Yes republicanism versus No republicanism

Alasdair Gray and Adam Tomkins

As I mentioned last time, Alasdair Gray’s politics were as prominent in his public image as his literary achievements; certainly, he never sought to keep the two separate. I wanted to look a little more at those politics, but not in any direct or obvious manner. Instead, I spent some time with a fascinating little pamphlet from 2005, called How we Should Rule Ourselves, which Gray cowrote with University of Glasgow legal academic Adam Tomkins.

For anyone at all familiar with the last decade or so of Scottish politics, these two names look a little odd beside each other on the cover of a book. Gray was a lifelong Scottish nationalist and became a leading light for the Yes side in 2014. Meanwhile Tomkins was one of No’s most prominent, intellectually forceful, and vocal voices: after the referendum he took part in the Smith commission and became a Tory MSP representing Glasgow.

A pamphlet that both these men could sign their name to, then, is as decisively pre-2014 as a Scottish document can get.¹ But there’s an interesting question here: is there anything (or at least, anything more interesting than birth or prejudice) that can explain how Gray and Tomkins could have started so close as to be co-authors, and yet drifted so far as to stand on opposite sides of the most important question in recent Scottish public life?

How we Should Rule Ourselves is (self-describedly) a defence of British republicanism. You probably take this to mean the view that Britain should abolish its monarchy, and certainly Gray and Tomkins were all in favour of that. But this isn’t all they meant by the word: they were very much reaching back to classical or civic republicanism. The list of names on the first page of chapter one of How we Should Rule Ourselves could be taken straight out of the index to The Machiavellian Moment: Aristotle, Cicero, Livy, Tacitus, Sallust, Machiavelli, Harrington, Milton, Sidney, Locke, Montesquieu, Madison, and Jefferson. Philip Pettit is one of few moderns to get a mention in the main text, and Quentin Skinner shows up in the bibliography.

As such, while our two authors certainly did call for the Queen (as it was at the time) to be removed from the constitution, this was the last and in many ways the least important of their demands. Their primary demand was the abolition of all prerogative powers of the Crown, which—while historically powers of the monarch—are now exercised de facto by ministers. Their argument here is pure republican liberty, nothing more and nothing less than opposition to arbitrary domination: ‘the government [should] exercise only those powers which are expressly conferred upon it by statute.’ Gray and Tomkins also called for Freedom of Information reform, to ensure open government, and radical changes in the procedures of parliament (including the prohibition of whipping) to limit the influence of faction and to help encourage politicians towards virtuous pursuit of the common good.

I think the connections between these two types of republicanism (classical and anti-royal) explain much about how Gray and Tomkins could completely elide political differences in 2005 that seemed almost total less than a decade later. To get into this argument, let me start with a representative bit of civic-republican reasoning from the pamphlet. Tomkins and Gray argued against the Human Rights Act, insisting that we can’t rely on the courts to uphold freedom:

In Britain we owe our freedom to parliament, not to the courts. Parliament has frequently legislated, often in face of overt judicial hostility, to extend liberty, whether it be in conferring on women the right to vote, in enacting prohibitions against discrimination, or in providing for essential welfare services, such as health care and social security. By contrast, the judicial record in protecting civil liberties in Britain is woeful.

…It is because of cases such as these that it is dangerous to rely on courts to stop governments. If we want to check government, we will have to do it ourselves, either directly or through elected representatives in our parliaments. [Chapter 4.]

Importantly, Gray and Tomkins’ point here is not a simple argument from democracy: the passage does not say that the courts are not illegitimate merely because they do not represent the people. (It’s not even the point, associated with Jeremy Waldron, that insofar as the people might disagree with each other over what liberties are important and how to resolve conflicts between them, we must adjudicate between them in a representative assembly rather than a court to properly capture the pluralism of our society.) The crucial premise is just that the people (or rather, their representatives) are better at warding off arbitrary domination; if the courts had a better record of protecting liberties, and parliament a worse one, this would give us reason to support judicial power instead of opposing it.

Now, Tomkins and Gray didn’t think it was just a contingent fact that parliament has been better than the courts at protecting liberties. Rather, it had to do with the nature of representative assemblies: when parliament acts it is (in some sense) ‘we’, the people, who are acting (indirectly), and we have an interest in advancing liberty.² But this view isn’t essential to republicanism, and there are many reasons to doubt that the people care about civil liberties more than judges do.

Indeed, similar doubts were entirely commonplace in the history of republican thought. For the Roman writers who were the fountainhead of republicanism, there was nothing particularly oxymoronic or paradoxical about the idea of a monarchy being a just regime form. The res publica could be democratic, aristocratic, even autocratic, so long as the public good was pursued, politics was governed by virtue, and the liberties of freemen were upheld. Influential here (and well into modern times) was Aristotle’s earlier classification of political regimes: he divided regimes up into those ruled by the many, those ruled by the few, and those ruled by only one. And Aristotle was clear that each of these three had could take just and legitimate forms as well as unjust and illegitimate forms—or, to put it a bit anachronistically, all three could be republican.

The modern understanding of republicanism as linked to popular sovereignty and opposed to monarchy developed only starting in the Renaissance, and even then only slowly and piecemeal. Subsequently in England, the execution of Charles I by committed republicans in parliament produced stronger links between republican political thought and the opposition to monarchy. But equally, after 1688, many English republicans reconciled themselves to monarchy, provided it was not absolute and the liberties of citizens could be maintained.

My personal opinion is that the decisive moment in the triumph of anti-monarchical republicanism came when the eighteenth century’s most influential political ‘textbook’, Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, abandoned the Aristotelian classification scheme entirely. While rule by the many (democracy) and the few (aristocracy) were both put under the heading of ‘republic’, Montesquieu classified monarchies as a completely separate regime form. He drew this line precisely because he was an opponent of republican politics, and wanted to argue that republicanism was unsuitable for monarchies like his native France. He thought that the major political players in a monarchy did not need republican virtue, and could as well be vain, smug, self-important arseholes; indeed, they should, because such pride and self-assertion would encourage nobles and representatives to behave in ways that checked and limited the monarch, rather than cosying up to them for favours. These ‘checks and balances’ were not, he insisted, best thought of as ‘mixing’ different types of republic together to protect liberty: a limited monarchy was just a fundamentally distinct thing from a republic, which was based on the total, unmixed sovereignty of the people as a whole.³

Of course, Montesquieu was no simple-minded cheerleader of monarchical power, and many republicans read and appreciated The Spirit of the Laws. But the immense influence of Montesquieu’s complete rejection of the Aristotelian scheme was the final nail in the coffin of the idea of a ‘republican monarchy’, and permanently tied the term ‘republic’ to the idea of popular sovereignty. And so, republicans writing after Montesquieu (like Thomas Paine or, more subtly and interestingly, Rousseau) tended to turn his ideas around—precisely because monarchies were unsuited for republican politics, they concluded that royal power was illegitimate and only a sovereign people could be trusted to defend liberty.

By the twentieth century, this way of thinking had become so established that the word ‘republic’ had just come to mean ‘popular state’ or, even more reductively, just ‘not-monarchy’. Its history in ancient and Renaissance thought was increasingly forgotten, so much so that intellectual historians had to actively recover the republican tradition that lay behind the word.

Enough on the history of political thought; let’s get back to Gray and Tomkins. They took for granted the key ideas of this version of republicanism, sometimes called ‘exclusivist’, as in the passage quoted above: popular sovereignty provides the only trustworthy basis for republican liberty, such that the institutions of popular sovereignty (parliament) should be trusted to protect that liberty over all others. Only ‘we’ can be trusted to uphold freedom. These ideas are the link between their classical republicanism and their opposition to the monarchy, and they are entirely clear about that—at one point being so emphatic as to tiptoe up to the line of hysteria: ‘Being subjects of the Crown rather than citizens of a republic reduces us to the status of slaves [emphasis mine].’ Following Montesquieu’s lead, Tomkins and Gray fully accepted the link between classical republicanism and opposition to monarchy, and so had to introduce popular sovereignty as the key concept of their argument.

Indeed, in chapter 1 Gray and Tomkins presented a picture of how republican popular sovereignty should work: a version of what Quentin Skinner has called the ‘populist’ theory of the state, so beloved of historical English republicans, that is remarkably thorough given its brevity. It starts with the people, who are sovereign, and who then ‘lend power to a government in order to help ourselves [emphasis mine]’. This power starts with the people and is gradually ‘delegated’ ‘upwards’ to other bodies for the benefit of the people, with each step of delegation involving only limited power and subject to clear rules so as to prevent the arbitrary exercise of power that would render citizens unfree.⁴ Crucially, the mere ‘tacit consent’ of the people does not in itself render the exercise of power legitimate—because that is not enough to guarantee effective guards against domination. So power can be delegated to a parliament, because it represents the people and can have its decisions contested by the people; but it cannot legitimately be delegated to an unelected and unaccountable monarch.

This is a story that begins with the people, the ‘we’ of the pamphlet’s title, and builds up. This is absolutely fundamental to the argument; the core idea is that ‘sovereignty belongs to the citizens of the nation’. The obvious question—the first year philosophy student’s question, the question that is almost too obvious to ask—is: which nation? Well, here’s Tomkins:

In our pamphlet we never identified the ‘We’ of our title, although we talked about it in [Gray’s] study, sometimes with the note-taker but more often without. I knew that for him it was ‘Scots’: How the Scots Should Rule Themselves. And he knew that for me it was the ‘Brits’: How We British Should Rule Ourselves. [Tomkins, ‘On the Nature of Scottish Nationalism’.]

Clearly it seemed to Tomkins and Gray at the time that this could just be put aside. They could agree on immediate priorities for reform, advocating parallel changes for the UK and (devolved) Scottish parliaments, and their national identities could be left as a private matter. And then—referendum.

The issue is not that exclusivist republicanism has nothing to say about nationalism and unionism, that it leaves the question ‘which nation’ open. That’s not necessarily a problem; no theory or idea can answer every single question in political life. It’s quite the opposite: exclusivist republicanism had too much to say, giving different contradictory instructions depending on one’s unspoken assumptions and allegiances. Suppose you believe that the nation has been subjected to the dominance of private capital, with a state-enforced ‘privatisation juggernaut’ stripping the citizens of their liberty. (I don’t buy one iota of this story; but Gray and Tomkins did, at least in 2005.) Then, suddenly, the option opens up for one part of the country to break off and become independent. What would a sovereign nation of virtuous citizens concerned with their republican liberty do?

Well, if the nation in question is Scotland (perhaps including English ‘settlers’ but not ‘colonists’),⁵ then grasping the nettle of independence, forging new institutions and delegating power in new ways, seems to be not only permitted but imperative. This certainly seemed to be Gray’s view: Scots who consented to their own colonisation were ‘without confidence in their own land and people’, and those with the public virtue fit for a free nation would tend to support independence.

But if the nation is Britain, then dividing the people like this can only contribute to their weakness. A large part—indeed, the majority—of the people will be left behind, with no more liberty than they had before. If anything, they might have less, with the ‘defection’ of so many of their fellow-citizens perhaps serving to resign them to their status. The people as a whole would have less ability to engage in collective action, to work together to contest their rulers and protect their liberty. It is true that the 2014 referendum gave the choice over independence to Scots, not anyone else; but as Tomkins later put it, ‘that choice cannot be exercised regardless of other obligations. Among those obligations are responsibilities Scotland has as a nation within the United Kingdom’.

Which answer is right? Neither. The presuppositions of the question are false.

The picture of popular sovereignty that Tomkins and Gray put forward made several crucial assumptions. On the one hand, they assumed the unity and political homogeneity of the people: the people are able and willing to act together, take part in collective action, to contest state power to protect one another’s liberties. And on the other, they assumed the boundedness and definition of the people: it is plausible for members of the nation to concern themselves in the first instance with each other’s liberty, with other nations firmly secondary—a matter of foreign policy or charity, maybe, but not part of the primary subject of politics. But these assumptions are exactly what Scots were questioning, in the case of Britain and Scotland, in 2014. How united is Britain as a nation? What obligations do Scots owe the English and vice versa? A ‘populist’ theory of sovereignty requires well-defined answers to these questions in order to make any sense. But because of this, it cannot justify or challenge those answers; it just takes them for granted.

How we Should Rule Ourselves ended with an instruction: ‘We are a sovereign people. So let’s act like one.’ But when a question was posed about how a sovereign people would act—in the context of an independence referendum—what seemed like a single, powerful, coherent imperative split apart, revealed itself to be a ‘Yes’ and a ‘No’ at the same time, depending on unspoken and unjustified assumptions about the ‘people’.

This was not an accident. This problem is inherent in exclusivist republicanism, and in any view of politics that overindexes on ‘the people’, ‘the nation’, the ‘common good’, without thinking through the diversity and fluidity of the public. We can only arrive at our ideas about nationhood and the common good through political debate, discussion, decision. They cannot coherently be used as constraints on any and all political decisions, because they are not prior to political decisions. When thinkers try in spite of this build a political theory from ‘the people’ up, the theory always rests on—and disguises—their own base allegiances and assumptions about nationhood. It might be a successful disguise (it might fool even a co-author into finding substantive agreement), but it will not substitute for an honest reckoning with reality in times of decision. The connection between republican liberty and popular sovereignty might seem tight and secure when the boundaries of ‘the nation’ are sturdy and well-defined. But when those boundaries are up for grabs, the connection falls apart.⁶

Written at another time, in another place, by other people, How we Should Rule Ourselves might have been unremarkable: if it had been written at the same time by two Englishmen, for example, it would be remembered (if at all) as just another attack on New Labour from the left in the aftermath of Iraq, with a bit of an anti-monarchy twist. Written when and where it was, however, the pamphlet is maddeningly, completely, inalterably unzeitgemäß. And for that very reason, it is fascinating and entirely worth reading.

1. I’ve not been to Gray’s archive to try to figure out who wrote which parts of the pamphlet, though I can make some guesses: the constitutionalism in the work was certainly Tomkins (it draws heavily on his earlier book Our Republican Constitution), while the stuff about the ‘victory of private capital’ at the end of chapter 3 was probably Gray. But regardless of who physically wrote the words, both men were content to put their names to the document as a whole. And because the pamphlet is so short, it’s essentially impossible that one of them just missed anything they disagreed with. So it’s reasonable to take the entire thing as representative of both men’s views as of 2005.

2. Gray and Tomkins don’t go into any particular detail about in what sense ‘we’ are the ones acting when parliament acts, and I will not either; representation is a hard thing to think about! Hanna Pitkin is still the best person to start thinking about it with.

3. As I said above, Montesquieu actually allowed for the possibility of an aristocratic republic, where only some of the people held sovereignty rather than all of them. Open and explicit aristocracy (without a monarch) did not generally fare well as a regime form in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and so this has generally been treated just as a footnote in discussions of The Spirit of the Laws. But one could make the case that the most prominent and stable example of a republic in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—the United States—was aristocratic in precisely this sense, at least before 1865.

4. As this description should make clear, they endorse open government, political virtue, and social equality more as means to protect against domination and tyranny than as ends in themselves. Pettit’s guiding hand is obvious, and indeed the story of this influence—the formation of a kind of ‘Celtic fringe republicanism’ among intellectuals in Scotland and Ireland under Pettit’s influence in the very late twentieth and early twenty-first century, in a manner separate from the wider interest in republicanism—is a fascinating one I may try to write about some other time.

5. A distinction, I might add as an aside, that even on its own terms was unclear, verging on meaningless. (Warning: a massive digression follows.)

The initial outrage at Gray’s ‘Settlers and Colonists’ essay focussed squarely on the offensiveness of the terms Gray used—and, it must be clear, they absolutely were offensive. But Gray’s protest was that he had used them in a specific way, clearly defined in his essay, and that he should have been evaluated on the strength of his ideas, not on how immune they were to caricature in unionist headlines.

I think there’s possibly something bad faith about that argument, but whatever, I’ll bite. Gray’s distinction went as follows: settlers are those who move to Scotland seeking to make it their home; colonists, by contrast, ‘look forward to a future back in England through promotion or by retirement’. Settlers can contribute much to the life and community of a nation, its arts and culture; but colonists can only ever suppress it. Ok, so far so clear, but how do we apply these ideas?

Consider me. I’m not English (I’m Northern Irish), but Gray wanted his terms to apply to people of all nationalities so this should be fair game. I have a little Scottish blood, but not much; I am married to a woman who’s half-Scottish, but she also couldn’t exactly claim birthright. We moved to Glasgow because my wife got a job here, a job that she knew would be purely temporary. But as we’ve spent time here our plans have stretched, and I now hope to stay here for a while. But not necessarily for the rest of my life: other opportunities might arise, and I may leave Scotland without it ever having been my true home. Or maybe I won’t; I love where I live, and maybe that will keep me here. I don’t think any of this uncertainty makes me a rootless cosmopolitan—it just means I’m accepting that the future is open, and I don’t know how my life will shake out. Gray believed that colonists could, with time, change into settlers. But right now, as of this moment, which am I: settler or colonist?

The line between those who come to Scotland hoping to make it their home, and those who come temporarily for personal advantage, is not a sharp one; it’s fluid, and it’s especially fluid for those who don’t follow Gray in seeing Scotland’s boundaries as the absolute borders of a well-defined nation. Whether someone is ‘settling’ here or merely ‘colonising’ is not an objective fact about them and their intentions. It’s a subjective evaluation about how good and noble those intentions are. In this way, the difference between ‘settler’ and ‘colonist’ came down to Gray’s personal judgment about the difference between the ‘good English’ and the ‘bad English’—or, precisely because Gray wanted to apply the ideas more broadly, the ‘good foreigner’ and the ‘bad foreigner’. It’s more than a little telling that Gray’s response to criticism involved literally saying ‘some of my best friends are English’. Like when the same excuse is used by racists, the implicit background idea is that Gray was an arbiter of virtue among foreigners, and ought to have had the (asymmetric) right to decide which of them are welcome in Scotland. No matter the words used to express them, these are ideas that should be rejected by anyone.

6. Tomkins seems to have grasped this: he has completely abandoned exclusivist republicanism in the intervening years, at the same time as he has moved to the right.