Republicanism Domination

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Reconstructing Republican Freedom: A Critique of the

Neo-Republican Concept of Freedom as Non-Domination

by

Michael J. Thompson

Dept. Political ScienceRaubinger Hall

William Paterson University300 Pompton RoadWayne, NJ 07470

[email protected]

This paper is forthcoming in the journal Philosophy and Social Criticism. Please do not quote without permission.



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Abstract: This paper presents a critique of Philip Pettit’s concept of “freedom as non-domination” and provides an alternative theory of both domination and republican political

freedom. I argue that Pettit’s neo-republican concept of domination is insufficient to confrontmodern forms of domination and that this hampers his concept of republican freedom and its

political relevance under the conditions of modernity. Whereas the neo-republican account of

domination is defined by “arbitrary interference,” modern forms of domination, I argue, arecharacterized by routionzation and systemic forms of control and subordination. In the end, the

neo-republican account of domination is more appropriate for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century social institutions rather than those that persist under modernity. In its place, I propose a

more dynamic concept of domination and rework the concept of freedom in order to place therepublican tradition within the context of modernity itself. I argue that the core insight of republicanism is its emphasis on the arrangement and reformation of social institutions to

enhance social freedom. From this, I argue that republicanism can take its place as a moreattractive alternative to liberal theory.

Keywords: Republicanism, domination, authority, freedom, liberalism,

I. Introduction

The emergence of republicanism as a coherent alternative to liberalism and

communitarianism as well as socialism has been seen as an important shift in contemporary

political theory. This theoretical turn has sought to revisit the republican tradition in order to

enhance the character of modern democracy. Arguing that liberal theory’s conceptualization of

freedom as “non- interference” is limited, these theorists have been interested in the more robust

notion of political freedom put forth by the republican tradition. Perhaps one of the most

important theorists of this neo-republican turn has been Philip Pettit whose concept of

republicanism has centered around the normative ideal of “freedom as non-domination,”

something he and others see as the core ethical-political commitment of the republican tradition.

My intention in this paper is not to oppose the on-going project of reconstructing republican

theory, but to go beyond what I see to be the limitations of the neo-Roman variant of this theory.

I want to revive what I see to be a deeper, more compelling insight implicit within the republican



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tradition: that the ways social institutions are arranged seriously shapes the nature of individual

agents and, as a result, the nature of freedom. Republicans placed emphasis on the ways in

which the relations between individuals were rooted in the ways power was organized within

society as a whole. Rather than being the central concern of the republican tradition, I argue that

domination should be seen as the expression of oligarchical (and even tyrannical) concentrations

of power within society as a whole, as pathological results of a badly arranged society. The key

to a republican conception of freedom lies in the architecture, the arrangement of social

institutions. To be free in the republican sense is not only to be free from the domination of

others, although it is a central concern of republican thought. Rather, the emphasis of republican

thought is in the ways in which the freedom of individual agents is rooted in the structure of

social power as a whole: in ensuring that society is arranged in such a way as to orient social

power not only negatively, but positively as well.

In an era when rational choice, methodological individualism, and ethical subjectivism

have become hegemonic in political theory and the social sciences, I see it as crucial to

resuscitate the way that republican political theory places emphasis on the civic nature of citizens

and seeks to shape individuals toward organized forms of self-government. The essence of

republican freedom is found in this insight: in the relational nature of human beings and the

centrality of politics and civic life to the security of their public and private liberties. I want to

suggest that republican theory sees domination not as arbitrary interference (the basic concept

that lies at the heart of the neo-republican conception of freedom as non-domination) but rather

as the result of the ways in which social power is distributed and legitimated among subjects.

Republicans should see domination as the expression of perversions or corruptions of common

power, where the concept of the common, public good is the regulative ideal to know when





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another agent, it is, under conditions of modernity, the shaping of the wills of others in such a

way that any kind of unequal society is legitimated. Domination exists in multiple forms, but I

would like to suggest that in modern societies, it takes a form that neo-republican thinkers do not

capture. In this sense, domination needs to be seen as a broader reality than theorized by Pettit

and other neo-republicans in that domination. Relations of domination cannot be theorized apart

from the institutional architecture in which they are embedded. Freedom therefore shifts its

emphasis from domination alone to the more comprehensive concern of the arrangement of

social institutions and their ability to provide for common, public ends. It is not only about

defending against domination, it is also, and perhaps more importantly, about providing the

context for the development of the members of the political community.

This domination is usually not perceived or known by those involved, but it nevertheless

has corrupting force on the nature of public life, of republican politics, on the ability of

individuals and groups to possess political control over the institutions which govern their lives.

The result of this corruption is that individuals can be so constituted by the institutions and

culture to accept, tolerate, see as legitimate, and even value a condition of domination.

Domination is therefore a question not simply of interference, but of the constitution of

individuals. In this sense, domination in the modern world consists more in routinized, rational

form than in arbitrary form—it is a feature of certain modern institutions, as I will show. It is

essential to push beyond the “thin” interpretation of domination Pettit lays out which places more

emphasis on a concept of rational agency, and the “thick” interpretation that I will lay out

absorbing insights from Weber and the Marxian tradition which see the essence of the problem

of domination as the expression of institutional arrangements. In the end, I reconstruct the

republican notion of freedom as a concept where one’s acts, deeds, choices, and so on are not



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oriented toward the unequal benefit of others, but toward mutual, or reciprocal benefit. In my

view, republican theory is strongest not when talking about master-slave relationships (as

important as that may be from an historical vantage point) but rather in its emphasis on the ways

that concentrations of minority interests and social power have corrupting influence on the

political fabric of any society. Domination is the expression of these imbalances of social and

political power, not the cause of them. I want to draw attention back to this insight in republican

political theory and move beyond the neo-republican emphasis on interpersonal relations of

domination toward a more comprehensive republicanism: one that brings us to the core of

republican thought, the mitigation of organized, concentrations of social power.

Although Pettit has made an important contribution to the development of the republican

concept of freedom, I will argue that the concept of domination that he develops—and the notion

of freedom which follows from it—is insufficient and misses a larger, more developed concept

of both domination and freedom which the republican tradition can potentially bring forth. It is

inadequate because it is constructed far too narrowly and misses the more complex ways in

which domination operates through modern social institutions and its effects upon individuals. I

think this encompasses the Pettit’s concern seems to me to be too closely linked to the liberal

concern of negative liberty and the need to constrain arbitrary power, a concept of domination

which seems most useful when seen in relation to monarchical and feudal forms of political

power and does not take us very far when confronting modern forms of social power and

domination. In the end, I think that Pettit’s theory of domination is concerned with the same

thing that liberals have always been concerned with, especially modern liberals: with the

problem of constraining the arbitrary exercise of power, of the dependency of one person’s will

on that of another. As a result, I do not see the basic structure of Pettit’s theory as going far



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enough to place republicanism as an alternative to liberal theory nor as an appropriate anchor for

a new concept of political freedom.2 Instead, Pettit’s idea of domination is drawn from the

historical expressions of the republican tradition—and the concerns of those writers are different,

in many respects, than those of modern societies.3

II. Pettit’s Account of Domination and its Limitations

Pettit puts forth the thesis that the republican tradition privileges a conception of freedom

as “non-domination.” Central to this idea is the notion that non-domination is a more superior

type of freedom than the liberal notion of freedom as non- interference. Interference exists when

an agent is “prevented from obtaining a goal by human beings”;4 it is the purposeful blocking of

one’s life choices and any possible options an agent might have open for acting. Interference is

an actual activity, an intervention of one agent into the course of actions or the choices of

another. Pettit sees this as a limited way of thinking about political freedom. To be free from an

agent actively interfering with you is not enough to obtain freedom since that same individual

may in fact possess the capacity to interfere at any time; even when actual interference is not

present, the mere possibility of that interference is itself inimical to human freedom. In this

sense, the possibility of interference is itself an element in the diminution of human freedom.

The master who decides to rule his slaves with benevolence still has the power to interfere at any

moment, at his discretion, in the lives of his subjects. It is therefore dependent on the master’s

will, his arbitrium, that power rests. This Pettit sees as the crucial insight of the republican

tradition: to guard against such forms of arbitrary interference. From this he derives his

understanding of domination: the ability of an agent to interfere with another at his will, on an



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arbitrary basis, without taking any kind of consideration as to the effects of that interference.

The constraint of that power is what Pettit refers to as “freedom as non-domination.”

For Pettit, domination occurs when an agent can interfere with another on an arbitrary

basis, or “can interfere, in particular, on the basis of an interest or an opinion that need not be

shared by the person affected.”5 In this sense, a relationship is dominating when one agent

possesses the power to interfere on an arbitrary basis with another’s choices. The emphasis on

the arbitrary nature of interference is important for Pettit since interference on its own is not

inherently a moral or political wrong. Instead, the nature of arbitrariness is where the

dominating agent does not have any concern for the interests of the agent being dominated: “I

think that someone has an arbitrary power of interference in the affairs of another so far as they

have a power of interference that is not forced to track the avowed or readily avowable interests

of the other: they can interfere according to their own arbitrium or decision.”6

To formalize this concept, Pettit lays out three basic conditions for a dominating

relationship. An agent has domination over another when that agent:

1. has the capacity to interfere

2. on an arbitrary basis

3. in certain choices that the other is in a position to make.

Several further points are made to systematize this notion of domination. First, Pettit is clear that

it must be an agent—an individual or a corporate group—which performs this dominating role, it

cannot be a process or a system which is dominating.7 Second, he also explains that any act of

domination purposely tries to lessen the realm of choices of the dominated agent—it consciously

reduces the realm of freedom of the dominated agent.8 At the conceptual core of this theory of

domination is the category of “arbitrariness”: the notion that for one to be dominated, it must be



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at the will of another and that this other, alien power is something that can be exercised at any

time. Even more, Pettit is clear that this concept of domination needs to be seen as a capacity to

interfere—even if a dominating agent never acts upon the power to interfere in the welfare or

choices of another, that other is still under domination living in the shadow of the dominating

agent’s power: “What constitutes domination is the fact that in some respect the power-bearer

has the capacity to interfere arbitrarily, even if they are never going to do so.”9

To what extent does this account of “non-domination” really provide us with a more

robust alternative to the liberal tradition of freedom? I am not convinced that it does. First, I

believe that Pettit’s concept of domination relies on a notion of political and social power which

is more akin to those forms of social and political power characteristic of the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries and the concerns which republicans (and liberals, too) had at that time with

respect to the nature of political authority. 10 By this I mean that the form of domination which

Pettit theorizes is “pre-modern” in the sense that it relies on forms of social relations which were

still caught in monarchical, personal, patriarchal—in short feudal—forms of social domination

and power. These forms of domination characterized the broad sense of unfreedom during the

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and they were the focus of much of the republican struggle

against monarchy and other forms of arbitrary power.11 This form of social power was

characterized by dependency and subordination linked to individuals, to status, and to social

rank.12

This is not to say that such relations do not also persist in modernity, rather that they

cannot be an exhaustive understanding of domination in the modern world. Even more, I think it

misses the idea that In this sense, the category of domination Pettit lays out is defined more by

certain historical concerns which have been largely addressed by the liberal discourse.13 His



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emphasis is on a type of domination which is pre-liberal in nature, in other words, a kind of

servitude which is akin to direct forms of subjugation or “defenseless susceptibility to

interference, rather than actual interference.”14 It is true that modern society still suffers from

social relations of arbitrary power, of the kind of domination that Pettit discusses, but it is

ultimately wrong to assume that this is the prevailing way that domination manifests itself in

modernity where we are confronted with corporatist forms of power, with the corruption of

public institutions, and the basic problem of the legitimacy of those institutions. With his

emphasis on the notion of the arbitrary exercise of power over other individuals, Pettit places an

emphasis on pre-liberal forms of social relations, as did many of the republicans from whom he

garners his theory of non-domination. Although there was clearly a distinction between the ways

that liberal and republicans saw the issue of political society, they were united by the ir

opposition to the problem of constraining the arbitrary exercise of power, particularly by a

monarch. The real issue for eighteenth-century political theorists was the problem of monarchy

and moving toward a society of free institutions which were governed by legal-rational

institutions and formed by the rational consent of the governed rather than forms of political

power which were at the whim of an individual with no checks or accountability to that power.

This brings me to the next issue with Pettit’s theory of domination: he is explicit that

domination has to be the act of one agent upon another. “While a dominating party will always

be an agent—it cannot just be a system or network or whatever—it may be a personal or

corporate or collective agent: this, as in the tyranny of the majority, where the domination is

never the function of a single individual’s power.”15 To me, this is a gross misunderstanding not

only of the way that social domination actually operates in modern societies (as I will show in

the next section), but it also misses the point of what makes the republican tradition unique and,



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to be sure, superior to that of liberalism: namely that it is able to see individuals as “embedded”

in certain social processes, habits, or other forms of routinized activities and institutions which

transcend the wills of individual agents. In Pettit’s account, domination has to be a product of an

agent’s will, it has to be arbitrary i.e., it is a function of the express will of one agent to worsen

the condition of another agent. But this need not always be the case. Consider the office worker

who obeys the dictates of a bureaucratic mandate which in turn has negative effects on others; or

consider a woman who is forced to sell herself into prostitution by economic reasons to place

herself at the will of others. These forms of domination and control are not well-captured by

Pettit’s theory of domination because they miss the larger, systemic dimensions of domination

which frame the actions and relations of particular agents. Pettit claims that all participants are

aware when they are being dominated; but this seems false once we consider the routinized ways

that control and subordination are active in modern institutions.

Pettit seems to see all domination of a piece; he believes that domination can be defined

generally, through the concept of arbitrariness. But in so doing, much of what constitutes

modern forms of domination is left out of his analysis. Even more, the real issue which lurks

behind these concerns is that many republican theorists (such as Cicero, Machiavelli, Sydney,

and Rousseau, among others) saw that the agency of individuals was in fact shaped or at least

very strongly influenced by the social institutions within which they were individuated. Unequal

wealth not only makes the poor or less well-off more vulnerable to the power of their masters, it

also begins to change the very culture of a republic. Human agency was therefore contextualized

and could not be seen as the locus for the problems of creating and expanding freedom. Instead,

there was a need to construct institutions which would not only restrain the powerful, but those

which would also shape citizens who possessed the capacities needed for a free, political life.



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Read in this way, domination is not simply a matter of arbitrary interference, it is a matter of the

ways individuals are constituted by the social arrangements around them. From this insight, we

must seek to construct a more general understanding of domination that embraces the different

ways it manifests itself and how this can lead us to a more nuanced understanding of domination

than offered by liberal theory.

III. Toward a General Theory of Domination

If Pettit’s conception of domination is insufficient for the actual way social power

manifests itself in modernity, then we need to reevaluate the concept of domination within this

context. Pettit’s account of domination rests on certain flawed assumptions about the range or

extent of what it means to be subjected to a dominating power and what constitutes a relationship

of domination. It becomes clear that Pettit’s real intention in summoning the concept of non-

domination as central to the republican tradition is that (i) he sees it as being closer to the moral

impulse of the republican tradition as a whole; and (ii) he wants to preserve interference alone

(i.e., by the state) as a concept useful for republican ends. If interference itself were inherently

negative in a moral sense, then it would be morally impermissible for the state to interfere with

the choices of individuals in order to promote public ends. Pettit is able to preserve an

interfering role for the republican state as opposed to the liberal state which, in its classical

formulation at least, forbids any kind of interference as a net loss of the individual’s freedom.

Hence, Pettit is able to extract a positive power by differentiating plain interference from a

dominating, arbitrary interference.16

But domination operates in a much more expanded way within the context of modernity.

To this extent, a modern view of the phenomenon of domination needs to take into account a



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very different set of actions between agents than specified by Pettit. It needs to take into account

the ways in which domination is not simply based on the notion of arbitrary power, but on the

routinization of power relations in everyday life. It must also move away from the notion tan

domination is “arbitrary interference” in the choices of other agents. More to the point, modern

forms of domination operate differently from the historical, feudal forms of domination that

inspired much of the republican thought of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This is

because modern forms of domination become embedded in the systemic operation of social

institutions in a very specific way. Individual agents therefore do not become the primary unit of

analysis, but the logics of social systems. Pettit is clear that domination cannot be performed by

a network or system, but by the arbitrary interference of one agent by another. But interference

in what, exactly? Those that adopt the neo-Roman argument believe that it is the ability “to

change what the latter would otherwise prefer to do.”17 But this obfuscates the nuanced way that

domination occurs, namely because it is not always clear that one might make choices that

deliberately put them in a position of inequality or reduced power with respect to others. This is

a severely limiting condition since much of what can be considered dominating under modernity

is not at all arbitrary, but thoroughly routinized and structured. Furthermore, domination acts in

a more nuanced way under conditions of modernity. Most importantly in the ways it can shape

the values of individuals to legitimate subordination and control. In this sense, Pettit’s

eighteenth-century formulation of domination cannot bear the weight which he places upon it, or

at least which I think ought to be places on it: the kind of domination which occurs from the

shaping of consciousness and action from the arrangement of modern social institutions. In this

respect, I want to propose a richer, more dynamic conception of domination which covers the

different ways in which individuals and groups can be subject to domination in modern society.



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1. Authority and Domination

As a first move toward broadening the concept of social domination, I want to look into

the way that domination can be seen as a relationship of “authority.” As a concept, authority is

distinct from the forms of domination that Pettit specifies. Whereas Pettit sees that domination is

the imposing of the will of one agent on the interests of another and that this will be known by

both agents, modern forms of authority and domination cannot be characterized this way. 18

Although it is true that the real mark of domination is that the dominated agent’s welfare is being

reduced, it is not necessary that this be known by either of the two agents. Authority is a

relationship which encompasses the dominating and dominated agent; it is not simply enacted by

the will of the dominator, but is part of the overall logic or process of the society, institution, or

association, to which the dominator and dominated belong. In this sense, domination is a process

that requires legitimation—both individuals feel that the authority relationship is itself a

legitimate one. On this view, what Pettit misses in his account of domination is that it need not

be arbitrary at all. In his sociological treatment of domination, Weber makes a crucial

distinction between “power” ( Macht ), and “domination” or “authority” ( Herrschaft ).19 Weber

defines “power” as one agent in a social relationship being “in a position to carry out his own

will despite resistance, regardless of the basis on which this probability rests.”20 When this

power is exercised over another on threat of punishment or rests on some other kind of

compulsion, Weber refers to this kind of power as “coercion.”

But Weber contrasts this form of power to that of “domination” or “authority” which is

“the probability that a command with a given specific content will be obeyed by a given group of

persons.”21 It requires that there be a set of habits which allow for a disciplined acceptance of



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commands and the loss of one’s autonomy to the extent that a dominating agent possesses the

capacity to control another. The key element in this conception of domination is therefore one of

the “disciplining” of the accepting agent. Domination is therefore not concerned with the

problem of arbitrariness—something that is contained within the concept of “power”—but rather

with the routinized acceptance and legitimation of unequal power relations. Modernity displays

new, distinct forms of power relations—and in this way, Weber was able to capture a crucial

aspect of domination: its non-arbitrary character. Even more, it means that there is some degree

of obedient acceptance of domination that becomes a routinized, habitual character of modern

society. In this respect, there can be no doubt that there is a discrete difference between forms of

domination which dominate pre-modern society and those which pervade modern institutions.

Domination works itself out through routinized systems based upon the rational legitimacy of

agents—in other words, agents give authority relations legitimacy on a voluntary basis. This is

the key aspect of domination that Pettit misses, and this has, I believe, deep consequences for his

theoretical reconstruction of republican theory.

This second dimension of domination, that of legitimacy and the acquiescence or

obedience to relations of authority, needs to be explored more fully. In this respect, domination

requires not an arbitrary exercise of power as Pettit suggests, but, rather, the opposite: a defined

set of behaviors which are ingrained within the agent through a process of “routinization”

(Veralltäglichung) wherein the subjective orientations of individuals make up a constitutive part

of the presence of domination.22 The resulting concept of domination is therefore seen as a

relation bound not to the personal will of one individual over the other, but by the recognition of

both individuals of a process of power integrating them both through the process of “obedience”



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(Gehorsam).23 This results in an “authority relationship” ( Herrschaftsverhältnis) which is

defined by two crucial features:

1. that the subject of domination enters, to some degree, into the relation of

domination in a voluntary way;

2. submission of the will (of thought and of reason) to that of an other. 24

These two reformulations of social power under conditions of modernity point to a broad sphere

of domination not covered by Pettit, namely that of “authority.” Weber’s theory of authority is

defined as “legitimate domination”: where one individual obeys the orders, norms, legal

strictures, and so on of another agent and believes these orders, norms, and legal strictures to be

valid. Several crucial features of authority need to be pointed out. First, it is based on the fact

that the dominated party sees his obedience as valid or correct from a normative point of view. It

is not necessarily seen as domination, as a reduction of one’s freedom. This comes from the dual

problem of routinization and discipline. On the one hand, discipline is necessary because of the

nature of modern domination: an agent is not compelled to act because of an external threat, but

has rather internalized a set of norms which lead him to subordinate himself to the authority

relation. He sees it as legitimate, and accepts it as a part of his world- view. This is made

necessary because, for Weber, modern forms of domination (legal-rational forms) are not related

to the will of the individual, but rather to the rules of the institutions to which individuals belong.

It is through the process of rationalization of an institution that these older forms of coercion can

become forms of domination. Read in a deeper way, it means that certain forms of coercion and

control in one period of time may become, through the process of routinization, accepted forms

of legitimate domination. This process of rationalization is crucial since without it, a form of



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domination cannot serve its true sociological function: to hold the social order together according

to some legitimating logic.

We can say that Weber provides a theory of domination as authority which works under

different principles from mere coercion since dominating authority requires legitimation, it

requires that those logics of domination operate within institutions as well as within the internal,

subjective orientations of individuals toward that authority. Weber’s key insight, in this regard,

is that there is a differentiation between two kinds of domination: between substantive and

formal or between personal and impersonal forms.25 We are therefore presented with a very

different question than the one posed by Pettit: to what extent do modern social institutions

embed individuals within different contexts of domination? More importantly, can we argue, in

the face of Weber, that domination can only be between agents? This is in contrast to the

emphasis placed on domination being the source of one’s dependency upon another’s will since,

in Weber’s analysis, rational forms of domination—those which characterize modern society—

are not reducible to the will of another. Instead, rational forms of domination are embedded in

social processes and institutions, ingraining themselves within the lives, habits, and even

structures of consciousness of agents. Rational modern forms of domination (legal-rational

authority) transcend the dependency the will of one agent on that of another and become the

systemic logic of social institutions.

It therefore becomes a crucial expansion of the concept of domination within the context

of modernity to move beyond the acts of mere agents and to move into the ways that social

institutions and their functional logics manifest relations of domination and control. What the

modern conception of domination highlights is the fact that social processes, institutions and

their logics, shape relations of domination and even act as dominating systems. Whereas Pettit





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value from the dominated agent to the surplus of the dominating one. In this sense, the power of

extraction need not be reducible to the authority relation. Take for example the case of a

manager and a factory worker: the worker is dominated by the manager in terms of authority—

the worker will obey commands from the manager, have his work schedule fixed by him, and so

on. But this does not mean that the manager himself is the beneficiary of the work produced by

the laborer. The owner(s) of the factory—who employs both the manager and the laborer—

possesses extractive power over both these individuals. In this sense, extractive domination can

be either coerced, as in a master-slave relation, where one is forced into the process of

production for the sake of another or another group; or it can be rationalized to produce a

relationship where an individual willfully submits himself to the authority of another or to

another organization, but the purpose of that submission is extractive. One can see this in the

institution of wage-labor under capitalism where individuals sell their labor power, via contract,

to another in order to survive or for some other set of goods. What makes it domination is that it

manifests a relation of subordination or control and that this relation is done with an

disproportionate benefit to the dominating agent than to the dominated. Extraction implies that

one “takes out” of another some value, benefit, which is unevenly consumed or benefited from

by the dominating agent, by the extracting agent.

The relation between structure and agency is crucial here, just as it was in the Weberian

concept of “rational domination” because it also leads us to the thesis, put forward initially by

Marx, that certain social institutions—in his case, specifically “capital”—are social processes

and a distinct “social power” (gesellschaftliche Macht ) unto themselves. This means that social

processes and structures have the ability to constrain and even shape the agency of individuals—

the core of domination therefore lies outside of the individual and is a property of the social



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institutions themselves. Read in this way, domination cannot be reduced solely to the will of an

agent, but must be seen as generated by the logic of social structures, as with Weber’s account of

rational domination or authority. From the Marxian tradition, we see that power relations are the

result of certain processes of extracting gain from another individual or group of individuals.

But this process of extraction need not be isolated to the system of modern capitalism: slave

societies are extractive; personal relations can even be extractive, as when one individual extracts

personal surplus benefit from another (a wife, a child, and so on); or they can be

institutionalized, as in the system of wage labor. The domain of extractive domination is distinct

from Weber’s concept of authority in the sense that it is a specific kind of dominating

relationship, and one present in all societies to a greater or lesser extent. Its relevance for the

republican theory of freedom, however, is central since it deals with a specific kind of social

relation, one which limits the capacities, development, and freedom of the subject.

Consider, in this sense, a factory which will close down due to economic pressures of

globalization. The workers within the factory would be, in Pettit’s view, subject to the arbitrary

will of the factory owner for their livelihood. They are dependent upon him for their work,

wages, and so on. But is this really the case? It is perhaps more likely that we should read this

situation as a result of the functional logic of the institution of a capitalist economy. It could be

argued that the owner of the factory could choose to accept less profits rather than relocate; but it

is more likely that, regardless of the predisposition of the owner as a moral agent, the functional

logic of the economy would dictate such a move: the need for more extractive power (lower

wages, less organized labor force, and so on). In this sense, the workers would be subject to the

inequality of social power given to them as actors within a system which distributes benefits

based on the ownership of capital. They are dependent less on the individual capitalist than on



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the structure of extractive power. We would hardly be able to characterize this kind of

domination as “arbitrary” in the sense that Pettit theorizes it, and we would also be unable to

characterize it as between two agents in the sense that there exists a systemic context within

which these agents operate, constraining their choices and options.

3. Three Domains of Power: A Dynamic Analysis of Domination

This discussion therefore leads us to question the extent to which Pettit’s conception of

domination is an exhaustive one under modern conditions. As I have argued above, I do not

think that it is and believe that a more dynamic, more general conceptualization is needed. By

dynamic, I mean that these three basic “domains” of domination are in fact interactive. From

Weber’s notion of authority relations we see that individuals follow forms of authority for

different reasons—because they are traditionally obeyed, because of charismatic zeal, or because

of the rationalization of the process of obedience to certain instrumental ends. In either case,

authority is a specific kind of domination. From the Marxian tradition, we see that domination

has a more cohesive structure: to have power over others means to have the capacity to “extract”

profit or some other kind of benefit from them or their labor. Social power is therefore a

function of, and is shaped by, the need to increase extractive domination. This constitutes a

dominating relationship in the sense that one is subordinate to another for the concrete purpose

of extracting benefits from one agent to that of another. Pettit’s concept of domination fits more

squarely into the notion of coercion, or the ability to reduce an individual’s abilities, range of

choices, and so on, but from the point of view of the arbitrary power of an other. It is, as I have

argued above, a concept of domination which fails because it is in fact stamped by the social and

political concerns of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.





23

Dynamic Typology of

Domination

Coercion

Authority

-Rational

- Traditional- Charismatic

Extraction

A B

C

D

Figure 1: Three Domains of Power

In this figure, we can see the ways that these three different “power domains” can interact

and blend to express different forms of domination. Any relationship manifesting domination

can be theorized through this dynamic form of categorization. There can exist exclusively

coercive forms of domination—where one is enslaved to another, or when one mugs another at

gun point. If one is in a coercive relation but in order to produce for another, or to perform

favors for another, and the dominating agent benefits from this, then we have a relationship of

“coercive-extraction” (A). Similarly, there can exist a relation of “rational-extractive



24

domination” (C) where one submits to another willingly through a system of laws and

instrumental interests, as in wage labor where profit is made. This can also be based on

traditional authority, as when individuals submit to the will of others based on some kind of caste

system or some other form of ascriptive category, and are exploited. There can also be forms of

“coercive authority” (B) as when one is forced into recognizing certain legal limits to activity, or

when one is forced into certain contractual relations against one’s will, but either by necessity or

some kind of threat to one’s well-being. In the end, we can also see that all three domains can

culminate in coercive forms of authority in place for the purpose of extraction (D) as when

individuals are faced with coercive “choices” in the labor market, or in other forms of economic

life. These forms of domination are shaped and framed mostly by the arrangements of society

and the structural- functional logics of modern institutions. There are instances or arbitrary

coercion, to be sure, but the predominant character of modern domination stems, I think, from

the systemic nature of domination rooted in social arrangements and institutional logics.

IV. Freedom and the Republican Tradition: Reworking the Theory

The discussion of domination leads us back to the central issue that I have proposed

against Pettit’s concept of domination: namely that he places an exclusive emphasis on the

actions of agents rather than considering the complex interplay between structure and agency in

the discussion of political freedom. This kind of de-contextualization of domination is crucial:

since domination is something which can become institutionalized , something which is in fact

systemic, it is insufficient to theorize domination as an interfering capacity grounded in the will

of another. What needs to be seen is that domination works itself into (i) certain structures,

certain logics of institutions; and (ii) into the consciousness of agents themselves. By this I



25

emphasize a political reality which sees the structure of society as a central issue of concern

rather than the ways individuals are treated by others as an exclusive concern of republican

theory. What this means is that the concept of domination in modernity needs to be changed so

as to make the republican discourse in modern democratic theory a more relevant and, indeed,

more attractive alternative to liberal political theory. What republicanism ought to be able to

offer us is not only the normative ideal of the public good as having a central place in political

life, but also the empirical claim that domination is embedded in social institutions and processes

and permeates the consciousness of political subjects. Republicanism is a theory of the

architecture of social relations; it is a theory which sees that individuals are products of these

relations, and that social contexts within which individuals are formed play a crucial role in

forming individuals and conditioning their freedom. For freedom to hold in the republican sense,

the institutional design of society needs to be arranged in such a way that we focus not on

domination as the central goal, but on the more crucial aim of maximizing the common good.

This is not a vague, communitarian perspective, rather it places domination in a much more

robust context since domination can be understood not only as interpersonal terms (as in

coercion) but also in the ways that society can be arranged for the unequal benefit of some rather

than the majority (extractive power) as well as the ways that these relations can be legitimated so

that agent loose their awareness of their own subordination and the devo lution of the public

realm (authority). This is because the republican sees institutions and the arrangement of society

more broadly as having a dramatic developmental impact on individuals. Domination can

become necessary for the very functioning of many social institutions, and they can therefore be

seen as necessary where individuals submit their wills to the logics of those institutions.

Republican freedom must include, but also go beyond, the concern with restraining arbitrary



26

power and seek to transform and reorder the social institutions which deprive individuals of

capacities for individual and social freedom by orienting them toward private rather than public

benefits and goods.

Pettit’s interpretation of republicanism adopts the liberal, eighteenth-century conception

of the political subject as an independent agent who is assumed to be capable of making

individual choice. Domination consists in the arbitrary interference with his choices rather than

the ways in which the individual is constituted. This leads to Pettit’s emphasis on the “neo-

Roman” interpretation of the republican tradition, one that sees that the individual can be free

only, as Quentin Skinner has argued, “within a free state.”

27

According to this interpretation,

individuals are free to the extent that they live within a context of free laws, laws which

eliminate the capacity of agents to interfere arbitrarily in the affairs of others. Republican forms

of freedom also give people freedom over their capacities to intervene in the power relations

within which they find themselves, or what he calls “discursive control”: “An agent will be a free

person so far as they have the ability to discourse and they have access to discourse that is

provided in such relationships.”28 In this sense, individuals must be free from the ability of

others to dominate them, and this is a problem solved by institutions which prevent or negate the

power of dominating agents. Republican institutions fulfill the role of providing “anti-power” to

vulnerable agents in that they protect them from the dominating influence of others.

I believe that the republican concept of freedom is a much more robust one than that of

liberalism even though others have previously argued that there is no real, or substantive

difference between the two or that the difference between them is essentially confused by

republicans.29 My interpretation of what makes the republican tradition unique lies not in the

emphasis on domination per se but, rather, in the recognition that social processes can either



27

impede or promote free political life. Whereas the liberal tradition has placed emphasis on the

freedom of the individual, on the importance of negative liberty, and the absence of the arbitrary

exercise of power, the distinctiveness of the republican tradition lies in its ability to embed the

concern of individual freedom within the structure of social relations. Seeing the individual as a

property of social relations and social institutions, and that the extent of freedom or non-freedom

of the individual is in some way predicated on the ways that social institutions and arrangements

can foster free agents by arranging the powers of society toward the common good, not simply

negating the power of dominating agents. One of the core issues we find organizing the

republican tradition, for example, is the emphasis on the ways property was tied to political

power and the corruption of “civic virtue” or orientations of citizens toward the common good.

Whereas liberals saw property as a natural right and tied to individual labor, republicans

generally saw unequal divisions of property as capable of distorting the structure of a free

political life since individuals would be tied to forms of servitude and domination having effects

within the sphere of civic life.30 They would be exposed to forms of servitude and robbed of

their ability to develop and live as free and equal citizens.

Unequal divisions of property were seen as detrimental to the maintenance of a free

polity because property and social-political power were linked. As a result, early republicans

and those inspired by republican themes tended to advocate the redistribution of property by the

state and they were generally critics of economic inequality. This brand of republicanism—we

can call it “radical republicanism”—sought to constrain unequal power relations (e.g., relations

of domination) by preventing the unequal accumulation of property by institutional design which

would provide certain individuals or groups with the capacity to exercise domination over

others.31 But this need not be limited to forms of economic power, other unequal power



28

structures and systems could be critiqued, those based on race, gender, or any number of

categories. The republican sees that the individual’s freedom as a political agent, as a social

being, is in the first instance dependent upon the restraint of the powerful from acting upon you

arbitrarily, but also, and more deeply, that social systems which restrain your own abilities,

capacities, and functionings need to be broken and reshaped to promote freedom as self-

determination. It is not enough, in this sense, to simply not interfere arbitrarily with others, the

republican also sees that institutions need to be constructed positively: to enhance the

participation and balance the power of individuals to prevent oligarchy and tyranny—in short,

the subordination of the public to the interests of the few. The republican also sees that this

freedom as self-determination is itself socially constituted: that the power, abilities, functionings,

etc. are provided for through the structure of social arrangements. 32 This is the distinctiveness of

the republican viewpoint. The central role of politics in this reading is therefore to root out the

institutions and social processes which prevent that kind of freedom from being realized. Indeed,

the kind of domination that hinders such the realization of this kind of freedom need not be

arbitrary, in Pettit’s sense. It can transform the logic of political institutions, rework the

imperatives of the law, of education, of the very structure of society, but in so doing, it is not

arbitrary, but rather admits a functionalist relationship between agency and structure. To be

more precise, domination becomes a logic rather than the mere arbitrary exercise of authority.

This form of republicanism is in contrast to another strand of republican thought which is

where thinkers like Pettit take their cue for reworking republican theory in the modern context.

This “neo-Roman” theory of republicanism emphasizes an equality and non-arbitrariness in legal

terms. The law and the rights of individuals are to be protected from the power of other

individuals; master-servant relations are to be expunged, achieved by making rules which limit



29

the capacity of individuals to “interfere” with others on a non-arbitrary basis: “the world must be

a non- interference world of that kind, not by accident, but by virtue of your being secured against

the powerful.”33 I am not convinced that the way Pettit theorizes domination that such a maxim

can be realized politically. Even more than this, the concept of “freedom as non-domination”

that Pettit and other neo-republican thinkers put forth does not confront the ways in which social

processes impact and shape consciousness and, as a result, the capacities for free political choice.

Individuals begin to conform to social institutions which thereby dominate, have some kind of

control over, their choices and their world-views. It can deprive individuals of certain capacities

for agency by, as Weber shows in his theory of authority, molding their consciousness through

obedience and routinization. Similarly, extractive forms of domination can violate republican

freedom not only in inter-personal terms, but also by giving one class or group of people a larger

degree of influence over social resources and institutions further shaping individual character and

choice. One need only think of the ways public education can be adapted to serve the interests of

the business community in modern times, this would be a prime example of public corruption

and a violation of republican freedom.

The significance of this goes to the heart of Pettit’s concept of republicanism since it

relies heavily on the notion of agency. For Pettit, and those that have followed his conception of

republicanism, the key issue of domination is that it occurs between two agents where the

dominating agent does not consider, or “track” the interests of the dominated agent: “The key to

determining what is arbitrary centers on whether or not the interfering agent consulted and

tracked the opinions or interests of the agent subjected to the interference.”34 Pettit himself sees

this as a crucial feature of his theory domination and freedom, namely that individuals must be

seen as capable of choosing between certain options and that the arbitrary interference by another



30

agent in that individual’s choice constitutes a relation of domination. This he terms “alien

control” where “the first party will control what the second does, at least to some degree, and

control it in an alien way that takes from the personal choice of that agent.”35 The problem with

this, as I have argued above, is that this does not provide a distinctive theory of freedom nor of

domination that is sufficiently distinct from liberal theory. There are two reasons for this: first,

Pettit sees domination relations through an exclusively agent-centered perspective, and second,

he sees that domination is the result of arbitrary interference in the choices of another agent. In

this sense, Pettit invests too much power in inter-personal, agent-centered forms of domination

and control and remains, in my view, within the domain of liberal theory.

Now, having said this, it is important to return to what I argued above was the more

salient theme of the republican tradition: the effect of social systems and processes upon social

and individual freedom. The concept of domination that I put forth above, derived from a

blending of themes from Weber and the Marxian tradition, sees that emphasis needs to be placed

on the structure of social relationships and institutions within society as a whole. If the

republican thesis about political freedom is correct, then it relies on seeing that the individual is

not the Archimedean point for liberty but the relations which produce the individual, which

shape his powers for moral reflection and political agency. Republican institutions seek to

maximize social institutions which allow for the free development of individuality, not simply to

prevent arbitrary interference. It sees this as best realized by maximizing the extent to which

institutions serve common rather than particular ends. In this sense, republican freedom is not

simply concerned with securing individuals against domination, it is more concerned with

providing and protecting an arrangement of social institutions which serve public ends and this

includes producing an environment which will allow for the self-development of its members.





32

I think the “neo-Roman” theory advanced by thinkers such as Pettit holds far too closely

to liberal theory to count as sufficiently distinct in this regard because of (i) its focus on agents

rather than on the relational structure within which agents are embedded; and (ii) its narrow

definition of freedom as the absence of an agent’s arbitrary interference in the affairs of others.

Republicanism—or at least the interpretation of republicanism that I privilege—sees the

individual as shaped by relations of social power and it sees those social relations as structured

by institutional patterns of political, economic, social, and cultural life. This means that the

common (liberal) assumption made about the rational, conscious, political or moral agent cannot

be seen as a starting point for constructing a political theory. Rather, what republicanism can

contribute to political theory is the idea that individuals are produced by social systems which

shape as well as constrain their subjectivity and agency. In this sense, republican institutions

must be organized not simply to immunize individuals from the domination of others, they must

be so arranged, so structured and designed as to give individuals certain capacities and social

goods necessary for self-government. Republican freedom is sensitive to the ways that social

equal social relations can be distorted and perverted toward the interests of the few. Domination

is not simply the crude subordination of one’s will by that of an another, it is the shaping of

social relations and institutions toward certain portions of the community rather than the

common good. To have power over others is not simply to have constraint over their wills, it is

also the capacity to shape their wills, to legitimate the unequal relations of social life that benefit

the few rather than the totality of the community. Domination needs to be seen, as Weber rightly

saw, as much more deeply rooted in the ways modern institutions work and the ways they affect

the constitution or development of individuals. They cannot be conceived as atomistic moral-

political agents, but as agents constituted by certain restraints imposed by forces of coercion,



33

relations of various types of authority, or systems of property or unequal economic relations. As

such, republican theory sees an embedded form of individuality and agency and placed

importance on the ways that social institutions operate, the ways that social structures are

arranged within any given polity.

If this interpretation of republicanism has merit, it lies in an emphasis on the insight of

the social embededdness of individuals, in the fact that their subjective consciousness, their

ability to discourse, reflect ethically and politically, to act, and so on are constituted by the social

institutions within which they find themselves. It connects this insight of the systemic nature of

domination with the normative concern expressed by Algernon Sydney that “liberty consists only

in being subject to no man’s will, and nothing denotes a slave but a dependence on the will of

another.”36 Domination rightly should be the central category from which the republican concept

of republican freedom is based, but it must take into consideration the broader typology of

domination that I have laid out here and attempt to confront the obstacles to freedom which

manifest themselves socially, rather than only inter-personally. From this “empirical” argument

stems a moral one: that social institutions, the very structure of social relations, can either

enhance or erode an individual’s capacity to choose moral ends which are in tune with public

ends, that the freedom of the individual is deeply connected with the structure of social

arrangements and their respective logics. Institutions do not only have the role of preventing

arbitrary interference, they also must find ways of enhancing public life itself. Modern forms of

domination can lead to just such an erosion of the capacity for moral autonomy on the part of the

subject which means that the older emphasis on uninterfered choice becomes almost meaningless

since domination becomes ingrained, rationalized, routinized, and internalized. Given the

predominance of these kinds of institutions, freedom needs to be theorized from within the



34

context I have laid out here if republican theory can have any meaningful import to the problems

of contemporary politics.





36

of this process, see Karen Orren, Belated Feudalism: Labor, the Law and Liberal Development

in the United States (1991) New York: Cambridge University Press.

14 Philip Pettit, “Freedom as Antipower.” p. 577 (1996) Ethics, vol. 106, no. 3, pp. 576-604.

15 Pettit, Republicanism , p. 52.

16 “What is required for non-arbitrary state power . . . is that the power be exercised in a way that

tracks not the power-holder’s personal welfare or world-view, but rather the welfare and world-view of the public.” Pettit, Republicanism p. 56.

17 Frank Lovett, “Domination and Distributive Justice.” (2009) The Journal of Politics. Vol. 71,no. 3, pp. 817-830.

18 Pettit claims that any act of domination “will be a matter of common knowledge among the

people involved, and among any other who are party to their relationship—any other in thesociety who are aware of what is going on—that the three base conditions are fulfilled in therelevant degree.” Republicanism, p. 59. It seems to me that this mistakes the mechanisms of

modern forms of authority and domination, in particular as Weber lays it out. On Weber’saccount, forms of domination become absorbed by individual agents making domination a partof a kind of “second nature.”

19 The translation into English of Weber’s use of the term Herrschaft has been seen by some to

be problematic. Some have seen different implications to the rendering of Herrschaft as either“domination” or as “authority.” See David Easton, “The Perception of Authority and PoliticalChange,” in Carl Friedrich (ed.) Authority, Nomos I (1958) Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press; as well as Dennis Wrong, Power: Its Forms, Bases, and Uses (2002) New Brunswick, NJ:Transaction Publishers, pp. 35-41; and Reinhard Bendix, Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait

(1962) New York: Anchor Books. However, I see this as largely unproblematic since Webersuggests that the terms “authority” and “domination” are interchangeable. Weber’s text reads:“Herrschaft (‘Autorität’) in diesem Sinn kann im Einzelfall auf den verschiedensten Motiven der

Fugsamkeit: von dumpfer Gewöhnung angefangen bis zu rein zweckrationalen Erwängungen,beruhen.” Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft . (1972) Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), p. 122.

20 Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft , p. 28.

21 Ibid.

22 “We therefore find that the concept of domination . . . is therefore identical with authoritarianpower of command (autoritärer Befehlsgewalt ).” Ibid., p. 544.

23 Ibid.



37

24 Herbert Marcuse, “A Study on Authority,” in Studies in Critical Philosophy (1972) Boston:

Beacon Press, pp. 51-55. Also see the more detailed discussion by Weber, Economy and Society,vol. 1, pp. 212-215.

25

For an important discussion, see Wolfgang Schluchter, The Rise of Western Rationalism: MaxWeber’s Developmental History. (1981) Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 106-

138.

26 I take this concept of “extractive domination” from C. B. MacPherson’s concept of “extractivepower.” He defines this simply: “political power, being power over others, is used in anyunequal society to extract benefit from the ruled for the rulers…The amount of power may

therefore be measured by the amount of benefit extracted.” Democratic Theory: Essays in

Retrieval (1973) Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 47-48.

27 Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, pp. 17-57; and his Hobbes and Republican Liberty

(2008) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 149-210.28 Philip Pettit, A Theory of Freedom: From the Psychology to the Politics of Agency (2001) New

York: Oxford University Press, p. 70.

29 See Charles Larmore, “Liberal and Republican Conceptions of Freedom.” (2003) Critical

Review of International Social and Political Philosophy. Vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 96-119 as well asMelvin L. Rogers, “Republican Confusion and Liberal Clarification.” (2008) Philosophy and

Social Criticism. Vol. 34, no. 7: 799-824.

30 See Michael J. Thompson, The Politics of Inequality: A Political History of the Idea of

Economic Inequality in America (2007) New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 57-98.

31 For a fuller discussion of the way republicanism was employed in the context of earlyindustrial capitalism in America, see Michael J. Thompson, “The Critique of EconomicInequality in Early American Political Thought.” (2008) New Political Science vol. 30, no. 4:

307-324.

32 Pettit claims that institutions are important to help constitute the state of non-interference of citizens: “To be immune to arbitrary interference, to enjoy non-domination, is to have inhibitorspresent in your society—maybe these, maybe those—which prevent arbitrary interference in

your life and affairs. And the presence of suitable inhibitors—suitable institutions andarrangements—represents a way of realizing your non-domination; it is not something that leads

by a causal path to that non-domination.” Republicanism, p. 108.

33 Pettit, Republicanism , p. 24.

34 John Maynor, Republicanism in the Modern World , p. 38.



35 Philip Pettit, “Republican Freedom: Three Axioms, Four Theorems,” in C. Laborde and J.

Maynor (eds.) Republicanism and Political Theory (2008) Oxford: Blackwell, p. 106.

36 Algernon Sydney, Discourses Concerning Government (1990) Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund,

pp. 402-3.

Documents

Republicanism Domination