1. Alexander Watson Ideas and Identities 22 January 2015
REPUBLICS
Alexander Watson
Ideas and Identities
22 January 2015

2. The United States of America
What is a Republic?
The Republic of France
The United States of America

3. The Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea
What is a Republic?
The Republic of Belarus
The Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea

4. A nineteenth century depiction of the Roman Senate
INTRODUCTION
Some definitions…
Renaissance Italy and Classical Republicanism
The English Civil War,
The American Revolution,
Conclusion
A nineteenth century depiction of the Roman Senate

5. 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.

6. 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’.]

7. 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’.]

8. Italy, c.1494

9. The perfect city-republic?
VENICE
The perfect city-republic?
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
Procession of the True Cross in Piazza San Marco, Venice, 1496, by Gentile Bellini

10. Florence

11. Florence 1382-1434 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
From 1532 The Medici Duchy

12. Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527)
Machiavelli’s most important works: Discourses (above) and The Prince (left)

13. 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

14. Ancient texts Livy – Roman historian (59BC-17AD) Ab urbe condita libri
Virtue of Romans, Fortune, glorious past
Polybius – Greek historian ( BC) Histories:
cycle of corruption of states:
monarchy>>>tyranny
aristocracy>>>oligarchy
democracy>>>licence/tyranny

15. 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

16. 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’.

17. The English Civil War,
King Charles I attempts to arrest 5 members of the House of Commons in Parliament, 4 January 1642

18. Cromwell chops down the royal oak
Cromwell chops down the royal oak. A piece of political propaganda by Clement Walker (1649)

19. 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.”

20. 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)