Art and Republicanism :: Government Republican Essays

Art and Republicanism ABSTRACT: Republicanism is contrasted with liberalism with special reference to the notions of presence, absence and representation. The contrast is more conspicuous in the Platonic tradition of republicanism than it is in the Aristotelian tradition, the former being more likely to degenerate into some form of totalitarianism. Examples thereof are given in accordance with the distinction between a strong and a soft iconoclasm, as it is found both in Antiquity and in Eastern and Western Europe’s quest for absolute presence or—as in avantgarde art of modernity—for absolute self-presence of the work of art. Having left such political and artistic utopias behind it, the pendulum is now swinging back in the direction of representation, but no longer in the illusionist sense which has dominated Western art form the Renaissance to the beginning of our century. Tied to the question of iconoclasm is the debate about the end of art inaugurated by Hegel in the general intro duction to his Aesthetics and resumed in our days. There are two traditions of republicanism, one predominantly Platonic and the other predominantly Aristotelian. Both have several characteristics in common which set them off apart from the tradition of liberalism, such as the paramount concern for morals in politics, or the priority of politics over economics, or the mistrust of growth and riches as well as the preference for poverty over luxury, proximity over distance and—most important from the point of view of arts—direct presence over mere representation and immediacy over mediation. Still, surely the overarching characteristic is that of giving the common good of the res publica absolute priority over private interests with consequences such as the rejecting of factions and—in the last analysis—even of political parties. But there are also differences. The most important of these is that in the Platonic as opposed to the Aristotelian tradition the issue of self-government of all citizens is, to put it mildly, not prominent. If only for this reason, the danger of sliding into totalitarianism is greater in the Platonic than in the Aristotelian tradition of republicanism. Nevertheless, one could, on the whole, say that totalitarianism is the perversion of republicanism in the same sense that anarchy is the perversion of liberalism. To realize this, one need only bear in mind that, republicanism being fundamentally suspicious of political parties as potential factions, it more naturally leads to one-party rule than liberalism does. In addition, the