Rethinking the Political Thought of James Harrington: Royalism,Republicanism and Democracy

Traditional accounts of seventeenth-century English republicanism have usually presented it as inherently anti-monarchical and anti-democratic. This article seeks to challenge and complicate this picture by exploring James Harrington's views on royalism, republicanism and democracy. Building on recent assertions about Harrington's distinctiveness as a republican thinker, the article suggests that the focus on Harrington's republicanism has served to obscure the subtlety and complexity of his moral and political philosophy. Focusing on the year 1659, and the pamphlet war that Harrington and his supporters waged against their fellow republicans, it seeks to re-emphasise important but neglected elements of Harrington's thought. It suggests that the depth and extent of Harrington's sympathy with royalists and royalism has been underplayed, while too little attention has been paid to the fundamental differences between his ideas and those adopted by other republican thinkers at the time. In addition it brings to light, for the first time, Harrington's innovative endorsement of both the term and the concept of ‘democracy’ and draws attention to his intellectual and personal affinities with the Levellers. Finally it outlines some implications of these findings for understandings of English republicanism and the republican tradition more generally.     

Kant and the Two Principles of Publicity

ABSTRACT

The aim of this article is to argue that the principle of “publicity” constitutes a fundamental idea in Kant’s political thought. Publicity provides a central insight that binds together various strands of Kant’s political writings (on issues as diverse as the question of Enlightenment, the right of revolution, historical teleology, reflective judgment, cosmopolitan citizenship, democratic peace, and republican government), and moreover, it offers a much-needed cornerstone for a systematic exposition of his nonexistent political philosophy. Apart from some eminent examples, publicity has been a rather neglected topic in the ever-expanding literature on Kant’s political ideas. Revisiting this notion will make us more attentive to his evocation of the “spirit of republicanism” over and above the letter of the law, and might prompt us to reconsider Kant’s reputation as a classical representative of liberal political thought. Indeed, it should inspire us to situate Kant’s appeal for the “public use of reason” in the vicinity of the republican ideal of political liberty.     

Elite migrations in modern Italy: patterns of settlement,integration and identity negotiation

Abstract

Francesco Crispi has often appeared a paradoxical figure. In the earlier part of his life he was a revolutionary republican and a friend of Mazzini. After 1860 he accepted the monarchy, but remained very much a man of the Left and in many ways a quintessential democrat. Yet he ended his career as an authoritarian Prime Minister, a vigorous opponent of the Far Left, and an imperialist, who prorogued parliament and contemplated dispensing with representative government altogether. This article contends that Crispi's career has more coherence than is commonly suggested; it focuses on an important but hitherto neglected aspect of his thinking, namely the problem of how to achieve a sense of national consciousness in Italy through ‘political education’. The article traces the development of the idea of national political education throughout Crispi's career and argues that his two terms as Prime Minister in 1887–91 and 1893–6 can only be fully understood in the context of his long‐standing concern with this problem.     

The Republican Discourse on Religious Liberty during the Exclusion Crisis

Summary

Much recent historiography assumes that republican calls for religious liberty in seventeenth-century England were limited to Protestant dissenters. Nevertheless there is evidence that some radical voices during the Civil War and Interregnum period were willing to extend this toleration even to ‘false religions’, including Catholicism, provided their members promised loyalty and allegiance to the government. Using the case study of the republican Henry Neville, this article will argue that toleration for Catholics was still an option during the Exclusion Crisis of the late seventeenth century despite new fears of a growth of ‘popery and arbitrary government’. Neville's tolerationist approach, it will be shown, was driven by his Civil War and Interregnum experience, as well as by political pragmatism and very personal circumstances which shaped his attitude towards Catholics in his own country and abroad.     

‘Divided Within Itself’: The Parliamentary Labour ‘Right’ and the Demise of Post‐War Revisionist Social Democracy in the 1970s

The article seeks to identify a neglected dimension of the ‘crisis’ and schism of British social democracy in the 1970s from within the ranks of the parliamentary Labour ‘right’ itself. Accounts of the so‐called ‘Labour right’ and its influential revisionist social democratic tradition have emphasized its generic cohesion and uniformity over contextual analysis of its inherent intellectual, ideological and political range and diversity. The article seeks to evaluate differential responses of Labour's ‘right‐wing’ and revisionist tendency as its loosely cohesive framework of Keynesian social democracy imploded in the 1970s, as a means of demonstrating its relative incoherence and fragmentation. The ‘crisis of social democracy’ revealed much more starkly its complex, heterogeneous character, irremediably ‘divided within itself’ over a range of critical political and policy themes and the basis of social democratic political philosophy itself. The article argues that it was its own wider political fragmentation and ideological introspection in the face of the ‘crisis’ of its historic ‘belief system’ which led to the fracture of Labour's ‘dominant coalition’ and the rupture of British social democracy.     

Towards a chequebook democracy? Business,parties and the funding of politics in Italy and the United States

This article seeks to establish to what extent Silvio Berlusconi's entry into electoral politics as leader of Forza Italia signals an ‘Americanization’ of Italian politics. It argues that Italian party democracy is moving in an ‘American’ direction in two ways. First, Italian party organizations are declining, leading to a more candidate-centred type of electoral politics. Second, the decline of parties is enhancing the ability of business to use its financial clout to tailor public policy to its own requirements. However, these trends do not have identical effects in Italy and the United States. This article will also show that this process of ‘Americanization’ interacts with the existing political praxis and institutional framework of Italian politics to produce an outcome which differs from both the traditional Western European model and the American model of party democracy. It will be concluded that this outcome seriously undermines representative democracy in Italy.     

The Bullock Report on Industrial Democracy and the Post-War Consensus

The post-war settlement among the policy elite is central to much historical literature. This article considers the rise and fall of the idea of ‘industrial democracy’, and its relationship to this settlement. The elite failed to respond coherently to claims for workplace democracy. The notion that politicians could work with ‘the unions’ and ‘industry’ was shown to be deficient. The unions contained numerous views, many hostile to industrial democracy in the form proposed by Bullock and the TUC. Industry was almost uniformly antagonistic. The notion of consensus ostensibly underpinned the attempts of Labour and Conservative politicians to progress this issue. In truth, this was a curious approach. The debate over Bullock was, at root, an argument over whether the owners of capital should cede some of their power in favour of organised labour. There was never likely to be agreement on this. The inconclusive debate over Bullock ultimately showed how fragile the consensus was. The political elite could not forever smooth over underlying disagreements between capital and labour, or between groups of workers with differing interests.     

Mill’s closet: J.S. Mill on solitude and the imperfect democracy

This paper focuses on the role solitude played in John Stuart Mill’s political thought. By doing so, it challenges contemporary appropriations of Mill’s thought by participatory, deliberative and epistemic theories of democracy. Mill considered solitude to be contrary to political participation and public debate, but nonetheless regarded it as essential for democracy and for intellectual progress. Since the early 1830s Mill began developing an idea of solitude while simultaneously forming a particular kind of a democratic model which I refer to as ‘imperfect democracy’. According to this model, democracy is restrained by non-democratic elements which offer a contrary spirit and are not incorporated by democracy. At first Mill believed the ‘leisured class’ would fulfil this task, but later considered solitude as a possible solution. This paper follows the way in which these ideas were crystallised in Mill’s thought, and by doing so offers a novel interpretation of Mill’s political thought and his nuanced understanding of solitude, political participation and democracy.     

Representative democracy and the ‘spirit of resistance’ from Constant to Tocqueville

ABSTRACT

The role of resistance in the politics of modern representative democracies is historically contested, and remains far from clear. This article seeks to explore historical thinking on this subject through a discussion of what Benjamin Constant and Alexis de Tocqueville had to say about resistance and its relationship to ‘representative government’ and democracy. Neither thinker is usually seen as a significant contributor to ‘resistance theory’ as this category is conventionally understood. But, in addition to their more familiar preoccupations with securing limitations on the exercise of political authority and averting majority tyranny, both thinkers wrote extensively on the nature and meanings of resistance in ‘representative governments’ or democratic societies. Both thinkers are examined in the context of revolutionary and Napoleonic discussions about the legitimacy of resistance or ‘right to resist’ oppression, and against eighteenth-century discussions of the ‘spirit of resistance’ since Montesquieu. The article notes conceptual distinctions between resistance, revolution and insurrection in the period, and addresses the broader question of the extent to which early nineteenth-century French liberals sought to ‘institutionalise’ principles of resistance within modern constitutional frameworks.     

What is national self‐determination? Nationality and psychology during the apogee of nationalism*

Abstract. The idea of national self‐determination propounded at the 1919 peace conference centred in Paris marked a new era in international relations. In this article I re‐examine the history of the idea of national self‐determination in this period by situating it in the context of ‘the psychological turn’. I argue that national self‐determination came to serve as a popular philosophical basis for post‐war democracy among Entente liberals at a time when the Enlightenment equivalence between democracy and ‘self‐determination’ was under challenge from new scientific depictions of the unconscious and irrational, and the biologically determined self. The focus of my discussion is the psychological discourse that threaded through the versions of national self‐determination articulated by British and French intellectuals during World War I.     

‘A common law of nations’: Giuseppe Mazzini's democratic nationality

The aim of this article is to analyse the theoretical origins and character of Giuseppe Mazzini's idea of the nation and the wider tensions within nationalist thinking. In particular I will ground Mazzini's idea of national self‐determination on his distinction between rights and duties and finally his republican (and in this sense political, not ethnic) view of the nation‐people. It will emerge that, even if Mazzini shared a voluntaristic idea of the nation, he none the less had a clear perception that the argument of popular consensus needed to be limited (and legitimated) by normative principles, which for him were true democratic principles. Mazzini's originality and modernity lay in his capacity to avoid being a universalist in the old cosmopolitan sense without becoming a relativist. He faced the tension between universality and national identity by making the former concrete and inclusive: universality meant humanity which revealed itself through and within each nation, and was synonymous with democracy. Democracy at home is the premise for democracy abroad: this is Mazzini's legacy.     

Political communication and democratic government

This paper overviews the Australian System of Political Communication in the light of the communications requirements of modern representative democracy. The broad point of departure is that representative democracy requires political communication in both directions between government and people. In addition to the media, the approach takes account of the following channels for ‘political messages’: direct mail, public opinion polls, elections, government inquiries. Five criteria of satisfactory democratic communication are examined. The Australian system of political communication is reviewed in the light of these criteria. Some research findings and other information is included demonstrating the extent of political communication in Australia. An argument is developed to show what conditions need to be satisfied for the criteria of democracy to be met in the contemporary environment.     

Baudelaire's literary criticism

In the current debate on republicanism the relationship between republicanism and democracy is an aspect whose historical dimension has thus far hardly been investigated. It offers instead also the chance to clear up ambiguities on the opposition between republicanism and liberalism. In this sense, recent research on the radical Enlightenment, on the link between economics and politics, by a new reading of physiocracy as political discourse, and on the foundations of political representation represent some of the most important advances made by historical research over the last few years. This essay wishes to trace these results back to a long line of research on a modern republicanism that had already been investigated many decades ago by a historian of the Enlightenment interested in republican tradition, Franco Venturi, the author of Settecento riformatore and of Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment, to which John Pocock dedicated the first volume of his recent Barbarism and Religion. By means of a successful integration of three recent essays by John Israel on the uniqueness of Dutch republican discourse, by Richard Whatmore on the economic roots of French republicanism and by Nadia Urbinati on the foundations of representative democracy in Condorcet, it is possible to isolate the characteristics of a democratic republicanism. Among the various threads that have been followed up, the theme of equality has surfaced in various ways in the search for the characteristics of modern republicanism. These highlight the idea of the emergence in the early modern age of an European political culture and of a democratic and egalitarian republicanism that was encouraged by the contribution from various national situations within which it forged its identity, against the model of an Atlantic republicanism.     

Sustainable policy? A public debate about nature development in the Netherlands

This article makes, first, a general argument for ‘sustainable policies.’ This argument will build on the observation that modern societies, of all political guise, find it difficult to cope with the challenges and opportunities posed by science and technology. Classical models of democracy do not seem to be sufficiently equipped to guide the political process in our highly developed societies. Second, this paper will discuss constructivist views on the development of technology in relation to society, and explore possible implications for democratization of technological culture. And finally, the article will present a particular case of experimentation with one alternative form of democracy. This experimental addendum to the existing political repertoires in the Netherlands was a public debate about the issue of ‘nature development’ or ‘nature construction’—the making of new nature, for example by giving back some of the Dutch land to the water of the rivers Rhein and Maas.     

Balance of Power and Political Equilibrium: A Response

This article analyses the international thought of the US sinologist and political advisor Owen Lattimore (1900–89). A well-known expert on China and the Far East, Lattimore was a ‘public intellectual’ and advisor to Chiang Kai-shek and Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1950, after Senator Joseph McCarthy accused him of Soviet espionage, Lattimore's reputation was irrevocably damaged and his political thought forgotten. By assessing his visions of global democracy and geopolitics, this article claims Lattimore made insightful contributions to international thought. On the eve of the cold war, Lattimore's ideas of pluralistic democracy and tripolar world order offered an alternative vision of the post-war era, focusing on political participation and diversity. This article focuses on Lattimore's published writings in the 1940s, when, as political advisor and director of the Johns Hopkins’ Page School of International Relations, he sought to shift international attention from Europe to the Far East as the potential birthplace of a new version of post-colonial democracy. A fervent anti-imperialist, Lattimore crafted new political space for global democracy in a post-imperial age. His thoughtful discussion of participation, co-operation, democracy, knowledge, and pluralism make his vision of world order an interesting contribution to international thought in the twentieth century.     

Institutionalizing the democratic party-state: political parties as ‘public utilities’ in Italy and West Germany, 1945–75

This article argues that the rise of parties as ‘public utilities’, that is, semi-state organs crucial in the functioning of democracy, which is currently observed by political scientists, has long historical roots. It looks from an institutionalist perspective to the development of party–state relations in Germany and Italy since the Second World War, paying specific attention to how institutional reform corresponded to changing normative assumptions about the position of political parties in twentieth-century democracy. The first notions on the ‘statist’ dimension of parties were put forward as an answer to the challenges of mass politics in the interwar era. After 1945, politicians and constitutional judges drew upon this tradition in their efforts to stabilize mass democracy. They deliberately constructed ‘party-state democracies’, in which parties influenced the state and the state managed individual parties and the party system. This became visible in the constitutionalization of political parties, as well as in the enactment and normative justification of party (finance) laws in the 1960s and 1970s. The advent of parties as public utilities, even though fiercely criticized today, was therefore embedded in an ideological tradition that sanctioned the ‘party-state’ as crucial for the stability of modern democracy.     

An unsettling integration: Immigrant lives and work in Palermo

Giuseppe Garibaldi was the most enduring political hero of nineteenth‐century Italy. His political image was inspired by both the romantic movement and religion and, in turn, inspired a new kind of charismatic popular politics. The first part of this article explores the sources and assesses the impact of the cult of Garibaldi during the Risorgimento. The second part examines the use made of Garibaldi's image after Italian unification and, especially, after his death. It finds that government attempts to glorify Garibaldi were relatively unsuccessful while the parallel, republican cult of Garibaldi had a considerable impact. Thus, Garibaldi's extraordinary popularity highlighted the failed official ‘nationalization’ of Italians. At the same time, support for Garibaldi points to the emergence of an alternative sense of Italian national identity     

Delegitimation and anticommunism in Italian neofascism

Abstract

Although anticommunism was a key element of the identity and political strategy of the neofascist Italian Social Movement (MSI), it has remained a largely unexplored theme in historiographic research. This article reconstructs its origins, developments, and outcomes, from the birth of the MSI in the aftermath of World War II to its dissolution in 1994. Far from being an immutable feature of neofascist political culture, anticommunism took on very different roles and meanings depending on the political climate of republican Italy. In a more radical key, anticommunism both facilitated and hindered political dialogue with the other parties, firstly and foremost the Christian Democratic Party (DC). Taken to excess, anticommunism also accentuated neofascist hostility to democracy. This led to a lasting delegitimation of the MSI at a systemic and ethical-political level, and the party’s alienation in the years of the First Republic.     

The many Robespierres from 1794 to the present

The Belgian Constitution of 1831 marked a decisive step in the continental evolution from Restoration constitutional monarchy, based on the monarchical principle, towards the establishment of parliamentary constitutional monarchy. At the time, the new balance of power desired by the Belgian revolutionaries was captured by the phrase ‘republican monarchy’. It is remarkable that this concept, despite being so central to the founding fathers’ deliberations, has hardly been commented upon by later historians and public lawyers. This article aims to reconstruct the origin, meaning and uses of this concept in the context of the 1830 revolutionary wave. French revolutionary veteran general Lafayette was responsible for popularizing republican monarchy in the July Revolution, although the term’s origins went back to eighteenth-century debates on the reform of absolute monarchy. Lafayette used it to summarize the institutional demands of the republican movement vis-à-vis king Louis Philippe. Its transnational migration to the Belgian context subsequently entailed a shift in meaning which will be charted through an analysis of the Belgian constituent and public debates. Finally, the reasons for the concept’s sudden disappearance from the political stage will be addressed.