Abstract
The standard story of republican thought stops around the end of the eighteenth century, and contemporary republican political theory based on that story—for example, the work of Philip Pettit—is ill-equipped to confront problems that have appeared in the era of capitalism. Republican theory can benefit from attention to the emergence of social democracy in the early twentieth century, and to the role of republican ideas in that emergence. Jean Jaurès, perhaps the most prominent exponent of social democracy at that time, drew on the republican tradition to defend a concept of justice that combines commitment to non-domination with worry about modern loneliness, and he derived from the republican tradition a defense of reformist political methods against their revolutionary critics. He suggests the usefulness of left political thought to republicanism, and of republicanism to thinkers on the left.
