Liberals abandoned non-domination because universalizing it seemed unrealistic, not because it was wrong.
Evidence
For thinkers like Paley and Bentham it would have been axiomatic that all human beings are equal, even if in practice they did not draw the full implications of this equality. ‘Everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one’, in the slogan ascribed to Bentham by John Stuart Mill (1969: 257). Given such an assumption of equality, any ideal for government would have to present itself as a universal ideal, not just as an ideal for an elite citizenry. And the ideal of universal nondomination, the ideal of securing a non-dominated status for every adult, might well have seemed a fantasy to thinkers who took for granted the subordinate status of women and employees. … Perhaps this explains in some part why the ideal of non-domination lost its place in the work of Bentham and Paley and, later, in the work of those who would have claimed the new name of liberal. As these thinkers enlarged the compass of their concern to include more and more people as citizens, it must have seemed less and less realistic to stick with the rich old ideal of freedom as non-domination. Much better to thin out the ideal of freedom and to orientate the state by the light of the new, modernist ideal, or by the light of some other goal entirely. Even securing the greatest happiness of the greatest number— the goal shared by Bentham and Paley—would have looked much more tractable and attractive than securing freedom as nondomination; it was taken to require the reduction of many forms of interference—and, in those ways, the furthering of freedom as noninterference—but it would not necessarily have seemed to require that no one be subject to the arbitrary will of another. — Philip Pettit, Republicanism, 263
Categorization
- QUESTION: Whether the equality-of-all premise actually forced abandoning non-domination, or whether it merely seemed to, is worth interrogating.
- XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how inclusive, positive ideals get traded away; also echoes the tension in Pettit between universal scope and civic feasibility. — connects to: Universalizing equality made freedom-as-non-domination seem unrealistic — Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and…, 263; Non-domination is less skeptical of government but socially more radical than non-interference — Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and…, 1253; Republicans hold liberty as non-domination while liberals define it as mere non-interference. — Frank Lovett, Republicanism, 46 (+1 more)
- ADDENDUM: Tangent to the moral-panics and dress pieces only loosely; really fits the reader’s republican-solidarity research via the mechanism of ideal-thinning under inclusion.
Broader Connections
- Universalizing equality made freedom-as-non-domination seem unrealistic
#corroborates(0.92) — Philip Pettit, Republicanism, 263 - Non-domination is less skeptical of government but socially more radical than non-interference
#expands(0.75) — Philip Pettit, Republicanism, 1253 - Republicans hold liberty as non-domination while liberals define it as mere non-interference.
#qualifies(0.75) — Frank Lovett, Republicanism, 46 - Universalistic norms lose force without status-group exclusionary sanctions behind them.
#complicates(0.72) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 271