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CIAO DATE: 03/02
Critical Review
Winter–Spring 1998 (Vol.12 Nos.1–2)
On Civil Republicanism: Reply To Xenos and Yack
By Maurizio Viroli *
Abstract
Current debates about patriotism and nationalism have so far failed adequately to take into account the historical meaning of republican patriotism. For classical and modern republican theorists, love of country is a charitable love of the republic and of its citizens. It is an attachment to the political values of republican liberty and to the culture based upon them. As such, it is a theoretical alternative to both civic and ethnic nationalism, and it is not at all confined within the bygone experience of city-states.
I have gladly accepted the opportunity to discuss Nicholas Xenos’s and Bernard Yack’s essays on civic nationalism published in the Spring 1996 issue of Critical Review, because both raise important questions that can help us to refine our understanding of patriotism and nationalism. I also wish to stress that I am particularly happy to have the opportunity to respond to Xenos’s critique of my book For Love of Country, not only because his remarks have compelled me to think about a number of historical and theoretical issues which I had not considered at all, but also because I find his essay a laudable example of civilized scholarly discussion, a style that is becoming more and more rare as it is too often replaced by polemical language marked by arrogance and condescension.
I must, however, confess that I had some hesitations about entering into a debate with Xenos and Yack: their essays criticize civic nationalism, and I am not, nor have I ever been, a proponent of such a theory. On the contrary, I entirely concur with Yack’s opinion that civic nationalism is a “mixture of self-congratulation and wishful thinking” inspired by liberal thinkers’ understandable desire to define national identity in a way that makes it compatible with rational and universalistic political principles of liberty and equality.
I am also inclined to accept the thrust of Xenos’s argument, even if I would rather call civic nationalism a bad choice of words signalling an unappealing theoretical mixture, rather than an “oxymoron.” What I mean to say is that civic nationalism is a combination of two concepts (civism and nationalism) that obscures reality and lacks intellectual elegance. Combinations of different concepts and traditions can be powerful and attractive, if—as, for instance, in the case of Carlo Rosselli’s theory of liberal socialism—the two concepts enrich one another. In the case of civic nationalism, however, the combination is one in which the two terms subtract from and impoverish each other. The second term (nationalism) pollutes the first (civism) by adding to it elements that are hardly congenial; while civism, once attached to nationalism, does not redeem it at all. It is, if I am allowed a nationalist remark, like spaghetti with meat balls; they are better separated, or to paraphrase Secondo’s line in the movie “The Great Night,” they want to be alone.
Having said that, however, I still think that a dialogue with Yack and Xenos can be useful, because they frame their arguments within a set of concepts that are not exhaustive of the historical traditions and theoretical possibilities available to us. Yack discusses the distinction between civic nationalism, understood as a freely chosen rational allegiance to political principles, and ethnic nationalism, which celebrates the inherited cultural identity of a nation; he concludes that civic nationalism is a myth, as the title of his essay indicates. Xenos contrasts an urban patriotism based on the political experience of the patria identified with one’s city, on the one hand, against nationalism understood as allegiance to the abstract, large-scale nation-state, on the other, and concludes that since the concrete experience of the patria is no longer available to us, we should not pretend that an attachment of comparable intensity can possibly be recovered in the large nation-states of our times.
What is missing in both pictures is the tradition of republican patriotism. As I hope to be able to clarify, this interpretation of patriotism is significantly different from all the conceptions discussed by Yack and Xenos: civic and ethnic nationalism, urban patriotism, and nationalism in the sense of the allegiance to the nation-state (which Xenos equates, if I understand him correctly, with ethnic nationalism). The omission of republican patriotism may turn out to be theoretically irrelevant, but it is worth considering it, both because of the eminence of its proponents and for reasons of accuracy. I find it rather odd that in current debates on patriotism, nationalism, and cosmopolitanism, no one takes the trouble to refer to what philosophers, historians, poets, agitators, and prophets belonging to the republican family have meant to say, over the last two thousand years, when they have spoken of love of country. 1
General Features of Republican Patriotism
For classical republican theorists, and most notably for the Romans, love of patria is a passion. More precisely, it is a charitable, compassionate love of the republic (caritas reipublicae) and of its citizens (caritas civium). As a Scholastic thinker later put it, “Amor patriae in radice charitatis fundatur”: “Love for the fatherland is founded in the root of charity which puts, not the private things before those common, but the common things before the private” (Ptolemy of Lucca 1954, 299).
Even when love of country respects the principles of justice and reason, and is therefore also called a rational love (Amor rationalis), it is an affection for a particular republic and particular citizens who are dear to us because we share with them important things: the laws, liberty, the forum, the senate, the public squares, friends, enemies, memories of victories and memories of defeats, hopes, fears. It is a passion that grows among equal citizens, not the result of rational consent to the political principles of republics in general. Because it is a passion it translates into action, and more precisely into acts of service to the common good (officium) and acts of care (cultus). 2
Last, it must be taken into account that for republican theorists caritas reipublicae is an empowering passion that impels citizens to perform the duties of citizenship and gives rulers the strength to accomplish the hard tasks necessary for the defense, or the institution, of liberty. As Livy explains in Book II, Section 2 of his History, where he narrates the earliest phases of the consolidation of Roman liberty after the expulsion of Tarquinius Superbus, it was charity toward the republic (caritas reipublicae) that gave Brutus the moral strength to overcome his reluctance and accomplish the unpleasant but necessary task of speaking against Lucius Tarquinius before the people of Rome. A similar use of the language of patriotism understood as caritas is in John Milton’s Defense of the People of England of 1651 (VII, 455) where he writes that the execution of Charles I was an act inspired not by factiousness, or a desire to usurp the rights of others, or mere quarrelsomeness, or perverse desires, or fury or madness, but by love of country—“patriae caritas,” as the Latin version reads.
Examples could be multiplied, but in the context of the present discussion, I only need to make one further remark concerning the much-debated relationship between political membership in the republic and the prepolitical or nonpolitical values of the nation. For republican theorists the republic is a political ordering and a way of life; that is, a culture. To describe people’s love of their republican institutions and of the way of life based upon them, Machiavelli speaks, for instance, of love of the “vivere libero.” Other republicans of his time defined the republic as “a particular way of life of the city” (una certa vita della città; Brucioli 1982, 112).
Republican patriotism surely has a cultural dimension, but it is primarily a political passion based on the experience of citizenship, not on common prepolitical elements derived from being born in the same territory, belonging to the same race, speaking the same language, worshipping the same gods, having the same customs. This means that the antirepublican argument that “a purely political creed is insufficient” misses the point because republican patriotism does not rely on a purely political creed (Smith 1996, 22).
The distinction between the political and cultural values of the republic and the nonpolitical values of nationhood was rendered in Latin with the words patria and natio respectively. 3 Which of the two was considered to be more important is rather obvious. The bonds of citizenship, as Cicero put it in De Officiis (I.17.53), are closer and more dignified than the bonds of the natio. This distinction and ranking were reiterated by later theorists. Shaftesbury, for instance, complained, in his Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, about the confusion between love of the republic and love of place and noted the inability of the English language to express the distinction clearly.
| I must confess, I have been apt sometimes to be very angry with our language for having denied us the use of the word Patria, and afforded us no other name to express our native community than that of country, which already bore two different significations abstracted from mankind or society [rus and regio, in French campagne and pays]. Reigning words are many times of such force as to influence us considerably in our apprehension of things. Whether it be from any such cause as this, I know not, but certain it is, that in the idea of a civil state or nation we Englishmen are apt to mix somewhat more than ordinary gross and earthy. (Shaftesbury [1711] 1963, 248) |
A similar warning not to confuse the patrie with the qualities associated with the fact of being born in a particular place was issued in even stronger terms in the Encyclopédie (XII, 178): there we read that patrie does not mean the place in which we are born, as the vulgar conception holds. It means instead the “free state” (état libre) of which we are members and whose laws protect our liberty and our happiness (nos libertés et notre bonheur). The Encyclopédie maintains that for Machiavelli and the republican political writers, similarly, the term patrie is synonymous with republic and liberty. Under the yoke of despotism there is no patrie, for the obvious reason that under a despotic government subjects are unprotected and excluded, precisely like strangers (ibid.) Following in Montesquieu’s footsteps, the authors remarked that “those who live under the Oriental despotism, where no other law is known than the whims of the sovereign, no other maxim than the adoration of his caprices, no other principles of government than terror, where no fortune and no one are safe, those do not have a patrie and do not even know its name, which is the true expression of happiness” (ibid., 180). 4
Thus, the commonplace that the Enlightenment was antipatriotic is just a gross mistake. The philosophes were not nationalists, but they were surely patriots in the republican sense. Equally mistaken is the widely held view that the French Revolution was inspired by, or produced, a distinctive and “powerful republican nationalism” (Smith 1996, 22). For one thing, the conception of patriotism that inspired the rhetoric of the Jacobins was precisely the classical republican interpretation of patriotism that Montesquieu, Rousseau, and the Encyclopédie had rephrased in the statement that love of patrie is love of equality. 5 Second, when the French revolutionaries spoke of the nation they meant the sovereign people, as in Sieyès’s Qu’est-ce que le Tiers-Etat? They meant, more precisely, a political principle derived from natural right, with no reference whatsoever to the common culture, the history, the language, the religion, or the ethnicity of a particular people. The so-called nationalism of the French revolution was therefore completely different from nationalism proper.
I find the republican interpretation of patriotism more convincing than the contemporary view that, in order to hold heterogeneous peoples together, we need “stronger fare” than the political and cultural values of the republic, as Anthony Smith recently put it. I do not know what Smith means when he speaks of “holding together,” but if he means, as I mean, to hold individuals together as free and equal citizens, we need nothing more than a politics genuinely inspired by the ideals of republican liberty and republican equality, and a culture based upon these ideals. Citizenship does not grow out of the bonds of nationhood. Peoples who are culturally, religiously, or ethnically homogeneous are not those who are the most civic minded; on the contrary, they tend to be intolerant, bigoted, and boring. Politics, a true democratic politics, can do all the work of citizenship by itself. It does not need embarrassing nationalistic helpers.
The Role of Republican Patriotism
From this outline it is rather evident, I think, that republican patriotism is different from civic nationalism, from ethnic nationalism, and from urban patriotism, as Yack and Xenos define and discuss them. Republican patriotism differs from civic nationalism in being a passion and not the result of rational consent; it is not a matter of allegiance to historically and culturally neutral universal political principles, but of attachment to the laws, the constitution, and the way of life of a particular republic. It is also distinct from ethnic nationalism because it does not attach moral or political relevance to ethnicity; on the contrary, it recognizes moral and political relevance, and beauty, in the political values of citizenship—particularly republican equality—which are hostile to ethnocentrism. And it cannot be equated with urban patriotism because it springs from attachment not to the city, but to the republic.
While the difference between republican patriotism and civic or ethnic nationalism does not need, I think, further clarification, the theme of urban patriotism does, particularly in view of Xenos’s remarks. The main feature of republican patriotism is not, for him, a charitable commitment to the republic and liberty, but an attachment to the city, to urban experiences. Xenos points out that patria, as republican political writers understood it, cannot be rendered as “nation,” and therefore that patriotism cannot be equated with nationalism. He than argues that the very examples of the contemporary presence of republican patriotism that I quote in my book actually undermine my interpretation of them.
Xenos quotes and comments on the following passage from Natalia Ginzburg:
| The streets and the squares of the city, once a theater of our adolescent joy and an object of our highest scorn, became the places that we had to defend. The words “patria” and “Italy” which had made us so sick on the walls of our schools because they had been accompanied by the adjective “fascist,” because they had been filled with emptiness, suddenly appeared to us without adjectives, and so transformed that it seemed to us that we heard them and thought for the first time. Suddenly they seemed real to our ears. We were there to defend the patria and the patria was those streets and those squares, our loved ones and our childhood, and all the people passing by. A truth so simple and so obvious seemed strange to us because we had grown up with the conviction that we did not have a patria and that we had been born, unluckily for us, at a point filled with emptiness. And even more strange was the fact that out of love for all those unknown people who were passing by, and out of love for a future we did not know but which we could make out in the distance, in the midst of deprivation and devastation, solidity and radiance, every one of us was ready to lose himself and his own life. (Ginzburg 1984, 8–9) 6 |
Although Ginzburg mentions Italy in quotation marks, Xenos writes, the affection she describes
| is not toward “the nation,” but rather toward the city and toward the particular streets and piazzas of individual experience. The unknown others may be unknown, but they have been seen in the public spaces of the city. That public space, that shared life, is the common good, if there is one. It is not at all abstract, and I think it is telling that when Viroli adduces an example of patriotic affection, it is framed in these urban terms. (Xenos 1996, 220) |
I find Xenos’s point important but not convincing. Republican patriotism historically has been connected to the experience of city-republics. However, it is not based upon the attachment to the city but on love for the republic. As a distinguished member of the republican family, Jean–Jacques Rousseau, put it: “It is not the walls, nor its habitants which constitute the patrie, but the laws, the mores, the customs, the government, the constitution, and the way of life which results from them. The patrie consists of the relationship between the state and its members; when these relations change or dissolve, the patrie disappears” (Rousseau 1965, vol. 19, 190). 7 It is the political experience of republican liberty, or the memory, or the hope thereof, that makes a city meaningful. A city by itself is not capable of sustaining republican patriotism.
The ideal of the free republic is visible as well in Ginzburg’s text. She describes an experience of discovery: the same piazzas and streets that had been meaningless to her assume a new significance, a new warmth, a new light because they have become the theater of a struggle for liberty. It is Ginzburg’s new experience of commitment to political liberty, and her hope of walking on those streets and piazzas as a free citizen in the company of other free and equal citizens, which has changed her perception of those places.
For republican theorists, what makes urban places significant are common experiences and the memories of them. As Machiavelli tells us in the Florentine Histories (II.34), “Even if their fathers did not keep alive in the citizens the memory of liberty, the public palaces, the places of the magistrates, the ensigns of the free orders recall it.” They remind the citizens of the “sweetness of the free way of life.” 8 The patria always inspires love and attachment, but when the patria is joined with republican liberty, citizens love it in a special manner. People and places acquire a special beauty that stimulates feelings of closeness and sharing. The very perception of the city’s beauty changes according to the significance of its places in the life and history of the republic.
Because the fundamental component of republican patriotism is love of the republic as a political and cultural institution, the problem of scale—the fact that we no longer live in city-states but in nation-states—is not so decisive, I think, as Xenos maintains. At least it was not so decisive for republicans. Mazzini was thinking of Italy, not of a city, when he wrote that “a country (patria) is a fellowship of free and equal men bound together in a brotherly concord of labour towards a single end. A country is not an aggregation, it is an association. There is no true country without a uniform right. There is no true country where the uniformity of that right is violated by the existence of caste, privilege and uniformity” (1972, 884).
It is perfectly true that “memories are concrete,” as Xenos claims. This does not mean, however, that only memories connected to the experience of our own city are concrete. Memories of episodes that have occurred beyond the walls of our city can also be concrete, indeed can be, politically, very meaningful and moving. To see truly compassionate love of the republic and of our fellow citizens flourishing in our polities we do not need to dissolve our nations into city-states; nor do we need to reinforce linguistic, ethnic, religious, or (worst of all) moral homogeneity (if this were its price, I would rather give up patriotism). We need good government, justice, exemplary political leaders, and we need to encourage political participation. As Rousseau (1964, 258) put it: if we want the citizens to love their patrie, “let the homeland, therefore, show itself as the common mother of all citizens. Let the advantages they enjoy in their homeland endear it to them. Let the government leave them a large enough part of the public administration so that they can feel that they are at home. And let the laws be in their sight merely the guarantees of the common liberty.” 9 In addition to that, we need to reinvent our ceremonies and to find a public rhetoric that is capable of giving warmth and color to the language of republican liberty.
Whether or not this is a desirable and feasible political project is another matter. I have argued elsewhere that it is. Here I simply want to suggest that we are not bound at all by a choice between the myth of civic nationalism, the horror of ethnic nationalism, and the dream of city-state patriotism.
References
Brucioli, Antonio. 1982. Dialogi, ed. A. Landi. Naples: Bibliopolis.
Cohen, Joshua, ed. 1996. For Love of Country. Boston: Beacon Press.
D’Alembert, Diderot, ed. 1765. Encyclopédie. Neuchatel: Samuel Faulch.
Ginzburg, Natalia. 1984. Preface to idem, La letteratura partigiana in Italia 1943–45, ed. G. Falaschi. Rome: Editori Riuniti.
Mazzini, Giuseppe. 1972. Dei doveri dell’uomo. In idem, Scritti politici, ed. Terenzio Grandi and Augusto Comba. Turin: utet.
Milton, John. 1932. Defense of the People of England. In The Works of John Milton, vol. VII. New York: Columbia University Press.
Ptolemy of Lucca. 1954. De Regimine Principum, in Divi Thomae Aquinatis Opuscula Philosophice, ed. R. Spiazzi.Turin: Marletti.
Robespierre. 1965. Discovrs et Rapports a la Convention. Paris: Union Générale d’Edition.
Rousseau, Jean–Jacques. 1965. Correspondance complète de Jean–Jacques Rousseau, vol. XIX, ed. R. A. Leigh. Banbury, Oxfordshire: The Voltaire Foundation.
Rousseau, Jean–Jacques. 1964. Economie politique. In idem, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 3. Paris: Gallimard.
Shaftesbury, Anthony, 3d Earl of. 1963. Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith.
Smith, Anthony. 1996. “In Search of (One-Sided) Statues of Liberty.” The Times Higher Education Supplement, 9 August.
Viroli, Maurizio. 1995. For Love of Country. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Endotes
*: Maurizio Viroli, Department of Politics, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J. 08540, is the author, inter alia, of L’Etica laica di Erminio Juvalta (Angeli, 1988), Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the “Well-Ordered Society” (Cambridge, 1988), From Politics to Reason of State (Cambridge, 1992), and For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism (Oxford, 1995). Back.
Note 1: The best examples are the articles published in Cohen 1996. Back.
Note 2: I provide textual references in Viroli 1995. Back.
Note 3: See for instance Quintilian, Istitutio Oratoria, V.10.24–25. Back.
Note 4: “Ceux qui vivent sous le despotisme oriental, où l’on ne connoit d’autre loi que la volonté du souverain, d’autre maximes que l’adoration de ses caprices, d’autres principes de gouvernement que la terreur, où aucune fortune, aucune tête n’est en sureté; ceux là, n’ont point de patrie, et n’en connoissent pas même le mot, qui est la véritable expression du bonheur.” Back.
Note 5: “Mais comme l’essence de la République ou de la démocratie est l’égalité, il s’ensuit que l’amour de la patrie embrasse nécessairement l’amour de l’égalité.” Robespierre, “Sur les principes de morale politique qui doivent guider la convention nationale dans l’administration intérieure de la République,” in Robespierre 1965, 214–15. Back.
Note 6: I apologize for not having given these references in the book. Back.
Note 7: “Ce ne sont pas les murs, ni les hommes qui font la patrie, ce sont les loix, les moeurs, les coutumes, le gouvernement, la constitution, la manière d’être qui resulte de tout cela. La patrie est dans les rélations de l’Etat à ses membres; quand ces rélations changent ou s’aneantissent, la patrie s’évanouit.” Back.
Note 8: “E quando mai i padri non l’avessero ricordata, i palagi pubblici, i luoghi de’ magistrati, l’insegne de’ liberi ordini la ricordano; le quali cose conviene che sieno con grandissimo disiderio da’ cittadini cognosciute. Quali opere volete voi che siano le vostre, che contrappesino alla dolcezza del vivere libero, o che faccino mancare gli uomini del disiderio delle presenti condizioni?” Back.
Note 9: “Que la patrie se montre donc la mere commune des citoyens, que les avantages dont ils jouissent dans leurs pays le leur rend cher, que le gouvernement leur laisse assez de part à l’administration publique pur sentir qu’il sont chez eux et que les lois ne soient a leur yeux que les garants de la commune liberté.” Back.