The End of Kings: A History of Republics and Republicans

In 1983 Chicago published the first edition of William Everdell’s The End of Kings. The second edition contains a new preface and a bibliographical essay providing an overview of the voluminous writings on republicanism that have appeared since 1983. The main chapters of the book deal with Samuel and Solon, the Brutus’s and William Tell, Machiavelli, Calvin, Milton, John Adams and Franklin, Robespierre, Thaddeus Stevens, Gambetta and the Third French Republic, Noske and Weimar Germany, and critiques of North American presidential powers from the late nineteenth century to the present. The resulting narrative is necessarily summary, but elegantly written and of interest to the general reader. Accordingly, The End of Kings, mainly because of its accessible style, can be recommended to the student who comes to the idea of the republic for the first time.

The second but clearly more important goal of the book (at least to its author) is to educate the public in the republican tradition as it is deemed to have developed from a North American perspective, and through this to contribute to a reorientation of republican ideas in order to counter the growing willingness of over-powerful presidents to flout the constitution. In addressing this goal Everdell becomes a passionate republican in the mold of John Adams, giving renewed voice to an ancient and rational set of opinions defending multiple rulership:

A republic is, in essence, what a monarchy is not. That, in short, is the argument, based on a very long history of states called republics, and thinkers called republicans, who learned from each other. A republic is a state that has many rulers, instead of one, most of them independently elected rather than appointed. A republic is a state where most of the public business must perforce be publicly aired, since these many magistrates naturally differ about that business and thus cannot conduct it without robust argument. Though it is still said in our civic pedagogy that a republic is sometimes called a ‘representative democracy,’ many of history’s republics have not been representative, and many have been far from democratic, including some which were undemocratic precisely by virtue of being representative. What all republics have been is polyarchal, ruled by the pluribus instead of the uno… So much is required of a republic’s citizens that all of the republics of the past have explicitly demanded civic awareness and participation, and some, like Athens, have found hardly any room for private life at all, whether for citizens or magistrates—much less for presidents. (xvii-xviii)

This paragraph—and others stating that a republic is more than a state in which powers are separated and/or balanced—reveals that Everdell is aware of the plurality of so-often incompatible ideas that have been called republican by their authors. He condemns the blanket use of the term today and is especially concerned to refute those who simplistically group together republicanism, representative government, and democracy. Such labours are necessary and important in a contemporary political world unwilling to understand ideas by reference to historical contexts and often wilfully ignorant of the very basic concepts that constitute Atlantic political thought. Especially when writing about North American authors, Everdell is both scholarly and revealing. But in terms of the book’s broader goal of transforming republican thinking, Everdell fails, mainly because he has not understood the significance of John Pocock’s magisterial work on the subject, The Machiavellian Moment. Everdell refers to Pocock, of course, and in one footnote he claims that Pocock neglects Machiavelli’s distinction between monarchies and republics (xxv n.20). But Everdell does not incorporate Pocock’s insight that the small state republican tradition was transformed by the rise of commercial monarchies from the seventeenth century and that Machiavellianism became associated with the building of commercial empire rather than with the expansive empire traditionally conceived of in republican thought.

David Hume, in his Essays Moral and Political, made the claim that the world changed fundamentally with the rise of commercial monarchies because they brought to the fore issues of luxury, public credit, national banks, mercantile policy, and the suitability of national manners to self-defence and domestic security. Hume was also responsible for the famous argument that, because of the sanctity of law, subjects were as free in France under absolute monarchy as they were in England under limited monarchy. John Pocock’s genius was in part to recapture Hume’s perspective and to re-examine accordingly the republican tradition. The result was not a history of a unified tradition but of a series of shifting and contested cultural imperatives, such as the need to bear arms, the ability to own land and fight for the land of the community when necessary, and the importance of contributing to the law-making process as an individual citizen. All of these imperatives clashed with aspects of the commercial society that Europe was fast becoming. Yet republicans in the eighteenth century ultimately had to accept commerce, where their forbears had condemned it, because commercial states could better defend themselves in war (the successive miracles of British arms before the North American Revolution provide an example). Various moralized versions of a peaceful commercial world emerged, now associated with such authors as Thomas Paine and Karl Marx. The problem for Everdell is that he ignores so much of the rich and unexpected legacies of republican thought which Pocock has brought to light; this is one consequence of clinging to the definition of a republic as a state ruled my many rather than by one.

The limitations of Everdell’s definition of republicanism become evident in reading the abbé Emmanuel Sieyès writing to Thomas Paine in Le Moniteur in 1791. Sieyès argued that, if being a republican meant nothing more than replacing kings with presidents, then there was precious little difference between monarchical Britain and republican North America. Sieyès wanted to attack the very idea of a republican tradition because he believed there were no specifically republican solutions to the problems of the modern world. Yet individuals were committing gross atrocities in the name of the republic in France at the time. Republicanism had become a popular contagion. It was far more sensible, Sieyès argued, to accept that many forms of government could embody the welfare of the public, and accordingly be ‘républiques’ in Jean Bodin’s sense of the term. John Adams recognised Sieyès’ point when making clear that monarchies like Britain’s contained ‘republican’ elements that needed to be incorporated into the constitutions of the North American states. Everdell’s difficulty is that from such a perspective the political thought associated with limited monarchy, or any monarchy respectful of fundamental law, can look as republican as his non-monarchical states. Everdell is at his weakest dealing with eighteenth-century divisions between putative republicans and especially when writing about French authors like Sieyès or Genevans like Rousseau, both of whom he mistakenly labels orthodox anti-monarchists.

With respect to contemporary thought, Everdell neglects the continued tension between republicans who see the state as essentially the ultimate barrier to dangerous forms of democracy (following Madison, Kant, Sieyès, and Constant) and those who seek to create a democratic republic in which the people determine the law in as direct a fashion as possible. This is because he ignores the voices of the former and associates republicanism too closely with the latter. For all of these reasons, Everdell’s book is a useful introduction to republican ideas but ultimately a poor guide to their historic role and political function.