Answers to Questions

Answers to Questions

Questions: 1

Contemporary republicanism challenges liberalism as political doctrine on the basis of a largely familiar anti-liberal platform according to which liberalism wrongly promotes or assumes individualism, scepticism and atomism. That is the uninteresting part about republicanism: its 'hysterically' negative positioning in opposition to liberalism, which it construes too often in a cardboard-like, generic or simply misleading fashion. In doing what other communitarian, feminist, post-modern, deliberative democratic and even perfectionist liberal authors do, which is to find fault with liberalism (or at least a certain mainstream version of it) as an advocate of a morally wanting political morality, republican authors propose a more political version of communitarian thought. The main gist of a basic republican argument is that individual freedom and the freedom of a state, the endurance and quality of liberal democratic systems depend on the civic involvement of its citizens. The nature of that civic involvement can range from contestation of public decisions to participation in public deliberations on matters of common concern. A contemporary republican theory will contain arguments of collective self-government, non-domination, patriotism, freedom and political autonomy in different forms and to different degrees.

Different authors will focus on some of these ideas rather than all. Because of this protean character of contemporary republican thought, as well as a certain lack of conceptual clarity, one of the first tasks that I am undertaking is to reconstruct and interpret specific republican arguments. Then, the more substantive and interesting task is to assess the normative coherence of different strategies in promoting republican arguments, as well as to try to ascertain their specificity.

The conclusion that I reach, after trying to steer the analysis through the dangerously unclear waters of themes, authors or arguments that are republican (not all necessarily at the same time) is that it is not to the notion of freedom as non-domination that we should look if we want to find that which is normatively salient in republicanism. Where republicanism seems to hold best hope is in the notion of self-government understood to refer to enhanced civic participation in public deliberations related to matters of common concern. I then argue that republican ideas of enhanced civic participation could be better defended if they were conceptualized as part of a general notion of republican political obligation. I argue in other words, for a general normative justification for republican citizenship that could ground normatively the basic republican idea that citizens should take active part in civic life rather than merely obey just institutions. After developing the argument for the appropriateness of the notion of political obligation, I go on to construct a role-based justification for demanding republican obligations such as an obligation to deliberate, to do so from public reason and to contribute to the economic empowering of others, so that they too can take part in deliberations.

Despite a certain revival of republican thought inspired by a revisionist history of ideas of the Founding Fathers' project and a subsequent interest in republican arguments from an American juridical ...