In The Well-Ordered Republic Frank Lovett sets out “to expound as rigorous and comprehensive an account of republican political theory as possible, given our present state of knowledge and constraints of space” (p. 1). As he immediately admits, there’s a tension between the aims of rigor and comprehensiveness: to the extent that we set out to define republican values and goals precisely, we run the risk of articulating a position that some republicans would disavow, and thus of failing to be fully comprehensive. Conversely, to the extent that we take a capacious position on who counts as a republican, we run the risk of defining the boundaries of the tradition so broadly that it becomes hard to see what it stands for at the end of the day.
To my eye The Well-Ordered Republic walks this line admirably well. In the introductory chapter Lovett associates republicanism with a parsimonious but demanding trio of normative principles: the non-domination principle, which states that reducing domination (the uncontrolled ability to intentionally frustrate other people’s choices) should be the primary concern in the design of laws, policies, and institutions; the empire of law principle, which requires that the use of coercive force, whether by public officials or by ordinary citizens, be controlled by law; and the popular control principle, which requires that public officials be meaningfully accountable to those over whom they rule. He plausibly locates a common allegiance to these principles in the writings of early modern thinkers such as Niccolò Machiavelli, John Milton, James Harrington, Algernon Sidney, Thomas Paine, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison (a group that he refers to collectively as the “Machiavelli to Madison canon”) and among contemporary “neo-republican” political philosophers and theorists such as Philip Pettit, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli. Probably the most controversial feature of his approach from an historical point of view is that it reads the Greeks and Romans out of the republican tradition; a position that he defends in Appendix A.
The book goes on to provide a detailed analysis of each of the three defining republican principles (Chapters 2–4), and to consider how they might best be realized domestically (Chapter 5) and internationally (Chapter 6). In pursuing this line of inquiry Lovett engages broadly—one is tempted to say comprehensively!—with the enormous literature on republican political thought, and delves judiciously into a number of contentious issues, including the question of whether domination should be conceived of in personal or structural terms, whether non-domination is best treated as a side-constraint or a maximand, and how we should think about the nature and importance of civic virtue, among many others. Throughout he strikes a nice balance between defending the views that seem best by his own lights—often building on and extending his previous work—and clearly and charitably describing the main alternatives.
There are of course doubts that one might raise about the positions that Lovett takes on particular issues, and for that reason among others his book is sure to generate wide discussion. Nevertheless it’s fair to say that The Well-Ordered Republic comes as close as can reasonably be expected to defining the “state of the art” of republican political theory. It can serve both as an excellent starting point for anyone who wants to familiarize themselves with the republican tradition, and as a worthy foil for anyone who already has settled views about it. I will focus my critical remarks not on Lovett’s reconstruction of republicanism, with which I’m broadly in sympathy, but rather on what it leaves out of the frame. Conveniently, this allows me to put his book into dialogue with my own book Liberal Freedom.
We can start by considering the 200-year gap that lies between the American Founding—the Madisonian end of the “Machiavelli to Madison canon”—and the neo-republican revival of the 1980s and 1990s. This is the period in which liberalism supplanted republicanism as the leading political ideology of freedom: as I point out in Liberal Freedom, the true founders of liberalism aren’t John Locke and the other early modern defenders of natural rights and the social contract, but rather nineteenth-century thinkers such as Benjamin Constant, Alexis de Tocqueville, and John Stuart Mill—the thinkers who first used the word “liberal” to describe their political position. The liberal tradition that stretches from Constant to, say, Isaiah Berlin almost exactly fills the historical gap that I’ve just mentioned. There is, in short, a liberalism-sized hole in Lovett’s republican narrative.
It would be natural to ask, as some neo-republicans have, why republican ideas went into eclipse during this tumultuous period. The answer, of course, is that they didn’t. Making due allowance for differences in terminology and emphasis, Constant, Tocqueville, and Mill—and later liberal thinkers such as T.H. Green, L.T. Hobhouse, J.A. Hobson, and John Dewey—were no less committed to non-domination, the rule of law, and accountable government than their republican forebears. Indeed, more progress was made toward realizing those ideals in “liberal” polities over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than in all preceding human history (which is not to deny that much work remains to be done).
What makes liberal political thought distinctive is the fact that it insists on the importance of carving out a domain of conduct—of liberty—in which we aren’t responsible either to the state or to each other for what we do, even when our republican freedom is thereby compromised. In other words, liberals don’t reject the value of republican freedom, but they do hold that it should be balanced against the enjoyment of a very different kind of freedom: freedom as non-responsibility, or market freedom as I call it for short. To make a very long story short, the early liberals arrived at this view in an effort to respond to the gradual but cumulatively decisive collapse of traditional social and political hierarchies in the wake of the American and French Revolutions. They argued that the rise of the modern democratic state has made political power both harder to control and harder to avoid, and that the overbearing weight of public opinion, amplified by the new organs of mass communication, threatened to stifle individual creativity and initiative: thus for example the famous worries that Tocqueville and Mill raise about the tyranny of the majority. The necessary response, they concluded, is to promote a flexible and entrepreneurial economy, a robust and pluralistic civil society, and an open and tolerant public sphere—even, again, when the associated freedoms of expression, association, and exchange tend to threaten or undermine the enjoyment of republican freedom.
Thus from a liberal point of view what was new about neo-republicanism is not the fact that it drew attention to the importance of non-domination, but rather the fact that—especially in Pettit’s hands—it held that non-domination should take strict priority over other political values; that it is in this sense primary or sufficient. The most interesting moments in The Well-Ordered Republic when read from the standpoint of Liberal Freedom are those at which Lovett retreats—albeit cautiously and somewhat ambiguously—from this position. He argues, for example, that “republicans can with perfect consistency maintain both the claim that non-domination is a primary good, and also the claim that its value will be outweighed at the margin in this or that special case” (p. 77; the “special cases” that he mentions are parenting and political activism). He suggests that “even if markets inherently involve domination, their other advantages might in the end tell in their favor” (p. 104). He concedes that “if there are many things we should care about as public aims, then there will presumably be some situations in which the distinct values served … outweigh the value of freedom from domination, and thus the latter should give way to the former” (p. 151).
Taken at face value, these passages go a long way toward blurring the line between republicanism and liberalism, at least as I understand it. However, where Lovett considers the question of whether republican freedom might need to be balanced against other political values only in passing, suggesting that this is a minor concern from a republican point of view, liberals place that question at the very center of attention. This is not to deny the importance of the issues that Lovett does bring to the foreground. In Liberal Freedom I insist that a liberal polity must give priority to republican freedom in the limited but crucial sense that the limits of non-responsible conduct—of market freedom—must be defined by republican means, but I touch only briefly on the question of what this requires of us practically speaking. I can think of few better resources for thinking that question through than The Well-Ordered Republic. In that sense the two books complement each other nicely.
