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Keys to Decrypt the Republic Against Democracy

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Abstract

The concept of the republic is a complex meta-principle that facilitates and conceals global relations of domination. Specifically, it enables the invisibility of racism as the core of political power. From its very origins the concept of republic serves to seize constituent power or politeia. In modernity, as it merges with private property, it will serve as the launchpad of a vast colonization project that then evolves in a new form of power in coloniality. The article applies the theory of the ‘encryption of power’—to decrypt the historical concept of the republic. In doing so, we will demonstrate the key antidemocratic role it has played at the heart of global coloniality. We will bear witness as to how, from within the concept of republic, a refined mechanism of domination raises and expands, conforming the most magnificent and lethal form of power of our times. We exemplify our theory showing that the concept of ‘republic’ is the common thread between the law that abolished slavery in Brazil (known as Lei Aurea) and the 1988 constitution. Within this scope, we propose a vital space of reconsideration of political ontology through radical democracy as the only means to build the world from immanent difference.

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Notes

  1. Imperial decree 3353, 13 May 1888. Aurea means ‘golden’.

  2. It is essential to clarify in what sense we use the term ‘political’. We follow the differences established, among others, by Alain Badiou (2003) between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’, or that created by Jacques Rancière between Politics and Police (2001). Politics is the institutionalized order where negotiation takes place between those who are already institutionally included. Politics guarantees the harmony of what is established institutionally and refers to the rules of the game that allow distributing benefits, rewards and positions within an established social agreement. For politics, the fundamental thing is the maintenance of the given order established by the status quo. On the other hand, the political is the power that constitutes from unrestricted difference; the space where antagonism and conflict create the possibility of all political and social meaning. The political is the conflict in its most primal form, pure contingency.

  3. J.G.A Pocock, highlights how before the humanists of the quattrocento, Boncampagno, Annius of Viterbo and Brunetto Latini (all from the 13th century) declare the need for a republic to achieve the unification of the virtues of action and discourse (Pocock 1979, p. 100).

  4. As David Harvey proves, ‘the type of society that emerges is founded on private property and legal individualism’ but the fundamental irony is that, according to Harvey, market freedom can only be guaranteed through a state ‘that understood that its role as manager of the economy implied an increase in its own power and its own wealth’ (Harvey 2011, p. 90).

  5. What do Hamilton, Jay and Madison read? They read Machiavelli and Polybius and understand that in a modern sense the republican discourse, especially after the ‘Decade of Titus Livius’, became a populist discourse - the moment of inflammation of the spirits that allows power to be organized in such a way that benefits a few, while everyone falls into the ecstasy of republican virtue.

  6. See among others Alberto (2011); de Abreu and Brakel (1998); Freyre (2006, 2019); and Leal (2012).

  7. Translated by the authors from Portuguese.

  8. A satiric portrait of the republicanism of the time was made by Lima Barreto in Bruzundangas (1996/1922). He describes elites who are carrying the lantern of civilization, pseudo-intellectuals walking along dressed in Greek cloaks through a swamp of social injustice by co-opting the illiterate provincial elites and using refined theoretical discourses to perpetuate social exclusion. See also Maestri (2015).

  9. Translation is ours.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Instituto Tecnológio Autónomo de México (ITAM), Mexico City, CDMX, Mexico

    Ricardo Sanín-Restrepo

  2. Faculdade Mineira de Direito (Law School), Pontificia Universidade Católica de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, MG, Brazil

    Marinella Machado Araujo

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  1. Ricardo Sanín-Restrepo
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  2. Marinella Machado Araujo
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Correspondence to Ricardo Sanín-Restrepo.

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Sanín-Restrepo, R., Araujo, M.M. Keys to Decrypt the Republic Against Democracy. Law Critique 33, 41–62 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-020-09272-w

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