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date: 21 April 2021

Abstract and Keywords

How should freedom be characterized as a political ideal? This chapter explores one such view, commonly called “republican” or sometimes “neo-Roman,” which holds that the specific sort of freedom a well-ordered society ought to promote is freedom from domination. Recently, a number of new challenges to this view have been raised. The most important of these are that republicans have failed to develop a conception of freedom distinct in any meaningful sense from the non-interference conception and, in concentrating on relationships of domination, inappropriately narrowed the scope of freedom. This chapter argues that when we carefully attend to the suggestion that a conception of freedom ought to serve as a central public ideal for well-ordered societies, these particular challenges can be seen to fail. Some other challenges are shown to remain, however.

Keywords: freedom, domination, non-domination, republicanism, non-interference

Frank Lovett

Frank Lovett is Associate Professor of Political Science, and Director of Legal Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

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