First, let me thank Professor MacGilvray for his thoughtful and generous review of The Well-Ordered Republic. I am struck by the fact that we both agree our two books stand in a generative rather than competitive relationship with one other, and yet disagree as to how this is so. Many people tend to regard liberalism and republicanism as opposed or even antagonistic political doctrines. MacGilvray and I agree that it is misleading to see things this way. Liberalism is an elastic idea that can mean different things to different people; when understood in a sufficiently capacious sense, it need not conflict with republicanism. Put another way, republicanism opposes not liberalism as such, but rather certain strands of liberal thought that have perhaps been dominant at various times.
MacGilvray places the origins of liberalism somewhat later than others would, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, around the time that the collapse of the old aristocratic social order and advent of the industrial revolution transformed social and political thought. He argues that these major changes led liberals to articulate the value of a private sphere free from social interference or regulation. But, he says, liberals did not reject republican freedom for all that: rather, they insisted on a need to balance the two values. From his point of view, the contemporary republican revival was simply about reasserting the priority of republican freedom.
I read the historical record somewhat differently. While I agree that liberals in the nineteenth century were responding to the dramatic social and economic changes mentioned, it is less clear to me that they retained any attachment to republican freedom. The freedom “of pursuing our own good in our own way,” says J.S. Mill in On Liberty, is the “only freedom which deserves the name.” Herbert Spencer was even more overt, asserting in The Man versus the State that “the liberty which a citizen enjoys is to be measured, not by the nature of the governmental machinery he lives under,” but rather by “the relative paucity of the restraints it imposes,” regardless of “whether this machinery is or is not one that he has shared in making.” In such passages, I detect no trace of concern for republican freedom. Thus I am persuaded by Pettit’s thesis that liberalism in the nineteenth century aimed not to counterbalance republican freedom, but to replace it—precisely because the rapidly changing social and economic conditions revealed republicanism to have radical implications. Bentham and Mill were perhaps too clever to say so explicitly, but William Paley was less guarded: referring to republican views, he says that “those definitions of liberty ought to be rejected, which, by making that essential to civil freedom which is unattainable in experience, inflame expectations … and disturb the public.” And why would republicanism inflame expectations? Because if freedom really does mean having no master, then we should interrogate patriarchal family relations, wage labor capitalism, colonialism, and much else besides!
In short, if we embrace MacGilvray’s broad and attractive understanding of the liberal tradition as a flexible framework for balancing republican freedom on the one hand with the value of a private sphere on the other, then we can certainly count republicanism as a strand in liberal political thought. But we should think of it as a strand fundamentally opposed to classical liberalism’s attempt to elide the republican ideal of living in a free society of equal citizens, no one the master of any other.
