The Specter of Democracy by Howard Dick;

Author:Howard, Dick;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI019000, Philosophy/Political, PHI000000, Philosophy/General
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2002-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

Intersecting Trajectories of Republicanism in France and the United States

THE CONCEPT OF REPUBLICANISM: HISTORICAL SYMMETRIES AND ASYMMETRIES

Like many inherited historical concepts, republicanism has been understood differently in different contexts and at different times. This has resulted in confusion, polemic, and, most often, paradoxes that also have the benefit of adding depth and richness to the concept itself. So it is today. As used in France, republicanism refers to the political project that found its idealized representation in a vision of universal citizenship that is identified with the achievements of the Third Republic. In the United States, the concept designates the social community needed to provide a meaningful identity to the participants in a liberal polity organized to ensure competition among people who benefit from equal but abstract individual rights. The paradoxical result of the French stress on the political form of republicanism as opposed to the American emphasis on its social implications is that in practice French republicans defend just the kind of formal abstract rights that American republicans denounce as liberalism, while American republicans praise the kind of identity politics that the French republicans criticize as a threat to the unity of the nation. This paradox is all the more frustrating because both sides seek the same result: inclusion. But the meaning of that concept too remains unclear. Is the system to include the individual, or does the action of the individual reproduce and validate (or transform) the system?

Republican political theory has served and continues to serve in both countries as a critique of the existing society. In France, the republican critique today focuses on the problem of exclusion rather than the old Marxist notion of class. The excluded are those whom society is unable to integrate not only into its economy—whose capitalist nature is often ignored or reduced to the euphemism “the market”—but into its political life as well. Republicanism and integration stand together as a political program.1 In the United States, the concept is related to the (often vague) concept of communitarianism, which is invoked to denounce the abstract legalism and competitive egoism of an individualistic liberalism that both veils and rationalizes a self-denying society through the politics of what Benjamin Barber criticizes as “thin democracy.”2 It demands a participatory rather than a merely representative democracy and stresses personal virtue and “the good” rather than the individual rights that serve political liberalism as trumps in the game of life. The fact that American republicanism can come to imply the demand for more social—even socialist—measures returns to the initial paradox. It inverts the French quest for a political alternative to radical social—or socialist—demands.

This polar opposition of the French and American representations of republicanism has the virtue of identifying a problem but the weakness of remaining at a formal level. In both cases, republicanism can play a critical function because it represents a political solution to social problems.3 In both cases, it proposes guidelines for eliminating exclusion and ensuring inclusion (although the community sought by the French is national and universal, while the American model is more limited and particular).

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