How did the idea of freedom change from a privilege and character accorded to persons of elevated political and social status, to the unregulated behavior of individuals exemplified by their actions in the market? This focused and elegant question motivates Eric MacGilvray's important recent contribution to political theory. MacGilvray elucidates the history of republican and natural-juristic political thought in order to explain “how the market came to hold such a privileged place in modern thinking about freedom” (p. 2). His account is impressive in its ability to organize a vast terrain of political thought in ways that are historically sensitive and richly layered with potent observations. The author's narrative is delivered in chronological yet thematically precise chapters that each delivers an argument, even while they reward reading the book from beginning to end. The result is a lively, engaging, and informative contribution to the literature on republicanisms (traditional and contemporary), as well as a critical window into the state of freedom-talk in liberal democratic polities today.

MacGilvray's adroit handling of republican tradition drives the most insightful and important contributions in this book. Along the way, he (perhaps unwittingly) offers two, rather than one, “definitions” of republicanism. His main and most explicit definition, and the one that drives his historical account, is pragmatic. It draws various, even competing, republican visions into a single “tradition” focused on a set of problems to which various republicans in the tradition respond. “Republican thought,” he contends, “centers around the problem of securing the practice of virtue through the control of arbitrary power, and this is what it means to be committed to the pursuit of republican freedom” (p. 22). This tradition of republicanism is deeply rooted in the status hierarchies and exclusions that were hallmarks of classical and early-modern worlds. It is nonetheless, in MacGilvray's account, brimming with insight into political dilemmas, and appealingly pluralistic.

The promise and pluralism of this tradition lie in two tensions that the republican notion of freedom forced thinkers to confront. First, the dilemma of republican means: Control of arbitrary power entails both arranging institutions to provide accountability and a citizenry that is capable of recognizing, and agreeing upon, when this control has failed (pp. 36–42). Second, republican thinkers wrestled with a tension regarding whether republican virtues are instrumental for providing freedom or are ends in themselves (pp. 42–49). In confronting these tensions, republicanism “created the conceptual space for a more open-ended and contentious understanding of the implications of freedom” than present-day discourse allows (p. 33). This capacious and engaging picture of republicanism informs, as MacGilvray sees it, the contribution of big thinkers for whom inequality was itself valued, like Aristotle and Machiavelli, as well as those writing in the twilight of that world and the dawn of our own time, like Rousseau and Adam Smith.

In MacGilvray's telling, the “commercial republicanism” of Smith, Montesquieu, and the authors of Cato's Letters transformed the classical or traditional dilemmas of republicanism into a matter of fitting the republican language of liberty with the natural jurists' idea of subjective rights. His telling of this story is perceptive, if compact: The natural jurists' egalitarianism demanded an emphasis on subjective right, which provided “a conceptually precise and ideologically powerful tool for defining the sphere of personal independence” (p. 117). Subjective right as freedom resonated with the older republican principle of self-sufficiency, even though self-sufficiency was not attainable or even relevant in a social context marked by commercial interdependence. The market, with its apparent dispersion of power and impartial sources of value (e.g., natural prices), spoke to the older republican concern with arbitrary power, albeit in a way that displaces (or seeks to displace) politics. MacGilvray pauses to note that “the story here is not the triumph of liberal ideas over republican ones” but, rather, “a weaving together of republican and liberal ideas about freedom, and the historical relationship between the two schools is not one of conflict and supersession but rather cross fertilization and synthesis” (p. 57). An appealingly catholic idea, but as the author has himself acknowledged, it is difficult to draw the neat boundaries around traditions upon which a claim of this sort depends.

The details of MacGilvray's account, alongside his explicit definition of republicanism, tell a somewhat different story, in which liberalism emerges as an ideology, with market freedom at its center. Market freedom, according to this story, thrives on a new productive tension effected by putting republican freedom and natural juristic equality into shared theoretical space—even while the tensions that once separately animated those distinct traditions are reduced or eliminated.

The role of virtue is a case in point. MacGilvray notes that the most prominent recent formulations of republicanism (both historical and contemporary, like those of Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit) have downplayed the importance of virtue. His work to restore its importance to our understanding of republicanism is an important corrective, and he might have pushed further the critical insights it offers. So, for example, he shows that Smith's emphasis on the virtue of prudence is a crucial development in this thinker's appropriation and transformation of republicanism. However, a reader of Smith is apt to wonder whether, with nearly all virtue more or less reduced to prudence, Smith's synthesis of these traditions remains republican in name only.

Throughout the work, MacGilvray avers that he will not take sides in a debate pitting republican and market freedom. Few readers will miss his sympathies for the republican position from the start of the work; in the end, he has little to say on behalf of market freedom. This is necessarily so, given that (as he shows) the economic context that supported the development of the market freedom ideal laced it with assumptions that are implausible after industrialization and its denouement. MacGilvray's handling of modern Viennese and American defenders of market freedom is intelligent and fair-minded, and his critique is decisive. It also clears ground for his other (competing?) definition of republicanism to make way. This view draws on classical republicanisms' emphasis not on the freedom of persons but, rather, of polities, from which the powers and duties of citizens follow. This is the vision that, broadly speaking, animates much of contemporary republican thought, for it preserves room for egalitarian treatment of political subjects. According to this definition, republicanism is “the hope that it is possible, at least under some circumstances, for a people to shape its own political destiny, that we need not embrace the tenets of economic determinism, whether ‘neoliberal’ or Marxian in form” (p. 19).

Recall that MacGilvray wishes to distinguish his discussion of republicanism from those of his contemporaries by better attending to virtue. Here, too, this very promising move might have been given wider play. In the last two pages of the book, he at last formulates and defends a conception of republican freedom, namely, as a virtue that “consists in a willingness to take responsibility for the social consequences of one's actions” (p. 197). We but glimpse this moment in his thought, but it amplified a question I had pondered (amid the echoes of Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring) throughout my reading of the work. To what extent, I wondered, do strains in recent anarchist thought, particularly those (like Simon Critchley's) that have attended to the ethics of taking responsibility, present opportunities to reinvigorate republican concerns and insights, in an age when individualism is an ineluctable backdrop to political thinking and polities must be recovered from the oligarchs? The stage MacGilvray sets for us to consider freedom as “taking responsibility,” in this intelligent, historically rich, and thought-provoking book, pushes the possibilities of republican thinking into the most timely and urgent terrain.