Un-Peculiar Institution

Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death begins with the claim that, far from being a “peculiar institution,” slavery is commonplace in history.

That’s not surprising. What is counter-intuitive is Patterson’s claim that slavery rose in importance at precisely the moments when civilizations reached their highest development: 

Slavery “was firmly established in all the great early centers of human civilization and, far from declining, actually increased in significance with the growth of all the epochs and cultures that modern Western peoples consider watersheds in their historical development. Ancient Greece and Rome were not simply slaveholding societies; they were what Sir Moses Finley calls “genuine” slave societies, in that slavery was very solidly the base of their socioeconomic structures. Many European societies too were genuine slave societies during their critical periods. In Visigothic Spain, late Old English society, Merovingian France, and Viking Europe, slavery-if not always dominant-was never less than critical. The institution rose again to major significance in late medieval Spain, and in Russia from the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth. Slaves constituted such a large proportion of the Florentine population during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that they significantly transformed the appearance of the indigenous Tuscan population. Late medieval and early Renaissance Venice and Genoa were extremely dependent on slave labor, and the Italian colonies of the Mediterranean during the late Middle Ages not only were large-scale plantation slave systems but . . . were the models upon which the advanced plantation systems of the Iberian Atlantic colonies were based. These, in turn, were the testing grounds for the capitalistic slave systems of the modern Americas” (vii-viii).

This doesn’t make sense in the post-Enlightenment West, nor does the apparent contradiction exhibited by everyone from Aristotle to Thomas Jefferson, namely, the combination of a love of freedom and ownership of slaves. Patterson argues that our puzzlement arises from a false understanding of both slavery and freedom: “The joint rise of slavery and cultivation of freedom was no accident’ but “a sociohistorical necessity” (ix). We think that a lover of freedom shouldn’t have slaves, but that comes from our tendency to “reify ideas” and to “read the history of ideas backwards” (ix).

Patterson’s effort to untangle this apparent contradiction has two main components. On the one hand, he defines slavery in terms of honor: It is the “permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons” (13). Given this definition in terms of honor, he argues that “There was nothing at all hypocritical or anomalous about the southerner’s highly developed sense of honor and freedom. Those who most dishonor and constrain others are in the best position to appreciate what joy it is to possess what they deny” (94).

Appealing to Hegel’s slave-master dichotomy, he argues that “The slave, by his social death, and by living ‘in mortal terror of his sovereign master’ becomes acutely conscious of both life and freedom. The idea of freedom is born, not in the consciousness of the master, but in the reality of the slave’s condition. Freedom can mean nothing positive to the master; only control is meaningful. For the slave, freedom begins with the consciousness that real life comes with the negation of his social death. . . . Freedom – life – is a double negation; for his condition is already a negation of life, and the reclamation of that life must therefore be the negation of this negation” (98). And so notions of freedom are the children of slavery, not of freedom.