Republicanismo: aspectos filosóficos

El republicanismo es una doctrina que plantea que el poder público siempre debe servir al bien común de todos aquellos sujetos a su gobierno. Plantea la cuestión de cómo hacerlo de manera cada vez más efectiva, ya sea a través de políticas particulares o de la estructura constitucional (“la forma republicana de gobierno”). La tradición filosófica republicana comenzó con Platón y Aristóteles, floreció en los escritos de Cicerón y reapareció con el renacimiento del aprendizaje en autores como Maquiavelo, James Harrington, John Adams y Kant. Más recientemente, Philip Pettit, Jürgen Habermas, entre otros, han regresado a la concepción republicana de la libertad como no dominación. Además de cómo asegurar esto último a través del Estado de derecho, la soberanía popular y los pesos y contrapesos de una política deliberativa bien diseñada. El republicanismo busca la libertad y la justicia a través del derecho y el gobierno a favor del bien común.

Eleitoralismo e oligarquização da democracia: reflexões sobre o uso do sorteio como garantia do ideal republicano da não-dominação

Nos últimos anos, o “mal-estar” da população mundial com as regras e resultados da democracia representativa tornou-se um fato público e notório em grande parte das democracias do mundo. A corrupção do sistema político, as dificuldades de superação das desigualdades sociais e a incapacidade de inclusão das minorias refletem um domínio persistente das elites políticas, incompatível com os valores democráticos e republicanos. Partindo da constatação dos limites práticos dos governos representativos contemporâneos, de modo geral, e da democracia representativa brasileira, em particular, o propósito do artigo é o de debater em que medida a reintrodução do elemento do sorteio em nossas práticas políticas pode contribuir para uma reabilitação dos valores democráticos, promover a inclusão social e favorecer a implementação da liberdade como não-dominação, nos termos da formulação de Philip Pettit. Para tanto, serão abordadas referências teóricas recentes no campo das denominadas “inovações democráticas”, em especial a perspectiva de “democracia aberta”, de Hélène Landemore. A metodologia empregada é essencialmente a análise bibliográfica dos textos estudados.

A Conversive Theory of Respect

Philip Pettit develops an account of the fundamental nature and basis of respect. Pettit’s “conversive” theory of respect draws on the fact that our unique command of language provides us with a “special means of mutual influence,” making us accessible to each other’s understanding. Cooperative, conversive practice inevitably generates some shared expectations and standards for what you ought to believe and even, allowing for individual variation, for what you ought to desire or intend. We will respect you in the conversive sense when we are robustly guided and constrained by your responsiveness to such standards. We will be guided to the extent that, in conversive exchange, we seek to shape your attitudes of belief and desire only in accordance with those standards. We will be constrained to the extent that in relating to you in other ways, we robustly avoid any behavior that is precluded or prohibited by the standards.

Criminal Law and Republican Liberty: Philip Pettit’s Account

Philip Pettit has made central to modern republican theory a distinctive account of freedom—republican freedom. On this account, I am not free solely because I can make choices without interference. I am truly free, only if that non-interference does not itself depend on another’s forbearance (what Pettit calls ‘formal’ freedom). Pettit believes that the principal justification for the traditional focus of the criminal law is that it constitutes a bulwark against domination. I will, in part, be considering the merits of this claim. Is the importance of the orthodox realm of the criminal law solely or mainly explained by the wish to protect people from domination? In short, the answer is that it is not. Across the board, the criminal law rightly protects us equally from threats to what Pettit calls ‘effective,’ as opposed to formal, republican freedom. I will develop my critique of Pettit’s account of criminal law, in part to raise questions about the role of ‘domination’ in political theory, and about whether it poses a significant challenge to liberal accounts of criminal law.

Sieyès and Republican liberty

In On the People’s Terms, Philip Pettit incorporates the Sieyèsian notion of constituent power into his constitutional theory of non-domination. In this article, I argue that Emmanuel Sieyès’s understanding of liberty precludes such an appropriation. While a republican, his conceptualisation of liberty in the face of commercial society stood apart from theories of civic vigilance, preferring instead to disentangle individuals from politics and maximise what he understood to be their non-political freedoms. Sieyès saw that liberty was heightened through relations of representation and commercial dependency. This conception of liberty was pivotal to the identity of the nation, and so allowed Sieyès to assess forms of collective injustice committed by the French nobility. It also provided the normative foundation of his theory of constituent power. For Sieyès, constituent power guarded against legislative excess in a decidedly minimal sense, intending instead to separate citizens from the political sphere so they were not burdened with ongoing participation or public vigilance.

Hope in the task of forgiveness

A second putative virtue key to forgivingness is hope. This chapter compares the hope that Kierkegaard labels as a variety of ‘expectancy’ [Forventning] with what Philip Pettit has called ‘substantial’ (as opposed to ‘superficial’) hope, focusing in particular on their mutual capacity to provide what Pettit calls ‘cognitive resolve’. Such hope, it is argued, can itself be understood as a work of love, returning to the earlier discussion of Helen Prejean’s relation to the Death Row inmate Pat Sonnier in Dead Man Walking to discuss how such hope can ‘scaffold’ normative change. This view of hope is defended against objections in the context of considering the role of hope in the task of interpersonal forgiveness.

Elitist Interpretations of the Republic

This chapter traces the intellectual history and institutional iterations of the theory of the mixed constitution that originated as a critique of monocratic constitutions and offered a realist redress for systemic corruption based on the institutionalization of different forms of social power. It offers the genealogy of an elitist-proceduralist strand commenced by Polybius and Cicero, reinterpreted by Montesquieu, constitutionalized by Madison, and brought to its highest level of philosophical sophistication by Philip Pettit. It also analyses a plebeian-materialist strand originating in the political experience of the plebs within the ancient Roman republic and continuing in Niccolò Machiavelli's interpretation of the political praxis of the popolo during the Florentine republic. The chapter makes the distinction between elitist and plebeian constitutions based on who has final decision-making power in a given framework. It provides a visual representation of constitutional orders to better understand the distribution of powers and compare between different models of republics.

Prosecutorial Discretion and Republican Non-Domination

Prosecutors in the US legal system have great power to interfere at their discretion in the lives of citizens, and face relatively few checks on the exercise of this discretion. The vast scope of the criminal law provides a pretext for prosecuting nearly anyone. Meanwhile, other features of the legal system, such as the way plea bargains are structured and the doctrine of prosecutorial immunity, further increase prosecutorial power. And existing institutional restraints on prosecutorial abuses, such as democratic accountability, the grand jury system, and the possibility of a selective prosecution defense, are mostly ineffectual. I draw on republican political theory, including insights from Philip Pettit and Elizabeth Anderson, to argue that this state of affairs gives prosecutors dominating, and therefore unjust, power over vast swathes of the public. I then survey some potential institutional changes which might help ameliorate the problem.