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https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Pettit
"This idea of freedom immediately caught my imagination. Perhaps that was because it made sense of my experience when, intending to be a priest, I had spent years in establishments that I learned later to describe, in Erving Goffman's phrase, as total institutions. While such schools and seminaries offered wonderful opportunities for study and comradeship, they certainly did not teach us to look the authorities in the eye, confident of knowing where we stood and of not being subject to capricious judgement. On the contrary, they communicated a sense of systematic vulnerability and exposure to the governing will, sometimes even making a virtue of the practice. I had come to rail against the subordination inherent in such training, and the notion of freedom as non-domination offered a satisfying way of explaining what was wrong with it. Our formation had tried to cultivate unfreedom ; it was designed to make students passive, unassertive, unsure of where they stood. Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in the 1790s of the way that women's subordination turned them into creatures who learned to bow and scrape, and to achieve their ends by ingratiation. She might have been writing of us.
Since the experience of subordination is so widespread, I hope that readers will share with me the sense that there has to be something attractive about the sort of liberty which requires that you are not dominated by another and which enables you, therefore, to look others in the eye. I am encouraged in that hope by the conviction that this is indeed how traditional republicans had conceived of liberty when they argued that its antonym was slavery or subjection, and when they depicted exposure to the arbitrary will of another as the great evil to be avoided." (p.VIII)
"Quentin Skinner helped to give me the courage of my convictions, directing me to the historical bodies of literature which bore them out, offering much-needed encouragement and providing very helpful comments on a first draft of the book." (p.IX)
"To the philosopher's eye the unexamined language, whether it be a language of politics, or ethics, or free will, or consciousness, is not worth speaking: it may introduce too many unwanted assumptions. The excitement of the task described here, like that of any philosophical task, is the excitement of mastering your medium, assuming a degree of control over thoughts that will otherwise control you." (p.3)
-Philip Pettit, Republicanism. A Theory of Freedom and Government, Oxford University Press, 2002 (1997 pour la première édition britannique), 296 pages.
"This idea of freedom immediately caught my imagination. Perhaps that was because it made sense of my experience when, intending to be a priest, I had spent years in establishments that I learned later to describe, in Erving Goffman's phrase, as total institutions. While such schools and seminaries offered wonderful opportunities for study and comradeship, they certainly did not teach us to look the authorities in the eye, confident of knowing where we stood and of not being subject to capricious judgement. On the contrary, they communicated a sense of systematic vulnerability and exposure to the governing will, sometimes even making a virtue of the practice. I had come to rail against the subordination inherent in such training, and the notion of freedom as non-domination offered a satisfying way of explaining what was wrong with it. Our formation had tried to cultivate unfreedom ; it was designed to make students passive, unassertive, unsure of where they stood. Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in the 1790s of the way that women's subordination turned them into creatures who learned to bow and scrape, and to achieve their ends by ingratiation. She might have been writing of us.
Since the experience of subordination is so widespread, I hope that readers will share with me the sense that there has to be something attractive about the sort of liberty which requires that you are not dominated by another and which enables you, therefore, to look others in the eye. I am encouraged in that hope by the conviction that this is indeed how traditional republicans had conceived of liberty when they argued that its antonym was slavery or subjection, and when they depicted exposure to the arbitrary will of another as the great evil to be avoided." (p.VIII)
"Quentin Skinner helped to give me the courage of my convictions, directing me to the historical bodies of literature which bore them out, offering much-needed encouragement and providing very helpful comments on a first draft of the book." (p.IX)
"To the philosopher's eye the unexamined language, whether it be a language of politics, or ethics, or free will, or consciousness, is not worth speaking: it may introduce too many unwanted assumptions. The excitement of the task described here, like that of any philosophical task, is the excitement of mastering your medium, assuming a degree of control over thoughts that will otherwise control you." (p.3)
-Philip Pettit, Republicanism. A Theory of Freedom and Government, Oxford University Press, 2002 (1997 pour la première édition britannique), 296 pages.
