The republican idea of freedom as non-domination dominated Anglophone thought until the late 1700s

Evidence

The fact that Bentham could think his conception of liberty a kind of discovery, and the fact that the conception appeared at a time when it could serve an important ideological purpose—the critique of the cause of American independence—suggests strongly that we were right in saying that Hobbes’s notion of freedom had little influence prior to the late eighteenth century: that up to then, the republican notion of freedom as non-domination reigned more or less unchallenged in the English-speaking world. It is as if the Hobbesian notion had been put on the shelf of historical curiosities, only to be reclaimed at a time when suddenly it promised to do important, ideological work: to help in silencing complaints of servitude and domination— complaints of unfreedom—from those in Britain’s American colonies. — Philip Pettit, Republicanism, 236

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s civic-republican research: this establishes non-domination as the historically dominant conception before Hobbesian non-interference displaced it for ideological work. — connects to: Hobbesian freedom-as-non-interference displaced republican non-domination only in later eighteenth-century writings — Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and…, 222; Contrasting liberty with slavery reveals a non-domination rather than non-interference theory of freedom. — Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and…, 170
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: Pettit dates non-interference’s ideological triumph to British anti-independence tracts — what does this imply about later republican revivals and the load-bearing metaphors each theory carries?

Broader Connections

• Contrasting liberty with slavery reveals a non-domination rather than non-interference theory of freedom. #expands (0.80) — Philip Pettit, Republicanism, 170