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Philip Pettit, "The State" (Princeton UP, 2023)
00:43:12
An interview with Philip Pettit
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Philip Pettit
This is a real good story about.
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Apple Watch Narrator
Bronx and his dad Ryan, real United Airlines customers.
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United Airlines Customer/Passenger
We were returning home and one of.
- [00:37]
Philip Pettit
The flight attendants asked Bronx if he.
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United Airlines Customer/Passenger
Wanted to see the flight deck and meet Captain Andrew.
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Philip Pettit
I got to sit in the driver's seat.
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Caleb Zakrin
I grew up in an aviation family and seeing Bronx kind of reminded me of myself when I was that age.
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Apple Watch Narrator
That's Andrew, a real United pilot.
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Caleb Zakrin
These small interactions can shape a kid's future.
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Philip Pettit
It felt like I was the captain allowing my son to see the flight deck. Stick with us forever.
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Caleb Zakrin
That's how good leads the way.
- [01:00]
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Details welcome to the New Books Network.
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Caleb Zakrin
I'm Caleb Zakrin, Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Today I'm speaking with Philip Pettit, professor of Human Values at Princeton University and Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University, and author of the State from Princeton University Press. Philip's new book seeks to understand the proper role of the state in today's world work of political theory. Philip's book gets at the heart of the proper functions of states, the reaches of their power, and their necessary limits. Random Scope this book features in depth commentary on an array of political theorists. Philip, thank you for joining me today on the New Books Network.
- [02:07]
Philip Pettit
A pleasure.
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Caleb Zakrin
Well, before jumping into the book, I was wondering if you could just tell us a little about yourself and your background.
- [02:12]
Philip Pettit
Oh dear. Well, I'm long in the tooth, so I've got a long background. I was born in Ireland. I was also trained in Ireland in philosophy. I moved then to England where I had some positions there and moved in 1984 to the Australian National University, 1983. Then from 2002 to 2012 I was full time at Princeton. And since 2013 I've been dividing my time between Princeton and the ANU, the Australian National University. I guess that's as much as you want, isn't it?
- [02:47]
Caleb Zakrin
Yeah, that's perfect. And I think, you know, just for some grounding for listeners, you know, what is the relationship between this particular work and your previous work? Do you see this as the culmination of certain threads that you've been following?
- [03:01]
Philip Pettit
I see it as something close to a slight shift of direction within political philosophy. I also work elsewhere, but within political philosophy I guess I'm identified with neorepublicanism it's often called. And that begins from a conception of freedom that's very different from the non interference conception of freedom. It says basically that you're free in a range of choices only if you're secure in the exercise of those choices. In other words, you don't depend on anybody being nice to you, so to speak, in order to exercise the choices. So it's a richer notion of freedom as requiring that you're protected against the power of others, not just against the exercise of that power. The idea is that if someone has power over you, say with regard to how you speak, say for or against the government, then even if they don't exercise that power, the fact that if they wished they could would mean that you're already, so to speak, their vassal. And I've used that idea as many other people have done as well. It's often called the republican theory of freedom and indeed has a long history, as various historians have now made quite clear going back to Rome. But I've used that, and I call it the notion of freedom as non domination. No one is going to be in the position of a dominus in your life, even a nice dominus, even someone who lets you be. So that's a reliance associated with, and I've argued within normative political philosophy that we ought to be protected individually against the domination of others, which I think entails really quite a demanding social justice measures and in the public sphere, relationally, government. That we ought to have a system of control over government to which we have equal excess. I mean, that's a theory of democracy. Except I think in the republican tradition there are many, many strands of democratic control other than election, that have been emphasized, and I emphasize those in turn. For example, the power of a citizenry to protest or contest during the term of A government is really part of the democratic package, and that includes the power of an individual to take the government to court, to write to the media, and of course, to assemble in the streets if needs be. But it also includes the sort of discipline that the presumably popularly maintained Constitution imposes on those in government when it imposes a rule of law, when it imposes restrictions on how they may behave towards ordinary people, and so on. So it gives you both a theory of social justice and a theory of democratic or political justice. It also, I've argued elsewhere, many other people take this argument further than I have. It gives you and the rudiments of a theory of global justice. Anyhow, that's what I've been associated with. And as I say, this book on the state, it represents a slight change of direction. Not a change in my commitments, I should say, but a change in the way in which I approach philosophy.
- [06:23]
Caleb Zakrin
So what would you say were some of the big motivations that convinced you to write this book?
- [06:29]
Philip Pettit
Well, the best way of putting it, really, is that, okay, in terms of personal motivations, I worked for many years with Christian Nist, and great Part, who's a philosopher at, used to be the lse, is now at the University of Munich on the notion of group agency and what it is for a group to constitute an agency, like a corporation or like a political party, or indeed, I would say, like a state. And that theory of group agency, corporate agency, if you like. And it began to seem to me this has immense ramifications for how we should think about the state, if the state is a group agent itself, as I argue it is. So that's the motivation, in terms of my background, I suppose, development of my own thinking. The motivation, put in another way, is this. I mean, in political philosophy. Well, in so many enterprises we say, okay, what's the goal? It might be social justice, political justice, global justice. And if that's the goal, what are the best means we should adopt to the goal? I mean, that's a standard sort of approach, not just in political philosophy, but across the board. Now, I'm inclined to feel, and this may be a bit unfair in some ways, that someone like John Rawls, a titan though he was, of course, and even someone actually like Jurgen Habermas, who represents really the two major directions in normative political theory over the last 40 years, 50 years, they both have a very strong conception of justice, but they don't really look at the means whereby this, other than invent them as they go along, so to speak. So Rawls tells Us, we have to have institutions that have this, that or the other feature. Now, I think that if the state is the means whereby social and political justice can be advanced, and I think it is the only means. I mean, I argue that very early in the book, and the state is probably going to be with us indefinitely, and it's really the only hope of achieving domestically social political justice or globally achieving some degree of global justice. If the state is the means, then of course we're stuck with the means. We can't just invent a means to suit the goal. We're stuck with this means. So it struck me in that basis. It's important that we know, so to speak, the potential and the limitations of this means, of this instrument, of these institutions we call the state, that is going to be our only way of achieving, say, ends of justice.
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Caleb Zakrin
People sometimes describe states as legitimate or illegitimate, or sometimes describe a state that has a bad economy or bad leadership as a failed state. What do you see as some of the main features that characterize all states, all legitimate states?
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Philip Pettit
Legitimate is a normative word, whereas I'm focused on the state and what its function is before ever you get the legitimacy. It's used in many different senses. So, for example, you can talk about the legitimacy of an appointment within the state system, for example, but you can also talk, pulling back, about whether a state. Or you can talk about how the government, those who run the state, have been appointed legitimately, and you can talk about whether the state is legitimate. I think, unfortunately, the word legitimacy, even though I've used it a good deal in the past, is freighted with these different ambiguous connotations. If it comes to the legitimacy of the state. I would say that a state is legitimate insofar as. And that's a matter of political justice, as I think our democratic justice insofar as those running the state, are subject to a system of control to which individuals, citizens, residents, adult, more or less permanent residents, have equal access even if they don't use it equally. That can put control on government and what government can do. So I have very much a democratic view of what legitimacy is when it comes to talking about the legitimacy of a state.
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Caleb Zakrin
And as far as your theory or understanding of. Of the state, how do you see it differing most from other political philosophers? For example, you talk a great deal about Hobbes in the book, who I think is. Oftentimes when people first are learning about social contract theory and thinking about states, they often start with Hobbes, right?
- [10:57]
Philip Pettit
Well, Hobbes is actually he really stands out. I mean, as John Rawls said of him, he's surely the dominant figure in the history of political philosophy. I mean, he's a man of immense intellect covering incredible range of topics. And while there are blind spots, you know, there certainly are connections where you might wonder, is he. Is he slipping something past us here? He's still extraordinarily consistent. And it's a wonderful overall view, even though it's a horrible view in some respects, but it's wonderful in its coherence. Now, the interesting thing about Hobbes is that he doesn't really talk much about justice. In fact, he thinks that, well, let me knock it into Hobbs scholarship. He doesn't know much about justice. What he's really concerned with is what is required for the state to be a functional entity, to do its job. Okay, that. And this is the topic I'm addressing in this book. He says, okay, how do we know what the job of the state is? Well, let's imagine how the state might be ideally made. And he thinks it would be ideally made in a contract in which everyone unanimously agrees with one another that a particular individual, not one of them or a particular committee formed maybe from among them, should be the absolute sovereign. That's what the theory of the functional state he comes up with. And he thinks that is the only workable state. He thinks there are three versions of that state. In one version, it's an individual that rules. In a second version, it's a committee of an elite that rule, a sovereign. And that means they have total power over what laws to introduce and how to impose them and what to change them. And the third is a committee of the whole, which is where every citizen. Now, Hobbes would have thought of those. Actually, he was fairly inclusive, but he would have restricted them to men. And that idea was taken over by Rousseau. When Roosevelt says, this is the only acceptable way of organizing the state, Hobbes is concerned more with not what's acceptable or just, but what would work in theory. And he thinks those three would work in theory. And that enables him in particular to argue against the sort of state that actually was quite common, and he would have known of it at the time, which was often called as a republican, described as a republican state. And for him, the important thing about Republican states is that there were checks and balances. There was a division, there was a sharing of power. This, the constitution of such a state, in a word that had been introduced way back by Republicans in classical Rome, was that of a mixed constitution. What he really wanted to argue was that the mixed constitution is chaotic, that it would not deliver a functional state. Because of course, on the story of contract, the aim of the state is basically to establish an order of peace. And he thinks that you need a center of control, be it an individual or a committee that will just lay it down, so to speak. No one can object. Once it's laid down, it's laid down. That's it. He thought that's the only possible functional state that would introduce order and peace. And he thinks the mixed constitution, whereby you've got independent courts, you've got a legislature, you've got an executive, maybe that are independent from another, that that's absolutely a recipe for disaster and chaos. So it's a functional state that you're interested in in the first place. And that topic of the move from what would make a functional state to what would make an ideal state. Now it really that occurs most sharply in Rousseau and then in Kant.
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Caleb Zakrin
So, yeah, kind of going with this idea that of hops being like the most centralized, putting forth the most centralized type of state possible. You talk a lot in the book about different notions of decentralization. You look at laissez faire theory, libertarian theories. So how do you think about how much is too much decentralization or how much is too little?
- [15:14]
Philip Pettit
Well, in the first half of the book, so to speak, I argue for. Well, first of all, in the first chapter, I set out an account of what the function of the state is. I do it not on the basis of a contract story, like Hobbes story, but on the basis of what you might call an emergence story. So this is to take the line that, for example, HLA Hart took in asking, what is law? He said, well, imagine a society without law. And then he described a world in which people would make adjustments to the problems they would find not in a planned way, but individually adjusted. And a byproduct unplanned of this was the emergence of something deserving to be called a law. Now, I think we can push Hart's emergence story. I call it a genealogy. It's a conceptual genealogy. We can push it a bit further and explain that actually, in the sorts of circumstance which it seems reasonable to imagine, creatures like us, in circumstances broadly like ours, you would have not just a system of law merging, but something deservingly called a state. And I say under that account, what would make the state, so to speak, an almost predictable, robustly likely development, as I put it, is that it would serve to establish a law and to Defend a law, Defend it by making the law coercive, for example, and by making the area territorial. Some people can't break the law and just escape. It would emerge as an organ whose job it is to establish a regime of law under which citizens know where they stand against one another and know where they stand against those who actually are in office, those who are making the. Okay, so that's the first chapter I established. That's not big news in a way, you know, And I say that in the book that. Look, if you want, you can skip the first chapter, you know, it's a way. It's a. It's a fancy attempt to. To argue for this being the function of the state. But most people will accept the function of the state is to lay down a system of law that enables citizens to know where they stand. I should say here that a functional state might not give citizenship to everybody. A just state would have to, I'd say. But a functional state, I mean, the state of the Norman lords or barons in the 12th century, that was a functional state. But the citizens, in my sense of citizens, of more or less equal individuals than whom no other private individuals are more powerful. The citizens there were just the barons, really, and they held King John to the terms they laid down. In any case, I'm directing that's the function of the state than to lay down a law for its citizens. I then argue in the first half of the book for two apparently conflicting theses. One is that the state should ideally be a corporate agent. And that involves introducing something like Hobbes notion of sovereignty and saying there ought to be some final. As were a court of appeal, there ought to be some final authority that can rule on what the law is. And that books no contradiction. You know, we all just defer to that ultimately. But I then go on to argue that despite the state needing to be organized around a sovereign center of power, it should be a state that. And this is for functional reasons now, it should be for a state that gives, that puts checks and balances in place. The reason for wanting sovereignty is that unless you have a sovereign voice, you get rogue elements breaking away. For example, I would say that Congress is being a rogue element in the United States at the moment in some areas, refusing to raise the debt limit. This is really an egregious offense. I would say patriotism actually, in caring about the whole is using for our particular interest. Or when the police go rogue or the military go rogue, you know, that's equally a failure of the state to be Governed by a single voice. That's why sovereignty is important. Secondly, though, you need checks and balances, because if you've got a powerful state like this, then of course you create the opportunity for someone seizing that power, as in a democratic autocracy, as people talk about nowadays, and really taking over all the levers of power, you know, squashing the public interest, contested everybody squashing the courts and being justice, that's really dangerous. And to guard against that, I do think you need checks and balances. But I think that. And you raise that question. I'm sorry to take so long to come back to it. I think that there's a big question about exactly what form checks and balances should take. My own, since we're speaking in American context here. My own sense is that the American Constitution introduced to extreme oppression of checks and balances that leads to gridlock, as is happening at the moment, for example, on the debt ceiling. And I set up in the book a contrast between a Washington style presidential democracy and the checks and balances it introduces. Dividing the legislature from the executive from the courts, for example. I contrast that with a Westminster style parliamentary democracy where you do have a big division between the courts and the executive and legislature, but you do not have a division between the legislature and the executive. I take actually Australia as an example of that because very like America in the sense that it's got a constitution, it's got two houses of parliament, both of which are actually quite important. And it's a federation of states as well as substates, so to speak. And I contrast that and the pros and cons of the different systems. I think that the more moderate form of checks and balances that you get in the Westminster system is probably more desirable.
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- [23:12]
Caleb Zakrin
Edu Yeah, I want to pick up on something that you were talking about. You mentioned a little bit about just the importance of there to be a state of state. Staffs have sovereignty to deal with rogue elements. And just thinking about, you know, the agency of states versus the agency of humans, you know, what does that mean in like a very literal sense? Like, are you saying that states and humans should be considered in certain respects, like some people? Mitt Romney famously said corporations are people. Is that sort of what you mean? Or is something totally different?
- [23:50]
Philip Pettit
Oh dear, that's very unfortunate phrase, corporations as people, because it suggests we should treat them with the same respect that we treat individual people. But let's stick with the and that goes back to the theory Group Agency, that Christian list and I brought up in a book called group agency about 10 years ago. I think that group agents are organized so that they're able to pursue goals and perhaps change the goals that they pursue. And they're able to pursue them. They're organized so that they can pursue them across different scenarios. You know, different obstacles, different opportunities appear. Then the corporation can actually adjust what it does in order to fulfill its goals. Think about a commercial corporation, you know, a hedge fund or an oil company or whatever. I mean, the oil company, which has got a goal, presumably of making profits and staying in business and so on, is certainly going to shift to renewable energy sources if it turns out that it's going to start losing customers otherwise. That's an example of there being a goal which you're pursuing in different circumstances. There's something else true about corporations, I think though, that is important. And by corporations, I don't mean just commercial corporations, but also bodies like churches, town council, sometimes the hospital and local area, whatever, which is that they can make commitments or promises and they can be held to those promises. In fact, they held to the promises in law, as we know. You can take corporation to law. Now, that means that corporations are more like human beings than like, for example, animals. I've got a dog. I'm deeply devoted to Dougal, you know, but you well trained and attractive as he is, you can't get Dougal to promise to do anything, you know, part of anything else. You need language, but you also need the sort of capacities that are distinctive of human beings, whether it be individual human beings or human beings acting together in a corporate identity. So, okay, so those are two very important aspects of any corporate body, be it a church, as I say, a town council, a hospital, or a commercial corporation, that it's agentially flexible, it pursues goals across different situations according to its judgments about what's needed in this or that situation. And secondly, like human beings, but unlike animals, because animals do the first, of course, it can make promises and be held to those promises. Now, I think states in that sense are capable of agency. I mean, every state is to some extent an agent because every state is going to have. Every functional state, I should say, is going to have as its goal maintaining a certain system or regime of law, in particular one that satisfies the goal of knowing, enabling citizens where they stand vis a vis one another and vis a vis the government. Every state has that goal. And every state, of course, adjusts in various ways in the pursuit of that goal as things, as situations alter. And when I talk about the state here, for example, the change might be made mainly via executive action, via legislative action come or by action on the part of the courts. You know, when the courts in America recognized same sex marriage, that's a major shift and a tissue. But these are all organs or aspects of the state. Okay, so I think of the state in that sense as an agent, but and as a permissive agent, an agent that can make promises, as in international law, but also, of course, promises to its own citizens that it can be brought to book on. I mean, as in you bring a government to court for breaching the Constitution, for example. Okay, so the next question is, what rights do corporate entities have, as you think, from, you know, what, what can we expect from what responsibilities, if you like, should they have. And the real mistake of saying corporations are people is to suggest that they've got the same rights as people. And you know, I've got, I don't want to rotate in detail, but an argument to the effect that it will be a huge mistake to give corporations the same rights or anything like the rights of individuals. Again, I think American law may have gone too far in that direction. You know, roughly the idea is this, that if we assume that people, the people should have equal rights, and I mean rights established in law defendants on, then it's clear that every right you give to a con give to a corporate body is a right that could impact on the rights of individuals. Like it favors those within the corporate body, for example, and may disfavor those without. And so you've got to taper corporate rights so that they don't jeopardize the rights of individuals within the community. So I would say giving corporations the right to contribute to any level in PACs is going to jeopardize the right of ordinary people to have an influence on what government does. Actually, even allowing, I would say campaign financing of the sort to be allowed by individuals does that. But in any case, this argues for why the rights of corporate bodies should be lesser than the rights of individuals.
- [29:21]
Caleb Zakrin
So sort of, you know, following this, you then in part two, you talk about potential of states and I was wondering if you could talk about collective power, thinking about the balance between the collective powers of citizens and individual rights, how you think about those two.
- [29:37]
Philip Pettit
Well, there are a number of different ways in which people down the ages, as it were, have argued for a normative result, a result in normative theory of justice on the basis of, as it were, a functionality restrictions. And for example, in the last two chapters I look at a normative restriction that people say, for example, like Robert Nozick argue that look, there are natural rights which are there before ever the state appears, before ever laws appear. And these natural rights normatively constrain anything you could allow a functional state to do. And then the last chapter looks at the claim that the state is normative, sorry, is empirically restricted insofar as it cannot profitably interfere in, as it's often put, the economy, it's got to regard the economy as a self regulating economy. And I argue, I think that both of those arguments are weak. I think that the state understood as a functional body, while it should satisfy requirements like bringing rogue agents together and having checks and balances. And they put restrictions, of course, on the state just in the Name of its function. I say that in the name of its function. There is no reason to think that the state should be limited by natural rights. And that's based on a critique of the notion of natural rights. And nor do I think it should be limited by the so called self regulating nature of the economy, for example. I don't think the economy is self regulating. I think it depends on every side on what the state in the form of the government at the time is actually doing.
- [31:31]
Caleb Zakrin
I want to just pick back up an earlier thread just around decentralization and I was wondering, you know, when. And you can even talk about, you know, contemporary examples like, like, like. I like. I really like the comparison that you did between the US system for this richly parliamentary system as far as checks and balances are concerned. But is there a way or a polity out there that you think approaches a more decentralized form of government? Government? Well, maybe not so. Well, I don't know. You could pick it up at whatever thread you'd like.
- [32:02]
Philip Pettit
Well, decentralized. By decentralized I mean that there are checks and balances, meaning there are independent agencies that have power of their own. So that what the state as a whole does has to be a result of how they interact with one another, those agencies. So the agencies of course will include the citizens electing, but also contesting and so on. They'll include the courts which assume the constitution is laid down, that can be amended by the people. They include the courts, for example, that keeps tabs on the legislature in the name of the constitution. They include two houses of the legislature where one may hold the other, so to speak, to account. So that's what I mean by decentralization here. Okay, so what do I think is the ideal in decentralization? I hate to sort of seem to run this too nice too insistently, but I do think a parliamentary system like that in Australia does pretty well on those accounts. I mean, the High Court, which is our Supreme Court, as you might say, it does pretty well in enforcing the constitution and holding the legislature to book, as it were, and its power is beyond as well as the power of the legislature or the executive to withstand and similarly the power of the central bank. For example, at the moment, like America, we're in a situation where inflation is a real problem. The central bank lays down rate increases, has done. And consistently the government says, look, we are not entitled to challenge the central bank. That is their business, so to speak, not our business, that's an independent arm of government. For example, in Australia, there's an electoral commission that determines the boundaries of districts and that determines whether or not elections are conducted fairly. Now, these people in the central banks, in the courts, in the electoral commission, are appointed, of course, by those elected, but they're appointed under conditions of transparency. And those very bodies themselves, of course, are exposed to critique and contestation in the press and elsewhere. So they're not, so to speak, rogue agencies. And they're also subject to severe limitations on what they can do and what they can do and do. Do they do in the open, you know, so everybody knows what they. What they do. But those bodies, I think they further the ends of the people. So, for example, an electoral commission of the sort that we don't have in the United States, unfortunately, at least not anyone with teeth. And that electoral commission is almost never questioned by either side of politics because the people appointed are appointed under these conditions of transparency with very explicit briefs with criteria they should be following, and they're sort of professionals. Now, do they speak for the people? Well, I would say they represent the pursuit of a goal that the people quite clearly given. They don't complain, for example, endorse. And that is the goal of establishing fair elections in which every voter basically has, as far as possible, the voters of the same weight. So that's an example of a check that's there in the Australian system, that's not there in the American system. And of course, we can see in the American system it's absolute chaos when a local legislature, a state legislature, can actually change the districts more or less at will, and where the ability of the courts to inhibit that action is severely limited, as we now know. So I think of a parliamentary system like that in Australia. I mentioned Australia mainly because, I mean, there are many others as well. There's the European systems in general. There's of course, there's Britain and there's Canada. But Britain and Canada are unusual insofar as they have an upper house that's basically not really as powerful as the upper house in America. Are the upper house here, I mean, so it's not really a check within the legislature by one house of another. New Zealand is another example. But I don't want to go on and on.
- [36:35]
Caleb Zakrin
Since this book has come out and seeing some of the reception that you've gotten and feedback, is there there anything that since you've written it, you felt either very vindicated by, like, yes, I really got that correct, or something that you thought that maybe, oh, I would rewrite this or retool this now if I Had a second run.
- [36:59]
Philip Pettit
Well, I'm not a person who has massive confidence in what they say. I think everything you put forward like this in this book is tentative, is subject to critique and so on. There hasn't been much of a reaction, I think. I mean, it only came out two months ago, actually less than two months ago.
- [37:21]
Caleb Zakrin
It usually takes about two to three years for everything to cycle down to like the New York Review of Books and all of that.
- [37:26]
Philip Pettit
Yes, I know. I've had various interviews, which is interesting, and symposia established and so on to discuss it, which indicates that people recognize that maybe we haven't focused enough on the state and the functional requirements of having a state that really plays the basic state job. What I want to argue, I mean going back to the neo republicanism I mentioned, is that while a functional state may not give citizenship to everyone, and while a functional state may only enable people to know whether they stand against other people in a very restricted way, you know, for example, they might allow an employer to have absolute carte blanche over whether to fire an employee or not. And while a functional state equally might give the people only limited system of control over those in government, you get an ideal showing up on the horizon. And I think neo republicanism as well spells out that ideal nicely, which is of course citizenship should be extended to all. And of course the rights that people have against one another that enable them to know where they stand against one another should enable each not to be dominated by anyone. And I have this sort of rough and ready test that people in this society enjoy that sort of freedom as non domination if they can pass the eyeball test. In other words, they can look others in the eye without reason for fear or deference based on the power of interference of the other. I mean, that eyeball test sums up for me what it would be to have freedom as non domination, that republican ideal, social world, citizens relationships with one another. But equally I think that there's obviously room for improving. And you know, in a way we. I think this is really the area of real exploration politically finding the institutions that will give people a really effective and more or less equally accessible system of control over those in government. You know, and there are new institutions coming on stream that I'm enthusiastic about. For example, like the Citizens assembly, you know, that selects a statistically representative group of people from the population at random and then maybe it's two or three hundred people they meet over maybe a year or six months at regular intervals, they get informed, they hear all sides of opinion on an issue and then they make a judgment on that issue. I think ideally that should be followed by a referendum, which for example, it has been in Ireland, which my home country, as it were, you know, in the recent developments on abortion law and on gay marriage, you had a citizens assembly whose results were published and then you had a referendum. And the evidence is that people were deeply influenced by what the citizens assembly judged because they said, well, those are people like us, you know, and they made this judgment on the basis of full information and hearing all sides. Maybe they know better than we do and they represent the sort of people we are that really influenced. I think. And I think that's a new sort of avenue when I talk about a system of control over government, broadly a democratic system that gives ordinary people a lot of power. That's a new institution that's been added to that. I mean, to follow this up with the companion volume which my publishers want me to call the Republic, but I think that has well and truly taken that particular title. It'll probably be called From State to Republic as you are grafting on the neo republican ideas of justice, this theory of the limitations and potential of the state as such.
- [41:21]
Caleb Zakrin
Yeah, I know. Definitely. I would really like to read something like that because that is, I think where I've, you know, found myself is that, you know, and I think what you said at the outset was, is exactly right. That like, it just doesn't. It feels like we haven't. This hasn't been a discussion point that people have been. Have been interested in other things besides the state. People have been interested in international form, international systems. They've been interested in corporations and, you know, the states. States have been overlooked. But I think maybe it's. It's the, you know, re industrialization, maybe it's Covid. But there's become this renewed focus on states as entities, at least in more of a realm of political philosophy theory. Obviously people are talking about states and nations all the time, but normally like sports teams in the way that you approach it.
- [42:09]
Philip Pettit
Well, I think what's important is to recognize that there are two sources, so to speak, of thinking about what shape the state ought to take. One is functional and the other is normative or a theory of justice. And I'm looking at here in this book, at the functional constraints on the state, in other words, what it's doing and how it may best do it. I argue by having a sovereignty, but also having checks and balances. And then whether or not it's subject to these other. And the other source of constraint on the state is, well, what would justice require? And I think that those two have tended to drift apart. Well, basically that the normative theory has swamped the functional theory.
- [42:53]
Caleb Zakrin
Yeah. That's an interesting way to put it. And I definitely sense that in some of my questions that I liked how you were really putting that forth, that this is that division that you're making and the emphasis on functionality. Well, Philip, thank you so much for being asked for the new Books Network. The book is the State from Prism University Press. I highly recommend people check it out. It's also is a beautiful book. It's my favorite color. It's a nice blue. Eve Klein blue. Well, thanks so much.
- [43:24]
Philip Pettit
Real pleasure. Thank you. Caleb.