‘In Dread of Modernity’: Republican Liberty and the Common Good in the American Tradition

by Felix de St. Vincent

---

The revolutions of the 18^th century appealed to ancient as well as to modern authorities. As I have argued elsewhere, the American Revolution appealed to ancient republican notions of the rule of law and the advantages of a mixed regime, and to medieval English conceptions of cosmic order being embodied in the ancient laws which had held since ‘time out of mind.’ But, as Charles Taylor argues, these ancient conceptions were to a large extent ‘colonized‘ and taken over by modern, Enlightenment ones which took over much of the form of the more ancient ideas, but without the substance of cosmic order and the primacy of the common good: « The American Revolution is in a sense the watershed. It was undertaken in a backward-looking spirit, in the sense that the colonists were fighting for their established rights as Englishmen. Moreover they were fighting under their established colonial legislatures, associated in a Congress. But out of the whole process emerges the crucial fiction of “we, the people”, into whose mouth the declaration of the new constitution is placed. »[1] Several articles here on The Josias have examined the defects of liberal, Enlightenment political philosophy. But perhaps it would be possible for Americans to revive the ancient republican element in their founding, and thus find a form of politics that would be at once autochthonously American and truly ordered to the common good. This is the position argued in Felix de St. Vincent’s first essay for The Josias. We are pleased to publish it for its lucid exploration of the transmission of the ancient republican tradition in England and America, and its eminently practical suggestions for political action today. I myself disagree with a number of Felix de St. Vincent’s points including his reading of St. Thomas Aquinas on sovereignty, his account of the relative importance of ancient republican and modern liberal ideals in the American founding, and the ideal relative weight of the different elements in a mixed constitution for promoting the common good (he thinks the republican form per se preferable to the monarchical). But I agree with on the most important principles, especially the primacy of the common good, and am very pleased to be able to present his thought provoking essay to the public. — Pater Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist.

---

Are American democracy and Catholicism compatible? Are liberal democracy and Catholicism compatible? The first question was asked by John Courtney Murray in We Hold These Truths (1960).[2] More recently, Patrick Deneen proposed that the debate was about liberal democracy, slightly reframing the debate between Murray’s compatibilism and its “radical Catholic” critics.[3] Insofar as this debate is about Catholic teaching, the two questions appear the same.

American democracy and liberal democracy are, oftentimes, taken to be synonymous. There is little danger in the generalization that when American politics and liberalism are wed, John Locke most often presides over the ceremony. In his influential book The Liberal Tradition in America (1955), Louis Hartz proposed that the “Lockian creed” of natural law and natural right was basically uncontested in the United States because Americans never had to contend with the legacy of feudalism.[4] Although Fr. Murray claims that the American founding is “more, much more” than an echo of John Locke, the American Republic was nonetheless providentially conceived in an era of classical liberalism “when the tradition of natural law and natural rights was still vigorous.”[5] Were the Founders providentially modern, as Hartz claims, or providentially premodern, as Murray suggests? This shade of difference between Hartz and Murray is the outline of a scholarly debate among those who defend the Lockean Founding. [6]

“Radical Catholics” seem all too willing to accept the narrative, so common in the 1950s and 1960s, that America is an entirely modern and liberal state. For instance, Christopher Ferrara’s 2012 tome Liberty, the God That Failed, argues that far from revivifying classical republicanism, the American founding in fact sundered the ancient alliance of throne and altar by idolizing liberty and adopting the framework of classical liberalism.[7]

But what if American democracy is not synonymous with liberal democracy after all? If this is the case, one might argue Catholicism is not compatible with liberal democracy but nonetheless compatible with American democracy. This distinction requires a different interpretation of the founding as the product of a republican tradition, rather than liberalism. And in fact, it turns out that the overly simplistic “Lockean Founding” paradigm of the 1950s and 1960s is widely challenged.

Accounts of the Founders’ republicanism became prominent in the 1970s and 1980s in the work of Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, J.G.A. Pocock, John Patrick Diggins and others. Bailyn’s 1967 study The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, which analyzed the pamphlets of the American Revolution, showed how popular critiques of “corruption,” “slavery,” and “conspiracy” echoed English republican figures like Algernon Sidney.[8] Pocock goes further to dispel the “myth of John Locke” as the progenitor of a liberal American revolution. Pocock is worth quoting at length

It is notorious that American culture is haunted by myths, many of which arise out of the attempt to escape history and then regenerate it. The conventional wisdom among scholars who have studied their growth has been that the Puritan covenant was reborn in the Lockean contract, so that Locke has been elevated to the station of a patron saint of American values and the quarrel with history has been seen in terms of a constant attempt to escape into the wilderness and repeat a Lockean experiment in the foundation of a natural society. The interpretation put forward here stresses Machiavelli at the expense of Locke; it suggests that the republic—a concept derived from Renaissance humanism—was the true heir of the covenant and the dread of corruption the true heir of the jeremiad. It suggests that the foundation of America was seen, and states, as taking place at a Machiavellian—even a Rousseauian—moment, at which the fragility of the experiment, and the ambiguity of the republic’s position in secular time, was more vividly appreciated than it could have been from a Lockean perspective.[9]

Or, as Pocock more succinctly put the matter in an 1972 essay: “America was founded in the dread of modernity.”[10]

American Catholics, in other words, need not confess to being strangers in a strange land of bourgeois liberal democracy and values alien to the common good. In Diturnum Iliud (1881), Leo XIII affirms an openness to all forms of government that tend towards justice and the common good:

there is no reason why the Church should not approve of the chief power being held by one man or by more, provided only it be just, and that it tend to the common advantage. Wherefore, so long as justice be respected, the people are not hindered from choosing for themselves that form of government which suits best either their own disposition, or the institutions and customs of their ancestors.[11]

There are good reasons identified by Charles de Koninck and others why liberal government, based on its foundational principles, cannot in the last analysis tend towards the common good. (Any tendency towards the common good, in this analysis, would be the result of fortunate circumstances and not the design of government, which one finds in Thomas Piketty’s argument about Western liberal democracies’ good fortune in the twentieth century.) But it is not clear that America’s founding principles amount to unadulterated Lockean liberalism. For Americans, there are indeed institutions and customs of our ancestors that can tend towards the common good.

Whether or not it is historically accurate that our American ancestors are the intellectual descendants of a republican bloodline (Bolingbroke, Harrington, Sidney, Sallust, and Livy), it is at least arguable that they were, and it is certainly true that republicanism is a minor tradition in American political history. I am less concerned with the facts of intellectual history than the normative implications of an American Republic constituting itself within modern American liberal democracy—the example of Abraham Lincoln is instructive, once one understands the deep affinities between Lockean liberalism and slavery. A republic would be a more capacious home for faithful American Catholics.

In this brief essay, I argue that republican political theory, sometimes called “neo-Roman” or “classical republican,” is the best vehicle to promote the politics of the common good. Although I do not aim to critique “radical Catholics,” this diffuse array of thinking seems to lacka constructive, workable political vision that can be presented to the American people as a planfor a common future. (With the despair only Twitter can sink into your bones, Rod Dreher and others propose a program of withdrawal into intentional communities—the “Benedict Option”.) American grown-ups reluctant to shirk the democracy entrusted to us by our forebears should search for a practicable political vision, even if the task is intellectually arduous. Rather than lining up for and against the oversimplified high-school presentation of the Lockean-liberal Founding (or for and against a book John Courtney Murray wrote a half-century ago), American Catholics should align themselves with the alternative tradition of American Republicanism.

Republicanism, Liberty, and Sovereignty

Liberty predates liberalism. The republican definition of liberty is more radically expansive than we are accustomed to; it insists that one be safeguarded against potential interference in certain domains. This is freedom as non-domination, rather than freedom as non-interference. Philip Pettit explains this older republican definition of freedom that pertained before the nineteenth-century:

To be a liber—a freeman, in the established English translation—as distinct from a slave was to be secure against any master in the domain of basic liberties; it was to be safeguarded against the dominatio or domination of others in the exercise of discretion within that sphere. The thing that gave you such security—the thing that gave you freedom as non-domination—was having the status of a civis or citizen, someone adequately and equally guarded by the law.[12]

This is ancient republican theory of freedom, “republican” in contradistinction to the classic liberal or libertarian perspective of freedom as non-interference that befitted the industrializing world of commerce.

Liberalism, as opposed to republicanism, holds that one is free until interfered with. Interference with one’s freedom is either a legal restriction or an illegal violation of one’s rights. The liberal citizen is free until he comes in contact with the law. The republican citizen, on the other hand, free because of the law. To explain this somewhat startling reversal, one must understand the Roman legal concept of obnoxius.

Obnoxius is a term of Roman political thought that describes those who are perpetually liable to harm or permanent potential subjects of punishment. Seneca describes slavery, for example, as the condition in which “corpora obnoxia sunt et adscripta dominis.”[13] Livy defines a civitas libera as one in which “imperiaque legume potentiora quam hominium.”[14] Therefore a free polity is one that is neither dominated by another polity nor dominated by a controlling faction. Republican citizenship ensures one is not in an obnoxious condition. Libertas is defined by Livy as the condition “quae suis stat viribus, non ex alieno arbitrio pendet.”[15]

A different concept of liberty distinguishes republicanism from liberalism. Going forward, we follow the lead of Philip Pettit more than any other modern expositor of republicanism. For it is Pettit who defines republicanism via this central concept of freedom as non-domination, rather than a politics of virtue or a critique of sovereign kingship.[16]

In England, republicanism was revived during the Interregnum period. Republican writers like James Harrington, John Milton, and Marchamont Nedham eventually became critics of Cromwell’s Protectorate, mimicking Sallust’s criticisms of Sulla.[17] The link to the Americans was Bolingbroke, who revived the arguments of Harrington and Algernon Sidney in the 1730s to critique the government of Sir Robert Walpole. The American colonists were versed in Bolingbroke.

By the eighteenth-century republican sentiment already had an antique feel, and emerged (with Bolingbroke) in harangues against corruption. Quentin Skinner explains, “The virtues of the independent country gentleman began to look irrelevant and even inimical to a polite and commercial age.”[18] Republicanism was revived by an indignant “squirearchy” (a term and a sentiment that migrates to Virginia) in their invectives against the “obnoxious” flatterers at Court (hence the migration of the modern meaning of “obnoxious”). In this context, republicanism was ripe for the picking, even if Bolingbroke and others expropriated it opportunistically. The seventeenth-century republican James Harrington, after all, “first stated in English terms the theses that only the armed freeholder was capable of independence and virtue, that such a proprietor required a republic in which to be independent and virtuous.”[19] In contrast to the rabidly anti-Catholic Puritans of the seventeenth century, however, Bolingbroke had the good sense to be a Jacobite.

These neo-romans were not necessarily enemies of monarchy in principle, but they did not believe that the people alienated their sovereignty by investing it in the body of the king. The late medieval postglossator Bartolus broke with Thomas Aquinas’s concept of sovereignty. Aquinas had argued that popular consent legitimates governments, but instituting government means alienating sovereignty in a ruler. Later writers like Marsilius of Padua suggest that it is Bartolus, not Thomas, who is in line with Aristotle’s thinking on sovereignty.[20] The work of these late medieval Italians paved the way for the republicanism of the Italian Renaissance.

Is it true that Aristotle’s political philosophy tends towards the republican theory of popular sovereignty, rather than the monarchist sovereign to whom the people (or God) transfers authority? For Thomas Hobbes, the question is moot, since Hobbes took Aristotle’s ‘government of laws, not men’ to be the evacuation of a meaningful concept of sovereignty.[21] If we follow Hobbes, there is no concept of sovereignty in Aristotle, and so Aquinas and Bartolus simply innovate in different directions. But, pace Hobbes, there does seem to be a concept of sovereignty implicit in Book III of the Politics, where Aristotle argues that “a constitution is the ordering of the state in respect of its various offices, and especially the office that is sovereign over all matters [Κύριος πάντων].”[22] When Aristotle refers to Κύριος (‘in charge’) over all matters, it seems to approximate what we mean by sovereignty. Furthermore, Arsitotle claims that the body of citizens or the civic body [πολίτευμα]—those made citizens by the constitution [πολιτεία]—which is “everywhere sovereign [Κύριος] over the state.”[23] Those made citizens, for Aristotle, are those who exercise the deliberative offices, a more restrictive definition of citizenship or the ‘civic body’ than we are accustomed to.[24] Sovereignty is identified with the deliberative office; in a monarchy, only the king holds sovereign power. In regimes where deliberative offices are divided, the lawmaking office with sovereignty over the law seems to be most important for Aristotle. Who holds this power is famously determined by the lawgiver [νομοθέτης].[25] So, in fact, Aristotle does have a notion of sovereignty, but it does not determine the form of government or constitution of the polity.

Aristotle offers some leeway for the optimal regime type, as does Divinum Illiud. The American Catholic political thoerist Orestes Brownson, from whom we shall hear more later, defines republicanism by its theory of sovereignty: “under it power is never an estate, never the private property of a the ruler, but, in whose hand soever vested, is held as a trust to be exercised for the public good.”[26] Republicans and monarchists may debate about who should hold sovereignty, and how. (Liberalism, so goes the main opinion in the wake of A. John Simmons, is unable to ground sovereignty in consent theory, since tacit and hypothetical “consent” accounts can confer nothing like an actual promise.[27] But the logical steps from liberalism to philosophical anarchism are the subject of another discussion.) I will turn to this debate now, which I propose that Catholics, should they be of an open-minded Aristotelian mind on the question, adjudicate based on a teleology of the common good.

We have framed a question with which to proceed: which view of sovereignty, republic or monarchy, is more felicitous to promote the common good?

Republicanism, the Common Good, and the Politics of Virtue

In De Regno, Thomas Aquinas determines that monarchy is preferable because of absolute values: unity, stability, and its imitation of nature. The last two points are intuitive; for the imitation of nature, he proposes the beehive and the kingship of God as examples: “Est etiam apibus unus rex, et in toto universo unus Deus factor omnium et rector.”[28] And yet Thomas recognizes that dissatisfaction with monarchy comes from the possible danger of tyranny, citing Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae which celebrates Rome’s aristocratic revolution against the Tarquin yoke. Thomas proposes a tradeoff where under monarchy citizens are sluggish to work for the common good, but without a monarchy each citizen understands the common good to be her own to interpret:

Plerumque namque contingit, ut homines sub rege viventes, segnius ad bonum commune nitantur, utpote aestimantes id quod ad commune bonum impendunt non sibi ipsis conferre sed alteri, sub cuius potestate vident esse bona communia. Cum vero bonum commune non vident esse in potestate unius, non attendunt ad bonum commune quasi ad id quod est alterius, sed quilibet attendit ad illud quasi suum.[29]

Thomas points out that monarchies tend to avoid dissension and are more stable, while various forms of polyarchy are also susceptible to tyranny. The modern experience should make us reflect seriously on Thomas’s concern that democracies have as many selfish conceptions of the common good as they do citizens.

The evils of disunity, disorder, and tyranny are foremost in Thomas’s mind, and indeed these appear to be the gravest harms to befall a polity. But Thomas’s assertion that monarchies are more stable than ‘polyarchies’ and less likely to devolve into tyrannies—“Nam fere omnium multorum regimen est in tyrannidem terminatum”[30]—may puzzle modern readers familiar with the tumultuous history of short-lived dictatorships compared to stable Western democracies with their mixed constitutions and robust middle classes (Aristotle would have approved of these two elements). But surely monarchies might also adopt mixed constitutions, while vigorous republics have been known to unite around conceptions of virtue. The republic, in fact, may be seen as another ancient remedy (more viable than monarchy) to alleviate the ills of relativistic modern democracies.

If we move beyond his argument about order, Thomas brings second-order concerns about promoting virtue in the members of a community. The promotion of virtue is secondary, and Thomas recognizes the impossibility of using human law to repress all vice; Alasdair MacIntyre shows how Thomas’s exposition of the natural law is thus opposed to the centralizing power of Louis IX.[31] Of the three duties of a king, Thomas argues, the most important is to instill virtue in his subjects: “quod quidem studium in tria dividitur, ut primo quidem in subiecta multitudine bonam vitam instituat.”[32] But Thomas does not compare the efficacy of monarchy versus republic on this score. Is monarchy a better form of government than republic to promote civic virtue? I doubt this is the case. At this point, I will turn to ancient and modern republicans’ concern with the potential tyranny present in monarchy and how it perverts a politics of virtue and the common good.

For all the difficulties of interpreting it, Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) gains a prophetic aura when one reads Raphael Hythlodaeus’s lament that courtiers and advisors must ingratiate themselves to glory-obsessed kings. Consigned to be flatterers, those in high positions of government cannot speak for the common good: “Nisi quod absurdissimus quibusque dictis assentiuntur & supparasitantur eorum, quos ut maxime apud principe gratiae, student assentatione demereri sibe.”[33] The advisor to a king is obnoxious.

In his Discourses on Livy (1517/1531), Machiavelli proposes that the greatness of Rome is due to the Romans’ liberation from kings: “The reason is easy to understand, for it is not the pursuit of the individual good but of the common good that makes cities great, and it is beyond doubt that the common good is never considered except in republics.”[34] Machiavelli echoes Sallust, who explains the difficulties of being a good man in a kingdom: “Nam regibus boni quam mali suspectiores sunt semperque eis aliena virtus formidulosa est.”[35] When Machiavelli turns to Sallust, he finds an argument about the virtue of citizens; when Thomas turns to Bellum Catilinae, as we have seen, he finds an argument about the overall prosperity of Rome. Republics leave one freer to consider the common good, and stake this legitimacy on this freedom.

More, Machiavelli, and Sallust (many more Renaissance humanists and Romans could be adduced to their number) demonstrate that republicanism is at least a potentially superior regime than monarchy for promoting civic virtue. Extending the sovereign deliberative office to the body of citizens can potentially have the effect of instilling virtues, should they have a right conception of virtue. But the warnings of Thomas still ring clear; freedom to consider the common good can easily degenerate into the license to interpret it for oneself. Then again, Alasdair MacIntyre may well be correct that the loss of virtue in our modern republic is the legacy of Enlightenment liberalism, rather than a problem with republics per se.[36] This is why we must turn to briefly consider a familiar aspect of republicanism, sometimes called “civic humanism”—the politics of virtue.

Freedom to consider the common good becomes the justification of republican legitimacy, made in so many polemical Revolution-era pamphlets against obnoxious “slavery,” “corruption,” and “conspiracy.” This is why republicanism always carries strong undertones of civic humanism and a politics of virtue; virtue is integral to the legitimacy of the republic.

Virtus describes a public act—Hannah Arendt underlines the necessary publicness[37]—that secures some benefit for the republic by one’s own courage, valor, or magnanimity. In Rome it was associated with military service and the cursus honorum, though Cicero mentions women that display virtus (despite the gendered implications of the term) in their domestic life. Although the term is closely related to an aristocratic nobility, Cicero and Sallust in particular were concerned with defending the applicability of virtus (even the greater value and urgency of virtus) to the life of the novus homo.

Christianity is sometimes construed as inimical to republican virtue. Hannah Arendt quotes Tertullian to this effect: “nec ulla magis res aliena quam publica.”[38] Indeed, Jesus teaches a code of morality that can be fulfilled privately; you are to do good works secretly “that your Father who sees in secret” will reward you for (Matthew 6:4-18). But any student of politics—Thomas included—recognized political virtues. Orestes Brownson glosses the point, “France owes infinitely less to St. Louis [Louis IX] than to Louis XI, Richelieu, and Napoleon, who, though no saints, were statesmen.”[39]

In America, there is precedent for incorporating virtue into a Christian republicanism, and also for Christian republicanism to dethrone a politics of competing interests. John Patrick Diggins shows how Hermann Melville and especially Abraham Lincoln, versed in the language of good versus evil, appealed to the Founding and the Declaration of Independence as religious text. (Indeed, Jacques Derrida has argued that the circular logic of the document, wherein the people’s representatives “sign the people into existence,” depends on God’s countersignature for authorization.)[40] Lincoln consecrates an American Republic based on a revolution older than the constitutional compact, “carrying on the classical tradition inaugurated by Machiavelli” while also fusing what Machiavelli had sundered: political virtù and moral virtue.[41]

At the time of Lincoln and Melville, Orestes Brownson, the sadly neglected American Catholic political theorist of the nineteenth century, points towards the ancient republicanism of virtue that predates the “modern infidel school.”[42] His own turn away from “liberal Catholicism” in 1874, and towards a more robust Catholic public discourse of virtue, should point towards Catholic republicanism. Of course, in Brownson’s time, it was mostly Protestants arguing that American democracy and Catholicism were incompatible. Catholics have only more recently jumped on that bandwagon in earnest. But it is unclear that these American “radical Catholics” have understood how their country was founded ‘in the dread of modernity.’

Brownson echoes Aristotle in passages of The American Republic (1865) that the constitution must fit the body politic like “your shoes to your feet.”[43] Human beings have dominion over creation, but not license to dominate other human beings, Brownson reasons, so the “only form or system that is necessarily illegal is the despotic.”[44] Brownson cautions his readers against ideological politics:

Religious propagandism is a right and a duty, because religion is catholic, and of universal obligation; and so is the jus gentium of the Romans, which is the only application to individuals and nations of the great principles of natural justice; bot no political propagandism is ever allowable, because no one form of government is catholic in its nature, or of universal obligation.[45]

Brownson indicts the Jacobins and English liberals (“since 1688”) of this kind of political propagandism. They threaten a core tenet of republicanism, denying the existence of a sovereign people—“Cicero, and St. Augustine after him, understood the people as the republic, organized in reference to the common or public good.”[46] We have the sovereign authority, and some of us undoubtedly the duty, to seek political solutions for the common good. The generation of Melville, Lincoln, and Brownson shows that “Church and state, as governments, are separate in deed, but the principles on which the state is founded have their origin and ground in the spiritual order,” a fact that unites the political and religious destiny of the people.[47]

Catholic Americans are well placed to articulate this politics of the common good at a time when the “myth of liberalism” has co-opted the American Founding as an expression of individualism and Enlightenment premises. God has graced Americans with a relatively orderly and bountiful republic, a powerful republic with deep resources for its own renewal. A dose of Aristotelian pragmatism—a healthier variety of the stuff Americans imbibe overmuch—should cure American Catholics of fantastic political theories long since confined to the past. But that does not mean we need to read our political heritage through the overly simplistic lens of Lockean natural-rights liberalism.

Today, the Catholic republican may have something to say about the obnoxious power of moneyed interests, corporate lobbyists, media gatekeepers, special interests, entrenched bureaucracies, etc. The Catholic republican may have something to say about pluralism. Hardworking American families, out of charity that sometimes seems misguided, tolerate an awful lot of shenanigans by those who presume to flaunt our republican values, even as they drive our roads, attend our schools, and sleep peacefully defended by our servicemen. And if he is called a socialist, the Catholic republican may have something to say about the billy club of “anticommunism,” which has twisted the very meaning of the American Republic and hammered it into a brittle mold of Enlightenment rationalism and atomistic individualism. It is time the Republic was reforged to dispel all of this obnoxiousness.

---

NOTES

[1] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2007), p. 208.

[2] John Courtney Murray, We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1988).

[3] Patrick J. Deneen, “A Catholic Showdown Worth Watching,” The American Conservative, February 6, 2014. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/a-catholic-showdown-worth-watching/

[4] Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1955).

[5] Murray, We Hold These Truths, 11 and 47.

[6] Are the Founders innovators of a basically new, modern natural rights liberalism (as Michael Zuckert claims), or do they preserve and continue an English Whig tradition and, further back, perhaps even traditions of late modern constitutionalism or the federal theology of the Reformed tradition? See Michael Zuckert, Natural Rights and the New Republicanism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).

[7] Christopher Ferrara, Liberty, the God that Failed (Tacoma, WA: Angelico Press, 2012).

[8] Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967).

[9] J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 545. See also, “The Myth of John Locke and the Obsession with Liberalism,” in John Locke, eds. J. G. A. Pocock and Richard Ashcraft, (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clarke Memorial Library, University of California, 1980).

[10] J. G. A. Pocock, “Virtue and Commerce in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 3 (1972): 119-34.

[11] http://w2.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_09051897_divinum-illud-munus.html

[12] Philip Pettit, Just Freedom (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Co, 2014), 4.

[13] Seneca, Moral Essays, ed. by John Basore, 3 vols., (London: Hememann and Putnam’s, Loeb’s Classical Library, 1928-35), Vol. III, 164.

[14] Livy, Livy, Books I and II, ed. B. O. Foster (Cambridge, MA: Loeb’s Classical Library, 1919), 2. 1. 1, 218. See also C. Wirzubski, Libertas as a Political Idea at Rome During the Late Republic and Early Principate (Cambridge University Press, 1960), 9.

[15] Livy, Livy, Books XXV-XXXVIII, ed. Evan T. Sage (Cambridge, MA: Loeb’s Classical Library, 1935), 35. 32. 11, 94.

[16] Philip Pettit, Just Freedom (W. W. Norton, 2014).

[17] Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 64-67.

[18] Ibid., 97.

[19] J. G. A. Pocock, Introduction to Political Works of Harrington (Cambridge University Press, 1977), 145.

[20] Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. I (Cambridge University Press, 1978), 63-4.

[21] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. A. R. Waller (Cambridge University Press, 1904), 506.

[22] Aristotle, Politics, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Unversity Press, 1944), 1277 b 9-10.

[23] Ibid., 1278 b 10.

[24] Ibid., 1275 b 8-10.

[25] Ibid., 1273 b 32-3.

[26] Orestes Brownson, The American Republic (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2003), 103.

[27] A. John Simmons, Moral Principles and Political Obligations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979).

[28] Thomas Aquinas, De Regno, ed. Joseph Kenny, O.P. (Toronto: The Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1949), 3.19.

[29] Ibid., 5.31.

[30] Ibid., 6. 39.

[31] Alasdair MacIntyre, “Natural Law as Subversive: The Case of Aquinas,” Ethics and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 47.

[32] Thomas Aquinas, De Regno, 16.117

[33] Thomas More, Utopia in The Complete Works of Thomas More, vol. IV, ed. Edward Hurtz, S.J. and J. H. Hexter (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965), 56.

[34] Niccolò Machiavelli, Il principe e Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio, ed. Sergio Betelli (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1960). Quoted in Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism, 62.

[35] Sallust, Bellum Catilinae in Sallust, ed. John C. Rolfe (London: Loeb’s Classical Library, 1931), 7.2, 12.

[36] Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981).

[37] Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1963), 79.; Hannah Arednt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 49.

[38] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 74.

[39] Orestes Brownson, The American Republic, 113.

[40] Jacques Derrida, “Declarations of Independence,” trans. Tom Keenan and Tom Pepper, in New Political Science (1986), 7-15.

[41] John Patrick Diggins, The Lost Soul of American Politics (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 326.

[42] Orestes Brownson, “Native Americanism,” in Brownson’s Works, ed. Henry F. Brownson, 20 vols. (Detroit: Thorndike Nourse, 1882-87), 10:17–37.

[43] Orestes Brownson, The American Republic, 120.

[44] Ibid., 118.

[45] Ibid., 120.

[46] Ibid., 122.

[47] Ibid., 257.