Republicanism

In the realm of political concepts, republicanism appears as the doctrine favoring the prevalence of the republican regime, whether this prevalence is the outcome of some activism (eager to see the achievement of the republic considered as the best regime) or of intellectual considerations (the republic encapsulates valuable political ideas and ideals). A more anecdotic subset of acceptations is linked with the existence (as is the case in the United States) of “republican” parties: Republicanism is no more than the fact of belonging to them. Republicanism is anything but a recent lexical creation: According to English dictionaries, the word made its grand debut in the language in the wake of civil troubles in 17th-century England. Its conceptual and semantic roots go back even further than its 3-centuries-old existence. Coined from the word republic (and the adjective derived from it, republican), the idea of “republicanism” encapsulates one of those long intellectual histories that are the privilege of only a handful of modern political concepts. It refers to a concept inherited from antiquity: the Roman res publica (which resulted in the modern republic). As such, it has this rare supplementary specificity among political concepts of having an authentic Roman origin: Classical Greece, which has influenced in so many ways the political history of the West, has only indirect equivalents for the Latin res publica. The success of the concept is all the more remarkable because, and is sufficiently measured by the fact that, in the 2 millennia of its history, the word has hardly changed in many European languages. The Latin res publica is still easy to retrieve from the French république (from which the English republic was imported), the German republik, or the Italian repubblica.

The meaning of the word has probably known more significant changes than its phonetics. Res publica means literally in Latin “the public thing.” Public in its turn (publicus in Latin) derives from populus, which means “people,” and thus, as Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BCE) puts it in his De Republica, “The public thing is the thing of the people”: “res publica, res populi.” This is why the traditional translations of res publica as “commonwealth” or even “state” [Page 2292](when it is not just “republic”) are not totally satisfactory as they do not spell out what was evident for the Romans when they talked about the republic: the dimension of the collectivity, the dimension of the people.

This meaning is equally lost in contemporary acceptations of the word republic. It has eventually specialized in characterizing a type of political regime, where, basically, the head of the state is not a monarch. Roman conceptions do include this aspect: The end of the monarchy and the instauration of republican institutions by Marcus Junius Brutus after the destitution of Tarquin the Proud is an important part of the political mythology of Rome. But it is a secondary aspect compared with the role of the people, which receives the real emphasis in the Latin expression. Being a notion defined by what it is not, the modern conception of the republic is even vaguer. It is not surprising that it applies to a large variety of situations, from the proudly secular French one (with a history of no fewer than five different “republics” in the span of nearly 230 years) to the “Islamic Republic of Iran,” created in 1979, where there is no separation between religion and the state.

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