ABSTRACT
Republicanism has emerged in recent years as a full-fledged theoretical alternative to the normative political theories that have been at the centre of philosophical debates in the English-speaking world, such as liberalism, socialism and communitarianism. As formulated in Philip Pettit’s much-discussed book Republicanism, the theory is based upon an original understanding of political liberty and of its institutional requirements. According to Pettit, liberty should be understood as ‘non-domination’. Like the negative liberty famously discussed in Isaiah Berlin’s essay, ‘Two concepts of liberty’, republican liberty as construed by Pettit is concerned with removing obstacles to human activity. But unlike the conception of liberty favoured by Berlin, it emphasises potential obstacles to freedom as much as it does fully realised ones. According to this conception, a person is unfree when another can choose arbitrarily to interfere with her, and not only when that person does so choose. A number of important institutional implications follow from this conception of freedom.
