JF Bray’s Economic Republicanism

In recent years political theorists have applied republican ideas to considerations of economic freedom. The development of a distinct socialist republicanism has been one strand of this literature, while another has claimed the centrality of a free market to freedom understood in republican terms. Revisiting the work of John Francis Bray (1809–1897) can point us beyond these binaries. Bray applied republican ideas, developed in the register of constitutionalism, to issues of exchange and production. He did not, however, do so in the name of the free market or of socialism. Rather, his concern was to create a system of popular economic self-government. Doing so, Bray believed, would involve a combination of markets and economic democracy, involving worker cooperatives and indicative economic planning. In Bray’s work, we find an economic republicanism which, out of a concern to establish popular economic self-government, combined elements of what have become two distinct camps.