Republicanism and Private Life

Abstract

In the work entitled, Razones Públicas. Seis conceptos básicos sobre la República Andrés Rosler offers us five ingredients that every republican conception must necessarily have to be considered such, i.e., freedom as non-domination, virtue, debate, law and patriotism; and one that must necessarily be missing: Caesarism. The republican conception that the author proposes revolves around the idea of freedom as non-domination. This idea is presented by Rosler as a conception of freedom that surpasses the positive and negative conceptions of freedom. In addition, the author maintains that since republicanism proposes to eliminate (or minimize) any situation of domination, the freedom on which it is based does not have to be reduced to the political sphere. In this paper I will try to argue that, given the fact of the reasonable pluralism that permeates our current constitutional democracies, it is not plausible to extend the idea of freedom as non-domination beyond the political realm.