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Limits of the Atlantic Republican Tradition

Forum: Limits of the Atlantic Republican Tradition
Edited by Jacob Soll
Was the Eighteenth-Century Republican Essentially Anticapitalist?
Margaret Jacob Volume 2, Issue 1

In 1975, writing within the intellectual ambiance created by the Cold War and the fashionable Marxism of scholars such as C. B. Macpherson, John Pocock brilliantly and successfully interrogated the Atlantic republican tradition in his now classic The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Among many of its interventions into the history of political and economic thought in the early modern period, the book proclaimed that after 1688–89 country Whig theorists such as Charles Davenant, John Toland, John Trenchard, and Thomas Gordon...

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Anti-Trinitarianism and the Republican Tradition in Enlightenment Britain
Matthew Kadane Volume 2, Issue 1

Writing in the opening months of the French Revolution and in response to the accusation of anti-monarchical republicanism, Joseph Priestley explained in self-defense that if he was a “unitarian in religion” he remained “a trinitarian in politics.”[1] The republican-leaning Priestley was making a subtle distinction, but if the image of a political Trinitarian who held faith in Commons, Lords, and monarch...

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Governing a Republic: Rousseau’s General Will and the Problem of Government
Luc Foisneau Volume 2, Issue 1

Rousseau revealed how the political relationship on which a republic is founded is typically different from the religious, economic, ethnic, and domestic links that connect men and women in society to one another, but he did so by exacerbating the contrast between commerce and virtue. In his sharp critique of political representation, he utters some of the harshest words ever pronounced against commerce and finance: “Give money and you soon will have chains. That word finance is a slave’s word; it is unknown among citizens. In a country that is...

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The Atlantic Republican Tradition: The Republic of the Seven Provinces
J. G. A. Pocock Volume 2, Issue 1

A conference was held at the Clark Memorial Library in April 2009, under the title “The Limits of the Atlantic Republican Tradition.” This inescapably carried some normative implica­tions. It was assumed that participants in general agreed on what this “tradition” was and aimed to look at its “limits,” though it was less clear whether the aim was to fix them, to look beyond them, or to dissolve them. There further hung over the conference the implication—though this was affirmed by nobody—that there existed an entity, alternatively a concept, of “republican­ism,” which might be better...

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Why Did the Swiss Miss the Machiavellian Moment? History, Myth, Imperial and Constitutional Law in the Early Modern Swiss Confederation
Thomas Maissen Volume 2, Issue 1

Since the publication of J. G. A. Pocock’s masterpiece, Machiavelli has been the founding father of the Atlantic republican tradition. For obvious reasons, however, the Florentine chancellor barely mentioned the states bordering the Atlantic in his works. When he studied the actions of great men, his sources were “a continual study of ancient history” and “a long experience of modern affairs,” whose obvious focus was Italy and the neighboring powers waging war on the peninsula.

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Jefferson, Pocock, and the Temporality of Law in a Republic
Matthew Crow Volume 2, Issue 1

Recalling his work on the committee appointed for the revisal of Virginia laws between 1776 and 1779, Thomas Jefferson wrote to his colleague and former law professor George Wythe that his “researches” into colonial legal history had led him to discover the deplorable state of the manuscript copies of the laws.

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"True Freedom" and the Dutch Tradition of Republicanism
Catherine Secretan Volume 2, Issue 1

Political debate filled a broad space in Dutch intellectual life throughout the seventeenth century. In perhaps no other European country did discussing political issues become such common practice. From learned circles to schuitpraatje (“barge talk”), through Cort bewijs (“short demonstrations”) or single sheets of Warachtighe waerschouwinghe (“true warning”), the proofs of political passions expressed verbally are countless.

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J. G. A. Pocock’s Atlantic Republicanism Thesis Revisited: The Case of John Adams’s Tacitism
Jacob Soll Volume 2, Issue 1

In a now classic 1992 article entitled “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,” Daniel Rodgers examined the scholarly field that had grown around the history of American republicanism.[1] Rodgers focused on J. G. A. Pocock’s notion that Italian humanist languages of republicanism and virtue had served as the linguistic building blocks for English and American revolutionaries alike.

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