IT IS CALLED THE LIVING REPUBLICAN TRADITION BECAUSE IT IS not bound to any single modern constitution. The ideals recovered in this vision coalesce into a single, coherent one, not limited by modern political assumptions, and advocates the vigor of an essentially pre-liberal (not anti-liberal) republican vocation. Atlas, the Enduring Titan Who Holds the Heavens represents a dense recovery of Atlas as the unwearying bearer of the heavens who keeps the ordered interval open between domination and dissolution, and the constellation of archaic and classical divinities that underwrite non-domination, measure, and civic endurance. It is neither a nostalgic reconstruction of ancient institutions nor a modern ideological program. It is a pre-liberal republican vision of the free city as a continuous labor of upholding an ordered interval, or the space that must be kept open between the collapse of arbitrary domination from above and the dissolution of formless license from below.
It emphasizes the common good under a higher measure that no temporary power may arbitrarily override. Precisely because it precedes and exceeds the later liberal reduction of freedom to individual non-interference or rights-claims alone, I believe it can be strategically applied within the federal and nation-state structures, and particularly in Europe where the republican tradition once possessed greater institutional depth and where its historical memory has not been so thoroughly eroded as it is in the United States.
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