to unfreedom, republicans believe, is not direct interference in a person’s actions, but exposure to arbitrary power: a slave with a benevolent master remains unfree.
For republicans, self-rule is indispensable to liberty. Only when ordinary people have a meaningful part to play in governing are they no longer simply dependent on the goodwill of others. Self-rule transforms individuals from subjects of another’s domination into co-authors of the common world.
The liberty of early modern republicans rested on the unfreedom of others
Classical and early modern republicans described domination in terms of imperium and dominium. Imperium was arbitrary public power, the capacity of kings, ministers, governors to command without the consent of the people. Dominium, arbitrary private power, was the authority that owners, husbands, fathers, masters and later employers wielded over those dependent on them. Significantly, as the political theorist Camila Vergara observes in Systemic Corruption (2020), early modern republicans were often elitist defenders of liberty in the state but of hierarchy in society.
Landowners, merchants and slaveholders pressed for limits on royal authority while defending their own private domination. Their liberty rested on the unfreedom of others. For these powerful men, property – especially land, and with it control over those who worked it – was what entitled them to political authority. It secured their independence, signalled that they could govern ‘responsibly’, and ensured they would not themselves be subject to arbitrary public power. By the same logic, those without property were denied political rights.
In contrast, popular republicans insisted that the political process should be open to the propertyless, though usually they excluded women and Indigenous and enslaved people. From the 17th century onward, groups such as