![]() And if the people’s wealth extends to the land, then a certain kind of agrarian socialism emerges as the definition of republicanism. It is an alternative to the kind of liberalism that favors individual rights. Meanwhile, another tradition takes seriously the etymology–“ res publica” means “public thing ”–and translates the phrase as “commonwealth.” A “commonwealth,” in turn, could mean all the things that are commonly owned by the people. Still other writers have noticed the ancient Roman penchant for civic duty and public service and have used the word “republic” for a regime that demands a great deal from its citizens and that encourages public engagement as a positive good. ![]() Thus, for some, a republic is a government that avoids direct and participatory democratic elements. All were limited by various laws (albeit unstably so). Some were elected and others were appointed. Yet the original Roman republic was composed of legislative bodies and officers who represented various classes and interests. In a very different vein, Jefferson defined a republic “purely and simply” as “government by its citizens in mass, acting directly and personally, according to rules established by the majority and … every other government is more or less republican, in proportion as it has in its composition more or less of this ingredient of the direct action of the citizens.” For Jefferson, a “republic” is what others would call a direct and participatory democracy. But they have precedent for calling a regime without a monarch a “republic.” Thus people who want to remove Queen Elizabeth II as the titular monarch of Australia (or Britain) call themselves “republicans.” Their proposal would change virtually nothing about the power structure it would be almost entirely symbolic. One defining feature of the Roman republic was simply that it wasn’t a monarchy. ![]() The words have subsequently been used by many writers in many languages to name a wide variety of regimes–and sometimes as terms of abuse.įor instance, a “republic” presumably must name a regime that has something in common with the original, the ancient Roman res publica. This definitional question is challenging because the words come, respectively, from Greek and Latin, and they were coined to name specific regimes that had lots of eccentric features (huge juries in Athens a host of executive officials in Rome) that no one considers definitive. There’s a current right-wing talking point that we are only the latter, but I’ve argued that this claim deviates from a long bipartisan consensus that the US aspires to be a democratic republic. We call ourselves a democracy and a republic.
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