Forthcoming in Michael Freeden (ed.

) Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies

Republicanism

Cécile Laborde
University College London

The republican tradition occupies a signal place in the Euro-Atlantic political heritage. Centred round
ideals of political liberty, self-government, citizenship, equality and virtue, it migrated from its ancient
Athenian and Roman roots to flourish in medieval and Renaissance Europe. It provided a powerful
language of political mobilization for French and American revolutionaries, and for the anti-imperial,
anti-monarchical and anti-capitalist struggles which punctuated the nineteenth century. To some
extent, republicanism was a victim of its own success. In Anglophone countries, its most persuasive
ideals were progressively absorbed by a triumphant liberalism, and republicanism was disqualified as
a nostalgic ideal prone to degenerate into exclusive nationalism, tyrannical populism, and narrow-
minded parochialism. To be sure, the republican tradition remained a central and ecumenical point of
reference in other countries, such as France. Yet there, too, it functioned more as a rhetorical gesture
towards past achievements than as a living language of political argument and debate.
From the 1980s onwards, the fortunes of republican theory were dramatically reversed. As
historians of political ideas unburied the republican roots of the Euro-Atlantic political tradition,
American constitutional lawyers, German critical theorists, French public intellectuals, British social
democrats, Italian leftwing patriots and Spanish reformers all began to talk the language of
republicanism, in self-conscious opposition to the dominant liberal approach to politics. The
republican revival has been spectacular and multi-faceted. It has affected real-world political life as
well as academic discussions, across the various fields of history, law, philosophy, criminology and
political science. After the relative demise of socialism, communitarianism, and various post-modern
alternatives, republicanism is now widely seen as the most plausible competitor - or interlocutor - to
liberalism. In ground-breaking work, historian Quentin Skinner and philosopher Philip Pettit have
sought to give this ‘neo-republicanism’ a coherent structure and firm conceptual basis, by anchoring
it to a distinctive ideal of freedom as non-domination. This concept is meant to provide the hook on
which a distinct and coherent republican ideology can be built, and the platform around which
practical political proposals can be discussed. Thus Pettit and others have sought to develop a

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comprehensive, distinctive political philosophy with a coherent, developing agenda for political
reform.
But how distinctive is republican ideology? Many liberals have expressed the view that –
much like the older republican movement – neo-republicanism can either be incorporated into
liberalism, and is therefore redundant; or it has deeply illiberal tendencies, and is therefore
unappealing. After presenting the recent republican revival, focusing in particular on the neo-
republican school of thought, this chapter will assess the exact nature of the differences between
liberalism and republicanism. The tools of ideological analysis will be valuable in assisting us in this
task (Freeden 1996). By drawing attention to the conceptual components, morphological structure,
and political function of the two theoretical constructs, ideological analysis will help us locate the
exact nature of disagreements between liberals and republicans. Some of these disagreements, it will
appear, are conceptual; others are normative; and yet others are strategic. This is related to the fact that
republicanism is not merely a professional academic theory, it is also an interpretation of a particular
tradition of political thinking and an action-oriented way of organizing social life. Republicanism is
both an academic theory and a public ideology, and it is at the interaction of these two levels of
analysis that its most fruitful contribution to the study of politics can be found.

I. The Republican Revival

- From History to Contemporary Political Theory

The republican revival of the 1980s and 1990s was anticipated by the work of historians of political
thought who retrieved a long forgotten tradition of republican political reflection. Challenging the
conventional view that liberal modernity in the Anglo-American world emerged out of Lockean
natural-rights ideology, revisionist historians showed that there was a coherent republican tradition,
running from the neo-classical civic humanism of Renaissance Italy powerfully exhibited in Niccolo
Machiavelli, through to the works of James Harrington and the ‘Commonwealthmen’, and later to
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and James Madison, which deeply influenced English thought up to the late
eighteenth century, and was a powerful inspirational force during the American Revolution (Baron
1955, Bailyn 1967, Fink 1962, Pocock 1975, Skinner 1978, 1997, Wood 1969). The ‘Machiavellian
moment’, to use John Pocock’s memorable title, stretched across several centuries and continents,
and brought to the fore of political consciousness the themes of freedom, political participation, civic
virtue and corruption. In Quentin Skinner’s seminal exploration of the foundations of modern
political thought, the republican tradition was shown to crystallize most dramatically around a distinct

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concept of political liberty – the Roman ideal of libertas – which was invoked, developed and
defended by Italian and English republican writers. The potency of this tradition had been obscured
by the dominant story of western liberal modernity, which charted the progressive emergence and
triumph of a natural-law, contractual, individualist, rights-based liberalism. Yet this emerging liberal
order, historians of republicanism pointed out, was always in tension with a civic tradition of political
thinking, which worried about the fate of political liberty in a world that counter-posed a market-
based privatized civil society with a sovereign state. Such anxieties coalesced into a powerful
republican ‘paradigm’, ‘language’, ‘ideology’ or ‘tradition’ of popular participation and civic equality –
a language whose integrity, coherence and appeal had been obscured by a ‘Whiggish’, teleological
history of liberalism. Traditional historians of ideas had been drawn to this teleological history
because of the textualist, unhistorical methodologies they were wedded to. Yet political ideas,
Pocock, Skinner and John Dunn stressed, should be studied as solutions to specific historical
problems, not presented as answers to timeless philosophical questions or as contributions to present
political debates. Methodologically, therefore, members of the ‘Cambridge School’ of intellectual
history - with whom the republican revival is tightly associated - challenged traditional, textualist
histories of political ideas and brought to light the historically contingent, context-bound, practice-
orientated nature of political ideologies. Only proper historical work – the recovery of authorial
intentions, the precise reconstruction of socio-political contexts, the analysis of available languages
and conventions of political speech – could capture the meaning of past political utterances.
Yet if the republican tradition was to be firmly located in a discontinuous, discrete and
unfamiliar past, was its retrieval not doomed to be only of antiquarian scholarly interest? Not so:
unexpectedly perhaps, a historiographical methodological shift which denied the relevance of the past
to the present turned out to inspire a spectacular republican revival in contemporary political theory.
There are (at least) three possible methodological pathways between contextualist history and
normative political philosophy, all of which have fed into the republican revival. First, the recovery of
old, unfamiliar and prima facie counter-intuitive ideas – the conceptual link between public service and
individual liberty, for example – helped philosophers think new thoughts and ‘ruminate’ about the
blind spots and unconscious assumptions of the dominant ways of thinking they had inherited
(Skinner 1997, 108). Second, the possibility was left open that fragments of the republican heritage
were, in fact, still present, in inchoate and inarticulate form, in contemporary political consciousness.
Third, republican historians were not, any more than the past authors they studied, detached from
the political context of their interventions: by retrieving republican ways of thinking, they were, with
varying degrees of intentionality and forcefulness, ‘doing things with words’ and investing (their own)
ideas with social power. More specifically, republican historiography, by bringing to light richer,
deeper and more complex foundations of liberal democracy, resonated in contemporary political

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theory in that it offered a language able to give shape to and articulate ‘democracy’s discontents’). If it
was true, as republican history suggested, that the liberal democratic heritage incorporated the ideals
of independence, participation, deliberation and civic equality, not as nostalgic remnants of an
aristocratic, pre-modern age, but as constitutive of modern political liberty, then the Euro-Atlantic
political heritage was richer and more resourceful than suggested by the desiccated credo of liberty as
non-interference, formal political equality, a strong public/private distinction and limited popular
input into politics. And as the latter were perceived as symptomatic of the 1970s crisis of liberal
governance, the revival of the republican tradition was particularly timely.
Nowhere was the connection between historiographical revisionism and normative
political theory more evident than in the USA. By the 1980s, historians such as Pocock, Gordon
Wood, Bailyn had illustrated how American revolutionaries, far from sharing a ‘spontaneously
Lockean’ (Hartz) confidence in the self-regulating tendencies of the rights-based society, had
articulated their concerns about democratic self-rule, individual independence, civic virtue, and
distrust of corrupt elites and the commercial society in a distinctively republican language.
Constitutional theorists such as Frank Michelman and Cass Sunstein quickly grasped how such a
constitutional lineage could inspire a left-leaning critique of mainstream liberalism. Their ideal of the
deliberative republic was designed to reinvigorate civic life and emphasise the value of democratic
reason-giving, explicit value commitments and public common purposes (Michelman 1988, Sunstein
1988). It updated a range of themes previously popularized by communitarian critiques of liberalism,
which targeted the latter’s purported obsession with immunities and rights, commitment to
procedural neutrality, and bias towards interest group pluralism. But the new republicanism shed the
communitarian emphasis on ethical consensus and thick ethno-cultural identities. Instead, republican
deliberative democrats endorsed a more agonistic, more pluralistic and open-ended conception of
democratic dialogue. On that view – recognizably indebted to Hannah Arendt’s early reworking of
the Athenian agora - what mattered was ‘doing-in-common’, rather than ‘being-the-same’.
This insight was the foundation for a creative reworking of the fraught relationship
between republicanism and nationalism, in Europe and elsewhere. A number of political theorists
(Schnapper 1988, Habermas 1992, Viroli 1995, Nabulsi 1999, Miller 2000) drew on the old tradition
of republican patriotism to show that the ‘love of one’s country’ need not be motivated by ethnic
membership, cultural affinity or a thickly constituted national identity. It relied, instead, on pride in
shared institutions and practices, insofar as these promoted democracy, freedom and equality. A
sense of collective identity and of shared purposes emerged from participation in common life, rather
than being pre-requisites for it. The republican revival in political theory, in this way, repudiated the
questionable ethical and sociological bases of nationalism and communitarianism. It is no surprise,
therefore, that high-profile communitarian philosophers, such as Charles Taylor (1989) and Michael

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Sandel (1996) had by the early 1990s professed allegiance to republicanism, and went on greatly to
contribute to its development. Given the new republicanism’s explicit embrace of central tenets of
liberal modernity, such as ethical pluralism and the importance of individual rights, a number of
theorists sought, in parallel, to demonstrate the internal coherence, and normative plausibility, of the
ideal of a ‘liberal republicanism’ (Sunstein 1988, Dagger 1997, Larmore 2001, Richardson 2002).
Doubts, however, subsisted. How much ethical and cultural diversity can the republic
accommodate? Does it not require too much conformity on the part of dissenters and minorities?
Should politics be about the search for common purposes and identity? And do republicans not
unduly emphasize the ethical value of political participation and citizenship? Habermas, who situated
his preferred version of deliberative democracy as a middle-way between rights-based liberalism and
virtue-based republicanism, put the problem neatly. He warned against the republican tendency to
construe politics as a process of ‘ethical self-clarification’ of an ethnically and culturally homogenous
community (instead of, as his preferred version would have it, as a process of deliberative
reconstruction of the universally valid presuppositions of diverse ethical world-views) (Habermas
1997). The German theorist’s scepticism about the communitarian residue of modern republicanism
was given credence by the circumstances of the revival of republicanism in neighbouring France in
the 1980s and 1990s. In France, republicanism is not merely an esoteric academic school of thought;
nor it is narrowly associated with anti-monarchical movements (as in the UK) or with a conservative
political party (as in the USA). It is, rather, the shared language of ordinary, ecumenical politics: a
rich, vibrant and internally diverse tradition which was rooted in the Jacobin revolutionary experience
and evolved in the 19th century to take on pluralistic, democratic and solidariste commitments. Central
themes of the tradition, throughout, were the ideals of equal citizenship, a strong, impartial state,
secularism, popular sovereignty, and the importance of public education. It is by reference to
republican ideals and conceptions that contemporary political battles – about the EU, taxation, the
welfare state, education, urban policy, foreign policy – are fought. France has long been a fascinating
laboratory of republicanism, a living political tradition where theory and practice are indissociably
linked (Hazareesingh 2001, Berenson, Duclert and Prochasson 2011).
In the 1980s, the republican tradition underwent a spectacular revival and reworking. The
intellectual left was struggling to respond both to the emergence of an individualistic, globalised ‘neo-
liberal’ market society and to the parallel rise of a far-right party, the National Front, intent on
instrumentalising immigration for its own reactionary, racist and nationalist purposes. Both these
pressures explain the distinctive shape taken by the republican movement in France in those years. It
construed both ethno-cultural diversity and market-based liberalism as threats to the common
political culture of citizenship, and sought to reinvigorate the latter by appealing to the integrative
function of the state, public schools, and the values of laïcité (secularism). Quickly, however, as

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republican rhetoric was nearly exclusively mobilised around the successive ‘hijab controversies’
(affaires du foulard) of 1989, 1994 and 2004, it became overshadowed by a defensive, obsessive, neo-
conservative rhetoric pitting ‘the values of the republic’ against those attributed to immigrants of
Muslim origin. Instead of opening up public debate about the terms of citizenship in a more diverse
France, republicans tended to assert and impose conformity to a pre-determined, non-negotiable
national identity (Bourdeau and Merril 2008, Laborde 2008). It seemed that state-promoted
republicanism, just as Habermas had feared, had degenerated into a conservative, communitarian
official ideology, and its progressive, radically egalitarian and deliberative insights had been lost in the
process. Where did that leave prospects for a republican revival? In 1996, liberal political theorist
Alan Patten advanced a pithy diagnostic. Either republicanism was compatible with liberalism, and
differences between the two were purely semantic; or republicanism substantively departed from
liberal principles, but in this case it was unattractive (Patten 1996).

- Neo-Republicanism and Freedom as Non-Domination

The gist of Patten’s complaint about republicanism was that, either republicans construed political
participation as merely instrumental to the protection of basic liberal freedoms and rights; or they
conceived of it as constitutive of liberty itself, as an essential component of the good life.
Republicans, in other words, had to choose between what Isaiah Berlin (1969) called ‘negative’
freedom (roughly, freedom as non-interference by others) and ‘positive’ freedom (freedom as self-
realization) – and only the former was compatible with liberalism properly understood. However,
neo-republican writers, most prominently Philip Pettit, had by then begun to challenge the very terms
of Berlin’s dichotomy, and suggested that there was an alternative, distinctive ideal of freedom
present in the liberal-democratic tradition, namely, that of freedom as absence of domination. In
Republicanism. A Theory of Freedom and Government (1997), Pettit recast the entire republican tradition by
giving it a firm foundation: liberty as non-domination. In so doing, he aimed to drastically distance
the republican tradition from its communitarian, nationalist, and populist associations and, in
addition, to provide conceptual coherence to the constellation of recent republican writings. A
decade later, Pettit’s theory had become the dominant, most influential and most debated, version of
academic republicanism – and the rest of this chapter will be dedicated to assessing its contribution,
notably as a response to Patten’s challenge.
Pettit connected his theoretical strategy to the best of the historical republican writings.
Since the mid-1980s, there had appeared a significant difference of approach between Baron and
Pocock’s ‘neo-Athenian’ interpretation of republican citizenship as the good, virtuous life on the one
hand; and the ‘neo-Roman’ ideal of libertas unearthed by Skinner and Maurizio Viroli on the other. In

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revisiting the writings of the Italian defenders of the self-government of city-states, and the anti-
Hobbesian English Commonwealthmen, Skinner initiated a paradigm shift in republican discourse.
He showed that neo-Roman writers did not think of freedom in a positive sense: they did not see it
as being tied definitionally to an Aristotelian teleological view of human purposes and a self-
realisation doctrine of positive freedom. Machiavelli, for example, defended an apparently ‘ordinary
negative analysis of liberty’ (as the unobstructed pursuit of one’s ends) in the Discorsi. Yet he also
insisted that such liberty could only be maintained in a free state – a state where the popolo actively
kept the ambitions of the grandi in check, and citizens were not subjected to the arbitrary power of
rulers. Their liberty was maintained not, as Aristotelian writers had insisted, through the pursuit of an
objective good by an ethical community, but by class conflict and the rule of law (Viroli 1998). In
later writings on English 17th century writers, Skinner went beyond his previous argument and argued
that, in addition to the non-interference view of freedom, neo-Roman writers held a distinctive
conception of freedom as non-dependency on the good will of others – with or without actual
obstruction, interference or coercion. Just living in a state of subjection or dependency, in their view,
was incompatible with freedom (Skinner 2008).
It is this distinctive notion that was expanded on and developed by Pettit, who built a
comprehensive political philosophy, inspired by classical republican sources, around the ideal of
freedom as non-domination. Freedom as non-domination systematises the neo-Roman ideal of
freedom, understood not as self-mastery or self-government but as absence of mastery, or
domination, by others. While freedom as non-domination has, therefore, an importantly ‘negative’
component (it does not specify the ethical ends to which freedom should be put), it importantly
differs from freedom as non-interference. Firstly, there can be domination without interference.
Consider the classical republican paradigm of unfreedom: slavery. Even if your master is of a benign
disposition, and does not interfere with your actions, you are dependent upon his will and vulnerable
to his interference: this is what makes you unfree. Advocates of freedom as non-interference,
according to Pettit, are unable to see that there is unfreedom when ‘some people hav[e] dominating
power over others, provided they do not exercise that power and are not likely to exercise it’ (Pettit
1997, 9). Thus domination is a function of the relationship of unequal power between persons,
groups of persons, or agencies of the state: the ideal of republican freedom is that ‘no one is able to
interfere on an arbitrary basis – at their pleasure – in the choices of the free person’. This raises the
possibility, secondly and conversely, that there can be interference without domination. This happens
when interference is not arbitrary, for example, when it is subjected to suitable checks and controls’
and tracks what Pettit has called ‘commonly avowable interests’. For example, while the state
interferes in people’s lives, levying taxes and imposing coercive laws, it may do so in a non-arbitrary
way, if it only seeks ends, or employ only means, that are derived from the public good (the

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common, recognizable interests of the citizenry). In this case, the law is not an affront on freedom;
rather, as John Locke himself saw, it ‘enlarges freedom’.
The seminal contribution of Pettit’s work was to provide republicanism with an explicit
and systematic basis in the concept of freedom as non-domination. Historically, republican theory
was associated with a range of ideas (the rule of law, constitutionalism, the dispersal of power, equal
citizenship) but it tended to lack an explicit basis. In addition to formulating a coherent basis for
republican political philosophy, Pettit’s formulation decidedly distanced republicanism from two of
its most unwelcome modern associations. The first was ‘populism’, the idea that the collective people
should be the supreme and exclusive sovereign in the state. Pettit insisted that no such principle was
demanded by the neo-Roman conception of politics, which required, not that the people be the
master, but that they had no master. In this way, Pettit distanced himself from the ‘strong’ neo-
Aristotelian identification of civic freedom with participation in the making of the laws. The second
unwelcome association acquired by republicanism in the 19th and 20th century was with
communitarian and nationalist politics. Here again, Pettit’s reworking of the republican ideal
explicitly eschewed any reliance on pre-political bonds of culture, ethnicity or religion. It re-
connected with the older tradition of republican patriotism and civility, which saw the virtues of
citizens as exclusively harnessed to the pursuit of a politically defined common good. Not only did
Pettit’s neo-republicanism distance the tradition from unwelcome bedfellows, it also connected it, via
the critical ideal of non-domination, to a range of progressive causes such as workers’ rights,
women’s rights, and environmental politics. In sum, Pettit gave republicanism a firmer and more
attractive foundation than it had had previously. In parallel, efforts were made, within the French
republican tradition, to salvage the progressive, inclusive, democratic and radical legacies of the
republican ideal, in particular as a response to the multi-culturalist, multi-faith challenges of the 1980s
and 1990s (Renaut 2005, Laborde 2008, Bourdeau and Merrill 2008). Important recent historical
work has shown the internal complexity, diversity, breath and potency of France’s republican
tradition – a far cry from the crude Jacobin homogeneous centralism often involved by both critics
and defenders of le républicanisme à la française (Hazareesingh 2001, Rosanvallon 2004) and the under-
appreciated locus of an original synthesis between individual liberty and socio-economic equality
(Spitz 2005). But as the republican tradition was in this way brought closer to the mainstream of left-
of-centre egalitarian liberalism, it remained to be assessed whether republicanism was still relevantly
different from liberalism.

II. Neo-Republicanism and Liberalism

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This section presents three possible responses to the liberal objection according to which neo-
republicanism is in effect indistinguishable from liberalism. These responses are grounded in an
understanding of both traditions as ideologies, which are characterised by (i) distinctive ‘building
blocks’ or favoured concepts, (ii) specific conceptual arrangements and political prioritizations and
(iii) practical political platforms, not abstract philosophical schemes (Freeden 1996). Building on
these three dimensions of ideology, this section elaborates on three republican responses to the
liberal objection: (i) republicans have a distinctive understanding of the concept of liberty; (ii) their
focus on non-domination and ‘anti-power’ shapes a more comprehensive, progressive political
agenda; and (iii) their language is more effective as a critique of real-world neo-liberal politics.

- A different core: the concept of freedom

For Pettit, freedom as non-domination differs from freedom as non-interference in two crucial ways.
First, it undermines the ‘interference-only’ thesis: not only interference, but the threat or possibility
of it, reduces freedom. I am unfree if I am subjected to an agent that operates like a master, even if
the latter does not actually interfere with my actions. Second, freedom as non-domination
undermines the ‘interference-always’ thesis. Interference per se does not reduce freedom; only alien, or
arbitrary interference does. I am not unfree if I am constrained by a system of laws designed with
appropriate checks and controls. What follows is a brief overview of the debates about whether each
position is (i) distinctive of republicanism and (ii) compatible with liberalism.
Whether the first position is distinctive of republican theory has been the object of an
analytically rigorous, sophisticated debate between Skinner and Pettit and advocates of the ‘pure
negative’ theory of liberty such as Matthew Kramer (2008), Ian Carter (2008) and Keith Dowding
(2011). Pure negative liberty theorists follow Hobbes in saying that one cannot be unfree to do what
one actually does. Slaves are free to perform the action x they actually perform, even if they do so at
their master’s discretion. However, what they are not free to do is to pursue the two conjunctively
exercisable options of doing x and not incurring the risk of their master’s wrath. Their overall
freedom is reduced, therefore, insofar as they cannot pursue a set of options simultaneously or
sequentially. For Carter and Kramer, therefore, republicans and liberals reach similar conclusions
about equivalent levels of overall freedom. Negative liberty theorists are able to accommodate the
republican view that there is a loss of freedom whenever a dominant party is able, without
interference or the use of force, to reduce the option set available to the dominated agent.
Republican theorists have resisted the implication that republican liberty is reducible to pure negative
liberty, however capaciously this is now defined. They doubt that pure negative liberty theorists have
genuinely freed themselves from the Hobbesian view of freedom as non-interference-only. Sticking

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points are whether the cost attached to options (by way of threat or penalties) is irrelevant to the
meaningful availability of these options; and whether the loss of freedom for dominated agents is a
measure of the probability of the dominating agent actually interfering with them (List 2004, Goodin
and Jackson 2007, Pettit 2008b, Skinner 2008).
While this debate has been conducted within the terms set by pure negative liberty theorists,
there is another, bolder version of the republican critique of the ‘interference-only’ thesis, which
severs the relationship between domination and interference more radically. There are two versions
of this. First, in the critical tradition of Karl Marx, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault and Iris Marion
Young, domination is defined as a structural power relationship which affects, not necessarily the
choice set available to the dominated agent but, rather, their ability to think of themselves as agents
capable of choice in the first place (Young 1990, Bourdieu 1998). Thus members of subordinated
social groups typically curtail their aspirations, adapt their preferences to the reduced social options
that they (rightly or wrongly) take to be available to them. Their subordinated status remains deeply
entrenched because it is internalized and ‘naturalised’ by them. Anglophone republican theorists have
been reluctant to embrace this view of structural domination, because it appears to rely on an
indeterminate and unspecific account of the agents of domination, and to point to internal rather
than external constraints on freedom. In contrast to positive liberty theorists, they insist on
construing constraints on freedom as both external (to the individual) and interpersonal (not
impersonal) (Lovett 2010, 47-49, 71-74). Yet if ideological conditioning can be traced back to deeply-
entrenched, self-reproducing, pervasive social structures that allow the continued dominance of
certain groups over others, without any need for interference or the threat thereof, there is reason to
think that structural domination can be accommodated by the neo-Roman account of domination
(Pettit 2008). This opens fruitful avenues for theorizing the interconnections between domination
and misrecognition, social humiliation and disrespect, as theorized by Charles Taylor, Axel Honneth
and Iris Young (Laborde 2008, Garrau and Le Goff 2009, Lazzeri 2010) This structural view of
domination points to the loss of freedom involved when individuals, because of their initial location
within a structure of domination, have lost their ability to think of themselves as agents with actual
options open to them. This is an instance of perfect, pure domination: because it is ideologically
maintained, it does not need to be monitored or invigilated by those who benefit from it.
Domination is structural in the sense that, although it is ultimately operated by agents on agents, it
works in practice because it is perceived as a natural state of affairs (women in patriarchal societies
think of themselves as ‘naturally’ vulnerable and subordinate to men) rather than the product of man-
made, alterable social relationships.
A second, connected departure from the ‘interference-only’ thesis more radically detaches
republican freedom from the individualistic ontology of liberalism – and, in particular, of Berlin’s

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theory of negative liberty. On this view, normative theory should not be based on a hypothetical
consensual contract between individuals conceived as a-social, rational and mutually self-
disinterested. Instead, a more holistic republican ontology takes at its starting point the mutual
dependency and mutual vulnerability of individuals-in-society, and envisages non-domination as a
political response to the dangers of degeneration of (normal) dependency into (problematic)
domination (Spitz 1995, Garrau & Le Goff 2009). Freedom here appears as an intrinsically social and
relational good, one which is not achieved through the absence of (certain types of) institutions and
relationships but rather through the presence (and active fostering) of the right kind of institutions
and relationships. Thus Pettit talks of freedom as a ‘social status’ which generates subjective feelings
of ‘security’ and inter-subjective mutual ‘recognition’. Such status is explicated in a terms of ‘anti-
power’, including the positive protections, resources, and dispositions which guarantee citizens’
‘immunity’ against domination. The Berlinian contrast between positive and negative liberty does not
adequately capture the unavoidably positive dimensions of republican freedom. To achieve mutual
non-domination, citizens must be provided with basic resources and capabilities (including minimal
autonomy) (Laborde 2008) and must display adequate other-regarding virtues and dispositions
(Honohan 2002, Maynor 2007, Costa 2009a). In addition, because state law has not only a coercive
but also an expressive dimension, a republican polity will take great care to express the equal status of
citizens through its institutions and symbols, for example by rejecting the (even purely symbolic)
establishment of religion (Laborde 2011).
Not only republican freedom should not be equated with the absence of interference (even
on the enlarged view of interference defended by negative liberty theorists). It is also, on the
republican view, compatible with the presence of interference. Another set of debates, then, has been
opened by Pettit’s suggestion that the republican theory of freedom invalidates the ‘interference-
always’ thesis. The suggestion is that while on a negative liberty view, interference always infringes on
freedom, on a republican view, only arbitrary interference does so. Imagine I am constrained by a
system of laws designed with appropriate checks and controls, which adequately track common
values and interests. In this scenario, my option-freedom is limited (or ‘conditioned’, in Pettit’s
formulation) but my agency-freedom – freedom as non-domination proper - is not compromised, and
remains intact (Pettit 2003). Interference by a non-arbitrary state, one suitably invigilated and checked
by the constitutional people, does not compromise republican freedom. For republicans, therefore,
there is no paradox involved in being ‘free under the law’: this, they posit, is in fact the core idea of a
distinctive political and social conception of freedom. But how distinctive is the republican theory of
‘freedom-friendly’ interference, in relation to the liberal tradition of thought? To answer this
question, it is important to distinguish between two different schools of liberalism, which we can call
‘negative-liberty liberalism’ and ‘constitutional liberalism’, respectively. As we shall see, the neo-

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republican theory of freedom is incompatible with the former, but bears important similarities with
the latter.
Negative-liberty liberalism is a family of liberal theories which place a negative conception of
liberty as non-interference at their core. These theories can be either moralised or descriptive. On the
moralised version defended by libertarian philosophers such as Robert Nozick, freedom as non-
interference is the supreme political value, and the state and its laws are the most important threats to
freedom. A liberal state, therefore, is a state where legal interference is (rightly) minimised (Nozick
1974). On the descriptive version propounded by Carter and Kramer, freedom is also construed as a
negative notion (as non-interference) but it is not integrated into a normative political theory. The
aim of this approach is to provide a measurable theory of descriptive freedom. It has been endorsed
by critics of Nozick, such as left-libertarians (van Parijs 1995, Steiner 2006) and Marxists (Cohen
2006) who have sought to detach the (valid) descriptive concept of liberty from the (misguided)
normative defence of the minimal state. How can we locate Pettit’s neo-republican theory in relation
to negative-liberty liberalism? Evidently, Pettit’s neo-republican ideal of the ‘free person’ is
incompatible with the libertarian picture of freedom and the state. On Pettit’s view, the minimal state
is not an attractive political ideal: legal interference in a republican state, if it adequately tracks the
interests of citizens, does not impinge on freedom properly conceived. Citizens who live under the
laws of a non-arbitrary state can be said to be free. This conceptual claim, however, has been
questioned by advocates of the descriptive conception of freedom. The neo-republican conception
of freedom, they contend, is a non-descriptive, moralised conception, which relies on a distinction
between arbitrary – ie. non-legitimate – and non-arbitrary – ie. legitimate – interference, and
therefore inevitably appeals to moral values which are distinct from, and independent of, a purely
negative ideal of liberty (McMahon 2005, Carter 2008, Dowding 2011). Neo-republicans have
rejected the charge. Pettit has insisted that freedom as non-domination is not a moralized notion, in
that there is a ‘fact of the matter’ as to whether a particular interference is subjected to appropriate
interest-tracking checks and controls (Pettit 2006). Frank Lovett, for his part, has cashed out the
notion of ‘appropriate’ or ‘non-alien’ control in purely procedural terms, emphasizing externally
effective rules or regulations, with no reference to substantive interests (Lovett 2009). Neo-
republicans, therefore, have struggled mightily to accommodate the negative-liberty critique and the
charge of moralization.
Comparatively less energy has been spent assessing the considerable affinities between neo-
republicanism and another school of liberalism – which we may call constitutional liberalism. This,
by contrast to negative liberty liberalism, does not give normative nor conceptual primacy to a purely
descriptive conception of freedom. In the spirit of the most prominent liberal theorists from John
Locke through to J.S. Mill and John Rawls, it is rooted in a normative ideal of a constitutional state

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committed to the protection of core civil liberties – a system of legal protections and guarantees for
morally significant spheres of personal and social freedom. As Charles Larmore and John Christman
noted in early reviews of Pettit’s theory, the neo-republican idea that freedom is best protected under
a constitutional state which adequately tracks the relevant interests of all citizens seen as free and
equal is also at the heart of constitutional liberalism (Christman 1998, Larmore 2001, Costa 2009b).
Rawls, for example, sets out a scheme of basic liberties, which protects individuals’ ‘moral powers’,
and are arranged within a system of legal guarantees and protections. What is more, Rawls’s
liberalism does not give prominent value to freedom as such: as a self-proclaimed theory of justice, it
puts forward a recognizably ‘social democratic’ theory of egalitarian distribution (Rawls 1971). Other
liberal philosophers, such as Ronald Dworkin, have severed the link between liberal constitutionalism
and negative liberty even further, by suggesting that the core ideal of liberalism is not liberty as such
but, rather, equality and equal respect (Dworkin 2002). Constitutional liberalism, in sum, significantly
diverges from negative liberty liberalism, in at least one of two ways. It does not value negative liberty
as such, but rather the ‘civil liberties’ (or ‘rights’) which must be protected through the state and the
rule of law; and/or it promotes a constellations of values, of which liberty is only one, and which has
to be weighed against, or interpreted through, the demands of other ideals such as equal respect.
It should be apparent that constitutional liberalism radically departs from negative-liberty
liberalism, and display structural affinities with the neo-republican combination of freedom, the rule
of law, and equality. While neo-republicans such as Pettit have perceived and acknowledged these
affinities, they have not set out the distinctiveness of their own approach with sufficient precision.
This is a pressing task for them, insofar as most academic liberals embrace constitutional rather than
negative-liberty liberalism, and therefore are unmoved (and unaffected) by the neo-republican
critique of libertarianism. The rest of this chapter will attempt to identify the chief differences
between neo-republicanism and constitutional liberalism. Many of these, it will turn out, are semantic
and strategic, instead of substantive. While a purely analytical approach would dismiss such
differences as undermining neo-republican claims to offer a truly distinctive normative theory, the
deployment of ideological analysis will allow us to see why they matter to political debate and
argument.
The most important disagreement between constitutional liberals and neo-republicans is
that, for liberals, there is some loss of freedom every time a law interferes with an action, even if the
law is otherwise legitimate because it secures a more important interest or freedom, or the freedom
of others. While some neo-republicans, such as Skinner, accept this point (1997, 83), Pettit (2002) has
insisted that a distinction be maintained between interferences which merely ‘condition’ freedom (by
limiting a range of actions open to the individual) and interferences which ‘compromise’ it (and are
an affront to the freedom of the agent, that is, to republican freedom). On the republican theory of

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freedom as non-domination, non-arbitrary law does not compromise freedom and (conversely) no
freedom is possible outside the law, as freedom is an inter-subjective status that can only be enjoyed
in the presence of others, and through adequate political and legal institutions. Liberals have retorted
that the neo-republican conflation of law and liberty confuses liberty and the security of liberty. On
their view, the law may make freedom more resilient over time, but it does not constitute it. So, it
may be legitimate to use the law to restrict some freedoms in the name of other freedoms, but this
does not mean that the law itself makes us free. Constitutional liberals, therefore, remain committed
to a distinction between freedom as non-interference (and its independent value) on the one hand,
and the rule of law and civil liberties, on the other. In Pettit’s theory, by contrast, republican liberty is
a conceptually parsimonious idea which tightly connects political liberty with the legal and political
institutions which instantiate it. Freedom as non-domination incorporates the liberal constitutionalist
commitment to basic rights, the rule of law, democratic governances and checks and balance into its
definition itself. It also integrates the ideal of equality and equal respect central to Dworkinian
liberalism. This is because freedom as non-domination, contrary to freedom as non-interference,
cannot be increased for some without being increased for all: it is an intrinsically collective, egalitarian
ideal of freedom.
In sum, neo-republicanism, like libertarianism, places liberty at the center of its theory, but
profoundly alters the adjacent concepts to which liberty is connected: not non-interference but the
absence of arbitrary interference; not the silence of the laws but the presence of strong laws and
institutions; not a minimal state but a protective state; not the freedom of the private individual but
the public status of the citizen. Insofar as those adjacent concepts do not lend themselves to purely
empirical, non-moralised descriptions and are charged with ethical, substantive (and controversial)
meaning, republican liberty (contra Pettit) appears to be an inevitably moralized, normative conception
of liberty. Like libertarianism, neo-republicanism grant prominent value to the ideal of liberty, but it
defines liberty in a radically different way. Like constitutional liberalism, neo-republicanism offers a
normative defense of a range of laws and institutions, but does so in a more parsimonious way than
dominant liberal approaches, which promote a range of values, of which liberty is only one (List
2006). There are advantages, and disadvantages, to republican conceptual parsimony. What it may
lack in conceptual precision, it gains in political and strategic import. This is because neo-republican
ideology connects the rhetorically powerful ideal of liberty to egalitarian, democratic and social
democratic ideals. As a result, neo-republicanism is able to offer a useful corrective to both (i) the
narrowly justice-centered, state-centered and ideal-theory-biased academic defenses of liberal
constitutionalism and (ii) the real-world, non-academic, common-sense libertarian view of freedom
and the state. The last two sections of this chapter examine these two points in turn.

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- A different focus: guarding against public and private power.

While neo-republicanism has clear affinities with the left-of-center constitutional and egalitarian
liberalism which is prominent in Anglo-American academic circles, it draws particular attention to the
dangers both of imperium (arbitrary public power) and of dominium (arbitrary private power). By
contrast, the focus of constitutional liberals inspired by Rawls and Dworkin has tended to be ideal
theories of justice (with less focus on real-world mechanisms for reducing the arbitrariness of
political rule) and a commitment to a strong distinction between the public and the private spheres of
social life (with less focus on non-legal, informal structures of domination). Neo-republican ideology
points to an extensive program of state and societal reform, which aligns it with a more radically
democratic and social egalitarian agenda than mainstream constitutional liberalism.
Let us start with the republican focus on private forms of domination. To see exactly where
the difference between neo-republicanism and liberalism lies, imagine a liberal society, which protects
basic individual rights and arranges schemes of social redistribution for the benefit of the worst-off.
Now imagine that that society is also characterized by significant inequalities of income and wealth;
and imagine, further, that informal social hierarchies and norms systematically reproduce an unequal
gender-based division of labor in the family. Is this a problem for constitutional liberals? It depends.
For some liberals, inequalities per se are not morally troublesome provided they benefit the most
disadvantaged groups in society; and, assuming the institutional and political ‘basic structure’ of the
state is just, individual choices in the private sphere must be respected. Left-liberals and socialist
critics disagree. A more expansive understanding of the scope of Rawls’s basic structure and of the
implications of his difference principle has led them to endorse a more comprehensive ideal of ‘social
equality’. They have drawn attention both to the relevance of positional differentials to justice, as well
as to the informal norms and ethos necessary to support just institutions (Cohen 1992, Anderson
1999, Wolff 1998, Miller 1995). Such approach is congenial to neo-republicanism, and can be directly
derived from the latter’s commitment to non-domination. Large inequalities of power and wealth are
great sources of domination, insofar as they equip the rich and the powerful with resources they can
use to entrench their positions in all spheres of social life. Rectifying large imbalances of arbitrary
social power is one sure way of reducing domination in society (Lovett 2009). One area where such
imbalances are pronounced, yet have largely been ignored by liberal theorists, in in the workplace and
marketplace (Dagger 2006, Spitz 2010). For neo-republicans, a totally unregulated labour market,
even if it maximizes salaries, profit and growth, is problematic insofar as it places employees in a
position of dependency on their employers. Neo-republicans, furthermore, castigate the evils of
private domination within contexts where domination is maintained informally, through social mores
and norms, rather than through laws and institutions. While a well-established republican theme has

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been that widespread social norms of equal regard and civility are essential to support the institutions
of non-domination in the ideal republican society (Maynor 2007, Pettit), recent work has shown that
the ideal of non-domination can, in turn, support the critique of norms and practices of oppression,
disregard and misrecognition in non-ideal, existing societies (Laborde 2008, Garrau & Le Goff 2009,
Lazzeri 2010). Neo-republicanism provides a radical language of critique of social and private
relationships of domination. Because of the practical, consequentialist focus of the ‘domination
complaint’ (Pettit 2005), neo-republicanism is more directly attuned to social critique than ideal-
theory liberal constitutionalism. And it is also a more openly comprehensive ideal than Rawlsian
political liberalism, in that it concerns itself, as a matter of justice, not with only political institutions
and laws, but also with social norms and private relationships insofar as they support practices of
domination.
Turning now to political power and state institutions, how distinctive is the neo-republican
approach to the guarding of public power? After all, the robust advocacy of the rule of law,
constitutional governance, popular consent and the protection of basic rights has not been the
preserve of the republican tradition, and has been central to modern constitutional liberalism from its
inception. As recent critics of neo-republican theory have noted, republicans are not on safe grounds
when they charge liberals with the (highly implausible) contention that they exhibit benign
indifference towards the constitutional form of the polity. For insofar as an arbitrary power is a
power that can discretionarily take away people’s rights and liberties, it is, paradigmatically, an illiberal
power (Goodin 2003, Waldron 2007). Only Hobbes and, perhaps, some strands of negative-liberty
liberalism endorse the view that freedom can be as extensive under an arbitrary monarchy as under a
regime constrained by the rule of law. Now that this mis-construal has been clarified, we can
formulate the republican critique of constitutional liberalism more accurately. It is this: liberal
constitutional government can only be non-arbitrary if allows for effective popular control of
legislation and policies. Recall that, for republicans, freedom depends on the availability and quality
of the controls that individuals have over the powers that interfere with them. Freedom, as Pettit put
it in an early formulation, is a kind of ‘anti-power’ (Pettit 1996). Non-arbitrary power tracks interests,
but one sure way to elicit and articulate relevant interests is through forums of democratic
deliberation where all voices can be heard. While the collective people should, in Pettit’s account, not
be the direct ‘authors’ of the laws, they should be its ‘editors’, through multi-layered and inclusive
forums of ‘contestatory democracy’ (Pettit 2000). Neo-republicanism, then, follows recent
democratic theory in its advocacy both of (ex ante) interest-identifying deliberation and of (ex post)
popular control of political decisions. Such democratic input takes place in addition to the traditional
liberal devices of electoral democracy and constitutional protections. An important debate has
further ensued, among republicans, on the subject of which of the latter devices best promotes the

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ideal of republican non-domination. Pettit has taken the view that unrestrained electoral democracy
risks degenerating into populism and majority domination, and has argued that robust schemes of
constitutional protection, entrusted to judicial ‘anti-power’, best fit with the updated ideal of
republican checks and balances. Other republican theorists, such as Richard Bellamy and Jeremy
Waldron, disagree. They question the democratic legitimacy of counter-majoritarian judicial powers.
They regard constitutionalism not as the subjection of the normal process of legislation to a ‘higher’
law protected by a separate judicial body, immune to popular control, but as resulting from the
involvement of the public in a set of political institutions that ensure the process of law-making and
adjudication gives equal consideration to their views. In Bellamy’s formulation, republicanism
demands a robustly ‘political’ rather than a ‘legal’ form of constitutionalism (Bellamy 1996, 2007).
Republican discussions about how best to constrain arbitrary power have, in recent years,
found fruitful applications in the sphere of normative international theory. Republican contributions
to this debate have focused on shifting emphasis away from global theories of distributive justice and
towards the normative scrutiny of transnational and international relationships of power, in light of
the ideal of non-domination. What is gradually emerging is a ‘political’ analysis of global injustice,
focused on a systemic critique of the international political order. While some republicans have
articulated a ‘republican law of peoples’ and argued that states should be free of the domination of
other international actors (Pettit 2010), other have advocated more extensive schemes of
cosmopolitan democracy (Bohman 2004, Marti 2010) and global distributive justice (Lovett 2010).
Yet others have shown that the republican ideal of ‘the free citizen in the free state’ requires a
combination of interstate and cosmopolitan reform, both political and socio-economic (Laborde
2010). Despite these differences, all neo-republicans advocate significant reform of the global order,
and reject both the Westphalian status quo and the ideal of a cosmopolitan world state. They take the
main issue of global politics to be the proliferation of unchecked, arbitrary power – be it that of
states, transnational corporations, or international organizations. They further take political justice –
adequate control by affected individuals and groups of the powers they are subjected to – to be
normatively prior to questions of distributive justice. This gives neo-republican theorizing a slightly
different focus from liberal constitutionalist theories of justice, which tend to be more orientated
towards both ideal theory and distributive questions. Methodologically, however, neo-republicanism
displays affinities with recent developments in the global justice literature, which locate the
circumstances of (distributive) justice, within and across states, in actual socio-political relations – be
they of association, domination or coercion (Valentini 2011). Substantively, neo-republicans’ take on
the shape and form of political reform tends to align them with the more egalitarian, democratic and
radical strands of political theory.

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Some have recently questioned whether the content of the ideal of non-domination is
determinate enough to support the range of progressive, egalitarian causes that neo-republicans
invoke (McMahon 2005, Pettit 2006). It is true that republicans seek broad appeal through an
ecumenically defined ideal of non-domination, yet they also defend substantive positions which
firmly place them on the left, or left-of-centre, of the political spectrum. There is a parallel here with
liberal theorists of ‘public reason’, where public reason is sometimes presented both as a meta-
theoretical language of public debate and as generating the liberal, egalitarian substantive outcomes
that liberals also favour (for example, on issues such as gay marriage or abortion). Arguably, both
liberal public reason and republican non-domination are more indeterminate than their advocates
recognize. Yet what is a worry for analytical philosophers may be a virtue for political activists. For
the language of non-domination, while substantively indeterminate, is a powerful rhetorical
alternative to the ‘real-world’ libertarian language of freedom and the state. To this rhetorical
function of republican discourse we shall now turn.

- Different function: progressive politics in the real neo-liberal world.

We have seen that republican ideology has a distinctive conceptual ‘core’, freedom as non-
domination. This demarcates it clearly from libertarianism, which also places freedom at its core, but
understands freedom as non-interference from the state. Yet the main normative desiderata
associated with freedom as non-domination – the rule of law, constitutionalism, popular consent,
civic virtue – align republicanism with liberal constitutionalist ideals. Disagreement here is more
conceptual (about what liberty is) than normative (about how political institutions should be
designed). Normatively, however, neo-republicans have not contented themselves with reformulating
central liberal constitutional ideas. When fleshed out by neo-republicans, the agenda of non-
domination points beyond liberal constitutionalism, and towards more radically democratic reform of
public authorities, both domestic and international, and of private relations and institutions, both
formal and informal. Neo-republican normative proposals, then, fit neatly with the more egalitarian
and democratic strands of contemporary academic liberalism. Some left-liberals might be tempted to
conclude that, even if neo-republican theory is plausible and attractive, it is structurally compatible
with liberalism, and therefore redundant. To some extent, this response is evidence of the
extraordinary resilience, elasticity and capaciousness of the language of liberalism in Anglophone
academia. But what it misses is the independent attractiveness of republican language in other
contexts, notably non-academic and non-Anglophone, where republican ideals operate as powerful
ideological rhetoric to defuse and combat the real-world, common-sense libertarian construal of
freedom and the state. Whatever the attraction of neo-republicanism as an academic political

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philosophy, then, its advocates also intend it to resonate as a political language for the real world.
Pettit, for example, has suggested that neo-republican proposals are not ‘analytically but rhetorically
distinctive’, and that they have ‘not only normative but significant strategic import’ for progressive
politics (Pettit 1997, 129-147). Pettit’s republican ideal of non-domination directly influenced Spanish
socialist Prime Minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, who invited Pettit to deliver a report card on
the republican achievements of his premiership (Marti and Pettit 2010). Here neo-republicans join
hands with a long tradition of democratic reformers who have taken real politics, not philosophical
utopias, as their main focus (Stears 2009).
What is it about the neo-republican ideal of non-domination, then, that makes it a
particularly suitable language for the advocacy of politically progressive causes? Three points are
worth noting. First, republicanism provides a language with which to criticize the common-sense,
libertarian connection between the free market and individual freedom. Because the real world of
existing liberal democracies is not a Rawlsian world, where ideals of individual freedom and
egalitarian social justice spontaneously cohere, and because in many non-Anglophone countries
‘liberalism’ is a only byword for the defense of economic liberties and market-based laissez-faire, there
is a pressing need for a political ideology that can provide a powerful rhetorical counterpoint to
libertarianism. Neo-republicanism, because (unlike socialism) it invokes the single, engaging value of
freedom in arguing for state policies, unsettles the discursive monopoly that neo-liberals claim over
the ideal of freedom. It allows republicans to explain (in the vein of Rousseau and Marx) that formal
consent is not sufficient to guarantee non-domination: workers, for example, are not free if they are
entirely dependent on the arbitrary will of their employers. It also allows them to put forward a
political critique of economic inequalities, one which points not to the intrinsic injustice of
differential gaps in wealth and income but, rather, to their detrimental effects both on civic cohesion
and solidarity (Sandel 1996) and on the dependence of the poor on the rich (Spitz 2010). Destitution,
ill-health and lack of employment are to be combated insofar as they make people structurally
vulnerable to domination. In addition, republicans do not shy away from tightly connecting market
freedoms and rights to social responsibilities – notably for those organisations, such as large firms
and banks, on which the futures of many depend. Republican political economy attractively captures
and reformulates key socialist, solidariste and social-democratic ideals, without however embracing the
top-down centralized statism, end-state egalitarianism, and anti-market rhetoric which have
historically accompanied them. Many republicans value the market economy for instrumental
reasons, because it disperses power, and because private property, as Rousseau insisted, guarantees a
basic degree of citizens’ self-sufficiency (Pettit 2006). This insight has been generalized into
innovative proposals for the provision of a basic income, or of funds to all citizens, as a ‘civic
minimum’ tied to their status as citizen and guaranteeing their independence (White 2003). The

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language of republicanism is compatible with a regulated market economy, and it resonates with the
left-wing critique of the market society (White & Leighton 2008).
Second, neo-republicans connect the ideal of freedom to civic demands for rulers’
accountability and popular control. In an age of popular mobilization against the seemingly arbitrary
forces of globalized financial capitalism and the steady erosion of democratically-authorized
collective organizations it brings in its wake, the rhetorical and political effectiveness of the
republican motto of resistance to ‘alien power’ cannot be underestimated. The concept of
domination, in particular, provides a vivid and accurate description of the diffuse sense of
disempowerment and alienation characteristic of contemporary politics, notably in their globalized
form. The idea of non-domination, in turn, can be cashed out through a range of strategies aiming at
bringing sources of arbitrary power, both political and economic, under the closer ‘control’ of those
who are subjected to it. Because the idea of popular control of power does not mandate a single
political strategy (say, of direct democratic participation) it can be filled in by a range of different
proposals. As a result, republicanism has provided an influential language for conceptualizing and
defending practices of political liberty in a variety of political contexts, from the United Kingdom to
South Korea and Chile (White and Leighton 2008, Kwak 2007, Vatter 2010).
Third, and lastly, the republican ideal of collective non-domination allows citizens and
political activists to deploy a rich language of civic solidarity, pursuit of the common good of justice,
and shared commitment to the republic, above and beyond the profound differences that otherwise
divide them. As a language of civic solidarity, then, republicanism provides an attractive alternative to
the nationalist and conservative politics of cultural or ethnic homogeneity. In Arendtian fashion, it
draws attention to the politics of being- and mixing-together, rather than being-the-same – a vision
with significant practical implications, for example in urban and education policy. The neo-republican
vision of politics repudiates communitarian, identity-centered constructions of shared identity, yet it
does not give up on collective projects, civic mobilisations and shared identifications (Honohan
2001, Laborde 2008). To that extent, it provides a powerful ideological language for the Left in a
variety of political traditions. Whether it has sufficiently deep and robust roots in Anglophone
political theory to be an effective competitor or interlocutor to liberalism remains, however, open to
question.

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