Republicanism - Hardcover

Maurizio Viroli; Antony Shugaar

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 080908077X ISBN 13: 9780809080779

Publisher: Hill & Wang Pub, 2001

Synopsis

A provocative new study of the political ideals that should guide a republic

At the beginning of a new century, there is renewed interest in the traditions and ideas that have inspired political republicanism. Maurizio Viroli, who has written extensively on democracy and nationalism, stresses that republicanism is a political ideal for citizens everywhere who are committed to the work of sustaining civic virtue. He explores republicanism's commitment to a rule of law administered on behalf of all citizens equally, to liberty, and to the repudiation of monarchy, aristocracy, and all discriminatory state formations.

Viroli traces the story of political republicanism from its origins with Aristotle and in classical Rome to its renaissance with Machiavelli, then to its great flowering in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with Locke, Kant, Rousseau, Tom Paine, and the Founding Fathers. He concludes with an impassioned evocation of the power of the republican ideal in our own time. We can derive from it, he suggests, a form of wisdom and strength that protects civic democracy and enriches private life.

About this title

About the Author

Maurizio Viroli has written many works on political philosophy, including Niccolo's Smile: A Biography of Machiavelli (FSG, 2000). A professor of politics at Princeton University, he lives in Princeton, New Jersey, and Forli, Italy.

From Publishers Weekly

In this slim volume, Viroli (Niccolo's Smile) bemoans the general "decline in civic consciousness" that has marked recent decades, and by giving a history of the theory and practice of republicanism, he reflects upon ways to resuscitate civic concerns. Focusing largely on Renaissance writers, Viroli seeks to define and explain republicanism as a richly lived tradition rather than an ideal theory (which was how writers who fashioned the subsequent liberal tradition understood it). It's most accurate "to regard both liberal and democratic theory as provinces of republicanism, based in its classical form on the two principles of the rule of law and popular sovereignty," Viroli writes. Later, however, he bases his distinction of republicanism from liberalism on differing concepts of liberty: freedom from domination (with the help of self-made law) vs. freedom from interference (including that of law). Viroli's underexplained shifts like this and underdeveloped yet repetitive statements can be frustrating, but gradually some truly provocative ideas emerge, like the notion of republican patriotism as a passion vital for preserving self-government and created through participating in the self-creating life of a republic. No such patriotism is possible, according to republican theory, among subjects of an absolute ruler (a conviction that stands in striking contrast to the supposedly natural ethno-nationalist passions developed in the 19th century under the name of patriotism). If Viroli is sometimes maddeningly fragmentary or repetitive, it may be because he is struggling insistently to excavate a meaningful but obscured indeed, almost buried tradition from its modern descendants.

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Hill & Wang Pub
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 080908077X
• ISBN 13: 9780809080779
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 123