Republican liberty vanished even from the history of political thought.

Evidence

Not only did the conception of freedom as non-interference displace the republican idea in the new liberal tradition. It apparently succeeded in staging this coup d’etat without anyone’s noticing the usurpation that had taken place. When Constant delivered his lecture on the liberty of the ancients and the liberty of the moderns, he saw only the alternatives of positive liberty, in particular the liberty of democratic participation, and negative liberty: liberty as noninterference. And when Berlin came to present his own retrospective musings on these matters, he could suggest that those not attached to positive liberty allied themselves invariably with the Hobbesian tradition. ‘Law is always a “fetter”,’ he said in exposition of the approach, ‘even if it protects you from being bound in chains that are heavier than those of the law, say arbitrary despotism and chaos’ (Berlin 1958: 8). Liberty as non-domination—republican liberty—had not only been lost to political thinkers and activists; it had even become invisible to the historians of political thought. — Philip Pettit, Republicanism, 270

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The point that a political ideal can be so thoroughly displaced that even historians of the field no longer see it as a possibility is striking and layered.