Systematic vulnerability to another’s will cripples people’s capacity for open, assertive engagement

Evidence

I had come to rail against the subordination inherent in such training, and the notion of freedom as non-domination offered a satisfying way of explaining what was wrong with it. Our formation had tried to cultivate unfreedom; it was designed to make students passive, unassertive, unsure of where they stood. Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in the 1790s of the way that women’s subordination turned them into creatures who learned to bow and scrape, and to achieve their ends by ingratiation. She might have been writing of us. — Philip Pettit, Republicanism, 33

Categorization

• DEFINE: Grounds what ‘freedom as non-domination’ concretely means: looking authorities in the eye, unafraid of capricious judgment.
• XREF: connects to: Accepting vulnerability to others is necessary to enjoy maximal non-domination — Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and…, 1193

Broader Connections

• Accepting vulnerability to others is necessary to enjoy maximal non-domination #expands (0.85) — Philip Pettit, Republicanism, 1193