Republic

A republic is a state in which public office is held in trust rather than owned, authority derives from law rather than from person, and the headship of state is filled by election or appointment rather than by inheritance. The Latin res publica means the public thing, and the phrase carries the whole conservative case: the commonwealth is property held in common, and the magistrate is its steward for a term.

Conservatives distinguish sharply between a republic and a pure democracy. A republic is a constitutional form defined by limits, offices and law; democracy is a method of selecting who fills those offices. The American founders built the first and were wary of the second, and the distinction remains the working core of Anglo-American constitutionalism.

Key Takeaways

• The republican tradition runs from Rome through Polybius and Cicero to Machiavelli, the Dutch and Venetian republics, and the American founding of 1787.
• Its central device is the mixed constitution: monarchic, aristocratic and popular elements checking one another within a single structure.
• Conservatives hold that a republic requires civic virtue in its citizens, and decays when private interest captures public office.
• The distinction from pure democracy is institutional, not rhetorical: a republic binds the majority by law it cannot easily change.
• Modern neo-republicans redefine liberty as freedom from domination, which yields a far more interventionist state than the classical account.

History And Context

Rome expelled its last king in the traditional year 509 BC and governed itself for nearly five centuries through paired consuls, a Senate, and assemblies of the people, with the tribunate added after the plebeian secessions of the fifth century BC. The Greek historian Polybius, taken to Rome as a hostage after 168 BC, wrote in the sixth book of his Histories that Rome’s strength lay in the balance of its constitution, which combined the three simple forms so that each restrained the others and none could degenerate alone.¹ That analysis of the mixed constitution is the founding document of republican political science.

Cicero restated it in De re publica, written between 54 and 51 BC, defining the commonwealth as the property of the people and the people as a body joined by agreement on law and by common interest. He watched the form collapse, and his death in the proscriptions of 43 BC marked the end of the argument in practice.

The tradition survived in the Italian city-states. Niccolò Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy, written in the 1510s and published in 1531, argued that the tumults between patricians and plebeians in Rome were the source of its liberty rather than a defect, because the friction produced the laws that protected the people.² Venice ran a republic on elaborate mixed lines until Napoleon ended it in 1797; the Dutch Republic operated from 1581 to 1795.

The American framers drew on all of it. The Philadelphia convention of 1787 produced a structure of enumerated federal powers, a bicameral legislature, an independent judiciary and a written constitution amendable only by supermajorities across the states. Article IV, section 4 guarantees to every state a republican form of government. John Adams’s Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, published in London between 1787 and 1788, argued the mixed-constitution case in three volumes of historical example.

The Conservative Position

The conservative attachment to the republican form rests on a view of human nature. Men in office pursue their own advantage, and no selection method produces rulers reliably better than the ruled. The answer is not to search harder for good men but to build a structure in which ambition is set against ambition and no single will commands the whole.

That yields several commitments. Offices are held for fixed terms and are not property; the distinction between the person and the office is the difference between a republic and a court. Powers are divided so that legislation, execution and adjudication rest in different hands. Law binds the government as it binds the citizen, which is what the rule of law means and what distinguishes a republic from an elective despotism. Amendment is deliberately difficult, so that the constitutional order outlasts the majority that inherits it.

Conservatives add the requirement the classical writers thought obvious: a republic runs on virtue. Montesquieu made this explicit in De l’esprit des lois in 1748, arguing that the principle animating a republic is virtue, meaning love of the laws and of the country, and that its corruption is the beginning of the form’s decay.³ A citizenry that regards public office as a means of private enrichment, or that expects the state to supply what family and locality once supplied, will not sustain republican institutions whatever the parchment says. This is why conservatives treat civil society, religion and the family as constitutional questions rather than private matters.

Differing Positions

Two challenges deserve a hearing.

The first is democratic. Critics argue that the republican structure of checks, staggered terms and judicial review is a device for frustrating majorities in the interest of property. The American Senate gives Wyoming and California equal weight; the electoral college has twice since 2000 produced a president who lost the popular vote; the courts strike down statutes passed by elected legislatures. If the people are sovereign, the argument runs, these are defects rather than safeguards.

The second is the neo-republican revision associated with Philip Pettit, whose Republicanism appeared in 1997. Pettit reconstructs the tradition around freedom as non-domination: a man is unfree if he stands subject to another’s arbitrary power, even where that power is not exercised.⁴ On this reading a republic must actively reduce dependence, which supports minimum wages, employment protection, welfare provision and regulation of concentrated private power. Classical liberals answer that expanding the state to remove private domination substitutes a larger master for a smaller one.

The conservative reply to the democratic objection is that unlimited majority rule is not liberty but its most efficient enemy, and that every republic which abandoned its checks in the name of the popular will, from Rome after the Gracchi to Weimar, arrived at the same destination.

References

1. Polybius, The Histories, book VI, trans. W. R. Paton (Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1923).
2. Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy (1531), trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (University of Chicago Press, 1996).
3. Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois (Barrillot et Fils, 1748), books III–VIII.
4. Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford University Press, 1997).