Dreams of a Mechanics’ Republic
Jottings about various historical perspectives on commonwealths, elitism, and the value of labor.
“Man has no property in man; neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to follow.” — Thomas Paine
Almost two years ago (egads!) I wrote that the “common quip that the United States is a ‘republic not a democracy’” reflects the long-lasting legacy of republicanism.
The fruit of a remarkably enjoyable political theory course taught by Ted Miller at the University of Alabama, that particular article focused on Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy. (A text which deserves to be read far more widely than The Prince.)
Republicanism-by-ways-of-Machiavelli, I argued, provides an intellectual justification for a reimagining of our public institutions: “new public fora, new ways of rewarding those who act in the public interest, and new ways of curbing the returns to the myopically self-interested.” But I didn’t highlight, save perhaps subtextually, the radical implications of republicanism.
It’s a common observation that the United States, a country founded by violent revolution, is naturally unfertile ground for Burkean conservativism. This remains true despite the countless patient counselors trying to make that marriage work. Willmoore Kendall and George Carey’s attempt to locate the founding of America at Plymouth Rock and identify continuity between colonial assemblies and republican legislatures is one noteworthy attempt, Lincoln’s Lyceum address arguably another.1
Yet in 1776 Thomas Paine did declare that “we have it in our power to begin the world over again”2 (hardly a small-c conservative statement). Over the intervening centuries, the relative excesses of the French Revolution and resultant intra-American political squabbles have acted to provide a respectable gloss to this ambition. The fact is that in the 1770s America’s Founding Fathers looked at centuries of time-honored tradition and instead took up arms to defend the principle that “all men are created equal.” A principle that has continued to inspire advocates for justice and democracy for centuries, despite how individual Fathers constantly betrayed it.
And while the worst fears of conservatives by and large never came to pass, rejecting royal rule did embolden the critics of many other time-tested institutions. If, as Michael Oakeshott said, being conservative “is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, … present laughter to utopian bliss,” then the revolutionary spirit and the conservative one were hardly complementary.
Political theorist Matt McManus puts it well in his recent book, The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism: “Each blow to the ruling ideology of hierarchical complementarity by liberals depreciated its prestige, making the next blow swifter and more damaging” (44). (To illustrate this point, McManus makes good use of John Adams’ condescending response to his wife inquiring about women’s rights.)
Historian Sean Wilentz penned an essay along similar lines for the NYRB last year convincingly arguing that the American Revolution was “the most profound antislavery political event in history to its time.” Once the arbitrary rule of kings had been overthrown, abolitionists could create and then utilize “a view of the Revolution that was not only antislavery but explicitly opposed to racial enslavement,” Wilentz claims.
This secular language of freedom from domination armed opponents of private property and oppressive employers as well as abolitionists. Tom O’Shea, a political theorist at the University of Edinburgh, has produced several interesting papers about radical republicanism, especially of the socialist variety. And Alex Gourevitch, of Brown University, wrote a rather enjoyable paper about the republicanism of the Knights of Labor. (Unfortunately I’ve not had time to read his 2014 book on the subject yet.)
In Wilentz’s first book, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, he offered a striking portrait of Thomas Skidmore, the radical acolyte of Thomas Paine. One of the key figures in the Workingmen’s Party in the 1820s (an eclectic assortment of deists and reformers), Skidmore’s proposal was a bit more ambitious than the rest of his ilk: “the lawful seizure of government by the poor and the ‘friends of equal rights,’ and the expropriation and equal redistribution of all existing property” (186).
Wilentz explains that “it was the Revolution, and especially the work of Paine, that originally inspired his politics and gave him the title of his book.” Skidmore’s proposals in The Rights of Man to Property! may have gone far beyond Paine’s late-in-life proposals for a welfare state funded by taxes on inheritances, but the New York artisan still intended “to secure a truly egalitarian small producers’ republic” (188-189).
While this specific almost Babeufian tendency never got all that much traction, ideologies popular with the urban masses still tended to be anti-elitism in their orientation and generally skeptical of power.3 In Paul Faller’s study of Lynn, Massachusetts, Mechanics and Manufacturers in the Early Industrial Revolution, he provides a nice summary of Lynn artisans’ “producerist” ideology:
“The social structure should reflect the hierarchy of human needs, giving first rank to the producers and relegating the parasitic nonproducers to the bottom of society. Power, position and prestige should go to those groups that were essential for the maintenance of human life. … Respectability and the full rights of citizenship—equality before the law, civil and political rights—were the just due of farmers, journeymen, and other workingmen, who for centuries had existed on the periphery of aristocratic society, a degraded and servile race.” (31)
In Lynn, left unable to bear the poor working conditions, long hours, and lack of control over their fates that shoemaking entailed, shoemakers created producers’ cooperatives (184), mutual benefit societies (197-198), independent newspapers (199), and cooperative stores (200-201). They ran for office (204-206). And when, in 1860, at the advent of the factory system, shoe bosses refused to implement pay increases, the journeymen went on strike (226-233).
That drive to create independent, republican institutions when faced with economic and political domination also notably manifested itself in the Populist movement. (Indeed, it arguably was the genesis of Populism as a movement, rather than the other way around.) As late as the 1890s, republicanism was a true fighting faith.
Today, those most predisposed to squawk that “this is a republic, not a democracy” have forgotten what it means for a nation to be a republic. Where classic republicanism, in the words of Bruce Laurie, “posed an enduring tension between virtue and commerce, the self and the market,” self-professed fans of the republic today deny this tension exists.
The producerist ethics common in the first decades of the American republic have been cannibalized in favor of the glorification of market income, a marked downgrade especially apparent recently. For instance, in order to keep the corpse of Twitter staggering around, Elon opted to embolden and enable the grifters that have always been on the site. Show Musk some respect (to the tune of $8 a month) and keep people’s eyeballs on the site and he’ll cut you a check.
One of Trump’s winning campaign messages (which Harris sought to defang) was that he would keep crypto scams running. Even if Trump did not use those exact words, he went from calling Bitcoin “based on thin air” to putting a pro-crypto fox in charge of the regulatory henhouse awful quick. Meanwhile, even traditional investments have grown ever further from their ostensible purpose: facilitating expenditures on physical capital and R&D.
If still a skeptic, look at the AI hucksters promising “passive income” if you’ll just pollute our informational ecosystem with more AI-generated YouTube videos. Or that plague of “drop shippers” a couple years ago. I may still question Marxists who claim the economy is dominated by “merchant” or “finance” capital, but it is certainly no longer any real source of opprobrium to be ‘nonproductive’ in the way artisan-republicans understood it.
Now, to be sure, the dissolution of that stigma around not being “productive” is not all bad. One of the longest lasting conservative talking points against creating a functioning welfare state has been the importance of work, to the immense detriment of many single parents and their children.
But there is something rotten with any society where no one looks askance at scammers, con artists, and flimflam men occupying public office. Something has gone wrong when gambling and speculation are the pastimes du jour of a nation’s youth.
In short, my thoughts haven’t changed all that much from two years ago: “it is worth looking back at republicanism in the hope its teachings can help reinvigorate liberalism.”
If you’re still looking for something else to while away your time reading, here are a couple of things I’ve written recently:
A short piece about the NLRB (finally) deciding captive audience meetings violate the NLRA
An article on the oral arguments before the Supreme Court in United States v. Skrmetti
And an update on the child labor cases against Hyundai and Mar-Jac Poultry of Alabama
And here are some other articles I’ve personally enjoyed reading:
My friend Alex Jobin on Kamala Harris’ appeals to Republicans for the Alabama Political Reporter
Jason Harrison on consumption taxes/the DBCFT for Crémieux’s Substack
Sophie Kemp on modern gender politics for the Los Angeles Review of Books
And Pedro Gerson on AMLO for The New Inquiry
Finally, for the real nerds, here are my references (loosely construed):
“Why We Need the Welfare State” for the People’s Policy Project by Matt Bruenig
Mechanics and Manufacturers in the Early Industrial Revolution: Lynn, Massachusetts, 1780-1860 (1981) by Paul G. Faller
The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (1978) by Lawrence Goodwyn
“Labor Republicanism and the Transformation of Work” (2013) in Political Theory by Alex Gourevitch
“Is the $11 Billion Online Sportsbook Bubble About to Burst?” in Rolling Stone by David Hill
Artisans Into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America (1989) by Bruce Laurie
The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism (2024) by Matt McManus
“Socialist Republicanism” (2019) and “Eugene Debs and the Socialist Republic” (2022) in Political Theory and “Wage slavery: A neo-Roman account” (2024) in the European Journal of Political Theory by Tom O’Shea
“The Myth That Shareholders Are Always Investors,” (2024) a working paper for the Roosevelt Institute by Lenore Pallodino and Harrison Karlewicz
“The Revolution Within the American Revolution” (2023) in the New York Review of Books and Chants Democratic (1984) by Sean Wilentz
I really ought to collate my thoughts on Lincoln some day. For now, I’ll once again recommend J. David Greenstone’s The Lincoln Persuasion and Garry Wills’ Lincoln at Gettysburg.
If you have read Paine closely, you may have already noticed that the name of this particular exercise in self-flattery (“Some Convenient Tree”) is taken directly from Common Sense.
“For the mechanics, aristocracy was defined as ‘the exhibition of feelings and views at war with the equal rights of men.’ … As a constant tendency among men, it could arise anywhere” (Faller, 44).