The State by Philip Pettit: An inspiring work of philosophy

The State

Author: Philip Pettit

ISBN-13: 9780691182209

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Guideline Price: £35

Out of the disorientation of the Covid-19 pandemic, one truth became clear. In confining us to our homes and propping up the economy, the modern state revealed itself as the main arbiter of political, social and economic life. Whereas hitherto the state had largely maintained a background presence in our lives, especially for Western societies, its powers were now evident; revealing its beneficent potential as well as its myriad shortcomings.

The world is dominated by a system of nation states; each of these constitute coercive, territorial regimes in which one sovereign authority exercises power over residents and claims the right to act on their behalf. This system is here to stay, as political realists will recognise. Our future, therefore, depends on how states perform against climate change, pandemics, war and global poverty. Only by marshalling the state on to the path of justice will it lead us to prosperity. For an institution with such a chequered past, this would seem a lofty ideal.

For the distinguished Irish philosopher Philip Pettit, not only is it an ideal worth following, the very future of humanity rests on our willingness to approximate it. It is with the systematic exposition of this argument that Pettit is concerned in his latest book, The State. Contrary to what Princeton University Press’s marketing strategy would have us believe, Pettit has not discovered a new realm of inquiry; there is already a substantial literature devoted to the history, economics and function of the state, as Pettit recognises. It is not true that the “state is the elephant in the room of political theory”, but this may be so in the domain of political philosophy.

Pettit is not offering a comprehensive analysis of the state; he is positing a novel theory of the state, one in which the rulers and the ruled share a rough balance of power, stipulating how it ought to function for it to meet the ideal of statehood he prescribes. In its ambition and execution, The State resembles such canonical works of political philosophy as Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) or Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Du contrat social (1762) and will likely be counted among them in time.

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The book should be read as extending some of the concerns Pettit has developed elsewhere. He is distinguished in the landscape of contemporary political thought for integrating the philosophies of law, mind, language, ethics and agency within a framework of political theory deriving its principles from the classical-republican tradition of Latin antiquity. Of this neglected tradition Pettit is the leading exponent in the realm of political philosophy, most influentially via his 1997 book Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government.

Central to the neo-republican theory advanced by Pettit is the concept of freedom as non-domination. A just society, in his estimation, is one in which all citizens – including children, refugees and temporary immigrants – are free from the threat of arbitrary interference or domination; where they can relate to their fellow citizens on equal terms, allowing them to look one another in the eye without fear or deference.

He takes “incorporation as an equal citizen under a state to be essential to anyone’s enjoyment of justice” but all depending on the willingness of states to co-operate and preserve order in the international sphere. By way of a counterfactual thought experiment, Pettit presents his neo-republican ideal of the state as a law-positing, nomothetic entity under which citizens enjoy a realm of security, from threats external and domestic.

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He then proceeds to argue that for the state to effectively guarantee the security of its citizens it ought to incorporate as a group agent, “establishing a single voice behind which officials can rally in acting for the state and under which other citizens can have precise sense of where they stand” – vis-a-vis the law, say. Moreover, the state should also operate under a decentralised model, on a mixed constitution, so as to limit potential corruption and inaugurate a checks-and-balances system.

In part two Pettit demonstrates the benefits of a neo-republican state in three spheres, as against some traditional positions: it offers its citizens a high degree of collective, countervailing authority against the sovereign; it honours significant institutional rights on their behalf as individuals; and it has the capacity to intervene productively in the market economy.

Pettit has little to say in this volume about the potential of the state in mitigating the effects of climate change or of advancing the cause of social justice, but as this is the first of a projected two volumes, we may reasonably expect such topics to be treated in the second instalment. Meanwhile, we can find much to stimulate us in this inspiring work of philosophy.