Abstract：More than 30 years after Isaiah Berlin gave his famous lecture on “Two Concepts of Liberty” in 1958, Philip Pettit suggested a third concept of liberty, “Freedom as Non-domination.” Pettit wanted to solve a problem that Hobbes encountered in his Leviathan when he tried to construct a theory of contract between the sovereign princes and their subjects (or between the state authority and its citizens), and to remove the 20th century’s anxiety as exposed by Berlin that “when the state power becomes stronger, the people have fewer rights.” Then, has Pettit been successful? It is an issue I want to discuss here. Firstly, Hobbes takes seriously private property, individual rights and security without taking seriously the responsibility of the state authority (or the sovereign princes) in improving the public interests or the common good. How does the state or its government distribute social resources fairly so that every citizen may enjoy his share of social and economical primary goods? It is one of the main subjects John Rawls wanted to explore. A Theory of Justice is a further attempt after Hobbes’ Leviathan at ending the natural law of the jungle. In Rawls’ original position, under the veil of ignorance, when all the parties make a contract as rational members, they don’t take the maximization of their interests as their first aim, but rather the maximum avoidance of the loss of their primary goods. According to Rawls’ conception, the principle of justice as fairness is a reversal of the natural law of the jungle. It is concerned with and regulates every member’s basic rights, liberty and interests. When Robert Nozick suggested that “Individuals have rights and there are things no person or group may do to them without violating their rights” (Nozick, 1974, p. ix), he was trying to replace Rawls’ conception of “primary goods” with his “holdings.” He believed that these holdings are desert, and they should not be interfered, changed or deprived by the state. Secondly, just like Nozick’s theory of “individual rights or holdings,” Pettit’s theory of “the freedom as non-domination” does not challenge Rawls’ theory of primary goods. His theory of freedom as non-domination does not readily apply to the realm of sovereign authority, but in a civil society, there is a lot of room to apply it. Pettit supplemented not only Berlin’s theory of liberty but also Rawls’ theory of primary goods. However, when he argued that the freedom as non-domination is an independent third type of freedom and took it as one of Rawls’ primary goods, Pettit did not prove it on solid ground. Thirdly, Pettit accorded a high status to the freedom as non-domination, and he even took it as the essence of freedom. He thought that in contrast with the freedom as non-interference, only the freedom as non-domination is real freedom and political freedom should be distinguished from social freedom. My view is that, in the political area, there is no space left for the freedom as non-domination; it is only in the social area that there is some room left for that freedom. According to the theory of the freedom as non-domination, there is no social desert for any social member, let alone the obtainment and maintenance of such social desert. So the conclusion of this paper is that even if there is the freedom as non-domination, its scope is very limited.
