Is republicanism necessarily pro-equality?

sarkozy

Last week, Mícheal Martin said something which made me think. Answering a question about Fianna Fáil's distinctive identity in Irish politics he said that Fianna Fáil is a republican party, and therefore they are about creating an equal society.

I thought this was an interesting conflation of two things - a rhetorical trick that may not stand up to examination.

The first thing to point out is that our Constitution does not define our State as a republic. The Constitution sets out how our pillars of State function, which are very much like so-called modern, representative democracies, but it does not define the State as a republic; our country's name is not officially 'The Republic of Ireland', it's 'Éire' or 'Ireland', and it's only in recent history that 'The Republic of Ireland' became internationally accepted, but all treaties our State has signed mentions 'Ireland'.

So, what defines 'republicanism'? Its key features are:

• 'The people' are the sovereign (i.e. hold all political power) and a head of state is only a representative of the people
• Heads of state are appointed by means other than heredity, so it is not monarchy (though, historically, renaissance and post-renaissance republicans were not entirely opposed to monarchy as much as they were finding ways to reconceive stable government, emphasising the common good, virtues and being a 'good ruler')

That basically seems to be it for republicanism. However, in modern times, especially since the 1700s, humanism of the renaissance made way for the ideology of fundamental, natural human equality as conditions of liberty, and so we saw a blending of theories of republicanism with 'philosophical' equality of people, if not actual equality.

Therefore, there is an association between republicanism and representative democracy, but beyond formal political equality (and even then, not everyone has a right to vote) there is no necessary link with actual equality. Parliamentarianism, which gradually brought about a higher degree of formal political equality in the form of the vote whereby 'the people' transfer their shared sovereignty to representatives who make decisions on their behalf. But a criticism of representative parliamentary democracy is that 'voting' for representatives is not actually participation in political life but a transfer of the sovereignty of the people to a cadre of individuals who may abuse that power and not rule for the common good.

And here lies the problem. What essential part of republicanism can guaranteesreal social equality?

Perhaps Mícheál Martin means the kind of republicanism defined in the 1916 proclamation in which the rebels sought to commit Ireland to a radically anti-authoritarian, socialist state built on firm principles of political, economic and social equality and real political participation. The problem here is that when various parties came to power after 1921, that radical vision was gradually snuffed out. Is Mícheál Martin referring to Fianna Fáil's heyday when Ministers like Todd Andrews rehoused many families living in inner city tenements, for example? Again, there is nothing necessarily republican about redistribution or social programmes.

However, it may be that a condition of achieving 'social justice' is liberal democracy and, therefore republicanism. It may very well be that if you got a bunch of people in a room leaving their identities and their lives at the door and were asked to think about the best possible system to create the best country they could, they may pick republican liberal democracy. Yet there isn't any reason why social justice cannot be guaranteed by one-party states (themselves internally democratic) or absolute monarchies or forms of direct participatory democracy.

As a populist political party (as part of our comparatively unusual tribal political party system), it's clear that Fianna Fáil has never always been on the side of social equality or social justice. Fianna Fáil bends whichever way the wind blows.

So, having explored this conundrum briefly, I'm left rather confused. I can only surmise that what Mícheál Martin said is political spin. It's branding - connect two associated yet tenuous ideas into a neat package to differentiate your product in order to increase market share and grow your customer base.

Godge

I think you are right - republicanism does not mean equality.

The classic example of this would be the Republic of South Africa, declared a republic in 1961, it continued as a republic despite the maintenance of apartheid. The republic nature related merely to its system of government and equality didn't even stretch as far as enfranchisement.

It wasn't only on race grounds that republics have denied equality. The French Republic has been in existence since 1792 yet only gave the vote to women in 1944, over 150 years later.

DarkyHughes

Godge wrote: »

I think you are right - republicanism does not mean equality.

The classic example of this would be the Republic of South Africa, declared a republic in 1961, it continued as a republic despite the maintenance of apartheid. The republic nature related merely to its system of government and equality didn't even stretch as far as enfranchisement.

It wasn't only on race grounds that republics have denied equality. The French Republic has been in existence since 1792 yet only gave the vote to women in 1944, over 150 years later.

That's not quit true, It was still in the process of a Revolution while it was a Republic (this was the first French Republic, there's been 5) & it didn't end up as Republic after the Revolution was over. it ended up as an Empire with Napoleon the emperor just a few years after 1792.

Permabear

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KomradeBishop

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.

Peregrinus

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.

sarkozy

Godge wrote: »

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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 ...

KomradeBishop

sarkozy wrote: »

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 ...

Very good points! I've learned over the last 3-4 years reading up on economics, that a proper understanding of political theory and how it ties into economics (which is very hard to actually get, as there's so much misinformation out there about economics, at all levels) is what is really needed, to understand the different ways society/politics/economies can be reconfigured, to provide different levels of equality or inequality.

Economics used to be called 'political economy' in the past, which included a direct focus on how societies resources are distributed - tying directly into equality - and a lot of the things that political economy focused on, have been marginalized in political/economic discussion today.

People tend to not know enough about how economies work, and how economic systems can be reconfigured, to actually know just how much better (or worse) things can be, in terms of equality and prosperity.
If people in general did have a better understanding, then I believe that the political corruption we see that favours selected politically-connected interests, would be overpowered by public demands for a better functioning political/economic system - we will probably always have some level of corruption within government and business, but there's a hell of a lot we can do to reconfigure political/economic systems, to minimize the damage of that.

Permabear

This post has been deleted.

sarkozy

KomradeBishop wrote:

Economics used to be called 'political economy' in the past, which included a direct focus on how societies resources are distributed - tying directly into equality - and a lot of the things that political economy focused on, have been marginalized in political/economic discussion today.

Absolutely. Politics and economy are indivisible. Indeed, the only satisfactory way to explain, for example, the global crisis we're in through the political economy perspective. The only way to understand the way the world works is through international political economy. I've sat and read and thought long and hard about this and I'm convinced. Through economists like Thomas Piketty researching the impacts of income and wealth inequality, I hope this idea is coming back. It's also central to republican democracy. The masters of the 'dismal science', neoliberal economists such as Milton Friedman and his political abetter Friedrich von Hayek, sought to break the link with politics, but even their earthly god Adam Smith never made such a distinction. Indeed, he thought it folly.

Permabear

This post has been deleted.

KomradeBishop

sarkozy wrote: »

Absolutely. Politics and economy are indivisible. Indeed, the only satisfactory way to explain, for example, the global crisis we're in through the political economy perspective. The only way to understand the way the world works is through international political economy. I've sat and read and thought long and hard about this and I'm convinced. Through economists like Thomas Piketty researching the impacts of income and wealth inequality, I hope this idea is coming back. It's also central to republican democracy. The masters of the 'dismal science', neoliberal economists such as Milton Friedman and his political abetter Friedrich von Hayek, sought to break the link with politics, but even their earthly god Adam Smith never made such a distinction. Indeed, he thought it folly.

Ya good to see more who think this way I've actually found that's been a gap in discussion here in the Politics forums, but it's very hard to persuade anyone of that point of view, that the topics are intertwined/overlapping (actually got me banned/restricted to this part of Politics, when I used it to defend posting my non-mainstream economic views regularly) - I've suggested a 'Political Economy' forum (maybe changing this one, into 'Political Economy' or 'Political/Economic Theory') here and here - added voices there, might help persuade mods/admins that it's a missing part of discussion.

One of the political-economists I read semi-regularly, who does a lot of good writing on the EU and inequality within its current structure, is Yanis Varoufakis - he has done some very good writing recently, on the potential coming loss of more sovereign control in EU nations - such that 'the people' have ever less sovereign control over the powers that guide their politics/economies (which may eventually make it hard for FF, or any other political party for that matter, to defend the idea that they still have the power to provide an equal society, all of the time).

ModEdit: Poster banned for breaking agreement about posting style in political theory.

sarkozy

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.

Permabear

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sarkozy

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.

Permabear

This post has been deleted.

K-9

KomradeBishop wrote: »

Ya good to see more who think this way I've actually found that's been a gap in discussion here in the Politics forums, but it's very hard to persuade anyone of that point of view, that the topics are intertwined/overlapping (actually got me banned/restricted to this part of Politics, when I used it to defend posting my non-mainstream economic views regularly) - I've suggested a 'Political Economy' forum (maybe changing this one, into 'Political Economy' or 'Political/Economic Theory') here and here - added voices there, might help persuade mods/admins that it's a missing part of discussion.

One of the political-economists I read semi-regularly, who does a lot of good writing on the EU and inequality within its current structure, is Yanis Varoufakis - he has done some very good writing recently, on the potential coming loss of more sovereign control in EU nations - such that 'the people' have ever less sovereign control over the powers that guide their politics/economies (which may eventually make it hard for FF, or any other political party for that matter, to defend the idea that they still have the power to provide an equal society, all of the time).

ModEdit: Poster banned for breaking agreement about posting style in political theory.

Mod: It seems you have broken the agreement reached in your appeal thread in the dispute resolution section of the site, and specifically breached the post from Taltos here:
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=92263973&postcount=16

Unfortunate it has come to this, but there you are.

eire4

sarkozy wrote: »

Absolutely. Politics and economy are indivisible. Indeed, the only satisfactory way to explain, for example, the global crisis we're in through the political economy perspective. The only way to understand the way the world works is through international political economy. I've sat and read and thought long and hard about this and I'm convinced. Through economists like Thomas Piketty researching the impacts of income and wealth inequality, I hope this idea is coming back. It's also central to republican democracy. The masters of the 'dismal science', neoliberal economists such as Milton Friedman and his political abetter Friedrich von Hayek, sought to break the link with politics, but even their earthly god Adam Smith never made such a distinction. Indeed, he thought it folly.

As the cliche goes "follow the money".