Just Freedom: A Moral Compass for a Complex World

by Philip Pettit

An esteemed philosopher offers a vision for the central role of one of our most cherished―and controversial―ideas. In this rigorous distillation of his political philosophy, Philip Pettit, author of the landmark work Republicanism , champions a simple standard for our most complex political judgments, offering a challenging ideal that nevertheless holds out a real prospect for social and democratic progress. Whereas many thinkers define freedom as the absence of interference―we are left alone to do as we please―Pettit demands that in their basic life choices free persons should not even be subject to a power of interference on the part of others. This notion of freedom as non-domination offers a yardstick for gauging social and democratic progress and provides a simple, unifying standard for analyzing our most entangled political quandaries. Pettit reaffirms the ideal, already present in the Roman Republic, of a free citizenry who enjoy equal status with one another, being individually protected by a law that they together control. After sketching a fresh history of freedom, he turns to the implications of the ideal for social, democratic, and international justice. Should the state erect systems for delivering mandatory healthcare coverage to its citizens? Should voting be a citizen’s only means of influencing political leaders? Are the demands of the United Nations to be heeded when they betray the sovereignty of the state? Pettit shows how these and other questions should be resolved within a civic republican perspective. Concise and elegant in its rhetoric and ultimately radical in its reimagining of our social arrangements, Just Freedom is neither a theoretical treatise nor a practical manifesto, but rather an ardent attempt to elaborate the demands of freedom and justice in our time.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Nonfiction, Political Science

288 pages, Hardcover

First published March 10, 2014

About the author

Philip Noel Pettit (born 1945) is an Irish philosopher and political theorist. He is Laurence Rockefeller University Professor of Politics and Human Values at Princeton University and also Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University. He was a Guggenheim Fellow.

He was educated at Garbally College, the National University of Ireland, Maynooth (BA, LPh, MA) and Queen's University, Belfast (PhD). He was a lecturer at University College, Dublin, a Research Fellow at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and professor at the University of Bradford. He was for many years Professorial Fellow in Social and Political Theory at the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. He is the recipient of numerous honours, including an honorary doctorate from the National University of Ireland. He was keynote speaker at Graduate Conference, University of Toronto.

Pettit defends a version of civic republicanism in political philosophy. His book Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government provided the underlying justification for political reforms in Spain under José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. Pettit detailed his relationship with Zapatero in his A Political Philosophy in Public Life: Civic Republicanism in Zapatero's Spain, co-authored with José Luis Martí.

Pettit holds that the lessons learned when thinking about problems in one area of philosophy often constitute ready-made solutions to problems faced in completely different areas. Views he defends in philosophy of mind give rise to the solutions he offers to problems in metaphysics about the nature of free will, and to problems in the philosophy of the social sciences, and these in turn give rise to the solutions he provides to problems in moral philosophy and political philosophy. His corpus as a whole was the subject of a series of critical essays published in Common Minds: Themes from the Philosophy of Philip Pettit (Oxford University Press, 2007).

Reviews

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very clear and reasonably engaging description of Pettit's "neo-Roman" republicanism - it starts well, using Nora from Ibsen's "A Doll's House" to illustrate the problems with the common liberal definition of freedom as non-interference as opposed to the republican conception of freedom as non-domination (Nora's husband doesn't interfere with her freedom, but he could if he wanted to, so she is still constrained). It gets bogged down towards the end with increasingly implausible descriptions of how the world could be changed to bring it into line with republicanism of this type. A common problem with political philosophy - start with some concepts which may well be interesting and thought-provoking, and end up with pointless speculation about how the details of real-world institutions would be changed in a world where those concepts were widely accepted and applied. Pettit changed my political views (I wrote an MA dissertation trying to show that his views aren't as distinct from liberalism as he thinks), and this is probably the best explanation of his theories, but I think he grossly underestimates the difficulty of getting large states to stop dominating smaller states.

[Fernando Hoces de la Guardia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Freedom as non-domination is a compelling concept. I struggle with the more detailed explanations as it was hard to put examples in my mind to the abstractions described in the text. The same author expects the reader to go over the text several times, I am undecided if I will return for a second one.

[Hanna O'Connor]

En intressant introduktion till Republikanism, välskriven och lätt att följa! Även om den formen av republikanism som Pettit förespråkar inte är så radikal som en kanske skulle önska så är ändå många av grundargumenten mycket spännande.