Neo-republicanism and the civic economy

Politics, Philosophy & Economics

Volumn 5, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 151-173

  Dagger, Richard ^a  

^a ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

basic income; civic virtue; consumption tax; deliberative politics; equality; inheritance tax; markets; property owning democracy; publicity; republicanism; self government

Indexed keywords

EID: 34248040081     PISSN: 1470594X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1470594X06064219     Document Type: Article

References (54)

1. Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 161.
2. Michael Sandel, Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), Part II.
3. Cass Sunstein, ‘Beyond the Republican Revival’, Yale Law Journal 97 (1988): 1539-89; Cass Sunstein, Republic.Com (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
4. John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), Part IV.
5. Gerald F. Gaus, ‘Backwards into the Future: Neorepublicanism as a Postsocialist Critique of Market Society’, Social Philosophy and Policy 20 (2003): 59-91.
6. This section draws on Richard Dagger, ‘Communitarianism and Republicanism’, in Handbook of Political Theory, edited by Gerald Gaus and Chandran Kukathas (London: Sage Publications, 2004), pp. 167–79.
7. John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government, in On Liberty and Other Essays, edited by John Gray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 355.
8. Cicero, On the Commonwealth, in On the Commonwealth and On the Laws, edited by James Zetzel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 18.
9. For example, Philip Pettit, ‘Review of Michael Sandel, Democracy's Discontent’, Journal of Philosophy 95 (1998): 73-96; Iseult Honohan, Civic Republicanism (London: Routledge, 2002).
10. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract, edited by R.D. Masters, translated by J.R. Masters (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1978), p. 56.
11. Margaret Jane Radin, Reinterpreting Property (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 159.
12. Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), pp. 179–83; Will Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 4–5.
13. Michael Sandel, ‘What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets’, in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values 21, edited by Grethe Peterson (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2000), p. 121.
14. Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, p. 64.
15. Richard Dagger, ‘Autonomy, Domination, and the Republican Challenge to Liberalism’, in Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism, edited by John Christman and Joel Anderson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 177–203. See also Charles Larmore, ‘A Critique of Philip Pettit's Republicanism’, Philosophical Issues, special issue of Noüs 11 (2001): 229-43, especially pp. 233–9.
16. Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, p. 41.
17. Sunstein, ‘Beyond the Republican Revival’, p. 1549.
18. For a neo-republican account of the complexities of deliberative politics, see Philip Pettit, ‘Deliberative Democracy and the Discursive Dilemma’, Philosophical Issues, special issue of Noüs 11 (2001): 268-95.
19. Sandel, Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy, p. 6.
20. See, for example, Sunstein, ‘Beyond the Republican Revival’, and Shelley Burtt, ‘The Politics of Virtue Today: A Critique and a Proposal’, American Political Science Review 87 (1993): 360-8 for liberal republicanism; Thomas Spragens Jr, Civic Liberalism: Reflections on Our Democratic Ideals (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999); Richard Dagger, Civic Virtues: Rights, Citizenship, and Republican Liberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
21. Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, p. 163.
22. Gaus, ‘Backwards into the Future’, p. 64.
23. Cass Sunstein, Free Markets and Social Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
24. Gaus, ‘Backwards into the Future’, p. 59.
25. William H. Simon even sees an ‘alternative to classical liberalism inspired by the ideal of economic democracy. This alternative can be found in converging elements of the traditions of republicanism and market socialism’. William H. Simon, ‘Social-Republican Property’, UCLA Law Review 38 (1991): 1335.
26. Gaus, ‘Backwards into the Future’, p. 64; see also p. 90: ‘The market, we are told [by neo-republicans] is characterized by an imbalance of power, and so it is a realm of unfreedom; that it takes for granted people's preferences, but that these are often nonautonomous and run contrary to the agent's own best interest; and that it allows trades that ought not - indeed, rationally cannot - be made.’
27. See, for example, Terence Ball's fanciful ‘Imagining Marketopia’, Dissent 48 (2003): 74-80; and Sandel, ‘What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets’.
28. Stuart White, The Civic Minimum: On the Rights and Obligations of Economic Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 45 for the quoted passages (emphasis added), and pp. 44–7 for his account of market vulnerability and dependent exchange.
29. Jon Elster, ‘The Market and the Forum: Three Varieties of Political Theory’, in Foundations of Social Choice Theory, edited by J. Elster and A. Hylland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
30. For elaboration of this argument, see Dagger, Civic Virtues: Rights, Citizenship, and Republican Liberalism, p. 107.
31. For the tendency of the market to encourage the production and sale of luxury goods, see Robert Frank, Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess (New York: Free Press, 1999).
32. Rousseau, On the Social Contract, p. 58.
33. See generally Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, Part IV.
34. J.E. Meade, Efficiency, Equality, and the Ownership of Property (London: Allen and Unwin, 1964), Ch. 5; J.E. Meade, ‘Agathotopia: The Economics of Partnership’, in Liberty, Equality, and Efficiency: Apologia pro Agathotopia Mea (New York: New York University Press, 1993), pp. 100–64. See also Richard Krouse and Michael McPherson, ‘Capitalism, “Property-Owning Democracy”, and the Welfare State’, in Democracy and the Welfare State, edited by Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).
35. Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, p. 139.
36. See, for example, Simon, ‘Social-Republican Property’, pp. 1341–50, for the claim that two features distinguish ‘social-republican’ from ‘liberal private’ property: (1) restraints on transfer or alienation that encourage people to stay and participate in community affairs rather than sell out and move on; and (2) restraints on the accumulation of property so as to limit inequality.
37. Sandel, Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy, p. 242.
38. Hannah Arendt, who distinguishes labor from work and both of these from action, would no doubt say that the slave's labor should not be considered work at all (see Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition [Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1958], Section 11). Perhaps not, but there are other activities that she classifies as labor, such as farming, that should be considered work for the purposes of this article.
39. Christopher McMahon, ‘The Indeterminacy of Republican Policy’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 33 (2005): 85 (original emphasis).
40. Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, pp. 141–2; but compare McMahon, ‘The Indeterminacy of Republican Policy’, pp. 81–9.
41. Nien-hê Hsieh, ‘Rawlsian Justice and Workplace Republicanism’, Social Theory and Practice 31 (2005): 116.
42. See, for example, Sandel, Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy, pp. 227–31, 334-5.
43. Richard Dagger, ‘Republicanism and the Politics of Place’, Philosophical Explorations 4 (2001): 157-73. See also David Miller, ‘Bounded Citizenship’, in Citizenship and National Identity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000). For useful comments on globalization from a viewpoint sympathetic to republicanism, see White, The Civic Minimum: On the Rights and Obligations of Economic Citizenship, pp. 206–10.
44. Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, p. 161.
45. White, The Civic Minimum: On the Rights and Obligations of Economic Citizenship, p. 182.
46. Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, p. 161.
47. For a brief, lucid account of how such a tax would work, see Frank, Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess, pp. 211–26. For a sample of the extensive literature on the consumption or expenditure tax, see Nicholas Kaldor, An Expenditure Tax (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977 [1955]); Joseph Pechman (editor), What Should Be Taxed: Income or Expenditure? (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1980), pp. 75–113; Laurence Seidman, The USA Tax: A Progressive Consumption Tax (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).
48. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, edited by C.B. Macpherson (London: Penguin Books, 1968 [1651]), pp. 386–7.
49. The contrary view is taken in David Casassas and Daniel Raventós, ‘Property and Republican Freedom at the Beginning of the 21st Century: Basic Income as a Right of Existence’, unpublished manuscript.
50. Philippe van Parijs, Real Freedom for All: What (If Anything) Can Justify Capitalism? (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 94, 169.
51. For this term and a brief discussion of possible republican basic-income programs, see White, The Civic Minimum: On the Rights and Obligations of Economic Citizenship, pp. 170–1.
52. Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott, The Stakeholder Society (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), passim; White, The Civic Minimum: On the Rights and Obligations of Economic Citizenship, especially pp. 186–99.
53. White, The Civic Minimum: On the Rights and Obligations of Economic Citizenship, p. 186.
54. As McMahon argues in ‘The Indeterminacy of Republican Policy’.