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CIAO DATE: 03/02
Critical Review
Winter–Spring 1998 (Vol.12 Nos.1–2)
Questioning Patriotism: Rejoinder To Viroli
By Nicholas Xenos *
Abstract
The tradition of republican patriotism articulated by Maurizio Viroli only seems to avoid the naturalizing dangers inherent in the discourse of nationalism, whether in its so-called civic or ethnic modes. Rousseau’s comment that he wishes the patrie to be experienced as “la mère commune des citoyens” reflects the republican patriot’s desire to find a home in the patria. This sentiment originated in Rome and comes down to us primarily in texts written in the immediate aftermath of the Republic’s demise, a period characterized by widespread physical uprooting. The sentiment of republican patriotism can thus be seen as a nostalgic reaction to a sense of personal and political deracination and loss. In their yearning for a political home, at least, republican patriots like Rousseau share the rhetoric and desire of nationalists, and that similarity should cause us concern.
In my article, “Civic Nationalism: Oxymoron?” (Xenos 1996), I criticized the distinction often drawn in the literature on nationalism between so-called ethnic and civic nationalisms. My point, in part, was that the rhetoric of civic nationalism betrays an underlying naturalism that is revealed in repeated allusions to the family, and that this naturalism, in turn, betrays a close affinity between the two allegedly different forms of nationalism. The persistent invocation of familial rhetoric, I suggested, is tied to the fact that the national state is an abstract entity requiring an infusion of domestic imagery to sustain it emotionally. By point of contrast, I argued that the original object of patriotic discourse, the patria, was a more concrete entity, the city, and that the experience of the patria available to the Romans and to Machiavelli is available to us only fleetingly, if at all. Instead, we fall victim, often literally, to the myth-making imagery of the national family.
Maurizio Viroli’s response places the question of patriotism at the center of the discussion, as he sketches out a tradition of republican patriotism in distinction from civic nationalism. His contention that I give too much credit to the city itself, rather than to “the political experience of republican liberty, or the memory, or the hope thereof” in describing the sentiment of civic affection is a point well taken. Certainly, the distinction between the city as a physical space and the city as a political entity is expressed not only by Rousseau but also in the Greek distinction between astu and polis. But to say that patriotism refers not to the city but rather to the experience of freedom in the city still leaves us with the question of how to conceptualize that experience. And in this case, Rousseau is indeed instructive, since he combined in his own experience the three possibilities Viroli mentions. Born in Geneva, he experienced the city republic in a direct way that was almost unique by the eighteenth century. Later alienated from and by it, he experienced it as a memory, which was also transformed into a hope in his Contrat Social, Considérations sur le Gouvernement de Pologne, and other writings. I therefore find it particularly interesting that Rousseau, in the comment quoted by Viroli, refers to the patrie as “la mère commune des citoyens” and calls upon it to furnish a sense of being “at home” to its citizens. If republican patriotism is its own source of affection and a “purely political passion,” as Viroli claims, then why does an exemplary figure such as Rousseau fall back on metaphors associated with the family to express it? I want to suggest that the answer to this question lies in the experience or feeling of loss or estrangement that lies at the center of the notion of patriotism, and that in its expression, republican patriotism exhibits the same characteristics, and poses the same threats, I emphasized with regard to civic nationalism.
Viroli is right to take us back to Rome in order to understand the origins of the idea of patriotism, but on further reflection I find those origins to be complex and not easily comprehended by a modern sensibility. For the Romans, a walled city was an urbs, and the word alone could mean Rome in the same sense meant by people who live in the vicinity of New York City when they say simply, “I’m going to the city.” But whereas polis to the Greeks referred obviously to a particular political entity, patria is harder for us to grasp. It is not a synonym for polis, but “Rome” is clearly signified by a Roman’s reference to his patria, though any individual “Roman” could have been born in another city. Indeed, Cicero addresses this situation in a section of his dialogue on the laws, De Legibus, when he suggests that everyone has not one but two patriae. The dialogue takes place at Cicero’s country estate in Arpinium, and Cicero remarks that he has two patriae: Arpinium, the place where he was born and where his family ancestors are buried, and Rome, the place where he receives his citizenship (De Leg. II. 5.) In making this argument, Cicero relies upon what is in essence a familial metaphor to describe the patria of his citizenship. The patria in which we find our political identity is like the patria of our genus, in which we find our ancestral identity, but they are neither equivalent nor the same. 1 Cicero wants to explain the nature of his emotional attachment to Rome, and this attachment is in part the political passion of which Viroli speaks, but to convey it he has to liken it to a more domestic passion. The ancestors and religious rites and sites of his familial identity are paralleled by the great men of the past, the public gods, and the public buildings of Rome. It is a short step, I think, to a confusion of the two realms and toward the sort of sacrificial demands made of the polity in the name of the imagined political family that I find manifested in Lincoln’s Gettysburg rhetoric, for example (Xenos 1996, 224–28).
To clarify my point, I think it is important to note that it is only at the end of the republic that this conception of republican patriotism is articulated by Cicero. Viroli cites the example given by Livy of Brutus after the expulsion of Tarquinus Superbus to emphasize the enabling power of love of the patria. This example involves Brutus’s reluctant endorsement of his friend Lucius Tarquinus’s expulsion from Rome. Even more compelling is the virtue displayed by Brutus in presiding over the execution of his sons for conspiring against the new Republic, for this example shows the need for love of the second patria to take precedence over love of the first. The patria potestas, the power of the father over the lives of his children, was well established in the Roman tradition, but it was a power almost always held in abeyance. In the story of Brutus, this power is exercised by metaphor, we might say, since he was both the actual father of these young men and the founding father of the Republic. All eyes were on Brutus’s face as his sons were executed, Livy tells us, because this act was thought to be so horrifying (II v. 5–9). His face registers both the anguish of the father and the steadfastness of the political pater (and we are reminded that the Roman Senators were later called the patres, or fathers).
But it is also important to remember that these examples are given us long after the fact, and indeed after the demise of the Republic itself, since Livy completed the early books of his History around 27–25 bc. Cicero was a victim of the civil wars that ravaged the late Republic, while Livy, who was born and died at Patavium, the present-day Padua, wrote during what came to be known as the Augustan Age. The Romans were acutely conscious of the fact that they, unlike the Athenians (or so they believed), were not autochthonous. It was in the Augustan Age that the multiple stories of Rome’s origins that had coexisted without concern for consistency suddenly were supplanted by the narrative power of great literary works. Livy’s History, together with Virgil’s Aeneid, established a definitive version of Rome’s origin and subsequent history, one that helped to legitimate the new regime of Augustus, in which he was declared pater patriae, “father of the patria” (Gruen 1992, ch. 1). These works had the effect of narrating a genealogy of the political family of Rome.
It is perhaps not too much to speculate that the emphasis upon love of the patria in such a period is tied to the upheavals that characterized it, both politically and domestically. Not only had the Republic been lost, but many Romans had suffered through the land expropriations by which Octavian had rewarded his soldiers and punished his enemies (this was likely true for both Virgil and Horace). Cicero, a member of the equestrian class, could walk among the traces of his familial ancestry at Arpinium, but thousands of less fortunate Romans were newly provided with land and had to look instead to Rome itself for their genealogy. Their love of the patria might be unrivaled. They might take pride in the history of the Republic, but that history was now enveloped in the Empire. I suspect that it was then that some indistinct threshold of abstraction was crossed.
The French philosopher Simone Weil (1996, 45) wrote, in the middle of our millennium, that “our patriotism comes straight from the Romans,” and she meant by this that patriotism is a kind of idolatry indulged in by the uprooted and that in modernity we are all uprooted. This is as true of the itinerant Rousseau as it is for seemingly settled citizens of liberal democracies today. 2 Behind the republican patriotism of Rousseau I hear a yearning to return home that is echoed in the language of civic nationalism today. And it still makes me nervous.
Bibliography
Gruen, Erich S. 1992. Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
Weil, Simone. 1996. The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind. New York: Routledge.
Xenos, Nicholas. 1996. “Civic Nationalism: Oxymoron?” Critical Review 10(2): 213–31.
Endotes
*: Nicholas Xenos is professor of political science, Thompson Hall, University of Massachusetts, Box 37520, Amherst, MA 01003-7520, telephone (413) 545-6183, telefax (413) 545-3349. Back.
Note 1: I have interpreted this passage in detail in an unpublished paper entitled “A Patria to Die For,” which was presented at the 1997 Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association. Back.
Note 2: Machiavelli, who had an immediate experience of his city republic, is notable in this regard since he never, I believe, uses familial metaphors to describe his patria or that of the Romans. If anything, this increases the distance between ourselves and Machiavelli that I emphasized in my article, and it suggests that a peculiarly medieval experience of urban cosmopolitanism was still resonant in Machiavelli. This may well signal a rupture in history of civic republicanism, rather than a tradition stretching forward from the Romans, as described by Viroli. Back.