Bruno Leipold
Most centrally, republicans held to a particular understanding of the idea of democracy. They were trying to create democratic regimes that were committed to, certainly, universal manhood suffrage, but also to much more than that. They wanted extensive control over representatives, a citizen public administration, in order to establish real active popular sovereignty. And by the way, it is often forgotten that liberals in the nineteenth century were not committed to democracy in the same way; they did not support universal suffrage but instead favored property and educational qualifications as requirements for voting.
Another distinguishing element of republicanism, and one that ties together these various commitments, is their understanding of freedom. Republicans believe that freedom means the absence of arbitrary power. That means that you are unfree whenever you have a master over you who has the power to interfere with you and your life as they please. Even if that master is benevolent and mostly lets you do what you want, you are still unfree because they still dominate you, they still have power over you that you don’t control. In the political sphere, this leads to a critique of absolute monarchy, which is a traditional republican worry. But republicans also used their conception of freedom in the nineteenth century to critique new emerging forms of arbitrary power or domination, including capitalism.
In Marx’s analysis, even good capitalists, let’s say, who are kindhearted and might want to pay their workers well, are forced by the market from doing so because they’ll be put out of business.
Republicans are, on the whole, quite critical toward capitalism, and this is easily forgotten. They object to how capitalist bosses dominate their workers. But they distinguish themselves from socialism in their critique of…
Auteur: Bruno Leipold
