188 The Nature of Political Theoryterminology for several hundred years after it was no longer politically effective.
Res publicarefers, more generally, to the common weal, common wealth orcivitas.In
this generic sense, the term ‘republic’ (the public thing) is not a particularly helpful
term, since it could refer literally toanyform of political regime with an identifiable
public realm. The more specific normative concept of republicanism, which derived
from a somewhat rosy reading of Republican Rome, implied that the people (popu-
lus), or more specifically the citizens, had a decisive role in the organization of the
public realm, although we should not mistake this in any way for democracy. The
republican citizen, in this scenario, exhibits virtue and rational self-control within
the public realm.
In late medieval, renaissance, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century versions of
republicanism, this also clearly implied a belief in Christian truths, as well as martial
and other such virtues. It was only eighteenth-century republicanism, which became
linked with more secular themes. Further, the citizen was viewed as an independent
agent in the public arena, but such independence also implied basic property own-
ership. Property ownership implied that one had a ‘stake’ in political order and a
consequent sense of social responsibility. The language of republicanism is also one
of the right to resilient individual liberty, intimately tied to the correlative duty of
active service for the community. Each citizen has to be formally willing to renounce
private concerns for the common good, order, and flourishing of the community.
There was, in addition, a continual fear, in earlier republican thought, of potential
degeneracy, institutional decay, loss of public virtue, and corruption. This often led
to a pervasive conservative and pessimistic demeanour within republicanism, which
originally favoured political stasis.
Whether or not republicanism submerged in the medieval period and re-emerged
in renaissance city states is a subject of scholarly debate. The standard view among
recent neo-republican writers is that the theory passed through the fifteenth-century
Italian renaissance city-states (like Florence), with Machiavelli as a founding figure,
to the seventeenth-century English civil war period, emerging also in the Dutch
Provinces in their struggle against Spanish Monarchy. It was seen to be revived by
writers such as Henry Neville and Algernon Sidney in the 1680s, given an opportun-
istic rendering in Lord Bolingbroke in the 1720s and restored again by Richard Price
and others to defend the American colonists in the 1770s (Skinner 1998: 10–13).
The fruits of classical republicanism can be found in doctrines such as the mixed
or balanced constitution and American Constitutional separation of powers of the
next century. The French Revolution is, however, standardly seen to transform
republicanism into a debate about forms of radical democracy.
Most scholars of republican thought thus, conventionally, see it fading into the
background in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in the face of the rise of ideolo-
gies such as liberalism, conservatism, and socialism. However, from the 1960s, some
commentators, critical of the idea that American politics was founded in Lockean
individualism, identified the alternative real roots of American politics in a civic
republican tradition. The culmination of this interpretation was J. G. A. Pocock’s
magisterial work The Machiavellian Moment (1975). Pocock interpreted many