On the Slogans of Republican Political Theory
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885109349407 |
| Published date | 01 January 2010 |
| Date | 01 January 2010 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
On the Slogans of Republican
Political Theory
Quentin Skinner
Queen Mary’s College, University of London.
I
All the contributors to this symposium have their own particular thesis to defend,
but they are united at the same time by their concern with a single overarching
theme. They are all interested in extending what they describe as a ‘republican’
view of freedom and equality to encompass broader questions about human rights
and the proper relations between states. I mainly want to comment on this attempt
to expand the reach of republican political thought. But I also want to focus – more
explicitly than any of our symposiasts have done – on the intellectual traditions
from which they draw their sustenance, thereby seeking to illuminate what it
might mean to describe their shared outlook as republican in provenance.
Suppose we begin by recalling some of the classic statements of republican polit-
ical theory from the heyday of the tradition in early-modern Europe. Consider,
for example, Niccolò Machiavelli’s Discorsi, written in the immediate aftermath of
the fall of the Florentine republic in 1512. Or consider some of the English writ-
ers most heavily indebted to Machiavelli, such as James Harrington in his Oceana
of 1656, or Algernon Sydney in his Discourses on Government of 1694, or such later
theorists as Richard Price in his Observations on Civil Liberty of 1776. It would not,
I think, be too much of an oversimplification to say that the common features
of the republicanism espoused by all these writers arose out of two basic com-
mitments. Furthermore, as the republican tradition developed, these underlying
principles came to be summarized in the form of two slogans, as I shall call them,
that may almost be said to define the republican case. It is with these slogans and
their implications that I shall mainly be concerned in what follows.
II
One of the basic commitments announced by every republican theorist of the
early-modern period was about the nature of political liberty. As our symposiasts
95
comment
Contact address: Quentin Skinner, Department of History, Queen Mary,
University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS.
Email: q.skinner@qmul.ac.uk
EJPT
European Journal of Political Theory
9(1) 95–102
© The Author(s), 2010
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[DOI: 10.1177/1474885109349407]
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