Civic Republicanism

Classical liberalism gets a lot of talk but I think the more Stoic-aligned political philosophy is civic republicanism. Civic republicanism has a large emphasis on civic duty. The citizenry needs to be informed and educated. They need to see liberty as requiring personal involvement. It's not something you're owed, but something you actively maintain.

Classical liberalism is focused on what our rights are and what the world owes us. But it largely ignores our responsibility to the cosmos. My reading of civic republicanism is that liberty as non-domination depends on us being independent from others in a legal sense. We are, of course, better off with close ties to our fellow cosmopolites, but we should be free from influence that could lead us to make poor decisions because we fear for our lives, property, or other freedoms.

In a system like a classical republic, we'd all be agarian intellectuals and be free to think for ourselves because no one can compel us to do anything we choose not to do. This system requires us to not live to maximize our comfort. It requires us to give up individual comfort for the success of the whole. It's probably why it hasn't succeeded for long. The United States was the shining light of republicanism, but it too devolved into overly-centralized government with an urban populace dependent on selfish employers for income. It seems to be how all societies trend.

But I still see this model of government as the best fit for Stoics. It aligns with our indepence of thought while requiring our love of civic involvement and desire to make the whole better even if the constituent parts have to suffer. Rebels can always see the benefits the whole will receive even though they know they may not live long enough to see the end. But being a rebel takes courage we often cannot muster. And should our rebellion succeed, we start the trend towards the thing we rebelled against.