 Contemporary civic republicans aim to promote freedom, understood as independence from arbitrary power. Roughly speaking, there are two directions from which republican freedom might be threatened. First, there is the obvious danger of an autocratic or despotic government assuming arbitrary powers over its subjects; this concern, and republican remedies for it, will be discussed below. But there is a second danger to republican freedom as well—one that concerns contemporary civic republicans just as much as the first. This is the danger that some individuals or groups within civil society will succeed in assuming arbitrary or uncontrolled powers over others. Absent this second concern, republican policy would indeed often seem “indeterminate,” as observed by McMahon (2005) and Costa (2007). A few examples will help clarify this second danger.