The question of whether or not a closed border entry policy under the unilateral control of a democratic state is legitimate cannot be settled until we first know to whom the justification of a regime of control is owed. According to the state sovereignty view, the control of entry policy, including of movement, immigration, and naturalization, ought to be under the unilateral discretion of the state itself: justification for entry policy is owed solely to members. This position, however, is inconsistent (...) with the democratic theory of popular sovereignty. Anyone accepting the democratic theory of political legitimation domestically is thereby committed to rejecting the unilateral domestic right to control state boundaries. Because the demos of democratic theory is in principle unbounded, the regime of boundary control must be democratically justified to foreigners as well as to citizens, in political institutions in which both foreigners and citizens can participate. (shrink)

Capitalist societies are full of unacceptable inequalities. Freedom is of paramount importance. These two convictions, widely shared around the world, seem to be in direct contradiction with each other. Fighting inequality jeopardizes freedom, and taking freedom seriously boosts inequality. Can this conflict be resolved? In this ground-breaking book, Philippe Van Parijs sets a new and compelling case for a just society. Assessing and rejecting the claims of both socialism and conventional capitalism, he presents a clear and compelling alternative vision of (...) the just society: a capitalist society offering a substantial and unconditional basic income to all its members. Not just an exercise in political theory, this book reveals a new ideal of a free society and its meaning in the real world by drawing out its policy implications. It is essential reading for anyone concerned about the just society and the welfare state as we move into the twenty-first century. (shrink)

A basic income is an income paid by a political community to all its members on an individual basis, without means test or work requirement. This article surveys the various forms the basic income proposal has taken and how they relate to kin ideas; synthesizes the central case for basic income, as a strategy against both poverty and unemployment; examines the question of whether and in what sense a universal basic income is affordable; and discusses the most promising next steps (...) towards it, both in the North and in the South. (shrink)

The concept of dependence is central both to the study of modern republicanism and to the study of systemic corruption. Recently, Lawrence Lessig has described American politics as suffering from “dependency corruption,” a type of institutional corruption about which eighteenth-century republican writers were extremely worried. This article examines the use of the concept “dependence” in the current “neo-roman” republican theory stemming from Quentin Skinner, Maurizio Viroli, and particularly Philip Pettit. The article argues that the term dependence has two essentially distinct (...) inflections, one relating to outright domination (subjection to arbitrary power) and the other relating to a condition of material subordinacy (dependency corruption). If liberty is the “the absence of dependence on the will of others,” it is extremely important to determine just what independence entails. This article suggests that dependency corruption was a dominant concern of the modern republican tradition, but it is a concern that is largely ignored in today’s new republicanism. By way of a foray into the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources employed by the new republicans, the article attempts to revive a manner of thinking about corruption that risks being lost to view. (shrink)

This book originated as lectures for a course on political philosophy that Rawls taught regularly at Harvard in the 1980s.

The market is traditionally hailed as the very exemplar of a system under which people enjoy freedom, in particular the negative sort of freedom associated with liberal and libertarian thought: freedom as noninterference. But how does the market appear from the perspective of a rival conception of freedom (freedom as non-domination) that is linked with the Roman and neo-Roman tradition of republicanism? The republican conception of freedom argues for important normative constraints on property, exchange, and regulation, without supporting extremes to (...) the effect that ‘property is theft’ or ‘taxation is theft’ or anything of that kind. It does not cast a cold eye on commerce; it merely provides an alternative view of the attractions. (shrink)

In his most recent book, Philip Pettit presents and defends a “republican” political philosophy that stems from a tradition that includes Cicero, Machiavelli, James Harrington, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Madison. The book provides an interpretation of what is distinctive about republicanism—namely, Pettit claims, its notion of freedom as nondomination. He sketches the history of this notion, and he argues that it entails a unique justification of certain political arrangements and the virtues of citizenship that would make those arrangements possible. Of (...) historical and philosophical interest, he stresses, is the fundamental contrast between freedom as nondomination and slavery. Joseph Priestly, for instance, invoked this contrast in defending the cause of the American Revolution, and in 1769 declared, incredibly, that if the parliament of Great Britain continued to tax the American colonies, “the colonists will be reduced to a state of as complete servitude, as any people of which there is an account in history”. Those opposed to American independence, among them Jeremy Bentham, relied instead on a Hobbesian notion of freedom as noninterference, using it to argue that the colonists were no more interfered with by the British government than were citizens of Britain. Drawing out this contrast, Pettit aims to establish that a republican view of freedom better supports the institutions of a constitutional democracy than does liberalism. His account of the distinguishing characteristics and strengths of republicanism is, however, only partially successful. Neither his case that a republican notion of freedom provides for a more solid defense of democratic institutions and constitutional protections than is available within liberalism, nor his argument that republicanism can better address “private” injustices, is convincing. (shrink)

Many political theorists today deny that citizenship can be defended on liberal grounds alone. Cosmopolitans claim that loyalty to a particular state is incompatible with universal liberal principles, which hold that we have equal duties of justice to persons everywhere, while nationalist theorists justify civic obligations only by reaching beyond liberal principles and invoking the importance of national culture. In Liberal Loyalty, Anna Stilz challenges both views by defending a distinctively liberal understanding of citizenship. Drawing on Kant, Rousseau, and Habermas, (...) Stilz argues that we owe civic obligations to the state if it is sufficiently just, and that constitutionally enshrined principles of justice in themselves--rather than territory, common language, or shared culture--are grounds for obedience to our particular state and for democratic solidarity with our fellow citizens. She demonstrates that specifying what freedom and equality mean among a particular people requires their democratic participation together as a group. Justice, therefore, depends on the authority of the democratic state because there is no way equal freedom can be defined or guaranteed without it. Yet, as Stilz shows, this does not mean that each of us should entertain some vague loyalty to democracy in general. Citizens are politically obligated to their own state and to each other, because within their particular democracy they define and ultimately guarantee their own civil rights. Liberal Loyalty is a persuasive defense of citizenship on purely liberal grounds. (shrink)

According to republican theory, we are free persons to the extent that we are protected and secured in the same fundamental choices, on the same public basis, as one another. But there is no public protection or security without a coercive state. Does this mean that any freedom we enjoy is a superficial good that presupposes a deeper, political form of subjection? Philip Pettit addresses this crucial question in On the People's Terms. He argues that state coercion will not involve (...) individual subjection or domination insofar as we enjoy an equally shared form of control over those in power. This claim may seem utopian but it is supported by a realistic model of the institutions that might establish such democratic control. Beginning with a fresh articulation of republican ideas, Pettit develops a highly original account of the rationale of democracy, breathing new life into democratic theory. (shrink)

This study builds on the work of contemporary civic republicans, supplying a detailed analysis of the concept of domination absent in the familiar accounts of political freedom as non-domination.

In Individuality and Mass Democracy, Alex Zarakas acknowledges the importance of both, but focuses on the responsibility of citizens.

This is the first full-length presentation of a republican alternative to the liberal and communitarian theories that have dominated political philosophy in recent years. The latest addition to the acclaimed Oxford Political Theory series, Pettit's eloquent and compelling account opens with an examination of the traditional republican conception of freedom as non-domination, contrasting this with established negative and positive views of liberty. The first part of the book traces the rise and decline of this conception, displays its many attractions, and (...) makes a case for why it should still be regarded as a central political ideal. The second part of the book looks at what the implementation of the ideal would imply for substantive policy-making, constitutional and democratic design, regulatory control and the relation between state and civil society. Prominent in this account is a novel concept of democracy, under which government is exposed to systematic contestation, and a vision of relations between state and society founded upon civility and trust. Pettit's powerful and insightful new work offers not only a unified, theoretical overview of the many strands of republican ideas, but also a new and sophisticated perspective on studies in related fields including the history of ideas, jurisprudence, and criminology. (shrink)

The basic income proposal provides everyone in a society, as an unconditional right, with access to a certain level of income. Introducing such a right is bound to raise questions of institutional feasibility. Would it lead too many people to opt out of the workforce, for example? And even if it did not, could a constitution that allowed some members of the society to do this – at whatever relative cost – prove acceptable in a society of mutually reciprocal, equally (...) positioned members? I assume in this short essay, however, that none of these problems is insurmountable. I concentrate on the question of how far republicanism makes room for justifying something like a right to basic income, assuming that there are no problems of this kind with introducing and establishing such a right. Any satisfactory argument for a basic income should satisfy two desiderata. First is that of adequacy: the argument should establish a right to an intuitively.. (shrink)