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Delineates the principal ideas that make up my theory of freedom as negative liberty. Raises a number of challenges to positive-liberty theories and to the civic-republican conception of freedom, with sustained criticisms of the work of Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit. It likewise objects to moralized conceptions of particular freedoms and unfreedoms. It pays particular attention to the ways in which such freedoms and unfreedoms exist over time.

This chapter argues that civic republicanism and procedural liberalism are allies, and that exaggerating their conflict is philosophically suspect and politically counterproductive. It explains the reasons why Sandel exaggerates the differences between these two approaches. It further argues that under certain circumstances, procedural liberalism is preferable to civic republicanism.

Turns our attention to politics and discusses the potential for a ‘green republicanism’ as a viable, attractive, and pragmatic basis for green politics. It suggests that the republican account of the human political condition takes cognizance of vulnerability and in this way has an inherent concern with unsustainability. Its promotion of, inter alia, civic virtue, active and empowered citizenship, the promotion of ‘rough equality’, the creation of social solidarity, and a politics of the common good, has many of the features identified as constitutive of resilient communities as outlined in chapter 3. The civic republican focus on memorialization and remembrance resonates with the discussion in chapter 3 of the role of rituals, such as festivals and public holidays for example. Against the dangers of ‘sequestration’ , a green republicanism consciously seeks to bring to the fore those features of human life which are prone to be suppressed and sublated and in so doing rendering that which is often viewed as non- or pre-political, such as human-nature relations or gendered reproductive work, explicitly political.

The concept domination, despite its widespread employment in contemporary political and social theory, has so far escaped sustained, rigorous analysis. Chapter 1 aims to redress this lacuna. The connection between this project and the work of civic republicans such as Philip Pettit is discussed in this chapter. This chapter is envisioned as supporting a civic republican alternative to the standard liberal contractualist political doctrine. The methodological importance of the so‐called separation thesis to the project is also considered.

This chapter inquires into the general design of a legislature best suited to the democratic ideals of authority-validation and self-rule. It criticizes the civic republican model of representation for excluding private interests from the public sphere, and the politics-of-difference model for abandoning the ideals of impartiality and civic virtue. It proposes instead Hegel's reconciliation model in which private interests are openly and equally represented in the legislature insofar as they are organized into corporate bodies that seek their members' welfare, whose internal rule is democratic, and have a private stake in the common good. The chapter argues that the formal representation of corporate interests by the corporations' chosen leaders serves authority-validation and self-rule better than the representation of the individual's disinterested will by political elites. Finally, it connects the reconciliation model with contemporary tendencies toward consociational democracy.

Chapter 4 inquires into lawyers’ motivations for embracing oral, adversarial procedure. It notes that lawyers had strategic interests for preferring adversarialism, and most especially, cross-examination. Antebellum lawyers, however, viewed procedure not only as a mechanism for winning cases, but also as a means of improving their status and standing within both the legal profession and the community at large. These were heartfelt goals during a period in which lawyers believed themselves to be in fierce competition with one another and in which they were subject to enormous public animosity. With these goals in mind, lawyers drew on the pervasive discourse of civic or classical republicanism, claiming to be modern-day Ciceros and seeking to create a distinctively American model of courtroom oratory. In so doing, they came to conclude that the Ciceronian model of oratory that they favored—one requiring grand public performances in defense of civic virtue—implied a particular model of procedure. This was the model afforded by the common law and its practices of public jury argument, as well as oral, adversarial witness examination and cross-examination. Because equity’s written and secrecy-oriented, quasi-inquisitorial procedure denied antebellum lawyers the opportunity for republican self-display, they turned away from it.

This chapter presents a conceptual history of civic republicanism and citizenship and identifies within this lineage, as an alternative history of citizenship theory to the dominant liberal tradition, a corrective to what it sees as the overly individualistic, litigious and inactive nature of contemporary political life. It evokes Benjamin Constant's 1820 work The Liberty of the Ancients Compared to that of the Moderns to highlight the contrast between the classical aim of sharing ‘social power among citizens of the same fatherland’ with the modern preference for the ‘enjoyment of liberty in private pleasures’ where ‘the guarantees accorded by institutions to these pleasures’ are called liberty. A requirement of greater citizenship participation is the dispersal of power from central institutions, not just from Westminster to devolved assemblies, but from ‘stifling central bureaucracy’ to civil society, and within political parties from leaders to membership. The chapter notes the declared willingness of political leaders to accept this, but it identifies an obstacle to devolution in what it calls the ‘post-code lottery’ argument.

Chapter 6 is also concerned with citizen capacities and virtues but approaches them from the perspective of political leaders and their responsibility to educate citizens. Does good democratic leadership, the chapter asks, necessarily include such responsibility? Clearly, continuous communication is necessary between leaders and citizens in a democracy, but such communication, the chapter argues, can take any of three forms: instrumental (simple communication in which leaders compete for the electoral support of an essentially passive citizenry); civic republican (the most self-consciously educative form, aimed at transcending self-interested motives and creating an active, deliberative, self-governing citizen body committed to the common good); and populist mobilization (which assumes an adversarial view in which citizens must be mobilized to protect their rights against powerful domestic forces that distort democracy and make a mockery of any supposed common good). The chapter notes that leaders may employ each of these modes of communication on different occasions.

Philip S. Gorski’s chapter provides historical context for progressive religious groups’ use of civil religious rhetoric. Through an analysis of Barack Obama’s efforts to resurrect the civil religious tradition during his two campaigns and terms as president, this chapter revisits and reconstructs the vision of American civil religion that was originally advanced by Robert Bellah in 1967. The chapter shows that the American civil religion is woven out of two main threads: the prophetic religion of the Hebrew Bible and an Anglo-American version of civic republicanism. It also distinguishes the civil religious tradition from its two main rivals: religious nationalism and radical secularism.

This chapter demonstrates the incompatibility of the harm principle with various claims that forms of harmless immorality and other conduct that some people view as reprehensible or disgusting ought to be regulated or prohibited. The chapter asserts that under the externality constraint people may not generally have interests in others’ interests. The chapter also rejects communitarian, civic republican, and multiculturalist claims that because communities are sources of value government may regulate conduct that impinges on community norms. Finally, the chapter shows that by overturning law-like custom, antidiscrimination laws are consistent with the harm principle.

This chapter explores the doctrine of revolution according to the traditions of classical liberalism and civic republicanism, arguing that America was born out of the principles of classical liberalism, made apparent by its emphasis on individual rights and self-determination. On the other hand, America was also born out of the principles of civic republicanism: it emphasizes the significance of virtue and the common good. These two principles swirl around each other, playing around in the minds of political thinkers, as they were always invoked in the great debates among scholars in the last half of the previous century. Some thinkers reconcile these two principles by making a hybrid ideology called liberal republicanism, which focuses both on individual rights and the common good.

This chapter addresses the normative and spatial dimensions of sovereignty in a society characterized by cultural diversity, social fragmentation, and ideological conflict. The thesis of this chapter is that in mediating these tensions, decision makers and the courts often use the ‘ethics of provincialism’, a vision of ethnic, cultural, and religious pluralism managed by geographic autonomy and isolation, using geography as a proxy for subgroup affiliation. For the sake of clarity, the discussion is focused on a recent decision delivered by the Israeli Supreme Court — Solodkin v. City of Beit Shemesh — that raises significant questions regarding the (appropriate) place of space in legal analysis, permitting the analysis of severe social effects of the ethics of provincialism. After exploring the facts of the case, it then considers how various political theories — liberalism, multiculturalism, and civic republicanism — would address the dilemma presented in it. This discussion, in turn, serves as a springboard for exploring pervasive questions regarding the association between social groups and the urban spaces they inhabit in multicultural societies.

The model of civic republicanism is associated with a range of principles: a concept of the common good, citizenship, a presumption of civic virtue and freedom. The idea of radical democracy is strongly associated with a sense of active citizenship, engagement in a political community and collective action. At times, however, it tips into populism, which claims to pit a virtuous people against a corrupt elite, but risks bringing radical democracy into disrepute.

This chapter considers the alternatives to using PMSCs and the claims that the use of PMSCs undermines the legitimacy of the state. First, it rejects various suggestions that the use of PMSCs undermines the social contract. Second, it argues that conscripted forces are highly problematic according to the Cumulative Legitimacy Approach—even worse than the employment of PMSCs—and rejects the civic-republican claims about the import of citizens performing military service. Third, it argues that an all-volunteer force, despite facing some problems, is the most legitimate way of organizing the military. Fourth, it considers and rejects the case for complete military disarmament. Overall, the chapter argues that the use of PMSCs is worse than at least one alternative feasible arrangement—an all-volunteer force.

This chapter examines the historical relationship between modernity, civil society, and civic virtue. It demonstrates the value base of social policy. It argues that civil society is rooted in civic republicanism, secularism, and socialism. However, it notes that the origins of civil society, in social policy terms, are intimately connected to a much older tradition of charity that defined civic virtue but not always in humanistic ways.

For many, the Kentucky farmer and writer Wendell Berry has provided the surest conservation voice in the United States over the past several decades, especially for his appealing agrarian visions, his attention to local foods, and his calls to live ethically on and with nature. This chapter looks critically at Berry’s writings, finding much appeal in his attention to interconnections, his admission of human limits, his affectionate bonds with nature, and his calls to sink roots and act responsibly. The deficiency it probes has to do with Berry’s resistance to collective action, particularly through governmental means; with his near-exclusive focus on change within individuals as such. Berry’s community leaders show no interest in collective or political action at the community level, much less higher. Berry’s call for love is thus not attached to any plausible mechanism for widespread change. The needed critique of today’s culture thus may need to extend to the kind of individualism that Berry embraces. Reform calls not for Berry’s form of Jacksonian democracy but for something more like civic republicanism; not for Berry’s modern Epicureanism but for an updated Stoicism that stresses civic engagement.

This book explores civic republicanism and citizenship, active citizenship and Britain's Labour Party, and the sharing of power between the people of Scotland, the legislators and the Scottish Executive. It also discusses the changing balance of power since World War II between elites and citizens in respect, particularly, of the health professions; gender equality and democracy; what active citizenship can achieve for schools and through schools; the meaning of multiculturalism and its bearing on citizenship education in schools and naturalisation policy; immigration and naturalisation; democratic citizenship and lifelong active learning; the role of active citizenship in European and international contexts; the making of young people into active citizens; active citizenship and sharing of power in Scotland, focusing on the need to go beyond devolution; and Britain as a multinational and multicultural state.