1. Introduction

We’ve been discussing Philip Pettit’s Republicanism in our online discussion group since March of this year. Our July 21 meeting focused on Chapter 5, “Republican Aims and Policies”: “what a state ought to achieve, and what form it ought to assume, in the modern world” (Republicanism, p. 129). Chapter 5 is the first of four in the book that explicitly ties the book’s theoretical claims to political practice, concretizing what would otherwise be a rather abstract set of theses.

I’ve had some conflicted thoughts about Pettit’s republicanism from the beginning of our discussions, crystallized by his account in Chapter 5 of a pet topic of mine, at-will employment. Having recently finished the book, I sat down over the last few weekends to put my thoughts in order. I have no idea whether these thoughts are of general interest, but in any case, I’ve written up a series of five longish blog posts on Republicanism (five excluding this one), and sketched out a bunch of shorter digressions that were originally footnotes but ended up taking on a life of their own. Starting tomorrow, I’ll post the first of the five posts here, followed by one post per week. I haven’t yet written up the digressions, so there’s no telling when (or if) they’ll appear. But they’re digressions, after all. They can wait. So can you.

In general, we focused directly on the book in our sessions, not on the (extensive) secondary literature on it, or on Pettit’s (extensive) follow-ups to it. I’ve generally done the same in this series. Granted, Pettit’s Republicanism was published back in 1997, so that any purely textual commentary on it is bound to be dated. Unfortunately, if I wait to digest another couple hundred pages of commentary, I’ll die before I finish this thing. So for better or worse, I’ve proceeded on the assumption that a dated commentary is better than none.

With any luck, I’ll comment on some of the secondary literature in the “near future.” Is that a promise? Well, it’s a “promise at-will.”