Guns, Cowboys, Philadelphia Mayors, and Civic Republicanism: On Sanford Levinson's The Embarrassing Second Amendment

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

s reading of the Second Amendment deftly parlays a strategy of historical interpretation into an opening move in a much needed contemporary political conversation about guns, individual rights, popular sovereignty, and state power.'This reading suggests an intriguing recovery of the Amendment's origins in republican anti-statism and, in the same gesture, potentially retrieves the political value of the Amendment for those who ordinarily have little in common with its stickiest adherents.Historically situated in the republican concern with popular power, the Second Amendment might be less the individualistic cudgel of National Rifle Association sloganeering than a token and vehicle of collective civic resistance against the domestic imperialism of centralized state power.However compelling and disturbing several aspects of Levinson's provocative argument may be, I think it is ultimately less republican than it wants to be; I think the republicanism it does harbor is of questionable value; and I think the republican subject, if he exists, is definitely a "he."In what follows, I will suggest that both the republican subject and polity invoked in Levinson's interpretation are, at best, appealing historical figures, of little relevance to our socially fragmented and politically disintegrated mass culture, to our bureaucratized, centralized, and nucleararmed state, or to the relationship between them. I. REPUBLICAN POLITY OR LIBERAL STATE?The republican argument for arming the citizenry is most powerfully elaborated not by the English thinkers Levinson cites, but in that passionate republican work, Machiavelli's Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius. 2 In Machiavelli's account, terrible ills arise from disarming