Category Archives: Personal Philosophy and Moral Economics

In my life I have only recently begun to advocate radical political change in a medium as permanent, easily traceable and permanently accessible as a blog in my own name. It is a very small and slow process which compensates for its low probability of success mostly by being risky and unpaid.  Nonetheless,  it is a very serious little enterprise and so I am always able to find something  to work on within this advocacy and change modeling process. In this post I want to discuss how my model relates to the idea of republicanism and the history of republicanism within the United States of America. It is not an absolute rejection of republicanism.

One assertion that I have made in the past is that America was set upon the path of Rome as it went through its original republican revolution.  It is in one of the many posts that make up this model:  https://franksummers3ba.wordpress.com/2010/05/12/the-direct-imperial-government-in-the-new-american-regime-part-three/ and which ought to be read to fully understand what is being discussed. The point I am making there cannot be explained without considerable knowledge of both Roman and American history. However, one sign of the Roman quality of American Civilization is found in another post of this blog. It is the fact that we have a capital city which stands at a unique level and is not lost in our complex balance of the Union of States in these United States.

I have these nesting quotes on point: “To quote myself in a Facebook note I wrote on Western Civilization, “If Greece is ultimately our culture and Jesus is ultimately our conscience then what is missing. Neither Jesus nor Greece gave us a capital. Rome is the Capital of Western Civilization. That is actually Rome’s greatest achievement in my view. It is not insignificant. In Rome our center hold in some way none of us really understand but for reasons that fill libraries as well. Only in the Forbidden City and the Temple of Heaven in Beijing China have I found anything which approaches the feel of Rome. They are very different. Rome is more our cultural capital even now when we are hardly existing as a unity than Beijing is China’s cultural capital.” Both our revolutionary Founding Fathers and this revolution would seek to emulate much of what was best in Rome. A large part of it would be an effort to have a great and effective capital city.”

Now  the post for which I gave the link above states briefly how our Founding Fathers expected America to follow the path from royalist agrarianism to republicanism and into Empire. “One must remember that this would be a revolution that leaves the vast preponderance of resources in a slightly altered set of institutions that have evolved within a republican structure.  This is a very American approach since America’s 200 and more republican years have merged from a relatively slightly modified version of British and Arcadian-Acadian royalist regimes mixed with Iroquois Chieftainly confederated mixed government  seen through the lense of Greek Classical political science and the Roman republics emergence from the Kingdom of the City of Rome. In the tradition we now would move like Rome from Republic to Empire. However, the American enterprise has never been a purist enterprise and this is not a purist’s proposal.” 

Most of our words related to theories of government have Greek roots and are basically Greek. These include democracy, oligarchy, aristocracy, monarchy, tyranny, politics, police and others. However republic and republicanism are Latin in root and origin despite the prominence of Plato’s account of the Socratic dialog Republic. The real name of the book is Politea which more or less means Politics. However, since English has called Aristotle’s great work Politics it is easier for us to call this earlier book Republic. It is also true that “City-State Politics” might better translate Plato’s title.  The very Roman concept of republic had not been invented in Plato’s time but they did get most of its elements from Greece.  Greece had conquered colonized and formed much of the cultural environment in Italy in which Rome grew to maturity. That is true although ancient Rome was one of the less Greek parts of that world until they started conquering Greeks of the aging and crumbling Hellenic Empires that also did not exist when Plato wrote or Socrates spoke. Republic is the joining of two Latin words: res and publica and begins as a phrase res publica before being contracted into republica.   The phrase means the public thing. There is a difference between a true Hellenic or Greek King and a Norse or Teutonic King in classic times. There is even more of a difference between a true Emperor and such Northern or some far Eastern despots. Christianity which is Hebrew and Greek and Roman as Hitler rightly pointed out brought to the North of Europe the balance that Henry VIII and the Lutheran Princes began to erode. In Christian Europe of the Middle Ages the King might own a great deal but God owned a lot as well through the democratic and aristocratic structures of the Catholic Church. Thus the Public Thing survives and the realm is not merely a possession of the King.  It was against this resurgence of a state which is not really public and constitutional that the Americans fought the revolution.

The new Empire proposed here will pay due respect to the Northern and Western origins of so many of the citizen-subjects of the proposed regime. It will recognize the Protestant importance which really eroded so much of the European consensus. However, it will recognize that there is a long tie of Celts to Greece, that England and earlier Britain were so much part of this constitutional public tradition for so long. Finally it will recognize that our Founding Father’s set us on the path of Rome expecting us to be an Empire some day. They hoped for an Empire directly springing from and formed by a republican period. We have reached the point where our republic has matured and must either decay into something vile or mature into a true Empire of the type intended. Therefore I do not believe myself a traitor to American Republicanism but rather one proclaiming the time and place has come to fulfill it or lose it.