Solidarity and Civic Virtue
This chapter argues that debates around republicanism and civic virtue are structured around two unwarranted assumptions. First, neo-republicans and their critics assume that civic virtues are qualities that stabilize a free state. Second, they assume that the cultivation of virtue primarily requires coercive inculcation. I contest both assumptions through historical reconstruction of nineteenth-century ‘labour republicanism’. Labour republicans thought about civic virtue as qualities that agents exercise to transform rather than stabilize a regime. And they argued that virtue developed out of the self-education and activity of citizens themselves, not state coercion. The real danger lies not in the defence of an illiberal state but of the kinds of demands that the oppressed make on each other to act virtuously. As such, labour republicans offer us a model for thinking about the role—and risks—of virtue in emancipatory politics.