New Conventions for Old 203- A process that has been deeply familiar to the French Republican tradition.
- He adds that weak republicans have occasionally denounced Barber’s position as virtu-
ally communitarian, which Brugger considers deeply misleading, ‘since Barber refused to
regard community as antecedent to politics’, Brugger (1999: 14). - This is not always the case, for example, in David Miller’s work.
- I am not concerned here whether the public thing is instrumental to this conception or
whether it is embedded in the republican state. - ‘Liberalism goes for a quantity-centred conception of liberty, a conception to which
restraint is the antonym, and sees the law as instrumentally serving the cause of such
liberty: law is itself a form of restraint but overall it does more good in this regard than
harm. Republicanism prefers a security-centred or quality-centred conception, a concep-
tion opposed to servitude...the rule of law helps to confer on citizens that secure status
in which their liberty consists’, Pettit (1993: 179). - ‘Communitarians deny the possibility of the neutral state or constitution, the state that is
justified without reference to any particular conception of the good life. This line is that
such a state will end up satisfying no one or will surreptitiously favour one conception of
the good life above others. The ultimate communitarian lesson is hard to gauge, and the
defenders of the approach are often shy about pointing practical lessons, but the apparent
upshot is there can be no satisfactory mapping between pluralist society and a single state
or constitution. That lesson is bleak indeed’, Pettit (1993: 182). - Kant, for example, gets one passing reference in Pettit’s 300 pageRepublicanismbook, and
that is in a list of thinkers associated with positive liberty, which is, to say the least, slightly
bizarre. - It hardly needs to be pointed out that communitarianism is not a simple entity.
- Pettit could have associated Arendt with a ‘neo-Athenian’ republican model. This would
have allowed him to get round part of the Arendt issue. - ‘ “the political” (frompolis) was classically the stage for the individual action among peers,
Arendt defines “the social”...as the extension, in hierarchical order, of the patriarchal
family (oikos) and the realm of collective housekeeping’, Springborg (1989: 9–10). - As such it is not a work specifying or arguing for an ideal. Thus, in itself, it should not be
taken as Arendt’s key work in theory. - Her lasting legacy is ‘her incomplete (and often inconsistent) attempt to combine this
egalitarian idea of the human capacity for initiatory action with the older civic republican
idea of freedom as self-government’, Brunkhorst in Villa (ed.) (2000: 196). - Thus, the patriotic republic ‘does not fly the field of particular loyalties on which
nationalism flourishes, but works on it to make citizenship grow’ (Viroli 1995: 14–15). - Habermas’ own way out of this dilemma is ‘constitutional patriotism’. Like Arendt, oddly,
Habermas sees the United States as an example of a state in which the political culture
‘sharpens an awareness of multiplicity’, Habermas (1992: 6, 7, 11). - For Viroli, whereas Habermas stresses political and legal factors, communitarians, such
as MacIntyre and Taylor, stress the need for particular communal moral values. For
Viroli, MacIntyre’s notion of patriotism is thus ‘really nationalism’—hardly a startling
supposition—and the crucial issue is that political liberty disappears in this nationalist
setting, see MacIntyre (1984). - Despite the more secularized vision of republicanism, presented by late twentieth century
exponents, others have drawn attention to its deep traditional Christian roots. This explains
partly some of the moral uniformity presupposed within the republican perspective overall.