Recovering the Pre-Marxist Radical Republican Tradition

MORAL ARCHITECTURE OF REPUBLICANISM

My Guide to Italian Republicanism series challenges far-left (particularly Marxist-influenced) historical reductionism by recovering a distinct, pre-Marxist radical republican tradition centered on Mazzini, Cattaneo, Garibaldi, and the Carbonari networks that was morally universalist, anti-slavery, and duty-based, but emphatically not socialist or class-struggle oriented in the Marxist sense. I think we must reposition and supersede Marxism by reclaiming and revitalizing classical civic republicanism as a deeper, more enduring framework for all American citizens.

Then, you will have built and developed your tradition grounded in the cause of civic humanism it was reborn through and unfulfilled, against the modern anti-American propagandists and disinformation within and abroad, that our system does not work. You have fought for every new and shiny vision, but your foundations, and you have lost sight and the plot of what is truly important in an age of emerging technocratic order. It does not take socialism and Marx to know what policies most benefits the citizens of our republic. Fight Power with Power, and Knowledge and Wisdom is Power against corruption of Knowledge and Wisdom.

You have been taught by both right and left to fight against this history and tradition, sliding you into other visions that increasingly sideline and obscure history. We, as ordinary citizens, can revive the republican tradition and critique of Power federally, beloved State to State, body to body, without elite approval, certificates or social media badges.

Mazzini transformed reactive, conspiratorial republicanism (e.g., Carbonari opposition to Austrian, Bourbon and Papal power) into a positive system grounded in his Doveri dell’Uomo (Duties of Man, 1860). The history itself should show you the path. This prioritized a duty to Humanity. By placing universal Humanity above nation, it made any republic tolerating slavery or oppression logically disqualified, not merely imperfect. This contrasts with rights-based (French and American) models that could accommodate compromises like the U.S. Constitution’s slavery clauses. Italian republicans, such as Mazzini and federalist rival Cattaneo, offered a more rigorous indictment of American slavery as a “false republic.”

Far-left historiography often folds 1848-era republicanism and nationalism into a prelude to proletarian socialism or dismisses it as “bourgeois.” Mazzinian thought however was a coherent, duty-driven alternative that rejected both liberal individualism and emerging Marxist class struggle as divisive and materialist. Mazzini favored unitary spiritual nationalism, and Cattaneo’s defense of federalism with empirical rigor argued that U.S. slavery stemmed from royalist-aristocratic remnants, not federalism itself, considering slavery’s abolition in Spanish American federations as opposed to its survival in monarchist-imperial holdings.

Republicanism was a vibrant battlefield of competing visions (unitary moral duty versus federal civic autonomy), not a monolithic “bourgeois” phase to be transcended. We must enrich the tradition rather than reducing it to economic base-superstructure. Mazzini’s consistency (denouncing slavery outright) highlights principled republicanism influencing radical U.S. thought independently of (or prior to) dominant socialist frames. The Risorgimento’s republican promise was undermined by alliance with the Savoy monarchy (diarchy), conservative elites, and later Fascism, which co-opted and distorted Mazzinian language while banning originals, outlawing Masonic networks, and assassinating heirs like the Rosselli brothers.

Far-left accounts (e.g., Gramscian views) often frame the Risorgimento as an incomplete bourgeois revolution that failed to mobilize masses or fully break with aristocracy, paving the way for socialism. I prove that evolutionary republican networks were actively crushed by right-wing forces building on counter-Enlightenment and conservative reactions. The “failure” of 1848 republicanism is not a dialectical step toward Marxism but a violent rupture whose universalist inheritance was stolen. Marxism cannot reproduce the full expression of this tradition.

I propose encouraging disassociation from any Marxist frameworks, reproducing a political tradition that those in Power cannot deny and must adhere to, to be truly accepted by the People of the Republic who will be raised up through civic education, inside and outside of elite universities. Movements are not born out of thin air (Decline of Civic Republicanism in America: Stages (1820s-1975).

Radical republicanism is foundational (not “foreign” or Marxist). I reject the teleological reduction of all radical history to class-economic determinism or absorption within the narrative of the “International Left.” We must recover republicanism as a spiritual-moral, anti-tyrannical tradition that critiqued power structures (including slavery and monarchy) on philosophical grounds of duty and humanity. The facts complicate and expand the historical palette beyond far-left binaries of the reactionary against the progressive proletarian, emphasizing internal republican debates, transatlantic moral rigor, and conservative betrayal as key dynamics in this brutal history. We must reclaim republican depth against both simplistic American exceptionalism, potential elite co-opting, operative dismantling, obstruction, suppression and reductive materialist histories. There is a tremendous potential and readiness among the American people, who have not made themselves aware of the contexts underlying their national and factional conflicts. But this is being utilized and channeled into Socialism. What I have endeavored to show you is a mightier current to sweep the exhaustion with the culture war and expressions between both modern left and right.

Scaling ancient-inspired civic discipline and mixed government in a vast, diverse, technological mass society is historically unproven in modern form. A solution must be developed, or we will simply find ourselves in a prison constantly moaning about a utopia or expecting an external savior.

Time to turn American minds, from all classes to the true vision. Time to turn those in power to Wisdom. Republicanism is a more primordial and regenerative tradition that does not need Marxism’s insights on domination and exploitation while transcending its materialist dialectics, revolutionary teleology, and tendency to sideline civic-moral formation. I propose we aim for a fortified republic of virtuous citizens rather than a classless society engineered through economic base change. However, also like any tradition, it could be diluted into mere conservatism or aesthetic classicism without its inherent radical edge against oligarchy. This should be a deliberate American intellectual effort to move “beyond Marx” by going “before and around” him and to our classical roots, continuing the American project and prospering together.