IT'S NO LONGER A QUESTION OF WHETHER THE THIRD WAY PREVAILS...:

Western Political Models and Their Metaphysics, Part II: On the Differences between a Republic and a Democracy (Claude Polin, 05/26/10, First Principles)

[A] few standard characteristics of a republican city.

In order for the citizens to be allowed to be meaningful parts of the whole, and not mere grains in a sand pile, they must be given the very means of some independence, a true independence but one which at the same time does not sever their ties to their fellow citizens, which does not prevent them from loving the whole of which they are only parts, a real freedom, but one they love no more than they love their membership in the community. This is a very delicate independence indeed, and this tricky balance has not always been achieved in traditional societies, but I think it has always lived in the minds of the wise men of the past as the ideal to be pursued. It has but one natural basis: the average citizen must enjoy some kind of personal property that allows him not to be dependent for his very survival on the good will and the support of the others. And this means another balance between an excessive wealth that induces the illusion of an ability to live alone, and a wretchedness that turns everyone into beggars at the mercy of the others (Rome ceased to be a republic when the average Roman started demanding bread and circuses, like a slave at the hands of his masters). In other words, the chances for a city to be a republic are directly proportional to its being what has been called since Aristotle a middle-class society. Which points to a society with a sturdy rural agrarian foundation (“our governments,” warned Jefferson, “will remain virtuous for many centuries, as long as they are chiefly agricultural”). Of course, most of our contemporaries look with contempt on such a backward society, but that is only because they are blind to the evidence of common sense that society obtains between men only when one’s living is not achieved at the expense of the other.

There is another evidence, not only acknowledged but extolled in classical societies: beyond a certain size a city cannot be a republic. There comes a point when the difference between individuals and the whole of which they are part becomes so great that it becomes impossible for them to feel like a member of that whole, to feel they are citizens. The natural birthplace and habitat of a republic is a local community. Which means the only way for a republic to grow in size is the very one that was used for the individuals to gather into a society: a large republic is by nature a confederation of smaller ones. But again, even a confederation runs the risk of growing to a point beyond which there is too great a disproportion between the constituent communities and the whole that they are supposed to form. Rome ceased to become a republic when it became an empire.

Let me add a third basic feature: the core of the common good is actually acted upon when all are left to their own particular callings while having at heart to contribute something to the common wealth; when all are willing to go about their own affairs and even promote their own interests, but unwilling to do anything that would bring harm to the community; when all strive not to be a burden to the community, not to be dependent on the others, but also look forward to contributing something to it, not asking what their country can do for them, but what they can do for their country. I’m fully aware there may be something utopian in the idea that everyone can contribute something significant—that is, meaning something to the community. But I think nevertheless it is definitely realistic to maintain that there is no republic when all citizens do not aim as much as possible at doing just that, however minute it may be.

And finally I would like to allude to a fourth basic feature of a republic. It is of the essence of a republic to admit only a minimum of government, whose limited activities are moreover subjected to the consent of the people. The reason why seems to me to be the following one. If there is no republic in which the average citizen is not a man who enjoys the freedom to order his private life according to his best judgment, while feeling a propensity to play to his best his role in the functioning of the whole—that is, to serve the community—then it is obvious that a republican city is one whose organization is essentially natural and spontaneous. Its laws stem not from the imagination of some providential man but from the natural talents and vocations of its citizens, who naturally tend to organize themselves into a viable entity—that is, to resemble an organism whose organs tend to complement one another, each doing his own thing, but at the same time serving the others. Then two things are obvious. First, the government is to the republican city what the head is to the body: a particular organ whose function is crucial but essentially limited. Crucial because its main object is to ensure the smooth working of the whole, to make sure that no cell grows at the expense of the others, as well as to protect the body against external aggressions. But limited because this does not entail interfering with the natural way each part performs its particular role. That is to say, a republican government is limited to warranting justice and providing defense (and possibly helping a stricken organ to recover its health). This essential limitation has one essential consequence: since what is the common good has nothing to do with the decree of a Rousseauist general will; and since on the contrary its management requires mainly wisdom, sedate judgment, equity, and experience, there must be some propensity to entrust it to men of good intellectual standing and moral repute. At this rate what then makes a republic is not so much the actual participation of all the citizens in the performance of the governing function as their consent to their being governed, and therefore the existence of channels through which they can express their possible grievances (principibus nolite semper confidere). Which is why, all in all, the best regime in which the republican idea may bloom is probably the famous mixed one that all classical philosophers have always hailed, up to and including, I believe, the Founding Fathers of the American Republic.

2. Now I think a democracy is be understood as the exact opposite of a republic.

...but of whether it risks making individuals too independent of their fellow men.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 27, 2010 2:03 PM