What are the debts that the modern world owes to the political culture of the Enlightenment? For historians of political thought this is a widely debated subject. Throughout Europe, the Enlightenment provided the critical lens for a widespread reassessment of the nature of political authority. Much of the intellectual history of the eighteenth century focuses on this reassessment and the debates over the nature of good government, liberty and sovereignty. The discussion of these issues is linked to the history of liberalism, democratic republicanism, popular sovereignty, and the nature of the modern political world itself.

What is striking about this debate is that it is usually conducted in terms of the political experience of the large monarchies of the late Enlightenment. It is as if scholars have neglected the experience of the smaller republics and followed David Hume's claim that “monarchical government seems to have made the greatest advances towards perfection.”Footnote ¹ However, by looking at republican debates we can understand more fully the shaping of political culture in the modern political world.

In late eighteenth-century Europe a rights-based political culture emerged; increasingly, this political culture based its legitimacy on popular sovereignty and the value of an individual. The claim to base society and a conception of liberty on rational fundamental principles or self-evident inalienable rights is a key characteristic of modern societies that separates them from those premodern societies that were built on older forms of historical-precedent, customary, or theological legitimations of political authority.Footnote ² We can see the emergence of this rights-based political culture in republican Europe, as well. Studies of republicanism expand our understanding of this shift and the spectrum of political thought. If we focus on the overthrow of absolute monarchy as the birth of modern politics we miss the fact that there are many potential paths to popular sovereignty or government for the common good. Conceptions of liberty and popular sovereignty had long been part of political discussions and these debates played a role in how early modern thinkers thought about sovereignty.

Much of the recent work on republicanism has its starting point in the scholarship of John Pocock or Quentin Skinner.Footnote ³ The work of Pocock and Skinner has aimed to rethink the entire political history of Europe through the category of republicanism. However, the category of republicanism has meant very different things over time and in various places. Indeed, Maissen promotes the idea that we should think of republicanism as a “family of thought” (32).Footnote ⁴ In a European context, early modern republicanism referred to a variety of strands of political thought, including a conception of government without a king, a mixed constitution, government for the public good, or a civil society that encouraged public virtue. Modern versions of republicanism can also refer to a commercial society or a society based on popular sovereignty. All these forms of republicanism claim to safeguard liberty; the republic provides a framework in which one can practice liberty freely. These understandings of liberty could include conceptions of self-rule, collective security, popular sovereignty, personal autonomy, independence from foreign rulers, freedom from coercion, rule by law, or freedom from governmental interference.Footnote ⁵

In order to understand the full history of modern political liberty, all of these strains of thought must be considered and it is significant that all of these republican strains were found in eighteenth-century Switzerland. Although the republics of the Swiss Confederation have rarely featured as a centerpiece in discussions of European history, the Swiss example is of increasing interest to historians of the Enlightenment, of the revolutionary period and of political thought. In the dramatically evolving history of the Swiss Confederation we can see different aspects of European political culture in a state of transformation. Switzerland serves as a window into the European Enlightenment and revolutionary era because inhabitants of the Swiss Confederation were pragmatic political actors who participated in the European reform conversations in multiple language spaces within a state structure that allowed practical political innovation.

The last years of the Old Confederation were a particularly illuminating moment in the making of modern Switzerland. The Swiss Eidgenossenschaft was an example of an extreme composite state in which the component parts (cantons) were sovereign and acted independently from one another is terms of constitutional and political practice.Footnote ⁶ Beyond the variety of political forms and sovereign powers, internal rivalries almost tore the Confederation apart. The Old Confederation broke apart along sectarian, political and rural/urban lines and ceased to function effectively. After the conclusion of the second Villmergen War in 1712, contemporary observers saw a clear need to reevaluate the political nature of the Confederation and its governance. Some residents of the oligarchic, guild-dominated cities and directly democratic rural cantons sought to restore the status quo ante bellum, whereas others sought regeneration or modernization of Swiss republican liberty. This reassessment of the nature of political authority in Switzerland was driven by the search for practical solutions to the failures of the Old Confederation in the belief that these solutions were necessary for securing the continuity of Swiss republican liberty. This pragmatic Swiss republicanism consisted of practice-oriented debates about political reform that ultimately served to reinvent Swiss republican authority.

The nature of that republican continuity is a common theme for the authors under review. In the Swiss context, the historiographical debate on the origins of modern society and the continuities and discontinuities within republican political thought has been long-running. In 1941, Leonhard von Muralt wrote about “old” and “new” freedom in the Helvetic Revolution, but more recent debate has been shaped by Peter Blickle's work on communalism and reactions to it, as well as by the work of the so-called Cambridge school on the history of republicanism.Footnote ⁷ Blickle's work raised the question of the origins of modern democratic society. He went so far as to claim that the study of the varieties of republicanism reveals a “continuity of principles that reaches right back into the peasants’ world of the later Middle Ages.”Footnote ⁸ This raises the question of the debts the modern world owes to early modern political thought. Are the roots of the modern liberal republic and other forms of democratic politics to be found in the experience of early modern republicanism or in conceptions of popular sovereignty? Understanding this link, or the lack thereof, allows us a better understanding of modern political systems. In a sense, I argue that the study of republicanism and the nature of sovereignty is a quest for the origins of modern liberal democracy.

Classical republicanism focuses on the continuity of the concept of virtue. The idea of classical republicanism emphasizes the appeal of republican thinkers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to ancient, almost sacred, models of political virtue. Certainly, these models were later constructions of the ancient world, but for many early modern republicans the quest to return to a society where citizens virtuously sacrificed their individual interests for the common good struck at the core of what the res publica should contain. For these thinkers and actors, civic virtue was the foundation of a well-governed society.

Weinmann, Zurbuchen, Volz-Tobler and Kapossy all find elements of classical republicanism in Switzerland and use these elements as part of the framework for understanding the political character of the Swiss republics. Weinmann makes the strongest argument for continuity, adding a discussion of the German-language scholarship on communalism to the English-language-dominated work on classical republicanism (17–19).Footnote ⁹ In effect, Weinmann adds Blickle's portrayal of medieval and early modern communes to the classical republican conception of the common good and self-rule. She follows Pocock in arguing that a belief in the necessity of generating civic virtue through a fully functioning civil society was a key element for Zurich's transition into a modern society (12–15). Zurbuchen emphasizes how many Swiss looked to the ancient republics rather than to contemporary versions as models of good government (72), and Volz-Tobler finds frequent references to the discussions of the ancient Stoics in her examination of reform circles in Zurich (19). Moreover, both Volz-Tobler and Kapossy single out the figure of Johann Heinrich Füssli, who walked the streets of Zurich in a “Spartan” outfit and found his models of a modern Swiss citizen in antiquity (Kapossy, 150; Volz-Tobler, 26). The attacks on corruption by patriotic reformers, such as Füssli, in Zurich and Bern, “might well have warmed any true civic humanist's heart.”Footnote ¹⁰

In The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu argued that virtue must be the fundamental principle of any effective republic. For the radical republican reformers of eighteenth-century Switzerland, there was widespread agreement on this point. The group of students and young intellectuals who surrounded Johann Jakob Bodmer in Zurich argued that virtue needed to be restored in order to regenerate the city and, by implication, the Confederation and Europe. Volz-Tobler examines this radical, societal critique in Zurich in the 1760s, by means of a study of the Bodmer circle and of Der Erinnerer, the short-lived but influential newspaper from 1765 to 1767.

The conscious goal of the editors of Der Erinnerer was to create a moral society by introducing to the public arena the patriotic discourse concerning virtue (Volz-Tobler, 12, 19, 23, 269). This aim followed Bodmer's emphasis on ancient virtue. Through his teaching, Bodmer had encouraged the spread of political virtue as a means to restore civic virtue to Zurich. Bodmer argued the need to follow the great examples from history—Greek and Roman antiquity as well as the heroes of the Swiss Confederation. He wanted the inhabitants of Zurich to return to the virtue of the original Confederates (Zurbuchen, 75; Volz-Tobler, 236–7). Part of the point of the group's looking to the past was to find models of government in order to improve governmental practice in contemporary Zurich (Volz-Tobler, 47). Publicizing the origins of the Swiss Confederation was a strategy to strengthen ideas of popular sovereignty in Zurich; reformers used the rhetoric of the “ancients” in opposition to the contemporary oligarchic establishment.

Bodmer's students and followers took up his call to look upon the heroes of old as inspiration for virtuous behavior. The title of the weekly paper implied a remembrance of the greatness and virtue which was practiced by the founders of the Confederation. Moreover, Volz-Tobler tied the creation of Der Erinnerer inextricably to the Grebel affair of 1762, which created a patriotic Öffentlichkeit for the first time in Zurich (269). The Grebel affair was precipitated by an anonymous letter by Johann Caspar Lavater to Felix Grebel, confronting this administrator of a Zurich subject territory about his financial corruption and abuse of authority. When Grebel failed to acknowledge the letter or the charges of corruption, Lavater published a pamphlet, The Unjust Governor or the Complaint of a Patriot, with the support of the artist Johann Heinrich Füssli and Felix Hess. In this text, Lavater asked in classical republican language what had become of the virtuous Swiss citizen: “Will then nobody stand up and demand revenge [for Grebel's abuses]? Is there no patriot left in Zurich? And none who take injustice to heart live among you, who descend from heroes and whose fathers were Bürger?”Footnote ¹¹ The publication of this pamphlet and its distribution by Füssli and Lavater under cover of night exposed Grebel and made the young students heroes in the Bodmer reform circle.

Like most other historians, Volz-Tobler does not claim that this discourse of classical republicanism was perfectly coherent. Der Erinnerer (and, by extension, the entire Zurich patriot movement) pursued two approaches to reform, which Volz-Tobler categorizes as radical and philanthropic (12–13, 49–55). She labels Bodmer's strain of republicanism radical because of its reverence for Rousseau and mention of human rights and equality. The philanthropic strain, as defined by Volz-Tobler, focused on practical reforms rather than an abstract goal of restoring virtue to society (43–8).Footnote ¹² For Volz-Tobler the two co-editors represented each of these segments of the patriotic reform movement. Johann Heinrich Füssli (the cousin of the artist) was seen by contemporaries as the great hope of Bodmer—the “Spartan” clothing episode, as well as his enthusiasm for ancient models, demonstrated his support of the Bodmer line of classical republicanism. The other co-editor, Johann Caspar Lavater, on the other hand, epitomized the philanthropic strain of republicanism. One might expect the future pastor and theologian to attempt to create a moral society based on Christian virtue and philanthropic aid to the community.Footnote ¹³ However, Volz-Tobler overstates Lavater's later position. His writings during the Grebel affair (which, according to Volz-Tobler, led directly to the founding of Der Erinnerer) reflect his explicit gaze toward ancient heroes. Lavater and Füssli worked together, and although they had different reform goals, the two strains they embody were not entirely in conflict with each other, partly because they had a common enemy in the existing government, which resisted any reform.

The Grebel affair looms large because it links different strands of republicanism. Certainly the entire episode is an example of the Bodmer circle's attempt to create a moral, virtuous public. Bodmer and other classical republicans, along with Rousseau, feared the decay of the republic through the corrupting influences of commercial activity. The Grebel affair appeared to demonstrate the inevitable corruption of republican politics when state officials sought luxury. For Bodmer, Lavater and those who rejoiced at Grebel's removal from office, it was clear that modern commerce led to luxury, which in turn led to political and moral corruption, which negatively impacted the common good. Lavater represented both strands of republicanism in Zurich when he chose to expose the corruption in order to serve the republic and improve governmental practice.

The critique of commerce has been a long-standing trope in republican discussions and often characterized radical and classical republican critiques of society.Footnote ¹⁴ Nonetheless, in the face of commercial development, many thinkers sought to reconcile older political and social virtues with the reality of modern economic life. It is essential to understand the dynamic relationship between those who supported conceptions of ancient virtue as the basis of a good society and those who viewed the emergence of commercial activity as the dawn of a new age.Footnote ¹⁵

This is the issue addressed by Kapossy in Iselin contra Rousseau. Just as Switzerland can serve as a window into European intellectual developments as a whole, Isaak Iselin stands at the intersection of many different trajectories of republican thought. Iselin allows us to see the broader republican picture. Furthermore, his audience extended beyond Switzerland; he was widely read as a political philosopher throughout Europe (14, 250). His attempts to find innovative solutions to the corruption apparently resulting from commercial societies was an effort by a member of a patriotic circle to promote good republican government that benefitted more than just the aristocratic elite.

Isaak Iselin, state secretary of the Basel government, was “spiritus rector” of what Volz-Tobler labeled the philanthropic reform strain (15). He was one of the founders of the Helvetische Gesellschaft, a nationally organized Enlightenment society, and was a key figure in the creation of modern Swiss political culture, especially if we accept the importance of mixed discourses to Swiss republicanism and politics. Zurbuchen contrasts Iselin's patriotism with Bodmer's as two focal points of the Swiss Enlightenment (chapter 4). Led by Iselin, many members of the Swiss Enlightenment's learned societies sought to reconcile virtue with modern commercial practices and thus commercial activity with good republican government. Iselin argued that reason, rather than virtue, should be the defining characteristic of good republican government.

In his critiques of political philosophers such as Rousseau and Montesquieu, Iselin sought to promote prosperity as a rational aim of republican government. In contrast to Rousseau and Montesquieu, Iselin argued that sociability was natural to all men and therefore republics did not have to be built on virtue, but could follow reason, a step that allows for commercial activity and economic prosperity to be part of Iselin's ideal republic (Kapossy, 15, 278–305). Therefore Iselin and those who agreed with him focused on specific reforms that would improve the common good and prosperity. Kapossy focuses on the concept of “economic republicanism” and details Iselin's interaction with the leading Bernese reforming societies to develop these reforms (103–204). Iselin and his collaborators in the Bernese societies reformulated the republican debate in Switzerland and Kapossy demonstrates that Iselin argued self-consciously for the discontinuity of republican traditions in his rejection of the thesis of Bodmer's group in Zurich. By criticizing the adoration of ancient republics, Iselin rejected elements of Rousseau's thought and Bodmer's reform plan because he allowed room for commercial activity and for the possibility that commercial activity could be virtuous (Kapossy, chapter 2; Zurbuchen, 75–9). He replaced virtue with rational self-interest as the fundamental principle of republics, though he remained anchored to Christian morals. For Iselin, Switzerland needed to adapt in order to survive in an economically transforming Europe.

For Kapossy, Iselin's rejection of virtue as the sole guiding principle of republican government demonstrates that three apparently autonomous strands of eighteenth-century republicanism—the commercial republicanism of Iselin, natural law and civic humanism—are only artificially divided and should not be perceived as three different conversations. Kapossy emphasizes the fact that in order to fully understand the Swiss Enlightenment, one must look at the reality of the melding of intellectual traditions. It is not necessarily possible, or even desirable, to separate all the intellectual traditions into their component parts. Therefore Kapossy recommends going beyond Volz-Tobler's categories of philanthropic and radical republicanism; it is too difficult to separate the discourses, which feed off each other (310–12).

Kapossy might appear to land on the side of continuity. Indeed, he quite explicitly states that there is “strong continuity between eighteenth-century Swiss commercial republicanism and nineteenth-century Swiss liberalism” (313). However, in arguing for continuity between Iselin and nineteenth-century liberalism, Kapossy claims that Iselin was already a modern thinker in the eighteenth century. For Kapossy, Iselin represents the essential stage of commercial republicanism that emerged before the political revolutions of the late eighteenth century (313). The broader contribution of Kapossy's book (beyond the useful, detailed analysis of Iselin's work) is that it demonstrates the significance of Iselin's quest for a unifying history of mankind in defining the origins of modern liberty. It allowed him to demonstrate the importance of economic realities for republics and monarchies alike and in this way offered a powerful critique of Montesquieu and Rousseau. Although implicit, this is not a minor side argument; practical economic reforms had broad implications in preparing the way for reformers to question the nature of the state itself (Weinmann, 89).

We do not need to think about the Enlightenment in Switzerland and elsewhere as a single coherent intellectual movement with a single specific agenda.Footnote ¹⁶ However, if there was no consensus on the principles of good government, there was broad consensus among different political groups that it was necessary to consider of what good government consisted. Kapossy details the role that Iselin played in teasing this question out in Swiss and European contexts. However, he does not add much about how these debates affected practice or about the particular Basel context of Iselin's political career.

This practical interest in good government can also be found in the work of learned societies formed prior to the mid-eighteenth-century groups. Michael Kempe and Thomas Maissen examine three of these learned societies in Zurich from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.Footnote ¹⁷ Members of these societies, educated throughout Europe, introduced natural-law concepts into Zurich (and German-speaking Switzerland), occasionally in a strikingly democratic manner. The production of these learned societies supports Maissen's claim that modern republican society is a practice-driven development.

In Die Geburt der Republic, Maissen seeks to discover when and how the Swiss gained a republican self-understanding. To do this, Maissen brings the entire early modern period under the microscope and raises the question of continuity between non-modern and modern forms of republicanism. Maissen quite clearly sides with the discontinuity camp; he claims that the meaning of a republic changed fundamentally in the transition from early modern to modern societies. Maissen follows a Begriffsgeschichte tradition in refining our understanding of the republic. He asserts that the word “republic” was not used in the same way throughout the entire period. Instead, a new conception of sovereignty developed, a significant legal change that defined the modern republic (70–76, 293).

Like Israel, Skinner, and Pocock, Maissen sees the key transition period beginning in the mid-seventeenth century, and it is only by looking at this longer era that we can fully examine the Swiss republican transformation.Footnote ¹⁸ Maissen carefully places early modern European republics into their monarchical context (77–163). Grotius's natural law (and by implication much of the ensuing natural-law school) was developed in this monarchical context (98 ff.), and therefore, Maissen implies, it is inadequate as the sole intellectual basis for a political modernity grounded in popular sovereignty. For Maissen, modern republics do not exist in a monarchical context, and, in fact, are anti-monarchical in structure and in principle (577). Maissen thus rejects Protestant resistance theory, classical republicanism, mixed constitutions, or the language of virtue as the central force for the making of the modern political world (chapters 1–2, pp. 293, 570 ff.). Rather, the late seventeenth century saw a new form of sovereignty (198 ff.). Maissen demonstrates this in both Switzerland as a whole and in his paradigmatic example of Zurich (chapter 4). Through his linguistic and contextual analysis, Maissen argues that it is only in the seventeenth century that some Swiss start to self-identify as republican. Furthermore, Maissen writes a complete history of this new political language by providing cultural evidence in order to demonstrate his claims (e.g., 253 ff.), pointing to iconography and visual symbols that show discontinuity in republican traditions.

In arguing that modern republicanism has a new vocabulary, Maissen refutes the myth of continuity in the Swiss self-understanding of the nature of the Swiss state (577–9). Maissen also takes issue with Pocock's claim of continuity (160) and challenges the use of Skinner's theoretical framework of neo-Roman republicanism for the Swiss case. Maissen de-emphasizes the importance of virtue and cannot find the texts that he claims Skinner's theory demands. In order for classical (or neo-Roman) republicanism to exist, virtue must be a priority, yet Maissen claims that the pertinent texts that might reveal the population's obsession with virtue or securing rights are nonexistent. Instead he finds in his sources that the population was much more concerned with sharing the available collective privileges (159, 578–9). Consequently, Maissen argues that there were no roots able to sustain a long classical republican tradition in Switzerland.

Instead Maissen posits that the move to a modern anti-monarchical republic is directly linked to political events such as the Dutch search for allies against Louis XIV's potential universal monarchy in the late seventeenth century. This search led to a quasi-propaganda campaign to convince the Swiss to join the fight. For Maissen, it is Petrus Valkenier's leading of this campaign that helped to introduce a new republican vocabulary into Switzerland.Footnote ¹⁹

In this book, Maissen moderated an earlier version of his argument by conceding that one particular understanding of republicanism comes from the Netherlands, rather than implying that republicanism as a whole was brought as a Dutch message to Switzerland. The same moderation appears to be necessary with his discussion of the discourse of virtue. A warning that one should not overstate the importance of virtue is well taken. However, an argument which states that virtue is not a topic of discussion in early modern Switzerland is too extreme. At a minimum one must acknowledge that the discussion existed by the eighteenth century. Certainly Zurbuchen, Volz-Tobler, Weinmann and Kapossy demonstrate that there are aspects of classical republicanism complete with an emphasis on virtue to be found in Switzerland in the eighteenth century. As Kapossy shows, even Iselin, who rejected a classically republican perspective, was very aware of the discourse on virtue.Footnote ²⁰

In response, I recommend coming back to the European picture. A fundamental point to consider is that Swiss thinkers exist within an European intellectual world. Therefore it is less intellectually significant if a republican tradition is strong within the political boundaries of the early modern Swiss Eidgenossenschaft. The Old Confederation was never a modern national state and Swiss thinkers easily read other traditions and absorbed them; Swiss writers such as Bodmer, Iselin, Lavater and Füssli all participated in European discussions. Ironically, it was Maissen who pushed the transnational element by emphasizing the Dutch sources of the Swiss understanding of republicanism.

I framed this review of recent literature as an investigation of the debts owed to eighteenth-century political thought because all of these authors raise important questions about the relationship of republican theory to republican practice and the foundations of the modern world. These writers make the argument that in order to understand republican practice, looking at Switzerland is an important element to the overall European picture. The republic was not simply an ideal for the Swiss, but political reality. The recent Swiss literature collectively provides worthwhile addenda to Skinner's implicit claim that all republicanism fits the same model, the extreme continuity suggested by Blickle's communalism, and Israel's purely philosophical modernity.

Individually each of these authors under review makes important points in favor of examining the history of ideas through pragmatic politics. Kapossy insists that in order to fully understand the Swiss Enlightenment, one must look at the interaction of intellectual traditions, while Volz-Tobler gives us a case study in the form of Der Erinnerer. Additionally, Zurbuchen demonstrates the multiplicity of republican strains by describing the tension between Bodmer's ancient patriotism and Iselin's commercial republicanism and adds chapters on the natural-law school of west (French-speaking) Switzerland as well as the radical pastoral critique by Beat Ludwig von Muralt. Through the lens of Zurich political development, Weinmann sees the mixing of classical strains of republicanism with communal strains, but also recognizes the importance of the new economic realities to critique and reform in this period.

What makes the Swiss case so interesting is exactly this pragmatic blending of discourses of republicanism. Very few of the Swiss republican strains are purely radical, but political reality often consists of mixed messages. Switzerland provides an important case study for understanding the interactions between liberalism and republicanism, the moderate and radical Enlightenments, the revolutionary process in eighteenth-century Europe and the creation of the modern political world. The Swiss debates were republican debates about the nature of political participation, equality and political authority. These debates are essential reading in our attempt to understand the origins of our own society. By examining political practice and the continuity or discontinuity between early republicanism and modern liberal-democratic society, these authors are writing European history, albeit through the lens of a small state.