The purpose of this volume is to explore the various ways that republican political thought can contribute to debates about the present meaning and future shape of democracy. It achieves this aim by bringing together a series of chapters by a range of republican scholars writing from diverse perspectives, each reflecting on the relationship between republican theory and democracy from within their particular field.

The combined effect is impressive. There are 13 essays from a stellar cast of contributors that includes a great many of the figures that a reader might hope to engage with, and there is also a helpful introduction from the two editors. The essays are divided into six short sections covering the ideal of the common good, historical responses to the challenges of democratic politics, nondomination as a democratic ideal, the reciprocal influences between republicanism and democracy, the workplace and the market, and republicanism beyond the nation-state. There are no weak chapters in the volume, and the net effect is a thought-provoking collection that challenges the reader from a wide variety of (often conflicting) standpoints. Although a lot has inevitably been left out of such a short volume on a rich and fast-changing area, as I suggest later, its range of subjects and the quality of its writing mean that this book is likely to become a definitive collection for the next decade, rather like Cécile Laborde’s and John Maynor’s Republicanism and Political Theory (2008) was in the last.

No firm stance is taken either by the editors or within the volume on the question of what constitutes republicanism or what its core commitments and principles are. That is as it should be, because many of the chapters show the complexity and subtlety of thinking of republican writing even within the confines of what might broadly be taken as the Roman, rather than Athenian, or the Italian-Atlantic tradition that inform most of the essays. This much said, although a broad range of historical thinkers are invoked—often innovatively— it is noticeable that all the contributors confine their attention to a fairly safe and predictable set of canonized figures. Pettit, for example, engages with Rousseau on the common good; Daniel Kapust closely reads Sallust on inequality; Annelien de Dijn contrasts the approaches of Richard Price, John Adams, and James Madison on the problem of the tyranny of the majority; and Frank Lovett, John McCormick, and Nadia Urbinati each take in a broad sweep of established republican authorities in making their arguments.

There is, however, no mention in the volume of a single woman writing as a republican before Hannah Arendt. Neither are any nonwhite historical figures cited. This is both a shame and a missed opportunity. There is now considerable momentum behind the move to recognize, recover, and restore the contributions to the history of republican thinking from writers outside of traditional groups, with this process particularly well advanced in the case of women. Mary Wollstonecraft, for example, is now widely accepted as having made a significant contribution to republican thought (Alan Coffee, “Mary Wollstonecraft, Freedom and the Enduring Power of Social Domination,” European Journal of Political Theory 12 (2), 2013; Lena Halldenius, Mary Wollstonecraft and Feminist Republicanism, 2015). She is, however, but one of many, with the revolutionary period at the end of the eighteenth century alone providing many others, such as Catharine Macaulay, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Olympe de Gouges, and Sophie de Grouchy. Each wrote innovatively and influentially on themes of voice, inclusion, representation, and equality that lie squarely within the concerns of this volume. Similarly, African American writers in the nineteenth century frequently drew on the republican themes of the American, French and Haitian Revolutions; they include Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Anna Julia Cooper, and James McCune Smith, among many others.

Almost every chapter in the book engages with Philip Pettit’s work at some point, even if critically. Again, this is to be expected, because Pettit’s scholarship represents by far the most extensively worked-out account of neo-republicanism and has overwhelmingly set the agenda for contemporary debate within the field. Nevertheless, the lack of theoretical diversity in the volume shows in the way that contributors respond to Pettit. A great many theoretical problems in republicanism ultimately come back to its central tension, based on its being an account of the self-governing individual in a self-governing community. At some point, all republicans must identify a criterion by which they can establish the acceptable limits of coercive force that is consistent with individual freedom. The criterion must be sufficiently narrow to leave individuals free to pursue their own ends while being substantial enough to serve as the basis for real-life laws that are both stable and acceptable to the population. This represents the distinction between arbitrary (illegitimate, dominating) and nonarbitrary (legitimate, nondominating) power.

Broadly speaking, identifying this criterion can be approached in two ways. The most common approach by far in the literature is to accept that a process of public reason based on shared standards and values can in principle establish and administer a set of nonarbitrary laws. The task, then, is to determine how we should give specific content to the criterion of nonarbitrariness and whom we should trust to administer this process. Should we, for example, follow the popular will or turn to a set of appointed guardians of the constitution? Do we have most to fear from the tyranny of the majority or from an unaccountable minority? These questions are taken up by de Dijn, McCormick, and Urbinati, with the latter two entering into a spirited and useful exchange on representative democracy. A concern of McCormick’s is the unconstrained power of wealth, a theme that ties in with Kapust’s contribution. (For their part, Lovett and Niko Kolodny engage at a more abstract level with the question, asking what is the relationship between republicanism and democracy and what is the essential harm of being under the rule of others, respectively.)

Republicans may, however, question the operation of public reason itself. To do so represents a second level of republican inquiry into the criterion of arbitrariness. This is a necessary approach to take where the social and cultural preconditions for a free republic and a democratic system have not been met and must first be addressed. A key concern of Wollstonecraft’s in this context, for example, is that if women’s perspectives are not reflected in the baseline of cultural attitudes, values, beliefs, and practices that inform public debate, then women can have no chance of making a rational case for their rights to equal citizenship, something that is required for both republican freedom and democracy. This is not a peripheral matter for republicans but something both theoretically and practically essential to their framework. However, only one chapter in the book directly addresses this issue, with the rest of the first eight chapters focused on the operation of institutions that are successfully governed by public reason (following Pettit’s lead on this). Lida Maxwell navigates this second level of inquiry by making the unrepublican case for codependence as a sometimes necessary and valuable condition for marginalized people to contest prevailing social norms, but without engaging with the ample available resources written by women and minority group members from within the republican tradition. The chapter is excellent and provocative, nevertheless, and so my comment is not aimed at Maxwell so much as at the overall balance of the volume.

The final two sections of the volume look beyond the traditional scope of democratic theory, examining first the world of the workplace and second the transnational and global context. In the section on work, the contributors apply republican principles to the workplace, a matter that has until very recently been largely overlooked in the contemporary literature, even if there are notable historic antecedents. Oppressive work environments, even those that appear to be contractual and voluntary, are a pressing social concern that test the republican reliance on the notion of nondomination. Alex Gourevitch defends an unconditional right of all workers to strike, Elizabeth Anderson looks for ways to restructure the workplace to disperse power in accountable ways, and Robert Taylor favors a market-driven approach based on exit possibilities. This is an area of increasing republican focus, and these essays serve as an excellent gateway into that literature. Finally, beyond the nation-state, Richard Bellamy uses the European Union as a case study to argue for an association of republican states built around their own demos, whereas Stuart White examines the power of networked activism found in movements like Occupy Wall Street to combat oligarchy and reshape domestic politics in similar and linked ways across national boundaries. These final sections nicely round off a volume that contains both history and abstract theory in practical and transformative ways that are forward looking and liable to appeal to even nonrepublican readers.