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.
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