The Determinacy of Republican Policy: A Reply to McMahon

As formulated by Philip Pettit, the political theory of republicanism rests on the foundation of a distinctive conception of freedom: freedom as nondomination. An individual enjoys freedom as nondomination if and only if he is "more or less saliently immune to interference on an arbitrary basis."' This way of understanding freedom is contrasted with the view, associated with Hobbes, that freedom consists in the absence of actual interference, by compulsion or coercion, with choice. Pettit presents republicanism as an alternative to left-liberal theories of the good polity of the sort offered by Rawls. He describes these theories as combining a concern to promote freedom as noninterference with moral values such as justice and equality (p. 9). Pettit's vision of the policies and institutions of a good polity is similar to that of liberals such as Rawls. But he believes that once the concept of freedom as nondomination is on the scene, it can do by itself all (or almost all) the work that a normative political theory needs to do. A good polity can be defined, in effect, as one in which freedom as nondomination is successfully promoted.2 Thus Pettit formulates republicanism as a species of consequentialism. The appropriate institutions and policies are those that maximize nondomination.