Justin Champion delivering the first annual Christopher Hill memorial lecture at the National Civil War Centre, Newark, November 2018.
This month's blogpost, the latest in a series I have written on the myths surrounding republican government, is dedicated to the memory of the inspirational historian Justin Champion, who died last month, and whose research has fed directly into my thinking on this issue - and so many others.
The recent Covid-19 pandemic has raised important questions regarding the role of the state - particularly in times of crisis. In the UK, government intervention has been crucial in the form of the furloughing scheme and in providing cash injections to support small and medium sized businesses. At the same time, the high death rate in this country and the difficulties faced by the NHS have been blamed on decades of underfunding. On a broader scale it is self-evident that at a time when there is a high demand for Personal Protective Equipment and coronavirus testing kits in countries across the world, a market economy will operate in the interests of the richest and most powerful countries at the expense of poorer ones, bringing increased risks for their citizens and for the world.
This therefore seems a good moment to pay attention to another 'myth' relating to republicanism: that it either has little to say about twenty-first century economic matters or that it offers an unrealistic approach to economics that is antagonistic towards the market - regarding it, in Gerald Gaus's words, as 'inherently unfree and immoral' (quoted in Richard Dagger, 'Neo-republicanism and the civic economy', Politics, Philosophy and Economics 5:2, 2006: 158). In the same vein Gordon Wood, the historian of revolutionary America, has described republicanism as 'essentially anti-capitalistic' (Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787. Chapel Hill, 1969, p. 418). This attitude has led some to conclude that republicanism can have no place in the politics of the twenty-first century.
However, this is open to serious question. As is the case with many of these modern myths, its roots are to be found deep in history - or perhaps more accurately in historiography. In 1975 the great intellectual historian John Pocock produced a groundbreaking book The Machiavellian Moment, which traced the journey of republican ideas from the ancient world, via Renaissance Italy and early modern England, to their zenith in revolutionary America. Pocock paid particular attention to how those ideas faired in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Britain, highlighting the inevitable tension between the republican emphasis on virtue and the rise of commerce, and presenting republican authors as antagonistic to the new commercial society that was emerging around them. This fed into a wider argument about an incompatibility between liberalism and republicanism that was central to Pocock's book.
The Ponte Vecchio which spans the Arno river in Florence and has been the location for shops since the thirteenth century. Image by Rachel Hammersley.
While the distinction between liberalism and republicanism was challenged from the outset, the notion of republican virtue as inherently at odds with commercial society and a market economy proved more persistent. Nonetheless, recent research has begun to reveal it too to be a false dichotomy.
In a 2001 article Mark Jurdjevic took issue with Pocock's account of Renaissance Italy, arguing that Florentine civic humanism (the underpinning of the republican arguments of that time) was in fact the ideology of an 'ascendant merchant class'. He went on to suggest that commerce and private wealth were not a threat to the republic, but rather were crucial to its survival (Mark Jurdjevic, 'Virtue, Commerce, and the Enduring Florentine Republican Moment: Reintegrating Italy into the Atlantic Republican Debate', Journal of the History of Ideas, 62:4, 2001: 721-43).
The dedicatory letter at the beginning of John Toland’s edition of The Oceana and Other Works of James Harrington (London, 1737), one of the texts cited in Justin Champion’s article. Here Toland celebrates the wealth and riches of London, which he attributes to English liberty, and likens Harrington’s constitution to that of the Bank of England. Copy author’s own.
Jurdjevic's conclusion chimes with the findings of Steve Pincus on seventeenth-century England, which at that time was already experiencing an expansion of trade. Pocock had focused on figures like James Harrington and John Milton who were hostile to commercial culture. Yet, as Pincus shows, there were plenty of supporters of commonwealth government prepared to defend the new commercial society (Steve Pincus, 'Neither Machiavellian Moment nor Possessive Individualism: Commercial Society and the Defenders of the English Commonwealth', The American Historical Review, 103:3, 1998: 705-36). The author of The Grand Concernments of England, for example, declared that 'trade is the very life and spirits of a common-wealth' (Anon., The Grand Concernments of England Ensured... London, 1659, p. 32).
Justin Champion has gone even further, drawing on little known published writings and unpublished manuscripts produced by John Toland and Robert Molesworth to show that these eighteenth-century 'commonwealthsmen' had a more subtle and sophisticated attitude to commerce than they have been given credit for. While they were certainly worried about the corruption that might be introduced by speculation, paper stocks, and credit, they drew an important distinction between schemes in which these mechanisms served only private interests and those that operated for the benefit of the public. While they condemned the former, they accepted that the latter could perform an important function in a well-organised republican state (Justin Champion, '"Mysterious politicks": land, credit and Commonwealth political economy, 1656-1722' in Money and Political Economy in the Enlightenment, ed. Daniel Carey. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2014, pp. 117-62).
Thomas Paine, copy by Auguste Millière after an engraving by William Sharp, after George Romney, c.1876, based on a work of 1792. Reproduced under a creative commons license from the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, NPG 897.
Could that notion of an economy operating in the interests of the public good, rather than in private interests, provide the basis for a republican political economy in the twenty-first century? The political philosopher Richard Dagger certainly thinks so. In a 2006 article he sketched out the key features of a neo-republican economy where the market would be preserved but be directed towards the service of the public good. This would require that certain values be allowed to trump the unfettered operation of the market. Efficiency in the production and distribution of goods and services would certainly be valued, but the interests and well-being of citizens would be deemed more important. For example, there would be constraints on managerial decision-making and institutional guarantees for workers to be able to contest managerial directives. Similarly, the market would be curbed to secure the protection and flourishing of communities, which might mean giving careful consideration to the impact of economic decisions on the environment or on particular groups within society. Dagger also proposes several mechanisms designed to secure greater financial equality and a better redistribution of wealth among citizens. These include a robust inheritance tax, a progressive consumption tax, and a minimum level of financial support for all citizens to help make financial security - and therefore self-government - possible for all, regardless of background. Options for the delivery of this financial support could include a basic income, of the kind advocated recently by the economist Guy Standing, or a basic capital grant, an idea originally proposed by the eighteenth-century revolutionary Thomas Paine in The Rights of Man.
If Dagger is right then perhaps it would be possible to build on republican arguments of the past to develop an economic system in which the market can be directed towards advancing the public good. The current crisis provides an incentive for us to do so, and perhaps also the opportunity.