Republican political thought emerged out of the Italian Renaissance’s orientation towards ancient Roman and Greek models of political life. It spread to the north and west as a minor note in humanism and an appendix or counterpoint to some of the new natural law thinking. It coalesced in the Dutch Republic at the end of the sixteenth century, from whence it informed both the Parliamentarism nascent in England and the incipient efforts to secure Irish independence from England. These republicanisms would collide when the English Commonwealth invaded Ireland in 1649, destroying the Irish Confederacy. But republican thought would re-emerge as a trans-Atlantic phenomenon in the next century, part of the explosive mixture circulating among American colonists, French anti-monarchists, Haitian revolutionaries, English radicals, and Irish rebels.
Republicanism was an especially combustible element of the Atlantic ideology. It signified the rule of law rather than of men, an independent and equal status for all, the destruction of despotism and unaccountable power, and constitutional constraints on states to pursue only the public welfare. As it escaped from its aristocratic past, where it had been wielded by hereditary peers against the presumption of monarchs, republicanism found its way into the hands of slaves fighting for emancipation, proletarians desirous both of equal suffrage and control over the terms of labour, women seeking independence from tyrannical husbands and fathers, and colonised peoples wishing to join the ranks of equal and independent states. Spoken in a universal tongue, republicanism meant that all were equally due the respect and status of free persons and that no one should be subject to the arbitrary power of another.
From the perspective of later history, it can seem at times that republicanism has been, if not victorious, then at least vindicated. From a revolutionary creed it has become simply the official doctrine of the status quo. The state is to be constrained by law to pursue only public ends. The officials who operate the levers of state power are to be prevented – by democratic elections, constitutional checks and balances, and the division of powers – from appropriating that power to their private ends. Private actors are to be policed by the legal apparatus of the state so that they cannot subject one another to coercion or violence. Each individual is to be protected in their person and their property, and thereby guaranteed the independence necessary to live according to their own lights. In this way, the means of violence are monopolised by the central state, the central state is constrained to be ruled by law, the law is fashioned and overseen by representatives of the people, and the people are free to enjoy their property and their associations under the protection of the state.
No one would say that this vision has been realised universally or that republican freedom is equally enjoyed by all. Nonetheless, many of the major political and cultural institutions of the contemporary world are in broad agreement with the primary theorists of republican freedom. The Weberian state is capable of delivering republican freedom to all when it (a) is constrained to govern on the people’s terms, (b) allows competitive markets to distribute economic resources against a backdrop of state-provisioned guaranteed minimums, and (c) is embedded in an international legal regime of free and equal states. The world does not live up to this ideal, but it is, nonetheless, the ideal of this world, the normative model for existing modern institutions of constitutional states, free markets, and international law.
Republicanism’s unfinished business
I do not want to minimise the gap between the normative vision of universal republican freedom and the contemporary world. Massive improvements in people’s lives would emerge from a sustained movement towards realising this vision. If, for instance, the formerly colonised people of the world actually enjoyed strong constitutional states of their own – states capable of protecting their citizens from one another and from predation by multinational criminal organisations and corporations (but I repeat myself) – then the mechanisms of trade and international law could deliver massive economic and security benefits that they currently do not. Yes, republicanism articulates the normative vision of the status quo. But compelling the world to actually live up to its own normative standards would entail phenomenal improvements in the lives of billions of people, redistribution of power and wealth in a radical fashion, and transformation of the political and economic life of everyone.
However, there are also good reasons to think that the desire for freedom will never be satisfied by a world of constitutional states, free markets, and international law. There is a messier side to republicanism that is hidden from view when treated as a normative vision. What made it a revolutionary doctrine in the eighteenth century was not the ideal world of freedom that it projected, but the way it framed the complaint about unfreedom. The diagnosis of domination is the restlessness of the negative at the heart of republicanism, and this cannot be placated by the state or the market, much less by the international order that is supposedly integrated by interstate relations and global markets.
Domination and the market
Why is the diagnosis of domination so explosive and so intransigent? What is the nature of the republican complaint, and why can’t the state and the market satisfy it?
The basic republican intuition is that you are unfree when you are vulnerable to the power of another in a certain way, even if that power is never exercised against you. This condition of unfreedom is named domination. What makes vulnerability into domination is that the power is both significant – being a power over basic goods, like access to sustenance, physical integrity, or social belonging – and possessed by an uncontrolled or unaccountable agent. Thus, a monarch who can act independently of parliament has dominating power, and those subject to this power are unfree. Thus, also, a people subject to foreign rule are dominated, being vulnerable to the power of the occupiers, who do not have to answer to the people whose land they occupy.
However, the institutions and social arrangements that are supposed to protect people from domination often also reshuffle it, shifting power from an identifiable and public loci to obscure and distant ones, or from obvious tyrants to dissembling ones.
Take the market, for instance. The market is supposed to replace ties of personal dependence, coercion, and abject beggary with the freedom to take or refuse any offer, and to take your business elsewhere if you don’t like someone’s terms. In the language made famous by Albert O. Hirschmann, a free market secures for everyone the right of exit, and if you can exit any relationship, then you cannot be dominated in that relationship.
It would be absurd to deny that exit rights are important means of fighting domination, but there are also serious problems with overestimating what markets can do. An economy can only work as a “market-based” economy insofar as one market in particular – the labour market – develops into the central mechanism for most people to acquire the means of living. But the labour market is constituted by people’s vulnerability, by the fact that they have to sell themselves day-in and day-out to survive. “Market-based” economies also give rise to immense wealth – this is indeed supposed to one of their virtues – and the interaction between a mass of people who must sell themselves to afford food and shelter and extreme concentrations of wealth is not promising for the freedom of the vulnerable.
Individual rights of exit – the right to divorce, the right to move away, the right to quit, the right to go elsewhere – are not self-supplying. They are only secured by collective projects of solidarity – the feminist movement, networks of kin or friends and secure legal protections for migrants, a vibrant labour movement, consumer protections that regulate and standardise, etc. – and these collective projects are neither supplied nor ensured by the market. Exposure to market competition across all facets of life would be a nightmare of insecurity in which most people would have no control over what could be done to them, even if their property rights were perfectly safe. Since we need access to material and social assistance in order to live, we need to be able to compel others to help us, not merely to prevent them from hurting us.
For all these reasons, markets cannot be relied upon to assuage domination complaints. Functioning markets can insulate people against unaccountable power by giving them the ability to escape. But markets can also subject people to power they cannot challenge by giving the wealthy the means and the motive to withdraw support from those who need it while offloading responsibility onto the aggregated decisions of investors and customers who cannot be confronted.
Why the state cannot guarantee republican rights under capitalism
But if markets can provoke claims of domination as easily as they can answer them, can’t republicans fall back on the democratic power of the state to oversee the market and ensure that every citizen retains their equal standing before the law?
Unfortunately, no. If there is a tendency to idealise the right of exit embodied in the market, there is a matching tendency to idealise the right of voice embodied in the democratic state. This idealisation expresses itself in the belief that universal democratic citizenship and the legitimacy that comes with it are the preconditions for robust social justice. The thought is that only a democratically legitimate state, which dominates no one, can protect citizens against domination by other citizens.
There are three problems, at least. First, if you grant that forms of social domination exist, then you should also grant that the socially dominant are unlikely to agree to share power on equal terms within the state. Systems of domination give rise inevitably to ideological justifications, and these are cognitive shields for the dominant, protecting them from the unwelcome thought that those subject to their power are capable of sharing power as equals and deserve to do so. Policies and procedures that put the dominated on equal footing with the dominant or allow the former to hold the latter to account will be experienced by the powerful as prima facie unreasonable and threatening.
We should therefore expect that socially and economically dominant groups will resist and seek to subvert the establishment of equal protection and that they will do so under the banner of – equal protection! Indeed, this is precisely what we have seen in the United States since Trump’s inauguration, where rolling back DEI initiatives has followed the playbook established by the dismantling of affirmative action programs, proceeding in the name of colourblind evaluation and anti-discrimination. Similarly, anti-union laws have always been justified as establishing the equal right of all to work, or as protecting workers against private coercion and cartels.
Second, even if equal rules and procedures are adopted, rules don’t enforce themselves, and the application of the law is necessarily given over to enforcement agencies with broad discretion over how and where the rules are enforced. The rule against homicide is impeccably fair and reasonable, but this does not prevent it from being enforced disproportionately against the powerless and disenfranchised, who are both over-policed and under-protected by the police. The state, via its policing and executive powers, can be an agent of domination even if its rules and procedures are democratically framed.
Finally, the very impersonality of rules and procedures – the fact that they are not respecters of persons and are supposed to bind their makers as much as anyone – can have the perverse effect of confronting the common citizen with an impenetrable maze of decisions without deciders. Everyone you encounter in a bureaucracy or a corporate structure or a legal system is simply following rules that emanate from elsewhere, and everyone denies both having the power to decide otherwise and being able to direct you to anyone with that power.
The economist and journalist Dan Davies attributes these situations to what he calls accountability sinks: when a system of rules and processes is so established as to prevent anyone affected by the decisions taken by the system’s agents from altering the system. No agent in the system is accountable because the procedures – by deflection or dispersal – prevent the consequences of any decision from being felt by the decision-maker. In this way, the bureaucratic state order, the managerialism of the modern corporation, and the market itself all function in tandem to obscure decision-makers and insulate them from the complaints of those affected by their decisions. Individuals are all subject to opaque and uncontrollable powers – and therefore have reason to feel dominated – but cannot even identify the hands in which this power lies.
How the international system undermines republicanism
The inadequacies of the state and the market to quiet the domination complaint are compounded rather than offset by the international system that integrates states and markets. Most states are far too weak to be anything but dependencies of transnational capital. Being in government means being responsible to the demands of capital, not to the people who elected you or who are most affected by your decisions.
The growth of the international system out of the history of modern European imperialism and colonialism has also stranded most postcolonial states in a bad equilibrium: too weak internally to stamp out competing centres of authority, they suffer from clientelism and internal instability, which makes them risky investment opportunities, allowing investors and guarantors to extract terms that keep the central state in its weakened condition.
In Indonesia, for example, foreign direct investment in liquid natural gas productions seems to have led directly to the emergence of rebel groups contesting the government over rents. And in Colombia, multinationals were drawn in at the height of its narco wars precisely because they could take advantage of the central state’s desperation for income. Scholars such as Pablo M. Pinto and Boliang Zhu have drawn on such cases to argue that foreign investment often contributes directly to domestic instability and civil conflict.
Global economic development and trade liberalisation have diminished nation-to-nation inequality, but only by widening inequality within developed and developing nations alike. The swelling steam of internal and international migrants – fleeing poverty, violence, famine, and war – are increasingly treated like a surplus population, dangerous to order and useless for production. All of these dynamics are likely to accelerate in the remainder of this century as climate change ratchets up the pressure. In a unipolar world, moreover, the United States does what it will politically and militarily, giving leave to its special allies to commit genocide and periodically decimating one troublesome nation or another. Domination – political and economic – is simply pervasive in the international arena.
The prospect of a world free from domination
If domination is so widespread, despite the fact that constitutional states, markets, and international law are the organising institutions of the contemporary world, where does this leave republicans? What are the hopes for a world where people are free from domination?
The domination complaint is so radical because it is so easy to understand: of course I am unfree if I have to navigate the world afraid of what someone else can do to me, wary of their uncontrolled power. What gets lost from view when we focus on the normative vision of republican freedom, however, is that power can only be checked and controlled by power. The republican project of expanding freedom is the project of building counterpowers to the existing forms of domination.
But counterpowers are not immaculately conceived. The union that protects workers from being fired at will or jerked around by managers at work only does so by threatening to disrupt the business of the bosses, and also by coercing would-be defectors – would-be scabs and strike-breakers – into going along with the collective decision. And both the bosses and the would-be defectors can lodge the domination complaint, too; they are now subject to a power they cannot control!
Domination cannot be captured on a graph where the project of emancipation could be summed up as making the line go down. Freedom and domination are thick and particular – one group may get free from one form of domination only at the cost of instituting another form of domination on another group of people, and the judgment as to whether this freedom is worth the cost of that unfreedom is not always straightforward. Projects of emancipation require robust social theories – accounts of how different forms and types of domination hang together or interact – in order to orient themselves and plot a course for liberation that might avoid building worse forms of domination. They also have to expect intense disagreement about which domination complaints to prioritise, which institutional levers to push on, and how best to build counterpowers.
This messy side of republicanism, however, is also the radical side of freedom struggles, the unruliness of their aspirations. Not every domination complaint is well-founded, and some forms of unfreedom are worth putting up with because of the freedoms they secure elsewhere. But every domination complaint is worth taking seriously, and any radical politics of freedom must stitch these diverse struggles together with the red thread of solidarity.
William Clare Roberts teaches political theory at McGill University, Montreal, Quebec. He is author of Marx's Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital (Princeton University Press, 2017) – which won the Deutscher Memorial Prize (2017) and argues that Marx’s Capital is a republican work – and the afterword to a new translation of Marx’s Capital, Volume One, published by Princeton University Press in 2024. He is currently working on a book project, The Radical Politics of Freedom.