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"It would be utopian to think that what happens in politics is a function of the normative ideas
that circulate in and around the political world. The form that institutional policies assume, and
the shape in which institutional patterns stabilize, are determined as much by the interests of
the parties involved, and by their views on empirical questions -- by their views, for example, on
what is electorally and institutionally feasible -- as it is by their ideas as to how things ought
ideally to be.
"Yet normative ideas are of the first importance in political life. For it is only possible for
politicians and public officials to gain support for the policies they pursue to the extent that
they can represent them as legitimate: to the extent that they can represent them as policies
that are motivated by this or that agreed, or more or less agreed, commitment. Even the
secret police of Eastern European societies couldn't keep communist regimes in place once
it became a matter of common recognition that the ideals associated with those regimes were
not well conceived, or at least not well targeted, and that few continued to believe in them.
"The normative ideas that circulate in and around political life are rarely as coordinated, of
course, as the ideas that permeated communist systems. In today's advanced democracies
they come in different currents that whirl and eddy around the prominent policy-making issues.
Sometimes these currents move together and create a momentum in support of one or
another policy direction; sometimes they pull against one another and generate a chaotic
and unpredictable pattern.
"The main currents that wash around our policy-making rocks are easy to identify. One is the
current of economic ideas about the importance of satisfying the preferences, whatever they
are, that people bring to the social world and about the need to devise efficient disciplines --
usually market-like disciplines -- for ensuring maximal preference-satisfaction. Another is
the current of ideas about people's universal rights, whether these rights be conceived in a
thin or a rich fashion, and about the requirement that political institutions respect and foster
the enjoyment of those rights. Yet another is the current of ideas that gives prominence to
issues of welfare or fairness or equality -- or that focuses on corresponding grievances like
poverty or exploitation, subordination or oppression -- and that argues for a system which
delivers this or that set of valued outcomes. And another, of course, is the current of democratic
ideas that associates legitimacy, more or less exclusively, with whatever policies and patterns
derive from the will of the people, as majority opinion is described in this tradition, or at least
from the will of the people's elected representatives.
"These currents in the whirlpool of contemporary politics are often represented, usefully
enough, as rival languages or discourses of legitimation. They are languages or discourses
-- and not, for example, theories or ideologies -- because they allow those who speak them
to disagree and debate with each another on matters of detailed policy. They consist in shared
assumptions that are abstract enough to leave room for differences and germane enough to
act as constraints on debate about those differences; they make conversation possible without
predetermining its direction. While they share many common idioms --one is the idiom of
freedom -- they are sufficiently distinct to be cast as rival systems for the political criticism and
legitimation of institutional arrangements.
"Granted that politics is inevitably conducted in normative language: in the language, now
of this current of ideas, now of that. Granted, in other words, that politics always has the
aspect -- the partial aspect -- of a conversation. What does this say about the role of the
normative political theorist: or, if you prefer, the political philosopher?
"It implies that whatever else the political philosopher may do, one obvious project is the
examination of the languages of political discussion and legitimation, the critique of various
of the assumptions from which those languages start, the exploration of how far the
languages cohere with one another and with the languages of other times and places, and
the search for new and broader terms in which to frame political debate.
"This is both a humdrum and an exciting task. It is exciting to the extent that it challenges the
philosopher to step back and examine matters that pass without notice in the hurly-burly of
engaged debate. It holds out the possibility of making the language in which you choose to
discuss political issues truly your own. You can become aware of the presuppositions it
carries, and mould them to your own mind, rather than being carried along in a medium of
debate and thought that commits you in ways that systematically escape notice. To the
philosopher's eye the unexamined language, whether it be a language of politics, or ethics,
or free will, or consciousness, is not worth speaking: it may introduce too many unwanted
assumptions. The excitement of the task described here, like that of any philosophical task,
is the excitement of mastering your medium, assuming a degree of control over thoughts
that will otherwise control you.
"But the task described here is also humdrum. For whatever the individual philosopher
achieves in the way of insight and mastery, all that he or she can ever hope to represent is
one contribution, at one specific time, in one specific forum, to a conversation that is destined
to outrun any efforts they may make to direct it. The conversation of politics, such as it exists
in today's advanced democracies, is constantly evolving and shifting, as now one language,
now another, comes to the fore, and as the debate turns now in this direction, now in that.
No one individual, and so no one philosopher, can expect to do more than play a very humdrum
part. They can expect to make their voice heard only in a small circle, and if they reach other
audiences that will almost always be because others happen to be saying related things:
they are part of a conversational cascade.
"It is very important that philosophers recognize this limitation on what they may hope to
achieve. If a philosopher comes to the business of political conversation with the ambition
of providing the political philosophy to end political philosophies -- the philosophical voice
to drown out all other voices -- then they are bound to be disillusioned. And such disillusion
can breed an attitude of despair and scepticism towards the possibilities of conversation in
general. It can lead theorists to imagine, as so many contemporaries like to imagine, that
there is no real conversation in politics, only the play of naked power: that political argument
and exchange never amounts to anything more than the ceremonial waving of flags. Finding
that they cannot bend the public conversation to the grain of their own reason, they conclude
that there is no reason there at all: not even the sort of reason that is never quickly implemented,
never perfectly implemented, never implemented under just its own impetus, and never
implemented on all fronts at once.
"Such theorists look at developments over the last two hundred years, for example, and
refuse to see any signs of conversationally motivated agreement or influence. They fail to
notice the long, broken, but still influential debates that took place in various countries on
such issues as the abolition of slavery, the reform of pocket boroughs, the provision of
compulsory education, the extension of the franchise, the admission of women to parliament,
the provision of social security, the systematic organization of hospitals, and the development
of public health schemes. They make it a badge of professional insight to find grounds for
cynicism about the value of any such development or about its having occurred as the result,
even in part, of reasoned demand or reasoned outrage.
"But to say that no one individual philosopher can expect to do much alone is not to say that
political philosophy as such does not achieve anything significant. The prospect of political
conversation coming entirely adrift from the reflection of political philosophers is a bleak and
chilling scenario. For it is mainly by virtue of the work of such theorists that the terms of political
conversation are systematically interrogated and interrelated, and occasionally renewed or
replaced. A conversation without any corner for sustained reflection of this kind would quickly
run to ground in a babel of dogmatic assertion and counter-assertion. If political philosophers
did not exist, we would have to invent them.
"So much on the nature of politics -- or at least on the conversational aspect of politics --
and on the role of political philosophy. What, then, do I intend to achieve by my efforts in
Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government?
"I want to remind my colleagues in political philosophy -- and, ideally, in the more general
audience that the discipline sometimes attracts -- of a sort of grievance, and a sort of ideal,
that has not been given enough attention in contemporary debates. I want to articulate the
grievance in question as a complaint about being dominated and the ideal in question as a
vision of being free. I want to show that this language of domination and freedom -- this
language of freedom as non-domination -- connects with the long, republican tradition of
thought that shaped many of the most important institutions and constitutions that we
associate with democracy. And I want to argue that there is very good reason to find a place
again for this language in contemporary political discussion. Thinking about politics in terms
of the demands of freedom as non-domination gives us a very full and persuasive picture of
what it is reasonable to expect of a decent state and a decent civil society.
"The grievance I have in mind is that of having to live at the mercy of another, having to live in
a manner that leaves you vulnerable to some ill that the other is in a position arbitrarily to
impose; and this, in particular, when each of you is in a position to see that you are dominated
by the other, in a position to see that you each see this, and so on. It is the grievance expressed
by the wife who finds herself in a position where her husband can beat her at will, and without
any possibility of redress; by the employee who dare not raise a complaint against an employer,
and who is vulnerable to any of a range of abuses, some petty, some serious, that the employer
may choose to perpetrate; by the debtor who has to depend on the grace of the moneylender, or
the bank official, for avoiding utter destitution and ruin; and by the welfare dependant who finds
that they are vulnerable to the caprice of a counter clerk for whether or not their children will
receive meal vouchers
"Contemporary thought suggests that individuals in these positions retain their freedom to
the extent that they are not actively coerced or obstructed. But whether or not they avoid
interference, they certainly have a grievance. They live in the shadow of the other's presence,
even if no arm is raised against them. They live in uncertainty about the other's reactions and
in need of keeping a weather eye open for the other's moods. They find themselves in a
position where they are demeaned by their vulnerability, being unable to look the other in the
eye, and where they may even be forced to fawn or toady or flatter in the attempt to ingratiate
themselves.
"It turns out that under an older, republican way of thinking about freedom, individuals in such
a dominated position are straightforwardly unfree. No domination without unfreedom, even if
the dominating agent stays their hand. Being unfree does not consist in being restrained; on
the contrary, the restraint of a fair system of law -- a non-arbitrary regime -- does not make you
unfree. Being unfree consists rather in being subject to arbitrary sway: being subject to the
potentially capricious will or the potentially idiosyncratic judgement of another. Freedom
involves emancipation from any such subordination, liberation from any such dependency.
It requires the capacity to stand eye to eye with your fellow citizens, in a shared awareness
that none of you has a power of arbitrary interference over another.
"The older, republican tradition of which I speak is the tradition associated with Marcus
Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE) at the time of the Roman Republic; with Niccolò di Bernardo
Machiavelli (1469-1527) -- 'the divine Machiavel' of the Discourses -- and various other
writers of the Renaissance Italian republics; with James Harrington (1611-1677) and a host
of lesser figures in and after the period of the English Civil War and Commonwealth; and
with the many theorists of republic or commonwealth in eighteenth-century England and
America and France. The 'commonwealthmen' dominated English and American political
thought in the late seventeenth and in the eighteenth century. The commonwealthmen were
devoted to the ideal of freedom as non-domination -- freedom as escape from the arbitrary --
and they helped to shape habits of political reflex and thought that still survive today. Their
distinctive refrain was that, while the cause of freedom as non-domination rests squarely with
the state and its officials -- it is mainly thanks to the state and the constitution, after all, that
people enjoy such freedom -- still those officials are also an inherent threat and people have
to strive to 'keep the bastards honest'; the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.
"When traditional commonwealthmen and republicans hailed the ideal of freedom as
non-domination, they only ever imagined that it was an ideal for an élite of propertied,
mainstream males; they were all men, after all, and men of their times. But there is every
reason why we should reappropriate their ideal and reintroduce it as a universal ideal for the
members of a contemporary society. That, at any rate, is my own conviction. I believe that the
notion of freedom as non-domination fits with many of our agreed preconceptions, that it picks
up important desiderata that are already inscribed in many of our institutions, and that it can
serve to articulate a compelling account of what a decent state and a decent civil society should
do for its members
"There are many languages of legitimation present in the world of democratic politics today.
One of the striking features of those languages, however, is that all of them, at one point or
another, invoke the notion of freedom; all of them share a common idiom of freedom or liberty.
The language of economics directs us to the free market and to the freedom to make whatever
contracts we will with one another; the language of rights focuses on rights of free thought,
free expression, free movement, and the like; the language of welfare and fairness and
equality, or of poverty and exploitation and subordination, claims to articulate the requirements
necessary for enjoying freedom or for making freedom effective. And the language of democratic
legitimation harps on the legitimacy of what a free people freely decide, and on the way in which
individual persons share in that collective freedom.
"This overlapping idiom of freedom gives an indication of the importance that all of us, or at
least all of us who identify with western-style democracies, naturally assign to the notion of
freedom. However we interpret it, the notion has mantric standing in our thought. The fact of
this status means that my argument about the republican ideal of freedom has more than
antiquarian or analytical interest. I maintain that the traditional, republican ideal of freedom
supports and unifies a compelling manifesto of political demands, and that if a state and a
society looks after the freedom as non-domination of its members, then most other desiderata
will look after themselves. Whatever may be said of this claim, the centrality of the notion of
freedom means that it should at least command attention. It may be mistaken but it surely
isn't boring.
"Neither is the claim idiosyncratic. I am not alone in finding the republican tradition of thought
a fruitful source of ideas and ideals. Historians like John G. A. Pocock (The Machiavellian
Moment: Florentine Political Theory and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, 1975) and Quentin
Skinner (The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 1978; 'Machiavelli on the Maintenance
of Liberty', 1983; 'The Idea of Negative Liberty', 1984) have not only made the tradition visible
to us; they have also shown how it can give us a new perspective on contemporary politics.
Skinner in particular has argued that it can give us a new understanding of freedom and my
own argument builds on this. Legal thinkers like Cass R. Sunstein (After the Rights Revolution:
Reconceiving the Regulatory State,1990; The Partial Consttitution, 1993; Democracy and the
Problem of Free Speech, 1993), on the other hand, have gone back to the republican tradition
in its distinctively American incarnation in the late 1800s, and have made a strong case for the
claim that the tradition suggests a distinctive way of interpreting the U.S. Constitution and, more
generally, that it gives us an insightful overview on the role of government. Criminologists and
regulatory theorists like John Braithwaite, with whom I have actively collaborated, find in the
republican tradition a set of compelling ideas for articulating both the demands that we should
place on a regulatory system -- say, the criminal justice system -- and the expectations that
we should hold out for how those demands can be best met (Ian Ayres and John Braithwaite,
Responsive Regulation, 1992). And these are just a few thinkers among many commentators
who have begun to chart republican connections, and sometimes to draw actively on republican
ideas, in recent years.
"When thinkers like Skinner, Sunstein, and Braithwaite describe themselves as republican,
and when indeed I describe myself in that way, I should mention that the tradition with which
we identify is not the sort of tradition --ultimately, the populist tradition -- thay hails the
democratic participation of the people as one of the highest forms of good and that often
waxes lyrical, in communitarian vein, about the desirability of the close, homogeneous society
that popular participation is often taken to presuppose. The republican tradition that is
characterized in this book is not inherently populist in this way and indeed not particularly
communitarian. Republican freedom is a communitarian ideal, in a sense, but the ideal is
compatible with modern pluralistic forms of society. And while the republican tradition finds
value and importance in democratic participation, it does not treat it as a bedrock value.
Democratic participation may be essential to the republic, but that is because it is necessary
for promoting the enjoyment of freedom as non-domination, not because of its independent
attractions: not because freedom, as a positive conception would suggest, is nothing more
or less than the right of democratic participation.
"This point is important to stress because the term 'republican' has come to be associated
in many circles, probably under the influence of Hannah Arendt (The Human Condition, 1958;
On Revolution, 1973), with a communitarian and populist approach (Maurizio Viroli, From
Politics to Reason of State: The Acquisition and Transformation of the Language of Politics,
1992). Such an approach represents the people in their collective presence as master and
the state as servant, and suggests that the people ought to rely on state representatives and
officials only where absolutely necessary: direct democracy, whether by assembly or plebiscite,
is the systematically preferred option. The commonwealth or republican position, by contrast,
sees the people as trustor, both individually and collectively, and sees the state as trustee:
in particular, it sees the people as trusting the state to ensure a dispensation of non-arbitrary
rule. For this position direct democracy may often be a very bad thing, since it may ensure the
ultimate form of arbitrariness: the tyranny of a majority. Democratic instruments of control will
certainly be desirable and indispensable, but they are not the be-all and end-all of good
government.
"So much for the populist alternative to republicanism. What now of the relationship between
the republican tradition, as I envisage it, and perhaps the more salient alternative that is
represented by the liberal conception of politics?
"The republican tradition shares with liberalism the presumption that it is possible to organize
a viable state and a viable civil society on a basis that transcends many religious and related
divides. To that extent many liberals will claim the tradition as their own. But liberalism has
been associated over the two hundred years of its development, and in most of its influential
varieties, with the negative conception of freedom as the absence of interference, and with
the assumption that there is nothing inherently oppressive about some people having
dominating power over others, provided they do not exercise that power and are not likely to
exercise it. This relative indifference to power or domination has made liberalism tolerant of
relationships in the home, in the workplace, in the electorate, and elsewhere, that the
republican must denounce as paradigms of domination and unfreedom. And it has meant
that if liberals are concerned with issues of poverty, ignorance, insecurity and the like, as many
are, that is usually because of some commitment independent of their commitment to freedom
as non-interference: say, a commitment to the satisfaction of basic needs, or to the realization
of a certain equality between people.
"Liberalism is a broad church. I think of liberals as those who embrace freedom as
non-interference. I distinguish between left-of-centre liberals, who stress the need to make
non-interference an effective value, not just a formal one, or who embrace values like equality
or the elimination of poverty in addition to the value of non-interference, and right-of-centre
liberals -- classic liberals or libertarians -- who think that it is enough to establish
non-interference as a formal, legal reality. But many left-of-centre liberals will be unhappy
with this way of casting things. They will see their liberalism as having more in common with
the republican position than with the libertarian and they would probably want to give up the
taxonomy of populism, republicanism, and liberalism in favour of an alternative like populism,
republicanism/liberalism, and libertarianism.
"There is something to be said for this alternative. Where the populist image of government
represents the people as master and the state as servant, the republican or commonwealth
image depicts the people as trustor, the state as trustee. Left-of-centre liberals would almost
certainly endorse this trustor-trustee image also, and one attraction in the proposed taxonomy
is that libertarianism can be linked to a third and different image of the relationship between
people and state. Self-described libertarians tend to think of the people as an aggregate of
atomized individuals -- an aggregate without a collective identity --and they represent the
state as ideally nothing more than an apparatus for accommodating individuals in the pursuit
of their atomized concerns. The model is not that of master and servant, nor that of trustor and
trustee, but rather that of an aggregate of individuals and an apparatus for ensuring their
individual satisfaction. For those who like taxonomies that go deep on a number of dimensions,
the best available may be: populist, republican/liberal, and libertarian.
"But this consideration notwithstanding, I intend to stick with my presentation of liberalism
as a broad church that encompasses both left-of-centre liberals and libertarians. The reason
is that my primary focus is on how different theorists think of freedom, and I believe that most
of those who describe themselves as liberals -- most, not all -- think of freedom in the negative
way as noninterference; certainly they do not think of it in the republican fashion as non-domination:
Left-of-centre liberals will find the republican line advanced in this book attractive in its institutional
implications. But I think that most of them should be ready to admit that the line is supported here
from a distinctive base. It may be a base that was familiar to those in the commonwealth tradition
that they admire -- it may have been familiar to the likes of James Harrington (1611-1677) and
John Locke (1632-1704), Charles-Louis de Secondat Montesquieu (1689-1755) and James
Madison (1751-1836) -- but it is not a base that is generally recognized in self-consciously liberal
writing.
"Some historians of thought will baulk at the breezy way in which I speak of the republican as
distinct from the liberal or populist traditions, and a word of qualification is required. While
Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government starts from a notion of freedom with a
distinctive historical provenance, the book is not essentially tied to many controversial theses
in the history of ideas. Perhaps republicanism is not deserving of the name of a tradition, for
example, not being sufficiently coherent or connected to be treated in that way. Perhaps there
is such a break in the new seventeenth-century concern about the power of the state -- the
power of the state as distinct from that of the powerful -- that we cannot see a single tradition
spanning that rupture. Or perhaps there are other grounds for subdividing what I present as
one tradition into different periods or strands. I do not have to commit myself on these detailed
sorts of question.
"All that I strictly need to claim is that the representation of freedom as immunity to arbitrary
control is found in many historical authors, that it is a distinctive and challenging conception
of the ideal, and that it is worthy of consideration in contemporary political philosophy. I go
further than that, of course, in the story that I tell about republican thought. I treat the belief in
freedom as non-domination as a unifying theme which binds together thinkers of very different
periods and very different background philosophies. And I suggest that the commitment to
this theme generates shared institutional concerns among such thinkers: concerns about
the character of law and government, about the checks and controls on public authorities;
and about the cultivation of virtue and the avoidance of corruption. But this historical aspect
of Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government is secondary. If historians of ideas
find it misleading, then they should regard the more substantive historical suggestions as
simplifications that are justified only by the colour that they give to my philosophical claims.
"Why should I expect populists and liberals, whether liberals of a rightist or a leftist bent, to
give a hearing to the republican approach? Every grand approach to politics gives us an axiom
or set of axioms from which judgements on more particular institutional matters are meant to
flow; the axioms need not represent a unique base of justification, as in a foundationalist
scheme, but they do claim to be a good starting-point for organizing intuitions. Any such approach
is bound to be judged, then, on two fronts: one, for the attractions of the axiom or axioms, both
in themselves and in the organizational role that they are allotted; and two, for the plausibility and
adequacy of the theorems that are derived from those axioms. The picture fits with John Rawls's
(A Theory of Justice, 1971) method of reflective equilibrium.
"Republican theory should recommend itself to all competitors in the axiom from which it starts.
The republican conception of liberty should appeal to liberals, in so far as it focuses on people's
individual power of choice and thus has much in common with the negative notion of freedom as
non-interference. And it should appeal to populists in so far as it requires that non-dominating
government has to track the interests and ideas of ordinary people; this is the idea that lies
behind the positive, populist notion of freedom as democratic self-mastery The central axiom of
republican thought is not a new-fangled notion, and is not even a notion, like justice or equality,
that depends for its attraction on the acceptance of a controverted vision. It is traditional and
modest enough, in itself, to make a claim on the attention of all comers.
"But though republican theory is organized around a modest and traditional starting-point,
it is extremely fruitful and challenging in the theorems about government institutions which it
enables us to derive. It does not leave us with the sparse and heartless sort of government
with which rightist liberals pretend to be satisfied. And it does not support the interventionist,
majoritarian rule -- the potentially tyrannical sort of rule -- which populists have to countenance.
It points us in a direction that is closest to that embraced by left-of-centre liberals, as
Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government exemplifies, offering a rival axiomization
of many of their intuitions. But the rival axiomization has two advantages. First, it starts from a
base that is less contentious than the base which leftist liberals generally espouse; it offers a
common ground on which to argue, for example, with their rightist opponents. And second, the
republican axiomatization develops even shared intuitions in a highly distinctive and yet
compelling way. For example, it offers an attractive way of justifying egalitarian and even
communitarian intuitions. And it supports an exciting way of rethinking democratic institutions,
in which the notion of consent is displaced by that of contestability.
"Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government tells the story of how the republican
notion of freedom emerged and stabilized, and of how it was eclipsed at the very moment of
its most conspicuous success in the debates surrounding the American Revolution. It was
at this time that the notion of freedom as non-interference took over from that of freedom as
non-domination, and that liberalism replaced republicanism as the dominant political
philosophy. Republicanism gives a philosophical articulation of the notion of freedom as
non-domination regimenting the idea formally and displaying its points of contrast with freedom
as non-interference. Republicanism argues for the capacity of freedom as non-domination to
serve as a guiding ideal for the state. And then Republicanism charts the connections between
freedom as non-domination and the values linked with it in the French trio of liberté, égalité,
fraternité; Republicanism displays the egalitarian and communitarian character of freedom as
non-domination, and shows the appeal that it should have as a political ideal.
Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government looks at the institutional ramifications
of organizing a state and a civil society so that the cause of freedom as non-domination is
served as well as possible. Republicanism looks at what is going to be required of a modern
state if it is to guard against the arbitrary sort of interference that individuals and groups may
practise against one another in virtue of having different levels of resources, different levels of
dominium. And then Republicanism looks at what is necessary if such a republican state is to
promote non-domination successfully, and is not itself to represent a form of domination
associated, in a twin term, with imperium. Republicanism describes the aims of the republican
state in controlling dominium -- the causes with which it should identify, the policies which it
should sponsor. Republicanism describes the forms that the state must assume if it is to
control imperium: in particular, it describes the sort of constitutionalism and democracy required
to guard against this danger. Republicanism looks at what can be done to make the realization
of such republican aims and forms resilient or stable, providing regulatory checks against
shortfalls and abuses. And Republicanism rounds off the discussion by arguing that if the
republican state is to achieve its ends in relation to dominium and imperium, it must connect
with a form of civil society in which republican values are firmly entrenched: it cannot expect to
work such wonders on its own. This connection with civil society is of the utmost importance."
-- Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, 1997
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Posted by rallen2 on 2008-05-26 10:15:37 | Rating: | Views: 47
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