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The Republican Critique of Liberalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Alan Patten
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Extract

A number of writers have drawn upon the republican tradition in political thought to criticize liberals like Rawls and Dworkin for neglecting the importance of public service and civic virtue. In this article, I present and evaluate one version of this critique, which can be found in recent work by Quentin Skinner and Charles Taylor. I argue that their critique, which I term ‘instrumental republicanism’, is caught on the horns of a dilemma. Depending on how the critique is formulated, either there is no interesting disagreement between liberals and republicans, or there is, but not one which should concern liberals. Either way, instrumental republicanism cannot be said to offer an improvement on the liberal attitudes towards public service and civic virtue.

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Articles
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British Journal of Political Science , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , January 1996 , pp. 25 - 44
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

1 Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973)Google Scholar; Dworkin, Ronald, Taking Rights Seriously (London: Duckworth, 1977)Google Scholar; and ‘What is Equality? Part II: Equality of Resources’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 10 (1981), 283–345.Google Scholar In more recent writings, Dworkin has explicitly repudiated contractarianism. See, in particular, ‘Foundations of Liberal Equality’, in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Vol. XI (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1991), pp. 3–119.Google Scholar I use the label ‘contractarian liberal’ to indicate that I am not talking about liberalism more generally and because it is convenient to follow Quentin Skinner's terminology in his articles about republicanism, cited below.

2 See, for instance, Sandel, Michael J., Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)Google Scholar; and ‘The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self’, Political Theory, 12 (1984), 81–96.Google Scholar

3 See, for instance, Charles Taylor's characterization of civic humanism in ‘Kant's Theory of Freedom’, Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 334–5.Google Scholar See also Rawls, John, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 205–6.Google Scholar

4 I am grateful to Richard Bellamy for suggesting this label to me. Shelley Burtt's distinction between an ‘Aristotelian’ politics of virtue and an ‘instrumental’ politics of virtue is similar to my distinction between the two kinds of republicanism. See Burtt, Shelley, ‘The Politics of Virtue Today: A Critique and a Proposal’, American Political Science Review, 87 (1993), 360–8, at p. 360.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 A third kind of republican argument has recently been advanced by Pettit, Phillip in ‘Negative Liberty, Liberal and Republican’, European Journal of Philosophy, 1 (1993), 15–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and ‘The Freedom of the City: A Republican Ideal’, in Hamlin, A. and Pettit, P., eds., The Good Polity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).Google Scholar As I understand it, Pettit's argument is neither a rejection of the ideal of negative liberty nor a claim about the causal conditions under which this ideal can flourish. His thesis, instead, is that republicans have a distinctive view about what constitutes negative liberty: whereas liberals have typically held a ‘realization-centred’ conception of liberty (to what extent am I interfered with?), republicans, according to Pettit, have worked with a ‘resilience-centred’ conception (to what extent is my freedom from interference resilient to various counter-factual differences in the world?). In what follows, I shall not consider Pettit's argument, but concentrate solely on the instrumental republican argument, which I believe raises its own distinctive set of issues.

6 Quentin Skinner has developed his account of republicanism in a number of different articles since the early 1980s. They include: ‘Machiavelli on the Maintenance of Liberty’, Politics, 18 (1983), 3–15Google Scholar; ‘The Idea of Negative Liberty: Philosophical and Historical Perspectives’, in Rorty, Richard, Schneewind, J. B. and Skinner, Quentin eds., Philosophy in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 193–221CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘The Paradoxes of Political Liberty’, in McMurrin, S., ed., The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Vol. VIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 225–50Google Scholar; ‘The Republican Ideal of Political Liberty’, in Bock, Gisela, Skinner, Quentin and Viroli, Maurizio, eds, Machiavelli and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 293–309Google Scholar; and ‘On Justice, the Common Good, and the Priority of Liberty’ in Mouffe, Chantal, ed., Dimensions of Radical Democracy (London: Verso, 1992), pp. 211–24.Google Scholar For the most part, I shall refer to the two most recent of these articles, which contain the fullest and, according to Skinner, strongest statements of his position.

7 Taylor, Charles, ‘Cross-Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate’, in Rosenblum, Nancy, ed., Liberalism and the Moral Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1989), pp. 159–82.Google Scholar In some of his other writings, Taylor is a critic of the ideal of negative liberty itself. See, especially, ‘What's Wrong with Negative Liberty’, Philosophical Papers, 2 (1985), pp. 211–29.Google Scholar In ‘Cross-Purposes’, however, Taylor explicitly formulates his ‘republican thesis’ in terms of ‘a broader gamut of freedoms, including negative ones’ on pp. 171–2.Google Scholar I defend the claim that Taylor can be considered an ‘instrumental republican’ more fully in Section 3 below.

8 For a critique of Skinner's interpretation of Machiavelli, see Charvet, John, ‘Quentin Skinner on the Idea of Freedom’, Studies in Political Thought, 2 (1993), 5–16Google Scholar, where Charvet argues that republicans, including Machiavelli, are committed to a positive conception of liberty. Another historical problem that I shall ignore concerns whether there are two distinct traditions in the history of political thought – one liberal, the other republican. Charvet contests this claim, as does Isaac, J. C., ‘Liberalism and Republicanism’, History of Political Thought, 9 (1988), 349–77.Google Scholar

9 My own critique of instrumental republicanism can be distinguished from several other critiques that have recently appeared in journal articles. For instance, I do not follow Charvet, , ‘Quentin Skinner and the Idea of Freedom’Google Scholar, in arguing that Skinner is too quick to abandon positive liberty. Nor do I assume, with Don Herzog and Shelley Burtt, that the main problem with instrumental republicanism is the ‘transition problem’ of getting a republican regime started in the first place (as Burtt points out, liberals can have the same problem). See Herzog, , ‘Some Questions for Republicans’, Political Theory, 14 (1986), 473–93, especially pp. 483–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Burtt, , ‘The Politics of Virtue Today’, p. 363.Google Scholar

10 Skinner, , ‘Republican Ideal of Liberty’, p. 301.Google Scholar

11 Skinner, , ‘Republican Ideal of Liberty’, pp. 301–2.Google Scholar

12 Skinner, , ‘Republican Ideal of Liberty’, p. 302.Google Scholar

13 Skinner, , ‘Republican Ideal of Liberty’, p. 302.Google Scholar

14 Skinner, , ‘Republican Ideal of Liberty’, pp. 302–3.Google Scholar

15 Skinner, , ‘Republican Ideal of Liberty’, p. 303.Google Scholar

16 Skinner, , ‘Republican Ideal of Liberty’, p. 304.Google Scholar

17 Skinner, , ‘Republican Ideal of Liberty’, pp. 305–6.Google Scholar

18 Skinner, , ‘Republican Ideal of Liberty’, pp. 307–8.Google Scholar

19 Skinner hints at such an argument in ‘Republican Ideal of Liberty’, pp. 304 and 308.Google Scholar

20 It is possible that Skinner has something like this in mind, but then it is misleading of him to characterize corruption (the tendency to ignore the claims of our community) as ‘simply a failure of rationality, an inability to recognize that our own liberty depends on committing ourselves to a life of virtue and public service’, ‘Republican Ideal of Liberty’, p. 304.Google Scholar The use of the words ‘our’ and ‘ourselves’ makes this claim about the preservation of liberty crucially ambiguous. If he means each of us separately, then the claim seems mistaken: it is false that any particular individual's liberty depends on committing himself or herself to ‘a life of virtue and public service’. If, however, he literally means ‘our’ and ‘ourselves’, the claim about liberty may well be true, but then corruption hardly seems like a simple failure of rationality. Rather it looks like a failure either of collective rationality or of individual rationality with a normative component built in.

21 Skinner, , ‘Republican Ideal of Liberty’, pp. 305–7.Google Scholar

22 For a fascinating attempt to test some of the republican hypotheses empirically, see Putnam, Robert D., with Leonardi, Robert and Nanetti, Raffaella Y., Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), especially chap. 4.Google Scholar

23 Skinner, , ‘Republican Ideal of Liberty’, p. 304.Google Scholar

24 Rawls, , A Theory of Justice, pp. 454–8, 474 and 493.Google Scholar

25 Rawls, , A Theory of Justice, pp. 333–7.Google Scholar

26 As Rawls puts it in discussing the ‘economic theory of democracy’, ‘since no system of constitutional checks and balances succeeds in setting up an invisible hand that can be relied upon to guide the process to a just outcome, a public sense of justice is to some degree necessary’ (A Theory of Justice, p. 493).Google Scholar

27 Skinner, , ‘Republican Ideal of Liberty’, p. 307.Google Scholar

28 Skinner, , ‘Republican Ideal of Liberty’, p. 307.Google Scholar

29 Dworkin, Ronald, Taking Rights Seriously (London: Duckworth, 1977), pp. 169–72.Google Scholar In his recent Tanner Lecture, ‘Foundations of Liberal Equality’, Dworkin appears to repudiate the right-basedness of political morality in favour of a more goal-based view.

30 See the comments on ‘codes of conduct’, Taking Rights Seriously, p. 172.Google Scholar

31 Skinner, , ‘Republican Ideal of Liberty’, p. 305.Google Scholar

32 Skinner, , ‘Republican Ideal of Liberty’, p. 305.Google Scholar

33 Rawls, , A Theory of Justice, pp. 229–30.Google Scholar The ‘balance of powers’ and the ‘separation of powers’ are, of course, distinct sorts of constitutional arrangements, but the distinction does not seem relevant to Skinner's argument nor to my attempt to rebut it.

34 Rawls, , Theory of Justice, p. 380.Google Scholar

35 This argument is made by Skinner, in ‘On Justice, the Common Good, and the Priority of Liberty’.Google Scholar

36 Skinner, , ‘On Justice, the Common Good, and the Priority of Liberty’, p. 215.Google Scholar

37 Skinner, , ‘Republican Ideal of Liberty’, p. 304 (emphasis added).Google Scholar

38 Rawls's recent work makes it especially clear that he does not wish to abandon notions of the common good. See, in particular, Political Liberalism, Lecture V, Section 7.

39 See Skinner, , ‘Republican Ideal of Liberty’, pp. 294–5.Google Scholar

40 Skinner, , ‘Republican Ideal of Liberty’, p. 302.Google Scholar

41 It is difficult to say whether Skinner thinks that contractarians and republicans would disagree about concrete policies and legislation, because we are told very little by Skinner about republican policy prescriptions. Some republican policies might include: (a) compulsory voting; (b) extending the idea of jury service into other domains; (c) encouraging the creation of neighbourhood councils and committees which take part in the political life of the community; (d) national service; (e) an education system which inculcates the virtues of the good citizen and a degree of patriotic allegiance; (f) prohibiting insults to the flag and national anthem; (g) subsidizing patriotic festivals and rites; or (h) establishing and preserving a certain social and cultural environment in the polity so as to secure maximal patriotic allegiance. Liberals might well balk at some of these proposals (in part, for reasons I discuss in Section 5 below), but not, as Skinner maintains, because they cannot, in principle, endorse the republican argument. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for suggesting to me some of the possible practical implications of instrumental republicanism.

42 Taylor, , ‘Cross-Purposes’, pp. 171–2.Google Scholar

43 See Taylor, , ‘Cross-Purposes’, pp. 165, 171–2Google Scholar; Skinner, , ‘Republican Ideal of Liberty’, pp. 301–2.Google Scholar

44 Taylor, , ‘Cross-Purposes’, pp. 171–5Google Scholar; Skinner, , ‘Republican Ideal of Liberty’, p. 303.Google Scholar

45 Taylor, , ‘Cross-Purposes’, pp. 181–2Google Scholar; Skinner, , ‘Republican Ideal of Liberty’, pp. 305–6.Google Scholar

46 Taylor, , ‘Cross-Purposes’, p. 170 n. 19.Google Scholar

47 Mark Philp explains this point well, suggesting that it is implicit in Skinner's argument: ‘even if civic virtue is instrumental to liberty and security, the citizens of a state must not believe that it is so, since the state requires their unconditional commitment, not one which calculates proportionality between what is being asked of them and what they receive in return’ (see Philp, Mark, ‘On Politics and its Corruption’, Political Theory Newsletter, 6 (1994), 1–18, at p. 13.Google Scholar

48 Taylor, , ‘Cross-Purposes’, pp. 165.Google Scholar

49 Taylor, , ‘Cross-Purposes’, pp. 172.Google Scholar

50 Taylor, , ‘Cross-Purposes’, p. 166; see also p. 176.Google Scholar

51 Taylor, , ‘Cross-Purposes’, pp. 166.Google Scholar

52 I take it that this is what Rawls has in mind when he says that a sense of justice ‘leads us to accept the just institutions that apply to us and from which we and our associates have benefited’, A Theory of Justice, p. 474.Google Scholar See also Political Liberalism, Lecture I, Section 3; and Gibbard, Allan, ‘Constructing Justice’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 20 (1991), 266–9.Google Scholar

53 Taylor, , ‘Cross-Purposes’, pp. 174 and 178.Google Scholar

54 Taylor, , ‘Cross-Purposes’, p. 174 (italics added).Google Scholar

55 Feinberg, Joel, The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law: Volume 4: Harmless Wrong-Doing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 111.Google Scholar Feinberg also argues (pp. 111–12) that American patriotism is a case of what I am calling ‘liberal patriotism’.

56 Taylor, , ‘Cross-Purposes’, pp. 176–7, 181–2.Google Scholar

57 Taylor, , ‘Cross-Purposes’, pp. 182.Google Scholar

58 Taylor, , ‘Cross-Purposes’, pp. 182.Google Scholar

59 See Raz, Joseph, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 114–15Google Scholar, for a good discussion of this distinction. Rawls explicitly endorses the ‘reasons-for-action’ conception of neutrality in Political Liberalism, Lecture V, Section 5.

60 For the distinction between full and partial compliance, see Rawls, , A Theory of Justice, pp. 245–8.Google Scholar

61 For an interesting attempt to develop a theoretical framework which can accommodate these kinds of considerations in a liberal theory of justice, see Kymlicka, Will, Liberalism, Community and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989)Google Scholar, especially chaps. 7–9. See also Taylor, Charles's own discussion in ‘Shared and Divergent Values’, in Reconciling the Solitudes (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1993), pp. 155–86, especially pp. 175–6.Google Scholar

62 This point is nicely made by Carens, Joseph, ‘Immigration and the Welfare State’, in Gutmann, Amy, ed., Democracy and the Welfare State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 229.Google Scholar As Carens puts it in discussing the possibility of a ‘backlash’ against permissive immigration policies, it is ‘surely important … to distinguish between a necessary tactical concession to a deep-seated and powerful prejudice and a legitimate defense of an important and honourable value’.