Professor Donald Livingston, with more wisdom from Vermont "...the Roman republic which, because of its great size - achieved through conquest - had collapsed into a centralized empire. Yet the legitimating language of republicanism remained throughout. Up to the end, laws were enacted under the seal S.P.Q.R (the Senate and the People of Rome), but republican liberty had vanished. The point here is that monarchy is not merely an abstract form of government, it is a centralization of power that occurs spontaneously and necessarily whenever a republic grows beyond its proper size. It is for this reason that the eighteenth century Scottish philosopher David Hume insisted that republics contain a law in their constitutions against conquests. They cannot both expand their territories and still be republics. And conversely, Hume also observed that a small kingdom tends either to become a republic or to develop republican characteristics merely because of its size. So size is not a morally irrelevant criterion of republicanism; it is essential. The being of a republic is its being small.. After the secession of the colonies from Britain, Americans faced a deep and unprecedented conceptual problem. They understood the republican tradition and were determined to extend it to the new world, but they had inherited territory of such a size as to require centralized monarchy. We should be clear what the colonists meant by monarchy. They did not mean merely an hereditary executive; they meant a large centralized unitary state (such as Britain was becoming) ruling directly over individuals. The form the central government took was irrelevant. In this sense, there were a few monarchists in America. They admired the centralized British state and wanted to develop an American version of it. At the Philadelphia Convention in 1787, Alexander Hamilton proposed a unitary state with an executive for life who could appoint state governors and veto state laws. His proposal, however, did not even receive a second. Instead Americans agreed on a federation of sovereign states that delegated enumerated powers to the central government as their agent, reserving the vast domain of unenumerated powers to themselves. They enshrined this in Article, IV, Section IV which guarantees to each State a republican form of government. So republicanism in America was to be a feature of the States and not a feature of the federation. “Federation” comes from the Latin foedus, meaning a compact or treaty between previously governing bodies. A federal union of republics is not itself a republic..." - vtcommons.org/journal/issue-11-march-2006/don-livingston-republicanism-and-size-part-1
Posted on: Wed, 21 Aug 2013 18:00:31 +0000
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