The reasons for what is nowadays labeled the republican revival are certainly manifold. From reasons that lie in the dynamics of academic discourse up to reasons that are rooted in political controversies1 the lasting interest (and correspondingly the expectation about the benefits of the republican political theory) in republicanism has various reasons. In what follows I will try to concentrate on one distinctive feature – or thesis – of republicanism that is more or less a unifying theme in the various strands of republican political theory. This “republican thesis” consists in the belief that freedom and a republican state are at least compatible or that freedom is even constituted by the republic.

The belief in the possibility of conceptualizing (and under certain circumstances even realizing) a form of an effective political order that is not per se based on a restriction of freedom becomes particularly attractive against the background of the experiences of the twentieth century. Up to the late 1970s political hope for a free society was closely connected with the state: While the national liberation movements of developing countries and colonies viewed the building of a national state as the way to end foreign domination, most progressive, social-democratic or socialist movements identified the state as the way for liberation from internal domination (mostly seen as being caused by an unequal control of the means of production). The reality of the post-colonial and socialist states led to a deep-going disillusionment, which nowadays has turned into fundamental skepticism about the relation between freedom and the state. This skepticism again fuelled a renewal of classic liberal political thought that culminated in the political movement of neo-liberalism?