Republicanism and Social Prejudice

Abstract

Abstract Republicans are, in principle, committed to securing freedom from domination for all members of the political community. Traditionally, this has been done through a set of institutional mechanisms and a culture of public deliberation that holds the government to account. The members of historically marginalized social groups, however, have long argued that institutions and dialogue are insufficient to guarantee freedom, and that there is a third core element represented by the background culture shared by the republic’s population. Women, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, showed that centuries of patriarchal society had evolved to support a culture in which women were systematically dominated by men as much through norms and values as by legal exclusion. African Americans, such as Frederick Douglass, showed how the internalized racist myths used to maintain slave society persisted long after formal abolition. One of Wollstonecraft’s key arguments was that social prejudices ‘cloud’ people’s ability to reason impartially and so undercut the operation of public reason through which republican institutions must operate. Douglass shows how large-scale, persistent social inequality leads to ideological struggles that polarize society, fatally diminishing the quality of public deliberation and civil society. Free, republican society is only possible, both Wollstonecraft and Douglass argue, where republican institutions operate within a background culture that is the representative outcome of the input of citizens from all constitutive social groups.