"Altruism," "public service," "selfless devotion to the common good"—these terms provide a pallid translation of what republicans meant by virtue. Those who today invoke republicanism in support of those ideals or, again, in the hope of encouraging the spirit of cooperation in what is perceived as an excessively competitive society, would be well advised to rest their case on other grounds. The republican ethic was nothing if not competitive. It was the ethic of the arena, the battlefield, and the forum—strenuous, combative, agonistic. In urging men to pit themselves against the most demanding standards of achievement, it also pitted them against each other. In politics, it set a higher value on eloquence, disputation, and verbal combat than on compromise and conciliation. Political life, for republicans, provided another outlet for ambition, another form of contest—not primarily a means of reconciling opposing interests or assuring an equitable distribution of goods. Economic issues, as the Greek word indicates, belonged to the household (oikos): in politics, men chased bigger game.

Because some types of republicans wanted to limit the powers of the state, they have sometimes been confused with modern liberals; because others spoke of civic "virtue," they have been confused with modern communitarians. The first of these misunderstandings describes the state of historical scholarship before the rediscovery of the civic tradition in the I960s; the second, the confusion inadvertently encouraged by revisionist scholarship. The republican revival began when Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood showed that the ideology of the American revolution derived not so much from the liberalism of John Locke as from the "commonwealth" or country-party tradition in seventeenth- and eighteenth‐ century England. Especially in Wood's version, the revolution had less to do with property rights than with citizenship. Eighteenth-century political debate, according to Wood, turned on the attempt to work out a plan of government that would assure the active participation of citizens in a country where the qualifications for citizenship were much less restrictive than elsewhere—to democratize the republican ideal of political life.

This interpretation of the revolution was advanced in opposition to historians who saw the War for Independence as a bourgeois revolution and argued, moreover, that it was a mild and moderate revolution (unlike the one in France) because America, lacking a feudal past, had been a bourgeois society from the beginning. Louis Hartz took this position in his Liberal Tradition in America, but many others subscribed to his thesis

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