Accueil
"Recent soul-searching among the intellectual left has returned with increasing frequency and interest to implicitly or explicitly ‘republican’ themes and arguments. As class identities fracture, and state ownership falls into disrepute, republican conceptions of equal citizenship and the inherent value of a ‘public realm’ have appealed to many as potentially productive starting points for the left’s ideological renewal." (p.1)
"The specific contours of the contemporary ‘conjuncture’ mean that these ideas have proved particularly attractive to a left that is struggling to redefine its project after the collapse of state socialism and the declining appeal of a top-down, bureaucratic corporatism and welfarism, and to respond to widespread concerns about the deteriorating social fabric and ‘hollowed-out’ politics of the contemporary market societies that neo-liberalism is creating. Republican ideas seem to promise a route back to the values of freedom and democracy that the twentieth-century left seemed too often to lose touch with, at the same time as offering a viable and sophisticated defence of political activism and social commitment that could prove newly resonant for contemporary audiences." (pp.2-3)
"The possibility that a reconstructed republicanism might offer a viable governing philosophy for twenty-first century social democracy has been taking up with particular enthusiasm by the Spanish Socialists, who went so far as to invite Phillip Pettit to assess their performance against his own republican principles." (p.3)
"The difficult relationship between republican objectives and more ambitious and challenging forms of collectivism is one that the left must continue to grapple with." (p.3)
"According to Philip Pettit this notion of ‘freedom as non-domination’ offers a compelling alternative to the more familiar liberal idea of ‘negative’ freedom as ‘non-interference’ (Pettit, 1999). Even if my freedom of action is not directly interfered with, I may be ‘unfree’ in republican terms if I remain at the mercy of another who might at any point choose to restrain me – just as a slave is no less a slave if her master is generous or benign. Domination is thus a predicament of dependence upon the will of another, while true liberty consists in self-government – a condition in which I can be judged the true author of my actions, because they issue directly from my own agency without reference to the approval or otherwise of another. This notion lay at the heart of early critiques of absolute monarchies as a form of domination or despotism, irrespective of the character and behaviour of the monarch. It was not because they always did interfere with our freedom, but because they always could, that such arrangements rendered us slaves. As Paine put it in his seminal defence of the French Revolution: ‘It was not against Louis XVI but against the despotic principle of the government that the nation revolted < All the tyrannies of former reigns, acted under that hereditary despotism, were still liable to be revived in the hands of a successor’ (Paine, 1998, p. 98). It is because of this that we must take an active interest in our governing arrangements, and play our full part as virtuous citizens – as the only reliable means of securing ourselves against arbitrary interference." (p.4)
"To the extent that our fates are intertwined, the ‘common good’ to which our collective power is directed must be substantive and specific – not merely the formal principle of individual freedom from interference, but actual shared projects." (p.6)
« It can be argued that as industrialisation and expanding trade extended and intensified the reality of interdependence, a consistent commitment to freedom from domination through collective self-government logically entailed attempts to bring the economy under collective democratic control. Behind this story lies the traditional association of republican political ideas with predominantly agrarian economies that favoured relatively small-scale units of production and a significant degree of self-sufficiency. Although the preferred economic models of republican thinkers varied enormously – from Harrington’s commonwealth of landowners to Rousseau’s idealised peasant communities – a common theme was the notion that each owned enough to prevent dependence upon any other, but never so much more than others as to render others dependent. This restriction on material inequality secured for everyone the independence to act as a free citizen and guarded the republic against corruption or tyranny.
But of course the growth of commercial trade and productive industry through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries undermined the purchase, plausibility and appeal of this image of upright independence. The reality of modern economies has for the most part been an extension and intensification of interdependence – most individuals spend a measurably diminishing portion of their time acting or working for themselves in an unmediated way, and an increasingly predominant part of their time working to meet the needs of increasing numbers of others – either in response to market signals or under the command of an employer through whom the needs of the market are transmitted. And at the same time most individuals increasingly rely on the productive activities of increasing numbers of other individuals to meet their own developing needs. Some early writers warned against these developments – the American founding fathers worried about trends favouring inequality and the pursuit of luxury, and republican thinkers such as Price and Jefferson warned against the influence of commercial and manufacturing imperatives. Others, like Adam Smith, who celebrated this advancing division of labour, hoped that the rise of a commercially minded middle class might be reconciled with the preservation of civic virtues (Winch, 2002). Indeed, for Smith the very spread of commerce served to unravel the ties of feudal power and servitude: ‘nothing tends so much to corrupt and enervate and debase the mind as dependency, and nothing gives such noble and generous notions of probity as freedom and independence. Commerce is one great preventative of this custom’. » (pp.7-
« A recurrent argument of early socialists was that this economic dependence constituted a form of domination no less significant than the political domination of an unelected or unaccountable ruler – indeed perhaps even more existentially pervasive, on account of the very importance accorded to questions of property and labour by early republican thinkers. » (pp.8-9)
« The writings of the Chartist period reveal an acute awareness of the developing interrelation of legal domination and economic exploitation, and of capitalism – in the form it was then taking – as a profoundly political construction. And the corresponding interconnection of republican self-governance and collective economic regulation was pursued and developed through William James Linton’s English Republic and the early formation of the Social Democratic Federation. Similar continuities can be seen in the development of socialism in France. In the 1840s Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, an ardent (if idiosyncratic) follower of Rousseau, justified his denunciation of property as a refusal of arbitrary power, in both political and economic forms. ‘The proprietor, the robber, the hero, and the sovereign (for all these titles are synonymous) each imposes his will as law and suffers neither contradiction nor control < property necessarily engenders despotism, the government of arbitrary will, the reign of libidinous pleasure’. For Proudhon, government was a matter of ‘public economy’ – ‘its object is production and consumption, the distribution of labour and products’ – but this objective of economic regulation was obstructed and undermined by the existence of private proprietors – ‘despotic kings < in proportion to their acquisitive faculties’ (Proudhon, 1994, p. 210). Proudhon’s translation of republican into socialist principle is bold and explicit: ‘since property is the great cause of privilege and despotism, the form of the republican oath should be 10 changed. Instead of saying, ‚I swear hatred to royalty‛, an applicant to a secret society should henceforth say, ‚I swear hatred to property‛’ (Proudhon, pp. 158-9). Even the later incursion of Marxist thought into French socialism did not prevent what Tony Judt describes as ‘a long period of overlap during which the socialism of Jaurès and Blum combined marxist social analysis and final goals with democratic or republican methods drawn from the earlier tradition’. » (pp.9-10)
« The history of the twentieth century is to some extent the history of the ultimate failure or defeat of those attempts to ‘make democracy social’ as Eley puts it. The full-blown version of collective economic control through centralised planning certainly proved unable to either meet people’s developing material needs or meaningfully actualise the impulse to economic self government that lay behind its initial formulation. More partial ‘social democratic’ variants, which left significant domains of market relations and private ownership in place but sought to correct their tendency to centralise social and economic power through measures of partial decommodification, corporate representation, and selective socialisation, also stand accused of depressing economic dynamism and impeding genuine empowerment. It is against this background that the left has retreated from economic collectivism and sought to anchor its objectives more firmly on the ground of individual autonomy and democratic participation. This, of course, is where classical republican arguments come into their own. But this still raises the question of whether contemporary capitalism furnishes the social and economic conditions for individual and collective self-government – or whether the new republican revival entails its own, distinctive agenda for economic and social reform. Insofar as contemporary discussions have pursued such questions, they have tended to converge on a cluster of ideas and proposals that I think can reasonably be brought under the heading of a ‘property-owning democracy’. » (pp.11-12)
« The nub of the issue is, I think, whether the depth and extent of our economic interdependence, and the degree of socialisation of productive processes this entails, must render any attempt to secure a meaningful ‘independence’ through individual private property entitlements at risk of inadequacy and marginalisation. Practically speaking, there are surely grounds to doubt that the decentralisation of property entitlements can be matched by an equal decentralisation of productive processes – so that self-employment or small-scale producer co operatives become the norm. If that is granted, then the reality for many citizens will be that their ‘property’ consists of a ‘stake’ in larger productive enterprises – a situation similar to the position of today’s employees of John Lewis, for example, or even that of the large portion of the workforce with an occupational or personal pension invested (usually through some intermediary) in contemporary stock markets. There is no question that the democratising potential of such incipient stakeholderism can and should be pushed much, much further (see Davis et al., 2006). But the challenge this presents is, I suggest, not actually so different from that faced by earlier forms of economic collectivism. This is the challenge of pooling our productive resources and capacities in forms of co-operative and socialised production that are sufficiently sophisticated to meet our diverse needs, and at the same time accommodate our aspirations for forms of work that can be experienced as genuine forms of self-expression and self-rule, rather than alienating or oppressive impositions. This is the task that history has set us. It is perhaps a far more difficult task than most early socialists imagined. But I don’t think it is one that republicanism allows us to bypass or defer.
The danger of the ‘property-owning’ ideal, then, is that its signature ideal of individual independence may seem to offer a false escape alley from the dangers and difficulties of building forms of collective action and democratic self-rule that don’t become distant, remote,unrepresentative and unresponsive. This by no means to dismiss the value of the reforms that have been proposed under this banner, but rather to suggest that they might be seen as reinforcing accompaniments, rather than radical alternatives, to more direct efforts at collective control over our economic life such as trade union representation and industrial democracy (raised in this volume by Adrian Zimmerman), government regulation and intervention, and, indeed, public ownership and planning." (pp.14-15)
-Martin McIvor, "Republicanism, socialism and the renewal of the left", in In Search of Social Democracy: Responses to Crisis and Modernisation, edited by John Callaghan, Nina Fishman, Ben Jackson, and Martin McIvor (Manchester University Press, 2009): https://www.academia.edu/297021/Republicanism_socialism_and_the_renewal_of_the_left?pls=RWLSjBp2OX
PDF.
"The specific contours of the contemporary ‘conjuncture’ mean that these ideas have proved particularly attractive to a left that is struggling to redefine its project after the collapse of state socialism and the declining appeal of a top-down, bureaucratic corporatism and welfarism, and to respond to widespread concerns about the deteriorating social fabric and ‘hollowed-out’ politics of the contemporary market societies that neo-liberalism is creating. Republican ideas seem to promise a route back to the values of freedom and democracy that the twentieth-century left seemed too often to lose touch with, at the same time as offering a viable and sophisticated defence of political activism and social commitment that could prove newly resonant for contemporary audiences." (pp.2-3)
"The possibility that a reconstructed republicanism might offer a viable governing philosophy for twenty-first century social democracy has been taking up with particular enthusiasm by the Spanish Socialists, who went so far as to invite Phillip Pettit to assess their performance against his own republican principles." (p.3)
"The difficult relationship between republican objectives and more ambitious and challenging forms of collectivism is one that the left must continue to grapple with." (p.3)
"According to Philip Pettit this notion of ‘freedom as non-domination’ offers a compelling alternative to the more familiar liberal idea of ‘negative’ freedom as ‘non-interference’ (Pettit, 1999). Even if my freedom of action is not directly interfered with, I may be ‘unfree’ in republican terms if I remain at the mercy of another who might at any point choose to restrain me – just as a slave is no less a slave if her master is generous or benign. Domination is thus a predicament of dependence upon the will of another, while true liberty consists in self-government – a condition in which I can be judged the true author of my actions, because they issue directly from my own agency without reference to the approval or otherwise of another. This notion lay at the heart of early critiques of absolute monarchies as a form of domination or despotism, irrespective of the character and behaviour of the monarch. It was not because they always did interfere with our freedom, but because they always could, that such arrangements rendered us slaves. As Paine put it in his seminal defence of the French Revolution: ‘It was not against Louis XVI but against the despotic principle of the government that the nation revolted < All the tyrannies of former reigns, acted under that hereditary despotism, were still liable to be revived in the hands of a successor’ (Paine, 1998, p. 98). It is because of this that we must take an active interest in our governing arrangements, and play our full part as virtuous citizens – as the only reliable means of securing ourselves against arbitrary interference." (p.4)
"To the extent that our fates are intertwined, the ‘common good’ to which our collective power is directed must be substantive and specific – not merely the formal principle of individual freedom from interference, but actual shared projects." (p.6)
« It can be argued that as industrialisation and expanding trade extended and intensified the reality of interdependence, a consistent commitment to freedom from domination through collective self-government logically entailed attempts to bring the economy under collective democratic control. Behind this story lies the traditional association of republican political ideas with predominantly agrarian economies that favoured relatively small-scale units of production and a significant degree of self-sufficiency. Although the preferred economic models of republican thinkers varied enormously – from Harrington’s commonwealth of landowners to Rousseau’s idealised peasant communities – a common theme was the notion that each owned enough to prevent dependence upon any other, but never so much more than others as to render others dependent. This restriction on material inequality secured for everyone the independence to act as a free citizen and guarded the republic against corruption or tyranny.
But of course the growth of commercial trade and productive industry through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries undermined the purchase, plausibility and appeal of this image of upright independence. The reality of modern economies has for the most part been an extension and intensification of interdependence – most individuals spend a measurably diminishing portion of their time acting or working for themselves in an unmediated way, and an increasingly predominant part of their time working to meet the needs of increasing numbers of others – either in response to market signals or under the command of an employer through whom the needs of the market are transmitted. And at the same time most individuals increasingly rely on the productive activities of increasing numbers of other individuals to meet their own developing needs. Some early writers warned against these developments – the American founding fathers worried about trends favouring inequality and the pursuit of luxury, and republican thinkers such as Price and Jefferson warned against the influence of commercial and manufacturing imperatives. Others, like Adam Smith, who celebrated this advancing division of labour, hoped that the rise of a commercially minded middle class might be reconciled with the preservation of civic virtues (Winch, 2002). Indeed, for Smith the very spread of commerce served to unravel the ties of feudal power and servitude: ‘nothing tends so much to corrupt and enervate and debase the mind as dependency, and nothing gives such noble and generous notions of probity as freedom and independence. Commerce is one great preventative of this custom’. » (pp.7-
« A recurrent argument of early socialists was that this economic dependence constituted a form of domination no less significant than the political domination of an unelected or unaccountable ruler – indeed perhaps even more existentially pervasive, on account of the very importance accorded to questions of property and labour by early republican thinkers. » (pp.8-9)
« The writings of the Chartist period reveal an acute awareness of the developing interrelation of legal domination and economic exploitation, and of capitalism – in the form it was then taking – as a profoundly political construction. And the corresponding interconnection of republican self-governance and collective economic regulation was pursued and developed through William James Linton’s English Republic and the early formation of the Social Democratic Federation. Similar continuities can be seen in the development of socialism in France. In the 1840s Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, an ardent (if idiosyncratic) follower of Rousseau, justified his denunciation of property as a refusal of arbitrary power, in both political and economic forms. ‘The proprietor, the robber, the hero, and the sovereign (for all these titles are synonymous) each imposes his will as law and suffers neither contradiction nor control < property necessarily engenders despotism, the government of arbitrary will, the reign of libidinous pleasure’. For Proudhon, government was a matter of ‘public economy’ – ‘its object is production and consumption, the distribution of labour and products’ – but this objective of economic regulation was obstructed and undermined by the existence of private proprietors – ‘despotic kings < in proportion to their acquisitive faculties’ (Proudhon, 1994, p. 210). Proudhon’s translation of republican into socialist principle is bold and explicit: ‘since property is the great cause of privilege and despotism, the form of the republican oath should be 10 changed. Instead of saying, ‚I swear hatred to royalty‛, an applicant to a secret society should henceforth say, ‚I swear hatred to property‛’ (Proudhon, pp. 158-9). Even the later incursion of Marxist thought into French socialism did not prevent what Tony Judt describes as ‘a long period of overlap during which the socialism of Jaurès and Blum combined marxist social analysis and final goals with democratic or republican methods drawn from the earlier tradition’. » (pp.9-10)
« The history of the twentieth century is to some extent the history of the ultimate failure or defeat of those attempts to ‘make democracy social’ as Eley puts it. The full-blown version of collective economic control through centralised planning certainly proved unable to either meet people’s developing material needs or meaningfully actualise the impulse to economic self government that lay behind its initial formulation. More partial ‘social democratic’ variants, which left significant domains of market relations and private ownership in place but sought to correct their tendency to centralise social and economic power through measures of partial decommodification, corporate representation, and selective socialisation, also stand accused of depressing economic dynamism and impeding genuine empowerment. It is against this background that the left has retreated from economic collectivism and sought to anchor its objectives more firmly on the ground of individual autonomy and democratic participation. This, of course, is where classical republican arguments come into their own. But this still raises the question of whether contemporary capitalism furnishes the social and economic conditions for individual and collective self-government – or whether the new republican revival entails its own, distinctive agenda for economic and social reform. Insofar as contemporary discussions have pursued such questions, they have tended to converge on a cluster of ideas and proposals that I think can reasonably be brought under the heading of a ‘property-owning democracy’. » (pp.11-12)
« The nub of the issue is, I think, whether the depth and extent of our economic interdependence, and the degree of socialisation of productive processes this entails, must render any attempt to secure a meaningful ‘independence’ through individual private property entitlements at risk of inadequacy and marginalisation. Practically speaking, there are surely grounds to doubt that the decentralisation of property entitlements can be matched by an equal decentralisation of productive processes – so that self-employment or small-scale producer co operatives become the norm. If that is granted, then the reality for many citizens will be that their ‘property’ consists of a ‘stake’ in larger productive enterprises – a situation similar to the position of today’s employees of John Lewis, for example, or even that of the large portion of the workforce with an occupational or personal pension invested (usually through some intermediary) in contemporary stock markets. There is no question that the democratising potential of such incipient stakeholderism can and should be pushed much, much further (see Davis et al., 2006). But the challenge this presents is, I suggest, not actually so different from that faced by earlier forms of economic collectivism. This is the challenge of pooling our productive resources and capacities in forms of co-operative and socialised production that are sufficiently sophisticated to meet our diverse needs, and at the same time accommodate our aspirations for forms of work that can be experienced as genuine forms of self-expression and self-rule, rather than alienating or oppressive impositions. This is the task that history has set us. It is perhaps a far more difficult task than most early socialists imagined. But I don’t think it is one that republicanism allows us to bypass or defer.
The danger of the ‘property-owning’ ideal, then, is that its signature ideal of individual independence may seem to offer a false escape alley from the dangers and difficulties of building forms of collective action and democratic self-rule that don’t become distant, remote,unrepresentative and unresponsive. This by no means to dismiss the value of the reforms that have been proposed under this banner, but rather to suggest that they might be seen as reinforcing accompaniments, rather than radical alternatives, to more direct efforts at collective control over our economic life such as trade union representation and industrial democracy (raised in this volume by Adrian Zimmerman), government regulation and intervention, and, indeed, public ownership and planning." (pp.14-15)
-Martin McIvor, "Republicanism, socialism and the renewal of the left", in In Search of Social Democracy: Responses to Crisis and Modernisation, edited by John Callaghan, Nina Fishman, Ben Jackson, and Martin McIvor (Manchester University Press, 2009): https://www.academia.edu/297021/Republicanism_socialism_and_the_renewal_of_the_left?pls=RWLSjBp2OX
PDF.
