Reflections on the Republican Revival : Interdisciplinary Scholarship in the Legal Academy

In a recent article in the Journal of American History, Daniel Rodgers attempts to sketch out the career of republicanism as an organizing historiographical concept. Rodgers is principally interested in establishing republicanist historiography as a paradigm, a status comparable to that conventionally assigned to two other significant twentieth-century historiographical concepts, which he labels Beardian and Hartzian, and which many other scholars have characterized as progressive and liberal, or conflict -focused and consensus -focused. According to Rodgers\u27s historiographical chronology, the twentieth century has witnessed three conceptual paradigms: the Beardian / progressive paradigm, dominant throughout the 1940s, which portrayed history as an unending series of conflicts among antagonistic classes, groups, and interests ; the Hartzian / liberal paradigm, emphasizing the consensual values that defined America as a civilization and profoundly limited the course and pace of cultural change, predominating from the early 1950s through the late 1960s; and the republican paradigm, which Rodgers seeks to characterize in far greater detail, emerging in the late sixties and perceptibly thinning out by 1990. My purpose here is not to critique Rodgers\u27s historiographical synthesis, which I believe most historians would find useful and even illuminating. It is rather to explore, in more detail, a tiny episode in Rodgers\u27s narrative. In that episode, as Rodgers describes it, legal philosophers discovered the terminology of the republican historiographical paradigm in the late 1980s