 The standard reply among contemporary civic republicans is to argue that there is indeed a connection between republicanism and liberalism, but that liberalism is “an impoverished or incoherent republicanism” (Viroli 2002, 61)—a bastard offshoot, so to speak, of what was originally a considerably more appealing political philosophy. The republican critique of liberalism is thus best understood as a critique of various problematic tendencies that developed within the liberal tradition as it increasingly diverged from its republican roots.