Our intuitions about what constitutes liberty or political freedom
are best captured by the so-called republican conception of
freedom. On this account, freedom is “the secure enjoyment of
non-domination”, i.e. “the absence of any structural dependence on
arbitrary
Power”.Lovett (2022).
Importantly,
non-domination comes in degrees: … one is not either free or unfree, but rather more or less free depending on the extent of non-domination one securely enjoys.Ibid.
In political reality, this is translated into a burden of proof for
domination: every form of (partial) domination has to be
legitimised, e.g. democratically by Consent of the
dominated (government and citizens) or morally by a duty of care to the
dominated (parents and children).This is close to Noam Chomsky’s
explication of the core idea of Anarchism.
In both its conceptualisation and its application, republican freedom is emancipatory. Shifting our understanding from more conventional liberal towards a republican conception is thus a form of Conceptual Engineering in service of Critical Theory.
References
- Chomsky: “Anarchism“
- Lovett (2022): “Republicanism”
- Skinner (2016): “A Genealogy of Liberty”