The tradition that locates political freedom in self-government — in citizens ruling themselves through shared institutions rather than being ruled by kings, aristocrats or officials. Its distinctive claim, sharpened by recent scholarship, is that freedom means the absence of domination rather than merely the absence of interference: a subject with a benevolent master is still unfree, because the master could always act otherwise.
The tradition begins in the ancient Mediterranean, in the Roman constitution that Polybius and Cicero analyzed and the citizen self-rule Aristotle described. It was recovered in the Italian Renaissance, above all in Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy, which argued that a republic's liberty is sustained not by civic harmony but by the managed conflict between the few and the many. From there it passed into the English Commonwealth writers, into Montesquieu's account of separated powers, and into the American founding, which drew from it both a constitutional architecture and a vocabulary of corruption, virtue and standing armies.
Rousseau's version stands apart and remains the most contested. He insisted on direct participation over representation, held that a people cannot alienate its sovereignty to delegates, and argued that genuine freedom requires the rough moral and economic equality that makes domination impossible. Critics from Constant onward have read the general will as licensing coercion in the name of what citizens would want if they were better; defenders read it as the only consistent account of what self-rule would actually demand.
Republicanism has been revived as a live alternative to liberalism by Pocock, Skinner and Pettit, who argue that non-domination grounds a more demanding politics than the liberal harm principle — with implications for workplace power, economic dependency and unaccountable administrative discretion that liberal frameworks tend to leave alone.