Preserving Republican Freedom: A Reply to Simpson

In his paper, “The Impossibility of Republican Freedom,” Thomas Simpson tries to show that the republican conception of freedom as nondomination is self-defeating. The core idea, briefly, is that it supports two inconsistent requirements: one, that individuals be robustly protected by the law against interference; and two, that the people, working as a team, control the state that makes and applies that law, else the state will itself dominate them. Those requirements are said to be inconsistent insofar as the ability of the people to control the state entails that they have dominating control over every individual. Although this claim constitutes Simpson’s more specific charge against republican theory, he also uses it to support a more general charge that the theory implies domination is inescapable, originating from a range of groups and not just from the people as a whole. The idea is that we are each surrounded by sets of others such that any of those sets, working as a team, could collectively interfere with us, regardless of legal protection. In virtue of claiming that individuals operate as a team to control the state, so the argument goes, republicans must concede, not just that the popular team dominates every individual, but that any in an open range of potential teams does so as well. If Simpson is correct, republicanism would be in deep trouble: there is no point in advocating a political ideal that is inescapably frustrated.