Neither Free nor Slave

The patron-client relationship pervades Roman republican moral and political philosophy. It operates as an intermediary category, partly juridical and partly informal with strong moral overtones, that primarily affected poor freemen and freedmen living between the worlds of the fully free and the enslaved. In his recent book on liberty as independence, Quentin Skinner downplays Roman clientelism (and, broadly, paternalism) as well as its early modern British legacy. In this paper, I claim that the category of the client not only complicates the opposition between freedom and slavery but also has an understudied afterlife in early modern moral and political philosophy that deserves closer scrutiny. In their respective interpretations of Roman republican decadence, both Montesquieu and Adam Smith underscore the gradual erosion of auctoritas in the patrician and plebeian branches as coeval with the erosion of Roman clientelism. Drawing on the Roman legacy, Montesquieu acts as a pioneer by shifting clientelist benefits away from elites and distributing them more widely to ensure political cohesion and stability within an 18th-century restricted franchise. Despite his skepticism about the efficiency of a patronage system within an imperial federalism that includes the American colonial assemblies, Adam Smith seems to endorse clientelism as long as it respects the authority of both the monarchical and the republican branches of the mixed constitution.