This conceptual limitation is reflected in the constitutional imagination of modern republics. One may consider the language of the earliest formal constitutions of the modern age. It is fundamentally a language of checks and restraints. Institutions are first created, powers are assigned to them, and then elaborate mechanisms are devised to regulate and balance those very powers. The assumption underlying this design is that power is inherently prone to abuse and must therefore be constrained through constitutional architecture. Constitutionalism, in this sense, is less a philosophy of public life than a technology of political management.
A striking contrast may be found in the concept of dharma. Rather than beginning with institutions, dharma begins with the individual as a duty-bound moral being. It conceives society as an organic moral order in which each person is connected to others through the conscientious performance of appropriate duties. The emphasis is not upon external restraints but upon the ethical formation of citizens and the cultivation of character. The primary safeguard of public life is therefore internal rather than institutional. Institutions certainly remain necessary, but they become secondary supports for a moral order rather than substitutes for one.
Modern republics have largely retained inherited institutional structures, adding little more than a democratic icing. Such cosmetic democratisation has not necessarily fostered a genuinely public ethos. Even the United States, arguably the most influential modern republic, exhibits significant tensions between republican ideals and the increasingly opaque and complex dynamics of contemporary politics. Constitutional checks, however sophisticated, cannot by themselves generate civic virtue, public responsibility, or a shared moral purpose.
The problem, therefore, is not merely institutional but conceptual. Republicanism has too often been reduced to a constitutional form of government rather than developed as a comprehensive philosophy of public life. If it is to remain relevant in the twenty-first century, it requires a fresh infusion of imagination and agency. It must move beyond defining itself by what it rejects, whether monarchy or imperial rule, and articulate a positive vision of civic virtue, public responsibility, dispersed power, and collective self-government. Such a reconstruction may also require republicanism to recover what constitutional design alone cannot provide: an ethical foundation that treats citizenship not merely as a bundle of rights and institutional relationships, but as a disciplined way of life grounded in duty, responsibility, and the pursuit of the common good.
Niraj Kumar Jha
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