Thomas Jefferson's Liberal Anticapitalism

This article reassesses Thomas Jefferson's political economy in light of debates about the influence of liberal and republican ideas on his thought. I argue that Jefferson embraced liberal premises, but used them to reach anticapitalist conclusions. He opposed neither commerce nor the prosperity it promised; he opposed working for a wage, and he did so on liberal grounds. The first section of this article shows that John Locke's theory of property turns on the justification of capitalist labor relations. The second section establishes, first, that Locke's argument played a decisive role in the development of Jefferson's own and, second, that Jefferson redefined its terms to fashion a forceful critique of wage labor. An examination of Jefferson's writings elucidates a neglected variant of the liberal tradition, prevalent in the United States until the Populist agitation. Its core is the stigma attached to working for hire as a diminished form of liberty, tantamount to wage slavery.     

Liberty, Nobility, Philanthropy, and Power in Alexander Hamilton's Conception of Human Nature

Alexander Hamilton's conception of human nature grounds his political thought. His predominately and radically liberal conception of human nature is based on Locke's concept of liberty, Hobbes's concept of power, and Machiavelli's concept of the "effectual truth." It thus stresses the necessary relation between self-interest and republican government and entails the repudiation of classical republican and Christian political ideals. But Hamilton's love of liberty is nonetheless rooted in a sense of classical nobility and Christian philanthropy that elevates even while contradicting his liberalism. The complex relation between liberty, nobility, philanthropy, and power in Hamilton's conception of human nature, in effect, defines his thought, reveals its assumptions, constitutes its strengths, and poses urgent problems. That complexity forms the spirit of his liberal republicanism.     

Milton's Case for a Free Commonwealth

This article will examine the development of John Milton's arguments for democracy as against monarchy and other sorts of autocratic rule. These arguments are interesting both in their own right and insofar as they shed light on historiographical debates concerning the classical republican tradition. Milton is shown to hold a negative conception of liberty, as opposed to a positive or participatory conception, which lends support to the neo-roman interpretation of that tradition, associated with Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit. However, it is further shown that Sinner and Pettit misunderstand the classical republicans' case for democracy, attributing to them a conceptual argument in place of an empirical one. A better understanding of Milton's political theory contributes to a better understanding of this dilemma, and perhaps suggests a solution.     

A Public Ethics of Care for Policy Implementation

Liberal and republican political theorists have not paid much attention to a theory of public administration or policy implementation. To the extent that they have, they have tended to endorse an ideal-typical Weberian model of bureaucracy and impersonal ethics of rules to limit street-level discretion. This article argues that the Weberian bureaucratic ethics is inconsistent with core liberal and republican values and, in fact, dominating at the street level. In order for laws and policies to be implemented in a manner consistent with liberal and republican principles, an alternative public ethics is proposed—a public ethics of care. Building on earlier research, this article argues that a public ethics of care represents an important supplement to liberal and republican ideals, as well as a better alternative to Weberian bureaucratic ethics, for implementing laws and policies at the street level in limited and responsive, nondominating ways.     

The Primacy of the Political: Rahe and the Myth of the Polis

Paul Rahe belongs to the long tradition of mythologizing the polis , otherwise known as 'the classical republican tradition', which has two signal achievements to its credit. The first is to claim for the great landed monarchies of Europe the democratic legacy of the polis as their very own. The second is to distance themselves from eastern regimes by characterizing them as 'despotic' and 'other'. This tradition is seriously challenged by modern classical and Near Eastern scholarship, which shows city-republican forms to have originated in the east. Rahe's particular version is open to the additional challenge that it glorifies the male warrior polis , from which women were systematically excluded, 'as a moral community of men united by a common way of life', as if a community which depended on the labour of women but gave them no rights could have moral integrity.     

Quentin Skinner: From Historian of Ideas to Political Scientist

This article is an assessment of Quentin Skinner's contribution to the study of political change and to the contemporary debate in political philosophy. We argue that the significance of Skinner's work to a large extent has been neglected by political scientists, as they have tended to regard him solely as a historian of ideas rather than as a political scientist. However, Skinner's approach not only offers valuable methodological lessons but a historically grounded framework that accounts for the relationship between human agency and the structural language-context, that make actions meaningful. This allows for a conception of historical change that is neither narrowly structuralist nor exclusively focused on the individual agent. In his most recent historical works, Skinner has entered the main debate of contemporary political philosophy, i. e. the debate between liberals and communitarians. Here, his analysis of the classical republican tradition of political thought, attempts a revitalization of the debate beyond the stereotypes of liberalism and Aristotelianism. This work points towards the possibility of developing a radical reconception of modern liberal democracy.     

Liberalism and the Obligation to Military Service

This article argues that liberalism's failure to address systematically the question of citizens' obligation to military service is indicative of its wider failure to develop a satisfactory concept of citizenship. Whilst liberalism's individualist bias, implicit class assumptions and hope of transcending war have all contributed to neglect of citizen duty to bear arms, the most interesting reason, in relation to contemporary republican critiques, is liberalism's inadequate view of citizenship. This article examines the different approaches of the classical English liberals Locke, Bentham and J. S. Mill to international relations, forms of national defence and the role (if any) of citizens, and considers very briefly the views of some contemporary liberal theorists on military service and justified resistance to the draft. Finally, it comments on the implicit reliance of liberal polities on non-liberal models of citizenship, and the need for a coherent liberal concept of citizenship which includes an examination of responsibility for defence.     

The evolution of Israeli citizenship: an overview

Israel's citizenship discourse has consisted of three different layers, superimposed on one another: An ethno-nationalist discourse of inclusion and exclusion, a republican discourse of community goals and civic virtue, and a liberal discourse of civil, political, and social rights. The liberal discourse has served as the public face of Israeli citizenship and functioned to separate Israel's Jewish and Palestinians citizens from the non-citizen Palestinians in the occupied territories. The ethno-nationalist discourse has been invoked to discriminate between Jewish and Palestinian citizens within the sovereign State of Israel. Last, the republican discourse has been used to legitimate the different positions occupied by the major Jewish social groups: ashkenazim vs. mizrachim, males vs. females, secular vs. religiously orthodox. Until the mid-1980s the republican discourse, based on a corporatist economy centered on the umbrella labor organization – the Histadrut – mediated between the contradictory dictates of the liberal and the ethno-nationalist discourses. Since then, the liberalization of the Israeli economy has weakened the republican discourse, causing the liberal and ethno-nationalist ones to confront each other directly. Since the failure of the Oslo peace process in 2000, these two discourses have each gained the upper hand in one policy area – the liberal one in economic policy and the ethno-national one in policy towards the Palestinians and the Arabs in general. This division of labor is the reason why on the eve of its 60th anniversary as a state Israel is experiencing its worst crisis of governability ever. While Israel's economy is booming and the country's international standing remains high, due to the global ‘war on terror,’ public trust in state institutions and leaders is at an all-time low, so that the government cannot tend to the country's pressing business.     

The Radical Critique of Economic Inequality in Early American Political Thought

This article examines the ideological roots and historical development of an early radical economic egalitarian tradition in American political thought. It concentrates on a group of thinkers and social critics that were active from the 1820s through the beginning of the Civil War. Inspired by republican themes, they forged a radical critique of the emerging capitalist order and a skepticism of economic modernity. By reworking the republican political notion of an equality of social relations as an essential context for individual liberty, these radical critics posed a challenge to the emerging capitalist order. They would also be unique in the way that they analyzed the workings of this new economic system arguing that it was a mechanism that would systematically reproduce economic inequality eroding republican forms of government and society making them a distinct voice in America's egalitarian tradition.     

The Strange Career of British Democracy: John Milton to Gordon Brown

Political debate in modern Britain has been structured by four narratives or traditions, called here ‘Whig imperialist’, ‘Tory nationalist’, ‘democratic collectivist’ and ‘democratic republican’. The Whig imperialist tradition goes back to Edmund Burke; it is a tradition of responsive evolution, flexible statecraft, genial optimism and abhorrence of dogmatic absolutes. It prevailed for most of the nineteenth century, for most of the interwar period and for most of the 1950s and early‐1960s. Its Tory nationalist counterpart is tense, rebarbative and often shrill. At its core lies a primal fear of the dissolution of authority and a collapse of the social order. Its most notable exponents include Lord Salisbury, Enoch Powell and Margaret Thatcher. The democratic collectivist tradition stresses ineluctable progress towards a just and rational society, to be achieved by a strong, essentially technocratic central state, with the power and will to replace the wasteful, unjust chaos of the market place by planned co‐ordination. Formative influences on it were the great Fabian socialists, George Bernard Shaw and Sidney and Beatrice Webb; it achieved its apotheosis under the Attlee Government of 1945‐51. The democratic republican tradition is much more inchoate: its exponents have been the awkward squad of British democracy. The most glittering stars in the democratic republican firmament were probably John Milton, John Stuart Mill and R.H. Tawney. It stresses active self‐government and republican self respect, embodied in a vigorous civil society and strong local authorities. During the ninety‐odd years since Britain belatedly acquired a more‐or‐less democratic suffrage, the first three traditions have all been tested, almost to destruction. But though the fourth has had great influence on social movements of all kinds, governments at the centre have done little more than toy with it, usually for brief periods. The great question now is whether Britain is about to experience a democratic republican moment.     

Republican Europe and Multicultural Citizenship

This article explores the possibilities for a normative understanding of the politics of EU development from a republican perspective. It draws on current debates on republicanism, which combine republican, liberal and multicultural themes, and defends an approach to European citizenship and the design of European institutions in which the contemporary republican emphasis on freedom as non-domination is complemented with the multiculturalist concern with group rights that cut across national boundaries. It is argued that the combination of republican institutions and multicultural citizenship can provide a model for European construction.     

A Pragmatist Critique of Liberal Epistemology

Abstract

This paper wrestles with the issue of the place of comprehensive beliefs within the public space. It tries to strike a middle path between the liberal ban on comprehensive beliefs and the anti-liberal claim that comprehensive beliefs should be given full pride of place in public deliberations. The article relies on arguments that are inspired by the pragmatist tradition. It starts locating the main cause of failures at articulating comprehensive beliefs and public reason in a central feature of liberal epistemology, namely the way it conceives public reason via a preliminary distinction between public and non-public beliefs. After criticizing this distinction, the article introduces a distinction between the normative practice of justification and the normative practice of adjudication as a more perspicuous way to establish the place that comprehensive beliefs should play within political forums. It then concludes showing that this approach provides a satisfying answer to the issue of the public role of comprehensive beliefs in a liberal democratic regime that is respectful of citizens’ thick identities while at the same time complying with the requirements of respect set by the liberal tradition.     

New Public Management and Substantive Democracy

The authors are concerned that a remaining refuge of substantive democracy in America, the public sector, is in danger of abandoning it in favor of the market model of management. They argue that contemporary American democracy is confined to a shrunken procedural remnant of its earlier substantive form. The classical republican model of citizen involvement faded with the rise of liberal capitalist society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Capitalism and democracy coexist in a society emphasizing procedural protection of individual liberties rather than substantive questions of individual development. Today's market model of government in the form of New Public Management goes beyond earlier "reforms," threatening to eliminate democracy as a guiding principle in public-sector management. The authors discuss the usefulness of a collaborative model of administrative practice in preserving the value of democracy in public administration.     

A Strange Drift to the Right: The Civic Historiography of Michael Sandel

Michael Sandel's Democracy's Discontent strives to contribute to the project of "democratic theory," which aims to bring people together across ideological differences. Sandel wants to revitalize citizenship by uniting religious conservatives and those committed to a more just political economy through an appeal to the American tradition of civic republicanism. However, his project is fundamentally incoherent. First, Sandel's narrative conflates the republican and religious aspects of the American founding, ignoring the fact that civic republican political theory actually developed in direct opposition to the ideal of a Christian polity. Second, his version of civic republicanism deviates from the historic tradition in a way that renders it much more conservative than it actually was and might still be. Third, his reading of American history consistently highlights conservative themes. Consequently, Sandel ultimately undercuts the progressive aspects of his own vision, detracting from rather than contributing to the transideological aspirations of "democratic theory."     

Deliberative multiculturalism in New Labour's Britain

The aim of this paper is to examine the principles that New Labour has employed in its citizenship and multicultural policies in Britain, and to clarify theoretical locations as well as philosophical rationales of those principles. By deliberative multiculturalism, I mean a set of policies and discourses of New Labour about citizenship and multicultural issues, which emphasizes rational dialogue and mutual respect with firmly guaranteed political rights especially for minorities. New Labour tries to go beyond liberal and republican citizenship practice through enhancing deliberation, the origin of which goes back to the British tradition of parliamentary sovereignty. It also attempts to achieve a one-nation out of cultural cleavages, shifting its focus from redistribution with social rights to multicultural deliberation with political rights. I organize my discussion with a focus on the difference between two theoretical concepts: the relationship between cultural rights and individual equality, and the relationship between national boundaries and global belonging. In the concluding section, I explain three positive developments of New Labour's approach and also four limitations it has faced.     

The First Machiavellian Moment in America

Standard interpretations of early American political thought and of the classical‐republican tradition fit uneasily with an overlooked episode in the history of ideas: the reception of Machiavelli in seventeenth‐century New England. Some puritans there not only found ways to justify bad means for good ends but also adopted a deeper, properly political Machiavellism, upholding the priority of popular judgment over elite wisdom and of institutionalized accountability over discretionary political authority. Unlike the eighteenth‐century republicanism that has preoccupied modern scholarship, the theory of radical democracy associated with the first Machiavellian moment in America puts fundamental institutional reform and accountability with teeth on the agenda of democratic theory.     

Liberal Republicanism

In this article I defend a broadly Rawlsian interpretation of citizenship which combines both liberal and republican themes to provide an account of citizenship which is more appropriate for modern democracies than alternative interpretations, such as that offered by communitarian critics of political liberalism. Liberal republicanism, I argue, gives a convincing interpretation of the nature and value of citizenship and provides the basis for a radical political agenda.     

Equity and Political Economy in Thomas Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes is often viewed as a seminal figure in the development of the homo economicus philosophical anthropology central to the acquisitive, bourgeois morality of liberal modernity. The present study challenges this interpretation of Hobbes as an antecedent to free market ideology by arguing that his political economy presupposed a complex relation between contract, law, and social networks of credit informed by prudence and robust norms of equity. The normative claims of equity permeate Hobbes's holistic account of political economy and inform his vision of liberal statecraft that gave priority to prudential judgment against economic determinism, especially as Hobbes understood trade, taxation, allocation of resources, and the provision of social welfare. I will conclude by reflecting upon how Hobbes's political economy both reveals the internal diversity within the liberal intellectual tradition and can help us to better understand and critique contemporary liberal states and democratic theory.     

Anglicizing the United States Constitution: James Bryce's Contribution to Australian Federalism

James Bryce's analysis of American federalism made it possiblefor the Australian founders to reproduce federal institutionson the American model without replicating the republican andempirical ideas that underpinned them in the United States Constitution.Bryce's account in The American Commonwealth (1888) appealedto Australia's founders because it was suited to their needs.Bryce was English, and, like a sensible nineteenth-century Englishman,he argued that U. S. institutions had little to do with intellectualproduct. Instead, they were largely English institutions adaptedto American purposes. Reading Bryce, Australia's founders assumedthat if federal institutions had little to do with abstracttheory, and had simply been adapted to American circumstances,they might also be adapted to Australian circumstances. Thus,Bryce's approach to American federalism allowed Australia'sfounders to substitute their own colonial tradition of parliamentarydemocracy under the Crown for the republican principles of rightsand the separation of powers that underlie the U.S. Constitution.