Under ideal conditions, the discipline of political science might welcome the publication of a mature philosopher’s magnum opus on democratic theory as a seminal and celebratory moment. Under actual conditions, seminal moments in the subfield of political theory have as much to do with its banishment from the curriculum of this or that department of political science as with the achievement of this or that scholar. Celebration does not come easy when levels of engagement with and support from other political scientists are steadily declining.
Philip Pettit’s book is encouraging, then, in its aspiration to bridge the gap between theoretical reflection and institutional design by articulating a down-to-earth ethic of “freedom as non-domination” (pp. 1–2) and then specifying how a “rich array of popular controls over government” (p. 3) could realize that ethic. If many political theorists already see opportunities for constructive engagement and cross-fertilization between empirical research and democratic theory, On the People’s Terms offers the prospect of affirming and promulgating that fact to the wider discipline.
Pettit’s political philosophy is built on the concept of freedom as nondomination, and the first half of the book explores its ramifications for theories of social justice and political legitimacy. The crucial conceptual distinction is between noninterference and nondomination (Chapter 1): An individual may be unfree because systematically dominated by others, even when no actual interference is taking place. Liberal political theory’s emphasis on noninterference, on this view, misses the forest (i.e., broad structures of power) for the trees (i.e., specific hindrances to free choice). The author further distinguishes two types of hindrance: “Invasion” involves the imposition of someone else’s will to reduce an agent’s choices, and “vitiation” involves impersonal external constraints on choices. His theory of social justice (Chapter 2) responds to these two threats by requiring a system of criminal law to prevent personal relations of domination and a system of welfare support to remove impersonal constraints (especially inequalities of material resources) on individuals’ choices.
The emphasis on structures of power promises to make this a properly political theory. Accordingly, the theory of political legitimacy (Chapter 3) spells out how freedom as nondomination could be attained in citizens’ relations with the state. Pettit notices the crucial point that popular control is something different from and more robust than popular consent (pp. 157–58): The latter concept, the classic touchstone of liberalism, is necessary but not sufficient for democratic power. Republican legitimacy therefore requires institutionalized popular control, or “directed influence” (pp. 153–54, 167). Popular control over the state must be a) divided among citizens in equal shares, b) unconditioned by the state itself, and c) efficacious (pp. 166–79).
Led by robust principles of equal freedom from invasion and vitiation, and of institutionalized popular power, Pettit’s republicanism seems radical in the context of conventional thinking about democracy today. But the realist’s hunch is that an institutional model must be specified before the theory can be fully assessed, and the second half of the book (Chapters 4 and 5) is devoted to that model. Here, Pettit’s realism and radicalism decline in tandem.
Chapter 4 revolves around the distinction between “indicative” and “responsive” types of representative assembly. The author’s argument is that responsive assemblies, whose members are held accountable through electoral sanctions, are preferable to indicative assemblies, whose members are chosen by nonelectoral means (e.g., appointment or lottery) in order to achieve descriptive representation (pp. 195–205). Some of the reasoning here is quite speculative and reliant on unexamined counterfactuals, but Pettit adds that real-world problems of corruption in elected assemblies make indicative bodies useful in secondary capacities: expert commissions, independent watchdogs and ombudsmen, and “private attorneys general” with “implicit briefs” to act on the public’s behalf (pp. 232–37). Chapter 5 offers an oddly detached and abstract argument that political deliberation should be modeled on an “acceptability game,” rather than an “acceptance game,” in the service of a “dual-aspect” (long-term, short-term) kind of popular control over the state (pp. 252–69). It is a far from straightforward case, and the historical illustration of the British Reform Bill of 1832 (pp. 270–74) is too lacking in institutional detail to clarify it, much less to clinch it. The author’s thinking is richly suggestive, to be sure, but political theorists might encounter diminishing returns after Chapter 4, and political scientists should both start and stop with that chapter.
The realism of Pettit’s analysis is hampered by a level of institutional abstraction that frustrates as much as it intrigues. Understandably, he wants to claim the mantle of feasibility while insisting (to counter previous criticism) that his political theory is not conservative but in fact demands significant reforms of actual institutions (pp. 23–24). But which reforms? Several allusions to the Citizens Assembly that was used to propose a ballot initiative in British Columbia in 2004 (pp. 197, 200–201, 232, 235) offer a poor return on the reader’s investment, since no sustained analysis of that institution in distinctive republican terms follows. On the rare occasion when another concrete institution is commended, as with compulsory voting in Australia (p. 210) or the Interstate Commerce Commission in the United States (p. 235), the real-world follow-up is cursory: These are footnotes in a 300-page work of analytic philosophy.
If political scientists might lament a reticence around institutional reality, historians are unlikely to revel in Pettit’s half-hearted defense of his excursions into the history of republican ideas: In essence, history makes good window dressing for philosophy (p. 19). His claim that English republican thought in the seventeenth century had the “widest influence” and “deepest impact” in the whole history of republicanism (p. 6) is somewhat spoiled when John Lilburne’s surname is rendered “Libourne” (pp. 8, 83), thereby conflating the most radical democrat on Pettit’s roster of luminaries with a French provincial town near Bordeaux—not surprising, cynics would say, coming from a research chair named after a Rockefeller.
More substantively, the book’s radicalism is hampered by a fixation on attacking the unitary theory of sovereignty associated with Bodin, Hobbes, and Rousseau (pp. 12–15, 189–90, 223–25, 228–29, 289–92) in order to salvage the mixed regime (pp. 9–10, 221–22, 228–29, 283–84, 305). Here is a theoretical debate with rich institutional consequences that deserves a less segmented and compressed treatment. Such a treatment might begin by conceding that Bodin, Hobbes, and Rousseau all recognized a distinction between sovereignty and administration, the former but not the latter being immune to division or mixture. In any case, defending senatorial and judicial vetoes over representative assemblies makes the author’s effort to disavow the label of conservatism—understandable though it is, in light of the rhetorical conventions of Western academia—an unlikely venture.
That Pettit’s model of democracy paints a close portrait of the political institutions and cultures already prevailing in long-established republics is nicely illustrated by the recent activities of the so-called Tea Party in the United States. This political movement includes contestatory and vigilant citizens who are determined to avoid domination by government. They have contested recent medical reforms in informal town meetings and in courts of law, in election campaigns, and in oversight hearings. Thanks to the essential device of all mixed regimes, the bicameral legislature, they have even resorted to procedurally complex and daring devices of legislative obstructionism, long after the fact of the reforms’ formal enactment and judicial ratification. This real-world case shows how economic and partisan elites can exploit the nooks and crannies of the mixed regime to stifle governmental action (to combat what Pettit would call “vitiation”) and to sabotage it when they cannot stifle it, all the while muddying the waters for the public’s attributions of accountability. The author’s republican theory might reassure the Tea Party that, in a better world, they could look forward to even more layers of contestation, including ombudsmen, grievance commissions, and private “attorneys general.”
Sympathizers with Bodin, Hobbes, and Rousseau would prefer to see clarity of responsibility in government, not an infinite regress of contestation by elite actors who claim the mantle of democratic representation, whether calling themselves grassroots activists, party politicians, public servants, or paid lobbyists. In a constitutional state characterized by the rule of law, the buck must stop somewhere, as Harry Truman would have said; a problem for democratic theory, then, might be to construct genuinely “popular” (or “indicative”) agencies to assume that sovereign responsibility. Yet this is what Pettit seems to consider the height of antidemocratic folly, joining a horde of otherwise dissimilar theorists who have declared war on the concept of sovereignty.
On the People’s Terms dares to broach the big questions of democratic theory. The author must be applauded for suggesting so many potentially fruitful lines of inquiry, but especially for having written a book that risks the ire of historians and political scientists. This kind of risk taking is essential to cross-disciplinary and cross-subfield research. If academic teamwork could be made to pay off in the real worlds we inhabit, the value of each member of the team would be accentuated in the process.
