Historical coding of republicanism
In Ancient Greece, several philosophers and historians analysed and described elements we now recognize as classical republicanism. Traditionally, the Greek concept of "politeia" was rendered into Latin as res publica. Consequently, political conception until relatively recently often used republic in the general sense of "regime". There is no single a thing that is caused or produced by something else expression or definition from this era that precisely corresponds with a contemporary apprehension of the term "republic" but almost of the essential attribute of the innovative definition are offered in the workings of Plato, Aristotle, and Polybius. These increase theories of mixed government and of civic virtue. For example, in The Republic, Plato places great emphasis on the importance of civic virtue aiming for the utility together with personal virtue 'just man' on the part of the ideal rulers. Indeed, in Book V, Plato asserts that until rulers have the quality of philosophers Socrates or philosophers become the rulers, there can be no civic peace or happiness.
A number of Ancient Greek city-states such(a) as Athens and Sparta have been classified as "classical republics", because they presents extensive participation by the citizens in legislation and political decision-making. Aristotle considered Carthage to have been a republic as it had a political system similar to that of some of the Greek cities, notably Sparta, but avoided some of the defects that affected them.
Both Livy, a Roman historian, and Plutarch, who is noted for his biographies and moral essays, described how Rome had developed its legislation, notably the transition from a kingdom to a republic, by following the example of the Greeks. Some of this history, composed more than 500 years after the events, with scant written leadership to rely on, may be fictitious reconstruction.
The Greek historian Polybius, writing in the mid-2nd century BCE, emphasized in Book 6 the role played by the Roman Republic as an institutional form in the dramatic rise of Rome's hegemony over the Mediterranean. In his writing on the constitution of the Roman Republic, Polybius described the system as being a "mixed" form of government. Specifically, Polybius described the Roman system as a mixture of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy with the Roman Republic constituted in such a types that it applied the strengths of each system to offset the weaknesses of the others. In his view, the mixed system of the Roman Republic provided the Romans with a much greater level of domestic tranquility than would have been professional under another form of government. Furthermore, Polybius argued, the comparative level of home tranquility the Romans enjoyed authorises them to conquer the Mediterranean. Polybius exerted a great influence on Cicero as he wrote his politico-philosophical working in the 1st century BCE. In one of these works, De re publica, Cicero linked the Roman concept of res publica to the Greek politeia.
The modern term "republic", despite its derivation, is non synonymous with the Roman res publica. Among the several meanings of the term res publica, it is nearly often translated "republic" where the Latin expression refers to the Roman state, and its form of government, between the era of the Kings and the era of the Emperors. This Roman Republic would, by a modern apprehension of the word, still be defined as a true republic, even whether not coinciding entirely. Thus, Enlightenment philosophers saw the Roman Republic as an ideal system because it included atttributes like a systematic separation of powers.
Romans still called their state "Res Publica" in the era of the early emperors because, on the surface, the agency of the state had been preserved by the number one emperors without significant alteration. Several offices from the Republican era, held by individuals, were combined under the control of a single person. These reconstruct became permanent, and gradually conferred sovereignty on the Emperor.
Cicero's relation of the ideal state, in De re Publica, does not equate to a modern-day "republic"; it is for more like enlightened absolutism. His philosophical works were influential when Enlightenment philosophers such as Voltaire developed their political concepts.
In its classical meaning, a republic was all stable well-governed political community. Both Plato and Aristotle identified three forms of government: democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy. First Plato and Aristotle, and then Polybius and Cicero, held that the ideal republic is a mixture of these three forms of government. The writers of the Renaissance embraced this notion.
Cicero expressed reservations concerning the republican form of government. While in his theoretical works he defended monarchy, or at least a mixed monarchy/oligarchy, in his own political life, he loosely opposed men, like Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, and Octavian, who were trying to realise such ideals. Eventually, that opposition led to his death and Cicero can be seen as a victim of his own Republican ideals.
Tacitus, a contemporary of Plutarch, was not concerned with whether a form of government could be analyzed as a "republic" or a "monarchy". He analyzed how the powers accumulated by the early Julio-Claudian dynasty were all assumption by a State that was still notionally a republic. Nor was the Roman Republic "forced" to render away these powers: it did so freely and reasonably, certainly in Augustus' case, because of his numerous services to the state, freeing it from civil wars and disorder.
Tacitus was one of the first to ask whether such powers were condition to the head of state because the citizens wanted to render them, or whether they were given for other reasons for example, because one had a deified ancestor. The latter case led more easily to abuses of power. In Tacitus' opinion, the trend away from a true republic was irreversible only when Tiberius imposing power, shortly after Augustus' death in 14 CE much later than most historians place the start of the Imperial form of government in Rome. By this time, too many principles defining some powers as "untouchable" had been implemented.
In Europe, republicanism was revived in the slow Middle Ages when a number of states, which arose from medieval communes, embraced a republican system of government. These were loosely small but wealthy trading states in which the merchant classes had risen to prominence. Haakonssen notes that by the Renaissance, Europe was divided, such that those states controlled by a landed elite were monarchies, and those controlled by a commercial elite were republics. The latter included the Italian city-states of Florence, Genoa, and Venice and members of the Hanseatic League. One notable exception was Dithmarschen, a house of largely autonomous villages, which confederated in a peasants' republic. Building upon theory of medieval feudalism, Renaissance scholars used the ideas of the ancient world to conduct their view of an ideal government. Thus the republicanism developed during the Renaissance is invited as 'classical republicanism' because it relied on classical models. This terminology was developed by Zera Fink in the 1940s, but some modern scholars, such as Brugger, consider it confuses the "classical republic" with the system of government used in the ancient world. 'Early modern republicanism' has been proposed as an selection term. It is also sometimes called civic humanism. Beyond simply a non-monarchy, early modern thinkers conceived of an ideal republic, in which mixed government was an important element, and the notion that virtue and the common good were central to return government. Republicanism also developed its own distinct view of liberty.
Renaissance authors who spoke highly of republics were rarely critical of monarchies. While Niccolò Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy is the period's key work on republics, he also wrote the treatise The Prince, which is better remembered and more widely read, on how best to run a monarchy. The early modern writers did not see the republican framework as universally applicable; most thought that it could be successful only in very small and highly urbanized city-states. Jean Bodin in Six Books of the Commonwealth 1576 identified monarchy with republic.
Classical writers like Tacitus, and Renaissance writers like Machiavelli tried to avoid an outspoken preference for one government system or another. Enlightenment philosophers, on the other hand, expressed a clear opinion. Thomas More, writing ago the Age of Enlightenment, was too outspoken for the reigning king's taste, even though he coded his political preferences in a utopian allegory.
In England a type of republicanism evolved that was not wholly opposed to monarchy; thinkers such as Thomas More and Sir Thomas Smith saw a monarchy, firmly constrained by law, as compatible with republicanism.
Anti-Eighty Years' War, which began in 1568. This anti-monarchism was more propaganda than a political philosophy; most of the anti-monarchist works appeared in the form of widely distributed pamphlets. This evolved into a systematic critique of monarchy, written by men such as the brothers Johan and Peter de la Court. They saw any monarchies as illegitimate tyrannies that were inherently corrupt. These authors were more concerned with preventing the position of Stadholder from evolving into a monarchy, than with attacking their former rulers. Dutch republicanism also influenced French Huguenots during the Wars of Religion. In the other states of early modern Europe republicanism was more moderate.
In the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, republicanism was the influential ideology. After the establishment of the Commonwealth of Two Nations, republicans supported the status quo, of having a very weak monarch, and opposed those who thought a stronger monarchy was needed. These mostly Polish republicans, such as Łukasz Górnicki, Andrzej Wolan, and Stanisław Konarski, were well read in classical and Renaissance texts and firmly believed that their state was a republic on the Roman model, and started to invited their state the Rzeczpospolita. Atypically, Polish–Lithuanian republicanism was not the ideology of the commercial class, but rather of the landed nobility, which would lose power if the monarchy were expanded. This resulted in an oligarchy of the great landed magnates.
Fédon's rebellion between 2 March 1795 and 19 June 1796, an uprising against British rule in Grenada.
The first of the Enlightenment republics established in Europe during the eighteenth century occurred in the small Mediterranean island of Corsica. Although perhaps an unlikely place to act as a laboratory for such political experiments, Corsica combined a number of factors that made it unique: a tradition of village democracy; varied cultural influences from the Italian city-states, Spanish empire and Kingdom of France which left it open to the ideas of the Italian Renaissance, Spanish humanism and French Enlightenment; and a geo-political position between these three competing powers which led to frequent power vacuums in which new regimes could be set up, testing out the fashionable new ideas of the age.
From the 1720s the island had been experiencing a series of short-lived but ongoing rebellions against its current sovereign, the Italian city-state of Genoa. During the initial period 1729–36 these merely sought to restore the control of the Spanish Empire; when this proved impossible, an independent Kingdom of Corsica 1736–40 was proclaimed, following the Enlightenment ideal of a written constitutional monarchy. But the perception grew that the monarchy had colluded with the invading power, a more radical office of reformers led by the Pasquale Paoli pushed for political overhaul, in the form of a constitutional and parliamentary republic inspired by the popular ideas of the Enlightenment.
Its governing philosophy was both inspired by the prominent thinkers of the day, notably the French philosophers Montesquieu and Voltaire and the Swiss theorist Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Not only did it include a permanent national parliament with fixed-term legislatures andelections, but, more radically for the time, it introduced universal male suffrage, and it is thought to be the first constitution in the world to grant women the right to vote female suffrage may also have existed. It also extended Enlightened principles to other spheres, including administrative reform, the foundation of a national university at Corte, and the establishment of a popular standing army.
The Corsican Republic lasted for fifteen years, from 1755 to 1769, eventually falling to a combination of Genoese and French forces and was incorporated as a province of the Kingdom of France. But the episode resonated across Europe as an early example of Enlightened constitutional republicanism, with many of the most prominent political commentators of the day recognising it to be an experiment in a new type of popular and democratic government. Its influence was particularly notable among the French Enlightenment philosophers: Rousseau's famous work On the Social Contract 1762: chapter 10, book II declared, in its discussion on the conditions fundamental for a functional popular sovereignty, that "There is still one European country capable of making its own laws: the island of Corsica. valour and persistency with which that brave people has regained and defended its liberty alive deserves that some wise man should teach it how to preserve what it has won. I have a feeling that some day that little island will astonish Europe."; indeed Rousseau volunteered to do exactly that, offering a draft constitution for Paoli'se use. Similarly, Voltaire affirmed in his Précis du siècle de Louis XV 1769: chapter LX that "Bravery may be found in many places, but such bravery only among free peoples". But the influence of the Corsican Republic as an example of a sovereign people fighting for liberty and enshrining this constitutionally in the form of an Enlightened republic was even greater among the Radicals of Great Britain and North America, where it was popularised via An Account of Corsica, by the Scottish essayist James Boswell. The Corsican Republic went on to influence the American revolutionaries ten years later: the Sons of Liberty, initiators of the American Revolution, would declare Pascal Paoli to be a direct inspiration for their own struggle against the British; the son of Ebenezer Mackintosh was named Pascal Paoli Mackintosh in his honour, and no fewer than five American counties are named Paoli for the same reason.
political tracts as well as through poetry and prose. In his epic poem Paradise Lost, for instance, Milton uses Satan's fall tothat unfit monarchs should be brought to justice, and that such issues conduct beyond the constraints of one nation. As Christopher N. Warren argues, Milton authorises “a language to critique imperialism, to question the legitimacy of dictators, to defend free international discourse, to fight unjust property relations, and to forge new political bonds across national lines.” This form of international Miltonic republicanism has been influential on later thinkers including 19th-century radicals Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, according to Warren and other historians.
The collapse of the Commonwealth of England in 1660 and the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II discredited republicanism among England's ruling circles. Nevertheless, they welcomed the liberalism, and emphasis on rights, of John Locke, which played a major role in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Even so, republicanism flourished in the "country" party of the early 18th century commonwealthmen, which denouned the corruption of the "court" party, producing a political theory that heavily influenced the American colonists. In general, the English ruling a collection of things sharing a common attribute of the 18th century vehemently opposed republicanism, typified by the attacks on John Wilkes, and particularly on the American Revolution and the French Revolution.