Catholic political theorist Pierre Manent is one of the most impressive contemporary thinkers on the crisis of Western democracies. Our nations, in Manent’s view, are beset by a sense of stagnation stemming from the rise of transnational institutions, the decline of religion and family, and the failure of republican deliberation. The last of these is Manent’s subject in The Tragedy of the Republic, an extended essay recently published in book form by Wiseblood Books. In it, Manent explores the struggle of liberal democracies to put “reasons and actions in common” to achieve the real political interests of their people.
To understand what’s wrong with modern republics, Manent argues, first we need to understand the nature of republics. A republic is not merely a representative government — representation is just a means to an end — but a specific vision of what good government entails. It is, according to Manent, a form of government in which leaders and citizens “put things in common” through public deliberation and action. A republic is self-governing, but this self-government requires virtuous leadership and a citizenry who desires and emulates it.
The Tragedy of the Republic invites us to return to the spirit of republican government by rediscovering the republicanism of ancient Rome as depicted in William Shakespeare’s historical plays, particularly Coriolanus and Julius Caesar. Manent’s purpose is to help us understand “the motives of the actors of that republican regime which left the deepest mark on the history of Europe and of the West. This is where we will look for the bases of the republic, that is, for the typical motives of actors in this form of common life.”
Coriolanus, in Manent’s telling, is a political tragedy that teaches a bitter truth about republics, which is the call to action of “the aristocratic principle.” Coriolanus is a military hero whose achievements on behalf of the republic almost separate him from Rome. He leads his city with aristocratic pride, providing a model for rule — he governs with excellence, and in so doing, he gives Romans an example of virtuous leadership that they can imitate and use as a standard to judge other leaders.
This is what Manent refers to as the “double movement” of republican leadership: the competent leadership itself and the emulation that this leadership provokes in the citizenry. But Coriolanus refuses to combine his great exploits with worthy public speech, a time-honored custom required to become consul. He cannot make a rhetorical appeal to the people because his pride leads him to regard the people as unworthy. This results in Coriolanus’s political downfall and death.
Coriolanus fails Rome because he does not join “speech to deed and deed to speech.” This joining, according to Manent, is the timeless element of republics, ancient or modern, aristocratic or democratic. Consider Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” or Charles De Gaulle’s “Appeal of June 18th.” In these, republican leaders matched their great deeds in times of crisis with politically transcendent speeches. Such speeches, and political rhetoric generally, create the “just exchange between ruler and citizens” required by republican government. Unable to explain his motives and actions to the people, Coriolanus loses the republic’s esteem.
If Coriolanus is concerned with the failure to match word and deed, Julius Caesar reveals the ways in which bold and ambitious deeds, unmoored from prudence and political wisdom, can prove fatal to republics. At the beginning of the play, Caesar has usurped the authority of the Senate and become a tyrant. Cassius, Brutus, and the other conspirators decide they must assassinate him in order to restore the republic. Their tyrannicide, however, does not achieve their lofty objective. Instead, the ensuing chaos hastens the collapse of the republic into an empire.
In his analysis of Julius Caesar, Manent pays particular attention to Marc Antony’s famous funeral oration as an example of how republican government can be destabilized. When Antony appeals in emotional tones to the dead body of Caesar, he speaks not as a citizen but as a mourner. In other words, he does not evaluate Caesar’s death in a political sense, proposing how the republic might reform or carry on in the wake of the killing, but rather, he uses emotion to ignite the people’s fury. Antony’s speech effectively seals the end of the republic because, according to Manent, the old republican regime was “founded on the … constant mobilization of man’s active faculties,” whereas whatever replaces it will be given legitimacy by the dead tyrant.
The ringleaders of the conspiracy, Cassius and Brutus, represent the other side of republican decay. They, unlike the demagogue Antony, seek to preserve the republic, but they fail because they refuse to think concretely about the consequences of killing Caesar. Brutus, Caesar’s former friend, refuses to admit to himself that he is planning a political murder, preferring instead to spiritualize the assassination and identify himself with an abstract conception of “Rome.” And both Brutus and Cassius prove unable to act prudently in the wake of Caesar’s death. Having killed Caesar, they should have also eliminated his supporters to ensure the success of their plan. But while they debate killing Antony, they decide that this would taint their actions with too much blood. Antony, left alive, politically outmaneuvers them and then crushes them at the Battle of Philippi.
What we can learn from these plays, according to Manent, is the importance of ambition, action, and pride for republican leadership. The leaders of modern republics lack these qualities. We are divided, led halfheartedly. “It has been so long since we had the rare benefit of being governed by a truly ambitious statesman,” Manent writes, that our republics have been overcome by stasis. We have turned our backs on political rule, and in exchange, we have gotten not greater freedom but inertia and anxiety. To stave off this dreary conclusion, we need to rejuvenate our liberal order with a “republican” recovery of honorable statesmanship and engage in political action at the service of the common good.
Richard Reinsch is the editor of Law & Liberty and the host of LibertyLawTalk. Follow him on Twitter @Reinsch84.
