Political theory is a field that finds nourishment in others. From economics, history, sociology, psychology, and political science, theorists have drawn a rich repertoire of schemas to parse the social world and make sense of it. With each of these encounters, new subjects are brought into focus as others recede into the background, ushering a change not only in how questions are tackled but also in what questions are thought worth asking.

Nossa seleção de verbetes parte do interesse de cada pesquisador e os dispomos de maneira histórico-cronológica e, ao mesmo tempo, temática. O verbete de Melissa Lane, “Filosofia Política Antiga” vai da abrangência da política entre os gregos até a república e o império, às portas da cristianização. A “Filosofia Política Medieval”, de John Kilcullen e Jonathan Robinson, é o tópico que mais demanda espaço na nossa seleção em virtude das disputas intrínsecas ao período, da recepção de Aristóteles pelo medievo e (...) da tensão entre poder Papal e Civil. No verbete “Liberalismo”, de Gerald Gaus, Shane Courtland e David Schmidtz, vemos as fontes fundantes da Filosofia Política da modernidade. As ideias de liberdade negativa e positiva se coadunam com a Ética Liberal e sua influência sobre a abrangência do valor fundamental da liberdade individual diante das políticas públicas. O texto de Ian Carter, “Liberdade Positiva e Liberdade Negativa”, expõe o paradoxo da liberdade em suas concepções valorativas e neutra, muito úteis para compreender os problemas políticos que enfrentamos hoje. Por fim, Bas Van Der Vossen no texto “Libertarianismo” trata das noções tensas entre Estado e indivíduos. A concepção de “liberdade de si”, genuinamente negativa, ganha destaque justificatório. Jackie Scully, no verbete Bioética Feminista, exemplifica o valor da influência dessas correntes no âmago de todos os contemporâneos. Sua escrita homenageia postumamente Anne Donchin com um apanhado histórico da luta de inserção de políticas feministas na pesquisa acadêmica global. No verbete “Democracia”, os professores brasileiros Gustavo Dalaqua e Alberto Ribeiro Barros acrescentaram tópicos importantes ao tema geral, respectivamente: “Construtivismo Representativo vs. Representação Descritiva” e “Democracia Contestatória de Philip Pettit”. O texto de Thomas Christiano perpassa os principais argumentos de justificação política contra e a favor da democracia ocidental, com foco central nas concepções de liberdade e igualdade. Os verbetes dispostos nessa seleção de textos são tendenciosos na medida que expressam o interesse genuíno de cada pesquisador com os assuntos relevantes em suas pesquisas. Em virtude disso, a escolha “adota um lado” em detrimento de outros – mais especificamente: de outro que poderia ser mais “progressista”. Por si só, o livro já nasce reclamando um segundo volume, que será providenciado. Colocamos de lado qualquer exigência de “imparcialidade”, algo que não existe na Filosofia, muito menos na Filosofia Política. Sobressai, nesse aspecto, o caráter reflexivo que o assunto exige e a importância do assunto, sem o qual não teríamos a modernas concepções de representatividade, as teorias da justiça ou mesmo as ciências sociais. Um outro volume, portanto, se faz imperativo, por conta da abrangência da própria SEP e do respeito a seu projeto inicial, genuinamente um plano plural. (shrink)

Contemporary proponents of republican political theory often focus on the concept of freedom as non-domination, and how best to promote it within a state. However, there is little attention paid to what the republican conception of freedom demands in the international realm. In this essay I examine what is required for an agent to enjoy freedom as non-domination, and argue that this might only be achieved for individuals if one of two possibilities is pursued internationally: either (1) all nations are (...) made equally powerful, such that none may arbitrarily impose its will on another without penalty, or (2) all nations are joined under a global sovereign which guarantees that the weaker states are not subject to the whims of the stronger. I further argue that the first condition cannot suffice for achieving true non-domination, and as a result, republicanism must prescribe working toward the establishment of a global state. This paper provides an important contribution to the literature by addressing the international implications of the republican conception of freedom. (shrink)

Some democratic theorists have argued that contemporary people should practice only a civility that recognizes others as equal persons, and eschew any form of deference to authority as a feudalistic cultural holdover that ought to be abandoned in the modern era. Against such views, this essay engages early Confucian views of ethics and society, including their analyses of different sorts of authority and status, in order to argue that, properly understood, deference is indeed a virtue of considerable importance for contemporary (...) democratic societies and the citizens who constitute them. (shrink)

After defining the essential elements of Aristotelian citizenship, the article proposes to apply these criteria in its search for the equivalent of a citizen within the corporate polis. It argues that shareholding managers are the best positioned among a firm's constituents or stakeholders in fulfilling the role of corporate citizens. Greater participation by management not only in the control but also in the ownership of firms brings about benefits for the firm as a whole and for the managers themselves, as (...) organizational citizenship behavior literature, among others, suggests. (shrink)

The republican ideal of freedom as non-domination stresses the importance of certain social relationships for a person’s freedom, showing that freedom is a social-relational state. While the idea of non-domination receives a lot of attention in the literature, republican theorists say surprisingly little about equality. My aim in this paper is therefore to carve out the contours of a republican conception of equality. In so doing, I argue that republican accounts of equality share a significant normative overlap with the idea (...) of ‘social equality’. However, closer analysis of Philip Pettit’s account of ‘expressive egalitarianism’ (which he sees as inherently connected to non-domination) and recent theories of social equality shows that republican non-domination – in contrast to what Pettit seems to claim – is not sufficient for securing (republican) social equality. In order to secure social equality for all, republicans would have to go beyond the ideal of freedom as non-domination. (shrink)

According to relational egalitarians, equality is not primarily about the distribution of some good but about people relating to one another as equals. However, compared with other theorists in political philosophy – including other egalitarians – relational egalitarians have said relatively little on what role personal responsibility should play in their theories. For example, is equality compatible with responsibility? Should economic distributions be responsibility-sensitive? This article fills this gap. I develop a relational egalitarian framework for personal responsibility and show that (...) relational equality commits us to responsibility. I develop two sets of arguments. First, I draw on relational theories of moral responsibility – particularly Strawsonian views – to show that valuable egalitarian relationships require responsibility. Second, I show why relational equality sometimes requires that economic distributions be sensitive to responsibility and choice. I also defend a seemingly paradoxical result: being committed to responsibility, relational egalitarianism not only justifies some distributive inequalities but some relational inequalities too. Overall, relational egalitarianism gives a nuanced and coherent answer as to why and how responsibility matters from within egalitarianism. That it does should be an important argument in its favour. (shrink)

This article problematizes the republican reliance on contemporary ‘states as they are’ as protectors and guarantors of the republican notion of freedom as non-domination. While the principle of freedom as non-domination constitutes an advance over the liberal principle of freedom as non-interference, its reliance on the national, territorial, legal-technical and extra-economic contemporary state prevents the theoretical uncovering of its full potential. The article argues that to make the most of the principle of freedom as non-domination, a strong Athenian element is (...) required. The democratic confederalist project that is being experimented with by Syrian Kurds in the cantons of Rojava, it is maintained, can contribute theoretically and practically to this republican ideal through its democratic and participatory mechanisms, despite fundamental challenges it has to face. (shrink)

The paper offers five desiderata on a realist normative theory of politics: that it should avoid moralism, deontologism, transcendentalism, utopianism, and vanguardism. These desiderata argue for a theory that begins from values rooted in a people’s experience; that avoids prescribing a collective deontological constraint; that makes the comparison of imperfect regimes possible; that takes feasibility and sustainability into account; and that makes room for the claims of democracy. The paper argues, in the course of exploring the desiderata, that a neo-republican (...) philosophy of government does pretty well in satisfying them. (shrink)

‘Optimistic’ normative theories of criminal justice aim to justify criminal sanction in terms of its reprobative/rehabilitative value rather than its punitive nature as such. But do such theories accord with ordinary intuitions about what constitutes a ‘just’ response to wrongdoing? Recent empirical work on the psychology of punishers suggests that human beings have a ‘brutely retributive’ moral psychology, making them unlikely to endorse normative theories that sacrifice retribution for the sake of reprobation or rehabilitation; it would mean, for example, that (...) we cannot expect people to support such optimistic theories democratically, calling their feasibility into question. Taking the civic republican theory as an exemplar of optimistic theories, we argue that it does not fail this feasibility test. We review recent empirical research, including studies of our own, to support the claim that, far from being brute retributivists, human beings are generally satisfied only with punishment that delivers something other than mere retribution. And we show that this coheres very closely with the goals and policies that civic republicanism would support, as it may be expected to cohere also with other optimistic proposals. (shrink)

In recent years there has been a revival of interest in civic republicanism. In light of this revival, it is interesting to consider what sort of theory of legal or judicial adjudication such a doctrine—centered on the value of promoting freedom from domination—would recommend. After discussing the importance of such a theory and clarifying its relationship to broader questions of institutional design, it is argued that theories of adjudication should be assessed according to three criteria: first, their contribution to the (...) republican cause of promoting freedom from domination; second, their suitability to the characteristic features of legal systems; and third, their impact on long-run institutional stability. According to these criteria, a republican theory of adjudication would hold that judges and other legal officials should strive in their decisions and interpretations to maintain and enhance the distinctive value of the rule of law. (shrink)

This article defends the democratic ideal of inclusive public discourse, as articulated in Democratic Speech in Divided Times, against the critiques offered by Billingham, Fraser, and Hannon. Specifically, it considers and responds to three core challenges. The first challenge argues, notably, that the “shared reasons” constraint should either apply everywhere or not at all, and that, if this constraint is to apply in divided circumstances, its justificatory constituency must be idealized. The second challenge contends that the resistance of hate speech (...) and misinformation to counterspeech cannot adequately be explained by considerations of salience, and therefore cannot adequately by countered (as I suggest) by “positive” forms of counterspeech. Finally, the last challenge objects that the ideal of inclusive public discourse I defend remains, as pessimists allege, excessively idealistic. (shrink)

Jürgen Habermas’s theory of ‘discourse ethics’ has been an important source of inspiration for theories of deliberative democracy and is typically contrasted with agonistic conceptions of democracy represented by theorists such as Chantal Mouffe. In this article I show that this contrast is overstated. By focusing on the different philosophical traditions that underpin Mouffe’s and Habermas’s respective approaches, commentators have generally overlooked the political similarities between these thinkers. I examine Habermas’s and Mouffe’s respective conceptions of democratic politics and argue that (...) they cannot be so neatly distinguished from each other. I show that much of Mouffe’s criticism of Habermas’s theory does not hold up to careful scrutiny, and discourse ethics shares important points of similarity with her own democratic theory. By using critical republican theory to show the similarities in their work, I push beyond the agonistic versus deliberative debate, and show that at the heart of both of these approaches is a critical republican emphasis on the need for civic solidarity, on the constructive role of conflict in democratic politics and on the vital importance of self-government. These are crucial ingredients for the regeneration of democracy in contemporary pluralistic societies. (shrink)

In the biomedical and behavioral sciences, it is widely recognized that researchers conducting studies involving human participants must respect the autonomy of research subjects. There is significant debate in the clinical research ethics and bioethics literatures about what it means for an individual to be autonomous. According to proponents of the Liberal Conception of Autonomy, an autonomous person is an agent who has interests and opinions and the capacity to deliberate about them. In contrast, proponents of the Relational Conception of (...) Autonomy argue that because humans are social creatures, autonomy is a relational concept and ought to be recognized as such by medical professionals. In this article, I argue that the LCA/RCA debate is flawed, and that the notion of freedom as non-domination, rather than autonomy, ought to be adopted for biomedical research ethics policies regarding informed consent and research agenda-setting. I then argue that this view of freedom should also be adopted... (shrink)

Some have recently argued that the current generation dominates future generations by causing long-term climate change. They relate these claims to Philip Pettit and Frank Lovett's neorepublican theory of domination. In this paper, I examine their claims and ask whether the neorepublican conception of domination remains theoretically coherent when the relation is between current agents and nonoverlapping future subjects. I differentiate between an ‘outcome’ and a ‘relational’ conception of domination. I show how both are theoretically coherent when extended to posterity (...) but only if we make different definitional and normative choices than those made by Pettit and Lovett. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine whether the concept of domination can be used to provide a coherent normative justification for policies or institutional changes regarding individuals who are members of f...

Politics, Philosophy & Economics, Volume 21, Issue 2, Page 97-121, May 2022. Republicans hold that people are unfree if they are dominated, that is, if others have an insufficiently constrained ability to frustrate their choices. Since legislation can frustrate individuals’ choices, republicans believe that the design of legislative institutions has consequences for individual freedom. Some have argued that if legislative institutions are democratic, then they need not be sources of domination at all. We argue this view is incorrect: the introduction (...) of legislative authority, even if democratically organized, always creates a new site of domination. However, republicans can defend democratic procedures as the best means of minimizing the degree to which citizens are dominated, subject to the constraint of equalizing everyone’s freedom. We formulate and prove this claim within a simple model of legislative authority and domination. (shrink)

It is common to think that state enforcement is a restriction on freedom that is morally permitted or justified because of the unfortunate circumstances in which we find ourselves. Human frailty and material scarcity combine to make the compromise of freedom involved in exclusive state enforcement power necessary for other freedoms or other goods. In the words of James Madison, ‘if men were angels, no government would be necessary’ (1990: 267). But there is an opposing tradition, according to which the (...) very idea of freedom in society entails the necessity of state enforcement. However morally good human beings are, or whatever material conditions they find themselves in, on this view, the ideal of freedom we ought to be concerned to realise is such that it cannot be attained without state enforcement. It follows a priori from an important ideal of freedom that a state with exclusive enforcement power is necessary for individual liberty in society. In this paper, I argue against what I take to be the strongest argument of the a priori kind, which begins from the neo-republican ideal of freedom as non-domination, and thereby in (partial) defence of the alternative, Madisonian, view. Insofar as it is true that some sort of problematic domination will inevitably be present in a stateless society, I argue, the introduction of a state can do nothing to eliminate it. For the state to improve on even an ideal stateless society, it would need to give individuals control over the interference of potential dominators of a sort that could not be achieved in the ideal stateless society. -/- . (shrink)

Who is responsible for fighting domination? Answering this question, I argue, requires taking the structural dimension of domination seriously to avoid unwillingly reproducing domination in the nam...

This article is concerned with the antagonistic character of democratic politics, specifically in relation to the neo-republican conceptualisation of politics, as outlined by Philip Pettit. I take up a problem not addressed in the neo-republican scholarship, namely, the broader dispute over the practice of contestation and the scope of its reach in relation to the activity of politics. This article proceeds through an examination of what I call Pettit’s method of political theory in order to approach sideways the concept of (...) ‘contestation’ as a marker for a sublimated antagonistic dimension of neo-republican politics. Drawing on the work of Rancière and the insights of post-Nietzschean critical theory (Derrida, Laclau and Arendt), I examine the relationship between populism, democratic contestation and non-domination in neo-republican discourse. As such, this article exerts pressure on Pettit’s privileging of a status concept of freedom as the supreme political ideal of republican politics. This article explores the political possibilities opened up through a re-politicisation of non-domination, and the radical potential that resides in a politics that does not foreclose on democracy, understood in terms of popular power and not popular control. (shrink)

A central issue in Chinese philosophy today is the relationship between Confucianism and democracy. While some political figures have argued that Confucian values justify non-democratic forms of government, many scholars have argued that Confucianism can provide justification for democracy, though this Confucian democracy will differ substantially from liberal democracy. These scholars believe it is important for Chinese culture to develop its own conception of democracy using Confucian values, drawn mainly from Kongzi (Confucius) and Mengzi (Mencius), as the basis. This essay (...) describes some obstacles to this form of Confucian democracy. It argues that considering the political philosophies of Kongzi and Mengzi in the context of their views on personal cultivation reveals that they oppose some of the central assumptions of democracy. They do not trust the public to make good decisions, and advocate government for the people, but not by the people. These philosophies alone cannot generate democracy. (shrink)

This article problematizes the republican reliance on contemporary ‘states as they are’ as protectors and guarantors of the republican notion of freedom as non-domination. While the principle of freedom as non-domination constitutes an advance over the liberal principle of freedom as non-interference, its reliance on the national, territorial, legal-technical and extra-economic contemporary state prevents the theoretical uncovering of its full potential. The article argues that to make the most of the principle of freedom as non-domination, a strong Athenian element is (...) required. The democratic confederalist project that is being experimented with by Syrian Kurds in the cantons of Rojava, it is maintained, can contribute theoretically and practically to this republican ideal through its democratic and participatory mechanisms, despite fundamental challenges it has to face. (shrink)

Republicanism is an approach within political theory that seeks to secure the values of political liberty and non-domination. Yet, in historical practice, early modern republics developed empires and secured their liberty through policies that dominated others. This contradiction presents challenges for how neo-Roman theorists understand ideals of liberty and political freedom. This article argues that the historical practices of slavery and empire developed concurrently with the normative ideals of republican liberty. Republican liberty does not arise in the absence of power (...) but is inherently connected to the exercise of power. (shrink)

Freedom is among the central values in political philosophy. Freedom also features heavily in normative arguments in ethics, politics, and law. Yet different sides often invoke freedom to establish very different conclusions. Some argue that freedom imposes strict constraints on state power. For example, when promoting public health, there is a limit on how far the state can interfere with individual freedom. Others, in contrast, argue that freedom is not just a constraint but also an important goal of state power (...) and collective action. Good public health policy, for example, promotes people’s freedom. Of course, different arguments often draw on different theories of freedom. So, to evaluate such arguments, we need to analyze these different theories and their implications and assess their plausibility. -/- The broadly liberal tradition views freedom as being about external options. Such theories typically start with an account of when someone has a specific freedom or unfreedom to do something. For example, some argue that only a narrow set of interpersonal interferences count as constraints on freedom. Others argue that a far broader set of factors, including ill health and natural constraints, can reduce one’s freedom. -/- Since the 1980s and 1990s, scholarship has increasingly recognized that to use liberal freedom in normative arguments, one must move beyond specific freedom and unfreedom. Most laws and policies both subtract and add specific freedoms. What matters is how a person’s freedom is affected overall. Philosophers and economists have thus engaged in intricate debates about how to measure overall freedom. Moreover, policies and law affect not only one person at one point in time but also multiple persons across time. So, liberal freedom-based arguments also require distributive criteria for intertemporal and interpersonal distributions of freedom. -/- In the early 21st century, republicanism has developed into a prominent alternative to liberal theories. Republicans argue that being a free person is not just, or not even primarily, about liberal option-freedom. Freedom requires being free from dominating power. Republicans and liberals have engaged in a lively debate on who offers the better theory. In developing the republican ideal, republicans also engage in intramural debates. For example, is domination primarily an interpersonal or structural phenomenon? And what economic institutions does republicanism imply? -/- Theorizing around freedom has become richer and moved from narrower questions regarding specific freedom and unfreedom to overall freedom and to republican theories of nondomination. But recent theorizing also seeks to extend its focus and scope. Historically, theorizing started with the freedom of able-bodied male citizens within nation states. Recent theorizing shifts the focus to include issues around gender, disability, freedom at the international level, and the freedom of nonhuman animals and future generations. Beyond fascinating implications of existing theories, a more inclusive focus is likely to also yield important lessons on how current theories can be improved. (shrink)

Theories of domination are primarily attempts to understand the value of justice, freedom, and equality by examining cases where they are absent. Such theories seek to clarify and systematize our judgments about what it is to be weak against uncontrolled strength, i.e., about what it is to be vulnerable, degraded, and defenseless against unrestrained power. -/- Much contemporary disagreement about domination involves competing answers to three questions: (1) Who, or what, can dominate? (2) Is it possible to dominate merely by (...) having power with a certain structure, or is domination an exercise or an abuse of power? (3) Exercised or unexercised, what kind of power is domination? The remainder of this entry will address each of these questions in turn, then conclude with a survey of how the idea of domination has been used in recent applied ethical theory. It will become clear as we examine competing answers to these three questions that different theorists have very different ideas of why, exactly, we need a theory of domination. There may be wide agreement that we need the idea of domination to make sense of unjust power relations, but unjust power relations are wildly varied, and theorists of domination disagree not only about which varieties most need to be understood, but about how theorizing domination helps us to understand them. (shrink)