Green Republicanism and the ‘crises of democracy’

ABSTRACT

‘Green’ republicans link environmentalism with democracy by casting both as contributions to virtuous world-making. Such virtuous acts aim to realize freedom by contesting domination. In the context of the erosion of democratic and environmentalist achievements since the 1970s, however, a focus on the world-unmaking virtue of obstruction is warranted. ‘Democratic’ republicans urge this. They ground virtue in civic liberty, which is realized when all can participate in formulating rules and defending procedures sufficient to subject all to constraint by so-formulated rules. Civic liberty requires mobilization of majorities’ latent capacity to contest government decisions and obstruct elites’ capacity to act with impunity in relation to such rules. This norm suggests that if elites have ‘seceded’ from democracy, contestatory presumptions about the deliberative character of contemporary politics falter. And, that if many of the poor are also ‘seceding’, then the emphasis the norm places on majoritarian veto-power aimed at reining-in elite impunity might be useful to those who hope to make anti-democratic populists less attractive to some in this group.

KEYWORDS:

• Democracy
• environmentalism
• republicanism
• oligarchy/elite theory
• Niccolò Machiavelli
• civic liberty

Acknowledgments

I thank Anne Fremaux, Ashley Dodsworth, Besnik Pula, Binio Binev, Carlo Burelli, Dirk Jörke, Elisabeth Chaves, Joel Kassiola, John Barry, Peter Cannavò, Rebecca Aili Ploof, Tim Luke, and Veith Selk for very helpful comments and encouragement. I am grateful to John P. McCormick for sharing his most recent work, discussants Lisa Ellis and Mark Brown at 2021 and 2022 events of the Western Political Science Association’s Environmental Political Theory Organized Section, and Sherilyn MacGregor and the two anonymous reviewers for their excellent suggestions. I am thankful for the support of the Institute for Society, Culture & the Environment, College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences, and Department of Political Science & International Studies at Virginia Tech, and the Institut für Politikwissenschaft at T.U. Darmstadt.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. On the strands of republican thought, see the editors’ introductions to Elazar and Rousselière (2019) and Leipold et al. (2020).

2. The term ‘aristocratic excess’ I adopt from Helen Thompson, who refers to proto-republican Polybius’ theses on Roman history (2022, 183). Throughout, I use ‘elite’ as a contemporary replacement for Machiavelli’s nobile, ottimati, and grandi and, so, to encompass ‘oligarchs … distinct from all other empowered minorities because the basis of their power – material wealth – is … highly resistant to all but the most radical democratic encroachments [and their allies among] the merely affluent’, whose power depends on institutions, which leaves them ‘more exposed’ to a wider range of such ‘encroachments’ (Winters 2011, p. 4, 8–9).

3. Kapust (2019, p. 43, 57, citing McCormick 2011) uses ‘equity’. I avoid it here out of deference to use of the term to critique structural racism in the United States and Settler Societies.

4. McCormick desists and espies in Machiavelli an account of ‘opposing natures’ (McCormick 2011, p. 23).,

5. The logically further step of defending majority wisdom, the ‘epistemic defense of democracy’, is optional. Unobstructed elite impunity is just more destabilizing than majoritarian passion (n.b., Pedullà 2018, 141n.).

6. As do Verret-Hamelin and Vandamme (2022), most proposals reject the class-based selection criterion and favour instead a random sample of all adult citizens or a parametric stratified sample according to economic or identitarian factors (e.g., Landemore 2020, Vergara 2020, Abizadeh 2021).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences and the Institute for Society, Culture & the Environment at Virginia Tech.