Is republicanism necessarily pro-equality?

Godge wrote: »

This post had been deleted.

Peregrinus wrote: »

Republicanism isn't intrinsically egalitarian. The republics of the classical world certainly weren't egalitarian and neither, as already pointed out, were the republics of renaissance Italy.

But modern republicanism - and especially Irish republicanism - has been profoundly influenced by the French revolution, and the encounter with the ideals of the Enlightenment. If nothing else, we can say that since then everyone who has paid lip service to republicanism has also paid lip service to equality. You can, of course, question the extent to which Fianna Fail is truly republican just as readily as you can question the extent to which it is truly egalitarian. But, in their own mind, they aspire to be both, and always have.

This is one of the features of republicanism, more precisely civic republicanism. The etymology of 'republic' is res publica meaning 'public affair' or, more loosely the common interest or public sphere, as distinct from the private sphere of the household and internal life. This implies that boundaries are set that define who is 'in' and who is 'out' of this commonwealth. In the earliest times, republicanism wasn't problematic because it meant rich white men, with women and slaves being property and men of lesser classes having to be placated and co-opted for state roles (the Roman Republic). With the birth of humanism and subsequently the Enlightenment, as you say, and the emergence of liberalism, you see more sophistication in the ideas of 'citizenship' which is a strong concept in that it confers rights and responsibilities on people in the public sphere (and also the private sphere), but nevertheless, citizenship has historically served to be an exclusive concept, even in liberal countries like France (where nationalism and citizenship are assimilationist) and the UK where national identity and citizenship have been more typically liberal. I think in practice, a state calling itself a republic, beyond formal laws and institutions circumscribing that, is more of an aspiration and statement of membership of 'civilised' nations than an actual commitment to formal political equality of people because republicanism has never been necessarily about political equality per se.

Permabear wrote: »

Is he advocating distributional equality or legal equality? Because, as Hayek notes in "Equality, Value, and Merit," we cannot have both at the same time:

I wouldn't agree with Hayek's conceptions of liberty or equality. He's right to point out different registers or types of freedom, but his form of freedom is of an ideal nature - absolutist - and therefore not very realistic and a bit of a straw man. Without wanting to derail the conversation about FF's conflation of republicanism and equality, the critique of Hayek's point here would simply be that neither 'distributional' nor 'legal' equality on their own are adequate because, as human beings rooted in the material world, both matter and both are subject to constant change grounded in social, economic and political tensions. And, in any case, you'd have to be clearer about the relevance this point of Hayek's has to republicanism. You seem to be saying that you can only have a republicanism rooted in legal but not actual, material equality (or more precisely egalitarianism), or actual, material equality and not legal equality, when in practical reality, both tend to imply each other. But going down this root of argument then brings us to discussing the necessary conditions of freedom, if such a thing can exist, which is perhaps a later discussion.

KomradeBishop wrote: »

There is no system of government that can guarantee social equality - democracy is just the least-worst at achieving that.

I'm reading this book at the moment, and it does a very good job of showing how various types of corruption have been a core part of the Irish state (and FF in particular), since about a decade after the founding of the state.

Since the 60's and moving up through the 90's (still getting to the part of the book dealing with 2000+ ) in particular - much of that time involving FF in control - governance has increasingly favoured a business/connected class ('golden circles' etc.) at the expense of the wider public, in some cases (e.g. corruption in the beef trade in early 90's), leading to massive fraudulent industry subsidies, and fines on the Irish state itself by the EU, for the regulatory breaches involved in those subsidies (so that's the public paying for the subsidy, the fine, and the costs of the industry monopoly it generated) - and nobody was held to account.

So ya, Republicanism doesn't inherently mean equality, it's just a system of governance - you still need an educated population, and enough transparency in governance, and an active/impartial media, to hold government to account, and to make sure government holds industry to account.

Agreed (and Elaine Byrne has done great stuff in this area alright). And this points towards another notion, reality even, about 'modern liberal democracies' in the context of capitalism. Joseph Schumpeter coined the phrase 'competitive elitism' to describe what he believed to be the (correct?) functioning of modern democracies: in order for governments to make efficient decisions, it was preferable for citizens to vote for public representatives who would form a government who would be relatively insulated from popular opinion such that democracy would be reduced to elite rule whereby different groups of elites (political parties representing interest groups) would exchange power at election time. This, he thought, was preferable to participatory democracy where the plebs had their say in an active sense. This idea became so pervasive that in the 1960s, American political scientists were actually making the argument that because citizens' participation in public life, even voting levels, had become so low that it was a sign of how well politics was working and how happy the people were about it! This, in the USA, a country founded on Enlightenment republican ideals! Things changed for a time in the 1960s.

I think the only reason people accepted this was because living standards improved for more people more than in any other period in human history. But this continued in a context of segregation in the South, economic depression, war and still continuing high levels of economic inequality.

Is it any wonder that such corruption came to exist? I guess my point is: we have this tendency in our own politics in Ireland. There's a mantra that because we're a republic and because parties pay some kind of unthinking lip service to high-minded concepts which are deliberately ill-defined to makes us feel good and to allow governments to get off the hook when they break their promises, we've just been bred to believe we live in a republic that has something to do with equality.

Well, historically this may have been true. My dad growing up in rural Ireland says he didn't know he was poor because everyone was equally poor.

I just don't know anymore. I despair, really ...

permabear wrote:

This post had been deleted.

Minimal governance by a minimal state whose primary role is to ensure the functioning of the capitalist free market.

When I hit the post button, I questioned my roping of Hayek into that particular statement immediately afterwards. Despite providing ideological inspiration for the likes of Reagan, Thatcher and Kohl, Hayek is more in the camp of Isaiah Berlin, but even then, I ended up disagreeing with his analysis on liberty and implications for governance despite an early attraction to his ideas.

Secondly, advocacy of small government and free markets does not preclude someone from being a political theorist;

I didn't say any such thing. In fact, I said the opposite with regard to political economy. I said that splitting the two is untenable.