also organised toward 'public' shared interests. In medieval texts, 'republic' was used to refer to the body of shared interest with the king at its head. For instance, the Holy Roman Empire was also known as the Sancta Respublica Romana, the Holy Roman Republic. The Byzantine Empire also continued calling itself the Roman Republic as the Byzantines did not regard monarchy as a contradiction to republicanism. Instead, republics were defined as any state based on popular sovereignty and whose institutions were based on shared values. Democracy vs. Republic debate While the term democracy has been used interchangeably with the term republic by some, others have made sharp distinctions between the two for millennia. "Montesquieu, founder of the modern constitutional state, repeated in his The Spirit of the Laws of 1748 the insight that Aristotle had expressed two millennia earlier, ‘Voting by lot is in the nature of democracy; voting by choice is in the nature of aristocracy.’" Additional critics of elections include Rousseau, Robespierre, and Marat, who said of the new French Republic, "‘What use is it to us, that we have broken the aristocracy of the nobles, if that is replaced by the aristocracy of the rich?’" Political philosophy The term republic originated from the writers of the Renaissance as a descriptive term for states that were not monarchies. These writers, such as Machiavelli, also wrote important prescriptive works describing how such governments should function. These ideas of how a government and society should be structured is the basis for an ideology known as classical republicanism or civic humanism. This ideology is based on the Roman Republic and the city states of Ancient Greece and focuses on ideals such as civic virtue, rule of law and mixed government. This understanding of a republic as a form of government distinct from a liberal democracy is one of the main theses of the Cambridge School of historical analysis. This grew out of the work of J. G. A. Pocock who in 1975 argued that a series of scholars had expressed a consistent set of republican ideals. These writers included Machiavelli, Milton, Montesquieu and the founders of the United States of America. Pocock argued that this was an ideology with a history and principles distinct from liberalism. These ideas were embraced by a number of different writers, including Quentin Skinner, Philip Pettit and Cass Sunstein. These subsequent writers have further explored the