Popular Sovereignty as Popular Control: Philip Pettit’s Republicanism

Abstract

AbstractIn On the People’s Terms (2012), Pettit devotes an extraordinarily thorough and refined analysis to the concept of domination, as distinguished from “interference” and “frustration”. He thus enriches his previous work by providing a more nuanced taxonomy of freedom. Domination is defined by Pettit as a power of uncontrolled interference enjoyed by an actor over others. The translation of the conception of freedom as non-domination into the realm of political legitimacy hinges upon the notion of control, which becomes central to Pettit’s democratic theory. Legitimate are those political decisions interfering with, but simultaneously controlled by, the citizenry, in a way analogous to Ulysses’s ordering his comrades to tie him at the mast before approaching the sirens. The institutional actors must decide laws and policies by tracking the collective interest from the ongoing popular expressions and debates, and more importantly the decisions enacted must be contestable. In this sense, it is often said that Pettit’s republican democracy tends to value the editorial moment more than the authorial one. The analysis of Pettit’s theory leads to an aporetic conclusion when it comes to defining his ‘sovereign people’. The last sections of this chapter are devoted to the analysis of the two possible definitions of ‘people’ that one may reconstruct from Pettit’s republicanism.KeywordsPettitFreedomNon-dominationRepublicanismControlContestationNorm of normsNeo-Roman liberty