Second Vermont Republic

The Second Vermont Republic is not yet a reality, but is what Plato called “a republic in speech.” For this reason it is important to understand what could be meant in saying that it is a “republic.” This might seem an easy task, for we are quite familiar with the term. But that is the problem. Nearly every state in the world today claims to have a “republican” character. The idiom of “republicanism” cuts across ideological lines of left and right. Some say a democracy cannot be a republic. Yet, some states describe themselves as democratic republics, or even as democratic socialist republics, or as liberal democratic republics. There are communist republics, constitutional republics, people’s republics, and republics ruled by dictators. The French Republic produced the first totalitarian regime - complete with a reign of terror - and was later ruled by an emperor, Napoleon. The United States claims to be a republic, but so did the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Benjamin Franklin, when asked what kind of government came out of the Philadelphia Convention in 1787, was supposed to have answered: “A republic, if you can keep it.” To enter the forum of “republican” speech is to enter the Tower of Babel. But one thing is clear. Whatever a republic is, it must be a very good thing since most everyone wants to identify with it.
What is the source of these morally favorable connotations? The term itself is derived from two Latin terms res and publicus, meaning “the public things.” So the first image we confront is that of the Roman republic. But that polity was modeled on the much older Greek polis, usually translated as city state. Plato’s great work on this sort of political association is translated as The Republic. Our primordial understanding of a republic is rooted in reflections on the adventures of the Greek city states and the Roman republic. This includes both an understanding of what is good about these polities and also why they failed. The lessons gathered establish some of the most important postulates of western political philosophy. This classical pagan republican tradition was developed throughout the civilization of Christendom reaching its high point from the 12th to the 16th centuries with the Italian city states and the free cities of Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and elsewhere.
The following are essential features of republicanism. (1) sovereignty resides in the people or their representatives; (2) all citizens are equal before the law (which is not to say that the laws should be the same for all); (3) although there can be inequalities of wealth, all citizens should have a measure of economic independence; otherwise factions, demagogues, and tyranny will result. (4) republics are morally intrusive; that is, they enjoy a distinctive way of life binding together generations; and this way of life is rooted in a law not made by the legislature, but is rooted in nature or sacred tradition. Governments can only legislate in accord with law; they do not make law; (5) republics must be small.
In the cacophony of talk about republics, lip service at least is paid to all of the above conditions except (5). Size is not thought to be an essential feature of republicanism. Size, it is said, is a mere quantitative notion, not a moral one. But this is a great mistake. Size is essential. Without it, the virtues of republics -what gives the term its favorable connotations - vanish.
To appreciate this, we must look more carefully at the requirement of size. The proper size of a republic, or of anything else, is determined by its function. The size must be in scale with the function. And the scale for all human things is the human being and its physical and mental capacities. The relative size of a bed has not changed over the millennia because its function has not changed. A committee of 400 is too large for the function of a committee. A cottage is not a small mansion, and a mansion is not a large cottage. Everywhere in the human world the goodness of a thing is inseparable from the question of its function and, consequently, of its size and scale. The function of a republic, according to Plato and Aristotle, is to provide a form of social cooperation which makes possible the development of human excellence, namely economic prosperity, security, justice, practice of the arts and sciences, and philosophic institutions that critically explore the idea and conditions of human excellence.
How many people are needed for such an arrangement? Plato suggested around 5 thousand citizens (i.e. male heads of households) which, when women, children, slaves and foreigners are added, would yield a republic of around 40 thousand-- something one could walk across in a single day, or as Aristotle said, something one could take in at a single view. Robert Dahl, a long time student of democratic institutions, has judged that a population of between 50 to 200 thousand is all that is necessary to create a political order allowing humans to flourish to a high degree. This judgment is amply confirmed by experience, for the great republics of history: Athens, republican Rome, the medieval republics and communes, Renaissance Florence and Venice, the German free cities, and many others fall within, or are below, the range of 50 to 200 thousand. (For two excellent studies of why size matters, see Leopold Kohr’s The Breakdown of Nations and Kirkpatrick Sale’s Human Scale.)
Modern writers on republicanism such as Montesquieu and Rousseau agreed that republics had to be small. So small is Rousseau’s republic in The Social Contract that he does not even permit representatives but requires that the sovereign people themselves regularly meet to vote on constitutional matters and to evaluate the performance of government. Rousseau’s republic is modeled on his beloved Geneva which had, at that time, a population of around 25 thousand.
The republican tradition is loud and clear in its proclamation that republican order, properly understood, must be of a human scale which we have taken to be, more or less, in the range of between 50 to 200 thousand. And the tradition also teaches that if a regime grew to great size, it would necessarily lose its self-governing republican character and become a centralized monarchy no matter what it called itself. The classical case was 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 because it cannot satisfy the five conditions mentioned above - notably the condition of size. Or to put it another way, if the federation were a republic, the political societies within in it would cease to be self-governing republics and would collapse into mere administrative units of the mega-republic - and this would be merely monarchy under another name. In the Virginia Resolutions (1798) James Madison used the term “monarchy” in just this way when he accused the Federalist Party of trying “to consolidate the states by degrees, into one sovereignty ... which would be, to transform the present republican system of the United States, into an absolute, or at best a mixed monarchy.”