[Republican virtues: interdisciplinary reflections between antiquity and the contemporary world]

Edited by Marco Barducci

This dossier collects the contributions of the conference "Republican virtues: interdisciplinary reflections between antiquity and contemporaneity" held at the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the University of Pavia on 10 October 2024. The organisation of this conference is part of the research and third mission activities promoted by the Pavia research unit belonging to the national project Lexicon for the republic: from municipal self-government to a united Europe coordinated by Professor Maurizio Ridolfi at the University of Tuscia, and financed by the Presidency of the Council of Ministers (National anniversaries and national and international sporting events mission structure). The title of the dossier may suggest the idea of the univocity and coherence of the object of investigation of the various contributions (the ‘republican virtues’), which are examined here with a multidisciplinary viewpoint and along a chronological span ranging from antiquity to the present day. In fact, this dossier, and of course the conference from which it has taken its cue, aims to problematise precisely the relationship between virtue and republic, which is why I consider it useful to briefly clarify in this introduction what its aims are. To this end, I intend to begin with an analysis of the title itself. First of all, examined through the lens of an interdisciplinary gaze that combines history, philology, pedagogy and constitutionalism, the ‘republican virtues’ appear as a corpus of concepts ranging from amor patriae to fraternity, whose common roots can indeed be traced back to Greco-Roman culture, but whose composition and meaning vary in time and space in response to different circumstances and political, social and economic contexts, as well as to different ideas of ‘republic’.  Here, for example, the promotion of community welfare over egoistic-individual welfare, even in the pursuit of the ‘good life. ', is central to both classical and humanistic-Renaissance culture and paideia, but then leaves room, between the 17th and 19th centuries, for various attempts to harmonise individual initiative and collective well-being in response to the emergence first of the trading society and later of the industrial society. Secondly, the very relationship between virtue and republic(ness) is not so straightforward, but rather it is rather complex, if not at times even contradictory. In part, this situation stems from the ambiguity of the very notion of res-publica, understood both as the primacy of the collective interest, as an alternative form of government to monarchy, and as a synonym for ‘state’. . The tendency, promoted by a certain Anglo-Saxon literature, to separate ‘constitutional’ republicanism from the tradition of civic humanism has certainly contributed to making this relationship particularly complex. One of the consequences of such a distinction is that ‘republican virtues’ have been identified in countries, such as England for example, which, with the exception of the very brief (and unsuccessful) Commonwealth interlude, have never established a republican order.
The importance of civic virtues and the need to promote them in the community are also central aspects of contemporary republican thinking. Within the so-called ‘neo-republican’ theory, for example, the importance of the virtues in the defence of political freedom is sometimes invoked in support of institutions and norms, sometimes instead as the basis for the active citizenship's contestation of the various forms of domination. The reference to the virtues not only as a moral and political tradition to be explored in a long-term framework, but also as a goal to be realised through political and educational initiatives, is therefore a theme that lends itself to reflections straddling the realist analysis and the normative-prescriptive dimension.
In line with these trends, this dossier also intends to demonstrate how the relationship between virtue and republic from antiquity to the present is still in the making, as it is historically conditioned as much by contextual factors as by political and ideological agendas, which revolve first and foremost around the definition of the controversial idea of the ‘republic’, the very crux of our common discussion.