Quo vadis, res publica? Republicanism today presents itself as a constellation of fixed ideas determined by a canonical set of classical texts and their authoritative interpreters: liberty as non-domination, civic virtue, political participation oriented toward the common good, and public recognition of distinguished citizens (libertas–virtue–commune bonum–honestas). A substantial body of contemporary historians—particularly those working within the Cambridge School's methodological framework—continue to treat republican theory as a historically circumscribed tradition stretching from the Greek polis through Roman exemplars to Renaissance Italy and the revolutionary experiments of England, America, and France. This crystallization of political imagination, however, exacts a steep price: it forecloses access to the heuristic potential that lies beyond these theoretical, historical, and geographical boundaries.
R. Hammersley's proposal to reconceptualize republicanism as a living language—wherein dialects and regional variations are bound together by Wittgensteinian "family resemblance," a constellation of overlapping features without rigid definitional criteria—promised to overcome this very problem. In practice, however, republicanism has failed to escape the disciplinary and geographical confines the canon imposed. The metaphor of a living language remains largely rhetorical; beneath it, the same boundaries persist, the same canonical hierarchies remain intact, and the same Eurocentric textual canon endures.
Our section aims to identify marginal argumentative trajectories and novel sources capable of expanding and revitalizing republican theory's historical and theoretical horizons. Yet one critical tension warrants particular attention: the relationship between this tradition and non-European political thought. African, Asian, and Latin American scholars frequently experience attempts to situate their subjects within republicanism as an erasure of their thought's distinctive character and force. When they acknowledge that these thinkers appropriated republican vocabulary, they often dismiss it as purely instrumental—a strategic maneuver to gain access to an elite discourse. Conversely, contemporary republican theorists themselves refuse to recognize these figures as authentic practitioners of their tradition, regarding them instead as imperfect users or crude distorters of republican concepts. This mutual exclusion is deeply problematic; republicanism thereby abandons potential interlocutors—thinkers who may share its conceptual apparatus or grapple with analogous problems.
Broadening this perspective extends beyond history and political theory. Anthropology, critical theory, art history, and political theology may furnish unexpected theoretical resources through investigations of collective endeavor and common life. Equally important is examining republicanism's relationship with rival ideologies—liberalism, communitarianism, libertarianism, Marxism—as well as its internal variants (plebeian, council, commercial republicanisms). Even critiques mounted by opposing political positions constitute a valuable archive for reconstructing its argumentative significance across centuries of ideological contestation.
Transcending the canon should not be construed as repudiating tradition or rupturing with it, but rather as the means through which its conceptual force can be preserved and revitalized for contemporary discourse. In his commentary on Toussaint Louverture's letter to the Directory, C. L. R. James wrote: "Pericles, Tom Paine, Jefferson, Marx and Engels were men of liberal education, formed in the tradition of ethics, philosophy, and history. Toussaint was a slave [...] dictating his thoughts in the crude words of a broken dialect, written and rewritten by his secretaries until their devotion and his will had hammered them into adequate shape. Superficial people have read his career in terms of personal ambition. This letter is their answer. Personal ambition he had. But he accomplished what he did because, superbly gifted, he incarnated the determination of his people never to be slaves again." We contend that amplifying precisely such "crude" yet resolute voices in our current moment of global turbulence may be what allows the language of republicanism to become not merely "alive," but genuinely shared among interlocutors of radically divergent cultures, convictions, and experience.