Republicanism

Abstract

Republicanism rests on the insight that justice entails the fair distribution of political and social power. As a result, it emphasizes the importance of civic virtue and political participation and favors a political system involving a mixed constitution and the rule of law. However, whereas a neo-Aristotelian tradition of republicanism, going back to ancient Greece, involves an ethical naturalist theory of positive liberty, which views political participation as necessary for self-mastery, a later, neo-Roman, republican tradition, associated with Cicero, Machiavelli, Harrington, and (more contentiously) Rousseau and Kant, involves a theory of negative liberty as freedom from mastery. The most prominent contemporary republican program, associated with Philip Pettit, develops this latter, neo-Roman, account. It characterizes political liberty as a condition of nondomination or independence from arbitrary power. It distinguishes this conception from both liberal conceptions of negative freedom and neo-Aristotelian conceptions of positive freedom. Accordingly, neo-Roman republicanism focuses on the role of power imbalances in creating domination and explores how a condition may be created, both domestically and internationally, that reduces the capacity for agents and agencies to interfere arbitrarily in the decisions of individuals and the collectivities, notably states, to which they belong. This focus allows republican theorists to offer accounts of domination and nondomination along both a vertical dimension, such as that which arises between the rulers and the ruled, on the one hand, and a horizontal dimension, such as that which arises between rich and poor citizens within a polity, on the other. Republicanism provides a normative language able to engage with and criticize certain features of the international world. This engagement and critique addresses not only the exercise of power by states over the citizens of other states as well as their own but also the influence of corporate actors operating across states and the economic structures and relations they create between the various agents acting within them. As such, republicanism provides a powerful tool for analyzing the current global economic and social order as well as the global political order. Moreover, it can link the two to explore how the maldistribution of political and economic power interact to create injustice. This perspective has informed recent republican-inspired critiques of colonialism and neoliberal processes of globalization.