Philip Pettit

This is the first full-length presentation of a republican alternative to the liberal and communitarian theories that have dominated political philosophy in recent years. The latest addition to the acclaimed Oxford Political Theory series, Pettit's eloquent and compelling account opens with an examination of the traditional republican conception of freedom as non-domination, contrasting this with established negative and positive views of liberty. The first part of the book traces the rise and decline of this conception, displays its many attractions, and makes a case for why it should still be regarded as a central political ideal. The second part of the book looks at what the implementation of the ideal would imply for substantive policy-making, constitutional and democratic design, regulatory control and the relation between state and civil society. Prominent in this account is a novel concept of democracy, under which government is exposed to systematic contestation, and a vision of relations between state and society founded upon civility and trust. Pettit's powerful and insightful new work offers not only a unified, theoretical overview of the many strands of republican ideas, but also a new and sophisticated perspective on studies in related fields including the history of ideas, jurisprudence, and criminology.

This authoritative collection of the seminal texts in post-war political philosophy has now been updated and expanded. Reprints key articles, mainly unabridged, touching upon the nature of the state, democracy, justice, rights, liberty, equality and oppression. Includes work from politics, law and economics, as well as from continental and analytic philosophy. Now includes thirteen additional texts, taking account of recent developments in the field and reflecting the most pressing concerns in international affairs. Can be used alongside A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy as the basis for a systematic introduction to the subject

Taken as a model for how groups should make collective judgments and decisions, the ideal of deliberative democracy is inherently ambiguous. Consider the idealised case where it is agreed on all sides that a certain conclusion should be endorsed if and only if certain premises are admitted. Does deliberative democracy recommend that members of the group debate the premises and then individually vote, in the light of that debate, on whether or not to support the conclusion? Or does it recommend that members individually vote on the premises, and then let their commitment to the conclusion be settled by whether or not the group endorses the required premises? Is deliberative democracy to enforce the discipline of reason at the individual level, as in the first possibility, or at the collective level, as in the second?

A generation of social theorists have argued that if free-rider considerations show that certain collective action predicaments are unresolvable under individual, rational choice – unresolvable under an arrangement where each is free to pursue their own relative advantage – then those considerations will equally show that the predicaments cannot be resolved by recourse to norms (Buchanan, 1975, p. 132; Heath, 1976, p. 30; Sober and Wilson, 1998, 156ff; Taylor, 1987, p. 144). If free-rider considerations explain why people do not spontaneously keep the streets clean, though they would each prefer unlittered streets, then those considerations will also explain why there is no effective norm against littering the streets.

Can groups be rational agents over and above their individual members? We argue that group agents are distinguished by their capacity to mimic the way in which individual agents act and that this capacity must “supervene” on the group members' contributions. But what is the nature of this supervenience relation? Focusing on group judgments, we argue that, for a group to be rational, its judgment on a particular proposition cannot generally be a function of the members' individual judgments on that proposition. Rather, it must be a function of their individual sets of judgments across many propositions. So knowing what the group members individually think about some proposition does not generally tell us how the group collectively adjudicates that proposition: the supervenience relation must be “setwise,” not “proposition‐wise.” Our account preserves the individualistic view that group agency is nothing mysterious but also suggests that a group agent may hold judgments that are not directly continuous with its members' corresponding individual judgments.

Assuming that states will remain a permanent feature of our world, what is the ideal that we should hold out for the international order? An attractive proposal is that those peoples that are already organized under non-dominating, representative states should pursue a twin goal: first, arrange things so that they each enjoy the republican ideal of freedom as non-domination in relation to one another and to other multi-national and international agencies; and second, do everything possible and productive to facilitate the representation of less fortunate peoples in non-dominating states and to incorporate them in a non-dominating international order. This republican ideal stands midway between a utopian ideal of cosmopolitan justice and a sceptical ideal of non-intervention. The article explores its attractions and the broad institutional measures that it would support

The rationality of individual agents is secured for the most part by their make-up or design. Some agents, however – in particular, human beings – rely on the intentional exercise of thinking or reasoning in order to promote their rationality further; this is the activity that is classically exemplified in Rodin’s sculpture of Le Penseur. Do group agents have to rely on reasoning in order to maintain a rational profile? Recent results in the theory of judgment aggregation show that under a range of plausible conditions they do. In a slogan: group agents are made, not born.