Philip Pettit was born in 1945 in Ballygar, County Galway, and studied at Maynooth College, the National University of Ireland and Queen's University Belfast, where he took his doctorate. He began teaching at University College Dublin in 1968, was a research fellow at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and became professor of philosophy at the University of Bradford. He moved to the Australian National University in 1983 and to Princeton in 2002. He has held posts at both universities jointly since 2013, as the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Human Values at Princeton and Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the ANU.
His best-known book, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (1997), offers an alternative to both liberalism and communitarianism built on the idea of freedom as non-domination. The standard liberal view treats a person as free to the extent that no one interferes with his choices. Pettit, drawing on a neo-Roman reading of the republican tradition, holds that a person or group is free only when no one else has "the capacity to interfere in their affairs on an arbitrary basis." On that account a slave whose well-meaning master mostly leaves him alone, a standard example in the tradition, is still unfree, because the master could interfere at will. Pettit's answer for government is what he calls contestatory democracy: institutions designed so that citizens have an effective opportunity to contest the decisions of those who act in their name.
The book found an unusual audience. When José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero became leader of the Spanish Socialist opposition in 2000, he pledged that if his party won power he would govern according to the principles of Republicanism. After his election in 2004 he invited Pettit to Spain to give a major speech and to monitor Spanish politics and report before the next election. Pettit returned in 2007 with a presentation that gave the government a qualified thumbs-up for promoting republican ideals, an episode he and José Luis Martí described in A Political Philosophy in Public Life (2012).
Pettit has continued the republican program in On the People's Terms (2012), a theory of democracy, and Just Freedom: A Moral Compass for a Complex World (2014). He also defends the view that groups such as states and corporations can be agents in their own right. His Tanner Lectures at Berkeley became The Birth of Ethics (2018), and his most recent book is The State (2023). He was made a Companion of the Order of Australia in 2017, and in 2007 he gave the inaugural Edmund Burke Lecture at Trinity College Dublin.
Philip Pettit is associated with Social Liberal. See the archetype