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Republicanism
Non-domination and the free state

Richard Bellamy

The recent resurgence of republican thinking has constituted one of the most notable and
exciting developments within contemporary social and political thought (Laborde and Maynor
2008). Roughly speaking, there have been three strands within this republican revival. The first
strand goes back to Aristotle and stresses the importance of civic participation for individual
self-realisation. This view has been prominent within modern communitarianism, particularly
the more left-leaning and democratic versions of this school of thought. It can be likened to
Benjamin Constant’s famous characterisation of ‘ancient liberty’ (Constant 1988 [1819]), in
which political freedom is bound up with popular sovereignty and assumes a close identification
between citizens and their political community, on the one hand, and among themselves, on
the other (for an example, see Sandel 1996). The second strand, while retaining elements of this
communitarian version of republicanism, draws more on the Enlightenment tradition of repub-
lican thought of Tom Paine and especially Kant. This view has figured within critical theory,
particularly the writings of Jürgen Habermas (1996). It can be associated with Constant’s charac-
terisation of ‘modern liberty’ as combining liberal civil rights with a communitarian republican
view of popular sovereignty to produce a system of constitutional democracy.The key difference
with Constant’s account is that these republican theorists have added social to the liberal civil
rights of ‘private autonomy’ and connect them not to the market but to the political rights of
‘public autonomy’. Rights on this account offer preconditions for citizens to deliberate on a free
and equal basis with each other. The third strand looks to the neo-Roman tradition of repub-
lican thought of Cicero and Machiavelli (Pettit 1997; Skinner 1998). The distinctive feature
of this view is a conception of freedom as non-domination. By contrast to the first two strands
that conceive freedom in terms of collective self-mastery achieved through popular sovereignty, this
view sees freedom in terms of freedom from mastery by another. On this account, political
participation is valued more for its instrumental than its intrinsic virtues. Rather than being the
expression of a sovereign popular will, democracy offers a system of government in which all are
treated as equals and act as rulers and ruled in turn, so no one is regarded as the master of others
or placed in a position to dominate them.
The three strands identified above are to some extent ideal types. Not only are there varia-
tions within each strand but also many thinkers straddle more than one of them. For example,
David Miller’s liberal nationalism has elements of both the first strand, in its emphasis on national

164 DOI: 10.4324/9781003111399-13

 Non-domination and the free state

community and the boundedness of citizenship, and of the second strand, in its commitment to
certain international duties to meet basic human rights, while also criticising certain positions
of thinkers in both these camps – such as Habermas’s support for the EU (Miller 2000).There is
also a common thread running through each of these strands in the emphasis placed on political
citizenship, albeit for somewhat different reasons, as we have seen. For relatedly distinct reasons,
all three also criticise what they regard as central features of contemporary liberalism – notably
an abstract individualism that prioritises property and other market rights, and sees all laws and
government regulation as prima facie inimical to freedom since they involve interference with an
individual’s supposed natural liberty.
In what follows I shall concentrate primarily on the third strand. As I noted, the first two
strands have largely figured as aspects of other schools of thought: namely, communitarianism
and critical theory, respectively. Instead, the third strand forms a distinctive and to some degree
self-contained republican school of thought, albeit with links to certain aspects of the other two
from which some neo-Roman republican theorists have at various times drawn inspiration. In
the rest of this chapter, I will outline the concept of freedom as non-domination on which the
distinctiveness of this strand rests, show how the resulting concept of the ‘free person’ is linked
to an equally distinct account of the political and constitutional arrangements of a ‘free state’,
and finally note the implications of this theory for distributive justice.

Freedom as non-domination
In his famous essay ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ Isaiah Berlin contrasted ‘negative’ with ‘positive’
liberty, characterising the first as ‘freedom from interference’ and the second as ‘freedom to
realise oneself ’ in some way (Berlin 1969). He argued that political participation was only con-
tingently and instrumentally linked to negative liberty, offering one possible means to ensure the
state interfered as little as possible with people’s interests – something that might be even better
achieved by a constitutional court or some other independent body such as an ombudsman.
However, positive liberty allowed for an intrinsic link with participation in both democracy
and the state as the means of realising oneself. Although such ethical naturalist reasoning has a
distinguished pedigree going back, as I noted above, to Aristotle and, in a rather different form,
to Kant, Berlin argued it was potentially ‘totalitarian’ in its implications even when espoused by
avowedly liberal thinkers such as T. H. Green. Not only do such moralised accounts of freedom
suggest that being free consists in pursuing certain possibly contentious ends that realise a per-
son’s ‘true’ self but also they risk suggesting that ‘real’ freedom consists in obedience to a state
that realises such ends. Within democratic theory, notions such as popular sovereignty suggest
a similar conflation of the individual with collective autonomy. As a result, Berlin’s analysis has
tended to discredit republicanism and the link it makes between freedom and politics. Instead,
the view typical of freedom as non-interference has come to prevail, whereby intervention by
the law or the state curtails freedom, albeit in many cases with justification. On this view, demo-
cratic participation necessarily sacrifices a degree of personal freedom that could be devoted
to business or leisure to public service, something that may be far less rewarding for many (if
not all) individuals and hence diminish their freedom over all. Democracy may also allow rent
seeking behaviour by particular individuals that unnecessarily expands the state beyond what is
necessary to reduce interference with individual choice overall.
An important contribution of the rediscovery of the neo-Roman tradition has been to dis-
pute Berlin’s influential account by suggesting a ‘third’ concept of liberty, that while a ‘negative’
theory of freedom as ‘freedom from domination’ nevertheless regards the role of the law and
state as furthering rather than constraining liberty (Pettit 1997; Skinner 1998). This account of

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freedom takes as its antonym the condition of a slave. According to what Berlin regarded as the
standard view of negative liberty as ‘freedom from interference’, slaves remain free so long as
their masters do not interfere with them. From this perspective, the slaves of benevolent and
non-interfering masters are free in fact, even if they lack the status of free persons. Not being free
persons may make their freedom less secure – if their master died they could be sold to a cruel
owner, say, or he may undergo a personality change that turns him into a brute – but so long as
their master remains alive and benevolent they may possess as wide a sphere of liberty as many
a citizen, possibly even wider than some. Quentin Skinner has noted how this division between
‘liberty’ and ‘security’ was introduced by Hobbes and then re-proposed by Bentham in criticism
of the neo-Roman republican view that then prevailed and which made no such distinction. For
the republican account holds a slave is dominated and his or her freedom curtailed not only by
the interference of his or her master but also by that master’s ability to invigilate and inhibit the
slave’s actions in arbitrary ways – that is, in ways that reflect the master’s not the slave’s interests
or preferences and that the master can impose on the slave willfully and without consultation.
The neo-Roman concept of liberty highlights three dimensions missing from the standard
account of liberty as non-interference. First, even when not actually interfered with, the fact
that the slave is invigilated by someone who could interfere if they chose may be just as effec-
tive in leading him or her not to act in ways that he or she believes might lead to interference.
Second, even with a good master, slaves may be inhibited from performing actions or expressing
views they know their master would disapprove of. They might even choose to do or say things
they know will please him or her despite these actions or opinions going against their own
preferences, interests or beliefs. Third, a key feature of this condition of domination lies in being
subject to the arbitrary rule of the master – that is, the master’s capacity to determine at his or
her own discretion how, when and for what purpose to interfere or not interfere with a slave.To
the extent such a determination rests solely on the will of the master, then it will be dominating
for the slave. The first two dimensions suggest we can have an absence of freedom without any
actual interference, for both invigilation and inhibition place constraints on what agents do and
lead them to actions that they would not otherwise choose to take. The third dimension goes
further and indicates how interference may in some respects actually enhance freedom. For laws
that oblige a system of rule to consult the interests of those it affects will liberate agents from
the domination that attends arbitrary rule. When interference reduces arbitrariness, and hence
domination, it promotes freedom and assists individuals to plan and act in autonomous ways. It
may also facilitate collective choices and projects that are in the public interest and that would
not be feasible without the coordination that common rules can bring.
The three dimensions of freedom highlighted by the non-domination view point to lacunas
in the conception of freedom as non-interference that reveal it as doubly flawed: it overlooks
those circumstances where freedom can be diminished without interference and neglects the
ways interference can promote freedom. These same points also build a quite different case for
linking freedom to political participation to those offered by the two other strands of republican
thinking outlined above. Freedom as non-interference regards liberty as a natural condition –
individuals are freest when free from all constraints in a state of nature.The problem, graphically
described by Hobbes (1996 [1651]) – the progenitor of this account of liberty – is that such
natural freedom is thoroughly insecure, with the naturally free individual’s life ‘nasty, brutish
and short’. Law and the state involve a rational sacrifice of a degree of natural liberty for greater
security. Yet on this account, an absolute monarch secures as good a quality and quantity of
liberty for his subjects as any republic will for its citizens. Indeed, in Hobbes’s view monarchies
rate better than republics given that the latter generally place heavier demands on their members
in terms of civic obligations and commitment to the public good. By contrast, the neo-Roman

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republican can respond by revealing monarchical rule as the epitome of unfreedom, for it insti-
tutionalises domination. Freedom and its absence on the non-domination account is a social
condition. Domination results primarily from three circumstances: a power imbalance, depend-
ency and personal rule, all of which allow for a degree of arbitrariness on the part of rulers. All
three are inherent features of monarchy, which involves hierarchy and ascribed status, with all
members of the kingdom ‘subjects’ of the monarch to serve his pleasure rather than the other
way around. The public welfare only emerges indirectly to the extent that the personal wealth
of the monarch depends on that of his or her kingdom. It is not just that these circumstances
all make interference more likely and so freedom less secure. For interference per se is not what
diminishes freedom on the republican account. Rather, they create domination and hence a loss
of freedom in themselves by allowing the invigilation of the dominated by the monarch and
inducing dominated behaviour, such as sycophancy, without the need for actual interference.
Moreover, they do so because personal rule encapsulates arbitrary power by placing the lives
and livelihood of all subjects of a monarchy at the pleasure of the King or Queen’s majesty. To
be ‘free persons’ individuals must be citizens of a ‘free state’, that is a polity that institutionalises
a form of republican rule that unlike monarchy includes checks against domination. It is to the
requirements of such a free political system that we now turn.

A ‘free state’: how republicanism guards against domination

A ‘free state’ has both an internal and an external dimension. Domestically, it must put in place
institutions that avoid and prevent the development of power imbalances, dependency and per-
sonal rule between citizens. Externally, it must protect against the domination of its citizens –
either individually or collectively – by other states or agencies operating outside the state, such
as multinational or transnational corporations or even international organisations. I shall explore
each in turn.
With regard to the internal, domestic, dimension, Pettit (1997) has tended to emphasise the
‘rule of law’ and constitutional constraints as the most suitable mechanisms for meeting the crite-
ria needed for non-domination, rather than democracy per se – though he has advocated contesta-
tory democracy as a means for allowing citizens to challenge rules and policies that do not track
their interests. The slogan ‘the rule of law, not men’ makes such suggestions appear the natural
means of overcoming ‘personal’ rule, given that even democracy could be regarded as allowing
some persons – be it the political class within a representative system, or a tyrannical majority in
a divided society, to consistently dominate others. Indeed, Pettit has seen ‘counter-majoritarian’
checks and balances, notably the separation of powers, as the natural complements to the ‘rule of
law’ in securing a ‘free state’. However, although the second strand of republicanism has adopted
this tack, albeit not only as a constraint upon but also in more recent versions, such as Habermas
(1996), as the basis for popular sovereignty, I believe it fails to capture the character of the third
strand. For non-domination requires citizens enjoy an equal political status as the makers of laws
and not just an equal legal status under the law. On its own, this latter condition is potentially
itself one of subjecthood and, unless laws can truly rule without persons, potentially places citizens
under the arbitrary rule of those few who administer and interpret the law. Indeed, to avoid just
this possibility this strand has typically adopted a political rather than a legal form of constitution-
alism, which equates a condition of non-domination with the status of citizenship and views the
right to equal participation in ruling or selecting rulers as ‘the right to have rights’ (Bellamy 2007).
Past republicans often expressed the link between non-domination and political equality
using the language of consent (Skinner 2008). Only the need for all to be counted equally in
consenting to the government would ensure that everyone’s interests were taken equally into

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account regardless of their wealth or social station. As Colonel Thomas Rainborough famously
expressed it in the Leveller debates in Putney, the ‘poorest he … has a life to live as the greatest
he; and therefore, … it’s clear that every man that is to live under a government ought first by
his own consent to put himself under that government’. It is a requirement with revolutionary
potential, implying ‘that the poorest man … is not at all bound in a strict sense to that govern-
ment that he has not had a voice to put himself under’. However, if these conditions could only
be met through unanimous consent to all policies, then – as R. P. Wolff (1970) demonstrated – it
is unlikely that any workable system of democracy could satisfy these criteria. It is almost as
implausible to assume that the basic structures of society could receive the actual consent of
all those subject to them. Social contract theories have attempted to overcome these problems
by modelling circumstances that might generate principles of political justice that all ought to
consent to.Yet, such idealisations have a tendency to build their conclusions into their premises
and be subject to numerous objections from those arguing from alternative premises of a similar
plausibility and reasonableness. As such, there is a danger that a constitutional settlement that
matches and is interpreted through the reasoning of a few – no matter how well-intentioned
and knowledgeable they may be – will fail to treat all citizens as equal sources of reasoned argu-
ment and relevant information.
To overcome this difficulty suggests the need for a middle way – one that secures all involved
with an equal weight in the process of decision-making while allowing that not all may be
equally happy with the result. Nevertheless, such equal weighting needs to be more than mere
equality in the process and less than full substantive equality of outcome. As Pettit (2012: 84–86,
177–178) puts it, the process and outcome must satisfy the ‘eyeball’ and ‘tough luck’ tests. To
meet the eyeball test, individuals must have equal status in decision-making and have their
basic interests secured in any decision. To meet the tough luck test, any failure to secure one’s
preferred government or policy must neither result from nor produce deliberate discrimina-
tion or injustice but rather reflect the unlikelihood in any collective decision of always getting
your own way. Past republicans sought to meet such criteria by constructing political and legal
systems that aimed ‘to hear the other side’. On this account, decisions should not only be made
impartially and fairly in a purely formal sense but also seek to consult the different interests of
those concerned so that the resulting decisions do not oppress them. Historically republicans
have advocated a number of devices to achieve this end.The choice of rulers by lot, for example,
institutionalised ‘tough luck’ to meet the ‘eyeball’ test by giving all citizens an equal chance of
power and an incentive to use it fairly and for the general interest rather than their own or that
of their friends, given that they could not know or influence who would rule after them. By
contrast, the doctrine of mixed government institutionalises the ‘eyeball’ test to achieve a bal-
ance of power between the different classes within society in ways that purport to minimise the
prospects of even tough luck. According to this doctrine, the monarch, aristocracy and people
could only rule with the assent of the others – a view that continues to find a formal expres-
sion within the English constitutional formula of ‘the queen in Parliament’. Unlike the first two
strands of republicanism, the third strand does not propose these democratic mechanisms on the
assumption that there is a single sovereign popular will. Rather, they assume the demos to be
fragmented into multiple demoi with different and often conflicting ideals and interests. The
aim is not achieve a consensus so much as an equitable accommodation between them. Nor do
they see participation as a means to individual or collective self-realisation or even self-mastery.
Instead, they are means to avoid mastery or domination by others.
The traditional republican devices also differ from the standard liberal view of constitutional
government (Bellamy 1996, 2007). They regard constitutionalism not as the subjection of the
normal process of legislation to a supposedly ‘higher’ law protected by a separate judicial body,

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immune to popular control, but as resulting from the involvement of the public in a set of politi-
cal institutions that ensure the process of law-making and adjudication gives equal considera-
tion to their views. This form of republican constitution rejects the view that a constitution can
offer a resource of substantive political principles in the form of constitutional rights that might
provide a set of public reasons to be applied by a court or the government to solve all ques-
tions touching issues of political justice. Law cannot rule in this way because within a pluralist
society reasonable disagreements exist as to the nature of rights, how they relate to other values
and considerations, and the ways they might be implemented in a given case. For example, it
may be uncontentious that women have a right not to be raped but there are many contentious
issues surrounding how best to secure this right so that an appropriate balance is met between
protecting the interests of women wishing to bring accusations of rape forward and ensuring
defendants get a fair hearing. So, rather than being a repository of acceptable public reasons, a
republican constitution serves to ensure all the relevant reasons the public might wish to raise
when deciding such questions get aired when framing legislation and policy.
The rules and procedures a republican constitution requires to pass a law or place a policy
issue on the agenda attempt to promote conscientious, coherent and considered decision-making.
They create feedback mechanisms that render rulers responsive and accountable to the ruled,
thereby giving governments incentives to treat citizens with equal concern and respect, pay
attention to their interests and correct harmful mistakes and policy failures. On this model,
public reasoning involves paying attention to the reasons of the public rather than being ruled
by a set of supposedly authoritative public reasons. The republican constitutional constraint
that prevents arbitrary rule comes from so balancing the input of citizens that they, and hence
those who govern them, are obliged to consult each other’s positions. Such a political consti-
tutionalism has the removal of power imbalances, dependency and personal rule at its heart. By
equalising power, each citizen is treated as an independent source of reasoning and information
who must be consulted in the decision-making process, while none can rule without the active
collaboration of others.
In contemporary democracies, a system of equal votes, majority rule and competing parties
can be seen as offering an updated form of the republican system of mixed government (Bel-
lamy 1996, 2007, 2008). One person, one vote and majority rule equalise power in decision-
making and aggregate people’s preferences in a fair way that is anonymous, neutral and positively
responsive. That is, people’s votes count equally whoever they are and whatever their views
may be, and a change in balance of opinion is directly reflected in the outcome. Meanwhile,
party competition plays a key role in the production of balanced decisions. To win elections,
rival parties have to bring together broad coalitions of opinions and interests within a general
programme of government. Even under PR systems, where incentives may exist for parties to
appeal to fairly narrow constituencies, they need to render their programmes compatible with
potential coalition partners to have a chance of entering government. In each of these cases,
majorities are built through the search for mutually acceptable compromises that attempt to
accommodate a number of different views within a single complex position.
Such compromises are sometimes criticised as unprincipled and incoherent, encouraging
‘pork barrel politics’ in which voters get bought off according to their ability to influence the
outcome rather than the merits of their case. Despite a system of free and equal votes, some
votes can count for more than others if they bring campaigning resources, are ‘deciding’ votes,
or can ease the implementation of a given policy. However, within pluralist societies, different
political resources tend to be distributed around different sections of the community, while their
relative importance and who holds them differs according to the policy. Democratic societies are
also invariably characterised by at least some cross-cutting cleavages that bind different groups

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together on different issues. Of course, in ethnically, religiously or culturally divided societies the
divisions on certain matters may be such as to make compromise agreements difficult to impos-
sible, so that majority tyranny on the part of the largest group becomes a genuine worry.Yet in
some cases at least it has been possible to use a mixture of executive power sharing, federalism
and special rights to secure either a threshold or proportionate voice for all groups in decision-
making that is sufficient to ensure their differences are respected.
In circumstances of reasonable disagreement, such compromises recognise the rights of
others to have their views treated with equal concern as well as respect. They legitimately
reflect the balance of opinion within society (Bellamy 1999). Naturally, some groups may still
feel excluded or dissatisfied, while the balance between them can alter as interests and ide-
als evolve with social change. The counterbalances of party competition come in here. The
presence of permanent opposition and regular electoral contests means that governments will
need to respond to policy failures and alterations in the public mood brought about by new
developments. Legislative programmes are remarkably close to the manifesto commitments
that parties develop to win elections. Yet, in anticipating future elections and in tackling
unforeseen issues – including certain unanticipated perverse consequences of their own
policies – party programmes do evolve.
This willingness of parties to alter their policies is often seen as evidence of their unprinci-
pled nature and the basically self-interested motives of politicians and citizens alike. However,
this picture of parties cynically changing their spots to court short-term popularity is belied by
the reality. Leap-frogging is remarkably rare, not least because they and their core support retain
certain key ideological commitments to which changes in policy have to be adapted. Neverthe-
less, that parties see themselves as holding distinctive rather than diametrically opposed views
renders competition effective, producing convergence on the median voter, which is generally
the Condorcet winner – that is, the proposal that best reflects the preference ordering of citizens
overall. It also provides protection for minorities. Because an electoral majority is built from
minorities and is prone to cycling coalitions, a ruling group will do well not to rely on a minimal
winning coalition and to exclude other groups completely – thereby reducing the possibility of
such cycles. In this respect, majority rule protects minorities. Either a currently excluded minor-
ity has a good chance of being part of a future winning coalition, or – for that very reason – is
likely not be entirely excluded by any winning coalition keen to retain its long-term power.
Of course, one cannot deny either that all democratic systems often fail to be as responsive
and as accountable as one might like, or that minorities or individuals sometimes are dominated
by policies supported by the majority. However, all real systems are flawed. That does not mean
we should accept these flaws and not seek to remedy them, merely that the failings of such
systems should not lead to their being regarded as irremediable. In this respect, the third strand
of republicanism offers a distinctive way for thinking about such institutional reforms – namely,
that they should avoid domination by enhancing political equality in ways that lead citizens and
their elected representatives to ‘hear the other side’. Doing so not only serves political justice by
guiding policy towards a conception of the public good that has equity at its core but also has
certain cognitive advantages of forcing policy-making to be more scrupulous and self-critical
with regard to its likely costs and benefits over all.
Turning to the external dimension, the governance of relations between ‘free states’ follows
the same rationale guiding the design of their domestic arrangements (Bell 2010; Bellamy 2019).
Neo-Roman republicans have generally been wary of schemes for global or cosmopolitan
democracy. The reasons are twofold. First, they worry that a concentration of power within a
single institution would raise the risks of domination. Even with the best will in the world, it
might be exceptionally difficult to frame collective policies that are responsive to the diversity

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of cultures and interests of the global population. Second, within states, the citizens’ lives are
sufficiently interconnected for them to have a more or less equal stake in the decisions. Though
globalisation has enhanced interconnectedness beyond the state, and many decisions within
states affect the lives of citizens outside their borders, globalisation has as yet to produce condi-
tions whereby all are affected to any degree as equally by common decisions on a global scale as
they are within states. As a result, there is a greater danger of majority tyranny and the oppres-
sion or neglect of minorities within a globalised democracy than within a national democracy.
To counter these two dangers, republicans have traditionally advocated a balance of power
between states (Skinner 2010). The aim is to prevent any one state becoming hegemonic. By
and large the most successful international organisations and agreements have been those that
seek to guard against the negative externalities one state’s domestic policies may have on other
states and to help it recoup some of the costs of its providing positive externalities. They have
also attempted to offer incentives for all states to become ‘free states’ on the grounds that such
states are less likely to seek to dominate others. As with the domestic arrangements for avoiding
non-domination, an advantage of the neo-republican programme is its political realism. The
pursuit of political justice goes hand in hand with attentiveness to the need to equalise power
and accommodate difference.The EU is probably the most successful set of arrangements in this
regard (Bellamy 2019). On the one hand, free trade policies have been aimed at promoting the
common prosperity of the member states, on the other hand, the incentives to democratise have
been focussed on securing peace and successfully helped sustain the transition from authoritar-
ian rule that has characterised the majority of its current members. Its governance has been
based on deep intergovernmental checks and balances that are designed to secure mutually
advantageous agreements in areas where inter-state cooperation proves necessary or desirable.

Non-domination and social justice

Republicanism is sometimes charged with having little to say about distributive justice, being
exclusively concerned with political justice. However, the republican approach sees the two as
intimately related. For grave social and economic disparities can be dominating and may require
interventions to tackle them that a liberal approach would find illegitimate. In this respect,
republicanism has a natural affinity to measures that promote social and economic as well as
political equality.
From the point of view of the classical liberal, a free market will allow huge disparities in
wealth and income that arise from the free choices of individuals. Any redistribution of wealth
tends to be treated as an interference with these free choices and as such a constraint upon
individual liberty. As a result, a presumption exists against redistribution (and, indeed, all regula-
tion) so long as it cannot be shown that it effectively reduces interference overall – an extremely
difficult point to illustrate.
Some republicans also support free markets but offer somewhat different reasons for doing
so. They argue that freedom of contract reduces the opportunities for domination by reducing
the prospect of an individual needing to serve any particular master (Pettit 2006: 142). Moreover,
regulations to ensure its effective running, such as rules against monopolies, are not ‘interfer-
ences’ with natural liberty, but consistent with producing freedom from domination. However,
other republicans point to forms of structural domination that render free markets in capitalist
societies inherently dominating. They also note how such concerns were present in both Marx
and ‘labour republicans’ of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, who argued that
the structures of property ownership render workers the ‘wage slaves’ of some master, even if
not necessarily of any one master in particular. Echoing this radical republican tradition, these

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theorists advocate forms of workers’ democracy and cooperative ownership to overcome this
problem (Gourevitch 2015; O’Shea 2020).
Pettit has been reluctant to concede the existence of forms of structural domination in which
no agent can be assigned responsibility for actively dominating another. However, it can be
argued that the market interactions among citizens produce a shared responsibility for sustaining
such structures, even if no one individual can be held personally responsible for their creation.
In consequence, citizens have a shared duty to reshape systems of property ownership so as to
remove the possibility of domination.
Pettit (2012: 91) does grant that the eye ball test means the republican will regard the poor
and ill-educated as vulnerable to domination by others. Poverty, illiteracy and ignorance reduce
people’s ability to exercise their political rights on equal terms with the wealthy and better
educated, to claim redress for any injustice through the courts and so on. Social and economic
rights that are funded through regular laws by state authorities are not dominating in themselves
and reduce the possibility of the weak being dominated by the strong. Moreover, as a number of
theorists have recently noted (Bell 2010), similar considerations apply to considerations of global
justice. Again, republicans will be sensitive to the ways wealthy states may dominate poorer ones,
forcing them to enter inequitable trade agreements, for example. Likewise, as a matter of consist-
ency, they will seek to ensure the citizens of all states have the capacity to resist domination by
others, with the meeting of basic levels of social and economic protection an important part of
such resilience.

Conclusion
Republicanism offers a distinctive political and social programme deriving from the notion of
freedom as non-domination. In particular, it offers a justification for a more participatory and
egalitarian society – one that is democratic in the widest sense – that escapes the standard criti-
cisms of such policies when they are tied to a theory of ‘positive liberty’. It also offers a way
of integrating social and political theory in that it emphasises how political and social relations
interact, most particularly through its emphasis on power and status.

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