Non-domination and democratic legitimacy

Abstract

While many regard equality as the moral foundation of democracy, republican theory grounds democracy in freedom as non-domination. The grounding of democracy in freedom has been criticized for relying on either an Aristotelian perfectionism or a Rousseauian equation of the people in their collective capacity and the people understood severally. The republican theory of freedom and democracy has the resources to meet these criticisms. But the most systematic elaboration of republicanism, that of Philip Pettit, achieves this by turning the relationship between freedom and democracy into an instrumental relationship in a manner open to objections. Instead, republicanism should offer a justification of democracy that also has a non-instrumental dimension. This revised republican freedom argument for democracy has advantages compared to the equality argument for democracy, including a better explanation of democratic procedures.