Antoni domènech: On republicanism, individual liberty, and rights

Abstract

Antoni Domènech (1952-2017) was one of Spain’s most important political philosophers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Known primarily as a scholar of republicanism, his work on the concepts of individual liberty and rights complicates standard liberal definitions, which he believed erred in defining these terms independent of institutional context, as pre-political attributes of the individual. He argued that republicanism corrected liberalism’s abstraction by making one’s actually being able to exercise liberty and rights depend on one’s enjoying a sufficiently robust set of material conditions, or on having enough property so that one could always avoid unequal social relationships.