The historical background to democracy, which good citizens must defend, started with the Greeks. Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, and Polybius thought that political history was circular, which meant that good regimes, ruling on behalf of the people, held sway for a time but deteriorated into bad regimes – tyrannical – ruling for the rulers’ benefit. Their solution was to propose “mixed regimes,” containing monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements which, checked and balanced, would have to cooperate with each other by compromising different interests. Such a regime was the Roman Republic, which promoted both compromise and public virtue (“republicanism”) in the sense of devotion toward the state. During the Enlightenment, European political thinkers added the concepts of “sovereignty,” in order to impose public order, and “social contracts,” to make sovereigns at least somewhat answerable to subjects. Thus when the Founders convened to invent their government, they used “common sense,” prescribed by Paine, Jefferson, Madison, and others, to fashion a mixed government of special character. That government, which the Founders called “republican,” rested on a written “constitution,” which reined in “factions” via “checks and balances,” and which refrained from creating a “sovereign” who might, as in the French case almost immediately, plunge the nation into war.

Locke’s work in epistemology and personal identity secures his reputation. His excursion into political philosophy seems to have been guided by his patron, the Earl of Shaftesbury, to make a case for mixed government, in which Parliament is supreme and the monarch a Protestant. Locke argued for toleration among Protestant sects but excluded atheists and Roman Catholics. Locke’s argument for limited government describes the state of nature as one in which each has an equal right to punish infractions of natural law. Civil society comes into being when any number of people agree to surrender this “natural executive right,” on the condition that others do so as well. But, Locke says, contrary to Hobbes, submission to an absolute Sovereign is worse than a condition of civil war.

This chapter is largely devoted to commenting on the other contributions to the volume.An attempt is made to evaluate the arguments and criticisms brought to bear by each contributor on the project of defining civil liberty not as absence of interference but rather in neo-Roman terms as absence of more general conditions of subjection and dependence. The chapter opens with an exposition of the neo-Roman theory, focusing on its articulation in Roman and common law traditions of thinking about the law of persons and related arguments about ‘fundamental’ rights and liberties. The chapter next defends the distinctiveness and coherence of the neo Roman approach against a number of objection that have been raised against it. The chapter ends by reflecting on how the re-appropriation and development of a neo-Roman perspective might help us to think more fruitfully about some current threats to privacy and democracy as well as individual liberty. This concluding section focuses particularly on threats stemming from increasing surveillance and other silent exercises of power.

In the face of current perplexity and debate about the nature of the republican tradition, this chapter recalls and more fully recovers the republican aspects of Cicero’s political philosophy. The creators of the American Republic, especially John Adams, and many others including contemporary scholars, have looked to Cicero as a major figure, if not the founder, of the republican tradition. Analysis of Cicero’s definition of res publica provides the basis for an interpretation that at its core is consent, not necessarily formal and explicit, implying liberty. To be fully human is to be free, and to be free is to be a consenting partner in a political community that is just and at liberty to set its own course. A dynamism toward equality coupled with the necessary wisdom and virtue and their implication of inequality are also essential to Cicero’s republicanism. These essentials are to inform institutions and practices. The practical wisdom in institutions includes the rule of law, indirect rather than direct popular government, and mixed government. Roman (and thus Ciceronian) republicanism can be differentiated in some respects from that very self-conscious and much-heralded form of republicanism that developed in the America of John Adams.

Chapter 4 focuses on the institutional foundations of a republican order, including the mixed form of government (forma mixta). All Polish republican authors argued in favour of the mixed polity, although they disagreed as to which of the elements of the mixed constitution should be strengthened or how the balance between them should be achieved. A close examination of these issues demonstrates that it is possible to talk about several republican projects at the time, as well as in later epochs, but there is no doubt that in Polish sixteenth-century republican visions of politics only a mixed res publica of a monarchical character was seen as the best guarantee of its normative foundations. In the republican discourse, the institutional order of the commonwealth served the same goal as the normative categories, which was the attainment and the preservation of a free and well-ordered polity. The category of a republic in its original Ciceronian form referred to the political order of a civitas libera, a free political community governed by laws and not by men.