Are law and freedom inevitably in tension with each or reconcilable? It is this old question of political philosophy that Philip Pettit sets about to answer in his On the People's Terms (OTPT). In this book, the author presents a theory of republican democracy based on freedom as nondomination (FND) as a core standard of legitimacy. In doing so, Pettit's book joins a movement in political theory that has been labeled as “republican revival.” Generally, this revival is characterized by taking recourse to a particular strand in the history of political ideas in the attempt to get inspirations and conceptions that can help to develop a normatively convincing alternative to liberalism. The term republicanism covers a number of quite heterogeneous approaches ranging from neo-Aristotelian models focusing on an orientation toward a supposed common good and the civic humanism of the Renaissance, up to Rousseau-inspired conceptions of the volonté...

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