Republic is unusual among political terms in being one that is actually very easy to give an ostensive definition to, but of which it is rather hard to explain the history. A republic is, very simply, a system of government that does not entail monarchy, nor, at least officially, aristocratic or oligarchical rule. But this does not necessarily mean that republican government must be democratic, because there is a large gap between abolishing oligarchy and insisting on universal suffrage.
The Roman Republic was, for example, the original precedent for republicanism, but had a clear class structure where only the higher orders of the society had any rights to participate in government. Despite this the ordinary working definition of a republic nowadays is any society that is both democratic and non-monarchial, and a huge number of the states in the world have ‘Republic’ somewhere in their official title. The fight over monarchy is long dead—the title means little, and the political questions it used to raise are now pointless.
This is the complete article, containing 169 words
(approx. 1 page at 300 words per page).
