Republicanism is one of the great traditions of Western political thought. To say that republicanism is a "tradition" of political thought is to say that distinctively republican ideas about politics have been championed by a number of authors in the history of political theorizing, and that many of the later authors who championed those ideas consciously drew on and developed the work of earlier ones. This continuity of reference and influence makes it possible to trace a republican strand in Western political writing. But what ideas about politics are distinctively republican? What ideas define the republican tradition?

The republican tradition is often associated with the claims that citizens can only be free in a free society, that the opposite of freedom is a state of dependence akin to slavery, that societies are most likely to enjoy freedom and to realize their common good when they are governed by...