Abstract

The term Republic is a word whose obviousness and presence in our contemporary political culture are matched only by its long-term indeterminacies. The first of these indeterminacies, moreover, has to do with the origin of “republic” in the Latin syntagm res publica with the immediately complex and polysemous meaning of a notion that we find frequently used under the Roman Republic itself but also under the Empire. Questioning res publica also obviously means questioning a crucial part of Roman political history, but also means thinking political history as such and methodologically reflecting on the language of these politics. As such, there is no stabilised model, no searching for “the essence of the thing”, or any claim to a stabilised definition of the object of study as a series of deletions and reappearances of core meanings is characteristic of res publica. The dynamic investigation concerns a question which, according to a syntagm present in the last page of Claudia Moatti’s book in a significant way, becomes a “mobilising reference”, therefore political. In this journey, the acceptance of uncertainty and indeterminacy, in a way, becomes the price to pay to rediscover the life of words and their historical signifiance, insofar as they are linked to the action of individuals, to their commitment to the world, without relying on semantic certainties or on a programme to be implemented, but by starting precisely from open questions because none of the proposed answers has proven to be satisfactory. The comparison with another moment of political and semantic crisis, the Machiavellian moment, will in conclusion illustrate the fruitfulness of the perspective adopted.