Republican Auctoritas: Harrington’s dual theory of political legitimacy
| Date | 01 July 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885118806677 |
| Published date | 01 July 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article EJPT
Republican Auctoritas:
Harrington’s dual theory
of political legitimacy
Cody Trojan
Department of Political Science, UCLA, USA
Abstract
Neo-republicans position James Harrington (1611–1677) as a seminal figure in a tradition
that asks what set of institutions grant the individual freedom from domination.
This article argues that the signal emphasis on freedom diverts us from the broader
question of legitimacy motivating Harrington’s republicanism. Harrington contends
that the liberty property confers is a necessary but insufficient condition for de jure
government. The popular liberty that a broad distribution of wealth secures must be
supplemented by a Roman concept of authority in order for the regime to become
legitimate. Republican legitimacy requires the marriage of popular power and aristocratic
virtue; it demands both thewide distribution of property and the integration of authority
as auctoritas into the political constitution. The elucidation of Harrington’s dual theory of
legitimacy makes it possible to reassess the distance separating a republicanism that
follows Harrington from a liberalism that follows Hobbes.
Keywords
Civic virtue, Hobbes, mixed constitution, non-domination, republicanism
Since the publication of JGA Pocock’s (1975) The Machiavellian Moment,it
has become difficult to speak of English republicanism without referring to
James Harrington (1611–1677), the movement’s most influential and innovative
theorist. Pocock argues that Harrington’s work inaugurated a specific republican
Corresponding author:
Cody Trojan,Department of Political Science, UCLA, Los Angeles, 4289 Bunche Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095-
1472, USA.
Email: codytrojan@ucla.edu
European Journal of Political Theory
2021, Vol. 20(3) 398–420
!The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885118806677
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vocabulary used by Anglophone commonwealthmen throughout the long 18th
century.
1
Quentin Skinner (1998) and Phillip Pettit (1997, 2012), the leading figures
of the second wave of the republican revival (“neo-republicanism”), propose an
alternative object of emphasis. Whereas Pocock asks us to conceive of English
republicanism as a political language,
2
Skinner and Pettit shift our attention to
a particular concept of freedom.
3
Harrington remains a pivotal figure in this latter
narrative, but we are now asked to understand his writings as a key statement
concerning what it would mean to realize a republican concept of liberty: freedom
as non-domination.
Harrington, on the neo-republican account, stands tall among a long line of
early modern writers who articulate the fundamental maxim that “it is only pos-
sible to be free in a free state” (Skinner, 1998: 60). These writers regard a state as
free when its legislation tracks the interests and ideas of the people and when its
government lacks the power to arbitrarily intrude upon citizens and their property
(Pettit, 1997: 11, 39; Skinner, 1998: 23). Unique to the republican tradition, the
latter criterion is crucial. It is not enough that a benevolent king refrain from
exercising his will, because his subjects would still live under threat of interference,
which could shape their behavior. Non-domination means rulers cannot exercise a
capricious will in the first place. Skinner and Pettit rely on Machiavelli’s formula-
tion that in a free state you are “able to enjoy your own possessions freely and
without any fear” (Pettit, 1997: 71; Skinner, 1998: 66) and on Harrington’s for-
mulation that in a free state citizens are “able to live of themselves” (Pettit, 1997:
28–29; Pettit, 2012: 17). The neo-republican hypothesis emphasizes the connection
between public liberty and private liberty. Living in a political system that secures
non-domination and tracks popular interests is the only means of securing pro-
priety, i.e. the confidence that one’s person, property, and actions are truly
one’s own.
4
Neo-republicans wager that the historical recovery of the concept of freedom as
non-domination will provide the basis for a new public philosophy,
5
one that has
the potential of dislodging the hegemony exercised by liberalism with its concept of
freedom as non-interference.
6
Just as neo-republicans position Harrington as a
progenitor of the republican concept of freedom as non-domination, they offer a
complementary genealogy that positions Thomas Hobbes as the progenitor of the
liberal concept of freedom as non-interference. Given that neo-republicans ground
their arguments in a foundational opposition between Harrington and Hobbes, it
is noteworthy that a growing number of scholars seek to align their
projects (Fukuda, 1997; Parkin, 2007: 177–185; Rahe, 2008: 321–247; Scott,
1993). We are told that Harrington shares with Hobbes the same goal (political
stability), the same metaphysical presuppositions (materialism), and the same
skepticism of civic virtue. The following problem presents itself: how can
Harrington be among the leading republican writers who give us a bold alternative
to Hobbesian liberty and at the same time remain within the Hobbesian paradigm
of political thinking?
Trojan 399
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