by Tim Sommers
Imagine a slave in ancient Rome with a very generous master. A master so, generous, in fact, that this slave lives their entire life doing as they choose and their master never once interferes with them. The liberal view of liberty, enshrined, for example, in the U.S. Constitution, is that liberty, or at least the most fundamental kind of political liberty, is the right to not be interfered with, especially by the government. This freedom not to be prohibited from or impeded in doing what one will is often called “negative liberty” – as opposed to “positive” liberty which implies the will (autonomy/self-directedness) and the means (money, for example) – and not just the absence of interference.
The point of the generous master hypothetical is that the slave seems to be free, in the negative, liberal sense; that is, free from interference, specifically, from their master. Yet surely, as a slave, even as the slave of a very, very generous master, one is not free. There must be something wrong, then, with the liberal idea that freedom is simply freedom from certain kinds of outside interference.
Political philosopher Phillip Pettit, who formulated this hypothetical, says, and it is hard to argue with him, that the slave is not free since the master could have interfered at any point – even though they didn’t. This kind of unfreedom he calls “domination” and, so, his account of freedom he calls “liberty as non-domination” or the “republican” theory.
Over the last twenty years, Pettit has been attempting to resuscitate, he says, “the republican viewpoint as a political philosophy.” He’s been developing a “neorepublicanism” which he thinks is founded on a significant theoretical difference between the republican and liberal views of political freedom.
Pettit thinks that his hypothetical generous master shows that the master and slave have a hierarchical relation, even if the dominant party never exercises their power. Arguably, the master still oppresses the slave without ever interfering with them. Read more »