Primarily due to the works of Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit, the classical doctrine of republ... more Primarily due to the works of Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit, the classical doctrine of republicanism has been resurrected in modern political theory. However despite the great and growing attention paid to it by numerous commentators, republican freedom remains an underdeveloped school of thought. It consequently is yet to answer many of the questions and challenges that have been presented by critics. One of the most effective and interesting critiques of republican freedom is offered by Christian List. List argues that republicans have to overcome an obstacle he describes as the ‘republican paradox’. List suggests that an individual’s freedom is a delicate balance between its scope, or its size, and its robustness, or its permanence. He suggests that if republicans are to attach primary importance to the robustness of freedom rather than its scope, then maximising the former might leave very little room for the latter. This paper aims to respond to List’s challenge by overcoming the very trade-off that List envisions. It will argue that depicting freedom as a trade-off between scope and robustness is a misrepresentation. This argument is founded upon another important feature of republican thought, this being deliberation. Whilst freedom’s robustness is determined by the rule-of-law, its scope is negotiated through a process of deliberation in which individuals demark the spheres of life that public authorities cannot interfere with. This study suggests that as long as effective individual agency is preserved in public discourse, a consequence will be a reasonable scope of freedom, and this would hold true in a world of robust non-domination. This essay will also argue that the best way to protect this agency is to supplement republican deliberation with John Rawls’ theory of Political Liberalism. This thesis therefore contends that freedom that has been made robust through the rule-of-law can retain adequate scope through public discourse that is supplemented by political liberalism, which safeguards the fairness of public decisions within deliberative democracies.
Primarily due to the works of Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit, the classical doctrine of republ... more Primarily due to the works of Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit, the classical doctrine of republicanism has been resurrected in modern political theory. However despite the great and growing attention paid to it by numerous commentators, republican freedom remains an underdeveloped school of thought. It consequently is yet to answer many of the questions and challenges that have been presented by critics. One of the most effective and interesting critiques of republican freedom is offered by Christian List. List argues that republicans have to overcome an obstacle he describes as the ‘republican paradox’. List suggests that an individual’s freedom is a delicate balance between its scope, or its size, and its robustness, or its permanence. He suggests that if republicans are to attach primary importance to the robustness of freedom rather than its scope, then maximising the former might leave very little room for the latter. This paper aims to respond to List’s challenge by overcoming the very trade-off that List envisions. It will argue that depicting freedom as a trade-off between scope and robustness is a misrepresentation. This argument is founded upon another important feature of republican thought, this being deliberation. Whilst freedom’s robustness is determined by the rule-of-law, its scope is negotiated through a process of deliberation in which individuals demark the spheres of life that public authorities cannot interfere with. This study suggests that as long as effective individual agency is preserved in public discourse, a consequence will be a reasonable scope of freedom, and this would hold true in a world of robust non-domination. This essay will also argue that the best way to protect this agency is to supplement republican deliberation with John Rawls’ theory of Political Liberalism. This thesis therefore contends that freedom that has been made robust through the rule-of-law can retain adequate scope through public discourse that is supplemented by political liberalism, which safeguards the fairness of public decisions within deliberative democracies.
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Papers by Charlie Haines