A Liberal Theory of Republican Freedom

• In Event: Norms of Liberalism and Cosmopolitanism

Abstract

Philip Pettit’s republican theory of freedom is one of the most widely-discussed ideas in the political theory and political philosophy of the last twenty years. In his recent work Pettit has argued that someone counts as a “free person” according to the republican view if they are robustly protected in the enjoyment of certain “basic liberties,” but that the status of free personhood, and thus of republican citizenship, does not necessarily require the robust protection of other liberties. Pettit’s motive in limiting the scope of republican freedom in this way is clear: if republicans were committed to extending the robust protection of choice more broadly, then republicanism would threaten to become an excessively demanding political ideal. However, this line of argument also has several worrying implications. In particular, it requires that we make ad hoc judgments about which choices, and which constraints on choice, “count” as freedom-promoting or freedom-reducing, and thus that we associate freedom with the behavior of “normal” agents and the existence of “normal” choice conditions. It also requires that we treat certain kinds of social constraints – most notably those arising from the behavior of markets – as “natural,” and thus beyond the scope of republican concern.

In this paper I propose a liberal theory of republican freedom that is both more demanding and more limited than the one that Pettit defends. According to this line of argument, republican freedom simply requires that those who create or influence the conditions under which I act be accountable to me, in the sense that I am able to check or control their actions in turn. This way of thinking has its own worrying implications: because everything that I do affects other people in ways that they do not choose or control, republican freedom so defined requires that all of my actions be subject in principle to the scrutiny and intervention of my fellow citizens, or of the state acting in their name. I argue that we should not respond to this worry by redefining republican freedom in such a way that this implication is avoided – or by denying that it is a worry at all – but rather by treating republican freedom as a partial rather than a comprehensive political value. In particular, I argue that the enjoyment of republican freedom should be complemented and qualified by the creation of a domain of behavior in which I am free in the sense that I am not subject to the scrutiny and intervention of others – and thus not accountable to them for (some of) the consequences of my actions.

Although liberalism requires that the enjoyment of this unaccountable kind of freedom – market freedom, as I call it – be authorized and guaranteed by republican political institutions, its enjoyment nevertheless detracts from the enjoyment of republican freedom because and insofar as it detracts from the extent to which citizens are able to control the social conditions under which they act. A liberal polity is one that embraces the flexibility and open-endedness – the special kind of insecurity – to which the exercise of market freedom gives rise, even as it recognizes the need to limit and regulate the enjoyment of market freedom for republican purposes. A liberal theory of republican freedom therefore allows us to be more faithful to the conceptual structure and moral motivations of republican political thought, even as it places republican freedom within the context of a broader and more complicated political ideal.

Author

• Eric MacGilvray, Ohio State University