-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Richard Whatmore, Hammersley Republicanism: An Introduction, by Rachel Hammersley, The English Historical Review, Volume 137, Issue 589, December 2022, Pages 1849–1850, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac240
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
At the end of the eighteenth century, a republican was someone who loved revolutionary France and hated Britain. Indeed, for Thomas Paine, republicanism would only ever be able to bring peace, prosperity and rights to the entire globe if the British government was ceaselessly assaulted militarily until it was wiped off the political map. This failed to happen, Paine got more and more depressed about his own republic of the United States, and Napoleon Bonaparte, once Paine’s friend, put an end to the First French Republic by proclaiming himself emperor. Republican history is so often one of failure, lament, betrayal and tragedy. It is also complicated. Fifty years before Paine, the great French jurist Montesquieu said that Britain was itself a republic hidden beneath the form of a monarchy. Fifty years after Paine, few would have described the Second French Republic as a sacred polity and Britain as the devil. How can we generalise when states as diverse as Sparta, Athens, the Hebrew Republic, Rome, Florence, Venice, Geneva, the Swiss Confederation, the Dutch Republic and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were all portrayed as worthy of emulation as republics? If republicanism means self-government rather than the republican exclusivism rejecting monarchy, any government of laws erected for the good of all can claim republican status, worthy of description as a res publica. Despite such challenges, historians of political thought, inspired by Hans Baron, Caroline Robbins, John Pocock and Quentin Skinner, have spilled a singular volume of ink on the republican tradition and traditions, centring on whether republicans through history have ever had anything in common.
