Philosophical discussion of liberty and republicanism going back at least as far as Philip Pettit’s Republicanism (1997) have very much revolved around antiquity, when considering a historical dimension. We can take this back to Hannah Arendt’s work on Athenian liberty, which is not as nostalgic and uncritical as some claim, but certainly takes Athens as a starting point. Historical work by Quentin Skinner, J.G.A. Pocock and others has considered the evolution of liberty since the Renaissance Italian republics, which looked back to antiquity, in ways we are familiar with through Machiavelli. Pettit’s work, which shares broad historical presuppositions with Skinner and Pocock, advances a Neo-Roman theory of liberty, as superior to Arendt’s Athenian orientation. Even Michel Foucault sometimes seems as if he was inclined to classicism in political thought.
Despite the predominance of debates about antique models, and their early modern reception, there is a lot of republican theory, which is not Roman or Athenian, or certainly not purely so. Charles de Secondat, better known as Montesquieu, serves as a primary reference here, since in his view modern liberty is mainly the product of the republicanism of ancient German tribes. Though they had kings, Montesquieu regards these tribes as republics since the kings and aristocrats were answerable to the people. It is their conquest of Roman lands in the west in the Fifth Century, which introduced milder laws more compatible with liberty, partly because they emphasise compensation over punishment. Montesquieu’s view of the ancient German tribes is heavily reliant on Tacitus, so raising questions about how far he is using a Roman conception of liberty projected onto the German tribes. To some degree Montesquieu himself sees the very earliest forms of the Greek and Roman republics in the German tribes, but preceding those republics as we know them from anything resembling reliable history. While we cannot make a very clear distinction between the reality of the German tribes and Tacitus’s Roman interest, there is a distinction to be made between how Tacitus regarded these ‘barbarians’ with fragmented political communities in the forest and nostalgia within the great Roman state of laws and fixed institutions.
It is not just the Germans who Montesquieu takes up as a republican alternative to the Romans, and Greeks. He admires the Carthaginian republic, which like Rome achieved an imperial extent, as more commercial and even as escaping from the Mediterranean world into the European and African Atlantic coasts, in a triumph of commercial liberty. It is the real precursor of the commercial world of modern monarchies and republics, or republic-monarchies like Britain, much more so than the Roman world. He also thinks of ancient German law as more suited to commerce than Roman law. As Montesquieu discusses in some detail, Germanic law becomes merged with revived Roman in the Middle Ages, but not to the extent to losing an underlying influence of Germanic republican liberty in modern ‘moderate’ states.
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