The Return of the Public - Dan Hind

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Those who sought the establishment of an English Republic, including James Harrington and John Milton, insisted that all who were capable of citizenship should constitute the political nation. Public status did not derive from monarchical appointment, but from qualities possessed by individuals and from the exercise of those qualities in government. The political nation was understood as a ‘body politic’ of which each citizen was a constituent part. The example set by the free states of ancient Greece and Rome inspired the English republicans, and, according to Thomas Hobbes, led them astray. Writing in the 1690s Hobbes was to denounce the universities as ‘the core of the rebellion’ against Charles I, while his friend John Aubrey put John Milton’s hostility to monarchy down to ‘his being so conversant in Livy and the Roman authors, and the greatness he saw done by the Roman commonwealth, and the virtue of their great Commanders’.3

      The argument between King and Parliament had long turned on the origins of political power. The Royalists insisted that power was the King’s god-given possession and that the people were to be understood as subjects of an indivisible and divinely mandated power. On the day of his execution King Charles I rejected Roman notions and insisted that freedom ‘consists in having of Government, those laws by which their life and their goods may be most their own. It is not for having share in Government, Sir, that is nothing pertaining to them. A subject and a sovereign are clean different things.’4 The Parliamentarian Henry Parker asserted on the contrary that the people were ‘the fountain and efficient cause’ of secular power. Even kingly authority depended on popular consent. After all, as Parker pointed out, ‘the Venetians and such other free nations’ are ‘so extremely jealous over their Princes . . . for fear of their bondage, that their Princes will dote upon their own wills and despise public councils and Laws’.5

      The public that will both constitute and stand guard over the state is most fully developed in the writings of James Harrington. Following Cicero, Harrington argued in The Commonwealth of Oceana that citizens could only be truly free in a state when they together determine the content of its policies, that is, when the state was a public possession. Freedom in a free state meant more than the absence of constraint, in the sense of freedom from fear of arbitrary arrest and confiscation. Free men are free because together they constitute the sovereign body of a state that in turn enacts their collective will. This collective power means that they do not have to rely on the goodwill of a prince. And it is in their union as deliberating citizens that a collection of private individuals achieves the status of a public. In Harrington’s words ‘the people taken apart are but so many private interests, but if you take them together they are the public interest’.6

      When citizens do not hold power in this sense – when they do not together constitute the public and so together determine the public interest – they cannot be free, since in any other form of government they find themselves in a condition of dependence on a prince or on some combination of magnates. And to be in a state of dependence is to be a slave since, as Algernon Sidney put it, ‘liberty solely consists in an independency upon the will of another’.7 A slave might have a benevolent master, might in practice be able to live as though he were free, but he is still a slave and is as such prone to all the vices of servility. The English republicans drew heavily on Sallust’s account of the collapse of Republican virtue. Sallust’s Catiline prefigures Milton’s Satan when he gives expression to a rhetoric of outraged competence:

      Ever since the Republic became the possession of a few great men it is they that have secured all the benefits of power – all taxes and tributes flow to them. The rest of us, for all that we are energetic and decent, nobles and commons alike, have become a mob without dignity or power. We are vulnerable [obnoxii] to those who should by rights fear us.8

      Fear of injury is only one of the dangers in a state where effective power is a private possession. Under a despot men may be free from the fear of punishment while being enslaved by the prospect of rewards. The courtier represents for the republican imagination the spectacle of a man corrupted not so much by fear as by hope. If power is not in public hands then falsehood multiplies and virtue is impossible. The powerless compete to tell the powerful what they want to hear, while the powerful move to suppress the civic virtues that would threaten their control of the state. The Romans hated kings precisely because they were seen as a threat to individual excellence in others.9 The republican ideal held out the prospect of a political settlement that was safe for individual virtue and honest speech. Where power is the private possession of a few men or of a prince, candid description menaces the system of power by undermining the lies used to make what is unjust seem justifiable, deception of the people provides a career for the ambitious. Where the citizens share power, the truth can be acknowledged.

      In a free state a citizen can rely only on himself and his fellow citizens to preserve the conditions of freedom and to resist the drift towards dependence and slavery. Mutual surveillance and constant exertion to prevent the capture of the state by private interests do not provide a guarantee of freedom. Vigilance bordering on neurotic suspicion would be the natural condition of a Republic of citizens. But the insistence that citizens should take responsibility for their own freedom, rather than relying on the restraint of their rulers, is a distinctive quality of republican thought.

      English republicans did not necessarily think most of the population were capable of sharing power and therefore of being free. Many thought, or simply assumed, that women were incapable of citizenship as were those men who, through lack of property, existed in a state of dependence. Indeed in some strains of republican thought the claim to a public status enjoyed by property-owning males depended on the effective subordination of women, children and inferior males. In this they drew on pre-revolutionary traditions that had associated political authority with those who could both manage their own households and ‘live idly and without manual labour’.10

      Hence, while John Lilburne – whose doctrine of ‘freeborn rights’ continues to influence constitutional liberalism, especially in the US – argued that ‘the poorest that lives, hath as true a right to give a vote, as well as the richest and greatest’,11 others advocated government in which ‘an elite few governed in the interests of the whole commonwealth’.12 Republicanism could be consistent with support for limited monarchy, meritocratic oligarchy (in the sense of rule by ‘godly’ men, for example), as well as democracy. But whatever limits to participation seemed natural in the seventeenth century we should not miss the fundamental point: liberty is not something that one is given, it is something that one achieves.

      The republican ideal of freedom differs from the modern notion of liberal democracy in fundamental and troubling ways. The English republicans explicitly linked economic independence and political liberty. Without means of subsistence they believed that men would be driven into a state of dependence that would radically undermine their claims to be free. In Harrington’s laconic formula ‘he who wants bread is his servant that will feed him’.13 And subsistence was not enough. For Harrington something like ‘equality of estate’ was needed in a free state. Indeed the distribution of land – of productive resources we would say now – determined the form of government. If one man owned the land, then absolute monarchy followed. If a few men controlled the land there would be mixed monarchy. Only if the ‘whole people’14 were landlords could a state hope to be a public possession: ‘where there is inequality of estates, there must be inequality of power, and where there is inequality of power, there can be no commonwealth’.15 Accordingly, Harrington, again drawing on his understanding of Rome’s example, called for an agrarian law to limit the size of estates. In The Commonwealth of Oceana he writes:

      An equal agrarian is a perpetual law, establishing and preserving the balance of dominion by such a distribution, that no man or number of men, within the compass of the few or aristocracy, can come to overpower the whole people by their possession in lands.16

      In a state of economic dependence we stand in fear of sudden dispossession. More insidiously, we are liable to be captured by the hope of arbitrary rewards and to alter our conduct and speech, even our beliefs, in order to obtain advantage. Even our desire for independence drives us into an ever more slavishly dependent cast of mind.

      The doctrines of a free state are disconcerting because they force us to consider who amongst us can claim to be free. Certainly it is wishful thinking to suppose that we are indifferent to

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