The Force of the Example by Ferrara Alessandro;

Author:Ferrara, Alessandro;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI000000, Philosophy/General, PHI019000, Philosophy/Political
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2008-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Republican Challenge

In the preceding sections I have questioned the thesis that republicanism poses a challenge for other conceptions of politics by way of articulating a distinctive notion of freedom called “freedom from domination.” I took it for granted that the other aspects of the republican tradition—such as the glorification of vita activa as the best form of human flourishing—do not pose a great challenge to our pluralistic understanding of politics. Thus the question must now be addressed: does republicanism still retain a relevance for us in the twenty-first century over and beyond its unquestionable merits as the breeding ground for liberalism, and, if so, in what sense?

The relevance and value of the republican tradition, in my opinion, are best captured as an elective affinity of the republican perspective with a more general philosophical perspective that hinges around the normativity of situated identity. No thinker in the republican tradition has ever been attracted by abstract schemes, universal principles, or demonstrations more geometrico. Instead, a distinctive propensity for “rhetorics” has emerged among republican authors, in the positive sense that today would translate as “dialogue” or “discourse,” where rhetorics means the attempt to argumentatively woo the consensus of citizens in a context where the best solution to a given problem cannot be known a priori.

Republicanism is inherently equivalent with the exercise of public reason and judgment, almost coextensive with situated historical judgment and political judgment. When we read a text by Machiavelli, we are struck by the absence of any abstract speculation: the basis of his arguments is constituted entirely by an interpretation of historical facts—facts that may be remote from our perception but that must have been quite vivid in his contemporaries’ minds. This methodological choice is often portrayed—by critics and defenders of republicanism alike—as a prevailing of the “rhetorical moment,” as opposed to “rigorous,” i.e., “abstract,” theorizing, within republican thought. This description, however, renders a bad service to republicanism, in my opinion.

The enduring relevance of republicanism for political theory in the twenty-first century, and the challenge that it implicitly poses to liberalism, can be better understood as a propensity toward a form of universalism where the cogency of general principles is replaced by the force of the example and the argumentative cogency of exemplarity: the exemplarity of institutions, political arrangements and regimes, norms and the like that demand our consent, no less than works of art, by virtue of their capacity to set the (in this case, political) imagination in motion by virtue of their exceptional self-congruence.

As we have argued in chapter 2 in the context of a critical examination of Hannah Arendt’s interpretation of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, in politics no less than in art the exemplary provides guidance and exerts cogency beyond its immediate context of origin not as schemata do, by providing prior cases to which we can assimilate the present one, but as works of art do, namely, by providing outstanding instances of authentic congruency that are capable of educating our discernment by

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