Democratic Republicanism and the Greening of Citizenship

• In Event: Untangling the Mess: The Promise and Peril of Eco-Progressive Politics

Abstract

Efforts to ‘green’ republican citizenship have to date focused on the positive promotion of democratic-environmentalist virtues. While laudable, such vanguardism does however underplay the negative role that the majority of citizens must play, if they are to effectively resist political and environmental domination. This issue is resolved on the basis of insights drawn from the democratic strand of republicanism. Green republicans synthesize neo-republican commitments to formal equality and the virtue of contestation in the electoral-representative system with a civic-humanist concept of ‘positive’ freedom that is, in fact, inimical to republican freedom as nondomination. Green democratic republicanism avows formalized inequality, extends the virtue of negative contestation to constraining the impunity enjoyed by wealthy minorities in relation to law and regulation while maintaining republican freedom. Modeled on Machiavelli’s ‘republican realism’, negative contestation preserves freedom (rejects positive freedom) by building majoritarian support for class-specific institutions designed merely to curtail illegitimate wealthy-minority impunity. Formal means for realizing such curtailment include institutions that restrict membership to those in the bottom ninety percent of the wealth/income distribution and are drawn by lot. Such institutions would be empowered to regularly review actions undertaken by wealthy minority-citizens’ closest political allies, elected legislators and/or executives while in office, and to veto a pre-specified number of these, or to apply penalties retrospectively.

Author

• Andy Scerri, Virginia Tech