My discussion of the prospects for a contemporary republicanism will revolve around, primarily, Philip Pettit’s Republicanism and, secondarily, Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Pettit and Habermas may be understood as describing how the conceptions of certain central concepts in political philosophy, in particular, conceptions expressing ideals associated with the republican tradition, were transformed with the expansion of the citizenry in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Their interest in the matter is more than historical. For (...) both Pettit and Habermas, the pre-transformation world espoused attractive ideals which were lost in the post-transformation world, and indeed are lost in our contemporary world. Beyond their historical interest is a concern for the viability of reinstating republican conceptions of those ideals in our contemporary political culture. (shrink)

The recent revival of civic republicanism has been grounded on a conception of liberty as non-domination. While this avenue of thought holds considerable promise, such a conception of liberty can only be as sound as the underlying concept of domination, and although the term appears frequently in the pages of contemporary political theory, unlike other basic concepts, domination has received remarkably little in the way of serious conceptual analysis. Indeed, one might be tempted to conclude that domination is not a (...) substantive concept at all, but rather mere empty rhetoric. This essay represents an experiment of sorts to see if the concept of domination can indeed withstand sustained philosophical examination; to the extent that it is successful, it can be viewed as a friendly addition or amendment to the work of contemporary republican political theorists. (shrink)