Transcript Republics Lecture Powerpoint (22/1/2015) File

REPUBLICS
Alexander Watson
Ideas and Identities
22 January 2015
What is a Republic?
The Republic
of France
The United States of America
What is a Republic?
The Republic of Belarus
The Democratic People’s Republic
of North Korea
INTRODUCTION
• Some definitions…
• Renaissance Italy and Classical
Republicanism
• The English Civil War, 1642-51
• The American Revolution, 1775-83
• Conclusion
A nineteenth century depiction of the Roman Senate
Key Terms:
• Republic
- A state in which the supreme power rests in the
people and their elected representatives or
officers, as opposed to one governed by a king or
similar ruler; a commonwealth. Now also applied
loosely to a state which claims this designation.
- [Etymology: Latin – respublica. Res – affair, matter,
thing; publica – public. Entered English language
from French c.1600]
Republicanism
- Republican spirit; attachment or adherence to
republican principles; republican government or
institutions.
• Tyranny
– The government of an absolute ruler or tyrant,
that is one who seizes upon the sovereign power
in a state without legal right; arbitrary or
oppressive exercise of power
[Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, part iv, chap. 46. ‘From
Aristotles Civill Philosophy, they have learned, to
call all manner of Common-wealths but the
Popular, (such as was at that time the state of
Athens) Tyranny. All Kings they called Tyrants’.]
• State
– The body politic as organised for supreme civil
rule and government; the political organisation
which is the basis of civil government; a body of
people occupying a defined territory and
organised under a sovereign government.
[Walter Raleigh (1618); ‘State is the frame or set
order of a Common-wealth, or of the Governors
that rule the same, especially of the chief and
Sovereign Governor that commandeth the rest’.]
Italy, c.1494
VENICE
The perfect cityrepublic?
Procession of the True Cross in Piazza San Marco, Venice, 1496, by Gentile Bellini
- Consiglio Grande
Body responsible
for appointing
most city officials
- Senate
Controlled foreign
& financial affairs
- Doge
Acted with his
council as the
elected head of
government
Florence
Florence
• 1382-1434
• 1434-1494
• 1494-1512
•
•
•
•
1512-1527
1527-1530
1530-1532
From 1532
Republican Regime: oligarchy
Medici Regime (unofficially
dominated by Medici family)
The restored Republic (Great
Council)
The Return of the Medici
The Last Republic
The Medici Principate
The Medici Duchy
Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527)
Machiavelli’s most
important works:
Discourses (above)
and The Prince (left)
Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy (1513-19)
• Book I, 1-18: nature of republican institutions
• 3 books:
– Internal affairs of Roman republic
– External affairs
– Private citizens
Ancient texts
• Livy – Roman historian (59BC-17AD) Ab urbe condita libri
– Virtue of Romans, Fortune, glorious past
• Polybius – Greek historian (203-120BC) Histories:
cycle of corruption of states:
monarchy>>>tyranny
aristocracy>>>oligarchy
democracy>>>licence/tyranny
Why are republics superior to monarchies?
•
•
•
•
•
•
Prudence, stability of people > than a prince
Longer life than principality
Common good observed in republics
Observe treatises more than princes
> gratitude to city than prince to subjects
More virtu in people than prince
The historian Blair Worden on English Republicanism:
• ‘... the movement of intellectual protest which
opposed the rise of the Renaissance and Baroque
monarchies of early modern Europe, and which, in
articulating that opposition, drew extensively on
the political writings and the political practices of
classical antiquity. This was the republicanism
whose vocabulary Niccolo Machiavelli had done
more than any other writer of the Renaissance to
shape. By 1600 Italian republicanism had lost its
vitality.... In the seventeenth century it was in
England that Machiavelli’s ideas were most
substantially developed and adapted, and that
republicanism came once more to life’.
The English Civil War, 1642-51
King Charles I attempts to arrest 5 members of the House of Commons
in Parliament, 4 January 1642
Cromwell chops down
the royal oak. A piece of
political propaganda by
Clement Walker (1649)
The American Revolution, 1775-83
The Constitution of the United States (1789)
“We the People of the United States, in
Order to form a more perfect Union,
establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility,
provide for the common defence, promote
the general Welfare, and secure the
Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our
Posterity, do ordain and establish this
Constitution for the United States of
America.”
Conclusion
The Origins of Republicanism
• Classical / Biblical texts
• Renaissance interpretations
The Values of Classical Republicanism
• Commitment to the value of political liberty
• In a free republic, laws not men rule
• Stress on values of civic virtue and danger
of corruption
“Freedom for France … Freedoms
for the French” (Poster – 1940)