ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a republican argument for the obligation to enter into a cosmopolitan political community. The first task is to reject the most common interpretation of the normative significance of global interdependence. The second task is to provide the normative basis for those republican arrangements that best respond to the new potentials for tyranny and domination. The chapter aims to make explicit the normative premises of a critical account of globalization and to show why they support republican cosmopolitanism in much the same way that the fact of pluralism supports political liberalism. According to the republican ideal, a well-ordered political community creates conditions for nonarbitrary political authority. For this reason the republican tradition emphasizes that "government by law rather than by men" is the best way to avoid the potential for tyranny inherent in all forms of political authority, including majority rule.
