(i) Misleading Anachronism of the Alternative Paradigm Thesis
Pocock wants first and foremost to establish that republican writers use distinctive terms of political argument.[14] To bring these to the surface. he employs two strategies—one linguistic, one analytical. The linguistic strategy consists in describing his paradigms by example: Pocock points to key terms, clusters of terms or preoccupations that are held to be distinctively liberal or republican. Yet on close inspection every such appeal encounters difficulties.
To begin with, the term republican exhibits a great many competing meanings. Even if we restrict ourselves to the uses Pocock explicitly embraces, we find a remarkable diversity of referents ranging from the Greek city-states of the ancient world to modern territorial ones and over polities as different in their socioeconomic systems as slave-based ancient societies and feudal, agrarian, commercial, and modern capitalist ones. At times when Pocock speaks of the republican tradition, he lumps together as its "major phases" ideologies as disparate as Aristotelianism, Thomism (which in other contexts is held to be paradigmatically antirepublican),[15] "neo-Machiavellism," and Marxism and claims they display "an astonishing unity and solidarity" in their mistrust of money as a medium of exchange (Pocock 1985: 103–4). Questions inevitably arise, therefore, of how anachronistic it might be to try to describe these different uses with
[14] Pocock's view of the relation between liberal and republican ideas is complex, and he has modified it over time but continues to discuss them as constituting analytically distinct paradigms, not translatable or reducible to one another. Pocock now acknowledges that liberalism's "law-centered paradigm" is "the principal theme of the history of early modern political thought" and concedes that there was a period in the eighteenth century when republican and liberal outlooks were fused by the legal humanists (Pocock 1981b: 361, 366–67). Yet even when he identifies his enterprise as "trying to get … [the liberal] paradigm into perspective," he continues to maintain that "readers of Kuhn will know that a covert attack on the paradigm may be entailed" (Pocock 1985: 61).
[15] See (ibid.: 104).
the same Arendtian political vocabulary[16] and of what consistent meaning over time the term republican can have if it is to apply to them all.[17]
Liberalism is notoriously no less problematical. It, too, denotes a host of quite different political ideologies. Pocock seems to think of it in Hartzian terms as representing a view of the world in which asocial individuals are prevented from destroying one another by legal constraints but otherwise pursue their self-interested goals. Yet liberalism has seldom been like this historically. Today it generally denotes a quasi-statist ideology geared to the promotion of public welfare and the protection, even privileging, of historically disadvantaged groups within the constraints of advanced capitalism. Perhaps the libertarianism of Nozick, with its eschewal of patterned theories of the good and insistence on "rights-as-side-constraints," and the Rawlsian insistence that all teleological commitments ride roughshod over the rights of individuals fit the Pocockian stereotype.[18] But these have no more in common with the major historical variants of liberalism than do they with contemporary political liberalism.[19]
Within the alleged paradigms, Pocock's characterizations of key terms
[16] Arendt's influence on the architecture of Pocock's civic republican model becomes explicit in Pocock (1975a: 550).
[17] If we think about the term republic and its cognates more generally than Pocock, the problem of characterization (let alone definition) becomes even more serious. In the history of ideas we can distinguish Plato's conception in The Republic from Machiavelli's neo-Aristotelian formulations from the uses of it made by the French revolutionaries of 1789 and the English Chartists of the 1840s and fail to discern obvious common characteristics. At times it is a generic term, almost synonymous with regime, so that even a monarchy can be a kind of republic (as indeed it was in the thought of some of Pocock's [1975a: 401–221 English neo-Harringtonian Machiavellians), yet it also exhibits an explicitly antimonarchical connotation—as it did in France in 1789, 1830, and 1848 and as has always been implied in its American usages (though here an anticolonial element enters as well). The many social formations that have historically been labeled republican are comparably diverse. The Greek city-states were republics (though they differed greatly in internal structure and organization); there was republican Rome, the English republic during the seventeenth century, and the various short-lived European republics of the nineteenth. The geography of the contemporary world tells a story of perhaps unparalleled diversity subsumed under the term. The United States is a republic, but we also have the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the People's Republic of China, the Fifth Republic in France, the Republic of the Philippines, the Federal Republic of Germany, the German Democratic Republic, and the Republic of South Africa, to name but a few. Of the 170 countries listed in The Countries of the World and Their Leaders, 1987 (Washington, D.C.: Gale Research Company, 1987), pp. 150–62, 113 contain the term republic or one of its cognates in their formal names.
[18] Even Nozick's libertarian view rests on conceptions of both human and public good. See Shapiro (1986: 165–78, 289–92).
[19] For useful discussions of liberalism that establish this case, see Galston (1983:621–29), Smith (1985), and Kloppenberg (1987).
and preoccupations run into analogous difficulties. He counterposes the emphasis on rights in liberalism's "law-centered paradigm" with the claim that the civic humanist paradigm revolves around the idea of virtue—that "homo is naturally a citizen and most fully himself when living in a vivere civile ." Because the civic humanist and liberal vocabularies are "discontinuous with one another," and they "premise different values, encounter different problems, and employ different strategies of speech and argument," republicanism's virtue "cannot be satisfactorily reduced to the status of right or assimilated to the vocabulary of jurisprudence." The discontinuity remains even when both vocabularies are used "in the same context and to congruent purposes," as when both republican and juristic modes of argument were simultaneously invoked to vindicate republican independence in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (Pocock 1981b: 365, 355–56, 357, 356).
Yet the entire historiographical debate spawned by Pocock's casting of republicanism as an alternative virtue-based paradigm (even if he equivocates about the periods in which it is held to have been distinct) has shed more noise than light on our understanding of early modern thought.[20] Many commentators have pointed out on the one hand that liberalism has always employed conceptions of virtue and on the other that such writers as Harrington, whom Pocock deemed paradigmatically republican, employed much of the liberal vocabulary of law, right, and value.[21] As with all historiographical fads, the endless contortions engaged in by Pocock's followers to save the thesis dilute its explanatory power. An increasingly diverse collection of theorists is deemed somehow to have been republican, including writers like Adam Smith who explicitly rejected core republican arguments, openly embracing standing armies and the division of labor.[22] Even Locke, who Pocock originally argued had been given too much prominence at the expense of civic humanist writers, now teeters on the verge of incorporation into the new civic humanist rewriting of early modern thought.[23] This is ironic, in light of Pocock's original motivation, his dissatisfaction
[20] For a recent statement of his view, see Pocock ( 1985: 37–50). In this and the next several paragraphs I draw on arguments in Shapiro (1989a: 62–65).
[21] On liberal treatments of virtue and the good, see Galston (1983: 621–29), Smith (1985: 13–59), and Kloppenberg (1987). On liberal assumptions in the English and Scottish republican traditions, see Isaac (1988) and Burtt (1986), and for a critical assessment of republicanism as an alternative paradigm in America, see Greenstone (1986: 1–49).
[22] See Winch (1980). For a good critical analysis, see Harpham (1984: 764–74).
[23] Thus although Grant (1985: 15) does not argue that Locke was a civic humanist and is not herself a Pocockian, she does argue that Locke's political doctrine "is perfectly compatible with community in many forms and with strong communal institutions."
satisfaction with what he saw as the tendency of Marxists and Straussians alike to give too much attention to Lockean liberalism and to discover everywhere they looked after about the time of Machiavelli either the rise of bourgeois modes of thought or the decline of Western civilization.[24] My point is not that a more scrupulous depiction of the paradigm would resolve these difficulties but rather that just as liberalism has always entailed notions of the good and of virtue, so republican writers have been concerned with law and legitimacy—even if sometimes implicitly—because any theory of politics has to be concerned with both.[25]
No more successful is Pocock's attempt to distinguish his paradigms by reference to liberalism's typical preoccupation with instrumental questions of distribution in the face of republicanism's teleological commitments. As he is forced to concede, there have always been ideas of legitimate distribution in the republican tradition. "If the citizens were to practice a common good, they must distribute its components among themselves, and must even distribute the various modes of participating in its distribution." Indeed, Aristotelian, Polybian, and Ciceronian analysis had shown "that these modes were highly various and capable of being combined in a diversity of complex patterns; political science in the sense of politeia took this as its subject matter." Pocock nonetheless continues to maintain that because the virtues that it was the business of these different distributions of means to realize could not be reduced to those means, "the republican or political conception of virtue exceeded the limits of jurisprudence and therefore of justice as a jurist conceived it" (ibid.: 358). Even this formulation should suggest to Pocock that his dichotomous classification is misleading; it is only because he operates with the assumption that the liberal view reduces politics to an account of law and right that he can entertain the notion of an alternative and discontinuous republican vocabulary that reduces it to an account of the good.
Pocock's analytical strategy is to underpin the dichotomy between republican and liberal paradigms with the dichotomy between negative and positive liberty. Although the value liberty is central to both traditions, in the liberal tradition liberty is typically a negative constraint on the power
[24] For an illustration of his ringing denunciations of "the paradigm of liberalism," see Pocock (1985: 59–62).
[25] In this connection note that Riesenberg (1969: 237–54) criticized an earlier version of the civic humanist alternative paradigm view, as formulated by Baron (1966), by arguing that citizenship in the Italian republics was mainly defined in jurisprudential terms, not those arising from the humanist vocabulary of vita activa and vivere civile, so that law, right, and obligation were central to the classical republican view of citizenship. Although Pocock (1975a: 83; 1981: 355) has acknowledged the existence of this critique, he has never responded to it.
of others (principally if not exclusively the state) over the individual. The negative liberty view tends to "lower the level of participation and deny the premise that man is by nature political" and to be narrowly preoccupied "with that which can be distributed, with things and rights." By contrast, classical republican positive liberty elevates participation through the Aristotelian affirmation that we are naturally political animals.[26] The laws of the republic, "the lois obeyed by Montesquieu's vertu politique —were therefore far less regulae juris or modes of conflict resolution than they were ordini or 'orders'; they were the formal structure within which political nature developed to its inherent end" (ibid.: 359).
Pocock's confrontation between republican and liberal paradigms and the negative/positive dichotomy with which he underpins it are instances of what I have elsewhere described as mutual oppositions of gross concepts. When protagonists argue in terms of gross concepts, they engage in a double reduction. First, they reduce what are actually complex relational ideas to one or another of the terms in the relation over which they range, dealing with the other terms implicitly while seeming not to deal with them at all. Second, they reduce what are often substantive disagreements about one or another of the terms in a relational argument to disagreements about the meanings of the terms themselves, making a self-fulfilling prophecy out of the "essential contestability" thesis, which posits exactly the kind of discontinuous vocabularies whereby protagonists allegedly speak past one another that Pocock is seeking to establishes.[27] As MacCallum (1972: 174–93) showed long ago in relation to the negative/ positive liberty debate, any assertion about freedom or liberty minimally involves reference to agents, restraining (or enabling) conditions, and actions. It always makes sense to ask of any use of the term, who is free from what restraint (or because of what enabling condition) to perform which action? Negative libertarians tend explicitly to argue by reference to the first two terms in this triad; positive libertarians, the second and third. Negative libertarians usually discuss the second term in the language of constraints, whereas positive libertarians employ that of enabling
[26] "The republic or politeia solved the problem of authority and liberty by making quisque [everyone] participant in the authority by which he was ruled; this entailed relations of equality which made in fact extremely stern demands upon him, but by premising that he was kata ph
[27] Essential contestability is the term first popularized by Bernard Gallie (1955: 167–98).
conditions. MacCallum's argument was, first, that constraints and enabling conditions can invariably be redescribed as one another (so that there is no politically interesting difference between saying that the prisoner is unfree because of the presence of locked chains, not the lack of a key) and second, that all three terms in the relation must be integral to any credible account of freedom. He showed that it does not take much digging to bring an author's assumptions about each of the three terms to light and that once this is done we can see that negative and positive libertarians do not have different understandings of the meanings of the terms freedom and liberty at all. Rather, they disagree about the content of the substantive terms in his triad, though this is seldom obvious to protagonists just because their disagreement appears to them to be about the meanings of the terms freedom and liberty . But just as the arguments of negative and positive libertarians can easily be rearticulated in one another's terms, so it can be shown that theories of the right and the good mutually require one another and are therefore not basic or paradigmatic terms of political argument. Pocock's analytic attempt to distinguish liberal from republican paradigms fails as a result.[28]
Certainly some writers have believed themselves to be embracing a republican ideal as an alternative to some other, but we make a serious error if we take them at their word. The very fact that civic humanist writers employ so many different and conflicting concepts of virtue,[29] that the idea of liberty is central to both alleged paradigms, and that those paradigm-case republicans, the American revolutionaries, were obsessed with questions of law and legitimacy should make us suspicious of this dichotomous classification. There is no exclusive language of the virtues (or of law). There are many (often conflicting) assumptions about virtue and about legitimacy embodied in both jurisprudential and civic republican traditions, some conservative, some radical, and some liberal, as we have seen on Pocock's own account.[30] The interesting questions are which of these assumptions merit our endorsement and which our rejection, but they are obscured by the mindless opposition of gross concepts, liberal versus republican. Perhaps Pocock can make a case that his interest is that we recover the terms of debate as the protagonists understood them. Granting this for now (though I dispute part of it in section II(ii) below), my analysis here reveals the limits of such methods from the standpoint of anyone interested in analytic clarity or normative argument. If a set of assumptions
[28] I defend a more general version of this claim in Shapiro (1989a: 51–76).
[29] Three have been distinguished in a useful paper by Burtt (1986).
[30] Even the neo-Kantian political theories of John Rawls and his followers, which express explicit agnosticism about intersubjective purposes, implicitly make these assumptions. See Shapiro (1986: 169, 214–18, 260–62, 285–87).
about purposes, or about law, is implicit in an argument—perhaps not even evident to its author—this may be one of the most interesting things about it, and exclusive preoccupation with authorial intention will lead us to miss it.
Whether or not a historian like Pocock can formulate a description of his enterprise that makes these issues exogenous, contemporary communitarians like Sandel, who want to invoke the revival of interest in republicanism as part of the normative basis for an allegedly alternate theory of politics, cannot legitimately avoid it.[31] For the debates on "whether-or-not republic" and "whether-or-not virtue" do not begin to get at the questions of what sorts; it is, consequently, small wonder that appeal to the republican conceptual vocabulary has seemed compatible with every political ideology from far left to far right and with every kind of polity from the pastoral village to the nation-state (and many kinds of the latter, at that).
Thus we should not allow the question to be who is right, liberals or republicans? because both are right about one another. Liberalisms that reduce politics to questions of right will always be vulnerable to republican critiques either because they appear to lack conceptions of the good or because their implicit conceptions of the good are not adequately defended. Conversely, republican alternatives that direct attention to the language of virtue while ignoring questions about its substance, about how it might be implemented, about the distributive consequences and external effects of treating one conception of the public good as authoritative rather than another will rightly seem vulnerable to liberals. Arguing by reference to alternative paradigms perpetuates the process of gross opposition because it directs critical attention to the terminologies in which arguments are expressed, rather than the arguments themselves.