While Emma Planinc’s review of Sharing Freedom adequately presents key aspects of the book, I would like to use this response to address some of the misunderstandings it also conveys.

First, a note on method. My decision to steer clear of causal claims may appear unusual in a book belonging to the history of political thought. Indeed, I do not engage with the contentious questions of the causes of the revolution or the extent to which ideas drive political events—issues that have preoccupied many of our colleagues for over two centuries. My interest lies not in explaining historical events but in exposing the internal argumentative logic of thinkers and political actors committed to a specific set of ideas—here, republicanism as a historical tradition. I therefore focus on the reasons republicans themselves advanced to justify their positions on the emancipation of minority groups. My concern is with the argumentative coherence of a specific theory, i.e., with the order of discourse, so questions of material causality largely fall outside the scope of my analysis.

Second, Sharing Freedom is not a history of France at large, but an inquiry into republicanism as a complex set of ideas that came to dominate French political thought. The paradoxes I identify are internal to republican discourse. Other traditions—liberalism, socialism, and conservatism—may (and often do) exhibit similar conceptual tensions, particularly around questions such as the limits of popular sovereignty or the nature of freedom. But each tradition articulates these tensions differently because each implies a distinct ordering of principles. Recognizing that other ideologies face analogous difficulties does not invalidate my focus on republicanism nor does it constitute a rebuttal of my thesis. Additionally, I do not deny (and in fact I argue) that many other variables must be considered to understand the political and social crises that France faces today. Again, my goal is not to provide a comprehensive causal diagnosis of these crises, but instead to elucidate the meaning of the French insistence that their national political theory—republicanism—needs to be rethought in light of them.

Finally, Sharing Freedom does not define French republicanism by its failures but rather by its theoretical structure and normative commitments. I argue at length that French republicanism constitutes a democratic expansion of an older Atlantic tradition and, in this sense, can be understood as an emancipatory theory—a theory of sharing freedom expansively. Importantly, however, the book offers a critical history of republicanism, not an apology for it. This is why I insist on examining the specific shortcomings of republican thinkers. The reviewer, perhaps uneasy with this critical dimension, concludes by recommending the abandonment of the term “republicanism”—a suggestion that would surely come as news to a nation now in its fifth institutional iteration of the idea. The task of the theorist, as I see it, is not to discard history’s complexity in pursuit of some elusive alternative but to lay this complexity bare in order to prompt a critical dialogue about the revisions that our normative commitments require.