Let’s move on from the population debate and ransack the Small Farm Future archives for another controversy to rake over. Ah, how about this one, in which I presented civic republicanism (CR) as a political tradition worthy of consideration for our troubled times (yeah, I wasn’t referring to those republicans). I’d like to try nudging that issue forward a little here – particularly in the light of the criticisms of CR made by Stephen Gey in an article linked by Jody that I finally got around to reading. My thanks to her for drawing my attention to it.
A couple of scene-setting remarks. I don’t have much taste for abstract theorizing about the politically ideal society. But it seems clear that under numerous intersecting pressures the way the world has done politics over the last century or two is changing, and I think it’s as well to try one’s best to influence the changes in positive rather than negative directions in the given circumstances (in that remark alone I reveal my republican sympathies, but let’s leave that thought to lie…) Influential writers within the environmental movement like Paul Kingsnorth and David Fleming (building on the likes of Leopold Kohr) have to a greater or lesser degree assimilated localism to ethnic, ‘tribal’ or communitarian identities – believing that outside contemporary political institutions like the European Union there are forms of more deeply inherent pre-political identity between people which will enable them to forge better political agreements. I think this is a mistake. One of the benefits of CR is that it doesn’t assume political agreements just emerge when you have the correct ‘natural’ community. For republicans, there is no natural community – only ones that emerge out of political deliberation.
Incidentally, on that note I’ve just started reading Pieter Judson’s history of the Habsburg Empire – “the prison of nations” according to the 19th century nationalists seeking to dissolve it. Judson’s argument is that we’ve become too influenced by them and have bought into their narrative of ethnic nations preceding the empire, rather than seeing the way that the empire was in many ways constitutive of the nations. In any case, what interests me about CR is the resources it offers to try to create viable and sustainable successor polities to our present world ‘empire’ of nation-states that are as pleasant to live in as possible under the circumstances we face of increasing ecological, economic and political disorder.
Gey’s fundamental critique of CR is that it insists on defining collective goals for society, and thereby risks creating a tyranny of the majority. What if, when all the deliberation is over, it’s decided that everyone called Chris should be enslaved, or that other more obvious categories should be denied privileges – that women or non-property holders should not be permitted to deliberate, for example? For Gey, CR accords enormous power to the collective polis, whereas liberal or pluralist political theories take a more limited view of government. For them, a society’s ethos can’t be defined by collectively-decided singularities, which threaten to become tyrannical. Theirs is a live-and-let-live approach, where political society is one long argument that’s never resolved except in the meta-agreement that people agree to disagree. Perhaps their strongest emphasis is on limiting the power of arbitrary government.
Gey makes some telling points, but I also think there are problems with his line of argument. For one thing, I don’t see that the problem of excluding minorities is particular to CR. Every political doctrine defines the scope of the political community and potentially draws questionable lines of exclusion around it. Gey was a legal scholar and his piece is especially engaged with CR as articulated by a handful of republican legal theorists in the USA (Cass Sunstein in particular) – but CR is a wider tradition than I think he allows, and in much of it elaborate attention is devoted to the question of full and uncoerced participation in self-government. Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), for example, was an early statement of the case for female political participation that was explicitly framed in republican terms against the view that there was a given or ‘natural’ political community comprising only propertied males.
But it’s true that CR doesn’t rest content with a minimalist framework of rules to live and let live by. The collective goals it defines through participation and deliberation are supposed to invest the citizenry’s practice. It strikes me that this is how all societies actually work, even if it’s not supposed to be how they work according to pluralist political theories. But CR certainly makes a stronger play for the idea than most political traditions. And a good thing too, in my opinion. In today’s world brought low by vast economic inequalities, climate change and other environmental degradations, I don’t think the pluralist who says to the republican “You presume to tell me that I must subordinate my particular interests to the wider common interest?” requires any more elaborate answer than “Damn right I do”. True, CR must pay attention to the possibility that notions of ‘the common good’ might mask oppressions of various kinds – but there’s plenty of attention to exactly that issue within its traditions. Its real emphasis is not on grimly enforcing majoritarian decisions of the “enslave all Chris’s” variety, but on developing the citizenry’s consciousness that immediate individual self-interest is usually a worse basis for building a good society than taking a broader society-wide view.
This brings me to Machiavelli (1469-1527) – the key thinker who paved the way for modern CR out of its classical roots. One aspect of Machiavelli’s politics was the need to avoid ‘factions’. For Gey, this republican antipathy to factionalism is another example of its potential tyranny – in a live-and-let-live world, politics is always inherently factional. But the problem with factions for Machiavelli is that they represent private interests, proposing laws “not for the common liberty, but for their own power” (Machiavelli Discourses I.18). Machiavelli calls this tendency to put private goods or interests over public ones ‘corruption’ (so for him ‘corruption’ means something different from our modern fingers-in-the-till sense of the term). Modern liberal political philosophy has come up with all sorts of arguments to suggest that, on the contrary, private interests beget public goods, of which Adam Smith’s metaphor of ‘the invisible hand of the market’ is probably the most famous. But even Smith looked admiringly at republican thought before concluding that it was inappropriate for an emerging commercial society. I think that’s true, but my contention here is that we now urgently need to transcend commercial society and create agrarian societies to which republicanism is better suited. And it’s also that anyone who thinks the ‘invisible hand of the market’ metaphor still usefully explains why government should take a back seat to the pursuit of private interests hasn’t been paying attention.
A few additional thoughts on delivering and living an agrarian republic. I find Machiavelli’s analysis of the ‘tumults’ (popular uprisings) that occur in republics of interest. He thought that in a relatively uncorrupted republic tumults can stave off corruption by preventing factions and re-vivifying political institutions, whereas in corrupted republics they merely accelerate corruption by enhancing factions and prompting violence between them. It interests me to think about some recent ‘tumults’ in western politics along these lines. There are those, for example, who think the votes for Brexit and Donald Trump were re-vivifying moves, and I do understand their logic. But to my mind rather they were signs of a corrupt factionalism that worked against ‘the common liberty’. Indeed, I think they were hyper-corrupt inasmuch as they probably work largely against the interests of many of those who supported them (though maybe less so in the case of Trump, who despite all the populist hue and cry still drew much of his support from wealthy white men). At the same time, I’d have to concede that the alternatives on offer weren’t much less corrupt.
So I’m not sure how much faith I now have in formal political processes in western politics to deliver an uncorrupted republic. In that sense, perhaps I’ve moved closer to a position I associated with David Fleming and criticized a while back in this post. Fleming wrote, “There is no case for dismantling the market; that will be done for us, all too soon” and “The task….is not about wrestling with the controls of economics to force it in the direction of degrowth, but about getting ready for the moment when the coming climacteric does the heavy work of degrowth for us”. In the discussion under that post, Shaun Chamberlin wrote that Fleming (whose book he edited) didn’t advocate sitting back and passively observing the demise of the market economy. Rather, he perceived “a far more urgent priority for our action – rebuilding the informal economy of community and culture that he foresees we will have to again rely on after the market economy fails us”. I’d pretty much go along with that, except that – as I said back then in response to Shaun – I think I’d place more emphasis than Fleming on political deliberation in that process and less on culture and religion (leafing again through Fleming’s tome, I see that there are quite a few CR ideas investing it, though he placed less emphasis on them than other concerns).
Culture and religion are important too, though, and I hope to write some more about them soon. Under my last post, Joe Clarkson wrote “I am prepared to be made poor (without making anyone else richer, so don’t volunteer to take my assets) and would welcome the circumstances which would force that condition on me and the rest of the rich world. I hope it happens soon.” To me, this is an excellently republican commitment to civic goals – a regrettably rare one in the contemporary rich world, but one that will probably become more widespread under the impress of events. Somehow it has to become a motivator of individual practice, but I’m not sure that it’s something best thought of under the rubrics of culture, religion or personal ethics. Perhaps it could be seen as a philosophical spiritualism of the kind familiar from Taoism in the east and Stoicism in the west (there are links between Stoicism and CR in antiquity, for example in the thought of Cicero). Or maybe just as the lived reality of republicanism’s collective goals.
But for now, I want to get back to the politics. The way I’d see republican political deliberation potentially emerging in the future is along the lines of what I called the ‘supersedure state’ in this post. It seems to me quite likely that people in many parts of the world will find the tendrils of the liberal-democratic capitalist state slowly withering without any other kind of political force necessarily filling the breach, making it increasingly necessary for them to self-organize by default. In these circumstances, people won’t find themselves a part of some obvious natural community with ready-made customs and procedures. Instead, they’ll be a random agglomeration trying to make things up as they go along in the persisting shadow of the capitalist world-economy. In that situation, I think CR has much to contribute.
Some of Gey’s strongest arguments against CR relate to the difficulties of implementing it in large-scale modern capitalist societies. By his own admission, these diminish the more you approach a smaller-scale, more face-to-face society in which more direct forms of deliberation are possible. In his words,
“by trying to recreate a modern version of the old model of direct democracy, the modern civic republicans end up preserving the bad things about the classical civic republican community – its conformism, inhospitality to dissent, and antidemocratic deference to some unassailable collective ideal such as “civic virtue” – while failing to recapture the old system’s one real advantage – its homey, personal, face-to-face means of identifying and achieving common goals.” (p.815)
This indeed is the kind of situation I have in mind for a future where CR fits the bill. I’d acknowledge the dangers of conformism and inhospitality to dissent that Gey identifies, though as I mentioned earlier I think the CR tradition is more robust to them than he supposed (CR isn’t the same as direct democracy). But I suspect this issue springs so readily to mind because when we think about small-scale agrarian societies we find numerous historical examples of authoritarianism, patriarchy, gerontocracy, caste oppression and other ‘illiberal’ forms of rule. I need to ponder this some more, but I’d like to make a few interim remarks about it.
Arguments for small-scale self-provisioning can’t really avoid being arguments for ‘family farming’. Since families are differentiated by gender and age, it’s necessary to consider both dimensions as potential sites for coercion and domination. And since family farms are differentiated by size, income and land quality, the potential for coercion and domination between farms as well as within them demands attention.
Focusing on coercion and domination within the individual farm, this seems to vary culturally – that is, the forces of coercion and domination are greater in some small farm societies than others in ways that aren’t obviously related to their agrarian character (though perhaps they may be less obviously related…?) But one aspect of agrarianism that does bear on gender and age oppression is the importance of property and inheritance, and therefore by implication local standing – the ‘family name’ – which bears heavily on young people, young women in particular. One reason for this is that status is easily lost, and among poor cultivators that can be economically disastrous, as is all too apparent for example from analysis of medieval peasantries in Europe among whom people were often only a bad harvest, a bout of illness or a questionable investment in land or marriage markets away from servitude.
But that insecurity wasn’t simply a given of agrarian life – it stemmed from extreme seigneurial domination. In more recent times, CR has invested the idea of a republic of property-owning smallholders who are not subject to that kind of domination. The best known of these times in the English-speaking countries are the aftermath of the English Civil War and the aftermath of the American Revolution. In the first case, James Harrington’s Oceana made the CR argument for a republic of smallholders, while in the second the best-known proponent was Thomas Jefferson. But it was the absolutism of Hobbes and the liberalism of Locke that won out in drawing the terms of the political debate in the first case, and the commercialism of Hamilton in the second, presaging the entirely non-republican age of commercial capitalism whose dying days now seem upon us. Republicanism has waned not because it was wrong, but because it lost those old political battles, and was less suited to the societies that emerged in the light of them.
So what really interests me is whether we may be entering another ‘Machiavellian moment’ when smallholder republicanism may, at least in some places, arise as a response to new times and challenges. If it does, I think the small farm futures it’ll bring about could look quite different from some of the small farm pasts that presently inflect our thinking about what small farm societies are like, successfully limiting some of the forms of domination I mentioned above that are often associated with those pasts. But only if we keep the channels of republican deliberation open. And even then, I perceive some serpents in the garden of which I hope to write more soon.
