Up the Republic

Up the Republic! 
by 

Fintan O'Toole (Editor)

I have never questioned  being "a republican" nor really enquired into what that means, beyond making HRH redundant,  on doubtless reasonable terms.   After reading this book I am suddenly an enthusiast. <i>Crudely, in a republic, nobody gets to dominate anybody else, nobody gets unaccountable power and citizens have a duty to be obstreperous.</i>

These eight essays by different authors are written with an Irish audience in mind and some of the material is specific to Ireland, but it deserves wider circulation, as a critique of neoliberal notions of “freedom” and liberal democracy in the USA [<i>"that embodied oxymoron, the US Republican Party, currently at war with every single principle of classical republican democracy"</i>] , the UK and Australia, inter alia, and a powerful argument in favour of a richer and more actively democratic system.   Among its surprises I was especially struck with an  excellent essay by Tom Hickey, exploring the challenges of designing an education system that prepares and equips students to participate in politics actively and effectively and to produce the “obstreperous “citizens required to call to account all those with power, and not only those in government; in the UK this would entail throwing away all of the self-styled “education reforms” implemented since 1987 and starting again from radically different premises.   The essay is also interesting on the role of religious education, in ways that will be topical far beyond Ireland.

Several of the writers are rightly enraged by the loss of sovereignty arising in Ireland from the totally avoidable and morally plain wrong decision to bail out the private Irish banks which collapsed in the 2008 crash; their discussion of sovereignty seem to me not only authentic but also an interesting contrast with the dubious misuse of language about “sovereignty” during the UK’s debate on Brexit; the clue is that Brexit is entirely in the interests of the same financial sector which in Ireland has been the source of its crisis. This book thus makes an interesting bridge between Finton O’Toole’s brilliant books on the 2008  crash (Ship of Fools) and on Brexit (Heroic Failure).    One day in the distant future, after lots more superb writing, when he needs an epitaph, it could well be simply “I told you so.” 

Quotes

Fintan O'Toole

One of the things that makes ‘the republic’ a slippery concept is the existence of two quite separate traditions of republicanism. ... The first is the one that emerged from classical Roman thought (‘what affects all must be decided by all’), by way of the Italian Renaissance. It took shape in Florence and the other city states, and went on to underpin the overthrow of monarchs in Poland, Holland and England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It enormously influenced the American Revolution and partly (but only partly) shaped the French. This stream of thought had three basic elements. First, freedom should be understood as the condition of ...non domination. The state’s job is not merely to uphold this freedom but – crucially – to uphold it equally for all citizens. This makes the idea of republican freedom very different from liberal and neoliberal definitions of ‘freedom’, which include the freedom to exploit and control others. ... The second principle holds that government should be ‘mixed’, its various powers and functions broken up among different and independent bodies to ensure that no one should exercise unaccountable power. Third, it is up to citizens, individually and collectively, to keep the republic on its toes... Crudely, in a republic, nobody gets to dominate anybody else, nobody gets unaccountable power and citizens have a duty to be obstreperous. [pp18-20]

As Maurizio Viroli puts it: Liberal liberty aims to protect individuals only from interferences, from actions interfering with their freedom of choice; republican liberty aims to emancipate them from the conditions of dependence. [p19]

Instead of the idea that power should be deliberately divided, the Rousseau tradition argues for the notion of a single, sovereign popular will : ‘the People’ effectively taking the place of the king in a monarchy... There is no room in the general will for different parts of government holding each other in check. .. it also follows that there is no room for obstreperous citizens. Once the general will has been expressed by the assembly, it must be accepted an obeyed – otherwise it would not be general... Once decisions have been made, the entire force of the state and of the citizens collectively is assumed to be behind them.  [p21]

John Philpot Curran, on his election as Lord Mayor of Dublin in 1790, said that the ‘condition on which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance’ (subsequently quoted as ‘the price of liberty is eternal vigilance’ and widely misattributed to Thomas Jefferson). [p27]

A republic is not something people are given but something they choose to become. [p30]

‘Civic virtue is not a martial, heroic and austere virtue, but a civilised, ordinary tolerant one.  It is not even at odds with the idea that is often counterpoised against it: self-interest. It simply asks that self-interest be enlightened. It suggests that the ‘self’ in which we are interested is not an isolated, robotic machine for calculating immediate advantage, but a nexus of connections to family, to place and nature, to community, to society, to the imaginary but potent entity we call a nation. It entails a belief that human beings take personal pleasure in trust and decency and collective achievement. It imagines that self to include a moral sense that finds satisfaction in justice and an aesthetic sense that is repelled by the chaos, disorder and obscenity that pits all against all and is gratified by balance and decency. [pp32,33]

Membership of  a nation is accidental and passive; citizenship in a republic has to be conscious and active. [p36]

...between 1995 and 2008.  Three huge things happened... Ireland became a ‘modern’economy of urbanised, industrial or service production. The power of the institutional Catholic Church was broken.  And Nationalism, in the shape of the quest for a united Ireland, ... was literally and intellectually disarmed  by the peace process and the Belfast Agreement of 1998. [p38]

The problem for Ireland was that, just as it was reaching a point where it had its best opportunity to construct a republic; all of these ideas were being systematically dismantled. Beginning with a specific strain in mathematical economics in the United States, the idea took hold that human beings are actually isolated, coldly rational creatures who are programmed to seek only their own advantage... This notion is literally paranoid: it was formulated by John Nash while he was a paranoid schizophrenic who believed that everyone was plotting against him. But it became mainstream economic and political wisdom. [p40] 

... The idea that worked well enough for thirty five years – that people might acquire pleasure, satisfaction and self-worth from doing something that could benefit the community as a whole – was scrapped. [p41]

...the emotion that destroyed the power of both institutional Catholicism and of warped ‘republicanism’ was not heroic or triumphal. It was disgust. ... For an Irish person of a Catholic background to look squarely at some of the atrocities committed by ‘republicans’ in his or her name, or to read the Ryan or Murphy reports on child abuse by religious orders and priests, was to look into the vilest, darkest, most abysmally nightmarish aspects of one’s own culture.... [p42, 43]

The founding of republics requires a certain concrete illusion, a utopian spirit in which everything seems possible.  Republics will settle down into something more sober and qualified, but they need that initial energy of hope. This simply wasn’t the way Ireland was in those years of glorious opportunity. [p43]

The Irish republic didn’t collapse by accident – it imploded because it was Gerry built... It was philosophically incoherent, wide open to corruption and riven by contradictions. It lacks the mortar that holds republics together: the active, conscious consent and commitment of its citizens. [p46]

It has to be admitted that, in general, the Irish people do not know what a republic means. .. It calls to mind either the kleptocracy of Fianna Fail The Republican Party or the viciousness of a self-appointed ethnic militia.  Put the word into the search engine of an archive such as that of the Irish Times and 99 percent of the results will refer either to that embodied oxymoron, the US Republican Party, currently at war with every single principle of classical republican democracy, or to some deranged zealot who continues to believe that the only problem with the Irish republic is that not enough people have yet been killed in its name. [p48]

...What is the point of trying to give meaning to a word that has become so thoroughly debased? The point, in fact, is twofold.  There is... a deep and resonant republican tradition that stretches back over thousands of years and that represents a strain of tolerance, decency and respect for genuine freedom that is remarkably resistant to the pressures of power, cruelty and imperiousness. Irish people are, after all, human, and humanity is not so overflowing with sources of hope that it can afford to give up on the few that it has. ... What is the alternative to this tough hope? Nothing but a surrender to the bleak belief that human beings are isolated, atomised, paranoid machines, programmed by their genes to kick each other in the face.  It is society as a system of organised begrudgery. [p49]

Ireland has been plunged into an existential crisis, not by the stupidities of public policy whose name is legion, but by an utterly incomprehensible and obviously demented decision to assume all private banking debt as a public responsibility... In a republic, the instinctive common sense of citizens would have bridled at the notion that each one of them should work part of his or her day for every day of the foreseeable future to pay off the liabilities of, for example, a German bank that lent money to a private Irish bank that lent it on to an English investor to speculate on an office block in Manhattan. [p52]

Iseult Honohan

There have been many different kinds of republics, and republican ideals have been interpreted in many different ways. But we can identify three principal themes that distinguish republicanism from mainstream liberalism, nationalism and other political traditions. 

1. It expresses a commitment to realising freedom in the context of interdependence among those who are subject to a common power or government.

2. ...A republic is a polity of self governing citizens... citizens are regarded as people who have become interdependent, through a common history, and by virtue of being subject to, and potentially dominated by, the same government – a much broader conception than the nationalist idea of citizenship being defined simply by membership of the same national group.

3. .. the idea that a primary goal of politics is the common good shared among citizens. ... Because there is a natural tension between individual private and common public interests, this too is a fragile achievement. The inherent tendency for individuals to put private interests first is one aspect oc corruption.  Countering it requires education in awareness of the common nature of common interests.

Tom Hickey

 Machiavelli lamented what he deemed the rotten factionalism among the political classes in late Middle Ages / earl Renaissance Florence. The different factions sought dominating control of the levers of political power, but were motivated by their own interests, and the interests of their supporters. In  the Roman republic of over a millennium earlier, on Machiavelli’s reckoning, different groups understood the political institutions as institutions of their own shared liberty,... The threat of being dominated by a given faction that might win power for a particular cycle led each group to secure equal liberty through good, un-dominating, non-factional laws and institutions. The idea is that citizens ought to be capable of abstracting away from their immediate whims and short-term interests, and to see the ways in which they share more valuable long-term interests in common with all citizens. [p96]

This means that citizens must not only seek political power for more noble reasons that naked self-interest, but, even more burdensomely perhaps, they must engage in the common deliberative process of politics by means of arguments that they can reasonably expect their fellow citizens to accept. They cannot expect other citizens to be moved in political debate by arguments based on factional perspectives that others necessarily do not share, or by virtue of sheer political power. Rather, citizens owe one another reciprocal reasons: reasons that they can reasonably expect others not merely to understand, but to accept as legitimate. [p99]

This capacity for undominating democratic deliberation requires, at the very least, that young citizens be exposed to and be acquainted with other ethical perspectives, and must learn to appreciate that these other perspectives express conceptions of value that are sincerely held by other reasonable people. [p100]

A helpful illustration... is provided by a famous case that came before the US Sixth Circuit Federal Appeals Court in 1987: Mozert v Hawkins Co. Board of Education. It concerned a group of Protestant religious fundamentalist parents who objected to a compulsory reading programme being taught at the public school at which their children were students... The parents’ argument ultimately was that the reading programme exposed their children to a diverse range of ethical perspectives and encouraged ‘critical reasoning’, rendering it more difficult for them to pass on their particular religious beliefs to their children... Judge Lively argued that the purpose of the public school was to teach fundamental values ‘essential to a democratic society’ including ‘tolerance of divergent political and religious views’ and the ability to ‘consider ... the sensibilities of others’. He rejected the claim that there was a violation of religious liberty on the ground that ‘exposure to something does not constitute teaching, indoctrination, opposition or promotion to the things exposed.’ [pp101, 102]

Republicans need not be shy in insisting on programmes and strategies that develop independence from the will of others, including independence from the will of kindly and well-meaning parents in respect of something as sacred as their children’s ethical commitments. Needless to say, the moral rights of parents to develop their children’s ethical commitments must always be respected by any state committed to liberty.  It is just that such rights are not absolute. And the burden is on proponents of religious schools to demonstrate that such schools are capable of educating citizens towards virtue. [pp113, 114]