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Visions of liberty: republicanism and liberalism in the current theoretical debate

In recent decades, there has been a recovery of a strand of republicanism whose genesis dates back to the ideals and institutions of the ancient Roman Republic. Reconstructed by historians of political thought - and recently absorbed by theorists of analytical and normative persuasion - the "neo-Roman republicanism" revolves around a conception of freedom as non-domination, allegedly distinct from freedom as noninterference, predominant in contemporary liberalism. By understanding freedom as an "essentially contested concept", the article tries to answer the following questions: (1) To what extent is defensible the thesis (put forward by neo-Roman scholars) about the rivalry between republicanism and liberalism as single historical traditions of political thought? (2) What are the main conceptual distinctions between freedom as non-domination and freedom as non-interference? While the first question frames the debate on liberty from the point of view of the history of ideas, the second one does so from the normative and analytical perspectives.

Neo-Roman Republicanism; Liberalism; Liberty; Nondomination; Noninterference


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