Republicanism: An Unattractive Version of Liberalism

Abstract

Philip Pettit is the most important contemporany advocate of the republican tradition in political philosophy. He advances a concept of freedom as non-domination, and constrasts it with the liberal conception of freedom 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 is arbitrary. I shall argue that Pettit´s republicanism is not sufficiently differente from liberalism, certainly not from John Rawls´s liberalism. The only relevant difference between republicanism and liberalism is related to (2): the notion of arbitrariness. Yet this difference makes republicanism an unattractive version of liberalism, 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 by Pettit´s consequentialist framework.