The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought

The author’s copy of Eric Nelson’s book. Image Rachel Hammersley.

I am currently co-teaching a module on 'The Scientific Revolution'. Consequently, Isaac Newton's famous comment to Robert Boyle about 'standing on the shoulders of giants' was already in my mind on 15th February when I attended a symposium at St Andrews. This was organised by Ariane Fichtl to discuss Eric Nelson's important book The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought, which was first published 20 years ago. In his remarks Eric commented that he had wondered beforehand what he would like to hear from those who were gathered to discuss his book. He quickly realised that, while being told 'you were right' would be flattering, it would also be rather disappointing. What he was hoping for, then, was for his book to have provoked thought and discussion and that the conversations inspired by it were still ongoing.

Of course, as Eric would be the first to note, he was himself standing on the shoulders of giants. This point was made explicitly in Quentin Skinner's opening paper in which he presented a useful typology of scholars. There are, he argued, supporters (who champion the work of those who have gone before) and challengers. The challengers can then be divided into contradictors (who insist that those who have come before have got it wrong) and supplementers (who praise past work, while suggesting that something important has been missed). The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought, Quentin suggested, is a good example of this last approach.

Quentin Skinner speaking at the symposium. Image courtesy of Lightbox St Andrews.

Prior to the publication of Eric's book, work on republicanism - including that of Quentin Skinner himself - had tended to emphasise the Roman origins of early modern republican thought. On this account, the ultimate purpose of life was to attain honour or glory. Crucial to this pursuit was a view of liberty as independence, which was grounded in the fundamental Roman distinction between a free person and a slave. What characterised a free person was that they were not dependent on the will of anyone else. This entailed living under the rule of law (not the arbitrary will of a sovereign) and having influence over the making of those laws (whether directly or via representatives). Moreover, those laws ought to protect the life, liberty, and property of the citizens, so that the understanding of justice at the heart of this Roman conception of republican rule involved 'giving each their due'.

What Eric had noticed was that while this Roman version of republicanism was certainly influential in early modern Europe, it was not the only one. Alongside it there developed an alternative understanding of republican rule that was more indebted to Greek sources. Here the aim was not for citizens to attain honour and glory, but rather to achieve happiness. Consequently, the emphasis was more on the contemplative than the active life. Liberty on this account involved not being enslaved to passion, but being ruled by reason and therefore by individuals who were themselves rational and virtuous. Yet authors in this tradition noted that a threat was posed to this ideal when individuals were able to accumulate wealth, creating a significant gap between rich and poor. Under these circumstances wealth would tend to be valued above virtue, causing corruption. Consequently these authors insisted not on the protection of private property, but rather accepted some measure of redistribution in order to maintain the balance required to ensure the rule of reason and virtue. On the Greek account this balance, or right ordering of the system, was what constituted justice.

Francesco Patrizi. Image taken from Wikimedia Commons.

In his book, Eric identified Thomas More, James Harrington, the baron de Montesquieu and others as exemplifying - and developing - this Greek tradition. As Eric himself noted, one way in which the conversation he initiated has been continued is through additions to the tradition. Several papers adopted this approach, proposing figures who did not appear in The Greek Tradition for inclusion. In other words, there was further supplementation.

James Hankins put the case for Francesco Patrizi of Siena. Patrizi drew on recently translated Greek material and adopted a Greek view of private property in line with the model set out in The Greek Tradition. According to Hankins, Patrizi drew a clear distinction between the social hierarchy, where wealth and ancestry were key, and the political order - which should be organised according to virtue and merit.

The grounds for including Patrizi within the Greek tradition seem relatively straightforward. Filippo Marchetti and I made the case for figures whose inclusion is less so, but who nonetheless pose interesting questions for the tradition. Filippo's paper focused on Alberto Radicati of Passeran. He explored the intertwining of republicanism and deism in Radicati's thought, arguing that he had an ethical preference for democracy. In my paper I considered the late eighteenth-century radical Thomas Spence. Spence was directly inspired by Thomas More and James Harrington, and like them he proposed restrictions on landed property to secure a fairer government and society.

A sketch of Thomas Spence's profile from the Hedley Papers at the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society. Reproduced with permission.

Adding new individuals to traditions often highlights new dimensions. The discussion generated by these and other papers emphasised the importance of education, religion, and democracy

In his discussion of Patrizi, James Hankins noted Patrizi's belief that virtue and merit could be stimulated by education in the classics. A similar claim was made by Isabelle Avci in her paper on Thomas More's biography of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Noting that Pico was a controversial figure, and therefore a curious choice for More, she argued that he helped More to address the question of how an individual could maintain virtue while pursuing a political career. For More, as for Pico, education - and, in particular, reading - facilitated the cultivation of virtue through access to the divine. This offered More a means of combining the active and the contemplative life - treating them as complementary - rather than facing a strict choice between the two. Eric had already noted the importance of education in his book and it was crucial to Spence too. In contrast to Patrizi, however, who insisted that all citizens should be taught Latin to break the monopoly of the rich on a classical education and therefore on virtue, Spence and his associates sought instead to render a classical education unnecessary by ensuring that individuals could learn to read, speak, and write just as effectively without this form of learning.

This rejection of the classics could be a reason to exclude Spence from the Greek tradition, along with his democratic bent. As Eric explained, while the Greek tradition does involve the deployment of radical means - in the form of state redistribution of property - it does so in the pursuit of hierarchical ends - namely the rule of those with reason and virtue. Consequently, democracy, despite its Greek roots, was not central to Eric's book - only featuring towards the end in the discussion of a late adaptation of the Greek tradition in Alexis de Tocqueville's reflections on America.

Eric Nelson speaking at the symposium. Image courtesy of Lightbox St Andrews.

Yet several contributors to the symposium explored the theme of democracy, suggesting that it perhaps has more to contribute to the Greek tradition than might initially be thought. In part this is because two types of democracy emerge from the Greek sources. Extreme democracy, which was the focus of Eero Samuel Arum's paper, builds on Aristotle's account of democracy in Book 4 of the Politics, and describes a society in which the multitude has control over the laws. By contrast, restricted democracy draws on Aristotle's notion of politeia. Here sovereignty lies with the people, but virtuous magistrates are chosen by them to rule. The paper demonstrated that Jean Bodin's theory of sovereignty is indebted to this idea. It was also, as Markku Peltonen showed, much discussed by political scientists working in the Holy Roman Empire in the early modern period. Most accepted it as a viable form of government (in contrast to extreme democracy, which they firmly rejected) and some even saw it as the best form. What this tells us, as Markku highlighted, is that representative democracy did not - as was conventionally claimed - emerge fully formed in the age of the democratic revolution, but had its foundations in this tradition. Interestingly, this is also a topic that Eric himself explored in more detail in his Seeley Lectures delivered at the University of Cambridge in 2024.

Mary Wollstonecraft by John Opie, c. 1797. National Portrait Gallery, NPG 1237. Reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.

Building on this democratic theme, several papers considered how Greek ideas could be deployed to justify a widening of the political nation. Hannah Dawson argued that while the Greek tradition looks on the surface to be hostile to women, some early modern feminists quickly found a loophole that they could exploit to argue their case for inclusion. While the notion that the intellectually and morally superior should rule was widely used to exclude women from politics, figures like Mary Astell and Mary Wollstonecraft questioned whether those men who currently hold power are entirely rational and, therefore, fit to rule. Conversely, on this account, rational women should be equally capable of political participation. Hannah also noted that the Greek idea of the contemplative life also offered something to women who could see their minds as free even when constrained under a patriarchal system.

Eran Shalev also touched on the opening up of politics and education to women in his paper on the democratisation of the American Republic in the nineteenth century. His main point, though, and one which was also emphasised in Becca Palmer's paper on debates in colonial American newspapers in the period 1765-1775, was that Greek ideas - and especially the example of Athens - offered a model for democratisation and empowerment.

Ariane Fichtl speaking at the symposium. Image courtesy of Lightbox St Andrews.

Finally three papers looked more explicitly at how the Greek tradition provided practical tools for use in different times and places. Mishael Knight argued that the enclosure commissioner Sir John Hales used Appian's account of ancient agrarian laws to inspire and justify sixteenth-century English agrarian policy. Hales explicitly rejected the Roman notion that justice required giving each their own, insisting instead that redistribution was justified in order to prevent a great distinction between rich and poor. In her closing keynote, Ariane Fichtl showed how the Greek tradition also offered a tool for abolitionists in their development of strong philosophical arguments against slavery. Aristotle's ambiguity on slavery made it possible for abolitionists to use his notion of legal slavery in the Nicomachean Ethics to condemn slavery as tyranny while firmly rejecting his argument in the Politics about the existence of natural slaves. Moreover, unlike its Roman equivalent, the Greek tradition did not insist on an absolute division between dependence and independence, opening the way for the powerful idea of interdependence. Finally Marijn Nolmans's paper suggested that the Greek tradition might offer an alternative to Rawlsian liberalism today. He argued that a combination of the neo-Roman idea of political liberty, Aristotle's notion of human flourishing, perfectionism, and justice understood as the fair distribution of resources, could produce an ideal political society that would not only be free and just, but could also facilitate the flourishing of citizens and encourage excellence in a wide variety of domains.

As can be seen from this, Eric can be assured that conversations sparked by The Greek Tradition have not been exhausted yet

Some of the speakers from the symposium. Image courtesy of Lightbox St Andrews.

Corruption

There has been much talk in recent weeks of the presence of corruption in British politics. The Prime Minister and members of the Cabinet appear to be relaxed about accepting gifts from wealthy donors. Keir Starmar is said to have accepted £76,000 worth of gifts since 2019 including £16,200 of work clothing from the Labour peer Waheed Alli, as well as corporate hospitality at Arsenal and Taylor Swift concert tickets. (For an in-depth assessment see Peter Geoghegan, 'Labour and the Lobbyists', London Review of Books, 15 August 2024, pp. 10-12).

Image of the Prime Minister’s official residence at 10 Downing Street, taken from Wikimedia Commons.

Of course, such gifts are nothing new, and the perks Labour ministers have accepted pale into insignificance alongside Boris Johnson's Caribbean holiday on the island of Mustique, courtesy of the co-founder of Carphone Warehouse David Ross, and the refurbishment of his Downing Street flat that was paid for by Lord Brownlow. The idea that being in government brings perks way beyond the imagination of most working people seems to be widely accepted, at least among politicians themselves.

However, there is an issue about the gap that this creates between the Government and those it governs and represents. Another concern is the fact that the gift-givers might expect something in return - such as a blue light escort through the capital or favourable deals and contracts.

Corruption is not a new problem in Britain. As long ago as 1701, a pamphlet was published entitled: The Corruption and Impiety of the Common Members of the Late House of Commons. Its author claimed that the government had fallen into decay and observed that even those candidates who before being elected had insisted that they would be 'True-Representatives of the People' - once in office 'have done nothing worthy of the Name of Englishmen' (The Corruption and Impiety of the Common Members of the Late House of Commons. London, 1701).

While what was meant by corruption in the eighteenth century was not necessarily the same as what is meant by it now, understanding how the term was used then and why it was a cause for concern, might illuminate the issues under debate today.

Image depicting Aristotle. Taken from Wikimedia Commons.

In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, concern about the problem of corruption was grounded in the understanding that the British constitution required that the three elements of the system - Crown, Lords, and Commons - needed to be balanced with and against each other, so as to ensure that the whole would operate in the interests of the public good. The notion of balance in government was based on ancient ideas: Aristotle's assessment of the advantages and disadvantages of the rule of the one, the few, and the many; and Polybius's suggestion that a mixed government comprising all three could secure the advantages of each without their disadvantages. This understanding of mixed or balanced government - and of the English parliamentary system as an embodiment of it - was voiced by many on the parliamentarian side during the mid-seventeenth-century Civil Wars. More interesting is the fact that in 1642 it was used by the writers of His Majesties Answer to the Nineteen Proposition to counter the demands made of the King in those Propositions:

There being three kinds of government among men (absolute monarchy, aristocracy,

and democracy), and all these having their particular conveniences and

inconveniences, the experience and wisdom of your ancestors has so moulded this

out of a mixture of these as to give this kingdom (as far as human prudence can

provide) the conveniences of all three, without the inconveniences of any one, as

long as the balance hangs even between the three states (His Majesties Answer to the

Nineteen Proposition, London, 1642).

The pamphlet went on to argue that the demands being made by Parliament in The Nineteen Propositions - such as the requirement that all officers and counsellors be approved by Parliament - if adopted, would disrupt the balance by shifting power from the King to the Commons.

For opposition writers in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was not the Crown that was at risk from the Commons, but rather the Commons that was at risk from the Crown. As the author of The Corruption and Impiety of the Common Members of the Late House of Commons noted:

It hath been a common and known Practice for this Forty Years last past; for Men of

Confidence and ready Elocution, if they could but procure an Election in some little

Mercenary Burrough, and so get into the House, presently to set themselves to

oppose the King and the Court, that they might be bought off by some good

Gratuity; Pension, or Place (The Corruption and Impiety, p. 2).

‘James Murray’, by Pollard, 1770s. National Portrait Gallery, NPG D32123. Reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.

In order to control Parliament, the monarch and ministers would offer money, pensions or positions to elected MPs. From 1706 the term 'placemen' began to be used to denote those implicated in this practice. According to the Oxford English Dictionary a 'placeman' is: 'A person who is appointed (or aspires) to a position, esp. in government service, for personal profit and as a reward for political support; a yes-man.' Placemen remained an issue throughout the eighteenth century. In 1774 the Newcastle minister and political activist James Murray spoke, via a thinly veiled reference to the Biblical state of Moab, of representatives selling out to the crown for 'places, pensions, and perquisites' so that the institution that was supposed to represent and protect the people's interests and liberties became a means of enslaving them. The system of places introduced was 'only to be enjoyed by the friends of the court, or such as wished well to its interests'. By this means, those appointed by the nation 'to guard their liberties in parliament, were corrupted, and sold their constituents for a place under, or a pension from the government.' (James Murray, New Sermons to Asses. Philadelphia, 1774, p. 9).

Not long after, the newly established 'Society for Constitutional Information' noted that the public had been repeatedly warned about the venality of their representatives and called for various changes aimed at expelling 'minions of a court from the temple of public freedom' and restoring 'parliaments to their original purity and people to their rights'. (A Second Address to the Public from the Society for Constitutional Information. London, 1782, pp. 9-10). The arguments of the Society on this point were again grounded in their understanding of the balance of the constitution and the importance of the three elements - King, Lords and Commons - remaining independent of each other: 'The moment that either the Crown, the Lords, or the Commons lose their independence, in that moment our Constitution is violated, our Government is overturned, and our Liberty is endangered.' (An Address to the public, from the Society for Constitutional Information. London, 1780, p. 1).

The kind of corruption at issue today is, of course, different from that condemned by James Murray and the Society for Constitutional Information. For those interested in the complexity and history of the concept I recommend Mark Knights’s book Trust and Distrust: Corruption in office in Britain and its Empire (Oxford, 2021). Today there are many sources of corruption, but the bottom line is the dominance of private interests, including those of the rich and the powerful, over the public interest or the common good.

Radical Republicanism

As I acknowledged in my recent book, the term 'republicanism' means different things to different people. Adding the adjective 'radical' to the term only complicates matters further, especially when the focus is the early modern period. The term 'radicalism' was not in use until the early nineteenth century, leading some scholars to argue that it should not be applied before that time. Yet 'Radical Republicanism in Early Modern Europe' was the title of an excellent conference organised by Anna Becker, Nicolai von Eggers, and Alessandro Mulieri in late June 2021. The conference organisers did not shy away from the difficulties with the terminology, indeed Nicolai von Eggers opened the proceedings by asking whether it is valuable to speak of 'radical republicanism'. What followed was a rich and lively discussion about what we mean by that label, what role the people should play within a republic, and why radical republicans are so often neglected within the historiography.

Niccolò Machiavelli by Santi di Tito. Taken from Wikimedia Commons.

The constitution of the citizen body and the role its members should play have been key questions for those discussing republican rule ever since ancient times. As Alessandro Mulieri noted in his paper, Aristotle argued for the wisdom of the many over that of the few, insisting that as a collective body the many (understood as the middle orders rather than the poor) would have greater expertise, prudence, and virtue when it came to the selection of magistrates and the judgement of their actions. Niccolò Machiavelli famously expanded Aristotle's assessment to incorporate the plebs and to include lawmaking as well as the selection of magistrates. John McCormick has drawn attention to this aspect of Machiavelli's thought in his published work on the Florentine's democratic credentials. He developed this idea further in his paper at the conference, by exploring in greater detail the aristocratic republicanism of Francesco Guicciardini, which was in large part a response to Machiavelli's democratic republicanism. McCormick convincingly demonstrated that Machiavelli had got under Guicciardini's skin, leading him to adopt awkward positions (such as justifying genocide).

Plans that appeared in the Revolutions de Paris for platforms designed to make it possible for orators to be heard in a large assembly that was part of the wider proposals made by radical republicans during the early years of the French Revolution discussed by Nicolai von Eggers. Source gallica.bnf.fr/BnF.

One feature of the more aristocratic form of republicanism advanced by Guicciardini is the mixed constitution. Both Markku Peltonen and Annelien de Dijn questioned its dominance within the republican tradition, showing that many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century republicans explicitly rejected that model, opting instead for a purer form of democratic rule. One of the key claims of Peltonen's excellent paper was that not only were republican arguments boldly made by a large number of English commentators during the period of the Commonwealth and Free State (1649-53), but that many described the government under which they were living positively as a democracy. De Dijn cited another seventeenth-century radical republican, Pieter De la Court who insisted that freedom would only be secure in a true democracy where decision-making power lay firmly with the people. Moreover, De Dijn argued that De la Court (along with his contemporary Baruch Spinoza and, later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau) took Aristotle's argument to its logical conclusion, insisting that the people were more likely to rule in the common good than the elite and arguing, therefore, that there should be no restraint on popular power but only a strict form of majoritarian rule.

In the discussion, Camilla Vergara articulated the distinction being explored very clearly: one form of republicanism involves the sharing of power between the elites and the plebs; whereas the other (democratic or plebeian republicanism) involves giving power to the people. Of course this raises further questions about how popular power can and should be exercised (especially in large modern states). This issue was broached in the two papers on the French Revolution. Ariane Fichtl explored the influence on the French revolutionaries of ancient institutions such as the popular tribunes. Nicolai von Eggers focused on those radicals who adopted an intermediate position between representative and direct democracy by calling for the use of imperative mandates that would bind deputies or delegates to act only on the instructions of those who had elected them.

Samuel Hayat's paper on the recent 'gilets jaunes' protests in France, opened up a further question of whether 'the people' speak with a single voice. This is certainly the impression the 'gilets jaunes' seek to present, but to do so they must downplay differences of opinion based on race, sex, or class. A further issue raised by Hayet's paper is the thorny relationship between the terms 'popular' and 'radical'. The importance of distinguishing the 'popular' from the 'radical' has long been acknowledged by historians of the British civil wars - not least John Morrill. Moreover, not only in that Revolution but also in France in 1793 and again in 1848, the revolutionary authorities were presented with a dilemma. Should free and fair elections be suspended if the outcome of such elections was likely to be a rejection of the revolutionary regime? 

Portrait of Pieter de la Court by Abraham van den Tempel, 1667. Taken from Wikimedia Commons.

Regardless of the different ways in which it has been defined, radical republicanism has long been obscured or even neglected. Throughout the conference we heard papers calling for the rehabilitation of important figures as diverse as Ptolemy of Lucca, Pier Filippo Pandolfini, and Pieter De la Court, as well as for recognition of the republican implications of the works of figures such as Étienne de La Boétie (examined in an interesting paper by Saul Newman). Selective borrowing has been in operation throughout history. In papers by Miguel Vatter and Alessandro Mulieri, Machiavelli was shown to have rejected Platonism and Aristotelianism while simultaneously taking on board certain ideas from them. In my own paper I showed that selectivity was also in operation in the use of James Harrington's ideas by eighteenth-century British thinkers.

This selectivity has continued in later scholarship. Jérémie Barthas noted that Rudolf von Albertini was crucial in downplaying the significance of radical republicans like Pandolfini, because of the perceived connection between his ideas and those of the Jacobins. Following John McCormick's account of the brutal side of Guicciardini's thought, Anna Becker posed the leading question of where the more positive reading of him had originated. Similarly, Markku Peltonen argued that radical republican writings of the early 1650s have largely been ignored by recent republican scholars.

Gaby Mahlberg and Anna Becker both wondered whether part of the reason for the dominance of a more elitist reading of the republican tradition arises from the source material that tends to be used - in particular the focus on a range of printed canonical texts. Gaby's exploration of translations, reviews and networks - along with Anna's work on women and republicanism - have the potential to offer an alternative view. While source material may be part of the problem, political attitudes and priorities no doubt also play their part. For this reason, radical republicanism not only offers a rich vein for future historical research, but also a potential source of valuable material to help us to understand the nature of the political system we have inherited and the means by which it might be improved in the future.