What Do We Do When Liberty Dies? Republicanism and Fanaticism after Enlightenment

Most republics owe their origins to the perception that liberty has been lost and that action needs to be taken to restore or create anew such liberty. In the eighteenth century most of the surviving republics or free states – Venice, Genoa, the Dutch Republic, Geneva, the Swiss Confederation (and some would include the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth) – were seen to be losing their liberty and no longer had the tools to do anything about it. They gradually lost their independence in the turn to empire that accompanied what Hume termed commerce becoming a reason of state. For most republicans in the eighteenth century, the doctrine looked as if might go the way of the dodo; it appeared unsuited to commercial society, enlightenment and the large states generated by the necessity of expanding markets. The irony is that republicanism not only survived but thrived to become the foundational ideology of free states. This paper explores the republican legacies of the two free states that reversed the association between republicanism and military defeat: Britain and the First French Republic. Each accused the other of fomenting fanatic forms of liberty, addictions to war and empire and the renewal of wars of religion via republican patriotism. In the 1940s, Hayek, Popper, Talmon and others were searching for tools to combat fanaticism in the form of fascism, in the contested republican histories of the eighteenth century. They were certain that tools to prevent the death of liberty in the present could be found in the intellectual history of the European past.