The quarrel between populism and republicanism: Machiavelli and the antinomies of plebeian politics

Abstract

This article discusses the current debate between populist and republican accounts of democracy. To talk about democracy is inevitably to talk about the idea of a people and its power. From the beginnings of the Western political tradition, 'the people' has referred to both a constituted part of society (populus) and to a part excluded from political society (plebs). The article examines the differences between populism and republicanism in light of the different ways in which these two parts relate to each other, and the resulting conceptions of the power of the people. For populism, the people have power when the plebs achieves hegemony within the populus by wresting control of the state from the 'wealthy' elites. According to the alternative republican account developed in this article, instead, the people have power when the plebs inscribes within the state the possibility of abolishing relations of rule. The distinction between these two conceptions of popular power is pursued in terms of the opposing attitudes that populism and republicanism have in relation to the rule of law. The article also raises a hypothesis as to the historical reasons for these distinctions between populism and republicanism by examining three historical moments, which are crucial for the development of plebeian politics: the early Roman republic, the Augustinian foundation of a Christian republic and the crisis of guild republicanism in Machiavelli's age. Contemporary Political Theory (2012) 11, 242-263. doi:10.1057/cpt.2011.25; published online 11 October 2011Keywords: populism; republicanism; rule of law; plebeian politics; Machiavelli; Cicero The revival of republican political theory has brought to the fore once again the importance of distinguishing between freedom as non-domination, which depends on the rule of law, and freedom as collective self-rule, which depends on a conception of popular sovereignty. For neo-Roman political theorists, popular sovereignty, being a species of sovereignty, is part and parcel of a theory of the state, whereas the rule of law -at least as it is conceived in the modern republican tradition -is not a mutation of state sovereignty r

Mapping rule and subversion: Perspective and the democratic turn in Machiavelli scholarship

“…On the other hand, both Vatter and Winter trace the Machiavellian impulse to upset all claims and capacities to rule. 3 Here Vatter (2012) reframes the same resistance to domination attributed to the people as exemplary of the ‘form of power that Arendt called ‘no-rule’ and which is exercised in the absence of the distinction between those who govern and those who are governed’. No-rule thus amounts to a logic whose end is not to establish the conditions under which the people can check elites, but rather to locate a popular capacity to subvert the distinctions under which any rule is organised and justified, thereby asserting ‘a political freedom … which does not fall under the processes of securing political forms of domination’ (Vatter, 2000).…”

“…In other words, here the first-order perspectival implications of Machiavelli's approach pose problems for McCormick's defense of popular rule insofar as this defense refrains from engaging how Machiavelli's continuous shifts among and beyond different institutional contexts could challenge the notions of judgment and action inherited from the very forms which generally temper or exclude popular participation. In Vatter's language, McCormick seeks to offer an account of how ‘the plebs achieves hegemony … by wrestling control of the state from the “wealthy” elites’ (Vatter, 2012: 243) while ignoring Machiavelli's alternate theorisation of a uniquely popular power where ‘the plebs inscribes within the state the possibility of abolishing relations of rule’, and thereby subverts all rule (Vatter, 2012: 242). Given that McCormick's difficulties arise specifically from the constrictions of institutional action, no-rule's turn to subversive events here appears to enable an examination of popular action removed from such difficulties to the greatest extent possible.…”

“…Insofar as the perspectival approach agrees with Winter's call to take the polysemy of Machiavelli's text seriously, 7 it thus becomes increasingly difficult to identify the Ciompi solely as those refusing ‘the struggle for economic advantage of one part of the city over another’ (Vatter, 2012: 252) 8 or those not ‘susceptible’ to institutional ‘absorption’ (Winter, 2012: 757). Instead, the Ciompi begin to echo their characterisation by the FH ’s unsympathetic narrator as groups constituted through particular institutional orders whose demands merely reaffirm the underlying logic and language of that arrangement: the Ciompi are not those unaccounted for revoking ‘all forms of government’ but workers ‘not satisfied’ ( non sodisfatti ; the narrator's language) whose attempt to gain ‘satisfaction’ ( sodisfazione ; the Ciompo's language) predictably fits within the city's ruler/ruled binary in swapping who occupies which positions (making the Ciompi ‘princes’) and hence ‘satisfying’ those below.…”

“…4 Although here Vatter does not use the language of democracy, he explicitly labels the no-rule approach a ‘republican [account] of democracy’ in Vatter (2012: 242).…”

Privatization and Protest: Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Toronto, and the Occupation of Public Space in a Democracy

“… 38 Contemporary theorists have also identified strands of this approach in the work of Hannah Arendt (Isaac 1998), including her reworking of the political to foreground the Greek concept of isonomy, which she translated as “no-rule” (Arendt 1965, 30; Markell 2006, Vatter 2012). Machiavelli himself does not suggest that “no-rule” is a viable political order and instead emphasizes the importance of law, given the tendency of elites to exercise domination and, to a lesser degree, the people's susceptibility to corruption.…”