"Can classical forms of republicanism provide instructive models for modern democratic thought and practice? Many philosophers have been skeptical. In Federalist 10 (1787), James Madison famously argued that the "pure Democracy" of the Athenian assembly was untenable for modern states. Republicanism could only exist in the modern world as a form of government based on the "delegation" of sovereignty to "a small number of citizens elected by the rest.""
"Three decades later, in 1819, Benjamin Constant held that the public spiritedness of the Greek polis or the Roman republic could provide no satisfactory answers for the commercial world of bourgeois society, with its private freedoms, elaborate division of specialized labor, and inevitable drift towards representative government. Such long-standing misgivings, from Madison and Constant through to twentieth-century commentators such as the classicist Moses Finley, have been based upon the understandable premise that the sheer complexity of modern bureaucratic government and commercial relations require forms of political representation which the ancient world simply did not possess."
"Yet, despite dismissals of its modern relevance, classical republicanism has also long provided a language of claim-making for critics of liberal, representative democracy-as this latter constitutional regime gained ascendance in western Europe, North America, and eventually in much of the rest of the world over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One particularly striking episode in the critical use of classical republicanism for twentieth-century democratic politics comes from a context which is only now begin to receive full attention from political theorists: the formation of anti-colonial nationalism in British India."
Classical republicanism was long considered incompatible with modern states because modern political complexity and commerce required representative institutions. James Madison in Federalist 10 argued that the Athenian-style "pure Democracy" was untenable and that republicanism in the modern world depended on delegation of sovereignty to elected representatives. Benjamin Constant argued in 1819 that Greek and Roman civic virtues could not address bourgeois commercial society's private freedoms, specialized labor, and drift toward representative government. Twentieth-century commentators like Moses Finley emphasized fundamental discontinuities between ancient and modern democracy. Nevertheless, classical republican language continued to serve as a resource for critics of liberal representative democracy, notably within anti-colonial nationalism in British India.
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