Slavery

Plato does not offer a sustained theory of slavery, yet the institution is assumed throughout his political writings. In the Republic, the ideal city rests on a division of labor among producers, auxiliaries, and guardians. The producers are not chattel slaves in the legal sense, but their fixed station reflects the same principle that later writers would apply to bondage: some natures are fitted for rule and others for service. The tripartite psychology of the soul supplies the pattern. As reason is to govern appetite within the individual, so the rational class is to govern those in whom appetite predominates. On this view, the hierarchy of persons in the city follows from the hierarchy of parts in the soul, a connection treated more fully under the idea of Justice.

In the Laws, Plato turns from constitution to household management and addresses the practical government of slaves. He notes that they are hard to rule and that the institution is dangerous for masters and slaves alike. The helot system of Sparta, he observes, generates perpetual fear of revolt, whereas more temperate treatment in other cities yields more reliable service. His counsel is measured: masters should tend their slaves justly, for justice as well as prudence requires it; yet authority must remain firm. The concern is the stability of the household and the city, not the question whether any person may rightly be owned.

Plato acknowledges that slaves are human beings and capable of virtue, yet he does not press that acknowledgment to the conclusion that slavery itself is contrary to nature. The slave's humanity is recognized and then set beside the requirements of political order. This silence is itself a contribution to the tradition. By treating bondage as a background feature of the well-ordered city rather than as a problem requiring defense or abolition, Plato leaves open the questions of natural and conventional slavery that Aristotle would later raise as questions of fact and of justice.

Plato's influence on the later discussion of slavery is less an explicit doctrine than a framework of hierarchy. By embedding inequality of function in both soul and city without asking whether ownership of persons can be justified, he bequeathed assumptions that Aristotle would convert into a theory of natural slavery and that Christian and modern writers would either qualify, reject, or reverse.

Aristotle offers the most systematic account of natural slavery in the ancient tradition. In Book I of the Politics, he treats the relation of master and slave as part of the household, alongside husband and wife and father and children. The relation is essentially economic rather than political: the slave ministers to the wants of an individual master by his labor. Yet slavery has a political aspect as well, since some men have no function in the state except to serve others. Aristotle distinguishes such persons from citizens; they are necessary to the state, but not parts of it. The mark of economic slavery, as later writers have noted, is the kind of work a man does and the conditions under which he labors, whereas political slavery concerns the kind of life he leads under a tyrant. These distinctions open into questions treated under Labor, Wealth, and Tyranny.

The central claim is that some men are by nature slaves. He who participates in a rational principle enough to apprehend it, but not enough to possess it, is a slave by nature; the lower animals cannot even apprehend such a principle. The use made of slaves and of tame animals is, on this view, not very different: both minister with their bodies to the needs of life. If the facts are granted, then no issue of justice arises between natural master and natural slave, for they have in reality the same interests. It is by the justice inherent in that natural relation that Aristotle can criticize conventional slavery, the enslavement of free men by force or law. He questions the custom by which captives taken in war become the property of the victors, for the cause of war may be unjust and the captive may be a man of high rank unfit for bondage.

Aristotle is aware that the question of fact must be faced. Whether anyone is intended by nature to be a slave, and for whom such a condition is expedient and right, remains open to dispute. He concedes that natural slaves are not always easy to identify by inspection, that the children of slaves need not themselves be slaves by nature, and that the distinction between those fit to rule and those fit to serve does not follow any simple line of birth or race. These admissions bear on the broader problem of human equality and inequality, treated under Nature and Justice. He further asks whether slaves have any excellence beyond merely instrumental qualities, and answers that since they are men and share in the rational principle, it seems absurd to say that they have no virtue. Their virtue, however, is limited to what service requires: enough self-control and courage to prevent failure in duty.

Aristotle's doctrine of natural slavery set the terms of the subsequent debate. Those who affirm the fundamental equality of all men in their common humanity, among them Roman Stoics, Christian theologians, and later writers such as Rousseau and Mill, reject the claim that any man is born to serve. Yet even they must still ask under what conditions free men may justly be made slaves, and how the economic and political forms of bondage are to be distinguished. Augustine will deny that slavery belongs to nature at all; Aquinas will restate the problem in terms of natural law and the law of nations.

Augustine rejects the claim that any man is a slave by nature. By nature, as God first created us, no one is the slave either of man or of sin. Both sorts of slavery, he holds, are introduced by sin and not by nature. In the original condition before the Fall, there was no domination of person over person for the master's use. Slavery entered human relations as a punishment imposed by divine providence on a fallen world. The very word servus, he notes, derives from the practice of sparing (servare) the lives of war captives, who were enslaved rather than killed. Bondage is thus a consequence of the disorder that sin introduced, not an expression of a natural hierarchy of rational capacities.

This theological account alters the moral status of the institution without abolishing it. Because slavery is a judgment of God, in whom there is no unrighteousness, it belongs to the providential order of the earthly city and is to be endured with patience by those who suffer it. Augustine counsels slaves to serve their masters heartily, so that if they cannot be freed by their masters, they may themselves make their slavery in some sort free through obedience to God. Masters, for their part, should rule with benevolence, recognizing that the hierarchy between them and their slaves is a product of sin rather than of nature. Both master and slave stand equally before God as sinners in need of grace. The relation of interior freedom to external constraint is also treated under the idea of Liberty and under Sin.

The position is more equalitarian than Aristotle's in one respect and more conservative in another. It denies that any person is by nature inferior and fitted only for service. At the same time, it places the institution within the just order of providence and discourages resistance as rebellion against that order. Emancipation, on this view, is an act of charity rather than a demand of natural right: a master may free his slaves out of kindness, but the slave has no claim to freedom in the earthly city as a matter of justice between persons. Whether such a framework can explain why some are enslaved and others free, when all are sinners, is a difficulty that later Christian writers inherit.

Augustine's penal theory becomes a principal alternative to natural slavery in the Christian tradition. Aquinas will accept that slavery is not instituted by nature, yet he will not treat it as simply contrary to natural law. He will distinguish what nature inclines to from what nature does not require the contrary of, and will place slavery among the arrangements that human reason devises for the benefit of life after the Fall. The relation of providence to an institution that appears unjust remains a standing question.

Aquinas brings together Aristotle's analysis of subordination and Augustine's denial that slavery belongs to the original natural order. He agrees with Augustine that in the state of innocence no person would have been subject to another as a possession. Something can be according to natural law in two ways, he observes: first, because nature inclines thereto; second, because nature does not require the contrary. As nakedness may be called natural because nature did not give man clothes, so all men may be called free by nature because slavery was not instituted by nature but devised by human reason for the benefit of human life. The institution whereby one man belongs to another for his use seems due to the fallen nature of man, as one of the penal consequences of original sin.

At the same time, Aquinas draws on the insight that human beings differ in capacity and that some forms of subordination may serve the common good. Slavery, on his account, belongs to the ius gentium, the law of nations, rather than to natural law strictly understood. Natural law recognizes the fundamental equality and freedom of persons. Reason, considering the practical needs of social life after the Fall, may still permit slavery under certain conditions. A person captured in a just war, for example, may be enslaved rather than killed, and the exchange of life for service is treated as a kind of rough justice. The law of the Old Testament, he notes, permitted under stress of poverty a limited sale into service that was not absolute ownership. These legal and customary forms of bondage are discussed under Law and under Justice.

Aquinas is careful about the limits of the master's authority. The slave remains a man, not a mere instrument, and the master's dominion extends only to labor and external service, not to the slave's interior life, moral choices, or relation to God. Marriage, for instance, does not require the master's consent, because it pertains to the slave's natural right. It is a grievous matter for anyone to yield to another what ought to be one's own; dominion of this kind necessarily implies a pain inflicted on the subject. That painfulness sits uneasily with Aristotle's claim that natural slavery fits certain natures and is for their benefit. Aquinas thus narrows the scope of ownership from total possession to a limited claim on labor, while still allowing the institution as a consequence of sin and of the law of nations.

The tension Aquinas leaves is between the claim that natural law recognizes the freedom of all persons and the permission of slavery through the law of nations. Later writers will press that tension in different directions. Hobbes will ground dominion in covenant after conquest rather than in natural hierarchy or sin. Locke will hold that freedom is so fundamental that a man cannot alienate it by compact, and that absolute slavery is only a continued state of war between lawful conqueror and captive.

Hobbes rejects the doctrine of natural slavery. In the state of nature, men are roughly equal in their power to harm one another, and no one possesses a natural right to rule by virtue of superior constitution. The natural inequality of powers does not establish a natural right of the stronger to enslave the weaker. Dominion arises from force and covenant, specifically from conquest. When the vanquished, to avoid the present stroke of death, covenants that so long as his life and the liberty of his body are allowed him, the victor shall have the use thereof at his pleasure, then, and only then, the vanquished becomes a servant. It is not the victory that gives the right of dominion over the vanquished, but his own covenant.

This analysis places slavery within the same framework as political sovereignty. Hobbes calls the resulting relation "despotical dominion" and treats it as structurally akin to the relation of sovereign and subject: in both cases, obedience rests on the rational calculation that the alternative is worse. The master of the servant is master also of all he hath, and may exact the use of his goods, his labor, his servants, and his children. Whether the servitude takes the form of private possession by an individual master or the subjugation of a whole people by a conquering state does not, for Hobbes, alter the principle. The questions of political liberty and absolute rule are treated more fully under Liberty, Government, and Tyranny.

Hobbes does, however, introduce a distinction that limits the claim of dominion. He differentiates between servants, who have made a covenant and retain certain obligations, and slaves in the strict sense, who are kept in chains and have made no covenant at all. The chained slave owes nothing to his captor and may rightfully escape or resist, because no agreement has been reached. True bondage without consent creates, on this view, no obligation and confers no legitimate authority. The foundation of servitude is thus consent under necessity, not nature, not sin, and not teleological hierarchy.

Hobbes's contractual account displaced the Aristotelian framework for many later writers. Locke will accept that absolute slavery may follow from lawful conquest, yet deny that a man can by compact enslave himself, since he has no power over his own life to transfer. Rousseau will deny that either covenant or conquest can generate a right of slavery at all, holding that the words "slave" and "right" contradict each other.

Locke opens his discussion of slavery from the principle of natural liberty. The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on earth and not to be under the will or legislative authority of another man. From this it follows that no person can voluntarily enslave himself. A man not having the power of his own life cannot by compact or consent give another power over it; nobody can give more power than he has himself. Slavery by consent is therefore a contradiction, and any contract purporting to establish absolute bondage is void. Temporary service for wages or debt, such as among the ancient Jews, is a limited drudgery, not slavery: the master has not absolute power to kill, and at a certain time the person sold must be let go free.

The only form of absolute slavery Locke admits is the condition of a captive taken in a just war. He who introduces a state of war as aggressor justly exposes himself to the hazard of death. He who has forfeited his life necessarily forfeits his freedom. Slaves, then, are those who, being captives taken in a just war, are by right of nature subjected to the absolute dominion and arbitrary power of their masters. Absolute slavery is nothing else but the state of war continued between a lawful conqueror and a captive. It is not a social relation of mutual interest, as Aristotle claimed for natural slavery, but a deferred execution. The moment the compact of subjection is withdrawn, the state of war resumes and the captive may resist or flee. These claims bear on the idea of War and Peace as well as on Liberty and Law.

The argument is narrower than many later readers have supposed, and its historical application has been much disputed. Locke invested in the Royal African Company and helped draft the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, which granted slave owners absolute power and authority over their slaves. Whether this practice can be reconciled with his just-war criterion, or whether it stands in contradiction to his theory, remains a matter of interpretation. What the theory itself does not justify is hereditary chattel slavery. The children of captives have committed no act of aggression and have forfeited neither life nor freedom. The inalienability of natural liberty thus cuts against both voluntary self-sale and the transmission of bondage by birth.

Locke's insistence that freedom cannot be alienated by contract, and that absolute slavery is only a continued state of war, became a principal resource for later critics of the institution. Montesquieu and Rousseau will press the critique further, denying even the just-war exception. Within the liberal tradition Locke helped to shape, hereditary chattel slavery is left without a theoretical foundation, even where practice lagged behind principle.

Montesquieu devotes Book XV of The Spirit of the Laws to the civil laws relative to slavery. He defines slavery, properly so called, as the establishment of a right which gives to one man such a power over another as renders him absolute master of his life and fortune. The state of slavery is in its own nature bad, he holds, neither useful to the master nor to the slave. He examines in turn the arguments that have been offered in its favor: the right of conquest, voluntary self-sale, claims of racial or climatic inferiority, and the supposed benefit of the enslaved. Each is tested against the requirements of reason and of natural equality.

The argument from conquest fails, on his account, because the right of war extends only to what is necessary for victory, not to permanent dominion over persons. The argument from voluntary sale fails because no person can sell what is not truly his to give. Climate, which Montesquieu, like Hippocrates before him, treats as a cause of manners and of political forms, is given a more qualified role. There reigns in Asia, he writes, a servile spirit that peoples have not been able to shake off; under Asiatic despotism, domestic slavery is more tolerable than elsewhere, and where heat enervates the body so that only fear of chastisement can oblige men to labor, slavery may seem more reconcilable to reason. Yet he also declares that as all men are born equal, slavery must be accounted unnatural, though in some countries it be founded on natural reason. Natural slavery, if any exists, is to be limited to particular parts of the world. When he turns to the claim that Europeans have a right to make slaves of Africans, he concludes with the remark that it is impossible to suppose these creatures to be men, because allowing them to be men, a suspicion would follow that we ourselves are not Christians.

Montesquieu's analysis also concerns the moral effects of the institution on masters and free citizens. Slavery breeds cruelty, arrogance, and contempt for law. In slaveholding societies, free men become habituated to arbitrary power and lose the habits required for republican self-government. A people accustomed to owning others will more readily tolerate despotism over themselves, because they have already accepted the principle that some persons exist to serve the will of others. The connection between domestic bondage and political liberty is treated under Democracy, Liberty, and Tyranny. The question concerns both justice toward the slave and the kind of citizen a slaveholding society produces.

Montesquieu's survey of the arguments for slavery, and his insistence on its corruption of free government, set terms for later Enlightenment criticism. Rousseau will reject even the residual concessions to climate and gradual necessity. Mill will return to the effects of subjection on character when he treats liberty and representative government.

Rousseau denies that there is any justice in slavery by nature, by covenant, or by right of war. The supposed right of the strongest is no right at all. Force creates obedience for as long as it is applied, but never obligation; a man compelled to obey has no duty once the compulsion ceases. Since might cannot make right, no conquest can produce legitimate enslavement. Against Aristotle, Rousseau holds that the notion of natural slaves is an illusion produced by force: those made slaves by force have their natures debased to slavishness. Aristotle, he says, took the effect for the cause. Nothing can be more certain than that every man born in slavery is born for slavery; yet if there are slaves by nature, it is because there have been slaves against nature. Force made the first slaves, and their cowardice perpetuated the condition.

The argument from voluntary submission fares no better. To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties. Such a renunciation is incompatible with human nature and therefore void. Even if a man were foolish enough to give himself away, he cannot give away his children, who are born free. Hereditary slavery is thus doubly illegitimate: it rests on a void contract and extends that void to persons who never consented. In Kant's later language, a contract by which one party renounces his whole freedom for the advantage of the other, ceasing thereby to be a person, is self-contradictory and null. Rousseau anticipates that conclusion. The relation of freedom to personhood is treated under Liberty and under Man.

Rousseau also rejects the claim of Grotius and others that war supplies a right of slavery. The right of conquest, he holds, has no foundation other than the right of the strongest. If war does not give the conqueror the right to massacre the conquered once they have laid down their arms, the right to enslave them cannot be based upon a right that does not exist. War is a relation between states, not between individuals; once a soldier lays down his arms, he ceases to be an enemy and becomes merely a man. To make the captive buy his life at the price of his liberty is unfair when the victor holds no right over that life. From whatever aspect the question is regarded, the right of slavery is null and void, not only as illegitimate but as absurd and meaningless.

Rousseau's categorical rejection of every proposed foundation for slavery became a principal statement of the modern position that all men are by nature born free. Hegel will accept that the slave has an absolute right to free himself, while adding that if a man is a slave, his own will is in some measure responsible for his slavery. Mill will treat freedom as the necessary condition of individual and social development, completing the turn from justifications of bondage to its abolition and prevention.

Hegel treats slavery both as a stage in the history of spirit and as a moment in the development of self-consciousness. In the section of the Phenomenology of Spirit often called "Lordship and Bondage," two self-consciousnesses confront each other in a struggle for recognition. One risks death and becomes the master; the other, choosing life over that risk, submits and becomes the bondsman. The master appears to have gained everything: he is recognized by the slave and enjoys the products of the slave's labor without laboring himself. Yet this victory is incomplete. Recognition from a consciousness that is not recognized as equal is of little worth. The master becomes dependent on the slave for material sustenance and for the recognition that was the object of the struggle.

The slave, by contrast, undergoes a transformation through work and fear. In shaping the natural world according to purposes not his own, he discovers in the formed thing an expression of his own being-for-self. Through the discipline of service he acquires a self-control that the master, at leisure, does not acquire. It is not simply that the bondsman has the feeling of self in his work; because he shapes and forms the thing, he becomes aware that being-for-self belongs to him. The truth of the master is in reality the inessential consciousness and its inessential action. Domination, on this account, fails of its own aim: the attempt to reduce another person to an instrument destroys the recognition that motivated the attempt. The analysis belongs as much to the idea of Mind and of Desire as to the politics of bondage.

Hegel also comments on slavery as a historical institution. He regards the natural condition itself as one of absolute and thorough injustice, yet holds that man must be matured for freedom. The gradual abolition of slavery is therefore wiser and more equitable than its sudden removal. Agreeing with those who treat a contract of total renunciation as a nullity, he holds that the slave has an absolute right to free himself, but adds that if a man is a slave, his own will is responsible for his slavery. The wrong of slavery lies at the door not simply of enslavers or conquerors, but of the slaves and the conquered themselves, insofar as they have not yet claimed the freedom that is theirs. This gradualism and this assignment of responsibility distinguish Hegel from Rousseau's unqualified rejection of every foundation of bondage.

Hegel's dialectic of master and slave became a frequent point of reference for later philosophy of history, labor, and recognition. Marx would adapt its structure to class relations; later writers on colonialism and interpersonal conflict would return to its account of how subjection can reverse itself. Within the Syntopicon's map of the idea, Hegel stands with those who deny that slavery is natural, while still treating its abolition as a historical process rather than an immediate moral absolute.

Mill writes when legal chattel slavery is under active attack and when the equality of all men as claimants to happiness has become a working principle of liberal thought. There is, he holds, an innate equality belonging to every man which consists in his right to be independent of being bound to others, so that he ought to be his own master by right. That all persons are deemed to have a right to equality of treatment follows from the principle that one person's happiness, supposed equal in degree, is counted for exactly as much as another's. The equal claim of everybody to happiness involves an equal claim to the means of happiness, among them freedom. A person who is not free to develop his faculties, form his opinions, and pursue his own plan of life is prevented from realizing what the idea of Man and of Happiness require.

In Considerations on Representative Government, Mill extends the argument from individuals to peoples. He looks upon slavery as a stage in the rise of certain peoples from a condition of savagery toward political life, and maintains that the transition to freedom must be gradually effected. A slave properly so called is a being who has not learnt to help himself. He is one step in advance of a savage; he has learnt to obey, but what he obeys is only a direct command. It is the characteristic of such persons to be incapable at first of conforming their conduct to a rule or law. They have to be taught self-government, and this, in its initial stage, means the capacity to act on general instructions. Benevolent despotism, if prolonged for its own sake, is self-defeating: it keeps subjects in passivity and dependence. The only way a people learns to govern itself is by governing itself, however imperfectly. Guidance may be needed, but its purpose must be to render itself unnecessary. These claims touch Progress, Democracy, and Government as well as Slavery.

Mill also applies the logic of subjection beyond legal bondage. In The Subjection of Women, he argues that the legal subordination of wives to husbands is a form of domestic slavery incompatible with the principles of liberty. Status determined by birth rather than by the free development of capacity is the older pattern of which chattel slavery was the extreme case. The love of power and the love of liberty are in eternal antagonism; where there is least liberty, the passion for power is the most ardent. By extending the critique of subjection to sex and to imperial tutelage, Mill treats equal freedom as a standard against which formal slavery and many other political arrangements may be measured.

Mill stands near the end of the classical debate mapped in the Syntopicon. With Rousseau and Kant he holds that men are by nature born free; with Hegel he allows that the passage from subjection to self-government may be gradual. His contribution is less a new justification or refutation of chattel slavery than a general principle: every form of subjection that permanently prevents persons or peoples from acquiring self-direction violates the equal claim to the means of happiness.