Domination

In plain terms

Consider a slave with a kind master. Nobody interferes with him, he does more or less as he likes, and he is not free.

What is wrong is not what happens to him but what could happen at any moment, at another person's discretion, with no recourse. He lives by permission. And the effects show up before anything is done to him: he watches what he says, anticipates moods, and cultivates the goodwill of someone who does not have to be reasonable.

That is domination, and it is a different thing from interference. A law that constrains you but applies to everyone, was made by a process you participate in, and can be challenged in court does not put you at anyone's mercy. A relationship with no rules at all can.

As a philosopher would put it

Pettit's neo-republican account defines domination as the capacity to interfere arbitrarily in another's choices - arbitrary meaning without reference to the interests of the person affected - and freedom as its absence.

Two consequences follow that liberal accounts cannot deliver. Domination can exist without interference, as in the case of the benevolent master; and interference can occur without domination, where it is constrained by rules that track the interests of those subject to it. That is why the republican tradition regards a properly constituted law as constitutive of freedom rather than as a trade-off against it.

The test is not what the powerful party does but what they could do without cost. A relationship in which one party must rely on the other's goodwill produces the characteristic effects - self-censorship, anticipatory deference, strategic ingratiation - which republicans take as evidence that unfreedom is present even where nothing has been done. Feminist republicans have extended the analysis to the household, which the classical tradition conspicuously did not.

What is actually disputed

Whether domination without interference is really unfreedom.

Liberals argue that freedom is about what you can actually do, that a benevolent master's slave is unfree only in the sense of being at risk, and that collapsing risk into unfreedom makes the concept cover too much - everyone is subject to some unaccountable power somewhere.

Republicans reply that this misses what people actually complain about. The wrong in an arbitrary relationship is present before anything is done, in the deference it produces and the standing it denies, and a theory that registers nothing until the blow falls has misdescribed the situation.

The practical question is where to draw the line. If any capacity to affect someone without accountability is domination, then markets, family life and every large organisation qualify - and the concept becomes a description of society rather than a criticism of particular arrangements.