ABSTRACT
Republicanism is unique among libertarianism’s ideological rivals in that it also treats freedom as a social and political maximand. However, republicans don’t associate freedom with unconstrained choice, but rather with the absence of domination; that is, of power that can be exercised at will by those who hold it. Freedom as libertarians conceive of it – market freedom, as I call it for short – therefore has a troubled and uncertain place in republican political thought. The republican critique of libertarianism has three main strands. According to the first critique, the exercise of market freedom leads to the corruption of civic virtue and thus of public life; according to the second critique, the unregulated exercise of market freedom leads to the accumulation of private power, and thus to the domination of the less by the more powerful; according to the third critique, markets themselves are unaccountable, and are therefore a dominating presence in the lives of those who participate in or depend upon them. Taken together, these three critiques make the relationship between republican and libertarian ideas about freedom an unusually fertile area of inquiry.
