chapter 10
...................................................................................................................................................REPUBLICAN
VISIONS
...................................................................................................................................................eric nelson
The early-modern period in Europe witnessed the rise of two distinct kinds of
republican political theory. One of these was Roman in origin: it valued
independence, private property, and the glory brought by empire. The
other was fundamentally Greek, and valued the natural ordering of the
state made possible by the regulation of wealth. TheWrst inspired all subse-
quent theories that have preached the sovereignty of the individual in his own
sphere; the second was the archetypal expression of the view that men in
commonwealths must be ‘‘forced to be free.’’ 1 Each would exert a powerful
inXuence on the shape of eighteenth-century political thought in both the
Old World and the New.
When present-day scholars and political theorists use the term ‘‘republic-
anism,’’ they usually have in mind theWrst of these traditions, an ideology
generated in late Medieval Europe out of a set of ancient Roman texts. The
unifying feature of these texts is that they all constitute, in one way or
another, a nostalgic reXection on the collapse of the Roman respublica:
- I am grateful to Bernard Bailyn, James Hankins, and Quentin Skinner for their thoughtful
comments on this chapter.
1 This famous phrase appears in the seventh chapter of Rousseau’sSocial Contract(see Rousseau
1994 , 141 ).