M AKING SENSE OF POLITICAL THOUGHT

The prominence of history in republican theory is not unrelated to this linguistic short-circuit, this incapacity to show in what sense republican rule would be dif-ferent from the sort of rule which has grown out of the history of sovereign power. History provides this difference. It is in and through its reference to pre-sovereign forms of government that republican theory demonstrates that it is in-deed different. History serves a dual purpose: it destabilizes sovereign discourse and it keeps republicanism from becoming entangled in the history of sovereign power. In the indeterminacy that attaches to republicanism, in its oscillation be-tween what belongs to and what does not belong to the history of sovereign

power, we find a structural precondition of yet another feature of republican theory: a feature that is a cause and a reflection of what we have termed the in-determinacy of republicanism. If the truth of republicanism is manifest only within our hearts, it is there that it has its locus. This is perhaps why repub-licanism is so concerned with meaning, more precisely, the meaning we attribute to political thought. Whereas liberalism and communitarianism advance theories on the order of things, on the rights and duties of the state and citizens, republi-canism strives to think about political community, and promote this activity. It reacts against the sense that political thought has become an otiose and scholastic endeavour. This fear is reflected in the remark with which Skinner concludes his lecture on Hobbes and republican liberty: that while Hobbes may have won the battle, it is still worth asking if he won the argument (Skinner, 2008, p. 216).

Common sense indicates that it is pointless to pursue an argument if the battle has been lost, but it is precisely this seemingly self-evident reaction repub-licanism seeks to combat. It should matter what we do when we think about the conditions of the life we lead in common with others. As Emile Perreau-Saussine (2007) noted, republican theory is not really a political proposition; it is a call to action, an existential appeal to engage with the questions of political life (pp.

109-110, 119-121).

It is by this appeal that republican inserts itself into the landscape of con-temporary political philosophy. Liberalism stands guard over liberty to protect it against state intervention; republicanism enjoins us to do noble things with this liberty. What concerns Pettit are not the limits placed on the exercise of liberty, nor is it the procedures that are meant to ensure the non-arbitrary nature of such limitations. His primary concern is the right of each man to relate as an equal to others, irrespective of differences in power, wealth, or social status. These con-cerns are shared by liberal theorists, but Pettit takes them further. Not content with the formal equality of the citizen, it is his material sense of equal worth that occupies him.

There is something compelling about republican theory’s insistence that poli-tical thought is not only, and not primarily, concerned with finding solutions to problems of communal life; that it is also about how we live our lives. Yet, for all its appeal, the resonance of republicanism in contemporary political theory should perhaps give us pause to wonder. Teaching people to walk with their heads held high is indeed a noble endeavour. It must be the aim of any political theory to enjoin us to think and to live politically. But in a world where the communities that define us have stretched to include individuals whose plight will not be ended through an ever so vigorous exercise of political liberty, there is quite a bit of self-indulgence in the excessive concern with the earnestness and

the nobility of our actions. Having to “toady” to the high and mighty, an ex-ample to which Pettit returns repeatedly, is certainly something no man or wom-an should have to do, but a political theory that sees this as more thwom-an a marginal problem has perhaps shaded over into something that has more to do with care for oneself than with concern for the matters of the city. The possibility of this drift is inherent in political life. Political life is always also a matter of sense.

Republicanism is right to remind us of this. We may need to remind ourselves that we loose the meaningof what a political life must be about if we become to concerned with the sense of it.

R

Boureau, A. (2006). La Religion de l’État. Paris: Les Belles Lettres.

Clarendon, E.H. (1676). A brief view and survey of the dangerous and perni-cious errors to church and state in Mr. Hobbes’s book entituled Leviathan.

Oxford.

Foisneau, L. (1997). “Obéissance politique et mortalité humaine selon Hobbes”

in Foisneau, Luc (Ed.), Politique, Droit et Théologie chez Bodin, Grotius et Hobbes. Paris: Éditions Kimé.

Foisneau, L. (2000). Hobbes et la toute-puissance de Dieu. Paris: Presses Uni-versitaires de France.

Foisneau, L. (2004). “Leviathan’s Theory of Justice” in Sorell, Tom & Luc Foisneau (Eds.), Leviathan After 350 years. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 105-122.

Garnett, G. (2006). Marsilius of Padua & “The Truth of History.” Oxford: Ox-ford University Press.

Hobbes, T. (1966). De Cive in Opera philosophica quae latina scripsit, I-V (Ed.

W. Molesworth). Aalen: Scientia Verlag.

Hobbes, T. (1969). Elements of Law Natural & Politic (Ed. Ferdinand Tönnies), London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd.

Hobbes, T. (1994). Leviathan (Ed. Edwin Curley), Indianapolis/Cambridge:

Hackett Publishing Company.

Hoekstra, K. (2004). The de facto Turn in Hobbes’ Political Philosophy. In T.

Sorell & L. Foisneau (Eds.), Leviathan After 350 years. Oxford: Oxford Uni-versity Press, pp. 33-73.

Kodalle, K.-M. (1972). Thomas Hobbes – Logik der Herrschaft und Vernuft des Friedens. München: C.H. Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung.

Lessay, F. (1988). Souveraineté et legitimité chez Hobbes. Paris: Presses Univer-sitaires de France.

Lev, A. (2014). Sovereignty and Liberty. A Study of the Foundations of Power.

Abingdon: Routledge.

Marsilius of Padua (1932). Defensor Pacis (Ed. Richard Scholz), Hannover:

Fontes Iuris Germanici Antiqui, Hahnsche Buchhandlung.

Perreau-Saussine, E. (2007). Quentin Skinner in Context. The Review of Politics, 69, pp. 106-122.

Pettit, P. (1997). Republicanism. A Theory of Freedom and Government. Oxford:

Oxford University Press.

Pettit, P. (1999). Republican Freedom and Contestatory Democratization. In I.

Shapiro & C. Hacker-Cordon (Eds.), Democracy’s Value. Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press.

Pocock, J.G.A. (1975). The Machiavellian Moment. Princeton: Princeton Uni-versity Press.

Rousseau, J.-J. (1964). Du Contract Social. In Œuvres Complètes, vol. 3. Paris:

Éditions Gallimard.

Skinner, Q. (1997). Liberty before Liberalism. Cambridge: Cambridge Universi-ty Press.

Skinner, Q. (2002a). Foundations of Modern Political Thought. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Skinner, Q. (2002b). Visions of Politics: Hobbes and Civil Science. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Skinner, Q. (2008). Hobbes and Republican Liberty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Skinner, Q. (2009). A Genealogy of the Modern State. In Proceedings of the British Academy, 162, pp. 325-370. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sommerville, J.P. (1992). Thomas Hobbes: Political Ideas in Historical Context, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press.

Sorell, T. (2004). The Burdensome Freedom of Sovereigns. In T. Sorell & L.

Foisneau (Eds.), Leviathan After 350 years, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Terrel, J. (1994). Hobbes – Matéralisme et Politique. Paris: Librairie Philoso-phique J.VRIN.

Tuck, R. (1993). Philosophy and Government, Cambridge: Cambridge Universi-ty Press.

Warrender, H. (1957). The Political Philosophy of Hobbes. His Theory of Obli-gation, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Zarka, Y.C. (1995). Hobbes et la pensée politique moderne, Paris: Presses Uni-versitaires de France.

Corruption as a societal diagnosis and the political forms of unfreedom in Machiavelli, Davenant, and Bolingbroke

T^UE A^NDERSEN N^EXØ

The following essay will examine a semantic change in one of the republican tradition’s key terms, “corruption.” This change can be traced back to opposi-tional polemics against the political order in England in the first half of the eighteenth century, polemics which more often than not were articulated through a republican vocabulary. It occurred, I argue, as a reaction to the very gradual birth of the modern state in England after the Glorious Revolution. Behind this exercise in historical semantics run two other, more theoretical arguments. The first is that a republican understanding of corruption is tightly interwoven with an understanding of the subjective state of not being free. The second, which will only be hinted at, is that the diagnosis of “universal corruption”, so called by Lord Bolingbroke, is semantically distinct from other attempts to describe the social ills of modernity. As such, it might be worth retrieving again today.

In that sense, my essay is a late addition to attempts in the past twenty years to make the republican tradition relevant for contemporary political debates. The different attempts to revive the republican tradition have also, however, almost exclusively focused on what one could call republicanism’s normative voca-bulary. Michael Sandel (1996) has attempted to reintroduce a republican concept of civic virtue; Quentin Skinner (1998) and Philip Pettit (1997) have challenged a liberal conception of freedom as absence of interference, replacing it with a concept of freedom as absence of dependence or domination; the Italian philoso-pher Maurizio Viroli (1995) has argued for a republican concept of “patriotism”

as an alternative to both cosmopolitan and nationalist currents in contemporary political thinking. This essay instead examines the potential in a less discussed

term (but see Lessing, 2011; Viroli, 2012) within the diagnostic vocabulary of the republican tradition.