Republican Liberty- The freedom you’ve (probably) never heard of.
Republican liberty is most likely a concept that is alien to most readers. Yet, an understanding of it allows one to better explain their intuitions, as well as better critique the political views of others. This short article hopes to give you the basic tools to do this, giving you an introduction into republican liberty.
To understand republican liberty I like to start with a scenario. We can imagine two people who have been stranded on some remote island. By sheer luck, A has managed to pool all of the island’s resources before B wakes up and hides them in a location that is well hidden. When B finally wakes, she asks A for some food. A then asks B to engage in a number of demeaning tasks before they will give them any food (this scenario is taken from Goodin’s analysis of vulnerability).
Is B free? Intuitively it seems quite clear that they are not. However, negative liberty, the most commonly used concept of liberty, says that they are. A is not interfering in B’s life directly and so any exchange that the two engage in is made freely and voluntarily (at least in the negative sense). So, we must appeal to something different to satisfy our intuitions. This something different is republican liberty- freedom as non-domination. Republican liberty is a relational concept of freedom whereby someone is free by virtue of where they stand in relation to another, unlike negative freedom which purely looks at the features of an act or exchange without taking into account the broader context. Someone dominates another when they are in a position (relationally) to arbitrarily make demands of that other person. They may never exercise this power but so long as they have it the ability of the other person to determine the course of their own life is constrained. (Pettit, 1997, 52).
Let us return to our two castaways. In this example the relation between the two is one of ‘asymmetric dependence’ (White, 2011, 566). This means that there is inequality in the power that they have to make requests of the other and meaningfully accept/deny them. A can ask B to do any number of demeaning tasks and B has no real power to say no- they will die if they reject A’s demands (as, if we recall, A has a monopoly on all the resources on the island). B on the other hand cannot make any demands of A. A has no dependence on B because they already have all they need to survive.
Therefore, there is inequality in the power to make demands. As Pettit puts it, B is “subject to the arbitrary will” of A- arbitrary because A does not have to take into account B’s desires when making the demand (Pettit, 1997, 52) This example uses one of the most extreme cases of this inequality in power- where one agent is reliant on another for their very means of subsistence (they require something from them to not die). But from this simple scenario we can expand on the concept of freedom as non-domination to see why our intuitions perceive unfreedom in all aspects of life from the economy, to the family, to our political structure.
Let us briefly address one of these intuitions. Firstly, the case of monopoly and monopsony power- particularly in the labour market. We can imagine a town in which there is only one employer and no social support scheme. This is an example of monopsony power in the labour market- where there is only one ‘buyer of labour’ who is able to set the wage rate below the equilibrium level (Taylor, 2017, 5). Any time a buyer or seller is able to set a price at a different level to the equilibrium they are called a ‘price maker’. In this example the labourers have no choice but to accept a wage- they need it for their subsistence- so the minimum wage they will accept would be a subsistence wage. They are ‘price takers’. The wage will, therefore, be set anywhere between the subsistence wage and the equilibrium wage. So, the workers are subject to a wage determined by the arbitrary will of someone else, the employer. Even if the wage is set at the equilibrium it is only done so by virtue of the ‘good will’ of the employer and does not change the circumstances of domination (remember that the person who holds the power never actually has to exercise that power to restrict the freedom of another) (Thomas, 2016, 97). Equally, the conditions of the workplace are established in this arbitrary way (White, 2011, 567). Because the alternative to working at this firm is death, the workers will tolerate any number of bad conditions up to the point that they are indifferent between working there and being dead. As one can imagine this allows a lot of room for abuse. Again, even if the working conditions are good this is only by virtue of the good will of the employer. Ultimately, this is all meant to demonstrate how employees ‘asymmetric dependence’ on employers opens them up to arbitrary interference, at least in the case of monopsony power.
Negative freedom is unable to make the argument that monopoly and monopsony power are bad. There is no actual interference going on: so long as a labourer signs a contract without being physically coerced by another agent it does not matter whether a wage was below the equilibrium level or not. This allows us to understand the difference between negative ‘natural rights’ libertarians like Rothbard and Nozick; and republican ‘empirical’ libertarians like Hayek and Friedman. The latter understand the importance of inequality in market power and so argue that the state has a legitimate role in correcting for this (if there is no other means to achieve it) while the former do not. Incidentally, even the empirical libertarians fail to understand the true scope of what sort of economy republican liberty demands because they place too much emphasis on domination by the state and not domination by private entities, however a discussion on that is for another time (see Thomas, 2017). The point of this investigation into market power was to demonstrate how an understanding of republican liberty is entwined within an understanding of neo-classical economics and that negative liberty is, therefore, unable to satisfy our intuitions on unfreedom.
I hope that this has been a satisfying and accessible introduction to the concept of Republican Liberty. I want to stress its importance in being able to understand our intuitive critiques of society and wanted to do this by showing how an understanding of negative liberty is insufficient. If you wish to read more on Republican Liberty as a concept I would point you to any of the sources below, although most of them will be quite tricky to understand without a basic academic background. Alternatively, feel free to leave any questions (and any criticisms) in the comments below and I will be happy to get back to you.
Bibliography
Berlin, I (1958) Two Concepts of Liberty. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Pettit, P. (1997) Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. New York: Oxford University Press.
Taylor, R. (2017). Exit Left: Markets and Mobility in Republican Thought. Oxford Scholarship Online.
Thomas, A. (2017) Republic of Equals: Predistribution and Property-Owning Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press.
White, S. (2011) “The Republican Critique of Capitalism”. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy. 14(5). 561–579.
