Freedom Recognition And Non Domination

This book offers an original account of a distinctly republican theory of social and global justice. The book starts by exploring the nature and value of Hegelian recognition theory. It shows the importance of that theory for grounding a normative account of free and autonomous agency. It is this normative account of free agency which provides the groundwork for a republican conception of social and global justice, based on the core-ideas of freedom as non-domination and autonomy as non-alienation. As the author argues, republicans should endorse a sufficientarian account of social justice, which focuses on the nature of social relationships and their effects on people's ability to act freely and realize their fundamental interests. On the global level, the book argues for the cosmopolitan extension of the republican principles of non-domination and non-alienation within a multi-level democratic system. In so doing, the book addresses a major gap in the existing literature, presenting an original theory of justice, which combines Hegelian recognition theory and republican ideas of freedom, and applying this hybrid theory to the global domain.

Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in republican political theory and, in particular, the republican conception of freedom as non-domination developed by Philip Pettit. This collection of essays offers one of the first sustained explorations of the notion of freedom as non-domination and its application in a range of fields, from democratic legitimacy, civic education, and workplace democracy to related debates on the nature of social equality, social freedom, and recognition, with Philip Pettit contributing a sophisticated account of the interrelations between freedom as non-domination and other dimensions of freedom. With republican political theory undergoing an unprecedented renaissance within contemporary political theory, this collection makes a significant contribution to current debates about the extension and further development of the ideal of republican freedom. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.

Domination consists in subjection to the will of others and manifests itself both as a personal relation and a structural phenomenon serving as the context for relations of power. Domination has again become a central political concern through the revival of the republican tradition of political thought (not to be confused with the US political party). However, normative debates about domination have mostly remained limited to the context of domestic politics. Also, the republican debate has not taken into account alternative ways of conceptualizing domination. Critical theorists, liberals, feminists, critical race theorists, and postcolonial writers have discussed domination in different ways, focusing on such problems as imperialism, racism, and the subjection of indigenous peoples. This volume extends debates about domination to the global level and considers how other streams in political theory and nearby disciplines enrich, expand upon, and critique the republican tradition’s contributions to the debate. This volume brings together, for the first time, mostly original pieces on domination and global political justice by some of this generation’s most prominent scholars, including Philip Pettit, James Bohman, Rainer Forst, Amy Allen, John McCormick, Thomas McCarthy, Charles Mills, Duncan Ivison, John Maynor, Terry Macdonald, Stefan Gosepath, and Hauke Brunkhorst.

The politics of multiculturalism faces challenges in Western democratic states. Arguing that this setback is based on the notion of culture as separate and distinct, this book explores how to face current challenges to multiculturalism without reifying culture, group and identity.

What does it mean to be free? We invoke the word frequently, yet the freedom of countless Americans is compromised by social inequalities that systematically undercut what they are able to do and to become. If we are to remedy these failures of freedom, we must move beyond the common assumption, prevalent in political theory and American public life, that individual agency is best conceived as a kind of personal sovereignty, or as self-determination or control over one’s actions. In Freedom Beyond Sovereignty, Sharon R. Krause shows that individual agency is best conceived as a non-sovereign experience because our ability to act and affect the world depends on how other people interpret and respond to what we do. The intersubjective character of agency makes it vulnerable to the effects of social inequality, but it is never in a strict sense socially determined. The agency of the oppressed sometimes surprises us with its vitality. Only by understanding the deep dynamics of agency as simultaneously non-sovereign and robust can we remediate the failed freedom of those on the losing end of persistent inequalities and grasp the scope of our own responsibility for social change. Freedom Beyond Sovereignty brings the experiences of the oppressed to the center of political theory and the study of freedom. It fundamentally reconstructs liberal individualism and enables us to see human action, personal responsibility, and the meaning of liberty in a totally new light.

Both classical and modern accounts of justice largely overlook the question of how the communities within which justice applies are constituted in the first place. This book addresses that problem, arguing that we need to accord a place to the theory of 'constitutive justice' alongside traditional categories of distributive and commutative justice.

This study of property-owning democracy argues that a society in which capital is universally accessible to all citizens uniquely meets the demands of justice. It defends a renovated form of capitalism in which the free market is no longer a threat to social democratic values, but is potentially convergent with them.

In Deliberative Freedom, Christian F. Rostbøll accepts the common belief that democracy and freedom are intimately related, but he sees this relationship in a new and challenging way. Rostbøll argues that deliberative democracy is normatively committed to multiple dimensions of freedom, and that this, in turn, makes it a distinct model of democracy. He presents a new version of deliberative democracy that rejects the prevailing synthesis of Habermasian critical theory and Rawlsian political liberalism, and contends that this synthesis obscures and neglects important concerns in terms of freedom and emancipation. In addition, Rostbøll explores how the many dimensions of freedom supply a new and fruitful way to address issues such as paternalism, elitism, rationalism, and neutrality.