Abstract

The existence of a «republican tradition» in the history of Western political thought has become a historiographic dogma, thanks especially to the work of the so-called Cambridge School. This article provides a critique. First, it shows that the insistence on the tradition’s distinctiveness was the product not just of historical research, but of various polemics against liberalism conducted between the 1970s and 1990s. Second, it considers the ways in which a tradition can be conceptualized in the history of thought, and compares them to the main versions of Cambridge-inspired republican historiography. The conclusion will be that, while in some ways it can be acceptable to speak of a republican tradition, the most common ones are methodologically inappropriate and historically misleading