Martí, José LuisSeleme, Hugo2019-01-252019-01-252015Marti JL, Seleme H. Three comments on Philip Pettit's on the people's terms. Philosophy and Public Issues. 2015;5(2):25-42.1591-0660http://hdl.handle.net/10230/36437Three years ago, Philip Pettit, quite possibly the most distinguished advocate of contemporary republicanism, published On the People’s Terms. A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy (hereinafter OPT).1 In that book, Pettit spells out the grounds of a distinctively republican theory of legitimacy that is eminently democratic. Justice and legitimacy, he argues, are the two normative domains in which political philosophy is divided, and both should be governed by the supreme value of freedom as non-domination. Justice, in short, is the domain that regulates the horizontal relations among citizens or individuals living together on equal terms, whereas legitimacy is the domain that involves the vertical relationship between those citizens and their governing institutions. This does not mean, however, that for Pettit both realms are of equal importance. Political legitimacy, and therefore democracy, should enjoy some kind of priority over social justice. If we consider, then, that most of the previous work by Pettit on republicanism had actually focused on the issue of social justice his book Republicanism (hereinafter R)2 above all the publication of OPT it is to be celebrated, especially along republican lines. In this sense, the book is not only a step further and a necessary complement to Pettit’s previous work but also provides the bones, so to speak, for all that flesh. OPT, specifically Chapters 3 to 5, constitute the preliminaries of a republican comprehensive democratic theory and include valuable insight on a wide range of elements: from the general legitimacy theory and a sovereignty theory to a constitutional theory, a political representation theory, a certain political ontology, a theory on basic rights and liberties, and a political equality theory, among others. It is safe to say that OPT has already become one of the most important books in democratic theory to be published thus far in the 21st century. It will surely generate profound discussions and controversy in the years to come. In this brief note we will not systematically discuss the virtues of Pettit’s theory of democratic legitimacy, nor will we develop a concrete line of attack. Instead, we will limit ourselves to sketching out three comments on three different aspects of his theory that we would like him to develop further or improve on, the first being the relationship between political legitimacy and social justice, the second his famous “eyeball test”, and the third his dual-aspect model of democracy.application/pdfeng© 2015 – Philosophy and Public Issues (New Series) Luiss University Pressinfo:eu-repo/semantics/articleinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess