This chapter focuses on the question of what, if anything, early modern philosophers have to say about the special status of human beings and its implications for the right to freedom. As we will see, they have quite a lot to say about it. I will concentrate on the question of whether, for these early modern authors, the special status of human beings makes it illegitimate for one human being to dominate other human beings completely, or to literally and (...) fully own them. In other words, I focus on whether, according to at least some early modern thinkers, human beings can possess the same rights over other human beings as one was thought to have over the brute animals and inanimate objects that one fully owns. (shrink)

Slavery has long stood as a mirror image to the conception of a free person in republican theory. This essay contends that slavery deserves this central status in a theory of freedom, but a more thorough examination of slavery in theory and in practice will reveal additional insights about freedom previously unacknowledged by republicans. Slavery combines imperium (state domination) and dominium (private domination) in a way that both destroys freedom today and diminishes opportunities (...) to achieve freedom tomorrow. Dominium and imperium working together are a greater affront to freedom than either working alone. However, an examination of slavery in practice, focusing on the experiences of American slaves, demonstrates that republicanisms’ acknowledged strategies for freedom-seeking, acquiring insulation from domination through law and through norms, do not encompass the full range of options. Slaves also seek freedom through physical absence, economic activity, and culture. The account of slavery and freedom developed here suggests republican accounts of freedom should either give up their focus on thresholds of freedom, or consider the possibility of a plural conception of freedom that extends beyond just freedom as non-domination to include freedom as collective world-making, or both. (shrink)

A deep dive into the influences of Hegelian thought on the work of revolutionary and postcolonial theorist Frantz Fanon Hegel is most often mentioned – and not without good reason – as one of the paradigmatic exponents of Eurocentrism and racism in Western philosophy. But his thought also played a crucial and formative role in the work of one of the iconic thinkers of the ‘decolonial turn’, Frantz Fanon. This would be inexplicable if it were not for the much-quoted ‘lord-bondsman’ (...) dialectic – frequently referred to as the ‘master-slave dialectic’ – described in Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit. Fanon takes up this dialectic negatively in contexts of violence-riven (post-)slavery and colonialism; yet in works such as Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth he upholds a Hegelian-inspired vision of freedom. The essays in this collection offer close readings of Hegel’s text, and of responses to it in the work of twentieth-century philosophers, that highlight the entangled history of the translations, transpositions and transformations of Hegel in the work of Fanon, and more generally in colonial, postcolonial and decolonial contexts. (shrink)

Using the writings of slaves and former slaves, as well as commentaries on slavery, Between Slavery and Freedom explores the American slave experience to gain a better understanding of six moral and political concepts—oppression, paternalism, resistance, political obligation, citizenship, and forgiveness. The authors use analytical philosophy as well as other disciplines to gain insight into the thinking of a group of people prevented from participating in the social/political discourse of their times. Between Slavery and Freedom (...) rejects the notion that philosophers need not consider individual experience because philosophy is "impartial" and "universal." A philosopher should also take account of matters that are essentially perspectival, such as the slave experience. McGary and Lawson demonstrate the contribution of all human experience, including slave experiences, to the quest for human knowledge and understanding. (shrink)

This paper examines the ethics of the Australian business community’s responses to the phenomenon of modern slavery. Engaging a critical discourse approach, we draw upon a data set of submissions by businesses and business representatives to the Australian government’s Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade ‘Parliamentary Inquiry into Establishing a Modern Slavery Act in Australia’—which preceded the signing into law of Australia’s Modern Slavery Act 2018—to examine the business community’s discursive construction in their submissions (...) of the ethical–political concept of freedom. The paper shows how the concept of freedom was employed by Australian business in a manner that privileged their own subject status and advocated for legislation with minimal burden. Relating this contemporary case to a longer historical context, we show how Australian business responses towards modern slavery map onto liberal and neoliberal ethics in which the freedom of the propertied takes precedent over that of the property-less. Further, we show discursive similarities in the arguments presented by modern Australian businesses and certain historical efforts by members of the business community to privilege commercial freedoms in responses to 18th and 19th Century abolitionist movements. Overall, our research makes two important contributions: first, it highlights the value of a critical discourse lens in business ethics research to show how business and other stakeholders in the field construct and shape their own and other’s ethically-laden understanding of reality; and second, it presents a case for considerable scepticism about the motivation of business to employ the freedoms made available to it under neo/liberal discourse to confront a key human rights challenge. (shrink)

This paper argues that the wrong of slavery lies in the denial of the good of law to the slave. Defending this proposition will require the positing of three related claims: (i) that law is good, (ii) that the good of law is denied to the slave, and (iii) that the denial is wrong. This paper will defend the main proposition by defending its three constituent claims. On claim (i), the paper will relate the form of law to the (...) formation of freedom. On claim (ii), the paper will relate law’s objectivity to legal subjectivity. On claim (iii), the paper will relate the state of nature to the state of civil society. (shrink)

Este artículo se centra en dos cuestiones: por un lado, la presunción de libertad en el «período literario» (desde el s. VIII en adelante); y, por otro, la cuestión de la esclavización, venta o servidumbre ¿voluntaria o no¿ de personas libres en la «época preliteraria» (ss. VII y VIII). Asumiendo de partida la idea de que la práctica legal en la Antigüedad Tardía influyó en las discusiones de los primeros juristas musulmanes, trataré de reconstruir el discurso legal de los siglos (...) I/VII y II/VIII y de mostrar que ese discurso contenía interesantes opiniones legales en relación a la venta de niños, servidumbre por deudas y la situación legal de los huérfanos. En la literatura legal que emergió desde el s. II/VIII los juristas, al contrario de lo que se hubiese esperado, no trataron estas cuestiones intensamente. Tal y como se muestra, existe una cierta inconsistencia entre el discurso ameno y controvertido sobre el tema del «período preliterario», que se reconstruye en este artículo, y la marginalización del tema en la literatura legal posterior. (shrink)

Kant’s account of the freedom gained through virtue builds on the Socratic tradition. On the Socratic view, when morality is our end, nothing can hinder us from attaining satisfaction: we are self-sufficient and free since moral goodness is (as Kant says) “created by us, hence is in our power.” But when our end is the fulfillment of sensible desires, our satisfaction requires luck as well as the cooperation of others. For Kant, this means that happiness requires that we get (...) other people to work for our ends; and this requires, in turn, that we gain control over the things other people value so as to have influence over them. If this plan for happiness is not subordinated to morality, then what is most valuable to us will be precisely what others value. This is the root of the “passions” that make us evil and make us slaves whose satisfaction depends on others. But, significantly, this dependence is a moral slavery and hence does not signal a loss, or even diminishment of the kind of freedom required for moral responsibility. (shrink)

Facsimile of 1943 Edition. In this work Berdyaev outlines his philosophical journey and describes the influences which brought him to his intellectual position. In his view, the only way of escape from the many forms of slavery--spiritual, economic, political--which shackle and impoverish the spirit lies in the fuller realization of personality, as he defines it. Berdyaev essentially embraced a religious view of man in the world and his work played a large part in the renaissance of religious and philosophical (...) thought in Russian intellectual life early in the 20th century. In 1922 he and other intellectuals were expelled from the USSR. In the end he advocated for a "personal transvaluation of values.". (shrink)

Critics have claimed that Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a primitivist who was uncritically preoccupied with "noble savages" and that he remained oblivious to the African slave trade. Fugitive Rousseau demonstrates why these charges are wrong and argues that a fresh, "fugitive" perspective on political freedom is bound up with the themes of primitivism and slavery in Rousseau's political theory. Rather than trace Rousseau's arguments primarily to the social contract tradition of Hobbes and Locke, Fugitive Rousseau places Rousseau squarely in (...) two imperial contexts: European empire in his contemporary Atlantic world and Roman imperial philosophy. Anyone who aims to understand the implications of Rousseau's famous sentence "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains" or wants to know how Rousseauian arguments can support a radical democratic politics of diversity, discontinuity, and exodus will find Fugitive Rousseau indispensable. (shrink)

But if you want to be free, you've got to be a prisoner. It's the condition of freedom—true freedom.‘True freedom!’ Anthony repeated in the parody of a clerical voice. ‘I always love that kind of argument. The contrary of a thing isn't the contrary; oh, dear me, no! It's the thing itself, but as it truly is. Ask any die-hard what conservatism is; he'll tell you it's true socialism. And the brewer's trade papers; they're full of articles (...) about the beauty of true temperance. Ordinary temperance is just gross refusal to drink; but true temperance, true temperance is something much more refined. True temperance is a bottle of claret with each meal and three double whiskies after dinner…. (shrink)

Book synopsis: Since its publication in 1677, Spinoza’s Ethics has fascinated philosophers, novelists, and scientists alike. It is undoubtedly one of the most exciting and contested works of Western philosophy. Written in an austere, geometrical fashion, the work teaches us how we should live, ending with an ethics in which the only thing good in itself is understanding. Spinoza argues that only that which hinders us from understanding is bad and shows that those endowed with a human mind should devote (...) themselves, as much as they can, to a contemplative life. This Companion volume provides a detailed, accessible exposition of the Ethics. Written by an internationally known team of scholars, it is the first anthology to treat the whole of the Ethics and is written in an accessible style. (shrink)

This article explores the British anti-slavery writings of the mid- to late 18th century, and the meanings which they gave to the idea of owning a property in the person. It addresses the construction of a particular moral and political landscape where freedom was understood as both a kind of property and as non-domination, and slavery was constructed as a form of theft, and as the exercise of arbitrary power. This created a complex moral space, where possession, (...) commerce, savagery, tyranny and the emergence of race were all caught up with each other and entangled with the concept of consent. The article concludes with the suggestion that our current understandings of slavery continue to be informed by our notions of contract and consent, and so by conceptions of freedom and ownership that take us back to the tensions and debates of the 18th century. (shrink)

On February 21, 1860, on the eve of Southern secession, Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II gave an impassioned speech in defense of American slavery on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. Nearing the climax of his argument, Lamar proposed to read from a book he described as “an imperishable monument of human genius.” According to this author, and here Lamar quoted at length, “The ‘natural condition’ itself is one of absolute and thorough injustice, contravention of the right (...) and just. Every intermediate grade between this and the realization of a rational State retains, as might be expected, elements and aspects of injustice; therefore we find slavery, even in the Greek and Roman States, as we do... (shrink)

William Blake belongs to one of those visionary artists who, during his lifetime, did not receive much recognition from society, was not understood and therefore even marked as “crazy”, his art “odd”. Nevertheless, a small circle of sensitive connoisseurs favored and supported him. But fortunately, his work was not completely forgotten. It seems that today William Blake is being highly valued. An extensive exhibition of his fine, masterful artwork was shown at Tate Britain in London till February 2020. His pictorial, (...) sensitive works are of inestimable value to us today as they address areas that are so important for the further development of mankind nowadays. For William Blake, imprisonment of a human being does not mean only the physical, as a slave, but above all the spiritual, the mental. Unfortunately, mental slavery is not recognized as such by mankind, as Blake let us know, this is influence of sly forces. From early childhood he had visions of God and angels. For him it was clear and undoubted that man should be innocent as a small child and therefore is under God’s protection. However, according circumstances emanating from negative forces, man is enthralled and drowned in it. Keywords: religion, mental slavery, mental freedom, love for mankind, salvation. (shrink)

In contrast to eminent historical philosophers, almost all contemporary philosophers maintain that slavery is impermissible. In the enthusiasm of the Enlightenment, a number of arguments gained currency which were intended to show that contractual slavery is not merely impermissible but impossible. Those arguments are influential today in moral, legal and political philosophy, even in discussions that go beyond the issue of contractual slavery. I explain what slavery is, giving historical and other illustrations. I examine the arguments (...) for the impossibility of contractual slavery propounded in the Enlightenment and their offspring expounded in recent writings, including those by Barnett, Cassirer, Ellerman, Rawls, Roberts-Thomson, Satz and Steiner. I show that they involve confusions between abilities and rights, free will and freedom, directing and doing, what may be true sequentially and what may be true simultaneously, default rights and universal rights, impermissibility and impossibility, and metaphorical and literal uses of language. (shrink)

The discovery that loans for the payment of slave abolition compensation had not been repaid by British taxpayers until 2015 took many by surprise. But it is the financial contribution of British A...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Slavery and the Roman Literary ImaginationJo-Ann SheltonWilliam Fitzgerald. Slavery and the Roman Literary Imagination. Roman Literature and Its Contexts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. xii + 129 pp. Cloth, $54.95; paper, $18.95.The study of slavery poses significant challenges for classical scholars. Slaves were numerous and ubiquitous in Roman society, and their almost constant presence surely affected the thoughts and behaviors of free persons. Many ancient (...) writers, from almost every genre, provide information about the practice of slavery, but they do not describe what it was like to be a free person surrounded by and dependent upon other human beings whom one considered inferior, yet essential. The proverb quoted by Seneca, totidem hostes esse quot servos, reveals that the pleasures and profits of slave ownership were accompanied by anxieties. These anxieties are the topic of this engaging book. Fitzgerald analyzes representations of slavery in literary texts in order to illuminate the ways in which slave owners imagined, structured and interpreted their experiences of being attended by servants. In the introduction, Fitzgerald provides several definitions of the phrase "living with slaves," which he uses throughout to denote the situation of the slave owner. (Fitzgerald generally uses the noun "master" to designate the dominant figure in the relationship, and masculine pronouns to refer to slaves.) He notes that the Romans inherited from the Athenians a conceptual structure that defined slavery and freedom, like body and mind, as polar opposites, but he suggests that it was difficult to reconcile this [End Page 599] theoretical opposition with the various interactions between slaves and free persons in everyday life. According to Fitzgerald, the slaveholder-slave relationship can best be understood as a set of ambiguities, contradictions, ironies, and paradoxes--whose clarification he undertakes. He maintains that literary texts are an appropriate source of information about the problems generated by living with slaves because "literature is preeminently the place where such complexities are expressed, exploited and managed" (9). He also asserts that slavery provided free persons with a metaphor for a range of other institutions, relationships, and experiences, and even for literature itself.In chapter 1, Fitzgerald explores literary representations of the slave as an "other self." One striking contradiction inherent in slavery was that a slave owner was best served by a slave who, on the one hand, acted as a mere extension of the owner's will, but, on the other hand, exercised judgment and showed initiative. The process of anticipating their owners' every thought required that slaves possess intimate knowledge of their owners, but this knowledge bestowed a power that was, paradoxically, incompatible with the slaves' subordinate status. Allowing one's slave total access to one's thoughts was, as Fitzgerald declares, one of the "attendant ironies of domination" (13). Silent, watchful slaves could, moreover, be a source of anxiety, if they were imagined to be judging one's behavior. Fitzgerald demonstrates how Horace, in Satires 2.7, exploits the specter of the judgmental slave to articulate a conflict within himself about his moral failings. The outraged and outspoken servile critic is, in fact, the voice of the master's conscience, a master who ironically is himself a critical observer of others. The clever slave and the exasperated slave owner are familiar figures in Roman comedy where, as Fitzgerald remarks, the antagonism that underlay the owner-slave relationship is a focus of comic interest. In real life, intelligent, resourceful slaves were valuable to their owners. In comedy, however, their behavior is portrayed as constantly threatening to the owners, who must assert their dominance through physical abuse. Analyzing a passage in Plautus' Persa (10-12), where a slave compares himself to his master's inflamed eye, Fitzgerald argues that the comparison indicates that the slave, like the eye, is essential to the master's well-being, but nonetheless irritates him and requires frequent scratching (physical abuse). As Fitzgerald points out, the abuse further aggravates, rather than alleviates, the situation, by making the eye/slave more inflamed. Chapter 1 ends with a discussion of poems in which Horace links the slave and the poet as providers of pleasure. Fitzgerald reads Odes 1.38, for example, as a poem in... (shrink)

The neo-republican conception of freedom as non-domination has emerged as a powerful framework for conceptualizing the dynamic relationship between power, democracy, and constitutionalism in modernity. Despite this, I argue that adaptations of republican freedom to the problem of slavery displace attention to race and foreclose more productive ways of addressing how racial slavery constitutes a distinct form of oppression. To illuminate the limitations of neo-republicanism, I turn to the political thought of abolitionists David Walker and Ottobah (...) Cugoano. Both utilize comparative histories of race and slavery to reveal the specificity of modern slavery as a form of oppression, which cannot be captured as an issue of domination in the technical sense of the term. They thus pose challenges to neo-republican theory for its failure to fully appreciate the historical differences between ancient and modern slavery. To do so would illuminate how neo-republican theory faces severe limitations in providing an adequate conceptualization of oppression in the case of racial slavery. (shrink)

James Burnett, Lord Monboddo’s (1714–1799) contribution to Scottish Enlightenment thinking on race is regularly held to be twofold. As a Lord of Session, he supposedly defended slavery on Aristotelian grounds, infamously voting against Joseph Knight’s freedom in Knight v. Wedderburn (1778). In his philosophical writings, Monboddo is known for his arguments in favour of the humanity of orangutangs, which scholars have claimed informed both his own views on slavery and also wider apologetics for the trade. At the (...) same time, Monboddo is frequently cited as providing a fulsome defence of the achievements of black Africans against Hume’s footnote in ‘Of Natural Characters’ (added in 1753). The full significance of Monboddo’s counterexample to Hume’s claims, the civilization of black ancient Egypt, has not been adequately understood. In this article I undertake a deep dive into Monboddo’s views on race, slavery, and the black origins of civilization present in his largely ignored six-volume Antient Metaphysics (1779–1799). The arguments that emerge show that Monboddo was not quite the apologist for enslaving black Africans as he is sometimes presented as being, but also that his thought was far from the enlightened Scottish mainstream. (shrink)

Recent scholarship has shown chattel slavery in the Roman Empire to have been a deeply oppressive experience. Paul knew that reality well and used the language of slavery metaphorically in Galatians and Romans to describe humanity's subjection to sin. However, he also made a remarkable shift in his use of the metaphor to indicate a new form of slavery to God which brings freedom, thereby subverting conventional ways of understanding slavery.In Paul's sense, slavery is (...) an ineluctable part of human existence in which we have a choice of being a slave to sin or a slave to God. Becoming a slave means giving up all claims to status and relates to Christ's humble-mindedness in Philippians. The slave is also a model of faithfulness, comparable with God's faithfulness to Israel and Christ's faithfulness to the mission given him by his Father. Being a slave (in Paul's sense) is at the heart of the Christian life, exemplifying the ‘obedience of faith’, for it is through this faithfulness that we become righteous. (shrink)

Violence, Slavery and Freedom between Hegel and Fanon is a volume of secondary literature that dispels common misconceptions about the relationship between Hegelian and Fanonian philosophy, and sheds new light on the connections and divergences between the two thinkers. By engaging in close textual analyses of both Hegel and Fanon, the chapters in this volume disambiguate the philosophical relation between Sartre and Fanon, scrutinize the conflation of Self-Consciousness in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and subjectivity in Hegel’s Lectures on (...) the Philosophy of History in light of Hegel’s reception in decolonial thought, and flesh out the pivotal ontological role of violence in Fanon’s work. In particular, this volume underscores the necessity of Fanon scholars to pay heed to the distinction between Hegel’s dialectic of lordship and bondage and Kojève’s master-slave dialectic, as the latter—an anthropological interpretation of a Hegelian epistemological gestalt of consciousness—is what enables Fanon to engage with the former as a historical dialectic. This review emphasizes that Violence, Slavery and Freedom between Hegel and Fanon is a pedagogically significant text, and ultimately concludes that this volume is a vital resource for Continental Philosophical scholarship on Fanon and Hegel. (shrink)

In 1905 the Supreme Court of Georgia became the first state high court to recognize a freestanding “right to privacy” tort in the common law. The landmark case was Pavesich v. New England Life Insurance Co. Must it be a cause for deep jurisprudential concern that the common law right to privacy in wide currency today originated in Pavesich’s explicit judicial interpretation of the requirements of natural law? Must it be an additional worry that the court which originated the common (...) law privacy right asserted that a free white man whose photograph is published without his consent in a city newspaper is like a slave in bondage? I argue that the jurisprudence of Pavesich need not be troubling. Pavesich’s natural law argument was supplemented by several positive law arguments. The positive law arguments were a strong enough basis for finding a right to privacy in the common law, as indeed Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis had previously argued. The observation that the Pavesich court’s natural law argument ran alongside positivistic arguments suggests that the arresting, high-toned natural law and slavery appeals in Pavesich are inessential rhetorical throwaways. But I maintain that the natural law argument and slavery analogy features of Judge Andrew Jackson Cobb’s opinion extolling the “liberty of privacy” are (1) of critical importance to a full contextual understanding of the decision and (2) illuminate the contemporary case for recognizing invasions of privacy as civil injuries to freedom and self-determination. One can poke holes in the logic of Thomas Aquinas and John Locke as scholars have done for centuries. But one can as easily choose to celebrate the spirit of the natural law tradition. The natural law tradition represents efforts rhetorically, rationally, and intuitively to derive principles of justice and goodness from basic facts about human characteristics, needs, and desires, where otherwise binding sovereign law may fall short. (shrink)

Abstract:The author examines the connection between claims concerning modern slavery encountered in Hegel's lectures on the philosophy of world history and relevant concepts and themes drawn from his theory of abstract right, as presented in the Elements of the Philosophy of Right. He reconstructs Hegel's argument for the claim that slavery in the modern world is an injustice in a way that directly relates this argument to his theory of property. He shows that this argument, insofar as it (...) involves the claim that both private property and contract are necessary conditions of the consciousness of oneself as free, may nevertheless form the basis of a paternalistic argument that seeks to justify colonial oppression in terms of how it serves as a means of increasing the consciousness of freedom. Equally, however, he argues that Hegel's theory of abstract right does not support such a position. (shrink)

The Emancipation Proclamation is one of the most important documents in American history. As we commemorate its 150th anniversary, what do we really know about those who experienced slavery? In their pioneering book, Envisioning Emancipation, renowned photographic historian Deborah Willis and historian of slavery Barbara Krauthamer have amassed 150 photographs—some never before published—from the antebellum days of the 1850s through the New Deal era of the 1930s. The authors vividly display the seismic impact of emancipation on African Americans (...) born before and after the Proclamation, providing a perspective on freedom and slavery and a way to understand the photos as documents of engagement, action, struggle, and aspiration. Envisioning Emancipation illustrates what freedom looked like for black Americans in the Civil War era. From photos of the enslaved on plantations and African American soldiers and camp workers in the Union Army to Juneteenth celebrations, slave reunions, and portraits of black families and workers in the American South, the images in this book challenge perceptions of slavery. They show not only what the subjects emphasized about themselves but also the ways Americans of all colors and genders opposed slavery and marked its end. Filled with powerful images of lives too often ignored or erased from historical records, Envisioning Emancipation provides a new perspective on American culture. (shrink)

Alex Gourevitch’s From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth is a valuable contribution to republican historiography: in reconstructing the ideas of the 19th century American labour republicans, this work significantly expands and enriches our appreciation of the classical republican tradition. While the labour republicans are convincingly shown to have made important contributions to that tradition, stronger claims that they fundamentally transformed republicanism are less persuasive.

Using the writings of slaves and former slaves, as well as commentaries on slavery, Between Slavery and Freedom explores the American slave experience to gain a better understanding of six moral and political concepts—oppression, paternalism, resistance, political obligation, citizenship, and forgiveness. The authors use analytical philosophy as well as other disciplines to gain insight into the thinking of a group of people prevented from participating in the social/political discourse of their times. Between Slavery and Freedom (...) rejects the notion that philosophers need not consider individual experience because philosophy is "impartial" and "universal." A philosopher should also take account of matters that are essentially perspectival, such as the slave experience. McGary and Lawson demonstrate the contribution of all human experience, including slave experiences, to the quest for human knowledge and understanding. (shrink)

The era of globalization has been accompanied by an increased awareness of private wrongs as well as acceleration of many forms of cross-border labor exploitation. The essay explores how refined distinctions between forced and free sex work could improve anti-trafficking policies. It addresses the understudied linkages between other forms of migration and sexual exploitation and suggests a triage approach to all forms of labor exploitation—based on harms rather than type of labor or victim. A better understanding of freedom, sex, (...) and development will allow us to expand a human rights approach to these private wrongs. The best anti-trafficking policy is one of universal, indivisible human rights. Victims of sexual exploitation need the same things as all migrants and all workers—recognition, monitoring, resources, access to justice, and organization. (shrink)

For the purposes of this enquiry—an account of what Equiano’sa modernity was, and which particular historical ‘demarcations’ of modernity provided for an enslaved man to achieve freedom through great fortune and great cunning, I will assume a definition of ‘modernity’ as defined by Kathleen Wilson: “. . . not one moment or age, but a set of relations that are constantly being made and unmade, contested and reconfigured, that nonetheless produce among their contemporaneous witnesses the conviction of historical difference.” (...) By adopting this definition, modernity in the times of Equiano refers to, “the cultural practices and representations that produced certain kinds of subjects and objects of knowledge, upheld widely-shared notions of space and time, or facilitated the formation of cultural identities that resulted in pluralities and contradictions as well as unities and coherences,” which provided for a slave to acquire freedom amidst eighteenth-century imperialism, slave-trade, and emerging abolitionist sentiments within bourgeois culture. (shrink)

For Jean-Jacques Rousseau, freedom functions as a foundational value for his entire political philosophy. Parallel to this emphasis is his deep and abiding condemnation of “slavery”, at least the slavery that he claims marked the social existence of his European contemporaries living under unrepresentative monarchical systems. However, the striking aspect of Rousseau's work is his virtually complete silence concerning the institution of chattel slavery of his day. Despite his ubiquitous condemnation of the “slavery” of his (...) “civilized” contemporaries, Rousseau wrote next to nothing about the actual enslavement of millions of people who pervaded the social landscape of the European–African–American triangle in the 18th century. In this paper, I trace out the various passages in Rousseau that could be seen as touching on the subject of contemporary slavery practices and show how very scant they were. I also discuss his views on the relation between climate, character, and persons' fitness for democratic forms of government (and hence freedom). I combine these points to draw particular lessons about the dangers of neglect and exclusion inherent in Rousseau's views of democratic freedom, suggesting how similar dangers lurk for contemporary visions of democracy inspired by his views. (shrink)

Such thinkers as John Stuart Mill, Gerald Dworkin, and Richard Doerflinger have appealed to the value of freedom to explain both what is wrong with slavery and what is wrong with selling oneself into slavery. Practical ethicists, including Dworkin and Doerflinger, sometimes use selling oneself into slavery in analogies intended to illustrate justifiable forms of paternalism. I argue that these thinkers have misunderstood the moral problem with slavery. Instead of being a central value in itself, (...) I argue that freedom is a means of serving the real value of autonomy. Moreover, I argue that autonomy is ambiguous. In cases of conflict, autonomous choice, here called "shallow autonomy", can justifiably be limited to serve "deep autonomy", or self-rule. I use these notions to give a better understanding of the problem with selling oneself into slavery, and argue that the work of Dworkin has to be seriously revised, and Doerflinger's position has to be given up altogether.\\\ John Stuart Mill, Gerald Dworkin y Richard Doerflinger han recurrido al valor de la libertad para explicar tanto porque está mal moralmente la esclavitud como venderse uno mismo como esclavo. Los teóricos de la ética práctica, incluidos Dworkin y Doerflinger, a veces utilizan el caso de venderse uno mismo como esclavo en analogias que pretenden ilustrar formas justificables de paternalismo. Sostengo que estos pensadores han malinterpretado el problema moral con la esclavitud. Argumento que en lugar de ser un valor fundamental en si mismo, la libertad es un medio para el valor real de la autonomia. Arguyo, por otra parte, que la autónomia es ambigua. En casos de conflicto, la elección autonóma, denominada aqui "autonomia superficial", puede justificadamente estar limitada a servir a la "autonomia profunda", o autogobierno. Utilizo estas nociones para ofrecer una mejor interpretatión del problema moral con venderse uno mismo como esclavo, y sostengo que la obra de Dworkin se debe revisar con seriedad, y que se debe abandonar por completo la postura de Doerflinger. (shrink)