Republicanism: An Unattractive Version of Liberalism

Philip Pettit is the most important contemporary advocate of the republican tradition in political philosophy.He advances a concept of freedom as non-domination, and contrasts it with the liberal conception offreedom as non-interference. He claims that two features distinguish domination from interference: (1)The capacity of interference (as opposed to actual interference), and (2) the fact that the interference isarbitrary. I shall argue that Pettit’s republicanism is not suffi ciently different from liberalism to count asa genuine alternative to it. First, (1) does not set apart republicanism from liberalism, certainly not fromJohn Rawls’s liberalism. The only relevant difference between republicanism and liberalism is relatedto (2): the notion of arbitrariness. Yet this difference makes republicanism an unattractive version ofliberalism, insofar as it, paradoxically, allows for republicanism to legitimize a grave form of domination,paternalism, and, in general, domination coming from the state. This problem gets exacerbated byPettit’s consequentialist framework.