Arbitrary Rule

Slavery, Tyranny, and the Power of Life and Death

Mary Nyquist

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780226015675
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Slavery appears as a figurative construct during the English revolution of the mid-seventeenth century, and again in the American and French revolutions, when radicals represent their treatment as a form of political slavery. What, if anything, does figurative, political slavery have to do with transatlantic slavery? In Arbitrary Rule, Mary Nyquist explores connections between political and chattel slavery by excavating the tradition of Western political thought that justifies actively opposing tyranny. She argues that as powerful rhetorical and conceptual constructs, Greco-Roman political liberty and slavery reemerge at the time of early modern Eurocolonial expansion; they help to create racialized "free" national identities and their "unfree" counterparts in non-European nations represented as inhabiting an earlier, privative age. Arbitrary Rule is the first book to tackle political slavery's discursive complexity, engaging Eurocolonialism, political philosophy, and literary studies, areas of study too often kept apart. Nyquist proceeds through analyses not only of texts that are canonical in political thought—by Aristotle, Cicero, Hobbes, and Locke—but also of literary works by Euripides, Buchanan, Vondel, Montaigne, and Milton, together with a variety of colonialist and political writings, with special emphasis on tracts written during the English revolution. She illustrates how "antityranny discourse, " which originated in democratic Athens, was adopted by republican Rome, and revived in early modern Western Europe, provided members of a "free" community with a means of protesting a threatened reduction of privileges or of consolidating a collective, political identity. Its semantic complexity, however, also enabled it to legitimize racialized enslavement and imperial expansion.
Throughout, Nyquist demonstrates how principles relating to political slavery and tyranny are bound up with a Roman jurisprudential doctrine that sanctions the power of life and death held by the slaveholder over slaves and, by extension, the state, its representatives, or its laws over its citizenry.

CHAPTER ONE

Ancient Greek and Roman Slaveries

The abolitionist and postabolitionist view that chattel slavery is fundamentally unjust was not shared by either Greco-Roman or early modern European authorities. To the overwhelming majority of such writers, slavery as lived experience was not of particular interest, much less one that called for major social reform or empathic understanding.¹ Why, then, was it so important to vilify slavery? Why should citizens have expended so much energy disparaging not only slaves but the very condition of slavery? Another question to be taken up here is why slavery was so frequently associated with violence in Greco-Roman political discourse. Initially, these may seem ridiculous questions. Anyone who has given chattel slavery a moment’s thought knows that slaveholders maintained their position of power by means of systematic debasement and brute, physical force. Yet while this was true of actual, institutional slavery, in the discussion that follows I offer alternative explanatory frameworks for the specifically polemical contexts in which ancient Greco-Roman literature associates political slavery with degradation and violence. Tempted as some may be to understand political slavery as expressive of identification on the part of those who happened to be “free” with those who were not, the genealogical analysis undertaken here will critique this assumption as an anachronistic projection from later liberalism(s).

In this chapter, we will be concerned primarily with interrelations in Greek and in Roman political thought between two modes of slavery: on the one hand, chattel slavery, a social institution that affected every aspect of life in ancient Greece and Rome, and on the other, political slavery, which appeared only as a rhetorical figure for an oppressive condition suffered by a political community or polis. Legal, chattel slavery tended to be conceptualized with reference to the individual household or its master, while political slavery invariably had reference to a political community. Political slavery itself appeared in two distinct modes. Within the polis, it represented a negative condition for the free, male citizens who expected to participate as equals in the political process, while externally, vis-à-vis other city-states, it represented a condition with which the entire community was threatened. Rarely, however, was internal political slavery explicitly distinguished from external, and the failure to articulate or acknowledge their interdependence is highly significant, as we shall see. In a further, consequential complication, Athenian democratic ideology represented political slavery as a condition for which certain populations were naturally suited while for others, capable of ruling themselves, it would be inappropriate or unjust. For Aristotle, this was true of both chattel and political slavery. Before we can explore this influential nexus of slaveries, though, we need to reflect on the distinctive character of slavery as a figure for political oppression.

The trope of political slavery, which appeared in the history, philosophy, rhetoric, and tragedy of fifth-century BCE Athens, was a key element in the conceptual opposition between freedom and slavery central to democratic ideology. Not surprisingly, the opposition free/unfree did not capture the complexity of social realities. Freedom’s antithetical relations with slavery obscured the variety of both free and unfree statuses available, together with the fact that since citizenship was determined by parentage, free status alone did not make one a citizen; metics (legally free resident aliens), for example, were not citizens. Only an adult male born to an Athenian citizen—and after Pericles’s legislation of 451 BCE, both parents had to be citizens—could actively participate in politics and therefore fully benefit from political privileges.² Yet within these limits, emphasis on the free status shared by all members of the polis minimized differentiation by ancestry or social prestige, and was thus empowering for nonelite male citizens, who, historically, were largely responsible for generating and sustaining democracy’s ideal valuation of freedom.³ Despite its far more inclusive and complex policies on citizenship, the Roman Republic, too, embraced a foundational opposition between freedom and slavery.⁴

The distinctive features of political slavery’s figural modality can more easily be appreciated if it is compared with ethico-spiritual slavery, also figurative. Moral philosophy occasionally represented douleia (δουλεία) in the positive sense of respectful submission to lawful order, as Plato did in the Laws.⁵ More commonly, however, douleia gets stigmatized as a failure of mastery on the part of the individual agent. Ethical slavishness or ongoing enslavement is the outcome of weakness or self-indulgence on the part of the paradigmatically “free” agent. When a higher faculty of the free self falls subject to a lower faculty, or when the free self as a whole becomes hopelessly enamored of inferior, mundane pursuits, ethico-spiritual “slavery” is the inevitable result. In Euripides’s Suppliant Women, for example, Eteocles, who is not well off, is praised for having rejected financial offers from friends “in case he should become slavishly attached to riches” (lines 874–76).⁶ He has exercised the praiseworthy rational control, associated with self-mastery, lacking in someone who becomes a “slave” to appetite. By means of this psycho-ethical logic, familiar to anyone acquainted with ancient Greek and Latin texts or their medieval and early modern descendants, an individual’s figurative, ethical slavery is understood as semiconsciously sought or, alternatively, tolerated because it has become habitual, in either case being somehow deserved.

While sharing figurative status, however, ethical and political slavery not only differ with regard to number—individual versus collective—but also operate on asymmetrical evaluative axes. The idea of political slavery as it appeared in Greco-Roman antityranny discourse does not valorize the position of master over slave the way ethical judgments do in recommending the rule of superior over inferior and self-mastery. This is true even when members of a political community are being shamed for an apparent willingness to submit to political slavery, in which case they acquiesce in a condition of subjection to a master when there is no need to do so. Instead of the paradigmatic rule of master over slave, antityranny discourse gives pride of place to the spirited exercise of freedom by political agents who meet as equals in the polis. Conceived as collective, political self-mastership by adult free males, none of whom rules over others—or, as Aristotle puts it, who rule and are ruled in turn⁷—Athenian democratic self-rule was, in essence, rule by isonomia within the polis: mastership without a master.⁸

Despite its aristocratic ethos and its often inegalitarian political practices, the Roman Republic appropriated this feature of Greek democratic ideology, according to which collective self-rule is a condition of autonomous governance by equals. Political slavery is thus the antithesis of the rational exercise of freedom that characterizes self-rule within the city-state. If psycho-ethical slavery results from a failure of individual self-mastery, political slavery comes about when a leader fails to protect the citizenry’s freedom, instead attempting to become its master. By contrast with psycho-ethical slavery, slavery as a figure for the perceived subjection, dispossession, or disenfranchisement of a polity’s naturally free members does not reflect badly on those who are, or are about to become, “enslaved.” Such enslavement is attempted or perpetrated by a tyrant or group of tyrannous leaders represented as a would-be master, and it is tyranny that stands condemned. Although political slavery internal to the state is by no means a monolithic, transhistorical construct, both ancient and early modern orators and writers confidently assume that distinctly political enslavement is self-evidently offensive. To represent its very possibility is to avow a conviction that those who depict themselves (or are depicted) as threatened with enslavement deserve the continued enjoyment of their privileged, free status. Inherently polemical, allusions to political slavery consolidate the identity of those perceived to be threatened over against their tyrannous leader(s).⁹ The injustice of political enslavement accordingly lies not in slavery per se but rather in the attempt to enslave those who patently ought not be enslaved.

What does the belief that such people should not be treated as slaves, even figuratively, have to do with attitudes toward those who are actually enslaved? Aristotle’s Politics is central to any investigation of this question, since its association of barbarism with both the personal, natural slave and Asiatic political slavery has been inordinately influential. The natural affinity for political slavery that Aristotle attributes to Asiatic barbarians tout court is essential to his discussion of household slaves-by-nature (ϕύσει δοûλοι). Like political slavery, Aristotle’s natural slave is associated with barbarism, just as natural freedom from both personal and political slavery is a characteristic of Greeks. When, for example, Aristotle concedes that critics who emphasize the random, conventional character of war slavery are onto something, it is on the commonsensical ground that there is a known category of people—implicitly, Greeks—whose legal enslavement cannot possibly be warranted: “[N]o one would ever say that he is a slave who is unworthy to be a slave,” while in almost the same breath, he explicitly associates the natural slave with barbarians (βάρβά ροι) (1255^a25–32).¹⁰ A bit earlier, Aristotle argues that the personal slave’s legal status ought to suit her or his nature (for Aristotle and other ancient writers, the paradigmatic slave is male), making it clear that only the mentally deficient, implicitly barbarous, natural slave ought to be enslaved: “For he who can be, and therefore is, another’s, and he who participates in reason enough to apprehend, but not to have, is a slave by nature” (ϕύσει δοûλος) (1254^b21–23).

Ancient Greek, Latin, and early modern writers tended to avoid overtly differentiating personal, legal slavery from political slavery. How, then, were they distinguished? By what means did auditors or readers determine which discursive context is appropriate? It would seem that addressees were to shift between (or among) discursive registers, performing rapid mental adjustments that would have become habitual given the prevalence of the polarity free/unfree. If for the moment we limit discussion to Aristotle’s Politics, it is clear that certain of Aristotle’s assertions refer unambiguously to legal, chattel slavery. The pronouncements just cited, for example, appear in contexts where Aristotle has already established that legal slavery is being discussed. Where such clarity reigns, it is because the immediate textual environment provides cues as to the relevant social context(s). When, as in book 1 of Politics, chattel slavery is being considered systematically, an author often signals this by using singular agent nouns such as a slave, a master, a husband, or a father (the latter two where wives and children are being distinguished from slaves). Generally speaking, singular forms indicate that either the individual citizen as psycho-ethical agent or the oikos (household) with its individual master are the implied social contexts, the latter being the relevant site for chattel slavery.

The individual citizen-master’s alleged superior rationality, ability to rule, and free status are highlighted whenever household slavery is evoked. Yet the household itself is not thereby associated with freedom. As a positive, political ideal, “freedom” was a priceless trait only of citizens in their capacity as active members of the polis or of the polis as a community of such citizens. Participants understood, however, that though they met in the political arena as political equals, they were masters within their own households (despotēs designates both the household and slave master, though the head of household is not a despotēs over his children or wife).¹¹ The position of slave master—in ethico-spiritual discourse associated with individual agency—was therefore implicitly an attribute of the public personae of democracy’s citizens. Put another way, active participation in the polis informally presupposed that citizens were slave masters endowed with the capacities needed to rule over the enslaved. Indeed, this commonality may have eased tensions among different economic strata of the free population.¹² When such slave masters assembled collectively in the polis, they were categorically disqualified for subjection to leaders who might try to treat them as slaves incapable of ruling themselves.

Problematically, however, in discussions of slavery as an institution, the private household is often the primary point of reference. Why should this be? Besides facilitating focus on the individual, the practice of foregrounding the household as slavery’s site obscures from view not only differences between household and agricultural servitude but also the exceptionally life-threatening, life-shortening violence of state-sponsored slavery utilized for mining and other large-scale projects. As a convention of more systematic political reflection, this practice additionally suggests that enslaver and enslaved exist primarily within a relationship, and that they invariably encounter each other within the minicommunity of the household. Deflecting attention away from the long, twisted chain of coercive practices, commercial transactions, and social sanctions that resulted in and perpetuated enslavement, the practice of situating slavery within the household has the effect of naturalizing it, since the relationship between master and slave thereby shares space with both marital and parental relations. At the same time, though, location within the household underlines the enslaved’s legal status as chattel, thereby differentiating the relationship between enslaver and enslaved from these normative familial relationships. Marital and parental relations are unquestionably sociable, while the relationship between enslaver and enslaved is only ambiguously so for Aristotle and later writers, since, as chattel, the enslaved ostensibly belongs to the same category as nonhuman animals and other possessions.

Aristotle brings even the acquisition of slaves by means of warfare within the purview of the household master in Politics, where household management requires the “art” of ensuring that the necessities of life are to hand. When first introducing this notion, Aristotle says that the art of acquiring slaves is “a species of hunting or war” (1255^b38–40). Whether they are to be domesticated or eaten, the beasts and fowl with which nature provisions humankind are legitimately pursued. Similarly, Aristotle argues, the enslavement of those defeated in battle is a form of hunting for human beings who are slaves-by-nature: “The art of war is a natural art of acquisition, for the art of acquisition includes hunting, an art which we ought to practice against wild beasts, and against men who, though intended by nature to be governed, will not submit; for war of such a kind is naturally just” (1256^b22–25).¹³ Aristotle’s analogy between hunting and just warfare, which, metaphorically, involves enslaving human beings who are naturally incapable of collective self-rule, has an exceptionally important afterlife in early modern debates on political and institutional slavery. These debates often perpetuate Aristotle’s uneasy slippage between an art practiced on behalf of the individual household and warfare that engages opposing nations.

Peter Garnsey points out that compared with Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle’s Politics both marginalizes and dehumanizes the slave. He singles out the above passage for its radical erasure of any boundary between enslaved humans and nonhuman animals.¹⁴ I would add that it also subtly links the just war with a compressed version of war slavery doctrine, whereby the victor has the options of either killing the vanquished (...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Citations
• Introduction
• 1. Ancient Greek and Roman Slaveries
• 2. Sixteenth-Century French and English Resistance Theory
• 3. Human Sacrifice, Barbarism, and Buchanan’s Jephtha
• 4. Antityranny, Slavery, and Revolution
• 5. Freeborn Sons or Slaves?
• 6. The Power of Life and Death
• 7. Nakedness, History, and Bare Life
• 8. Hobbes’s State of Nature and “Hard” Privativism
• 9. Hobbes, Slavery, and Despotical Rule
• 10. Locke’s “Of Slavery,” Despotical Power, and Tyranny
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index