4 - The Paradox of Republican Emancipation

Summary

Chapter 4 presents the paradox of republican emancipation, a paradox based on the ambivalence of republican freedom at the time of the revolution. On the one hand, republican freedom is the status of those who are already masters of themselves. Freedom is independence and it is this independence that makes them capable of governing with competence and virtue. On the other, freedom is the newly claimed right of everyone, or anyone, not to be dominated – regardless of their virtue, or their economic and social situation, that is, regardless of their capacity to self-govern. But how can one reconcile the universal claim of freedom as nondomination with the republican supposition that the free person ought to be already socially, economically, and intellectually independent to be able to self-govern? If the many are incapable of self-governing, how can they ever become independent from the government of the few – how can they ever emancipate themselves? This chapter presents four instances of this paradox: the debate on passive/active citizenship, Condorcet’s position on the emancipation of slaves, Guyomar’s argument for the emancipation of women, and Grouchy’s proposal for changing the way we think about human dependence.