The Origins of Civic Republican Thought

Abstract

Present-day ideas of citizenship do not stand in isolation from their historical roots and origins. The origins of recent civic republican thought lie in an extensive and, at times, heterogeneous list of political and moral philosophers, writers and political activists. A civic republican ‘tradition’ has been identified as running throughout the history of Western political thought by a number of republican scholars since the latter half of the last century (Pocock, 1975; Oldfield, 1990a; Skinner 1990a, 1990b, 1998, 2002; Rahe, 1992; Held, 1996, 1997; Pettit, 1999; Honohan, 2002). Honohan²¹ (2002: 4–5), for example, argues that it is appropriate to identify a tradition commencing in Greece and Rome, which developed in the late middle ages and progressed further during the eighteenth century in Europe and America, whilst Oldfield (1990: 4) contends that the ‘tradition’ is ‘at least as resilient a strain in Western thinking as liberal individualism’. The use of the term ‘tradition’ should, however, be understood broadly, and exactly which scholars should be viewed as contributing to republican ideas is contested. There is a general agreement that civic republican ideas can be traced back to ancient Greek and the work of Aristotle and to the writings of Cicero in ancient Rome, and that these ideas were then borrowed, critiqued, adapted and extended within the writings of Niccòlo Machiavelli, James Harrington, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and James Madison.²²