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CHAPTER ONE

The Classical Public

Every thinker puts some portion of the apparently stable world in peril.

John Dewey

THOUGH THE VARIOUS ideas of the public that survive and overlap derive from particular historical moments they are also contemporary inventions. The tangle of meanings towards which the word now vaguely gestures holds most of us in permanent suspense, at some distance from the points of decision. If we can separate out those that contribute something to the composite sense of the word as it is used today, then some of the rubbish that stands in the way of effective political action will have been be cleared away.

In this regard, I am not so much an archaeologist as a grave robber, in the sense that my aim is not to reconstruct the past, but to take what strikes me as retaining some contemporary currency. For this reason Rome, rather than Greece or ancient Mesopotamia, seems like the natural starting point. For the republican form of government, which has won out over monarchy in much of the world, justified itself in terms of an attempt to renovate classical, and especially Roman, institutions. To be sure, the vague desire to emulate Rome lies close to the heart of the American state project. And if modern republicanism defines itself decisively against monarchy and the idea of power as a private possession, then it takes heart from the Roman traditions of regicide.

The Roman Republic was a res publica, a public possession. That is, it belonged to a community regulated by laws. A public in the Roman sense only exists when the state belongs to its citizens, when, as Cicero puts it, ‘res publica [est] res populi’. Without ownership of the state, citizens cannot engage with one another as properly public actors. Freedom is only possible for those who have a share in state power; the subjects of a King can only ever be slaves. In practice only a tiny minority of Rome’s inhabitants enjoyed full rights to participate in political life. Families with established claims to recognition – that is to say, the nobility – dominated political office and sought constantly to maintain and enhance the rights of their family to a share in the burdens and rewards of administration. Though talented outsiders could reach the ranks of the elite, nobility – the celebrity of virtue that justified claims to a fully public status – was more often inherited.

Rome was an aristocratic Republic – generation after generation a small number of families dominated public life. The heads of these families were intensely conscious of their obligation to maintain the family’s glory and they would often claim pre-Republican and even divine origins to enhance their claim to public status. Each family was a monarchy in miniature and its claim to sovereign control of its own affairs could easily mutate into attempts to subvert the Republic for private glory. Furthermore public status depended on the authority that came from the disciplined control of the private household. The scandal of domestic disorder constantly threatened to cripple the public authority of a Roman noble.

At the same time the Roman Republic was characterized by an anxious insistence that the private world of the family and its obligations could be distinguished from the public world of the state. Rome’s historians endlessly repeat the message that the closest private ties meant nothing when compared with the citizen’s public duties. The consul Titus Manlius Torquatus executed his own son for engaging with the enemy in defiance of his father’s orders; Lucius Junius Brutus went one better and had two of his sons killed for treason.

The Roman patriarch was always pushing at the limits of his private power. As the head of a family he had enormous powers of compulsion and when he went into the city to dispute and build alliances with other heads of family he accepted only those restrictions that could be effectively enforced. In one improving anecdote a consul forces his father, Fabius Maximus Cunctator, to dismount before approaching him. The hero of the war against Hannibal then assured his son that he meant no disrespect but that he considered ‘publicly established laws to be more important than private obligations’.1 While the story repeats the official dogma that duty to the state outweighs filial piety, it shows too that the prerogatives of a head of family could only be restrained by the vigorous exercise of lawful authority.

As long as the Republic survived, its rulers wanted to maintain this distinction between the public, which is to say Rome, and the private, which is to say the family. Their energetic mutual surveillance took place in a culture where the control of the state was both the highest human excellence and the only truly honourable means to secure a fortune. Collectively, aristocrats worked to resist what they craved as individuals – the permanent ascendancy of one patriarch over all rivals. When Augustus, the founder of the first imperial dynasty, allowed the Senate to confer on him the title Pater Patriae, Father of the Fatherland, the significance was clear. Where once the whole Senate had styled themselves patres, from now on there was to be only one parent. The Republic had been finally subordinated to a single head of household, and as it became a private possession it became an empire. After Augustus aristocratic competitors for office no longer assert their right to public status, or secure it through popular recognition of their claims. Men enjoy the public status conferred on them by a monarch. In Europe the notion that a fully political identity is achieved through one’s own exertions revives only when republicanism emerges to challenge monarchy many centuries later.

The word public was first used in early modern England to describe servants of the Crown. The idea of a public of office-holders became current in Tudor England, as did the notion that the country might be understood as a crowned Republic. Those who held office and served the monarch were public persons. The rest of the population was to busy itself with private matters.2 But the legitimacy of this public of officer-holders rested on its claims to pursue the interests of the nation as a whole, to secure what the sixteenth-century administrator and philologist Sir Thomas Elyot called the ‘public weal’. Public persons were public because the monarch appointed them, but they, like the King, served a public interest that encompassed more than their own interests. These early modern ideas of the public – the notion that public status derived from appointment by the state, and the notion that those who enjoyed this status held it in virtue of their service to the nation as a whole – have proved extremely durable. Together they inform a tradition that conflates the public interest and the national interest and insists on the right of a properly constituted state to promote them both.

During the English Civil War era, however, there is an important shift in the idea of the public as it operates in English political culture. Those who sought the establishment of an English Republic, including James Harrington and John Milton, insisted that all who were capable of citizenship should constitute the political nation. Public status did not derive from monarchical appointment, but from qualities possessed by individuals and from the exercise of those qualities in government. The political nation was understood as a ‘body politic’ of which each citizen was a constituent part. The example set by the free states of ancient Greece and Rome inspired the English republicans, and, according to Thomas Hobbes, led them astray. Writing in the 1690s Hobbes was to denounce the universities as ‘the core of the rebellion’ against Charles I, while his friend John Aubrey put John Milton’s hostility to monarchy down to ‘his being so conversant in Livy and the Roman authors, and the greatness he saw done by the Roman commonwealth, and the virtue of their great Commanders’.3

The argument between King and Parliament had long turned on the origins of political power. The Royalists insisted that power was the King’s god-given possession and that the people were to be understood as subjects of an indivisible and divinely mandated power. On the day of his execution King Charles I rejected Roman notions and insisted that freedom ‘consists in having of Government, those laws by which their life and their goods may be most their own. It is not for having share in Government, Sir, that is nothing pertaining to them. A subject and a sovereign are clean different things.’4 The Parliamentarian Henry Parker asserted on the contrary that the people were ‘the fountain and efficient cause’ of secular power. Even kingly authority depended on popular consent. After all, as Parker pointed out, ‘the Venetians and such other free nations’ are ‘so extremely jealous over their Princes . . . for fear of their bondage, that their Princes will dote upon their own wills and despise public councils and Laws’.5

The public that will both constitute and stand guard over the state is most fully developed in the writings of James Harrington. Following Cicero, Harrington argued in The Commonwealth of Oceana that citizens could only be truly free in a state when they together determine the content of its policies, that is, when the state was a public possession. Freedom in a free state meant more than the absence of constraint, in the sense of freedom from fear of arbitrary arrest and confiscation. Free men are free because together they constitute the sovereign body of a state that in turn enacts their collective will. This collective power means that they do not have to rely on the goodwill of a prince. And it is in their union as deliberating citizens that a collection of private individuals achieves the status of a public. In Harrington’s words ‘the people taken apart are but so many private interests, but if you take them together they are the public interest’.6

When citizens do not hold power in this sense – when they do not together constitute the public and so together determine the public interest – they cannot be free, since in any other form of government they find themselves in a condition of dependence on a prince or on some combination of magnates. And to be in a state of dependence is to be a slave since, as Algernon Sidney put it, ‘liberty solely consists in an independency upon the will of another’.7 A slave might have a benevolent master, might in practice be able to live as though he were free, but he is still a slave and is as such prone to all the vices of servility. The English republicans drew heavily on Sallust’s account of the collapse of Republican virtue. Sallust’s Catiline prefigures Milton’s Satan when he gives expression to a rhetoric of outraged competence:

Ever since the Republic became the possession of a few great men it is they that have secured all the benefits of power – all taxes and tributes flow to them. The rest of us, for all that we are energetic and decent, nobles and commons alike, have become a mob without dignity or power. We are vulnerable [obnoxii] to those who should by rights fear us.8

Fear of injury is only one of the dangers in a state where effective power is a private possession. Under a despot men may be free from the fear of punishment while being enslaved by the prospect of rewards. The courtier represents for the republican imagination the spectacle of a man corrupted not so much by fear as by hope. If power is not in public hands then falsehood multiplies and virtue is impossible. The powerless compete to tell the powerful what they want to hear, while the powerful move to suppress the civic virtues that would threaten their control of the state. The Romans hated kings precisely because they were seen as a threat to individual excellence in others.9 The republican ideal held out the prospect of a political settlement that was safe for individual virtue and honest speech. Where power is the private possession of a few men or of a prince, candid description menaces the system of power by undermining the lies used to make what is unjust seem justifiable, deception of the people provides a career for the ambitious. Where the citizens share power, the truth can be acknowledged.

In a free state a citizen can rely only on himself and his fellow citizens to preserve the conditions of freedom and to resist the drift towards dependence and slavery. Mutual surveillance and constant exertion to prevent the capture of the state by private interests do not provide a guarantee of freedom. Vigilance bordering on neurotic suspicion would be the natural condition of a Republic of citizens. But the insistence that citizens should take responsibility for their own freedom, rather than relying on the restraint of their rulers, is a distinctive quality of republican thought.

English republicans did not necessarily think most of the population were capable of sharing power and therefore of being free. Many thought, or simply assumed, that women were incapable of citizenship as were those men who, through lack of property, existed in a state of dependence. Indeed in some strains of republican thought the claim to a public status enjoyed by property-owning males depended on the effective subordination of women, children and inferior males. In this they drew on pre-revolutionary traditions that had associated political authority with those who could both manage their own households and ‘live idly and without manual labour’.10

Hence, while John Lilburne – whose doctrine of ‘freeborn rights’ continues to influence constitutional liberalism, especially in the US – argued that ‘the poorest that lives, hath as true a right to give a vote, as well as the richest and greatest’,11 others advocated government in which ‘an elite few governed in the interests of the whole commonwealth’.12 Republicanism could be consistent with support for limited monarchy, meritocratic oligarchy (in the sense of rule by ‘godly’ men, for example), as well as democracy. But whatever limits to participation seemed natural in the seventeenth century we should not miss the fundamental point: liberty is not something that one is given, it is something that one achieves.

The republican ideal of freedom differs from the modern notion of liberal democracy in fundamental and troubling ways. The English republicans explicitly linked economic independence and political liberty. Without means of subsistence they believed that men would be driven into a state of dependence that would radically undermine their claims to be free. In Harrington’s laconic formula ‘he who wants bread is his servant that will feed him’.13 And subsistence was not enough. For Harrington something like ‘equality of estate’ was needed in a free state. Indeed the distribution of land – of productive resources we would say now – determined the form of government. If one man owned the land, then absolute monarchy followed. If a few men controlled the land there would be mixed monarchy. Only if the ‘whole people’14 were landlords could a state hope to be a public possession: ‘where there is inequality of estates, there must be inequality of power, and where there is inequality of power, there can be no commonwealth’.15 Accordingly, Harrington, again drawing on his understanding of Rome’s example, called for an agrarian law to limit the size of estates. In The Commonwealth of Oceana he writes:

An equal agrarian is a perpetual law, establishing and preserving the balance of dominion by such a distribution, that no man or number of men, within the compass of the few or aristocracy, can come to overpower the whole people by their possession in lands.16

In a state of economic dependence we stand in fear of sudden dispossession. More insidiously, we are liable to be captured by the hope of arbitrary rewards and to alter our conduct and speech, even our beliefs, in order to obtain advantage. Even our desire for independence drives us into an ever more slavishly dependent cast of mind.

The doctrines of a free state are disconcerting because they force us to consider who amongst us can claim to be free. Certainly it is wishful thinking to suppose that we are indifferent to the threats and promises of our employers. We are obnoxious in the classical sense that we are vulnerable to the will of another. And it is still true that men who ‘slide into a blind dependence upon one who has wealth and power’ eventually ‘care not what injustice they do, if they may be rewarded’.17 An energetic and ambitious minority will plunge into an ever more abject submission to the institutional logic in which they find themselves, profiting from an illegitimate power to the extent that they come to embody it.

For at present such power and prestige as we enjoy usually depends on our, permanently insecure, footing in some bureaucratic, often corporate, hierarchy. As C. Wright Mills noted in the 1950s, ‘to be celebrated, to be wealthy, to have power requires access to major institutions, for the institutional positions men occupy determine in large part their chance to have and to hold these valued experiences’.18 When large, hierarchical institutions all but monopolize access to the goods we value and distribute them very unevenly they are apt to breed the vices of the court.

The republican model of government presents another reason for contemporary disquiet. In establishing the conditions of independence Harrington focused on the need for material subsistence, but in a vastly larger and more complex industrial society accurate information has become ever more crucial to those who aspire to public status. Where day-to-day experience and conversation once furnished men with the knowledge required for them to understand the world, we now rely on an extended infrastructure of reporting and research to remain in touch with the ever more remote world of effective decision-making. Yet we do not together monitor, let alone control, the means by which we become informed about matters beyond our immediate experience; nor is the network of descriptions on which we rely open to critical challenge from an engaged public. The media constantly tell us that we are individually autonomous and collectively sovereign. The same media have the power to ensure that we are neither. We depend on institutions we do not govern or understand in our efforts to understand and govern the wider world.

From the outset soothing voices could be heard, insisting that the notion of the Republic was impractical, excessive and unrealistic. William Paley, for example, assured his readers that ‘those definitions ought to be rejected, which by making that essential to civil freedom which is unattainable in experience, inflame expectations that can never be gratified, and disturb the public content with complaints’.19 The bleak theorist of the omnipotent state, Thomas Hobbes, also scorned the idea of the Republic and the world of Roman virtue it both promised and demanded. As far as Hobbes was concerned the state could take whatever form it liked. It could call itself a civic Republic or a despotism on the Turkish model. The state was not constituted by an individual chosen by God or by natural persons arranged as a public. The state was an artificial animal, entirely self-sufficient and self-justifying. And the substance of the state was everywhere the same, it was absolute power, a permanent capacity to daunt all rivals, a frozen violence holding all subordinate powers in a condition of enforced peace. The state was the sole public institution but it did not rely on the consent of any existing public for its legitimacy. Necessity provided all the legitimacy needed since without states man would find himself in the chaos of war that was his natural condition.

According to Hobbes this was the reality that the republicans, drunk on classical learning, failed to grasp. Individual freedom amounted to no more than being left alone to pursue one’s own lawful projects under the state’s watchful eye. Any other concept of freedom was wishful thinking. In a much-quoted passage Hobbes mocks the citizens of Lucca and their republican pretensions:

The Athenians, and Romans were free; that is, free commonwealths: not that any particular men had the liberty to resist their own representative; but that their representative had the liberty to resist, or invade other people. There is written on the turrets of the city of Lucca in great characters at this day, the word LIBERTAS; yet no man can thence infer, that a particular man has more liberty, or immunity from the service of the commonwealth there, than in Constantinople. Whether a commonwealth be monarchical, or popular, the freedom is still the same.20

Harrington returns this contempt for the free state with interest. Commenting on Hobbes’s view that the liberty of a commonwealth is not the liberty of particular men within it, Harrington retorts that

he might as well have said that the estates of particular men in a commonwealth are not the riches of particular men, but the riches of the commonwealth; for equality of estates causes equality of power, and equality of power is the liberty, not only of the commonwealth, but of every man.21

Furthermore, insists Harrington, it is one thing to claim that a citizen of Lucca has no more liberty from the law than a Turk and quite another to claim that he has no more liberty by the law:

The first may be said of all governments alike; the second scarce of any two; much less of these, seeing it is known that, whereas the greatest Bashaw is a tenant, as well of his head as of his estate, at the will of his lord, the meanest Lucchese that has land is a freeholder of both, and not to be controlled but by the law, and that framed by every private man to no other end (or they may thank themselves) than to protect the liberty of every private man, which by that means comes to be the liberty of the commonwealth.22

In the twentieth century Isaiah Berlin influentially restated Hobbes’ rejection of the idea that true liberty was only to be found where citizens organized as a public controlled the state. In Two Concepts of Liberty Berlin described positive and negative liberty in terms that decisively favoured what Noel Annan called, in a revealing moment of amnesia, ‘the classic English interpretation of liberty’ – that to be free is to be left unmolested by arbitrary power. This is ‘the classic English interpretation of liberty’ only in the sense that it is what remains once the many advocates of an English Republic are removed from view.

Berlin describes negative freedom in ways that would be familiar to Hobbes, indeed he quotes Hobbes in a footnote: ‘A free man . . . is he that . . . is not hindered to do what he has a will to.’ It follows for Berlin that ‘a frontier must be drawn between the area of private life and that of public authority’.23 Freedom is something that is enjoyed in private, not something that is exercised in public. Berlin, like Hobbes, deals with the republican conception of virtue by ignoring its key arguments. Individuals are free when they are unmolested by the state. When they are dependent on others for survival Berlin cannot see that they are unfree, since they are free to defy their betters and starve.

Berlin’s elaborates his case against positive liberty in a way that is, at best, eccentric. He begins sensibly enough:

The ‘positive’ sense of the word ‘liberty’ derives from the wish on the part of the individual to be his own master. I wish my life and decisions to depend on myself, not on external forces of whatever kind. I wish to be the instrument of my own, not other men’s, acts of will. I wish to be a subject, not an object. . .24

He goes on to point out that positive liberty of this self-actualizing kind has sometimes turned into a blind faith in some abstract entity that realizes the true perfection of the imperfect human individual – the State, the Party, Reason, History, Human Nature. In the name of this abstraction the advocates of positive freedom can then coerce their fellows, secure in the knowledge that they are helping them to become truly free. Hence the Bolsheviks developed their enthusiasm for education and, especially, re-education and accepted the need to exterminate those social elements that incorrigibly stood in the way of the general freedom. Having discovered the nature of true freedom, Soviet communists were confident that they were justified in coercing those who opposed them.

But Berlin disastrously confuses the drive for effective autonomy with the desire to dominate others by allowing one possible development – or more accurately, one perversion – of positive liberty to stand for the concept as a whole. Berlin is thus able to conclude that those who seek to defend the freedom of the individual from external compulsion are ‘almost at the opposite pole’ from those who believe in positive liberty: ‘The former want to limit authority as such. The latter want it placed in their own hands.’25 This is suavely effective rhetoric but it allows Berlin to ignore centuries of republican practice as well as the substance of republican theory in the English tradition. The point for republicans is that ‘authority as such’ can only be limited effectively when a public of citizens is its sole source.

Berlin argued, for reasons that are essentially vapid, that the positive freedom to engage in the political process would inevitably conflict with the individual’s sphere of private immunity. But positive liberty, in the sense of freedom to engage in the formation and conduct of the state, does not entail any of the extravagances that he ascribes to it. The desire to be Somebody does not necessarily decay into the worship of Something.

Berlin is right to point out that democracies can sometimes act in illiberal ways. But he is wrong to claim that people can be free when they do not have the power to control and direct the state. Wrong too to imagine that people can be free when they cannot be confident in their material independence. Without secure access to the means of subsistence they will not be able to assert themselves fearlessly as citizens. Without political power they cannot defend the independence they have. And while the citizens of a Republic may never be invulnerable to the antics of an activist state, they will surely be more secure than those who must rely on the restraint and good manners of their rulers. To repeat, liberty in the republican sense of the word requires more than freedom from active coercion. It requires also the power to shape the state, and to do so from a position of material independence. A citizen who fears she may lose her livelihood if she speaks out is not meaningfully free unless she is a hero or a fool.

Perhaps Berlin’s distrust of positive liberty derives from his conviction that the population organized as a public cannot set limits to its own power. We are, according to this view, unable to discern and protect our private interests through public deliberation. Certainly the language of true liberty had been mightily abused in the decades before Berlin wrote in praise of negative liberty. But what Berlin sees as liberty is not liberty truly stated. The enjoyment of private property and the unmolested experience of life in a network of private relationships do not suffice as conditions for freedom. Without a public identity we are not free, any more than a free-range chicken is free. Indeed, though we may count ourselves lucky, and develop all manner of private properties of mind, we are not, in one sense, even fully human.

While Hobbes and his intellectual heirs denounced the English republicans for demanding too much, they were also attacked for demanding too little. Gerard Winstanley set out what he saw as the conditions of true liberty in The Law of Freedom. In the opening sections he sketches out the various ways of construing freedom. Freedom of trade, he says, is no more than ‘freedom under the will of a conqueror’ if it is conducted under the existing distribution of property. Freedom of religion would be an unsettled freedom, that is, men would have no security when they sought to assert their religious freedom. Sexual freedom was no more than the freedom of ‘wanton, unreasonable beasts’. And what of those who claim that ‘it is true freedom that the elder brother shall be landlord of the earth, and the younger brother a servant’?26

This is ‘but a half freedom’, says Winstanley, and one ‘that begets murmurings, wars and quarrels’. Winstanley believed that there could be no just basis for great inequalities of wealth and power. Rich men depend on the work of other men for their wealth: ‘if a man have no help from his neighbour, he shall never gather an estate of hundreds and thousands a year’. Great concentrations of wealth depend on capturing the value created by others. There had to be some trickery involved, thought Winstanley. The plain-hearted poor end up working for the idle rich only through the exercise of ‘covetous wit’. The pretensions of the propertied gentleman were no more than the swagger of a successful fraudster. At a time when covetous wit has brought vast wealth to a tiny number of knowledgeable operators and the prevailing descriptions have recast their work of upward distribution as a kind of productive labour, the contemporary implications must surely be obvious. True freedom could only be had, thought Winstanley, when men had equal, and equally secure, access to the means of subsistence, the land itself. ‘True Commonwealth’s freedom’, he declared, ‘lies in the free enjoyment of the earth.’27

If everyone could live independently then men could cooperate freely for their mutual advantage. Only then could men speak plainly to one another, without the fear that they would lose favour, livelihood, or life. A nation where only ‘older brothers’, the property-holding heads of households, were free would only be half free. Freedom required material independence as well as the formal enjoyment of rights and the absence of active coercion by the state or anyone else. Reluctantly or not, many of the republicans concluded that only a minority could therefore be free. Winstanley, on the contrary, decided that all must therefore become independent in order that all might be free. In the gap between those who sought a Republic built on a Roman conception of virtue and those, like Winstanley, who thought that to be human warranted liberation, we begin to see the shape of what haunts this book, the outline of a public that is at once sovereign and universal.

The older brothers of Cromwell’s Republic and the plain-hearted poor could not find common cause once the King had been defeated. In the century that followed the yeomen who had supplied the Parliamentary armies with their cavalry and the republicans with their constituency were driven into conditions of dependency as the great estates expanded. The poor, far from enjoying the common treasury of the earth, lost what common rights they had in a wave of enclosures. The magnates, who were terrified of radical democracy and could see no great protection from it in a Republic, instead brought back monarchy. An aristocracy that preferred order and the secure possession of private property to republican virtue installed first Charles II and then William III to be their King. The Bill of Rights, which set out the terms on which Parliament accepted William III, avoided the language of republicanism, and the successful conspirators in Parliament spoke instead of ‘asserting their ancient rights and liberties’.28

English republicanism provided an important resource for the framers of the United States constitution, but key principles have all but vanished from the openly stated political culture of both Britain and America, most notably the insistence that only a rough ‘equality of estate’ can substantiate the formal equality of voting citizens. To the economic equality advocated by Harrington and others we must, however, add equality of information. Otherwise we will face steady dispossession by those who combine restless ambition with a talent for fraud.