Caudillismo along the Nile

The “coup-volution” of 2011 removed President Mubarak but not his authoritarian regime, which is now guided by his successor, President Abd al Fattah al-Sisi. Both autocrats, there are nevertheless important differences between these two presidents and their respective regimes. Sisi’s tougher authoritarianism is analogous to the Latin American prototype of “delegative democracy”, a stalled phase of democratic institution-building in which voters delegate their authority to the president, who rules unconstrained by a balance of institutional powers. The primary feature of what in the Egyptian case might better be termed “delegative authoritarianism” is the decision-making autonomy of the president, who perceives himself as the “embodiment of the nation and the main custodian and definer of its interests”. This results in erratic, inconsistent and ineffective policymaking, which isolates the president yet more from institutions and political forces, while causing the entire polity to be suffused with a deep cynicism. Although the most probable scenario is that Sisi will continue for the foreseeable future as Egypt’s delegative dictator, as a one-man band his regime is inherently unstable and prone to coups, coup-volutions and outright revolutions.     

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.     

Republicanism, Freedom from Domination, and the Cambridge Contextual Historians

Philip Pettit, in Republicanism: a Theory of Freedom and Government (1997), draws on the historiography of classical republicanism developed by the Cambridge Contextual Historians, John Pocock and Quentin Skinner, to set up a programme for the recovery of the Roman Republican notion of freedom, as freedom from domination. But it is my purpose to show that classical republicanism, as a theory of institutional complexity and balanced government, could not, and did not, lay exclusive claim to freedom from domination as a defining value. Positive freedom was a concept ubiquitous in Roman Law and promulgated in Natural Law as a universal human right. And it was just the ubiquitousness of this right to freedom, honoured more often in the breach than the observance, which prompted the scorn of early modern proto-feminists like Mary Astell and her contemporary, Judith Drake. The division of society into public and private spheres, which liberalism entrenched, precisely allowed democrats in the public sphere full rein as tyrants in the domestic sphere of the family, as these women were perspicacious enough to observe. When republicanism is defined in exclusively normative terms the rich institutional contextualism drops away, leaving no room for the issues it was designed to address: the problematic relation between values and institutions that lies at the heart of individual freedoms.