of the English variant. The republican tradition varied from place to place and underwent many changes over time, the most important of which was Harrington's substitution of land for military service as the social foundation of citizenship. Rousseau's republicanism, with its stress on a unitary state and an all-encompassing "general will," bore little resemblance to the kind of republicanism that sought to limit the power of the state and to balance one kind of power against another—preoccupations that eventually gave rise to the modern theory of the separation of powers.

If there is any justification for speaking of a continuous tradition at all, and of a single tradition rather than several, it lies in the persistence of two characteristic concerns, the combination of which distinguished republicanism from other varieties of political thought. The first, originating in Aristotle's classification of regimes according to their domination by the one, the few, and the many (tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy, respectively), led to efforts to analyze the sources of political instability—which caused regimes to degenerate into one or another of these extremes—and to work out some principle of balance that would combine the advantages of each while nullifying the features that made them oppressive. The second set of concerns arose out of the belief that "virtue" was the object (not the precondition) of citizenship and that any political system should therefore be judged by the qualities of mind and character that it tended to elicit. On this point, there was a considerable range of opinion, from the Aristotelian emphasis on a unified human life to the Machiavellian emphasis on military prowess. For all republicans, however, virtue was associated with self-assertion and self-realization, not with self-abnegation. ^* Republicans had little use for Christianity, not

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It may be true, as Stephen Holmes asserts in a recent polemic against "antiliberal thought," that communitarian critics of liberalism now "assume that when a person transcends self-interest, he is necessarily behaving in a morally admirable way." But this assumption played no part in the republican tradition, even though communitarians appeal to that tradition, without much understanding of it, as an important source of their own ideas. A number of the historians whose work has contributed to the emergence of a "republican synthesis," as Robert Shalhope referred to it some years ago, have inadvertently encouraged the misunderstanding that republicanism was

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