Journal of the History of Ideas

Sismonde de Sismondi was perhaps the most prominent promoter of a republican theory of liberty and the government after the collapse of eighteenth-century republicanism with the Terror. In revisiting Sismondi's ideas this article shows how the French Revolution and the advent of capitalism changed the nature of republicanism without obliterating it. Contra contemporary neo-roman republicanism, we can see through Sismondi that it was not the priority of individual interests and liberty that troubled modern republicans the most. What challenged it was instead the growth of a society that praised political equality and legitimacy by electoral consent and made virtue and honor negligible. Sismondi thought that, if not tamed, the democratic transformation of society would threaten liberty, individual as well as political.