This project includes my book, which you can read about here, and five published papers. The project focuses on different concepts of political freedom, especially republican freedom as non-domination and pure negative, or liberal, freedom.
These two freedom concepts are clearly different. On the pure negative account, you are made unfree whenever another agent interferes with you. On the republican account, on the other hand, interference does not make you unfree as long as you are adequately protected against interference you have not yourself instructed.
Philip Pettit and other republicans argue that people are not made unfree when they are interfered with in a way that promotes their common interests. Pettit understand these common interests to be those interests citizens can avow in public without embarrassment because they are shared by most other citizens. In a modern, pluralistic society, the set of common interests is a small subset of all existing interests. They are the interests in exercising the basic liberties, according to Pettit. On the pure negative account, on the other hand, even the (arguably justifiable) interference to promote these common interests is a source of unfreedom.
Despite this difference between republican and pure negative freedom, which concept we prefer might make no difference when we try to promote freedom. To see why, note first that pure negative freedom theorists distinguish between specific and overall freedom. Specific freedom is the freedom you have to perform any action no one actually prevents you from performing. Overall freedom, on the other hand, is the measurement of the combinations of actions you can perform without anyone’s prevention. Maximizing overall freedom will likely involve imposing restrictions on what people can and cannot do to enable cooperation that enhances their sets of combinations of conjunctively exercisable actions.
The question I attempt to answer is whether promoting republican freedom is to also promote overall pure negative freedom.
My answer takes the form of a dilemma—what I call ‘the republican dilemma’. Republicans may follow Pettit’s and take freedom to require the promotion of people’s capacity to exercise their basic liberties. This is a compelling ideal, as it goes well with the pluralism characterizing modern society. However, promoting the basic liberties is also a plausible way of promoting overall pure negative freedom, since these liberties are the root to many combinations of conjunctively exercisable actions, or freedoms.
To avoid this result, and to distance themselves from the promotion of pure negative freedom, republicans must take the other horn of the dilemma: they must make it compatible with a wider range of interference for the sake of making citizens more virtuous and committed to a distinctly republican way of life. They must be devoted to monitoring political power-holders to make sure they serve the common good, and they must keep an eye on each other to make sure everyone is vigilant. This ideal, then, is unsuited for a modern society charcterized by citizens pursuing a plurality of conceptions of the good.
More succinctly, the republican dilemma is the following: We can make republican freedom compatible with pluralism, but then it promotes pure negative freedom. Alternatively, republican freedom can be distinct from the promotion of pure negative freedom, but then it undermines pluralism and is an unattractive ideal for a modern society.
These are my published papers on freedom and republicanism so far:
2024. Freedom and Its Unavoidable Trade-Off. Analytic Philosophy. Published online.
2023. Republican Freedom and Liberal Neutrality. Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 26(2): 325–348.
2023. Republicanism and Moralised Freedom. Politics, Philosophy & Economics 22(4): 423–440.
2023. Republicanism as Critique of Liberalism. Southern Journal of Philosophy 61(2): 308–324.
2022. Eliminating Terms of Confusion: Resolving the Liberal–Republican Dispute. Journal of Ethics 26(2): 247–271.
I made the first steps in my project on freedom in my PhD dissertation at the Australian National University. The Australian Political Studies Association considered my dissertation the best PhD dissertation in political science submitted at an Australian university in 2020:
