Republicanism and multicultural democracy

Philip Pettit’s writings about republicanism offer a valuable and distinctive perspective on individual freedom and the nature of a good society. He develops those ideas most fully in Republicanism : a theory of freedom and government. Pettit’s core idea is that we should conceive of freedom as “non-domination” — that is, that an individual is free when he or she is not subject to the arbitrary power of other individuals, groups, or institutions. He emphasizes that non-domination is a more demanding concept of freedom than either “negative” or “positive” freedom as characterized by writers as diverse as John Locke, John Stuart Mill, Isaiah Berlin, or Amartya Sen, because domination can occur even when crude coercion is absent. The threat of constraint or punishment for one’s “free” actions can make those actions and actors unfree, even if coercive means are never invoked. And most pertinently today, a structure of discrimination and negative stereotypes about members of a minority group can present barriers to the free and non-dominated choices and life trajectories of a despised minority — African-American men and women in the American South in the 1950s, Black South Africans during the post-apartheid period, women in a period of male domination and chauvinism, and Jewish men and women in pre-war Poland.

The other idea constitutive of republicanism is the view that the commonwealth, the civil society, or the republic have a value over and above the value of the individual activities of the citizens. Rousseau emphasizes this point in The Social Contract: entering into a unanimous and binding agreement with one’s fellow citizens is fundamentally transforming of each individual. Each is an expression and constituent of the “general will”, and the whole of the political collectivity is a moral presence for all the citizens. To be a citizen is to be civically motivated, to be concerned to bring about the good of the whole (and not solely one’s own particular good). And this civic membership is in turn constitutive of part of the value and satisfaction of the individual citizen. Citizens are morally invested in the wellbeing of their fellow citizens. This set of ideals, once again, is incompatible with a society that embodies persistent forms of social and legal domination of one group by another, because domination is incompatible with equality and dignity for all citizens.

The question of domination is central for Pettit. Here is how he explains this concept.

Domination, as I understand it here, is exemplified by the relationship of master to slave or master to servant. Such a relationship means, at the limit, that the dominating party can interfere on an arbitrary basis with the choices of the dominated: can interfere, in particular, on the basis of an interest or an opinion that need not be shared by the person affected. The dominating party can practise interference, then, at will and with impunity: they do not have to seek anyone’s leave and they do not have to incur any scrutiny or penalty. Without going further into the analysis of domination or indeed interference—we turn to that task in the next chapter—a little reflection should make clear that domination and interference are intuitively different evils. (22)

It is worth noticing how this conception of non-domination converges with Rousseau’s concept of “a free community of equals”. It is fundamental to Rousseau’s concept of a proper “republic” that no citizen is superior to another, none has dominion over another in virtue of property, status, religious authority, or other extraneous characteristic. In a free community of equals, no citizen is enabled to dominate another. This view is celebrated in The Social Contract and the Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of the Inequality Among Men.

Pettit especially praises the theory of republicanism because it provides a basis for articulating “grievances” at a wide range of causes. Whereas the “non-interference” theory of liberty does not provide a basis for articulating a grievance about engrained social hierarchy (squire to tenant), the “non-domination” perspective permits this grievance and many others: patriarchy and male supremacy, racial discrimination, a group’s exercise of unequal economic power over another group, and the many other ways in which entrenched patterns of thought and power give one group influence over the affairs and wellbeing of another group (Republicanism, p. 134).

In particular, Pettit argues that republicanism offers a strong moral basis for articulating the values of a multicultural democracy and the equal dignity of the diverse participants in such a democracy. And he forthrightly defends the idea that a democracy based on “non-domination” will require substantial programmatic efforts at reducing and eliminating the sources of domination that exist among groups in the existing society. He puts his view this way:

The challenge raised by that complaint [by members of minority groups within society] is whether the modern state can be given a rationale and a form that will enable it to serve the interests of those in minority cultures equally with the interests of those in the mainstream. The point that I want to make here, in defence of republicanism, is that if the modern state is orientated around the promotion of freedom as non­domination, then it will have a reason and a capacity to cater for the claims of those in minority cultures. … The lesson of this observation is that so far as membership in a minority culture is likely to be a badge of vulnerability to domination, the members of that culture, and the state that assumes concern for their fortunes, must address the needs of the culture in general. It is not going to be enough to claim to be concerned with individuals in the culture, without any particular reference to what binds them together. (Republicanism, 144, 145)

It might be noted that this conception of a multicultural democracy is itself somewhat limiting. It emphasizes the importance of “counting every voice” within a democracy — certainly an important value. But it doesn’t emphasize explicitly the positive value created by a multiracial, multi-ethnic, and multicultural society and the forms of learning and enhanced fulfillment that are enabled by full and equal relationships with members of groups other than one’s own. At its best a multicultural democracy is more than a social and political setting in which different groups can live peacefully together; it is one in which the lives of all members of society are enriched and enabled by the thoughts, experiences, and values of members of other groups.

Let’s now see how these ideas about republicanism intersect with the rationale for organizational programs enhancing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). In the past twenty years universities and businesses have introduced a variety of programs under this banner that are designed (in part anyway) to reduce and eliminate the barriers experienced for various groups in our society due to discrimination and negative stereotypes. Consider two specific examples: the well-known social phenomenon of “stereotype threat” (link) that Claude Steele and others have explored; and the persistent life disadvantages created for poor children and young adults by inadequate public schooling in urban centers (link).

Steele’s central finding as a social psychologist is that a widespread belief in society and in schools that the X group generally cannot perform as well as the Y group on a certain kind of task (a stereotype) causally brings about poor performance in members of the X group. Instead of the stereotype deriving from the facts, the facts of unequal performance derive from the stereotype. So what can be done? One possibility is to explicitly recognize the workings of this mechanism within schools, and to educate teachers about the harmful effects that follow from even veiled expressions of the stereotype. Suppose an engineering professor often begins the semester with a speech saying, “I see there are a few women students in the class. I know this will be a challenging class for you, and I want you to know that my teaching assistants and I are available to you to clarify things you don’t understand”. We may assume the professor’s intentions are good; but according to Steele’s research, the effects on some of the female students may be significant. So the professor would be well advised to learn to emphasize his or her availability in different terms, without reference to the gender of the students in the class. This suggests the value of programs in “hidden-bias” training for faculty and staff. And we might go a bit further: if the engineering college faculty is 90% male, the signal to female students seems to be that “engineering is not a profession for women”. So the college should make special efforts to recruit highly talented female faculty.

Now consider the second example: the barriers created for black and brown students who are heavily concentrated in urban neighborhoods with relatively less effective public schools, due to persistent residential segregation (link). How should selective universities address the fact that black and brown students from low-income families are persistently under-represented in their incoming classes? A program that has often been adopted is a university-funded supplementary instruction program for low-income districts in their state or region. The idea is that the university can help talented high school students close the attainment gap that exists between them and typical suburban high school students through intensive programs of this kind. This would have two positive effects: it would increase the preparation level of these low-income-neighborhood students so they are competitive for admission in selective universities; and it would potentially increase the confidence in a cohort of under-served students that the host university is indeed an attainable and attractive destination for them. These effects would increase the number of under-served students — black, brown, and white — who attend selective universities, and it would reduce the barrier that exists for residents of segregated neighborhoods and cities when it comes to college attendance. This would be one step in the direction of securing a more free and equal society, from the point of view of non-domination.

Now let’s return to “non-domination” and Pettit’s republicanism. These reparative policies are urgently needed, and many others as well, in order to eliminate the social barriers that have the effect of establishing relations of “domination” among specific groups in society. Moreover, policies and programs like these are not performed out of “charity” or noblesse oblige. Rather, measures like these are needed as a matter of reparative justice to all free and equal citizens — in the first case, in order to reduce the barriers created to female students’ ability to enter an engineering curriculum and to thrive in the profession; and in the second case, to begin to address the barriers to full educational development created by continuing racial segregation. In each case the policy is intelligently designed to reduce domination of one group in a democratic society by another group. And in this way the DEI policies currently under attack are specifically needed if we are to achieve the idea of a “free community of equals” in a multicultural and multi-racial society.

The micro and the social

In his influential article "A definition of physicalism" (1993) Philip Pettit attempts to formulate a consistent and coherent account of physicalism as an ontology of the world.

I believe that we can define a possibly true, substantive doctrine which holds, roughly, that the empirical world 'contains just what a true complete physics would say it contains'. (213)

The resulting view is offered as an attempt to identify the "furniture of the empirical world". Can there be a corresponding theory of the "furniture of the empirical social world"?

His statement in the follow-on reply to criticisms of this essay in "Microphysicalism without contingent micro-macro laws" (1994) is helpful.

“Physicalism – better, perhaps, microphysicalism – is the doctrine that actually (but not necessarily) everything non-microphysical is composed out of microphysical entities and is governed by microphysical laws; and this, in a sense which means that the non-microphysical facts supervene contingently on the microphysical” (1994: 253).

What is the analogy for the trivial fact, “no social structures without human beings embodying them”? Let's call the corresponding view “bare ontological dependence” (BOD). Here is a formulation of BOD constructed to be exactly parallel to Pettit's definition of microphysicalism:

“[Bare ontological dependence] … is the doctrine that actually (but not necessarily) everything [at the social level] is composed out of [existent human individuals with specified features of mentality, psychology, and cognitive capacity] and is governed by [psychological and neurophysiological] laws; and this, in a sense which means that the [social-level] facts supervene contingently on the [micro-individuals]”.

Is this a credible and defensible conception of the relation between individual human actors and "social entities"?

This formulation entails, apparently, that “the features of the social institution are constituted and governed by the micro-psychological characteristics of the individual actors who constitute it” and the social “supervenes” upon those micro-individuals. This in turn implies the supervenience maxim: “no difference at the social-structure level without some difference at the micro-individual level”. It also specifies a clear sense in which “micro-particles” have primacy over ordinary physical objects and "individuals" have primacy over "social entities"; their properties “fix” the behavior of the macro-objects. The corresponding statement for "bare ontological dependence is then that "actors" have primacy over ordinary "social" objects; their properties "fix" the behavior of the macro-social-objects.

Pettit's application of these formulae to the world of physics, chemistry, and planetary motion is reasonable enough. And part of the plausibility of the view in the case of physics is that the microphysical particles can be said to have properties that are fixed and independent from the macro-level ensembles that they constitute. However, this is not the case in the situation of "socially situated individuals" who constitute "ongoing social structures and practices". Rather, there are reciprocal causal relations up and down, or back and forth, across the levels that make the ideas of "constitution" and "fixing" no longer compelling. And this implies in turn that there are no trans-historical, universal "regularities" of human behavior that might constitute the bridge between individual actions and social entities.

Further, because of the contingency of some historical sequences (for example, the invention of monotheism or the discovery of the heavy plow), and given the path-dependency of some structural or institutional outcomes, there is no reason to expect that a common beginning point of unsocialized or pre-socialized individuals (a state of nature) would gradually develop, by perhaps unknown behavioral laws, into the establishment and articulation of specific social structures. And if we accept the point that it is sometimes the case that "different structures elicit different kinds of human mentality", then we are brought face to face with contingency all the way down: contingent structures and contingent social individuals.

So Pettit's line of thought in defining physicalism is quite implausible when applied to the social world. It is true that "the Ford Motor Company" could not exist if there were not actual human beings occupying roles within and outside the company. It is not true, however, that "the 'social' world is governed by forces or regularities that [empirical psychology] is best equipped to describe" (the analog to Pettit's statement about micro-particles). The mental characteristics and processes of the actors involved in a social entity or set of social arrangements are themselves in fact shaped by past social arrangements to which the actors have been exposed. So if the foundational body of empirical knowledge is "empirical psychology" (as JS Mill indeed believed) then we must reject the view.

One of Pettit's claims about the relation between microphysical things and macrophysical things is fundamentally a reassertion of the supervenience relation between levels: "No macrophysical difference without a microphysical one" (216). How does this proposition fare when applied to "macro-social entities" and "micro-individual states"? It corresponds to this assertion: "No macro-social difference without a micro-individual one". Unfortunately, this seems to be a trivial statement when applied to the social realm. Any two social states differ at the micro-level, for the most trivial of reasons: they are different states, with different individuals, and different individuals have different action-plans and beliefs. So whether S1 and S2 are "different" or "the same" in their macro-descriptions, it is trivially true that they will differ in their micro-composition. Consider these three facts: "The price of soybeans on the Chicago Board of Trade on May 1, 2025, is 1,060.50"; "The price of soybeans on the Chicago Board of Trade on May 1, 2024, is 1,000.00"; "The price of soybeans on the Chicago Board of Trade on May 1, 2023, is 1,060.50". Each sentence describes a structural fact: the circumstances of supply and demand on the specified day led to an equilibrium price as quoted. But none of the structural facts described here corresponds to a single set of individual actors doing the same things for similar reasons. The actors have changed, their motivations have changed, their habits have changed, and their styles of dress have changed. The pathways that led to the same structural equilibrium in 2025 and 2023 were no doubt different in multiple ways; and likewise, the actors and the pathways that led to different equilibria in 2025 and 2024 were different as well. Even if we were to perform a massive experiment in "experimental economics" and assemble 1,000 traders on May 1, 2023, and then again on May 1, 2025; control the information to which they are exposed in the preceding twelve hours; and ask them to buy and sell as they normally would, there will still remain idiosyncratic differences between the series of thoughts and actions undertaken on the two days. And the same will be true of the experiment when we model 2024 and 2025: there will inevitably be vast numbers of individual-level differences. So the supervenience condition is vacuous. There are always differences across cases at the micro-individual level.

It is pertinent to observe that some physical processes are path dependent as well, which means that the initial states of the micro-particles by themselves are not sufficient to "determine" the outcome. Rather, the outcome depends in part on the process of transition from one state to another. Suppose a physicist observes two vessels of pure water over a bunsen burner. One container is boiling vigorously, while the other, at the same observed temperature, is not boiling. The difference is that the first vessel was heated quickly while the second was heated slowly. The process made a difference in the outcome, even though the micro-constituents were indistinguishable. But this is the relevant point: there is a difference in the two states of containers of water, even though there is currently no difference in the states of the micro-particles.

Pettit considers a possibility that he considers to be inconsistent with his understanding of "physicalism":

Another [opponent of physicalism] will be the person, perhaps difficult to imagine accepts microphysical composition but thinks that the composition involved is not necessarily conservative: it allows, without further need of explanation, that two entities that are composed in the same way, and of the same materials, may yet differ intrinsically from one another. (217)

Pettit appears to think this is an absurd contention; how could these two macro-entities differ, without any difference in the composing microphysical parts?

Let's ask first what Pettit means by the phrase "composed in the same way". One natural reading is asynchronous and structural. A bar of iron may consist of precisely the same number of iron atoms, but the arrangement of the atoms is coherent in the first case and incoherent in the second arrangement. In that case the first iron bar has a property that the second bar lacks; it is "magnetic". And yet the two bars consist of exactly the same kind of microphysical parts. The solution in this case is that the arrangement of the parts makes a difference; when the iron atoms are coherently aligned, their magnetic fields aggregate to a macro-scale magnetic field.

The second possible meaning of "composed in the same way" is diachronic and historical. To be "composed in the same way" is to have undergone precisely the same set of processes of material transformation, heat transfer, application of pressure, etc. From the short explanation of path-dependent processes above, we know that differences in physical processes of material transformation can indeed lead to differences in macro-physical outcome for ensembles of precisely similar microphysical constituents; in the current case, one process leads to a magnetic bar of iron, while the second process leads to a non-magnetic bar.

Now return to the relation between individuals and social structures. Is it possible for two ensembles of individuals to be exactly similar in the current psychological characteristics of the individuals involved in the two cases but to nonetheless differ in some important way at the macro-social level? Much turns on how finely we expect to interpret "exactly similar" here. But suppose we assume an abstract conception of the individual's psychology along these lines: each individual wants a situation where he or she can satisfy as many preferences as possible, while avoiding catastrophic failures. And each individual has a set of "social emotions" that permit the emergence of social relationships based on trust and mutual solidarity. Now consider two thought experiments involving the emergence of a "wannabe" strong man dictator in the political system. In the first instance the potential dictator has the good fortune that his first efforts at taking power are generally unopposed because individuals recognize his intentions but find resistance to be too risky; as the dictator gains followers and successes this population becomes more passive; and after ten years the dictator is applauded and supported throughout much of the population. In the second instance the dictator has bad fortune. A few of his supporters are overly willing to use violence against dissidents and resisters, which stimulates a higher degree of alarm in ordinary citizens; a few of the ordinary citizens recognize the discontent present in others and form relations of trust. These "trust" circles expand over time and incidents of resistance become more frequent; the dictator and his supporters become more willing to turn to violent suppression; the dictator's violence tips more citizens into trust circles of their own; and after ten years the dictator's hold on power is precarious. His rallies are attended by his own militias and inner circle; but acts of resistance continue and proliferate.

The two scenarios begin and end with the same kinds of actors -- persons with their own interests and a capacity for forming social relationships. And yet the properties of the two regimes at the end of the experiment are quite different. This seems to correspond to the terms of Pettit's original reductio ad absurdum: different macro-arrangements constituted by the same kinds and arrangements of microparticles. What differentiates the two cases is the contingency, path dependence, and "triggering" of individual capacities that occurred during the processes involved in the two scenarios. In the first case, no events arose to trigger and encourage the emergence of trust networks; whereas in the second case, there were such events. The historical processes in the two cases were different, and the properties of the ensemble continued to evolve in different directions. The social capacities of the individuals were present in both scenarios, but they were only triggered in the second scenario.

What all of this suggests is fairly simple: the idea of "physicalism" as a fundamental model of ontology is not a suitable framework for thinking about social ontology. The individuals who "constitute" social arrangements are not analogous to the microparticles that Pettit considers; rather, they are actors whose states of agency are altered dynamically by events, processes, and structures that emerge historically, and the inherent contingency and path dependence of the social world guarantee that no version of foundationalism or individualism will suffice for social ontology.