Non-domination and democratic legitimacy

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While many regard equality as the moral foundation of democracy,
republican theory grounds democracy in freedom as non-domination. The
grounding of democracy in freedom has been criticized for relying on
either an Aristotelian perfectionism or a Rousseauian equation of the people
in their collective capacity and the people understood severally. The
republican theory of freedom and democracy has the resources to meet
these criticisms. But the most systematic elaboration of republicanism, that
of Philip Pettit, achieves this by turning the relationship between freedom
and democracy into an instrumental relationship in a manner open to
objections. Instead, republicanism should offer a justification of democracy
that also has a non-instrumental dimension. This revised republican freedom
argument for democracy has advantages compared to the equality
argument for democracy, including a better explanation of democratic
procedures.
Original languageEnglish
Article numberDOI:10.1080/13698230.2015.1033862
JournalCritical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy
Volume18
Issue number4
Pages (from-to)424-439
Number of pages16
ISSN1369-8230
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jul 2015

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