INTRODUCTION
TO TAKE REPUBLICANISM BACK FROM BOTH THE GOP (which turned “republic” into a tribal brand) and from the Marxist hegemony (which turned “revolution” into a synonym for socialism), we need a serious and deliberate, multi-decade counter-hegemony project.
The AMERICAN REPUBLICAN TRADITION is actually a living synthesis of classical wisdom, Christian humanism, and liberal-arts education that prioritizes human dignity, civic virtue, and transcendent insight over materialist reductionism. It rightly combines the Renaissance recovery of antiquity, the harmonizing role of Christian ethics, the value of eclecticism and syncretism (e.g., Neoplatonism, Stoicism, and symbolic interpretation or fourfold scriptural exegesis), and the enduring need for classical education to cultivate responsible citizens. Even a mass movement of land-owning, mutually aiding citizens who call themselves republicans, who celebrate, e.g., Toussaint and John Brown as twin patron saints can make modern political expressions irrelevant. There has only ever been one revolutionary tradition that actually ended chattel slavery on this continent, and that is the civic republican tradition of wise, matured and armed citizens refusing domination. Every other ideology is commentary and has proven even hostile in attempts to usurp our political heritage.
The work thus far has come to form and express an eclectic synthesis and continuous study of these currents of Civic Republicanism, the Carolingian Renaissance, classical eclecticism and Italian & Northern Renaissance Humanism. Its expression is Humanist-Carolingian-Republican. We seek to root this effort in the deepest strata of the Western tradition and make it once again the common sense.
Among the emerging generations, we need a movement that looks and feels older than the United States itself; speaks with the moral authority of Rome, Haiti, and the medieval West combined, and that is impossible to dismiss as “right-wing” (too communal) or “left-wing” (too anti-statist). It must aim in its revolution to produce citizens who are literate, musical, mathematically competent, and utterly incapable of tolerating domination; and therefore, resisting the artificial march of hyper-war and those who thirst for civil war. We seek to root this effort in the deepest strata of the Western tradition and make it once again the common sense.
CURRENTS WITHIN COMPARATIVE CIVIC HUMANISM
Comparative civic humanism is how the recovery stays a living philosophy rather than a local costume. Civic humanism, in Baron’s Florentine sense, named the active life, republican liberty, and letters in the service of a free city. Once that grammar is treated as a method rather than an Italian patent, other lineages become intelligible as cousins: they ask whether persons govern themselves under law or live at an unaccountable will. A genuine recovery needs those cousins. Otherwise “the West” collapses into the Athens-Rome-Philadelphia (or the The “Five Cities” schema from Russell Kirk’s The Roots of American Order 1974) combined with a church formula of the modern “Judeo-Christian” historical-grounding, and every non-Atlantic example is either exotic decoration or a stick with which to beat the republic. Comparison is the opposite of that. It multiplies the archive of non-domination without surrendering the criterion.
Franco-Continental civic humanism is the passage of the Italian civic idiom into French and wider continental argument. Montesquieu’s anatomy of republics, virtue, and the balance of powers; the Genevan and municipal strains that feared Parisian will as a new prince; Constant’s distinction between ancient and modern liberty must be held together rather than used to discard civic virtue. Tocqueville dreaded that democratic equality would produce soft dependence. The Jacobin and later socialist currents claimed the language of the republic while recentering it on a unitary people and an administrative state. Recovering the Franco-Continental line means keeping the municipal, federal, and liberal republican layer that the centralized nation state tried to swallow. It is the difference between a republic of citizens and a republic as a machine that speaks for them.
The Swiss lineage is the hardest European reminder that a free order need not be a single cultivated court. Cantonal self-rule, armed citizenship, religious plurality after the Reformation, and the Grisons Freestate’s claim to have no lord, but God gave Europe a living model of confederated liberty that Rousseau praised and that Adams could still recognize as discipline joined to freedom. Chinese reformers noticed it too: Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, and later federalists such as Chen Jiongming looked at Helvetic coexistence and local self-rule as an alternative to both imperial centralization and a copied unitary state (see Swiss Enchantment: Modern Chinese Intellectuals and a Federal Utopia). Switzerland is not a toy democracy. It is evidence that mixed peoples, languages, and confessions can sustain republican practices without a civilizational fortress or a single sacred ethnicity. That is why it belongs in the atlas beside Florence and Philadelphia.
German and Central European civic humanism provides for us a warning against selective memory (The Selective Historical Memory of the West: German and Central European Idealism and Romanticism). Early modern Germany printed Cicero in bulk (see Robert von Friedeburg, Civic Humanism and Republican Citizenship in Early Modern Germany); Melanchthon yoked Lutheran civil order to classical officium; free imperial cities practiced burgher self-rule, however later becoming oligarchic; and Althusius theorized consociation rather than a single sovereign will. Young Fichte’s republican enthusiasm, Hegel’s constitutional Sittlichkeit, and 1848 liberalism are not proto totalitarian footnotes. Post 1945 memory often pathologized organic community and Idealism as a road to the Reich, while leaving bureaucratic rationalism and party monopoly less examined. Recovering this lineage means taking civic humanism in German and Habsburg cities, and the constitutional side of Idealism, as resources for non-domination, not as a racial Volk project and not as a thing to be discarded because later nationalists abused the word “culture.” The Hidden West includes this layer, or it becomes an Anglo-Italian souvenir.
Chinese republican thought is the test of whether comparison is serious. Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles, Liang Qichao’s constitutionalism, the Xinhai Revolution, Chen Jiongming’s federalism, Hu Shih’s liberalism, and the unfinished Republic of China are a modern civic humanist project: popular sovereignty, a written constitution, mixed institutions (Sun’s five yuan trying to correct Western gaps with Chinese examination and control), and nationhood as escape from imperial domination rather than as a party church. The Chinese Communist Party claims Sun as “forerunner” while emptying minquan (people’s rights) into tutelage that never ends. Naive Western Sinophiles make the complementary error. They treat the Party state, “civilizational state,” or socialist modernity as the authentic China and as medicine for a hated or exhausted West. That is not comparative wisdom. It is conversion to a rival domination, dressed as humility. A republican comparison says the opposite: China already produced a republican philosophy that the Party buried which I warned you against as a pattern in Civic Republicanism as the Enemy: Marxist, Leninist, and Related Hostility). Admiring Beijing’s order is not respect for Chinese thought; and wanting the West to become like China or recognize the greatness of Marx or recover the purpose of socialism while abusing so much of this long history is wanting administrative monopoly, speech dependence, and the death of mixed government. Recover philosophy like that of Sun, Liang, and the federalists as republicans, and propagandists lose both the monopoly on China and the pose of anti-Western sophistication.
Indigenous republican traditions, especially Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) confederacy under the Great Law of Peace and later Cherokee constitutionalism, belong in the same comparative field without the cartoon that “the Constitution was copied from the Iroquois.” (Amy Sturgis, Liberty in Perfection: Freedom in Native American Thought). 18ᵗʰ century observers such as Cadwallader Colden already called the Five Nations republics, with neither possessing superiority of one over another; and where authority rested on reputation for wisdom, and resolutions not executed by compulsion. The Great Law bound formerly warring nations into a confederacy with checks among peoples and sexes, concern for alliance and peace, and leaders conceived as servants. That is civic practice aimed at non domination and the taming of factional blood, which is republican in the strong sense even where the institutions differ from Cicero or Madison. Treating these traditions only as a prefatory nod in a settler story, or only as a stick against “the West,” repeats the same capture. This is the weakness of the modern leftist framework, which others intuit, but cannot fully and rightly explain, without projecting the modern peculiar racial essentialism, which blames Black people or migrants for everything. They are neither a birthright deed for the American Founding nor an outside to civic humanism. So, these currents are another atlas plate: peoples who built law against arbitrary will without waiting for it.
Renaissance prisca theologia was a genuine scholarly conviction, not a later occultist daydream: Ficino, Pico, and their heirs believed a single ancient wisdom had passed through Hermes, the Chaldaeans, Orpheus, Pythagoras, and Plato, and they used that chain to santify pagan philosophy for Christian humanists. It was, however, an elite and Mediterranean art of concordance, practiced in courts, academies, and learned correspondence, not the working grammar of American republicanism, whose public birthright ran through Cicero and Polybius, common law, covenanted towns, and the Atlantic language of mixed government and non-domination. That historical limit is not a prohibition. The same eclectic instinct that made Florentine scholars treat antiquity as one sea can be adapted, without pretending every citizen inherited Ficino’s library, into a civic prisca: a disciplined recovery of Presocratic, Mesopotamian, Stoic, Italian, early Black republican sources and others as shared instruments of citizen formation rather than as a secret pedigree for the lettered few.
Taken together, the Franco-Continental, Swiss, German & Central European, Chinese republican, and Indigenous lineages do the work that Renaissance prisca theologia cannot do by itself. They show that civic humanism is a comparative discipline, not a Mediterranean club and not a birthright myth. They also draw a bright line the Sinophile cannot cross: to study China, or any people, in republican terms is to ask where citizens were formed and where arbitrary power was checked. The Party state fails that test. So does any Western self-hatred that would trade mixed government for a pretended Eastern wisdom that is, in present tense, Leninist administration. The recovery may have success when these schools are read as one conversation about non-domination, not when one civilization is told to copy or kneel to another.
THE VALUE OF THE CAROLINGIAN RENAISSANCE
A SYNTHESIS OF THESE TRADITIONS YIELDS A POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY centered on a republican framework that prioritizes the common good, civic virtue, and human potential, while eclectically drawing from classical sources to adapt to modern governance. Civic Republicanism provides the core structure of a mixed government that blends elements of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy to prevent domination and corruption, as emphasized by thinkers like Cicero and Machiavelli, who advocated for rule of law, separation of powers, and popular sovereignty. We envision it essentially as infused with Renaissance Humanism’s focus on individual agency and eloquence, where education in the humanities equips citizens to participate actively in public life, reflecting Petrarch’s and Bruni’s ideals of reforming society through classical wisdom. The history and ideas born from Northern Humanism provides a layer of moral prudence and social equality, tempering Italian individualism with Erasmus-inspired ideals of ethical governance rooted in piety and communal welfare.
The immense value of the Carolingian Renaissance is that it contributed a model of centralized yet culturally unified authority, as seen in Charlemagne’s promotion of liberal arts for doctrinal understanding and imperial stability, standardizing practices like grammar and script to foster intellectual cohesion. This an example of a recovered period of classical Eclecticism, which acted as the binding method, selectively integrating the best from Aristotle’s polity, Roman republicanism, and Renaissance innovations to create adaptive policies, e.g., combining property-based personality with humanist education to ensure anti-corruption and self-government. This would manifest as a humanism-infused republicanism where freedom is non-domination, virtue is cultivated through eclectic classical study, and politics serves human flourishing rather than divine or autocratic mandates.
THE NORTHERN AND SOUTHERN (ITALIAN) RENAISSANCES
The roots of AMERICAN REPUBLICAN HERITAGE are connected to the revival of classical culture in the two distinct movements of the Italian Renaissance emerging in the thirteenth-century and Northern Renaissance in the fifteenth-century. The Northern Renaissance flourished in Northern Europe, in especially the Low Countries (Flanders), Germany, France, and England; while (b) the Southern (Italian) Renaissance was centered in Italy (Florence, Rome, Venice, Naples). From Petrarch to Alcuin, REPUBLICANISM incorporates what Wisdom can be gained, whether we speak of the Renaissance secular tradition or Christian HUMANISM. If you excise the principal concern with the welfare of the human and family of humanity, the system is not REPUBLICAN. It falls.
Republicanism harmonizes classical wisdom with faith, and we owe this attitude to many, importantly to Francis Petrarch, promoting inner virtue and communal piety, without rigid dogmatism. The ideas of moderation in Classical Republicanism move through Christian monastic ideals and social teaching to the secular republic. The republican’ attitude towards education, the humanities and the liberal arts, such as grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy have its origins in tradition much further than the Carolingian Renaissance’s revival of scriptural studies and liturgical reforms under the Anglo-Saxon philosopher, Alcuin of York, but Alcuin and the specifics of the two eras are integral to the roots of AMERICAN REPUBLICANISM. The function and model of alternative Classical Studies Schools in our day recognize this issue, and potentially could provide and form the foundation, using a classical liberal arts education to deepen insight and bring up a new culture.
Italian Renaissance Humanism’s secular appreciation of human dignity, which celebrated the individual’s capacity for reason, creativity, and moral agency through the recovery and study of classical texts, would be tempered and elevated by Northern Humanism’s devout integration of these classical sources with Christian ethics, as exemplified in Erasmus’s advocacy for a moral philosophy that combines pious living with scholarly rigor, positioning humanity not merely as rational beings but as stewards of divine creation entrusted with the responsibility to cultivate virtue Civic virtue and civic humanism are framed as a sacred moral duty, integral to American Republicanism, but so is the Christian social teaching of charity, where Aristotle’s idea of human flourishing (eudaimonia) was interpreted during the Renaissance as a divinely ordained path achieved through active participation in the RES PUBLICA, transforming political engagement into a form of spiritual practice that nurtures inner BEING and unfolds human potentialities. Classical eclecticism is also important to this history, because eclecticism is the integrative mechanism, which facilitated the development of combinations of Platonic ideals of the soul with divine Stoicism and Christian theology, creating a flexible spirituality that selects virtuous elements from antiquity to enhance faith. For instance, we must take into account both Cicero’s Roman republican emphasis on justice as a divine harmony that binds society and Carolingian monastic reforms, which prioritized contemplative prayer and scholarly devotion.
What we call the analogetic method of interpreting myths and symbols as expressions of soul experiences provides a means for eclectically grasping, e.g., the Kabbalistic, Hermetic traditions, and Neoplatonic revivalism that Renaissance figures were influenced by, enabling people learning to discern universal truths across pagan, Christian, and mystical sources without dogmatic constraints. The developments from ancient analogetic interpretations to Renaissance revivalism influenced philosophical and theological thought by promoting a non-Eurocentric view that incorporates Mediterranean wisdom traditions and shows that theosophy is the birthright of humanity.
Religion here can be genuinely revived as active and humanistic, fostering new attitudes through the same eclectic classical-Christian expression that has been emerging among theologians, and where education brings human purpose in civic life.
As it is understood now, these influences of the Humanities and Religion face difficulties in a secularized-materialist dominated society. Education in the humanities and liberal arts are supposed to give fire to individuals to access the flints of a primordial gnosis that transcends cultural boundaries, which is our innate, gifted wisdom to intuit the interconnectedness of nature and its depth. It lies in the Pre-Stoic Roots of Human Rights Theory in the United States.
A synthesis would provide these things, but in truth, there is no need for developing a new synthesis, because it already exists. The heritage of American Republicanism combines Stoicism, Carolingian scholarship, Renaissance HUMANISM and Enlightenment era developments; and not to flex an illusion of prestige, but as an aid and expression of civilizational wisdom. This synthesis however, when it is expressed again, e.g., by Christians who genuinely seek to continue the efforts of those before them and not modern Political Zionism, should emphasize a Christian humanism, not a Christian nationalism, that harmonizes classical wisdom with faith, promoting inner virtue, communal piety, and a profound sense of divine intuition without rigid dogmatism. A study and adaptation of the Carolingian Renaissance’s revival of scriptural studies and liturgical reforms under Alcuin would form the foundational layer, utilizing education in the liberal arts such as grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy to deepen insight and even in its certain spheres unify believers through meticulously preserved ancient texts, standardized liturgical practices, and monastic scholarship, thereby creating a structured yet accessible path to divine understanding that echoes the Carolingian emphasis on intellectual cohesion for spiritual harmony. Go, look back and study this history. This foundation is enlightened by integrating classic philosophical roots in ancient European and Mediterranean thought, rather than holding them in contention and jealousy.
Italian Renaissance Humanism’s secular appreciation of human dignity, which celebrated the individual’s capacity for reason, creativity, and moral agency through the recovery and study of classical texts, would be tempered and elevated by Northern Humanism’s devout integration of these classical sources with Christian ethics, as exemplified in Erasmus’s advocacy for a moral philosophy that combines pious living with scholarly rigor, positioning humanity not merely as rational beings but as stewards of divine creation entrusted with the responsibility to cultivate virtue in alignment with the God of Nature.
Civic Republicanism contributes a spiritual dimension by framing civic virtue as a sacred moral duty, where the pursuit of patriotism, justice, and the common good aligns seamlessly with Christian charity and communal welfare, reinterpreting Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia (or human flourishing) as a divinely ordained path achieved through active participation in the res publica, thereby transforming political engagement into a form of spiritual practice that nurtures the soul’s growth. This republican spiritual ethos would be deepened by fostering a spirituality that views civic life as an arena for manifesting higher truths and ethical harmony.
In the republican model, classical eclecticism serves as the integrative mechanism, allowing for the selective blending of Platonic ideals of the immortal soul and its ascent toward the divine, Stoic principles of resilience, inner tranquility, and acceptance of fate as part of a cosmic order, and Christian theology’s focus on grace, redemption, and love, thereby creating a flexible, adaptive spirituality that draws the most virtuous and enlightening elements from antiquity to enhance and revitalize faith in contemporary contexts. For instance, Cicero’s Roman republican emphasis on justice as a divine harmony that binds society could be fused with Carolingian monastic reforms, which prioritized contemplative prayer and scholarly devotion, while the classic analogetic method of interpreting myths and symbols as expressions of soul experiences, would provide a tool for eclectically synthesizing these traditions, enabling you to discern universal truths across pagan, Christian, and mystical sources without dogmatic constraints.
Spirituality ought to become profoundly active and humanistic, where education in the humanities and liberal arts provides a sense of divine purpose woven into civic life, empowering individuals. This infusion would counteract rigid dogmatism by emphasizing experiential knowledge over blind faith, encouraging a communal piety that unites diverse believers in a shared quest for wisdom, moral elevation, and soulful harmony, while advancing the goal of human flourishing as stewards of the cosmos. The spiritual realm of this synthesis would manifest as a vibrant tapestry of divine wisdom traditions, where Carolingian scholarly unity, Renaissance humanistic dignity, republican virtuous duty, eclectic classical blending, and classic mystical intuition converge to create a holistic path of enlightenment, promoting inner virtue through contemplation, communal bonds through shared ethical pursuits, and a profound sense of connection to the super-sensible truths that underlie existence.
A genuine republican model would promote an educated, virtuous society where individualism coexists with communal harmony, drawing from humanist ideals to elevate daily life and reduce hierarchies.
Italian Renaissance Humanism’s celebration of human potential through broad education would encourage social mobility and eloquence, while Northern Humanism’s focus on piety and detailed realism in art would reflect everyday peasant life and moral equality, as seen in depictions of domestic interiors and simple devotion. The Carolingian Renaissance’s emphasis on literacy and cultural patronage would standardize social practices, like widespread schooling and arts revival, to unify diverse populations under shared knowledge.
Civic Republicanism reinforces social bonds through anti-domination and civic participation, minimizing corruption and empowering the weak via property rights and common good pursuits. Classical Eclecticism enables mixing social elements, e.g., Roman civic duty with Renaissance genre scenes creates inclusive norms, blending elite patronage with the realism of the common citizen for a society that values both individual achievement and collective welfare. This would result in a socially dynamic structure, with education as the equalizer, art as moral mirror, and virtue as the glue holding diverse classes together.
It would lastly, manifest as an engaged polity where citizens actively shape their community through virtuous participation, supported by eclectic cultural revival. Civic Republicanism’s core of civic virtue, patriotism, and self-government would drive public involvement, with mixed institutions ensuring checks on power and promotion of the res publica. The incorporation and understanding of the value of Renaissance Humanism, both Italian and Northern, would fuel this through education in rhetoric and history, preparing citizens for eloquent debate and ethical action, as Petrarch and Erasmus envisioned. There are already institutions and homeschooling that focus on this, but it ought to be the norm of a republican system inspired by its lineage.
The influence of the Carolingian Renaissance would lead to expression that combines civic infrastructure through patronage of arts, architecture, and learning centers, like Charlemagne’s Aachen palace, which embodied unified public spaces for cultural exchange. Diverse civic elements, e.g., Athenian democracy with Roman forums and Renaissance innovations for adaptive public institutions could be integrated through classical eclectic approach, such as eclectic architecture blending classical columns with humanist motifs to inspire communal pride. Ultimately, civics would emphasize active citizenship, where eclectic synthesis of traditions fosters resilient communities committed to liberty, virtue, and shared prosperity.
REPUBLICAN RECOVERY FOR THE GENERATIONS HERE AND AFTER
A recovery of classical civic republicanism is our primary lens, and its victory will be a victory for many other related schools as well. That follows from the anthropology. It is language, history, philosophy, rhetoric, and the slow work of institutions that treat a young person as a future peer in self government rather than as a client, a consumer, or a culture war recruit. Degenerated civics and a collapsed political vocabulary are therefore not separate crises from the exile of the humanities. They are the same exile seen from the forum.
The humanities regain a purpose older than “employability” and older than the seminar as a machine for unmasking. Republican letters asked what kind of soul can bear liberty without becoming a factional instrument. Poetry, history, moral philosophy, and oratory were civic arts because they trained judgment, measure, and the capacity to see a common thing. Petrarch’s revival of letters was already a republican act: the dead were summoned so the living could speak as citizens rather than as courtiers. A victory for the tradition would not baptize every current humanities department. It would restore the humanities as citizen formation against ignorance, corruption, and domination, which is the duty assigned to every republican thinker.
The classics are not a heritage brand for a civilizational fortress. They are the first archive of the questions the recovery puts first: mixed constitution in Polybius and Cicero; corruption and libertas in Sallust and Livy; law and office in Roman republican practice; the Presocratic and Stoic roots the site refuses to treat as optional preface. When the classics are taught only as “Western Civilizational” property, or only as a text to be indicted, both uses are captures! Black classicists already proved the point the other way using the republican idiom as weapons against domination, not as a deed to a complexion. A republican victory would make that use normal again. Greek and Latin would cease to be luxury electives for the professionally established and return, at least in ambition, to the status they had in early Black republican education and in the civic schools of the early American republic: instruments of speech and self-command. Then perhaps, you will not feel it so difficult to act, speak and write as those before us have rose to.
Language studies follow for the same reason. A citizen who cannot hear Cicero, Machiavelli, Mazzini, or Douglass in their actual grain will receive them only through the slogans of the present axis. Latin and Greek, Italian of the Risorgimento, the English of early American and Black republican oratory, even the older civic vocabularies buried under “democracy” as a feel word: these are not ornaments. They are how non domination was argued before it was translated into tax charts and identity inventories.
Tocqueville’s worry that the political language of the American was degenerating took place after the mid-19ᵗʰ century! The momentum of inspiration from the period combined with the hoary past in the ideal underlying the early American republic was not maintained. We indict what we cannot ourselves reproduce, it seems. Only now, you focus on translating ancient texts and aiding in the understanding of students toward them to understand our errors at present. Recover the thing and you must recover the tongues in which the thing was precise. Translation alone will not save a tradition whose enemies copied its words and then claimed to have invented freedom.
Forgotten institutions are the body of the same soul. Lyceums and mechanics institutes, classical academies and normal schools that still taught rhetoric, town meetings and ward associations that were schools of office, mutual aid and producer societies that aimed at independence rather than clientage, the early Black churches and debating societies that trained public speech, Carbonari and Mazzinian networks that treated moral association as the seed of a republic, even the neglected civic side of fraternal orders: these were intermediate bodies that kept power from becoming a direct relation between isolated persons and a distant will. The modern axis replaces them with parties, platforms, HR offices, and agencies. Reject one party logic and the hope that oligarchs will repent. I ask for associations of republican thinkers, civic education, and the embodiment of character. That is institution building, not commentary. Archives, journals, schools, libraries of civic classics, local forums that practice deliberation instead of branding are the work of Atlases and the noetic quality. Can you build and hold up the weight so a kosmos of ordered liberty may exist?
The humanities, the classics, and language study do not survive long as museum wings of a managerial society or as chapels of a single ideology y’know. They survive when a public still believes that letters make citizens. Forgotten institutions do not return because a foundation funds a replica. They return when people again need places in which to practice non domination. A victory for the republican tradition would be a victory for those schools and houses because it would give them a common end that is neither the fortress West nor the program of the professional class: the formation of persons who can share rule, bear law, and refuse to treat polish, pedigree, or party as a title to command.
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A republic is not a platform slogan. It is a people formed by letters, speech, memory, and institutions that teach citizens how not to live under arbitrary will. If that formation returns as a public purpose, the disciplines and houses that once carried it rise with it. A victory for the recovery of the republican tradition would necessarily be a victory for other schools of thought, fields of study (e.g., The Humanities, The Classics, Language Studies) and forgotten institutions.
From the Roman Republic through Charlemagne’s commonwealth to the Haitian and American revolutions, one tradition alone has fought arbitrary power in every age: the civic republican tradition. We are its living heirs.
REM PUBLICAM SALVAM ESSE VOLYMVS (“We wish the republic to be safe”) SALUS POPULI SUPREMA LEX ESTO (“Let the welfare of the people be the supreme law”)
