Marsilius of Padua and Isaac Abravanel on Kingship: The Medieval Precedents of Republicanism Revisited

This article offers a comparative investigation of Marsilius of Padua’s and Isaac Abravanel’s ideas on kingship. It looks at how these thinkers transform the “canonical” sources of their respective traditions of political theorizing, i.e., Aristotle’s Politics and the Bible, to articulate the notion that ultimate authority rests with the citizens/people. It also examines how these two writers’ positions on kingship relate to the political realities that prevailed in late medieval Italy. Finally, it illuminates the medieval precedents of modern republicanism in the Christian and Jewish political traditions.

Between Rhetoric, Social Norms, and Law: Liberty of Speech in Republican Rome

Although modern Republicanism, which highly values the right of freedom of speech, finds its inspiration in the historical reality of the Roman Republic, it seems that in the course of the Republican period citizens shared a recognised ability to speak freely in public, but did not enjoy equal status with one another in the domain of speech as protected by law. Of course, Republican Rome knew laws regulating free speech and perhaps even later provisions had been passed concerning iniuria. However, in these cases, as later on under Augustus, these measures acted as means of restraint and inhibition and did not directly address the right of the individual to speak freely. The fundamental question this paper addresses is why, in the course of the Republic, the right to speak freely was not protected by law and never came to be recognised as a formalised subjective right in Republican Rome. The answer, I argue, lies in the fact that in Rome speaking freely was conceived as the positive moral quality that characterised a natural ability of human beings, and thereby it could not have provided a field of legislation. It follows that the Roman Republic would not have passed the ‘straight talk test’ that modern Republicanism requires for the establishment of a free and just society. However, Republican Rome invites us to think about liberty of speech as belonging to the realm of ethics: as a moral quality sustained by contemporary social norms, not subject to legislation, which inevitably ends up protecting the interests of a group or groups and their specific speech regimes.

The Cambridge School’s “Guicciardinian Moments” Revisited

This chapter focuses on the most influential contemporary approach to the study of classical and early-modern republicanism and Niccolò Machiavelli's supposed place within that tradition—the Cambridge School of intellectual history, most prominently represented by J.G.A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner. It argues that these world-renowned intellectual historians obscure important aspects of both republican and Machiavellian political thought; specifically, they largely ignore the fact that ancient and modern republicanisms secure the privileged position of elites more than they facilitate political participation by citizens. They also underplay the fact that Machiavelli's political prescriptions more substantively empower common people and more actively facilitate popular contestation of elites than did most authors and regimes that typify republicanism.

Rousseau’s Repudiation of Machiavelli’s Democratic Roman Republic

This chapter contends that Jean-Jacques Rousseau's analysis and appropriation of the Roman Republic deliberately undermines Machiavelli's efforts to reconstruct and promote institutions that both maximize the participation of poor citizens in popular governments and facilitate their efforts to control or contain economic and political elites. Rousseau's radical revision of Machiavelli's appropriation of the ancient Roman Republic historically served to foreclose the possibility of an alternative, popularly participatory, and anti-elitist strand of modern republicanism that in subsequent centuries would have better served democratic theory and practice. Through the promulgation of sociologically anonymous principles like generality and popular sovereignty, and by confining elite accountability to elections alone, Rousseau's institutional analyses and proposals allow wealthier citizens and magistrates to dominate the politics of popular governments in surreptitious and unassailable ways.