Sismonde de Sismondi's aristocratic republicanism
| Published date | 01 April 2013 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885112456662 |
| Date | 01 April 2013 |
| Author | Nadia Urbinati |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
European Journal of Political Theory
12(2) 153–174
!The Author(s) 2012
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1474885112456662
ept.sagepub.com
EJPT
Article
Sismonde de Sismondi’s
aristocratic republicanism
Nadia Urbinati
Columbia University, USA
Abstract
This article shows through Sismonde de Sismondi’s work how peculiarly modern issues
like the revolution, equal political rights (universal suffrage) and an industrial and com-
mercial society contributed to renewing the identity of republicanism. That renewal
took place in Europe, after the French Revolution, and in a direct confrontation with
democracy rather than liberalism. The problem in relation to which Sismondi reflected
on the institutions of political liberty, the republican constitution and the role of indi-
vidual liberty was the unstoppable growth of equality, political and social. In his work,
republicanism was intended as an answer against the emergent democratic transform-
ation of society, with a role of moderating equality, dividing and bridling popular sov-
ereignty and containing the immoderate propensities of democracy. The modern threat
to liberty did not originate from the power of the few or of the one, but from that of
the many. It originated in the majoritarian principle on which democracy relies neces-
sarily. This principle, the republican Sismondi argued, contains the seed of the suppres-
sion of minorities, that is to say of individual liberty.
Keywords
Constitutionalism, democracy, equality, individual liberty, private property, republicanism
Sismondi and the ‘Two Liberties’
‘I am a liberal, or even better, a republican, yet never a democrat.’ This was the
ideological sketch that Sismonde de Sismondi (1773–1842) gave of himself in 1835.
1
Sismondi was, along with his close friends Benjamin Constant and Madame de
Stael, one of the thinkers who contributed the most in shaping the dichotomy
between ancient and modern liberty in reaction to French revolutionary republican
philosophy. In his monumental Histoire des Re
´publiques Italiennes du Moyen-Age
(1818), Sismondi praised the courage and virtue of citizens in Italian Republics yet
did not intend to revive their model of free cities or recover their rather forgotten
Corresponding author:
Nadia Urbinati, Department of Political Science, Columbia University, 719 International Affairs, 420 West
118th Street, New York, NY 10027, USA.
Email: nu15@columbia.edu
moment of history in order to restore a republican political agenda at a time when
republicanism was on trial. In fact, he thought that the aspirations and beliefs of
those Italians were very different from those of his time and society. We may
wonder, he observed, whether we do not make simply ‘a capital mistake of lan-
guage’ in believing their word and our word ‘freedom to designate’ the same idea.
‘What we call freedom is not what the Italians called it, and the entire goal of social
order appeared to them from a point of view absolutely different from ours.’
2
Sismondi thought that the freedom of the ancients (a rather eclectic category
which according to him included ‘the Greeks and the Romans, the Swiss and the
Germans, as well as the Italians’) was not ‘the freedom of the English’, that is to say
the moderns, as Montesquieu had explained in his Spirits of the Laws. Before the
17th century, Sismondi continued, Europeans understood freedom primarily as
‘participation in the sovereignty of one’s country’.
3
By contrast, modern freedom
came with the example of the British constitution, which taught people to think of
freedom in terms of a guarantee of one’s tranquillity (une protection du repos), of
one’s happiness and domestic independence.
4
One year before Benjamin Constant
in his lecture at the Athe
´ne
´e Royal, Sismonde de Sismondi articulated the distinc-
tion between the freedom of the ancients and the freedom of the moderns that
became the ground for the battle over the meaning of freedom during the first half
of the 19th century.
In what follows I would like to revisit the political ideas of this almost forgotten
republican author, who was engaged in a work of interpretation that was meant to
redefine political liberty at a time when the republican experience was on trial. The
examination of the political ideas of Sismondi relates to my previous study of John
Stuart Mill’s political thought. In that early work I set out the contribution of
ancient republican ideas to the making of 19th-century liberalism. In this article
I would like to show through Sismondi’s work how peculiarly modern issues like
the revolution, equal political rights (universal suffrage) and an industrial and
commercial society contributed to renewing the identity of republicanism. That
renewal, I will argue, took place in a direct confrontation with democracy rather
than liberalism. The problem in relation to which Sismondi reflected on the insti-
tutions of political liberty, the republican constitution and the role of individual
liberty was the unstoppable growth of equality, political and social. In his work,
‘republicanism’ wanted to be an answer to the emergent democratic transformation
of society, with a role of moderating equality, dividing and bridling popular sov-
ereignty and containing the immoderate propensity of democracy. The refutation
of democracy and popular sovereignty as they developed during the French
Revolution was the starting point of Sismondi’s theoretical and historical work.
In his rendering, the modern threat to liberty did not originate from the power of
the few or of the one, but from that of the many. It originates in the majoritarian
principle on which democracy relies. This principle, the republican Sismondi
argued, contains the seed of the suppression of minorities, that is to say, individual
liberty. Moreover, in modern time it is rendered through the fiction of electoral
representation, a strategy that does not make the majoritarian principle more legit-
imate but makes it an accomplice of the erasure of social pluralism because of its
154 European Journal of Political Theory 12(2)
To continue reading
Request your trial