Republican Political Thought

Abstract“Republican political thought” comes from the Latin wordrespublica, which means public thing or common property. Arespublicais a government that serves common rather than private ends. It is usually assumed that a republic must be self‐governing and that republican liberty is only possible in a free republic. While various traditions of political thought are built out of these simple ideas, “republican political thought” refers to a late modern scholarly paradigm that interprets or draws inspiration from earlier periods of reflection on the classical Roman and Greek republics. Neo‐republican scholars have rewritten the history of political thought in terms of the development and defeat of a classical, republican view of liberty. They have also attempted to revive some idea of “republican liberty” as an alternative to liberal theories of freedom and politics. Though a vital research program, republican political thought has not yet shown how its institutional program is strongly different from liberalism and it has been relatively quiet about economic questions.