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| Republicanism (1) |
"I argue for a social philosophy that is at once anti-collectivist and anti-atomist. The
philosophy is anti-collectivist in rejecting the idea that individuals are the playthings of
aggregate social forces; they are not numbers in a game of historical chance, not pawns
in a march to historical destiny. The philosophy is anti-atomist in insisting that nevertheless
the notion of the solitary individual is essentially bogus: people depend on one another,
and in more than a causal way, for the very ability to think; they are essentially social creatures.
"I discovered republicanism about ten years ago, when I was engaged in work with John
Braithwaite on criminal justice and political ideals, in particular the ideal of liberty. Conscious
of older, republican ways of thinking about political liberty, we wondered how it could be
possible to see the ideal as inherently social in character -- to see it as equivalent to citizenship
in a republic -- and at the same time to see it as a distinctively subjective value that enabled the
person enjoying it to have a sense of psychological security and status. And then we realized
that such a way of thinking about liberty became accessible once you made two things central.
First, that there is a big difference between constrained interference that is designed for a
common good -- say, the interference of a law that no one contests -- and arbitrary interference.
And second, that there is a big difference between just happening to avoid such arbitrary
interference -- say, because the powers that be quite like you -- and being more or less
invulnerable to it. Make those things important and it is very natural to think of freedom as the
social status of being relatively proof against arbitrary interference by others, and of being able
to enjoy a sense of security and standing among them. The approach casts freedom as
non-domination: as a condition under which a person is more or less immune, and more or
less saliently immune, to interference on an arbitrary basis.
"This idea of freedom immediately caught my imagination. Perhaps that was because it made
sense of my experience when, intending to be a priest, I had spent years in establishments
that I learned later to describe, in Erving Goffman's phrase, as total institutions. While such
schools and seminaries offered wonderful opportunities for study and comradeship, they
certainly did not teach us to look the authorities in the eye, confident of knowing where we
stood and of not being subject to capricious judgement. On the contrary, they communicated
a sense of systematic vulnerability and exposure to the governing will, sometimes even
making a virtue of the practice. I had come to rail against the subordination inherent in such
training, and the notion of freedom as non-domination offered a satisfying way of explaining
what was wrong with it. Our formation had tried to cultivate unfreedom; it was designed to
make students passive, unassertive, unsure of where they stood. Mary Wollstonecraft wrote
in the 1790s of the way that women's subordination turned them into creatures who learned
to bow and scrape, and to achieve their ends by ingratiation. She might have been writing of us.
"Since the experience of subordination is so widespread, there has to be something attractive
about the sort of liberty which requires that you are not dominated by another and which
enables you, therefore, to look others in the eye. I am encouraged in that hope by the conviction
that this is indeed how traditional republicans had conceived of liberty when they argued that
its antonym was slavery or subjection, and when they depicted exposure to the arbitrary will of
another as the great evil to be avoided. I am not a historian of ideas and it took a lot of time,
and some considerable re-education, before I was in a position to see that a recurrent motif
in republican thinking, down to and including the American and French Revolutions, was an
emphasis on this notion of liberty as a status that could only be achieved when others were
deprived of arbitrary powers. It was particularly intriguing to realize that that notion of liberty
went out of fashion only as it became clear, towards the end of the eighteenth century, that
with citizenship extended beyond the realm of propertied males, it was no longer possible
to think of making all citizens free in the old sense: in particular it was not feasible, under
received ideas, to think of conferring freedom as non-domination on women and servants.
If freedom was to be cast as an ideal for all citizens, then freedom would have to be
reconceived in less demanding terms; and reconceived it certainly was.
"But Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government is not just the presentation of
an alternative notion of freedom, with some account of its historical rise and fall. If we take
the goal of the state to be the promotion of freedom as non-domination -- if we reappropriate
the republican ideal -- then we can begin to see the outlines of a commanding political
philosophy. Freedom as non-domination has attractive institutional implications, and, so far
as that is possible in advance of more detailed empirical work, Republicanism tries to outline
the main lessons. Some of the implications presented in Republicanism will have a familiar
republican ring, such as the linkages with equality, community, and civic virtue, and the
emphasis on constitutionalism and on the checking of government. Others will be more
surprising, such as the argument about the policies that a republic ought to pursue and the
sort of democracy that it ought to implement. Freedom as non-domination supports a rich,
even a radical set of political policies, providing an ecumenical ground for what might otherwise
seem like sectional demands on the state. And freedom as non-domination supports a
conception of democracy under which contestability takes the place usually given to consent;
what is of primary importance is not that government does what the people tells it but, on pain
of arbitrariness, that people can always contest whatever it is that government does."
-- Preface, Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government
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Posted by rallen2 on 2008-05-24 09:39:09 | Rating: | Views: 118
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