For part 1 of this series, go here.

2. Republicanism and/vs. liberalism
Central to Pettit’s book is a contrast between republicanism and liberalism. The contrast is useful, but complicated by several terminological complexities. In colloquial American parlance, we often contrast the ideology of the Republican Party with that of liberalism, itself associated with the Democratic Party. So it may tempting at first to think that Pettit is defending the former against the latter. In fact, the preceding contrast has almost nothing to do with the way the terminology of “republicanism” and “liberalism” is used in political philosophy, and nothing to do with the topic of Pettit’s book. So set it aside.

The contrast Pettit has in mind is a historical one, between classical republicanism of the sort inspired by the Roman Republic and first adopted by its Renaissance-era admirers like Machiavelli, and classical liberalism of the sort inspired by Britain’s Glorious Revolution and first adopted by the likes of John Locke and Algernon Sidney. It’s therefore tempting to think that Pettit’s contrast is one between Machiavellian republicanism and Lockean liberalism. That’s closer to the mark, but inexact.

We can make it more exact by noting that both Machiavellian republicanism and Lockean liberalism underwent extensive, centuries-long development by Machiavelli’s and Locke’s respective successors. The result was a tradition of republicanism and a tradition of liberalism. So the relevant contrast is not between one specific brand of republicanism and one of liberalism, but of one tradition against another.

That said, liberalism has dominated the scene in a way that republicanism has not. And liberalism has, particularly in the last 150 or so years, undergone significant subdivision into sects and schisms. One brand of liberalism favors laissez-faire capitalism and tilts toward libertarianism; the paradigm twentieth century exemplar is Robert Nozick (along with Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard). The other brand favors capitalism tempered by a welfare state, and might be called welfare liberalism; the paradigm twentieth century exemplar is John Rawls (along with L.T. Hobhouse, Ronald Dworkin, and Amartya Sen). So when we contrast one tradition against another, we have to remember the taxonomic complexity subsumed by each label, particularly on the liberal side, and particularly as expressed by its more recent versions.

Pettit’s republicanism is an attempt to develop a classical republicanism for contemporary application, as contrasted with the liberalisms, both libertarian and welfarist, that currently dominate the scene in political philosophy. So republicanism involves a contrast with both Nozick-type libertarianism and Rawls-type liberalism. In what follows, however, I focus on the Pettit/Nozick or republican/libertarian side of the contrast, referring to it throughout as a republican/liberal contrast. This is, I realize, potentially confusing or misleading: I use the generic term, “liberal” while discussing the libertarian species of that genus, suggesting but not quite saying that what applies to libertarianism applies to welfare liberalism.

There is method in the apparent madness, however. It’s true that the “liberal” side of the liberal/republican contrast refers to both Nozickian libertarianism and Rawlsian liberalism. But it applies to both while referring primarily to libertarianism and only secondarily to welfare liberalism. For reasons I won’t belabor here, Pettit regards the libertarian form of liberalism as truer to the essential features of the original classical liberal vision than the welfarist version, which he treats as something like a confused bastardization of that vision, but still part of the family. So while Pettit intends his republicanism to contrast with both Nozickian libertaranism and Rawlsian liberalism, the contrast with Nozick-type libertarianism turns out to be clearer and easier to grasp. The further application to welfare liberalism is more complicated, and takes additional steps to work out. Though this way of framing the contrast is potentially problematic, it makes a certain sense, makes the job of exposition simpler, and turns out to be Pettit’s view, so I’ll assume it in what follows.

Both republicanism and liberalism take the promotion of freedom to be the supreme political value, but each has its own distinctive interpretation of freedom, partly overlapping and partly divergent from the other. Naturally, republicans take their interpretation of freedom to be the better one, both in theory and in practice; liberals hold the reverse view. So a fair bit turns on what each party has to say about freedom.

What’s distinctive to the liberal tradition is a conception of freedom as “non-interference.”(1) On this view, each member of the political community is entitled to a zone or space within which he has exclusive control to live and act, and where unconsented-to-interference by others is prohibited. Within this zone, the individual is entitled to action (or inaction) without constraint by others except by mutual consent. Unconsented-to crossings into this zone—paradigmatically, unconsenting contact with the person’s body, interferences with his action, and/or seizures of his property—are treated as morally consequential intrusions or rights violations. They’re therefore proscribed by law, and punished or compensated-for when they occur. A maximally just or legitimate polity is one that acts consistently and reliably to protect freedom in this specifically liberal sense–ideally doing no more and no less.

Liberalism so conceived has its share of strengths and weaknesses. On the plus side, a liberal regime keeps others at a consistent, well-defined distance from us: it gives us the moral space to do our own thing, and gives us a sense of security that that space will remain ours to decide what to do with. Put somewhat differently, it protects us from any harms that can plausibly be regarded as unconsented-to boundary-crossings. It thus easily handles the most intuitively obvious and morally consequential intrusions in human life, namely, crimes (including those not always codified by the criminal law, e.g., slavery and war-time atrocities),(2) torts, breaches of contract, and coercive forms of paternalism. And it gives the State a readily defined job with respect to these things, namely, to prevent or stop them, or if they occur, to punish or compensate for them.

On the negative side, however, a strictly liberal state declines as a matter of principle to go beyond this. In particular, it declines to protect us from any harm, however harmful, that can’t be regarded as an unconsented-to boundary-crossing. Put another way, it gives us no assurance of State-sponsored assistance when we need it. Assured assistance would, after all, require interference into the freedom of others, the very thing the liberal State is designed to stop. Strictly speaking, then, a liberal state–that is, a state motivated by the strictest version of freedom as non-interference–can be of no help when you most need it. It respects your freedom by leaving you “free” to fend for yourself, indifferent to whether or not you can.

Pettit’s republicanism is offered as an alternative to liberalism of this austere variety. Though it agrees with liberalism in accepting freedom as its starting point, it re-conceives freedom in a fundamentally non-liberal way. Instead of freedom as non-interference, we get freedom as non-domination. The idea here is that each member of the political community ought to be protected against arbitrary interference by others that fails to track the protected person’s interests (Republicanism, pp. 52-58). Paradigmatically, I dominate you when I amass or use power of a kind that arbitrarily induces you to do things that undermine your interests so as to promote my own. As with a liberal regime, violations of freedom are to be proscribed or at least regulated by law, and punished or compensated for when they occur. Like a liberal regime, a republican one will concern itself with–indeed, confine itself to–the protection or promotion of freedom. Unlike a liberal regime, however, a republican regime will act so as to reduce or eliminate domination.

To some extent, liberal and republican conceptions of freedom will overlap. Murder, rape, assault, enslavement, kidnapping, arson, robbery, theft, and fraud are as much republican dominations as they are liberal interferences. So neither liberals nor republicans should have much trouble conceptualizing them. Though Pettit explicitly says that torts are a form of domination, hence a prohibited violation of freedom, this is not as obvious an inference within a republican framework as it is within a liberal one (Republicanism, p. 157). But we might, in a spirit of charity, grant the point.

Paternalism, by contrast, seems to me a real sticking point. Liberals have traditionally rejected coercive paternalism in an explicit, uncompromising way. In Republicanism, at least, Pettit has relatively little to say about the wrongness of coercive paternalism; even a charitable reader might wonder whether he takes the issue nearly seriously enough. He clearly wants to rule out the more egregious sorts of paternalism, but never discusses the topic under that description. At one point, for instance, he argues that a republican politics aims to promote “personal independence” as contrasted with dependence on others, which would seem at least somewhat in tension with coercive paternalism (Republicanism, pp. 158-63). Later, in a discussion of checks on government power, he suggests that a republican polity would exercise power of a “contestable” nature, so as to “ensure that public decision-making tracks the interests and ideas of those citizens whom it affects…It must be a form of decision-making which we can own and identify with: a form of decision-making in which we can see our interests furthered and our ideas respected” (Republicanism, p. 184). It’s unclear how much anti-paternalist work these arguments end up doing. I’ll return to this issue in the fourth post of this series.

A crucial proviso within Pettit’s view is that the sheer asymmetric possession of arbitrary power (meaning, the power to act arbitrarily) is sufficient to constitute domination. To dominate you, I don’t need to do anything to you, or express an inclination or intention to harm you. I simply need to have the power that would get the job done if I wanted to, whether or not I do. Once I have that power, I dominate you simply by the having of it.

The ramifications of the latter view come out very clearly in the case of contract. In and of itself, the liberal ideal says nothing in particular about bargains struck under conditions of asymmetric power. On the liberal view, the fact that bargaining party A is more powerful than B has no bearing on the legitimacy of the bargain they strike, or on the bargain’s binding force. On the liberal view, asymmetries of bargaining power are just an extraneous fact–extraneous at least to political life–without any specifically political implications. Politically, we ought to accept such lopsided bargains and move on, leaving the affected parties themselves free to work out a mutually satisfactory resolution.(3)

Things are different from the perspective of Pettit’s republicanism. On a republican view, when A and B encounter one another in (say) the labor market, A’s asymmetric bargaining power relative to B implies or at least makes plausible the thought that A dominates B. And A’s dominating B implies, in turn, that to some extent anyway, A violates B’s freedom without even trying. That in turn implies that the State ought to do something about it.

This fact constitutes both the strength and the weakness of republicanism, depending on your point of view. From one perspective, indeed from the strict liberal one, the republican interpretation of freedom-as-domination gives a republican government an objectionably intrusive aspect. A republican government is one that sees domination wherever it sees asymmetrical power relations, and uses the coercive powers of the State to level those asymmetries according to its own conception of the “interests” of the contending parties. In practice, that looks like a lot of State-guided interference with not a lot in the way of limits or constraints.

From another perspective, however, the republican focus on asymmetries of bargaining power seems a salutary corrective to one defect in liberalism. Liberalism treats asymmetries of bargaining power as a normative “given,” as though the bargains struck under such conditions were, by default, perfectly legitimate. Liberals often have difficulty conceptualizing the complaints of those disadvantaged by the outcomes of such bargains. Since huge numbers of people are disadvantaged in this way, that ends up being either a huge defect or at least a huge omission within the liberal outlook. The standard liberal response to such people is to counsel patience, forbearance, or pluck; they have, after all, the freedom to improve their situation even if the odds seem stacked against them.(4) But historically, that response has seemed inadequate, to put it mildly. The question is whether republicanism gives the right or at least a better, response.

Notes

1. It’s conventional, following Isaiah Berlin’s famous account in “Two Concepts of Liberty,”  to distinguish between negative and positive liberty, to cash out negative liberty as “non-interference,” and to describe “non-interference” as the “freedom to be left alone to do as you choose.” Pettit himself does as much in Republicanism. Despite its canonical status, and despite Pettit’s reliance on it, I regard Berlin’s account as problematically confused, and regard it as involving a serious misdirection from the outset. So the account in the text is my own, not Berlin’s, and not intended to parallel Berlin’s (just the reverse). It would take me too far afield to diagnose the problems in Berlin’s account and explain the differences between my formulations and his, so I leave that task for another time.
2.  It may seem obvious that slavery and war-time atrocities are prohibited by the criminal code, but it’s not obvious, and not always true. I originally had a long footnote here on that topic, but I’ve deleted it for now and decided to turn it into a forthcoming blog post of its own.
3. For a very clear expression of this point of view, see the work of Richard Epstein, e.g., Simple Rules for a Complex World (1995), and Mortal Peril: Our Inalienable Right to Health Care? (1997).
4. Again, Richard Epstein’s work is almost a caricature of this point of view. For a nice summary, see the Wikipedia page devoted to his life and work.