Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government

"Philip Pettit is, I think, the key respondent to Hayek. Hayek has this belief that we ought to avoid coercion, no matter what the consequences of taxing people to regenerate a society may be. What Petit demonstrates is that what we ought to be concerned with is what he calls ‘resilient non-interference’. This is freedom from domination – that is to say, from people making arbitrary decisions about our core interests—whether that be in the home, through domestic violence, or the workplace, with people being forced to do demeaning things in order to be paid. We see a lot of that in the care sector, in sex work, and any number of different areas of our society. What Pettit argues is that instruments like basic income free us from domination. They produce that resilient non-interference. People can’t just make decisions that affect our fundamental interests without reference to those interests, and that’s a much more important and salient form of freedom than just not being taxed, which is essentially Hayek’s primary concern. Pettit says that we can have taxation and that introducing controls on the market are perfectly acceptable, so long as you produce from that a society in which you are free from domination. That’s a significant intellectual development, and one that is salient in our current context."