American Republicanism

Abstract

One salient and often inescapable source of a word’s meaning is its history. The English word ‘republican’ descends from the Latin res publica, meaning the Roman state as it existed between the expulsion of the kings in 509 BC and the imposition of caesars, princes and emperors half a millennium later. English revolutionaries adopted ‘republic’ (and its English synonym ‘commonwealth’) to describe the state they hoped to establish when they ousted and executed their own monarch in the seventeenth century.³ This first English republic foundered in Cromwell’s dictatorship and the eventual return of the Stuart kings, but it remained a vivid memory for civic-minded Englishmen and Americans.⁴