Rahe, Paul Anthony. Republics Ancient and Modern. UNC Press Books, 1994.

From a Review:

This is a work vast in scale, soaring in its scholarly ambition, and magnificent, if uneven, in its achievement. The author’s command of the primary sources is staggering in breadth and depth, deftly orchestrated, and rich with insight. Three hundred pages of footnotes provide a thorough and vivaciously critical review of the relevant secondary literature. Guided by a carefully constructed seventy page index, the reader will find this an invaluable reference resource on any number of crucial topics in the history of republicanism. Yet to use the book only as such a resource would be to miss the challenge of its admittedly “long and labyrinthine” argument.

 

The first, and theoretically most fundamental, of the book’s three parts provides a synoptic account of all that is known about the actual way of life of the polis, juxtaposed with some of the modern theorists and statesmen’s comments on that life, in order to bring vividly to light how radically alien to eighteenth century aspirations was the ancient citizen’s experience of freedom, family, property, “music,” god, and war. The discussion culminates in a marvelously informative account of Sparta, the city which is most revealing because of its “radical fidelity to the principles particular to the polis.” We are left with a lively impression of the fascinating mixture of nobility and inhumanity, reason and fanaticism, that characterized the polis.

 

[I]n the second part . . . we are treated to an exceptionally lucid and informative ferreting out of the fascinating twists and turns in the development of modern republican doctrines (particularly helpful is the extensive analysis of Harrington, as the key republican mediator between Hobbesian and Lockean constitutionalism). Deploying an avalanche of evidence, . . . Rahe shows how alien the modern project, in all its diverse versions, was to the classics as well as the Bible.

 

 

Since the third and last part, dealing with the American founders, covers the most familiar ground, one expects it to be the least interesting. On the contrary: Rahe elaborates a step by step interpretation of the evolution of the great debate between Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians that lends dramatic new significance to their arguments. He shows how each of the great parties to the conflict welded together an uneasy but powerful republican synthesis: predominantly modern, but with subordinate, and mitigating, ancient principles. Here as throughout, Rahe evinces an uncanny gift for reenacting debates in such a gripping fashion as to draw the reader into the most rewarding rethinking and reexamination.

—Thomas L. Pangle (University of Toronto), Political Theory

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