This Time by Benjamin T. Jones

Author:Benjamin T. Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Schwartz Publishing Pty. Ltd

Unlike the theory of liberalism articulated by John Locke in the seventeenth century, freedom in the civic republican tradition is not tied to individual rights but to the common good. The concept of virtue is crucial. The best kind of polis encourages citizens to see themselves as part of a community. Aristotle puts it this way: ‘To secure the good of one person only is better than nothing, but to secure the good of a nation or a state is a nobler and more divine achievement.’21

Aristotle was not an Athenian citizen. He was a Macedonian who travelled to Greece to study under Plato, before teaching others (including Alexander the Great). Perhaps it was his position as an outsider that gave him perspective. Athenian citizens were not equal in material wealth, but their equal vote in the ekklēsia was the great leveller. Through citizenship, the powers of a monarch were shared among the people. To use this power for personal gain was a form of corruption. Built into the psyche of the virtuous citizen is a desire to pursue the common good.

For Cicero also, virtue was critical to the survival of the state. The Roman republic was less democratic than the Athenian polis, and citizenship was ranked: from the elite senators, to the middle-class equestrians, and finally to the plebeians. Each class had its own assembly to debate public matters, but in reality power was concentrated in the hands of a small few. Like Aristotle, Cicero was writing at a time of crisis. The naked ambition of Julius Caesar threatened to topple the democratic nature of the republic. Cicero looked back to Aristotle and his peripatetic school of philosophy. He wrote, somewhat optimistically, that ‘I will content myself with asserting that Nature has implanted in the human race so great a need of virtue and so great a desire to defend the common safety that the strength thereof has conquered all the adherents of pleasure and ease’.22

Like Aristotle, Cicero takes it as a given that humans are social. It is not just for material benefit or safety that we live in communities, but because we crave interaction, discussion and debate. Cicero examined other forms of constitution but concluded that only a republican form was truly legitimate because it gave ultimate authority to the people.

Many influential writers drew on these ancient civic republican theorists. Niccolò Machiavelli in renaissance Italy, James Harrington in seventeenth-century England, and James Madison in the nascent United States of the late eighteenth century all took inspiration from the classical republican tradition when seeking the best form of government for their own societies. Even the word ‘republic’, derived from the Latin res publica, literally means a public matter. Monarchic apologists, such as Frank Prochaska, are quick to remind us that this does not necessarily mean the absence of a king.23 Indeed, a mixed constitution with shared power is central to civic republican thought. Machiavelli argues that in a constitution combining principato (a principality), ottimati (aristocrats) and popolare (democracy), ‘each would keep watch over the other’.

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