Republican freedom and the rule of law

Politics, Philosophy & Economics

Volumn 5, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 201-220

  List, Christian ^a  

^a LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

freedom; liberal paradox; liberalism; non domination; noninterference; republicanism; robustness; rule of law

Indexed keywords

EID: 34248032160     PISSN: 1470594X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1470594X06064222     Document Type: Article

References (22)

1. P. Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). See also Q. Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
2. P. Pettit, ‘Deliberative Democracy, the Discursive Dilemma, and Republican Theory’, in Debating Deliberative Democracy, edited by J.S. Fishkin and P. Laslett (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), p. 151.
3. For a recent critique of this claim, see C. McMahon, ‘The Indeterminacy of Republican Policy’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 33 (2005): 67-93.
4. C. List, ‘The Impossibility of a Paretian Republican? Some Comments on Pettit and Sen’, Economics and Philosophy 20 (2004): 65-87.
5. The classic article is A.K. Sen, ‘The Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal’, Journal of Political Economy 78 (1970): 152-7. My argument is consistent with Pettit's claim that the republican conception of freedom as non-domination is similar to, but more demanding than, Sen's conception of freedom as individual decisiveness. See P. Pettit, ‘Capability and Freedom: A Defense of Sen’, Economics and Philosophy 17 (2001): 1-20.
6. The terms ‘positive’ and ‘normative’ are used here in the same way as they are used in the philosophy of logic and language, in ethics, and in theories of rationality; the distinction here is not meant to refer to debates concerning legal positivism.
7. For an argument for the existence of laws in the social sciences, see H. Kincaid, ‘Defending Laws in the Social Sciences’, in Readings in the Philosophy of Social Science, edited by M. Martin and L. McIntyre (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).
8. Notice that I have already made the law explicitly conditional on a Euclidean geometry, so the possibility of a non-Euclidean geometry does not undermine the law.
9. Pettit, ‘Capability and Freedom: A Defense of Sen’, p. 18.
10. List, ‘The Impossibility of a Paretian Republican? Some Comments on Pettit and Sen’.
11. See Pettit, ‘Capability and Freedom: A Defense of Sen’. See also A.K. Sen, ‘Reply’, Economics and Philosophy 17 (2001): 51-66. Crucially, Sen's earlier account of freedom as individual decisiveness is distinct from his more recent account of freedom as capability.
12. Pettit, ‘Capability and Freedom: A Defense of Sen’.
13. For a more technical exposition, see List, ‘The Impossibility of a Paretian Republican? Some Comments on Pettit and Sen’.
14. This statement of the theorem has been adapted from Sen. For the original statement of his theorem, see Sen, ‘The Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal’. For further details on the application of Sen's result to the republican framework, see List, ‘The Impossibility of a Paretian Republican? Some Comments on Pettit and Sen’.
15. For a recent response to Sen's liberal paradox based on John Stuart Mill's philosophy, see J. Riley, ‘Liberal Rights in a Pareto-optimal Code’, Utilitas 18 (2006), forthcoming.
16. Note, however, that some liberal paradoxes may occur even without the condition of Pareto efficiency, and it is plausible to assume that these paradoxes will also reemerge in a republican framework. See A. Gibbard, ‘A Pareto Consistent Libertarian Claim’, Journal of Economic Theory 7 (1974): 388-410.
17. J.H. Blau, ‘Liberal Values and Independence’, Review of Economic Studies 42 (1975): 395-401; J. Craven, ‘Liberalism and Individual Preference’, Theory and Decision 14 (1982): 351-60; W. Gaertner and L. Krueger, ‘Self-supporting Preferences and Individual Rights: The Possibility of Paretian Libertarianism’, Economica 48 (1981): 17-28; G.A. Gigliotti, ‘Comment on Craven’, Theory and Decision 21 (1986): 89-95; A.K. Sen, ‘Liberty and Social Choice’, Journal of Philosophy 80 (1983): 5-28.
18. P. Pettit, ‘Freedom and Probability’, Working paper (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University).
19. K. Dowding and M. van Hees, ‘The Construction of Rights’, American Political Science Review 97 (2003): 281-93.
20. Pettit, ‘Freedom and Probability’.
21. For a discussion of this possibility, see, for example, Roberts, ‘A Positive Model of Private Charity and Public Transfers’, Journal of Political Economy 92 (1994): 136-48.
22. J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).