What Is a Republic?

   

As Professor Evrigenis notes, the founders used the word “republic” in diverse ways.  John Adams employed it to mean a classical mixed government, a system that balanced the power of the one leader, the few rich and well-born, and the many commoners.  By such a definition, even Great Britain might be termed a republic since its monarch was balanced by a House of Lords and a House of Commons.  By contrast, Thomas Jefferson used the word to mean a representative democracy.  James Madison often employed it to refer to a modern type of mixed government, one that balanced the multifarious interests of a modern commercial society rather than the patricians and plebeians of yore.

The U.S. Constitution won wide support because it embodied aspects of each of these different definitions of “republic.”  It established a mixed government but one that was innovative in two respects.  First, unlike in the aristocratic republics of Sparta and Rome, the many held most of the power in the American system.  Majorities of free white males directly elected the House of Representatives and indirectly selected U.S. senators and members of the Electoral College through the election of state legislators.  Second, unlike in the classical republics, the rich and the well-born were not the principal minorities protected by the undemocratic features of the Constitution.  The equal representation of states in the Senate and its resultant impact on the Electoral College, in which each state received as many electors as it possessed congressmen, primarily protected the less populous states.  Thus, the system created by the Constitution was sufficiently democratic for Jefferson, sufficiently aristocratic for Adams, and sufficiently modern for Madison.

As Professor Evrigenis also notes, even democrats like Jefferson and Madison preferred to use the ambiguous and more moderate term “republic” to the clearer and more radical word “democracy” in reference to their favored system.  This is because the aristocrats whose writings constituted the classical canon, such as Thucydides and Plato, successfully demonized the latter term.  By the founders’ day, “democracy” was closely associated in the Western mind with the instability and foolishness of the Athenian masses during the Peloponnesian War.  When feeling bolder, American democrats of the founders’ era might go so far as to call their political party the “Democratic-Republican Party,” thereby melding the radical with the moderate, the bold with the cautious, but more often they termed it simply the “Republican Party.”  The latter name also possessed the advantage of implying that their Federalist opponents were closet monarchists and oligarchs, thereby converting them into the real radicals.

A generation later, George Grote and other historians rehabilitated democracy by highlighting the intellectual and artistic triumphs of Periclean Athens.  In this project they were aided by the universities, which added Athenian tragedies to the Latin works that had previously dominated their curricula.  The new Hellenism was also enhanced by the modern Greeks’ dramatic struggle for independence, a cause celebre of American intellectuals during the antebellum period.  The former party of Jefferson and Madison, now the party of Andrew Jackson, could be renamed the “Democratic Party” without embarrassment.  The undemocratic features of the Constitution could then be reinterpreted as unintentional bugs rather than as intentional features, a formulation that reconciled the new democratic ideology with patriotic reverence for the founders.

A few additional notes concerning Professor Evrigenis’s provocative article are in order.  In classical theory, popular sovereignty referred to the right of the people to select their own form of government.  Simple democracy, or majority rule, was only one possible selection.  Thus, a people might choose to establish a monarchy, an aristocracy, or a mixed government rather than a democracy in complete conformity with popular sovereignty.  The fact that Americans began using the term incorrectly, as a synonym for democracy (i.e., as the right of the majority to elect public officials), illustrates the democratic tenor of the nation’s political culture from the nineteenth century on.

Aristotle did indeed compose the first encomium to the middle class, but it should be noted that he was referring to a middle class of farmers, not a middle class of merchants or artisans.  Like most other classical political theorists, Aristotle considered farmers the backbone of a republic.  Their independent means of subsistence enabled them to exercise their own judgment on political matters, and their attachment to the land inclined them to defend it, whereas men whose wealth consisted of paper were dependent on the caprices of the marketplace and apt to take their money and run when enemies invaded the country.  Thus, despite rejecting Aristotle’s arguments for mixed government, Jefferson embraced the pro-agricultural aspect of his thought.  Romanticizers of the agricultural lifestyle ignored the fact that most modern farmers were every bit as acquisitive and as dependent on global markets as merchants.

On the other hand, Aristotle’s arguments concerning the size of the ideal polis demonstrate that virtually no American, not even the Antifederalists, held a classical position on the issue.  One of the Antifederalists’ principal arguments against the Constitution was that its creation of a single, massive republic out of thirteen smaller ones would doom the American experiment in popular government.  A republic must remain small if it wished to remain a republic, they cried, citing Aristotle and other classical theorists.  But Aristotle and his cohorts would have been just as appalled by a republic the size of late eighteenth-century New York as by one the size of the United States.

Finally, while it is true, as Professor Evrigenis notes, that the Roman Republic began with one Brutus (Lucius Junius Brutus, the tyrant slayer) and ended with another (Marcus Brutus, Caesar’s assassin), it can also be stated that Rome itself began with one Romulus (the twin-slayer) and ended with another (the young emperor Romulus Augustulus, who was brusquely informed by the German commander of the Roman Army in 476 A.D. that his services were no longer required).  Whether the United States, which began with one George overthrowing the rule of another, will end with a third George remains to be seen.