8/14/2003
28
From this ‘moderns’ and ‘ancients’ drew completely different lessons. Where the
former saw in commerce a force that could reduce the temptations of power to near
meaninglessness, the latter saw the foundations of despotism. If the preference for
effeminate objects could eviscerate the willingness of oligarchs to defend their power, it
would do the same to citizens’ willingness to defend their power – the power of
participating in the exercise of public authority. This is why, from the perspective of
republicanism, the empty vanity, dissoluteness, enervation, melancholy, sickliness,
materialism, cowardice, and torpor, generated by commerce was reprehensible.
“Effeminacy” meant the evisceration of the ‘manly’ courage, self-reliance, self-denial,
endurance, candor, and vigor that citizens may need to stand up to those who would
arrogate public authority for themselves.
It should now be clear that there is much more to the republican critique of
effeminacy than the fear that effeminate dispositions would compromise virile
dispositions, and that those dispositions did not exhaust republican conceptions of
masculinity. In fact, to judge republicanism by the dispositions it promoted was a
peculiarly ‘modern’ position, which assumes that ideals of moral economy had to be
assessed by the dispositions they permitted. It is undeniable that republicans valued
fortitude, courage, and the like, and that they even admired those traits in monarchs,
aristocrats, and other power-holders. But the standard of approbation is not virility itself,
but the ends or purposes to which is put.
The example of Machiavelli may be instructive here. Praised by republicans for
his fidelity to the public object, and reviled by moderns for his advocacy of violence,
deception, and deceit – dispositions, not surprisingly, that were antithetical to ‘good
Convention