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Liberty, Nondomination, Markets

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2019

Paul Sagar Open the ORCID record for Paul Sagar [Opens in a new window]
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Abstract

Over the past two decades, Philip Pettit has consistently argued for an understanding of “republican” liberty in terms of nondomination. Yet in his major published studies, he has almost nothing to say about markets, nor about the economy more generally. I contend that this is a seriously problematic omission, insofar as markets represent a major problem for republican views of freedom. In short: if freedom requires the absence of the mere possibility of arbitrary interference (as Pettit maintains), then the widespread existence of markets indicates that on a republican view the vast majority of people in the world today exist in the dominated position of slaves. As a result, Pettit cannot adopt the “complacency” towards market transactions that he officially avows. But in turn, we ought to be highly skpetical that the republican account of freedom is a viable one.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 81 , Issue 3 , Summer 2019 , pp. 409 - 434
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2019 

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Matt Sleat, Ed Hall, Rob Jubb, Enzo Rossi, Bernardo Zacka, Adam Tebble, Carmen Pavel, Robin Douglass, Mark Pennington, Jeremy Jennings, Chandran Kukathas, the Journal’s three anonymous reviewers, the editor Ruth Abbey, and especially my former colleague John Filling, for helpful comments on this paper, a version of which was presented to the Political Philosophy Seminar at the London School of Economics.

References

1 Pettit, Philip, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 205Google Scholar.

2 Pettit, Philip, “Freedom in the Market,” Politics, Philosophy and Economics 5, no. 2 (2007): 142Google Scholar.

3 Ibid., 139.

4 Gaus, Gerald, “Backwards into the Future: Neorepublicanism as a Post-socialist Critique of Market Society,” Social Philosophy and Policy 20, no. 1 (2003): 59–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Gaus also claims that Pettit's republicanism is a postsocialist critique of capitalism. This is an interesting, but problematic, claim, at least as originally formulated. On the one hand, Pettit certainly does not conceive of himself as an opponent of capitalist arrangements—so as a characterization of the intentions of republican theory's leading practitioner, Gaus is surely wrong. On the other, as I try to show below, Gaus's intuitions may well nonetheless be fundamentally correct on this score: that when spelled out properly, the logic of republican freedom is in fact deeply hostile to market arrangements owing to the massive levels of potential uncontrolled interference they generate.

5 Gourevitch, Alexander, “Labour and Republican Liberty,” Constellations 18, no. 3 (2011): 431–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “Labour Republicanism and the Transformation of Work,” Political Theory 41, no. 4 (2013): 591–617CrossRefGoogle Scholar; From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labour and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.

6 Williams, Bernard, “From Freedom to Liberty: The Construction of a Political Value,” in In the Beginning Was the Deed, ed. Hawthorn, G. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 75Google Scholar.

7 That so much contemporary Anglo-analytic theory assumes precisely such neutrality and reasonableness indicates that so much contemporary Anglo-analytic theory is at present unhelpful.

8 For recent defense of a moralized account of freedom, see Bader, Ralf M., “Moralized Conceptions of Liberty,” in The Oxford Handbook of Freedom, ed. Schmidtz, D. and Pavel, C. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018)Google Scholar.

9 Not least in drawing inspiration from Williams, it is fair to say that the argument presented here is self-consciously and deliberately realist. Pettit has recently suggested that his neorepublican philosophy of government does a good job of satisfying various “realist desiderata” (“Political Realism Meets Civic Republicanism,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 20, no. 3 [2017]: 331–47)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. By contrast, this paper suggests that whatever may be said about such desiderata, at a more fundamental level Pettit's republicanism is anything but realist.

10 E.g., “Freedom as Antipower,” Ethics 106, no. 3 (1996): 576–604CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Republicanism; “Keeping Republican Freedom Simple: On a Difference with Quentin Skinner,” Political Theory 30, no. 3 (2002): 339–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “Reublican Liberty: Three Axioms, Four Theorems,” in Republicanism and Political Theory, ed. Laborde, C. and Maynor, J. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 102–30Google Scholar; On the People's Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)Google Scholar. I here concentrate on Pettit's account of freedom as nondomination because it is precisely the question of freedom that I wish to explore. I thus leave aside alternative formulations of republicanism in terms of nondependency, which are concerned primarily with reducing domination rather than establishing a central claim about the nature of freedom (e.g., Lovett, Frank, “Domination and Distributive Justice,” Journal of Politics 71, no. 3 [2009]: 817–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lovett, , A General Theory of Domination and Justice [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010])CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Pettit, Republicanism, 52–63, and On the People's Terms, 58. Previously Pettit claimed that interference must track the avowed, or avowal-ready, interests of the interfered with in order not to count as domination. This is dropped from the formal definition of freedom in On the People's Terms, in favor of an emphasis on control.

12 Quentin Skinner, “Freedom as the Absence of Arbitrary Power,” in Laborde and Maynor, Republicanism and Political Theory, 96, 99; cf. Pettit, “Freedom in the Market,” 136.

13 Pettit, “Republican Liberty”; On the People's Terms.

14 Pettit, “Freedom in the Market,” 139.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid., 141.

17 Ibid., 135.

18 Gaus, “Backwards into the Future,” 73–74. Gaus himself does not make this point in reference to the economy, but to issues of security; however, I take it that his point about security generalizes to markets in the ways that I argue here. At any rate, it was reading Gaus's article, many years ago, that began the chain of thoughts that have culminated in the present essay.

19 Hume, David, “On the First Principles of Government,” in Essays Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Miller, E. F. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1987), 32–33Google Scholar.

20 Cohen, G. A., “Capitalism, Freedom, and the Proletariat,” in On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice, ed. Otsuka, M. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

21 And indeed, I need not just a ticket, but also a passport and a visa—and hence, my lack of resources already assumes a set of broader political institutions and authority structures within which the resource question can become salient. It is, of course, states that issue passports and visas, and that ultimately enforce property rights over airline tickets—which ought to remind us that we are always in the realm of coercive apparatuses when it comes to thinking about the background enabling realities of any resource-and-freedom questions as regards modern market interactions.

22 See Williams, “From Freedom to Liberty.”

23 Beyond a certain point, we might even want to say that somebody who genuinely resents the natural environment is not engaging the world in a fundamentally sane manner, such is their failure to grasp the aptness of resentment's application to agents, not objects.

24 Pettit, “Republican Liberty,” 135.

25 And of course, America is not unique in this regard: if anything, Thatcher's Britain led the way (think of Elvis Costello's haunting song “Shipbuilding”). What is country specific is how a government deals with deindustrialization—meaning that how individuals are affected by deindustrialization, as a feature of the evolution of modern market economies, is heavily influenced by political choices. In other words, there is no clean separation here between the market and politics, and to miss this is to miss something very important.

26 By “socially relevant” interference I mean to indicate a distinction between forms of interference that are relevant to social freedom, and those that are not. Of course, deciding which instances are socially relevant is part of what will be at stake in any disagreement over freedom—and cannot simply be stipulated in advance, nor can the matter be settled simply by appeal to intentionality (as I show below). Nonetheless, and for example: although my house flooding after a storm will cause lots of interference in my life, in turn conditioning my relations with others and my ability to act in particular ways in society, we would not typically say that this is a case of socially relevant interference, because caused by a natural event. If, however, you run your hose into my basement and turn the tap on full, the case is clearly different. (Although, even here, it is not clear that the most appropriate way to describe what has happened is you imposing on me a cost in freedom—it looks rather more like criminal vandalism. It is worth noting that it is not obvious that socially relevant interference necessarily generates unfreedom; other bads clearly exist. A tendency to assume that socially relevant interference ipso facto damages freedom is a suspicious feature of republican accounts—but I do not explore that worry here.) Between these two extremes lie, of course, a range of possibilities, and deciding which cases of interference count as socially relevant and can in turn be built into claims in freedom will be controversial and require judgment. If my house floods because the state failed to enforce the taxes required to fix the levy, is this socially relevant interference? Experience shows that opinions are not uniform on such matters, nor is it obvious that some are simply making mistakes about the facts when disagreement arises. Pettit attempts to wrestle with these complexities in his discussion of “vitiation” of freedom in On the People's Terms (chapter 1)—however, the account there seems to me to confuse more than it clarifies, and so I leave it aside for present purposes.

27 Pettit, Republicanism, 53.

28 And of course, the Taiwanese company is not the only other agent involved here. A whole host of political decisions need to be made and enforced to allow any particular instance of competition to occur. What ought we to say about, for example, the role of the courts, trade bodies, and ultimately governments, that enable such interference? Pettit treats the market as a series of discrete one-to-one exchange interactions—but that is misleadingly oversimplified because markets rely on the economy as structured by background political institutions.

29 Cf. Matthew Kramer, “Liberty and Domination,” in Laborde and Maynor, Republicanism and Political Theory, 31–57.

30 This takes us back to the point initially made by Gaus (“Backwards into the Future”) and noted above: that if the mere possibility of arbitrary interference renders us unfree, then on the republican case we must apparently be in many ways unfree practically all of the time. I have developed this point in relation specifically to the market and the modern economy, but as Gaus's example of security vis-à-vis potential aggressors armed (for example) with nuclear ICBMs indicates, many other areas of human life will also carry such implications. Others may wish to develop various cases accordingly.

31 See, e.g., Dagger, Richard, “Neo-republicanism and the Civic Economy,” Philosophy, Politics, and Economics 5, no. 1 (2006): 151–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Casassas, David and de Wispelaere, Jurgen, “Republicanism and the Political Economy of Democracy,” European Journal of Social Theory 19, no. 2 (2016): 283–300CrossRefGoogle Scholar; White, Stuart, “The Republican Critique of Capitalism,” Critical Review of Social and Political Philosophy 14, no. 5 (2011): 561–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thomas, Alan, Republic of Equals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017)Google Scholar.

32 See, e.g., Pettit, , “A Republican Right to Basic Income?,” Basic Income Studies 2, no. 2 (2007)Google Scholar; Lovett, “Domination and Distributive Justice”; Domènech, Antoni and Raventós, Daniel, “Property and Republican Freedom: An Institutional Approach to Basic Income,” Basic Income Studies 2, no. 2 (2007)Google Scholar.

33 Jubb, Rob, “Basic Income, Republican Freedom, and Effective Market Power,” Basic Income Studies 3, no. 2 (2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Taylor, Robert S., Exit Left: Markets and Mobility in Republican Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 62–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Gourevitch, “Labour Republicanism,” 592, 599–600.

36 Ibid., 601–3.

37 Ibid., 604, emphasis in original.

38 Gourevitch, “Labour and Republican Liberty,” 445.

39 “Labour and Republican Liberty,” 433, 441–44; “Labour Republicanism,” 592, 598, 610–11.

40 Pettit, Republicanism, 205; “Freedom in the Market,” 132, 147.

41 In this regard it is interesting that, as has recently been noted by Sean Irving, Friedrich Hayek's state minimalist “classical liberalism” was expressly married to a concept of freedom as nondomination strikingly similar to Pettit neorepublican account (“Hayek's Neo-Roman Liberalism,” European Journal of Political Theory, published online July 17, 2017). Of course, Hayek was happy to say that the market simply does not restrict freedom, insofar as its outcomes are not the product of intentional interference—and endorsed in turn a very expansive view of markets, but a very restrictive view of the extent of legitimate state power. I take it that Pettit and other neorepublicans do not, for the most part, want to commit themselves to Hayekian libertarianism, but wish to remain close to the liberal-egalitarian mainstream. But that their core account of freedom may in fact push them in that direction is a nonetheless striking finding, and reinforces the contention of this paper that whichever way it turns, Pettit's republicanism is, as presently formulated, deeply unstable in its attitude towards markets, modernity, freedom, and the conjunction between them.

42 Pettit, Republicanism, 11, 102, 130.

43 List, Christian and Valentini, Laura, “Freedom as Independence,” Ethics 126, no. 4 (2016): 1067CrossRefGoogle Scholar. An advantage of List and Valentini's conceptual analysis, at least on my reading, is precisely that it leaves room for judgment about what is to count as a “robust absence of constraint,” and hence leaves open the possibility not only for reasonable disagreement about what counts as freedom limiting, but also the fact that judgments about freedom will be likely to vary with context and history. This both distinguishes their “freedom as independence” view from republican accounts, and also makes it more plausible.

44 Ibid., 1051.

45 Williams, “From Freedom to Liberty,” 75.

46 Ibid., 90.

47 Ibid., 91.

48 Pettit, Republicanism, 6–7, 11–13.

49 See, e.g., Ando, Clifford, “A Dwelling beyond Violence: On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Contemporary Republicans,” History of Political Thought 31, no. 2 (2010): 183–220Google Scholar; Douglass, Robin, “Montesquieu and Modern Republicanism,” Political Studies 60, no. 3 (2012): 703–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Larmore, Charles, “A Critique of Philip Pettit's Republicanism,” Philosophical Issues 11, no. 1 (2001): 229–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nelson, Eric, The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ghosh, Eric, “From Republican to Liberal Liberty,” History of Political Thought 29, no. 1 (2008): 132–67Google Scholar; McCormick, John, “Machiavelli against Republicanism: On the Cambridge School's ‘Guicciardinian Moments,’” Political Theory 31, no. 5 (2003): 615–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50 Skinner, Quentin, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 216Google Scholar.

51 Pettit, Republicanism, 50.