Chapter 7 Two Republican Traditions

Recent exercises in the renewal of republican theory have focused on the Italian–Atlantic tradition of republicanism and on its demise with the rise of classical liberalism in the early nineteenth century. 1 The focus on this tradition has been theoretically fruitful in generating a novel way of thinking about freedom and government in the contemporary world. But there is a distinct Franco–German tradition of republicanism, developed from the time of Rousseau and Kant, and it is important not to confuse this with the older way of thinking on which neo-republicans focus. My aim here is to reduce the risk of confusion by laying out the key differences between the two traditions and putting them in historical context. Inevitably I have to stylize the traditions I discuss but I hope that I do no serious injustice to the figures I address. While Rousseau and Kant remained faithful to some core ideas in the Italian–Atlantic tradition of thinking – in particular, as we shall see, to the idea of freedom as nondomination – the way of thinking about citizens an