Republicanism and Liberalism: Historical and Analytical Perspectives
Cécile Laborde
This is an advanced course in political theory which offers a critical combination of the two approaches to the discipline: the history of ideas and normative political philosophy. It aims critically to assess the attempt by a number of contemporary political theorists such as Quentin Skinner, to retrieve the ‘lost language’ of republicanism, a language seemingly eclipsed by the triumph of liberal historiography from the 18th century onwards. This course seeks to retrace the historical emergence of this language and to measure its influence on political history and philosophy in countries such as Italy, France, Britain and the United States. It explores the diversity of the tradition and its internal contradictions, and assesses whether the hopes associated with its ‘retrieval’ are well-founded. In the process, the course attends to some central problems in the methodology of the history of ideas and political theory. The ‘paradigmatic shift’ initiated by the republican revival has raised important questions about the relationship between history and philosophy, and between theory and reality. The course aims to equip students to reflect on these issues, using the large historiographical and philosophical literature produced by recent attempts to retrieve the ‘res publica’. The first part of the course deals with historical issues, and the second part with contemporary issues. Theorists and historians examined include: Hans Baron, J. G. A. Pocock, Quentin Skinner, David Miller and Philip Pettit.