When the People Assemble, the Laws go Silent - Radical Democracy and the French Revolution

From Neo-Republicanism to Socialist Republicanism

“…The republican tradition has often been labelled aristocratic, and the freedom enjoyed by male citizens during the Roman Republic, and all the way to the foundation of the American Republic has often come at the cost of the subjugation of slaves and women (Gourevitch 2014;McCormick 2018). Beyond the aristocratic heritage of republicanism, political theorists and intellectual historians have argued that a popular, plebeian and radical tradition of republicanism can be identified, emanating originally with the political practices and constitutional offices of the Roman plebs (McCormick 2011), re-articulated by Machiavelli (Lefort 2012;Vergara 2020) and re-emerging with the French Revolution (Breaugh 2013;von Eggers 2016) as well as with the Paris Commune (Breaugh 2013;Leipold, 2020). The central claim of the 'second republican revival', hence, is that nineteenth-and early twentieth-century socialism is the inheritor of a non-aristocratic, popular tradition of republicanism.…”