I want to get some basic thoughts on Philip Pettit’s book, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, on the record. Pettit’s ideas have the virtue of being not so far out in left field (from my own perspective) as to be hopeless, yet strange enough to be difficult to grapple with. What follows really are just some first thoughts, not very elegantly expressed, and not very certain.
Basic Idea
Pettit presents himself as advocating an alternative conception of freedom to the traditional oppositional pairing associated with Isaiah Berlin, of “negative” vs. “positive” freedom. Negative freedom is absence of coercion—or as Pettit says, interference. Positive freedom is empowerment to achieve one’s aims.
Pettit says he has found—or resurrected—a third alternative: freedom as absence of domination. Domination he defines as the capacity of arbitrary interference. This definition has three parts.
- Interference. “Interference” he defines (52–54) as any sort of intervention deliberately imposed by an agent that worsens someone’s condition. Thus, interference is done by humans, not by nature, and deliberately, not accidentally. Also, interference must make you worse off. It can do this in almost any way: by withdrawing options (like refusing to sell you my apples), altering the payoffs of certain outcomes, or changing the probabilities of possible outcomes. It can be performed by direct force, the threat of force or violence, by institutional authority (e.g., revoking one’s library card, by refusing to associate (e.g., hire, trade, do business with) one, or by manipulation, deception, or “non-rational shaping of people’s beliefs or desires” (53).
- Arbitrarity. This does not really mean, as it might seem to, that the agent’s capacity to interfere is unconstrained—although, if the capacity to interfere were totally unconstrained, then it would be arbitrary. But arbitrarity is compatible with severe constraints on the exercise of interference. What really determines that the interference is “arbitrary” is that it worsens the situation of the affected party. As Pettit puts it, the interference does not track “the relevant interests or ideas” of the affected party (65). Pettit doesn’t define “interests or ideas,” but this phrase seems to mean both a person’s objective interests and his conception of his interests. (It may be that Pettit is seeking to avoid the issue of how a person’s interests are determined, especially the issue of whether a person’s interests can exist independent of his desires, goals, or “ideas.” Perhaps Pettit wants to set this thorny issue aside.)
- Capacity. Pettit stresses that it doesn’t matter for domination whether the dominant party exercises their capacity for interference. Merely having the capacity puts those who are subject to it under domination. A slave is still a slave—dominated and unfree—even if he has a kindly master who looks out for his interests and never coerces him at all. (It is also true that you can be interfered with without domination, if the interference is aligned with your “interests and ideas.” This follows from the first two points.)
Thus, freedom from domination is not “positive freedom” (empowerment), since, for one thing, nature can’t impose “domination,” only human agents can. For another (although this is slippery), agents aren’t particularly obliged to enhance or benefit or empower other agents. I don’t think Pettit wants to say (though I could be wrong) that if you don’t have publicly provided healthcare, you aren’t free. (He would say that if an agent has the arbitrary capacity to remove any of my healthcare options that would otherwise have been publicly provided, then I am unfree. But that’s not quite the same thing.) Nor is freedom from domination “negative freedom” (absence of interference): for, merely potential, unactualized interference can be domination. Moreover, actual interference is not necessarily domination (if it is required to be in the agent’s interests).
Pettit claims (27–30) that his “republican” ideal of freedom as non-domination is rooted in Roman ideas about freedom as libertas, as particularly associated with Cicero, which was revived in the Renaissance by writers such as Machiavelli, from whom it was passed to 17th and 18th century Dutch and English writers like James Harrington, Milton, Algernon Sidney, Richard Price, Joseph Priestly, the authors of Cato’s Letters (Trenchard and Gordon), and the American patriot Tom Paine, and the authors of The Federalist (especially Madison). Also named as among the good guys are Montesquieu, de Tocqueville (“perhaps”), and Rousseau (but “only if his work is interpreted in a non-populist way”) (19); also John Locke (40). Contemporaries advocating a non-interference (“negative”) view of freedom were Hobbes, Sir Robert Filmer, John Lind, Jeremy Bentham, and William Paley.
Pettit thinks the republican view of freedom was dominant through the 18th century but then declined shortly after the founding of the United States of America in favor of the non-interference view. Interestingly, Pettit suggests that one reason for the change may have been the need to “democratize” the concept of freedom, from something only patrician gentlemen could realistically enjoy to something that could be claimed by all (48–49). Non-interference is an easier goal to achieve than non-domination.
Weird Things about Freedom as Non-Domination
Here I just want to list problems with the conception of freedom as non-domination as they occur to me, without elaboration.
- The weirdest thing about this idea of freedom is its vagueness. The idea of freedom as the opposite of slavery—which is Pettit’s core idea—is intuitive, yes. But what counts as “slavery”? Pettit seems to have a very expansive view of it (53–54). He thinks if your boss can fire you at will, that’s domination. So, the freedom of some to refuse to do business with others counts as domination of those others. But then if the some are forced to do business with the others, then how is that not domination? By what standard will Pettit sort this out? I’m not sure what solution there can be to this problem other than to set up a central committee of some kind that will determine what everyone’s obligations are. But this would be hopeless because, (a) on the one hand, everyone must be allowed to challenge the rulings of the committee on the grounds of not tracking their own “interests and ideas,” and people must have an ultimate right of secession if they think their “interests and ideas” are not sufficiently accommodated (56, 63); (b) on the other hand, if the committee can enforce its own rulings, this would quickly become an authoritarian disaster.
- At the heart of “non-domination” as Pettit defines it is the notion of an agent’s “interests and ideas,” and Pettit makes no attempt to say how these will be determined. Apparently, the agents themselves are the ultimate authorities of their own interests and ideas. The only way out of this would seem to be to start making lists of the various components of “human well-being.” Needless to say, there is no consensus as to the values that constitute human well-being, and Pettit evidently rejects this approach (96). But then how can freedom as non-domination be achieved? Domination is interference that is arbitrary; it is arbitrary if it is detrimental to the victim’s “interests and ideas”; and each individual is the sovereign judge of his own interests and ideas. Once again, we arrive at a place where “freedom” as non-domination turns out to mean that my “interests and ideas” impose positive obligations on you and vice versa. This reminds me of Hayek’s claim that individual freedom—together with its flip side, coordination with others—only exists through the setting of clear boundaries; i.e., through freedom as non-interference. See Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Vol. 1, Ch. 5, “Nomos”: “The maximal coincidence of expectations is achieved by the delimitation of protected domains”:
The understanding that “good fences make good neighbors,” that is, that men can use their own knowledge in the pursuit of their own ends without colliding with each other only if clear boundaries can be drawn between their respective domains of free action, is the basis on which all known civilization has grown. Property, in the wide sense in which it is used to include not only material things, but (as John Locke defined it) the “life, liberty, and estates” of every individual, is the only solution men have yet discovered to the problem of reconciling individual freedom with the absence of conflict. Law, liberty, and property are an inseparable trinity. There can be no law in the sense of universal rules of conduct which does not determine boundaries of the domains of freedom by laying down rules that enable each to ascertain where he is free to act.
- Pettit repeatedly asserts that a person under the “domination” of another person will be unable to “look them in the eye” (e.g., 60). This is a powerful image, but it’s totally false. Remember how casual “domination” is for Pettit. Pettit thinks your boss dominates you because he can fire you at will. But I’ve had lots of bosses and I always looked them in the eye and told them they were wrong if I thought so. And I also never suffered by doing so. I think there is a lot of needless moral cowardice in the world. I don’t think of myself as a particularly brave person, but I’ve never had trouble doing what is right and saying what is necessary in a business context, including menial labor. People are moved by moral arguments. More generally, the point is that it’s weird to claim that the fact that you can be arbitrarily fired means you are dominated. This is the kind of claim that sounds good in the abstract (“Gee, it’d be nice if I never had to worry about getting fired! Then I would be free!”), but in actual practice it’s not really an issue. I suspect the reason comes down again to freedom of association. In a system of free association, people in a business are all there because they want to be (at least in the sense of its being their most desirable available option). This includes both the employer and the people he hires. The employer surrounds himself with the best people he can get and invests in their training and development, so it is not normally in his interest to fire them. In such ways, a system of freedom of association works automatically to adjust people’s interests and expectations with respect to each other.
- Are we so sure “domination” in Pettit’s sense is a bad thing? People work their way up to positions of authority and responsibility, and by the time they get there, by and large they are reasonably qualified for those positions—or at any rate it’s not clear that any other selection procedure would be more effective at placing qualified people in such positions. Do we really want a situation where ne’er-do-well employees can’t easily be fired? Where people who are stupid, ignorant, lazy, and feckless aren’t under any measure of authority from people who are smart, informed, industrious, and responsible? I don’t mean authority to violate rights, obviously, or to dominate physically. But organizations such as business firms necessarily operate hierarchically, and this doesn’t seem to be a bad thing. But it would be undercut or even destroyed by “freedom as non-domination.”
Policy of Truth 
I agree with just about everything you say until the third and fourth “weirdness” bullets. I think we’ve had very different experiences in the work world, and particularly in the corporate business world.
As a prefatory comment: I’m of mixed mind about Pettit’s analysis as a whole: there are so many moving parts there. What I agree with is his account of domination, full stop. I don’t agree that freedom is non-domination, or that the state should concern itself with the promotion of freedom as non-domination. I’m also skeptical of the idea that you can get domination out of pure capacity-to-dominate (though I see the plausibility of that claim in some cases).
Coming the other way around, however, though I’m sympathetic to freedom as non-coercion (or “non-interference”), I think most libertarian analyses underestimate the conceptual resources necessary to make that concept clear, to justify it, or to enforce it in practice. I also think that defenders of free markets are insensitive to the problem posed by domination, whether or not that problem is to be resolved by law.
Now to domination: I think Pettit’s rhetoric about “looking people in the eye” is really throwaway stuff without meaning. You can be dominated and look someone in the eye out of defiance. And you can fail to be dominated and fail to look someone in the eye out of timidity. So “looking someone in the eye” strikes me as a highly contingent psychological matter that politically speaking is neither here nor there. But I think Pettit is right about the case itself: A boss who can fire you at will does dominate you. To see that, one has to re-describe your account of “freedom of association,” but the re-description is as at least true as the description you give.
This is how you put it:
That strikes me as a sanguine description of something that often takes a more malign form than that. In a system of free association, workers elect to take a job, not because that’s where “they want to be,” but for lack of any better options. They only “want” to be there in the Pickwickian sense that there’s nowhere else for them to go consistent with survival. To pick an extreme case that drives the point home: if I was in a famine, I would, if possible, end up at the assistance station dispensing food. But that’s only “where I want to be” in the sense that if I didn’t go there, I would die. In a larger sense, I don’t want to be in a famine at all.
Though it’s obviously not comparable to a famine, I think it’s reasonable for the average worker to say that they don’t want to be a worker in an economy where a handful of private equity firms run gigantic swatches of the country, and the corporate executives and managers working at the top of the hierarchy–who do nothing of discernible value themselves except attend meetings and give or consume PowerPoint presentations–enjoy huge swatches of arbitrary, unaccountable, discretionary power to hire, fire, and promote without ever having to give any reasons for anything they do, no matter what it is. But the average worker, constrained by any number of factors, ends up at a job under the authority of such people, and tries to achieve some stability in life by making themselves “of value” to the company–in a context where very little of what they do has any predictable chance of ensuring their presence on the payroll for more than a few months at a time. No one really “wants” that, except by default: they “want” it in the narrow sense of voluntarily choosing it because there’s nothing else they can do that’s much better.
I don’t think employers surround themselves “with the best people” they can get. They hire people on the basis of arbitrary dogmas about whom to hire plus nepotism. That’s their operative definition of “best.”
As for when it is normally in someone’s interest to fire someone: I think you’re presupposing a conception of normality that doesn’t apply to corporate executives or managers. This is the most common pattern behind the terminations I’ve seen over and over: Some anonymous executive makes some executive decision based on some wildly optimistic assumptions along with some heavily massaged “data.” The executive in question makes no effort whatsoever to figure out whether what he wants done is operationally feasible. The task in question simply becomes a “corporate priority” based on some vague gesture at some abstractly desirable goal. Some unfortunate person is then tasked with bringing this “priority” about in the real world, in real time. Sometimes the unfortunate person isn’t so much “unfortunate” as ingenuous: they volunteer for the task in question on the supposition that it must be feasible, and if they do it, they will get credit, be promoted, get a raise, etc. Call this person Pollyanna. Six months or a year pass. Lo and behold, the High Priority Task does not work out.
Pollyanna is fired. Why? Because “accountability” demands it. What evidence suggests that Pollyanna was at fault? What semi-plausible causal path through time and space would have made Pollyanna, in particular, responsible for the outcome? No one is permitted to raise these questions, and no one ever does. This is because the relevant executives do not have even the beginnings of an answer to them, and cannot imagine anyone’e challenging their decisions. All they know is that “someone must be fired in the name of accountability,” that Pollyanna is easy enough to fire, and that once Pollyanna is fired, the immediate problem posed by the recent failure of High Priority Task is solved, at least for the moment. The same executives who demand “weekly reports” on every fluctuation “in the market” have no compunction whatsoever about firing people based on no data whatsoever. It’s easy enough to understand why. It’s not as though they’re ever going to fire themselves. Once Pollyanna is fired, she’s erased from memory and forgotten. Then the next Pollyanna figure takes her place.
It’s worth noting that while management reserves the right to fire at will–without cause, without notice–no rank and file member of the staff enjoys the reciprocal right. No one, no matter how low on the totem pole, can leave their job without cause or notice. If they do, their pay will be docked, and they’ll lose their benefits. To the extent that anyone trains anyone in corporate life, it’s people-about-to-be-terminated who train their successors. A corporation wants the power to fire you on a “sudden death” basis, but wants to be able to hold you as long as is required to squeeze every last bit of information out of you that it might need to do your job in your absence. For people living paycheck-to-paycheck and/or with health problems (or any problem requiring benefits), this is not a small thing. It means that you live under perpetual uncertainty, with no idea whatsoever of your viability on the payroll, under conditions where losing your job has seriously adverse consequences on your well-being (too obvious to be lost in any confusion or contestation about what counts as “well-being”).
As for the investment made in training and development, the standard idea is that “people learn best by doing.” This is another way of saying that no one really needs any training or development: they either sink or swim by figuring it all out on their own. In this respect, corporate managers are all Deweyan pragmatists of the crudest variety (far cruder than Dewey himself).
My favorite example of this is a janitor who destroyed decades of sensitive research at Rensselaer Polytech because no one told him how to deal with an alarm that kept going off, night after night. Naturally, after the research was destroyed, everyone blamed the janitor–sort of. And what was wrong with him? Well, he was “slow,” i.e., mentally retarded. Since he wasn’t literally to blame for being retarded, I guess the upshot is that no one was to blame for what happened. It was an act of God.
It’s obvious why you don’t waste resources on training a mentally retarded janitor, right? What’s not at first obvious is why you would hire one, then triumphantly save money by not training him, then overlook the risk that he might destroy all of the research housed in the facility, then half-blame him when it happened. But once you factor in the mentality of the average corporate manager, it all becomes obvious. If you’re paying someone $13/hr to clean your facility, that’s because you regard his labor as “unskilled.” Why would you need to waste resources training an unskilled worker? What could go wrong? Yes, he might destroy the facility, but if he does, you (the manager) leave for greener pastures. It’s not your liability, after all, but the company’s. The inevitable lawsuit is a can you kick down the road, and indeed, leave in the middle of the road as you make a U turn for elsewhere.
https://13wham.com/news/local/janitor-at-ny-university-destroyed-decades-of-research-caused-1m-in-damages-says-lawsuit-new-york-troy-rensselaer-polytechnic-institute-daigle-cleaning-services-custodian
I should add that I myself don’t think the janitor was “mentally retarded.” I’m using that phrase because I’m certain it’s the insinuation that the company wants to convey. It wants to be able to pretend that it was forced to hire a retarded janitor under the ADA, and that, saddled with this unwanted burden, it couldn’t possibly have averted the disaster that happened. What happened, in their view, is just what happens when upright companies like theirs are forced to hire retarded people. I don’t believe that for a minute. But I’m curious to see how this case ends up.
So I don’t think the standard free market story about “free association” really works. The real story is that there are a bunch of people at the top who hold enormous, asymmetrical, unaccountable power. These people are totally insulated from the consequences of their decisions. Then there are people much farther down of whom the reverse is true. They have enormous responsibility but little power. The assumption that holds the whole structure together is that all of it is taking place “voluntarily,” hence everyone “wants” to be exactly where they are, and everything works out well for everyone. But that is true of the top, not the bottom.
In this context, the top dominates the bottom in a totally literal, straightforward way. The people at the bottom are executing the arbitrary wills of the people at the top, but not vice versa. The people-at-the-bottom only “want” to do this because they have no better options. But little of it is anything they really want to do. If they defy their bosses, they take on a whole hierarchy and risk termination along with all the attendant disruptions of termination. If they comply, they assure their continued employment for, say, another quarter. So they do the latter. Whatever the relation of this phenomenon to “freedom,” and whatever the solution to the problem involved, it strikes me as a paradigmatic instance of domination. Most people spend most of their lives at work. If most of their lives are spent executing the arbitrary wills of people above them in some hierarchy, I think it’s clear that they are being dominated. So I would say that most of most peoples’ lives are spent under conditions of domination. This may not have the implications that Pettit wants, but I think it happens to be true.
As for firing ne’er-do-wells, this seems to me a non-issue. You don’t need employment-at-will to fire a ne’er do well. If someone is really slacking on the job, their slacking should be easily demonstrable. The whole workplace is now under constant surveillance. Since slacking is easily demonstrable, it can easily be demonstrated and documented. If so, there is no need to think that a given worker is the equivalent of a squatter on payroll, and that only employment-at-will for everyone will suffice to handle the would-be problem of the impossible-to-fire ne’er do well. There really is no such problem. When a manager confronts such a worker, the remedy is simple: demonstrate the person’s slacking, and fire him with notice, for cause. If the problem is that the person belongs to some protected demographic class that makes him hard to fire (e.g., he might initiate a lawsuit), this problem is neither helped nor hindered by at-will employment. It’s just a sui generis exception carved out by US anti-discrimination law. But that is a separate issue with little bearing on the issue under discussion. It has to do with the justifiability of the anti-discrimination laws as a remedy for past discrimination. Nothing we do to at-will employment will affect much of that.
I don’t see how employment-at-will makes any contribution at all to the proper selection of job candidates, or to facilitating a merit-based approach to promotion or termination. All it does is to insulate HR from the responsibility of adducing reasons for what managers demand that they do, so as to preserve the latter’s capacity for domination. A friend told me a hilarious story to this effect. His boss wanted to fire someone, and told HR to do it. The HR director left a voicemail asking, “Where is the documentation on this termination? Why are we firing this guy?” Without batting an eye, the boss left a voicemail of his own: “My documentation is: fuck you.” That was the whole message. HR did not respond. The person was terminated. I don’t know if they explicitly conveyed the documentation to the person fired, but I don’t think they had to.
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Hi Irfan,
(What do you know? Editing tools (including a hyperlink inserter) in the reply text box! It took WordPress long enough, but I suppose we should be grateful.)
I’m going to concentrate on what seems theoretically most interesting—and especially on what is most pertinent for interpreting Pettit.
So, the most important point in that regard I think is the idea that all Pettit’s talk about looking people in the eye—that is, the supposed inability of people who are “dominated” to look their dominators in the eye—is really throwaway stuff without meaning. I don’t think that’s right. I think the claim is important to Pettit, because he has to establish that there’s something bad about “domination.”
Pettit’s view is that people are dominated if they are subject to the arbitrary interference of another. Interference is “arbitrary” if it can be imposed without much cost and without fear of reprisal and without being bounded by the “interests and ideas” of the person interfered with. And “interference” includes just about anything that intentionally affects another person (52–53), such as rewards or payoffs, the making or withdrawing of offers or other opportunities or services, and psychological manipulation, as well as obvious things like physical coercion. Most importantly, a person B is dominated merely if another A has the capacity to arbitrarily interfere with him. No matter how enlightened and benevolent A may be, A still dominates B by having the capacity for arbitrary interference.
Pettit’s stock example is the slave with a good master. A slave is still in a state of domination even when he has a totally indulgent master. That seems right in the case of the slave. The reason is that the master has the power to exercise brutal coercion against the slave even unto death. The problem is that Pettit wants to extend the domination claim far beyond masters and slaves to include, apparently, withdrawal of business opportunities, for example. I think Pettit intends a proviso along the lines of requiring that there be a substantial power imbalance, so that, say, a boycott normally wouldn’t constitute domination, since target of the boycott will presumably be a big business that is not easily threatened. But it’s clear that Pettit thinks that the capacity to fire an employee at will means that the employee is dominated by the boss, no matter how enlightened and benevolent the boss. It also seems clear that he means this to include everyday employment conditions such as are familiar to all of us in the modern Western world. So, the “domination” of the employee consists in the fact that if fired he’ll have to look for another job, not that he’ll be flogged until the flesh is torn from his bones. And this is a problem because Pettit wants non-domination to be a political ideal, and indeed potentially the central or even exclusive political ideal guiding our political institutions (80–81). So, domination has to be a very serious evil, if its avoidance is to be our ruling political ideal.
This is why I think Pettit emphasizes the supposed psychological torment of “domination.” In the section “Common Knowledge” of Ch. 2, after pointing out that conditions of a person’s domination or non-domination are likely to be common knowledge in a community, he says:
And in the next several paragraphs, Pettit quotes a series of classic republican authors on the psychic benefits and importance of non-domination. So, I don’t think this is a throwaway. Pettit needs to establish the prime importance of non-domination as a political ideal. If the best he can do is say you’ll have to look for another job if you get fired, then economists will be liable to say there’s a job market, that’s the way it works. Pettit needs a counter to this, so he says that your very social standing, your status as “a somebody, not a nobody” is what is at stake. And what I say is that that is nonsense.
However overwrought your description may be (considerably, in my view) of the relations between bosses and employees in business, I wouldn’t quarrel with calling it “domination” if you want to use that word. It is certainly a hierarchy. The bosses give the orders and the employees are supposed to follow them. It’s not a democracy. The bosses don’t have to explain themselves to underlings (though it’s usually a good idea if they do). This arrangement is subject to abuse, obviously, and mismanagement is common.
But I want to point out something about freedom-as-non-interference (henceforth just “freedom”) in relation to the hierarchical authority of business organizations. Namely, that freedom is essential medicine against the abuse of authority. All the evils of “domination” by bosses depend on the difficulty of finding alternative employment. To the extent that an employee can easily find alternative employment, the domination of the boss evaporates. Now, the point about freedom is that it promotes easy employment. However, I have in mind here the freedom of the employer more than of the employee. Restrictions governing how employees are to be treated, how much they have to be paid, restrictions on firing them, etc. raise the cost of employment and make employers less willing to hire people. A current example is anti-Uber laws, mandating benefits and higher-than-market pay for Uber drivers and other “contractors,” a result of which is that companies employ fewer drivers (or whatever). In some cases right now, the company withdraws altogether from the market where such rules are imposed. This is meant to benefit the workers, but a prime consequence is to make it harder to find a job.
It may seem paradoxical, because it’s human nature to think desired conditions must be brought about by command and control. Therefore, if employees are to be well-treated, it will only be by means of rules dictating such treatment. But in fact the best guarantee of good treatment is the ability of the employee to leave if he doesn’t like the arrangement. And in turn the best way to ensure this is to make employment a light burden for the employer. The complement of “easy go” is “easy come.” You probably won’t agree, but I think it is true.
Anyway, there’s more I’d intended to say, but I’ve run out of the time available to write this note, so that’s it for now.
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