COMMERCE AND CHRISTIANITY

I have argued that despite the sometimes bewildering variety of views that republican thinkers have held, it is possible to identify a common core of republican thought that is concerned with the problem of controlling arbitrary power in order to secure the practice of virtue. However, to put the point this way is to begin rather than end a discussion about the nature of republican freedom. Indeed, it is precisely the indeterminacy of this way of thinking that gives the republican tradition its uniquely pluralistic character. I now wish to argue that a decisive turning point in the political use of the language of freedom came with the emergence of the commercial republics of the Renaissance and early modern periods, and then more emphatically with the debates about the political implications of the so-called rise of commerce over the course of the 18th century. As we will see, the ideological challenge that was posed by these developments brought the various ambiguities in the republican conception of freedom to the surface, giving rise to a distinctively modern way of thinking that treated commerce not as a threat, but rather as a means to the enjoyment of republican freedom.