Socialist republicans advocate public ownership and control of the means of production in order to achieve the republican goal of a society without endemic domination. While civic republicanism is often attacked for its conservatism, the relatively neglected radical history of the tradition shows how a republican form of socialism provides powerful conceptual resources to critique capitalism for leaving workers and citizens dominated. This analysis supports a programme of public ownership and economic democracy intended to reduce domination in the workplace and (...) wider society. I defend this socialist republicanism from both the Marxist objection that it overlooks the impersonal nature of domination under capitalism and the left-liberal objections that property-owning democracy or worker codetermination are sufficient to suppress dominating relationships. The resulting position identifies the need for more ambitious institutional grounds for republican liberty than is often supposed, while offering us a distinctive emancipatory justification for socialism. (shrink)

European Journal of Political Theory, Volume 21, Issue 1, Page 47-67, January 2022. In response to the republican revival of the ideal of freedom as non-domination, a number of ‘radical’, ‘labour’ and ‘workplace’ republicans have criticised the limitations of Philip Pettit’s account of freedom and government. This article proposes that the missing link in these debates is the relationship between republicanism and socialism. Seeking to bring this connection back into view in historical and theoretical terms, the article draws from contemporary (...) radical republicans and the writings of Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg to propose a socialist republican theory of freedom and government. This consists of a conception of freedom as collective autonomy and a participatory democratic vision of a decentralised state with parliamentary institutions, the rule of law, worker-controlled workplaces, community-directed investment and a political culture of solidarity and public-spiritedness. This theory of socialist republicanism seeks to overcome the weaknesses and limitations of each respective independent theory and should appeal to republicans and socialists alike. (shrink)

European Journal of Political Theory, Volume 21, Issue 1, Page 47-67, January 2022. In response to the republican revival of the ideal of freedom as non-domination, a number of ‘radical’, ‘labour’ and ‘workplace’ republicans have criticised the limitations of Philip Pettit’s account of freedom and government. This article proposes that the missing link in these debates is the relationship between republicanism and socialism. Seeking to bring this connection back into view in historical and theoretical terms, the article draws from contemporary (...) radical republicans and the writings of Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg to propose a socialist republican theory of freedom and government. This consists of a conception of freedom as collective autonomy and a participatory democratic vision of a decentralised state with parliamentary institutions, the rule of law, worker-controlled workplaces, community-directed investment and a political culture of solidarity and public-spiritedness. This theory of socialist republicanism seeks to overcome the weaknesses and limitations of each respective independent theory and should appeal to republicans and socialists alike. (shrink)

In response to the republican revival of the ideal of freedom as non-domination, a number of ‘radical’, ‘labour’ and ‘workplace’ republicans have criticised the limitations of Philip Pettit’s account of freedom and government. This article proposes that the missing link in these debates is the relationship between republicanism and socialism. Seeking to bring this connection back into view in historical and theoretical terms, the article draws from contemporary radical republicans and the writings of Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg to propose (...) a socialist republican theory of freedom and government. This consists of a conception of freedom as collective autonomy and a participatory democratic vision of a decentralised state with parliamentary institutions, the rule of law, worker-controlled workplaces, community-directed investment and a political culture of solidarity and public-spiritedness. This theory of socialist republicanism seeks to overcome the weaknesses and limitations of each respective independent theory and should appeal to republicans and socialists alike. (shrink)

Occupy Wall Street is best understood, I would suggest, as a new form of political as opposed to civil disobedience that fundamentally rejects the political and ideological landscape that has dominated our collective imagination in this country since before the cold war. Civil disobedience accepts the legitimacy of the political structure and of our political institutions but resists the moral authority of the resulting laws. It is “civil” in its disobedience—civil in the etymological sense of taking place within a shared (...) political community, within the classical Latin framework of civilitas, within an art of civil government. Civil disobedience accepts the verdict and condemnation that the civilly disobedient bring upon themselves. It respects the legal norm at the very moment of resistance and places itself under the sanction of that norm. If it resists the legal sanction that it itself entails, it is, in effect, no longer truly civil disobedience. As Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” “an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for law.” Civil disobedience does not aim to displace the law-making institutions or the structure of legal governance but rather to challenge the governing laws by demonstrating their injustice.Political disobedience, by contrast, resists the very way in which we are governed. It rejects the idea of honoring or expressing the “highest respect for law.” It refuses to willingly accept the sanctions meted out by the legal and political system. It challenges the conventional way that political governance takes place, that laws are enforced. It turns its back on the political institutions and actors who govern us all. It resists the structure of partisan politics, the traditional demand for policy reforms, the call for party identification, and, beyond that, the very ideologies that have dominated the postwar period. (shrink)

The republican case for workplace democracy is presented and defended from two alternative means of ensuring freedom from arbitrary interference in the firm—namely, the right to freely exit the firm and workplace regulation. This paper shows, respectively, that costless exit is neither possible nor desirable in either perfect or imperfect labor markets, and that managerial discretion is both desirable and inevitable due to the incompleteness of employment contracts and labor legislation. The paper then shows that WD is necessary, from a (...) republican standpoint, if workers’ interests are to be adequately tracked in the exercise of managerial authority. Three important objections are finally addressed— that WD is redundant, that it is unnecessary provided that litigation and unionism can produce similar outcomes, and that it falls short of ensuring republican freedom compared to self-employment. (shrink)

The basic income proposal provides everyone in a society, as an unconditional right, with access to a certain level of income. Introducing such a right is bound to raise questions of institutional feasibility. Would it lead too many people to opt out of the workforce, for example? And even if it did not, could a constitution that allowed some members of the society to do this – at whatever relative cost – prove acceptable in a society of mutually reciprocal, equally (...) positioned members? I assume in this short essay, however, that none of these problems is insurmountable. I concentrate on the question of how far republicanism makes room for justifying something like a right to basic income, assuming that there are no problems of this kind with introducing and establishing such a right. Any satisfactory argument for a basic income should satisfy two desiderata. First is that of adequacy: the argument should establish a right to an intuitively.. (shrink)