John Rawls thinks republicanism is compatible with his political liberalism. Philip Pettit insists that the two conflict in important ways. In this paper, I make sense of this dispute by employing David Chalmers’s method of elimination to reveal the meaning underlying key terms in Rawls’s political liberalism and Pettit’s republicanism. This procedure of disambiguating terms will show how the two theories defend the same institutional arrangement on the same grounds. The procedure thus vindicates Rawls’s view of the two theories being (...) compatible. The reason for this compatibility is that both theories are politicized—that is, they are constructed to attract the compliance of all reasonable members of a modern, pluralistic society. (shrink)

In On the People’s Terms, Philip Pettit incorporates the Sieyèsian notion of constituent power into his constitutional theory of non-domination. In this article, I argue that Emmanuel Sieyès’s understanding of liberty precludes such an appropriation. While a republican, his conceptualisation of liberty in the face of commercial society stood apart from theories of civic vigilance, preferring instead to disentangle individuals from politics and maximise what he understood to be their non-political freedoms. Sieyès saw that liberty was heightened through relations of (...) representation and commercial dependency. This conception of liberty was pivotal to the identity of the nation, and so allowed Sieyès to assess forms of collective injustice committed by the French nobility. It also provided the normative foundation of his theory of constituent power. For Sieyès, constituent power guarded against legislative excess in a decidedly minimal sense, intending instead to separate citizens from the political sphere so they were not burdened with ongoing participation or public vigilance. (shrink)

Moralism is an often-cited feature of populist politics; yet, as a concept, it remains under-theorised in current literature. This paper posits that to understand the threat that populism poses to democracy, it is necessary to develop this key feature of populism. Essential to discerning what moralism is is the difference between moralism, or moralistic blame, and moral criticism. While moral criticism is a restrained and thoughtful method of holding persons accountable for their actions, moralism amounts to a distinctly punitive form (...) of exclusion: it seeks to undermine the equal moral status of the target of criticism. As a key feature of populism, then, moralism enables a political actor to solidify a conception of the ‘morally-pure‘ while normalising hate and disrespect for particular persons and groups in society. Populism – shaped by the features of anti-pluralism and moralism – therefore presents a clear threat to democracy, especially if we consider pluralism and recognition-respect as two basic principles underpinning democracy itself. (shrink)

The neo-republican conception of freedom as non-domination has emerged as a powerful framework for conceptualizing the dynamic relationship between power, democracy, and constitutionalism in modernity. Despite this, I argue that adaptations of republican freedom to the problem of slavery displace attention to race and foreclose more productive ways of addressing how racial slavery constitutes a distinct form of oppression. To illuminate the limitations of neo-republicanism, I turn to the political thought of abolitionists David Walker and Ottobah Cugoano. Both utilize comparative (...) histories of race and slavery to reveal the specificity of modern slavery as a form of oppression, which cannot be captured as an issue of domination in the technical sense of the term. They thus pose challenges to neo-republican theory for its failure to fully appreciate the historical differences between ancient and modern slavery. To do so would illuminate how neo-republican theory faces severe limitations in providing an adequate conceptualization of oppression in the case of racial slavery. (shrink)

This article is concerned with the antagonistic character of democratic politics, specifically in relation to the neo-republican conceptualisation of politics, as outlined by Philip Pettit. I take up a problem not addressed in the neo-republican scholarship, namely, the broader dispute over the practice of contestation and the scope of its reach in relation to the activity of politics. This article proceeds through an examination of what I call Pettit’s method of political theory in order to approach sideways the concept of (...) ‘contestation’ as a marker for a sublimated antagonistic dimension of neo-republican politics. Drawing on the work of Rancière and the insights of post-Nietzschean critical theory (Derrida, Laclau and Arendt), I examine the relationship between populism, democratic contestation and non-domination in neo-republican discourse. As such, this article exerts pressure on Pettit’s privileging of a status concept of freedom as the supreme political ideal of republican politics. This article explores the political possibilities opened up through a re-politicisation of non-domination, and the radical potential that resides in a politics that does not foreclose on democracy, understood in terms of popular power and not popular control. (shrink)

Contra las tesis que sostienen que Kant presenta versiones empobrecidas, poco originales o timoratas de republicanismo, tolerancia e ilustración, aquí se argumenta que tales versiones kantianas son, con todos los matices que se quiera, tendencialmente radicales, y terminan por descansar en la coimplicación entre moralidad y estado constitucional y republicano de derecho.

The paper offers five desiderata on a realist normative theory of politics: that it should avoid moralism, deontologism, transcendentalism, utopianism, and vanguardism. These desiderata argue for a theory that begins from values rooted in a people’s experience; that avoids prescribing a collective deontological constraint; that makes the comparison of imperfect regimes possible; that takes feasibility and sustainability into account; and that makes room for the claims of democracy. The paper argues, in the course of exploring the desiderata, that a neo-republican (...) philosophy of government does pretty well in satisfying them. (shrink)

Like the French revolutionaries, Kant defended individual rights and a republican constitution. That he nonetheless rejected a right of revolution has puzzled scholars. In this article I give an overview of Kant’s rejection of a right of revolution, compare it to the German intellectual context, and use it to explain Kant’s view of the events in France. In Kant’s nuanced account of the revolution’s two central phases, he refined a distinction between legitimate political transition and lawless popular rebellion.

Freedom is among the central values in political philosophy. Freedom also features heavily in normative arguments in ethics, politics, and law. Yet different sides often invoke freedom to establish very different conclusions. Some argue that freedom imposes strict constraints on state power. For example, when promoting public health, there is a limit on how far the state can interfere with individual freedom. Others, in contrast, argue that freedom is not just a constraint but also an important goal of state power (...) and collective action. Good public health policy, for example, promotes people’s freedom. Of course, different arguments often draw on different theories of freedom. So, to evaluate such arguments, we need to analyze these different theories and their implications and assess their plausibility. -/- The broadly liberal tradition views freedom as being about external options. Such theories typically start with an account of when someone has a specific freedom or unfreedom to do something. For example, some argue that only a narrow set of interpersonal interferences count as constraints on freedom. Others argue that a far broader set of factors, including ill health and natural constraints, can reduce one’s freedom. -/- Since the 1980s and 1990s, scholarship has increasingly recognized that to use liberal freedom in normative arguments, one must move beyond specific freedom and unfreedom. Most laws and policies both subtract and add specific freedoms. What matters is how a person’s freedom is affected overall. Philosophers and economists have thus engaged in intricate debates about how to measure overall freedom. Moreover, policies and law affect not only one person at one point in time but also multiple persons across time. So, liberal freedom-based arguments also require distributive criteria for intertemporal and interpersonal distributions of freedom. -/- In the early 21st century, republicanism has developed into a prominent alternative to liberal theories. Republicans argue that being a free person is not just, or not even primarily, about liberal option-freedom. Freedom requires being free from dominating power. Republicans and liberals have engaged in a lively debate on who offers the better theory. In developing the republican ideal, republicans also engage in intramural debates. For example, is domination primarily an interpersonal or structural phenomenon? And what economic institutions does republicanism imply? -/- Theorizing around freedom has become richer and moved from narrower questions regarding specific freedom and unfreedom to overall freedom and to republican theories of nondomination. But recent theorizing also seeks to extend its focus and scope. Historically, theorizing started with the freedom of able-bodied male citizens within nation states. Recent theorizing shifts the focus to include issues around gender, disability, freedom at the international level, and the freedom of nonhuman animals and future generations. Beyond fascinating implications of existing theories, a more inclusive focus is likely to also yield important lessons on how current theories can be improved. (shrink)

In this article, we discuss Greek and Roman conceptions of liberty. The supposedly ‘neo-Roman’ view of liberty as non-domination is really derived from negative Greek models, we argue, while Roman authors devised an alternative understanding of liberty that rested on the equality of legal rights. In this ‘paleo-Roman’ model, as long as the law was the same for all, you were free; whether or not you participated in making the law was not a constitutive feature of liberty. In essence, this (...) Roman theory was a theory of freedom as the rule of law and the guarantee of equal rights, especially due process rights. For this Roman concept of ‘legal liberty,’ as we call it, political participation was neither necessary nor sufficient. Theorized by Cicero and historicized by Livy, the Roman understanding of freedom flourished in early-modern times, proving important to paradigmatic republican authors such as Machiavelli and Rousseau as well as to Hobbes, whose work we discuss as a helpful point of comparison. (shrink)

The revival of republicanism was meant to challenge the hegemony of liberalism in contemporary political theory on the grounds that liberals show insufficient concern with institutional protection against political misrule. This article challenges this view by showing how neorepublicanism, particularly on Philip Pettit’s formulation, demands no greater institutional protection than does political liberalism. By identifying neutrality between conceptions of the good as the constraint on institutional requirements that forces neorepublicanism into the liberal framework, the article shows that neutrality is what (...) neorepublicans must jettison to offer a tenable critique of liberalism. Only then can neorepublicans ensure greater protection against misrule by demanding that citizens participate more actively in politics. They can then also criticize liberalism for failing to appreciate the importance of such protection. (shrink)

This article explains how 19th-century radical republicans answered the following question: how is it possible to be free in a social order that fosters economic dependence on others? I focus on the writings of a group of French thinkers called the solidarists who advocated “liberty organized for everyone.” Mutualism and social right were two components of the solidarist strategy for limiting domination in commercial/industrial society. While the doctrine of mutualism was rooted in pre-industrial artisan culture, social right was a novel (...) idea that built on Durkheim’s analysis of the division of labour. In this article, I describe the main features of the solidarist account: solidarity, social property, quasi-contractual debt, and restorative justice. Classical republicanism was deeply concerned with citizen participation and the balance between popular and elite power, but 19th-century radical republicans thought that these goals must be approached differently in market societies in which enormous power is exercised outside the state. The solidarists cautiously embraced the state as a mechanism for regulating the market in order to ensure equal liberty. Social right and mutualism were also conceived as ways of limiting the centralization of state power. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 1, February 2019, Page 20-39.

This article argues that Hayek employed a neo-Roman concept of liberty. It will show that Hayek’s definition of liberty conforms to that provided by Philip Pettit and Quentin Skinner, respectively...

Suele considerarse a Hegel (1770-1831) el filósofo europeo más importante desde Kant. Su influencia se extendió por todo el mundo hasta la Segunda Guerra Mundial, sobre todo a través de su discípulo díscolo, Karl Marx. Desde entonces, su importancia ha tendido a verse eclipsada por una marea creciente de polémica antimodernista, que ha ido de Heidegger al postmodernismo (aunque de forma ocasional e intermitente haya vuelto a prestársele atención). La visión que Hegel tenía de la Revolución Francesa fue fundamental en (...) la forja de su pensamiento político. Sin embargo, a pesar del papel decisivo que desempeñó en el desarrollo de sus ideas, su reacción ante este acontecimiento ha sido sistemáticamente malinterpretada. Mediante la presentación de un relato más fiel de la interpretación que Hegel hizo de su propia época, el argumento que aquí se expone sitúa su respuesta a los acontecimientos contemporáneos en el contexto de una serie de Revoluciones Mundiales que determinaron el significado de su época. Esta manera de aproximarse al problema sirve para ilustrar la singular combinación de razonamiento histórico y filosófico de la que dependía el pensamiento de Hegel. Cuando procedemos de ese modo, la reconstrucción de sus argumentos nos lleva a poner en cuestión la aplicabilidad de las ideas políticas del pasado a los periodos históricos posteriores. (shrink)

This paper addresses a neglected question in republican political philosophy: what are the conditions for a set of arguments to be considered republican? While republicanism traditionally confers a fundamental role to the democratic ideal of participation in decision-making, recent contributions argue that freedom could be promoted by facilitating exit where possible. The strong version of the latter argument states that when exit is possible, it constitutes the most important contribution to republican freedom, and it preserves the goal of isolating individual (...) choices, i.e. it precludes collective decision-making from interfering with them, and so it intends to limit the scope of public concern considered legitimate. I examine this argument to discuss the boundaries and varieties of republicanism: (i) the boundaries establish that an argument should be couched and substantively articulated in distinctively republican terms; (ii) the strong version of the exit argument does not fall within the boundaries because it is in tension with core republican commitments to self-government and civic virtues; (iii) once we abide by the boundaries we may encounter a diversity of proposals differing on the more concrete level of institutional design and empirical assumptions – these are the varieties of republicanism. (shrink)

Recently, scholars have criticized what they call the “Kantian-Republican” thesis of freedom as non-domination. The main complaint is that domination is unavoidable. This concern can be separated into the problem of state domination, which suggests that the state's intervening powers necessarily dominate its citizens, and the problem of majority domination, which suggests that the People necessarily dominate individual citizen as a result of the potential to form dominating majorities.

The Abbé Sieyès is usually portrayed as a thoroughly modern thinker and a critic of the nostalgic Classical Republicanism of some of his contemporaries, in favour of a “modern republicanism”, founded upon the division of labour and commercial sociability in a nation composed of equal labourers and producers. But Sieyès’s unpublished manuscripts suggest he, in fact, regarded modern labourers as unskilled “Machines du Travail”, dulled by work and incapable of exercising the duties of citizenship, a critique grounded in a critical (...) account of commercial society as compared to the ideal republican polity. Where most scholars regard this as either a simple contradiction or a passing juvenile nostalgia, this paper argues that, influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Sieyès consistently sought to counteract the degrading effects of the inequalities generated by commercial society and the division of labour. It was on this basis that Sieyès sought to construct a new political system which would reconcile participatory politics with representative government, enabling all citizens to enjoy a life of Active Citizenship. Based on these insights, this paper reinterprets Sieyès’s political project as an attempt to reconcile the classical conception of citizenship with the demands of a commercial society. (shrink)

The recent years have seen the revival of neo-Roman republicanism through the works of Philip Pettit, who has replaced Isaiah Berlin’s taxonomy of positive/negative liberty with freedom as nondomination. This essay compares the neo-Roman conception of nondomination to the liberal conception of noninterference, with the purpose of clarifying whether nondomination is a distinct concept of liberty and preferable to that of noninterference. The essay highlights the exchange between Pettit/Skinner and Carter/Kramer, wherein Carter and Kramer make their case for ‘pure negative (...) liberty’, which is claimed to be the proper articulation of negative liberty. Pure-negative theorists believe that nondomination is a strand of negative liberty, adding nothing new to the concept, whereas their republican counterparts disagree. My essay argues that nondomination is a distinct, preferable concept of liberty, thanks to its view on fundamental unfreedom and the mere presence of arbitrary power, which the pure negative view fails to account for satisfactorily. (shrink)

In this paper, I take issue with Arthur Isak Applbaum’s power-liability view of political legitimacy. In contrast to the traditional view that legitimate rule entails a moral duty to obey, here called the right-duty view, Applbaum argues that political legitimacy is a moral power that entails moral liability for the subjects of political rule. According to Applbaum, the power-liability view helps us explain how responsible citizens in some cases can act contrary to law while still recognizing the claims of law. (...) Against Applbaum’s attempt at establishing the power-liability view through conceptual analysis, I argue that we cannot specify the moral implications of de jure legitimacy without considering the moral argument that justifies the right to rule. I further argue that Applbaum’s normative account of political legitimacy implies commitment to a normative idea that forms the basis of a strong case in favor of the right-duty view. Finally, I argue that the present defense of the right-duty view has resources to account for the moral phenomena that prompt Applbaum’s advocacy of the power-liability view. (shrink)

When assessing institutions and social outcomes, it matters how free society is within them (‘societal freedom’). For example, does capitalism come with greater societal freedom than socialism? For such judgements, freedom theorists typically assume Individualism: societal freedom is simply the aggregate of individual freedom. However, G.A. Cohen’s well-known case provides a challenge: imagine ten prisoners are individually free to leave their prison but doing so would incarcerate the remaining nine. Assume further that no one actually leaves. If we adopt Individualism (...) plus the standard liberal view of freedom, such incarceration seems to leave societal freedom unaffected. This is an important theoretical challenge: it seems we must either reject Individualism or reject, or at least amend, the liberal view. Cohen also suggests his case, and the collective unfreedom therein, helps us capture how proletarians are unfree under capitalism. In this article, I argue that we can solve Cohen’s puzzle, if we focus on how power can reduce freedom. If we adopt the republican view of freedom, we can say that prisoners are unfree in Cohen’s case because they are dominated by the other prisoners. This solution keeps Individualism but moves beyond liberal freedom. I then also show how this individualistic framework captures proletarian unfreedom. (shrink)

This article critically engages with Philip Pettit’s republican political philosophy, and with his republican theory of democracy in particular. After a brief summary of Pettit’s conceptualisation of freedom as non-domination, the paper focuses on the question as to which institutional arrangement Pettit considers commensurate with this normative ideal. The paper prepares the ground for a critical reconstruction of Pettit’s theory of democracy by highlighting the understanding of democracy in the republican tradition within which Pettit aims to develop his contemporary theory (...) of democracy. The reconstruction leads to the argument that Pettit, in neo-Roman republican tradition, has written “the people” as a transformative actor out of the script of democratic theory. (shrink)

European Journal of Political Theory, Volume 21, Issue 1, Page 25-46, January 2022. This article explains how 19th-century radical republicans answered the following question: how is it possible to be free in a social order that fosters economic dependence on others? I focus on the writings of a group of French thinkers called the solidarists who advocated “liberty organized for everyone.” Mutualism and social right were two components of the solidarist strategy for limiting domination in commercial/industrial society. While the doctrine (...) of mutualism was rooted in pre-industrial artisan culture, social right was a novel idea that built on Durkheim’s analysis of the division of labour. In this article, I describe the main features of the solidarist account: solidarity, social property, quasi-contractual debt, and restorative justice. Classical republicanism was deeply concerned with citizen participation and the balance between popular and elite power, but 19th-century radical republicans thought that these goals must be approached differently in market societies in which enormous power is exercised outside the state. The solidarists cautiously embraced the state as a mechanism for regulating the market in order to ensure equal liberty. Social right and mutualism were also conceived as ways of limiting the centralization of state power. (shrink)

This article argues that Hayek employed a neo-Roman concept of liberty. It will show that Hayek’s definition of liberty conforms to that provided by Philip Pettit and Quentin Skinner, respectively the chief theorist and leading historian of the neo-Roman concept. It will go on to demonstrate how the genealogy of liberty Hayek provides is also the same as that offered by Pettit and Skinner. This is important, as the neo-Roman concept is not regarded, either by Hayek or by neo-republicans led (...) by Pettit, as a product of political theory. Instead it is viewed as underpinning a historical tradition. Hayek’s self-conscious association with this tradition reinforces the article’s prior claim that Hayek’s conceptual writing on liberty is neo-Roman. Finally, the article considers how the neo-Roman nature of Hayek’s work complicates the historical narrative and political claims the neo-republicans make for the neo-Roman concept. It concludes that it is open to use by another, very different, political tradition: free market liberalism. (shrink)

Philip Pettit ha utilizado la libertad positiva y negativa de Isaiah Berlin para dos propósitos diferentes. En primer lugar, la distinción es empleada para elaborar un ideal distinguible de libertad como no-dominación que contiene elementos propios de la libertad negativa y la libertad positiva. En segundo lugar, Pettit sostiene que la libertad como no-dominación es más atractiva que la libertad negativa defendida por Berlin –la libertad como no-interferencia– y una variedad de libertad positiva que Berlin critica –la libertad como participación (...) o populismo. Este trabajo sostiene que existe una tensión entre estos dos objetivos. Una vez que se elabora una concepción distinguible de libertad como no dominación no es posible argüir que es más atractiva que las alternativas rivales. Específicamente, los argumentos que Pettit ha formulado en contra de la libertad positiva no tienen ningún impacto sobre una variante de libertad positiva que, por un lado, identifica libertad con control y, por el otro, identifica al control con la existencia de instituciones republicanas. (shrink)