The unfinished republican economy examines how classical and early modern requirements of non-domination and widespread material independence remain incomplete in modern commercial society. It contrasts those standards with later frameworks that prioritize systemic replacement or administrative correction, showing why recovery of the older sequence still supplies a distinct measure for business, economics, and political practice.
PROPERTY, DEBT, LUXURY, AND WAGE DEPENDENCE ARE THE material conditions the tradition has always treated as politically decisive. Harrington’s agrarian seeks to freeze a balance of land that keeps citizens independent. Hume and Jefferson describe public debt as a machine that creates a creditor class and a government organized around the service of that class. Sallust and later moralists treat luxury as the solvent of the habits that make shared rule possible. Wage dependence raises the further question whether those who must sell their labor daily can possess the independence the citizen was said to require. Cooperation, in Blanc’s workshops, in Mill’s chapters, and in the Grange, proposes productive associations that do not leave participants as permanent dependents on a private owner or on a state bureau.
The commercial republic is the unfinished argument. It accepts the productivity of the division of labor and of mobile capital, yet it has not settled how the older concern with independence is to be met once land is no longer the dominant form of property. The argument has already been started in the encounter between Harrington and Smith, in the warnings about debt, and in the experiments with cooperation. It remains unfinished because no stable institutional answer has replaced the agrarian law as the material foundation of a large commercial republic. These essays to be gathered that deal with the unfinished republican economy contain the diagnoses and the partial remedies but declines to claim that it contains a completed solution.
Adam Smith’s framework is not identical to the later polemical use of “capitalism,” nor to classical republican economic concerns, nor to twentieth-century consumer capitalism. Smith’s framework, classical republican independence, and late consumer capitalism are three things that need to be distinguished, because there is a nation-wide problem when it comes to our political, civic and economic foundations.
Smith’s commercial society (The Wealth of Nations, 1776, and The Theory of Moral Sentiments) treats the division of labor, voluntary exchange, and the pursuit of self-interest under rules of justice as generators of prosperity. He expected commerce to foster certain virtues of prudence, punctuality and reliability, while remaining wary of luxury and the corruption of manners. Government’s role was limited to defense, justice, and certain public works. Self-interest was not licensed as unlimited acquisitiveness; it operated inside a moral psychology of sympathy and the impartial spectator. Smith was anti-mercantilist, not a theorist of mass consumer culture. Classical republican economic thought all the way into the history of Jeffersonian strains prioritized the independent citizen, typically the small freeholder, whose material independence signed-off civic virtue and resistance to dependence on patrons or the state. Luxury, concentration of wealth, and excessive commerce were viewed as threats that could erode public spirit and produce factions or servility. The goal was not maximum output but a citizenry capable of self-government. Hamiltonian commercial republicanism accepted more finance and manufacturing but still subordinated them to the republic’s political requirements.
The term “capitalism” became polemical mainly in the nineteenth-century, especially under Marxist usage that identified the system with wage labor, surplus extraction, and class antagonism. It is not a neutral description of Smith’s commercial society. Later “racial capitalism” frameworks, popularized by Cedric Robinson and adopted in much contemporary Black critical thought, treat race as constitutive of the capitalist order itself, collapsing historical slavery, colonialism, and modern markets into a single system of racial extraction. This reading is analytically loose: it stipulates what needs explanation and often treats ordinary commercial success by Black entrepreneurs or households as either exceptional or complicit. Modern consumer-capitalism, encompassing post-1945 mass production, advertising, easy credit and welfare-state transfers mixed with markets, is a further development. It prioritizes demand stimulation, status through consumption, and short-term gratification. Its cultural effects, advertising of luxury, sexualization of consumption and credit-driven lifestyle inflation, are distinct from both Smith’s prudence-oriented commerce and classical republican suspicion of luxury. These influences operate across groups but interact with specific policy incentives such as welfare rules that reduced the economic return to marriage, and cultural messaging.
Contemporary consumer culture supplies status goods, media models of immediate gratification, and commercialized sexual norms that sit uneasily with the older republican emphasis on independence and delayed consumption. Smith’s commercial society supplies tools (exchange, specialization, capital accumulation under rules of justice) that can serve such ends, while modern consumer culture often undermines them by elevating display and dependence. Distinguishing these three, Smith’s framework, classical republican independence, and late consumer capitalism explains why the wide general critique under capitalism make internal cultural work harder rather than easier, against the habit of externalized blame. The republican tradition can be carried without treating every commercial instrument as an enemy or every shortfall as someone else’s permanent project.
A recovery of the republican tradition in schools of business, economics, and philosophy would therefore begin from this distinction rather than from the Marxist premise that commercial society is a system to be replaced. It would ask how the tools of exchange and capital can be ordered so that they enlarge the independence of households and citizens instead of feeding the status competition and dependence that late consumer culture intensifies. The unfinished republican economy remains the more precise problem: not the abolition of commercial instruments, but their subordination to the older requirements of non-domination, civic capacity, and restraint of faction.
Marxist analysis, the modern Republican Party’s blend of managerial conservatism and electoral incentives, corporate and neoliberal market prioritization, and technocratic administrative expertise each treat the republican requirements of non-domination, widespread material independence, civic virtue, and mixed restraint of concentrated power as either obsolete, secondary, or actively obstructive to their preferred ends. Each has directed resources toward curricula, research programs, journals, and professional norms that organize business, economics, and philosophy around class antagonism and systemic replacement, organic national hierarchy, party and donor priorities, efficiency under concentrated capital, or expert optimization of outcomes. The result is not a neutral marketplace of ideas in which the older tradition simply failed to compete on merit. It is a field in which alternative foundations have been crowded by sustained material and status investment.
That crowding, however, is itself evidence of the unfinished character of the republican project rather than proof that schools cannot recover it. The tradition’s core claims remain available as standards that none of the dominant alternatives have rendered obsolete by demonstrated success.
The Marxist expectation that replacement of “the system” would dissolve domination has not closed the practical gaps in independence or virtue. Last century, Fascist and related hierarchical projects collapsed under their own concentrations of arbitrary power; and in ours, partisan and neoliberal variants have produced new forms of dependence and faction without restoring the older sequence. Technocratic approaches optimize within existing concentrations rather than dispersing them. Because these projects continue to compete by institutional means, recovery requires precisely the free adherence they seek to preempt: scholars and practitioners in the schools treating the republican criteria as live measures against which commercial instruments, administrative schemes, and revolutionary claims can be tested, rather than as relics already displaced by better-funded alternatives. The difficulty is political and cultural, not conceptual, because the tradition’s resources for judging independence and non-domination have not been refuted by the outcomes of the projects that displaced them.
A modern recovery of the republican tradition in schools of business, economics, and philosophy would reorient those fields around the older requirements of non-domination, material independence, and the common good rather than the Marxist grammar of base and superstructure, class antagonism, and revolutionary replacement of “the system.” Business education would treat the firm and the household enterprise less as vehicles of extraction or pure shareholder maximization and more as instruments for securing the independence of persons against arbitrary power, whether of concentrated capital, state agencies, or factional patronage. Economic inquiry would recover the unfinished republican economy: the practical question of how property, credit, skill, and association can be widely enough distributed that citizens are not reduced to dependence, while still restraining the oligarchic concentrations and public debt that classical and early modern republicans identified as sources of corruption.
Philosophy would once again treat civic virtue, the restraint of private passions, and the conditions of equal standing under law as central problems rather than as ideological residues to be dissolved by materialist critique. The result would not be a simple return to any past equilibrium, but a living standard against which both market outcomes and administrative schemes could be measured by whether they enlarge or diminish the capacity of ordinary citizens to form households, enterprises, and judgments free from unaccountable will.
Americans have drifted from those foundations precisely because the dominant alternatives, like Marxist analysis on one side and its various liberal or technocratic successors on the other, have treated the constitutional and civic order as either a superstructure to be superseded or a set of procedures whose substance can be left to markets and administrative expertise. The vaguely termed “system” and the equally vague “Revolution” that is supposed to replace it leave the practical tasks of independence, mixed institutions, and public-spirited association unexamined. By contrast, the unfinished republican economy remains intriguing because it never completed the work of securing widespread material standing without creating new forms of dependence or faction. A revival would force business, economics, and philosophy to confront that incomplete project directly: how to design incentives, property arrangements, and educational practices that make domination harder rather than merely redistributing its fruits or awaiting its abolition. The alternative has already had its period of influence; the republican sequence of independence followed by equal civic standing supplies a different and still available measure.
As to the democratic socialists and social democrats, they might claim the capacity to repair the unfinished republican economy and the drift from foundations, yet their frameworks remain incapable of doing so because they subordinate the older requirements of non-domination and material independence to state-mediated redistribution, group equity, and the expansion of administrative power. Where the republican tradition judges commercial instruments and property arrangements by whether they secure the standing of ordinary citizens against arbitrary will, whether of concentrated capital, faction or public agencies, these projects treat concentrated ownership and market outcomes primarily as sites of extraction to be corrected through taxation, regulation, public ownership, or mandated transfers. The result preserves or intensifies dependence: households and persons remain subject to the discretionary power of the administrative state and the political coalitions that direct it, while civic virtue and the restraint of private passions are displaced by the expectation that structural adjustment will dissolve the need for them. Because their diagnosis continues to locate the decisive problem in “the system” of capital rather than in the incomplete distribution of independence and the conditions of equal standing under law, they cannot recover the sequence early republican practice (including its Black American articulations) treated as foundational. They can only manage the consequences of its absence while competing for the same institutional ground already occupied by other projects of replacement or optimization.
Americans continue to drift from the republican foundations of non-domination, material independence, and civic partnership because successive projects whether Marxist, social-democratic, neoliberal, or technocratic, have treated those requirements as secondary or obstructive while directing resources toward their own competing visions. The unfinished republican economy remains unaddressed precisely because the dominant alternatives have not restored the sequence of widespread standing against arbitrary power; they have managed dependence, intensified faction, or deferred the practical tasks of virtue and self-command to structural replacement or administrative adjustment. Without a recovery that measures commercial instruments, state action, and cultural norms by whether they enlarge the independence of ordinary citizens, the drift will persist and the older resources for restraining it will stay displaced.
References I recommend would be to return to James Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), David Hume, “Of Public Credit,” 1752, Thomas Jefferson’s letters on debt and independence, Louis Blanc’s Organisation du travail, and John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy (Book IV, chapter 7).
