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REPUBLICANISM AND CIVIC VIRTUE IN TREATYITE POLITICAL THOUGHT, 1921–3
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 April 2020
Abstract
Republicanism has been one of the most influential political ideologies in modern Irish history; however, it remains conspicuously undertheorized by historians of the revolutionary period. While recent historiography has challenged representations of anti-Treaty Sinn Féin as a mindlessly destructive, anti-democratic force, the extent of ideological and rhetorical continuity linking the Provisional Government formed to assume control of the Free State on 7 January 1922 with the pre-Treaty republican tradition has not been understood. This article rejects the historiographical thesis that the Provisional Government abandoned republican ideas. Drawing from the Cambridge School's contextualist account of republicanism as a polysemic and contingent political language, it highlights the vigorously contested nature of republican thought in the intellectual firmament of revolutionary Sinn Féin and argues that the Free State leadership articulated its vision of politics and society through classical republican concepts of ‘civic virtue’ and the ‘common good’. It is suggested additionally that the colonial dynamics of the Anglo-Irish relationship helped to shape the vision of republican citizenship promoted by an administration possessed of a deep-seated determination to refute historical perceptions of the Irish people as congenitally ‘unfit’ for sovereignty.
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Footnotes
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In addition to the Historical Journal's three anonymous referees and its editors, I wish to thank those who read, commented upon, and thus improved previous incarnations of this article, notably Dr Roisín Higgins, Dr Ultán Gillen, Professor Michael Laffan, Dr Owen McGee, Dr Thomas Dolan, and Dr Andrew Phemister. The research on which this article is based was funded by Teesside University. I also benefited from a travel bursary from the British Association of Irish Studies.
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