Seminar
"Israeli Republicanism"

The Ribo Center's seminar is at the heart of the Center's intellectual development. The seminar brings together participants at a very advanced stage of their intellectual careers alongside promising young thinkers, based on the idea that for intellectual discourse to be fruitful, it must advance people at every level. The seminar engages with the republican idea across history, law, philosophy, economics, and other disciplines. Part of the seminar dealt with the revival of neo-republican thought in our time; another part addressed political and structural problems from an original republican angle; and at the seminar's core was the discussion among participants about the current problems facing Israel's regime and society.

Unfortunately, we're unable to share the seminar's original content or the discussions among the workshop's participants. Still, as part of our wish to include the public in the seminar's conversation, we're attaching here a kind of outline of the lectures given in the workshop.

1. 01

   Populism, Politics of Hope and Politics of Skepticism

   What exactly is the public good at the heart of the republic? This session opens the seminar by engaging with the fundamental tension between politics as a striving for wholeness and politics as conflict mitigation, presenting populism not as pathology but as the inevitable shadow of democracy itself.

2. 02

   Parliamentarism-Theory, Origins, and Crisis

   What makes an elected representative legitimate-fidelity to constituents or independent judgment? We examine competing conceptions of political representation from Cicero through Rousseau, and explore the parliamentarism crisis as described by Carl Schmitt and its implications for contemporary democracy.

3. 03

   Republican Citizenship

   Is citizenship a right granted to us or an office entailing obligations? We weigh the Aristotelian model against the Roman legal model, address the free-rider problem, and arrive at a dilemma especially burning for us: the relationship between military service and civic rights.

4. 04

   Freedom in the Republican Tradition

   What is freedom? The absence of actual interference, or the absence of the very possibility that someone might intervene arbitrarily? We engage with the debate reignited between Skinner and Berlin over the nature of freedom, asking whether contemporary republicanism offers a third way between liberalism and communitarianism.

5. 05

   Virtue and the Good Life

   Can a modern commercial society produce the kind of citizens it requires, or does it live off eroding moral capital? From Sparta and Rome through the Scottish Enlightenment-we examine one of the hardest questions of the republican tradition, which has lost none of its sharpness.

6. 06

   Public Deliberation

   What becomes of democratic discourse in an era when shared public space disintegrates? We engage with Habermas's deliberative model, Cass Sunstein's critique of digital media, and arrive at a question that shakes the theory's very foundations: what role does artificial intelligence have in public decision-making?

7. 07

   Republican Economics

   Is the modern workplace a private government? Does capital concentration endanger self-governance? We examine the relationship between republicanism and market economics, introduce practical proposals enjoying broad support across the political spectrum, and reflect on far-reaching economic implications for Israeli reality.

8. 08

   Israeli Republicanism

   The seminar concludes with a question that has accompanied us throughout: was the Israeli republic ever truly born? We examine Herzl's republican vision, abandoned constitutional proposals, and the structural tension between Israel as the state of the Jewish people and the demand for civic equality-a tension that continues to shape us to this day.