The contemporary study of the history of republican institutions and political theory was given much of its impetus by Pocock 1975. Pocock himself was inspired by Baron 1955, 1968 and Arendt 1958 to give great weight to the role of citizen participation in this tradition. Q. Skinner 1978, 1990 followed Pocock’s lead in focusing attention on the conceptual vocabulary of republicanism, but did so in such a manner as to depart from or qualify Pocock’s
Focus on the Aristotelian roots of republicanism. In Skinner’s account, Roman and late medieval theorists and lawyers predominate, with freedom being understood primarily as the freedom from arbitrary oppression rather than the positive freedom to participate in the common enterprise of rule. The common thread linking the enterprise of these scholars is a lament at the depoliticization of modern life, in which the economic interests of corporate bodies often supplant the deliberations of an engaged citizenry, and an effort to recover a historical alternative to counterbalance contemporary liberalism and its excessive concern with security, property, and the protection of other individual and economic rights. Pettit 1997 and Viroli 2002 elaborate applications of this standpoint to contemporary debates and issues.
In part as a reaction to the widespread influence of Pocock’s approach, and in part as a deepening or reconsideration of his insights, an alternative account of the republican tradition has emerged. Mansfield (1979, 1989, 1996), Rahe (1992), and M. Zuckert (1998) have been its chief exponents, arguing that Machiavelli is best understood to have broken with rather than revived Aristotelian republicanism, and that his distinctively modern version is compatible with or even contributes to the rise of liberal politics. Hankins 2000 offers critiques of the ‘‘classical republicanism’’ thesis from this and other perspectives. Yet even these ‘‘revisionist’’ accounts share something with that of the ‘‘classical republicans’’ as they too call into question the triumphalism of overly Whiggish or progressive interpretations of our political history, a point given special emphasis by Manent 1998.
World History
