Size, Scale, and American Republicanism

0:00It's a great pleasure to be here. My love of liberty and a sense of it always is strengthened after I come to get a jolt at the Mises Institute. It can be pretty dreary if you get too far away from it. When the American colonists seceded from Britain in 1776, Europe was dominated by Large Monarchies. The only place where there was anything like Republican government was in the Little Swiss Federation. Nevertheless, in the 18th century, philosophers and pundits of various kinds had argued that liberty would require Republican government. Hume argued Did this Rousseau, Kant, Locke earlier?

1:00What connection did they see between republican government and liberty? It's not obvious that liberty requires republican government. And I'm not going to argue that it does. I'm just going to assume it does, because they did. Well, if we look at the republican tradition, which goes back to ancient Greece, this is This is our image, our primal image of liberty and of political order. The world built by the ancient Greeks, and that was a world of very small republics. If we look at that tradition of over 2,000 years, from ancient Greece, the Roman Republic, medieval and modern republics, I think we see three characteristics that are essential.

1:46First, Republican government is government in which the citizens make the laws they live under. Secondly, they can't pass just any legislation. The legislation has to be in accord with a more fundamental law which they do not make, but which they have inherited through tradition or through natural reason. and that is the rule of law, the idea of the rule of law. The third condition for a republican government is that it have a human scale, that is to say, that it be small. Now, most all of us accept, I would accept the first two conditions, self-government of citizens and the rule of law.

2:38But the third condition, human scale, has dropped out. We no longer think of that. We think it makes no difference how large a republic is. We talk of the French Republic, the American Republic, the People's Republic of China. Under communism, there was the Democratic Socialist Republic of Germany, Union of Soviet Socialistic Republics. Most countries in the world probably today describe themselves as republics. So it's a pro term, it's an honorific term. We all want to be republicans. We want a republic.

3:28Kant wrote a famous essay called Idea of a, no, an essay called Perpetual Peace, and in it he argued that wars are the result of monarchies, that if you could have republics and small ones, you wouldn't have war as much because people wouldn't vote to spill their blood and treasure in wars as much as monarchs would. So, republicanism and liberty is very deeply ingrained in our public rhetoric going back 200 years.

4:14Well how small is small? What do you mean a small republic? If we look at the republican tradition, we might be astonished to find that hardly any of Money Republic was over 200,000 people. This form of political order that we so much admire for over 2,000 years built political regimes that were very small indeed. Ancient Athens hovered at around 160,000 people, yet it produced world-class philosophy. We still Real Study, Plato and Aristotle, architecture, science, medicine, drama. We still take our bearings from that little city-state.

5:01Florence was the leader of the Renaissance, around 60,000 people. Modern banking came from Florence, opera, Michelangelo, da Vinci, Donatello, Frangelico, Rousseau's republic in the social contract, people rarely pay any attention to the size and scale mentioned there, only 10,000 citizens, those are male property owners. When you add the women, the children and the foreigners, you have a political society of The French Revolutionaries took Rousseau's social contract and mapped it on to a scale the size of France, 28 million people.

5:51Do you understand? But you can't do that. It's out of scale. So, I'm not saying that real republics have to be 200,000. We can argue as to how large they can be. The point is, there is a scale beyond which the republican virtues diminish, in fact disappear. The second point I want to make out is that we do know empirically that you do not need many people in a political society to achieve human excellence. 200,000 is enough. Athens had 160, and it produced as high a level of human excellence as one could imagine.

6:39Now these little states were not self-sufficient indeed. Small republics are vulnerable and they need to trade. To trade is very important, but economic integration is not political integration. To trade with Sparta is not to be politically integrated with Sparta. Now the Greeks created a unique civilization. In the ancient world, civilizations went hand in hand with large empires, centralized empires, the Egyptian, the Hittite, the Babylonian, the Assyrian, the Roman. But the Greeks created a civilization that was highly decentralized. And that was unique.

7:25The next time you have anything like that is medieval Europe. There were more independent countries in Italy in the 13th century that exist in the world today. And indeed, our notions of liberty, capitalism and other things that we value of that sort were developed in Medieval Europe and Small Polities. But there is a problem with small states, obviously. One problem is not trade or economic prosperity. You don't need large states for that. But defense is, a small state can be overrun by a large one, obviously. So what about defense? Well, first of all, remember, a big state can be overrun by a big one, too. So being big is no guarantee. Has Europe been a safe place for big states in the 20th century?

8:13Not been a safe place for France or Germany or any of the others. Little states can survive, sometimes and sometimes not, just like big ones. Let me take one, I think, telling example. Greece faced the Persian Empire with 40 million people, a centralized regime that could put in the field vast armies and navies. And what was Greece? Eight million, not forty, but eight million people strung out in little republics from Naples to the Black Sea. Surely this big empire could pick these little republics off, but they couldn't. Through Federation, the little Greek republics repel the Persian Empire.

9:02So Federation is the solution in the Republican tradition to the problem of defense. But now another problem arises. What if the Republican Federation gets too big and starts centralizing? That's what happened to Rome. And it collapses into an empire and loses its Republican character. Well, the solution to that has to be there's only one solution. and that is secession. Since the little republics are, they entered voluntarily and since remember a federation of republics is simply a service agency of the republics, if the federation gets too large it simply splits and divides lawfully, lawfully because that would be written, it should be written into the laws of all republican federations. So the nice thing about a republican federation, it can become as large as it needs to be and if it gets If it's too large, it can split. If it needs to come back together again, it can do it, and split again, just as individuals can form partnerships and dissolve them when needed.

10:15So that's what the Republican tradition has to say about, I think, defense and size. But the question still remains, why can't there be a large republic that is not a federation? And here I need to say something about a confusion that often comes up. A federation of republics is not a republic. Just like a federation of country clubs is not a country club. The United States was founded as a federation of republics. And it's wrong to describe The United States, certainly as of 1865, as a republic. The United States was not, in fact is not now, a republic. It is a federation of republics. And that is a different thing.

11:12The first country that claimed to be a large republic was France. After the revolution, the French state declared itself to be a republic, quote, one and indivisible. That is to say, there are no political societies in France that could say boo, much less the seed. There is no such thing as Corsica in France. It is not a political society. Corsica is an aggregate of individuals under the French state. It's an artificial administrative unit. Corsicans might not think that, but constitutionally that's what it is.

11:58And that's what Lincoln said the American states are, in fact. Now, America was a federation of republics up to 1865. After that, for the reasons that Marshall de Rosa and Thomas de Lorenzo have mentioned, the elites described America as a republic, one and indivisible. The Civil War was America's French Revolution, where there was a revolutionary transformation of a federation of republics into one single republic, one individual. Now, a republic, whether large or small, is made up of individuals that govern themselves in some way, whereas a federation of republics is made up not of individuals but of political societies that are united in a certain way.

12:59So, let's look at America after 1865. It is now said to be a republic, and one might say, well, so what? It's huge, 305 million people, but don't we have the two elements of republicanism? Don't we have rule of law? Sorry, don't we have self-government? Sure, we have self-government. We have self-government. We have self-government. We have self-government. We have self-government. We have representatives in Congress. We have representative government. We govern ourselves. And don't we have the rule of law? Sure, we have a Supreme Court that polices the Constitution, which is the fundamental law, which we did not make, but which we inherited. So it looks like we have all the features of republicanism except size.

13:57So why should size matter? To understand this, let us look at the first theory of a large republic ever proposed. This was by David Hume in 1752. He wrote an essay called Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth. And Hume tries to lay out not a federation of republics, But a single republic, a big one, and he argues that this big republic can contain the virtues of republican government. Now you might think this might not be a big deal. Why not just have a republic and let it grow, become larger and larger? Well, Aristotle said, to the size of states, there is a limit as there is to other things, Plants, animals and utensils lose their natural power if they become too large or too small.

14:57To take an example, let's take a charming English cottage, thatched cottage with a garden, place that might be a B&B, and let's increase its size five times but keep it perfectly proportioned. We would no longer have a charming English cottage. Size is internal to the value it has. It's not separable. It's distorted. Or a great cathedral reduced by five times its size so that we can have five of them rather than just one. It would be ridiculous. There is a human scale to things. Throughout history, the size of bedrooms has not changed The size of plazas throughout the world are about the same, because if it gets too big, you can't recognize anything at the other end.

15:56So the Republican regime has to conform to human scale, to the limit of human memory, capacity, perception, and so on. One of the old principles of the ancient Greeks was you should be able to walk across it in a single day. That way you could keep an eye on the blokes that were governing you. So here's the problem. If Hume is going to have a large republic, is he going to end up with a distortion? A monster? Or can it be crafted in such a way as to retain the virtues of self-government and rule of law with a larger scale? Well, I think Hume succeeds. I think he does give us a large republic, and I think it's instructive to see how he preserved in changed form those two virtues of republicanism that were hitherto tethered to smaller scale, namely self-government and rule of law. Now, he asked Helps us to imagine a republic the size of Britain or France divided into a hundred small

17:06republics. Each of these in turn is divided into a hundred little parishes. Now the members of each parish neighborhood meet annually to elect one representative and this would yield a hundred representatives in each small republic's legislature. The legislature selects It's among its members ten magistrates to exercise the executive and judicial functions of the republic and one senator to represent the republic in the national capital. So if Alabama is the republic, then there's a national capital in Alabama and this county here would be a little republic with parishes and you would send one representative, a senator Laws are normally proposed by the national senate and passed down to the provincial republics for ratification. Each republic has one vote, regardless of population, and the majority of Republic's Rules.

18:19Now to free the provincial legislature for having to vote on every trivial law, a bill can be sent instead to the ten provincial magistrates in each republic for ratification. So Washington could send the bill down to the ten magistrates of the republic and they could take care of, you know, handicap parking, federal regulations, if those things exist. You wouldn't have to call the whole legislature of Alabama to deal with that. Let us now compare Hume's large republic in respect to the virtual self-government with the highly centralized regime the United States has become since 1865. Hume's republic has 100 senators in the national capital representing the individual states as we do.

19:09But the legislative body, his House of Representatives, representing the nation of individuals, is located in the several capitals of the provincial republics. So the House of Representatives would be made up of the legislature of Georgia, Alabama and so on. It wouldn't be in Washington, though the Senate would. Now this has two advantages. First, it provides a better and more republican ratio of representation to population. Let's look at how that would work. Europe's Republic is the size of Britain, which in his time had some nine million people. Yet his regionally dispersed legislatures jointly yield 10,000 representatives, because there are 100 little states with each 100 representatives, so 10,000 representatives.

19:58By contrast, the United States has not nine million, but 305 million people. This national representative body contains not 10,000 representatives, but only 435, a number kept by Congress in 1911. Hume's large republic provides a ratio of one representative for every 900 people. so is of a Republican scale, though otherwise large. The United States yields a ratio of approximately one representation, representative for every 700,000 people. It's more than that, but math is easier. One representative for every 700,000 people, which is not remotely within a Republican scale.

20:54Nor can this un-Republican character of the United States be remedied by increasing the size of the House of Representatives. Suppose people have said this, well we just need to increase the size of the House of Representatives. No, you don't. Judged by the size of legislatures around the world, go look, and you'll see that 435 is about the right size for a Lawmaking Body. Or to put it another way, the ratio of representatives to population at the first Congress was about one for every 60,000 people, 1790. Madison thought that was an inadequate ratio for four million, one for every 60,000, inadequate.

21:47But if that, in Madison's view, inadequate ratio were used today, there would be well over 5,000 members in the House of Representatives. A true parliament of geese. Now this would be just too large for a lawmaking body. Size as such, Aristotle was right, does matter. Or, let's look at it another way. If the ratio we use today were in place in 1790, namely one for every 700,000, there would have been only five members in the House of Representatives. I don't think Madison would have liked that. Now, notice this. If the number of representatives in Washington cannot be increased as the population expands, it cannot be, 435 is about right, should not increase it, but if that's the case, and it can't be increased as the population expands, we have evidently, absolutely reached the point at which talk of republican self-government is utterly meaningless.

22:59This is not an opinion, this is simply a structural fact of human scale. In the not too distant future, the population of the United States will reach 435 million. This would yield one representative for every million persons. Now would the civics teacher be able to tell the students, get involved in politics, write your representative, one for every million. Let your voice be known. Be a good citizen. Yet we continue to talk as if America were a republic, and as if we had self-government, and as if we enjoyed the rule of law. Now consider trying to re-enact the recent unpopular legislation in Hume's large republic.

23:51A strong majority of Americans oppose the bailouts for the monster banks who helped Bring It On, the Financial Meltdown in 2009, the Economic Stimulus Packages and Obama's Healthcare Plan. Now to this should be added that many believe Congress has no constitutional authority to impose a healthcare plan, whether it's a good one or not. The Constitution leaves healthcare to the states. Now imagine, had these unpopular acts of the legislation been, assuming now we had Hume's is Large Republic, okay? So we got the Senate in Washington, but the House of Representatives is the several states, legislatures. So this Obamacare has got to come down from the Senate to the disgusting state legislatures for the actual blokes to vote on. And how do you think it's going to fare? How is the bailout going to fare when you circulate it through Wyoming, The second advantage offered by Hume's model is that by dispersing the National Legislature Among the Provincial Republics, he has eliminated the corruption that inevitably comes from

25:25putting the House of Representatives and the Senate in the same place. Here again, human scale, separate them spatially. Spatial contiguity is like nuclear fission, boom, separate them. The number of representatives in Washington is 435 in the House, 100 in the Senate, and One President, a grand total of 536 lawmakers. A majority of this number is only 269. This small number rules 305 million people. Unbelievable. And the majority is worse. And the majority can be less since both houses can lawfully and often do operate with a mere quorum.

26:21With a quorum, a majority of both houses is only 135 people. But the matter is worse than that. Most of the regulations we live under are not passed by Congress at all, but by executive Bureaucracies with names like IRS, FDIC, FCEC, FDA, EPAE, FCC, blah, blah, blah, on and on and with Orwellian names. These are where the regulations come from. And then there's the Supreme Court where nine politically well-connected lawyers by votes of five to four rewrite the Constitution. To speak of Republican self-government and the rule of law in such a regime is simply Orwellian. 1984 came and no one noticed. Alright, to sum up, the federal budget for 2010 was some $355 trillion and that is more than the entire gross with the deficit, the gross national This vast sum was spent by a majority of only 269 in Congress and 135 if a quorum were used.

27:42Never in human history has so much financial power been put in the hands of so few. Never Soviet Union, China, Russia, nowhere. This is unique and we call it Republican government. And final point, what about lobbying? How are you going to lobby in Hume's big republic? You got to go to every state legislature. In Washington, you can send four or five people up there in the hot house and lobby the individuals, knock on doors of offices. But you got to go all the way to Iowa, all the way. This is going to be very difficult, very expensive to lobby. The deals that were cut, Senator Nelson of Nebraska, Landrieu of Louisiana, couldn't So, if America is a republic, and if it is a large republic, it should at least follow the model of Hume's large republic.

28:36If it doesn't follow that model, then what can it possibly mean to say it's a republic? Hume's republic is large, but it retains the virtues of human-scale republicanism. Thank you.