During the Interregnum, figures such as Thomas Hobbes, James Harrington, and John Milton produce substantial works of political philosophy. As can be seen in their titles, Hobbes’s Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civill (1651), Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), and Milton’s Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), each set out to describe a commonwealth. For Hobbes, Harrington, and Milton, the question after 1649 is how to understand – and, in some cases, how to reconstitute — the “one” that is at the Greek root of monarch. None of the proposals created, under the great pressures of the moment, could be implemented; however, they offered models for English-language political philosophy for decades, even centuries, to come. Later generations had a reservoir of English-language republican actions, rhetoric, and philosophy on which to draw, including in Ireland.

This chapter introduces the conceptual claim of this book that the idea of a competition-democracy nexus is grounded in a normative commitment to a republican conception of economic liberty as non-domination originating in ancient Roman thought. The chapter first shows how the existing ‘special interest capture’ and ‘conventional liberty’ accounts fail to make sense of the competition–democracy nexus. It then explores the republican conception of liberty as non-domination as an alternative explanation of the idea of a competition–democracy nexus. It shows that this republican understanding of economic liberty is the only explanatory variable that can explain why competition enhances and the concentration of economic power undermines democracy and why competition law is the right tool to address this problem.

This chapter provides an overview of this book’s core arguments and structure.

This chapter introduces the republican conception of liberty as non-domination. It explains how unhoused persons experience two forms of domination because they lack private property rights. First, others exert control over unhoused persons’ opportunities to obey laws that govern public property. Second, unhoused persons must make non-egalitarian sacrifices (or trade-offs) to obey laws that regulate public space.

Rhetoric was embedded in French Catholic education, and in revolutionary Paris rhetorical skills proved essential for any politician who wanted to command the assembly. Fabre d’Eglantine was an actor and director All expert in manipulating the political action behind-the-scenes. His play Philinte propounded Rousseau’s ideal that theatricality should be avoided in human life. Hérault de Séchelles by contrast drew on training by the classical actress Clairon to become a successful political orator, not ashamed to theorise the art of persuasion. The Marquis de Condorcet was a constitutional theorist who believed in truth, but lacked the performance skills to persuade others. The Comte de Mirabeau demonstrated outstanding skill as an orator and politician in the first years of the revolution, making no show of high personal morality, in contrast to Maximilien Robespierre who, partly in reaction, set himself up as a man of total sincerity. He bypassed the Assembly to control events through the more intimate forum of the Jacobin club. His sense of personal conviction owed much to Rousseau.

This chapter outlines the effective remobilisation and arming of elements of the Monaghan Ulster Volunteer Force in 1920 and refutes claims of a loyalist “collapse” by providing evidence of loyalist paramilitary activities after a wave of republican counter-reprisals in late March 1921. It contends that a number of IRA operations in the area of County Monaghan bordering Rosslea went badly wrong, and that a successful, well-organised loyalist defence helped to bring both sides to agree a formal truce in April 1921. Loyalist resistance continued elsewhere in Monaghan until the national truce of July 1921, putting the IRA under considerable pressure in parts of the county. It also argues that ties between Ulster loyalists in Belfast and those in Monaghan persisted, helping the latter to resist boycotting of their business interests, and shoring up their political position through the Protestant Defence Association in the new Free State.

This chapter sets out why a history of Ulster loyalism in the three counties after partition matters and outlines the literature on ethnic conflict, Ulster loyalism, and terrorism and political violence in Ireland. The chapter then sets out the book’s two main arguments. First, memories of the violence experienced by one generation of Protestants in the three counties entrenched a sense of separation from the new Irish state on the part of subsequent generations. Intergenerational grievance and inter-communal distance kept loyalism alive and set the conditions for militancy and revenge in the future, including during the Troubles. Three-county loyalists played an important role in Ulster loyalist militant movements in Northern Ireland after partition.

This chapter considers the presence and efficacy of loyalist armed resistance in Cavan from 1920 to 1923. It argues that resistance was generally less intense and more poorly organised in Cavan compared to Monaghan. A dispersed population meant that loyalist deterrence was primarily focused on pockets of the county that had sufficient numbers to contest republican control. The IRA in the area near Cavan town, where much of the Protestant population was concentrated, was more reluctant to carry out executions or inflict significant violence than in County Monaghan. This made resistance to arms raids less dangerous and successful relative to elsewhere in the county. Nevertheless, a poorly organised loyalist defence network in the Rathkenny area underlined the dangers of provoking republican violence through overt and ineffective resistance. West Cavan resembled shared similar experiences of IRA violence to that seen in neighbouring County Leitrim. A willingness by the IRA in West Cavan and Leitrim to resort to occasionally shocking acts of violence meant that the loyalist community in this area suffered disproportionately from acts of intimidation compared to east and south Cavan.

This chapter examines the phenomenon of three-county loyalists’ considerable impact on Northern Ireland’s security forces and radical or militant Ulster movements since partition. It describes how these individuals generally came from families that were threatened with, or experienced, republican or agrarian violence after partition. The chapter also explores the important roles played by three-county loyalists in paramilitary organisations such as the Ulster Defence Association during the Troubles. A number of these individuals came from areas that had seen high levels of loyalist militancy in the first half of the century, suggesting an intergenerational consistency across the twentieth century.

This chapter underlines the main contribution of the book. It argues that Ulster loyalism has survived within the Irish state to the present day. The ’affective bonds’ or culture created in previous generations persisted. Three counties’ loyalists were still willing to embrace an Ulster identity even after the partition of the province. What mattered more than political logic or calculation was sentiment. It also observes an enduring strain of frontier militancy in Ulster, summarises the tactical successes of three counties’ loyalists and their wider movements in the 1920s and again in 1970s but concludes that militancy in successive conflicts only served to delay conciliatory reforms, truces and peace agreements.

This chapter considers evidence of loyalist paramilitary activities and resistance in County Donegal in the early 1920s. It investigates why a vibrant UVF movement, active in the county from 1912 to 1914, did not mount a sustained resistance to the IRA in the county from 1920 to 1923. It suggests that low levels of republican violence in the county during the Anglo-Irish War required a more limited response and goes on to demonstrate that Donegal’s loyalists prioritised the defence of Londonderry during a critical period in 1920. Unlike Monaghan, a number of Donegal’s outstanding UVF leaders were killed during the First World War or did not return home. There is also some evidence that erstwhile units of the Donegal UVF quickly and collectively allied themselves with pro-treaty forces during the Civil War (26 June 1922–24 May 1923). The exception was Pettigo, where loyalists targeted republicans in the wake of the British occupation of the village over a seven-month period, during which time they also campaigned to be included in the new Northern Ireland.

This chapter examines the resurgence of suspicions among republicans towards real or imagined loyalists in the three counties, that some Protestants were acting as a loyalist ’fifth column’ for the security forces and/or paramilitaries in Northern Ireland. A successful loyalist cross-border paramilitary campaign in the early 1970s precipitated an IRA counter-intelligence operation to eliminate spies in the three counties. Families that were well known locally for their historical involvement in loyalism were again targeted by the IRA in the 1970s. The chapter outlines the suspicions and inter-communal violence in County Monaghan that led to the murder of Senator Billy Fox and the burning of the family home of his fiancée, Marjorie Coulson.

Rousseau’s Social Contract is often viewed as one of the early modern attempts to construct a theory of positive liberty. This interpretation makes sense. In Book I, Rousseau writes of freedom as a form of rational self-determination that enlarges and ennobles minds. Some theorists, most notably Isaiah Berlin, have argued that this notion of freedom opens the door to tyranny and blame Rousseau for the authoritarianism and fascism in the first half of the twentieth century. However, Rousseau is probably best considered a theorist of negative liberty. The Social Contract is in many respects a deeply practical work that primarily seeks to prevent both government and interpersonal domination and is animated by an underlying skepticism toward Rousseau’s very own solutions to these problems.

When Rousseau published the Social Contract in 1762, there was no more illustrious authority on politics than Montesquieu. Rousseau draws on Montesquieu’s discussion of republics, but his departures from his predecessor are even more important. Notably, he criticizes Montesquieu for not seeing that the sovereign authority is the same in all states and that “Every legitimate government is republican.” The chapter begins with Montesquieu’s treatment of republics in the Spirit of the Laws to identify the features of classical republicanism that attracted Rousseau and also to reveal Montesquieu’s ambivalence about these ancient models. It then turns to Rousseau’s endeavor to revive republicanism by putting it on a new basis of the principles of political right.