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Is republicanism the left's 'big idea'?
E. P. Thompson's classic The Making of the English Working Class is arguably a work of implicit political theory as well as history (Thompson, 1963). Written at a time when Thompson had made a decisive rupture with the Communist Party, Part 1 of the book can be read as an effort to reconnect with an alternative political tradition. This alternative revolves around a radical form of republicanism, excited by the aspirations of the French Revolution and tutored by Tom Paine. Its defining commitments are political and social equality, public-spirited participation in democratic politics, and an emerging theory of social rights to limit economic inequality. In the 1960s and 1970s, with Marxism in ideological ascendancy, Thompson's critical recovery of radical republicanism may have struck some on the left as anachronistic. But Thompson was ahead of his time. Gareth Stedman Jones's recent book, An End to Poverty?, celebrates enthusiastically the ideas of late eighteenth-century republicans such as Paine and Condorcet (Stedman Jones, 2004). And this is just one expression of an ongoing revival of interest in something, or some things, called 'republicanism'. Bernard Crick and David Marquand are long-standing proponents of 'republicanism', joined recently by Jonathan Freedland, Will Hutton and David Blunkett (Crick, 1962, 2000; Hutton, 1995; Marquand, 1997; Freedland, 1998; Blunkett, 2001). Within academic political theory we have seen a vigorous 'republican turn', variously developed in work by Stephen Elkin, David Miller, Chantal Mouffe, Karma Nabulsi, P...
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