Craddock on Civic Friendship in the Postmodern Polis: Law as Mediator in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice @joshjcraddock @Harvard_Law

Joshua J. Craddock, Harvard University Law School, James Wilson Institute for Natural Rights and the American Founding, is publishing Civic Friendship in the Postmodern Polis: Law as Mediator in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice in the Texas A&M Journal of Law & Civil Governance. Here is the abstract.

In Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare explores whether commercial republicanism can alone sustain civic virtue. Putting Shakespeare into conversation with pillars of American political thought, Merchant of Venice seems to support John Adams’ contention that a republican constitution is “made only for a moral and religious people” and “is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Economic liberty as an end unto itself cannot form the basis of a coherent political order and must ultimately erode public-spiritedness. By examining the character of the Venetian regime and the irreconcilable differences between its citizens regarding the nature of the Good, the attentive reader can identify barriers to civic friendship and evaluate whether law can serve as a mediating influence against what Publius calls “faction” in The Federalist. Shakespeare suggests that law’s mediating influence on faction is at best tenuous and follows the Aristotelean belief that civic friendship depends in large part on substantial agreement about first principles. These themes find their echoes in American political thought and remain deeply relevant to the legal and political challenges facing re-publican self-government today.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.