Arbitrary Rule: Slavery, Tyranny, and the Power of Life and Death

By Mary Nyquist

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: May 10, 2013
• ISBN: 9780226015675

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MARY NYQUIST is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Toronto.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2013 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2013.

Printed in the United States of America

22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13       1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-01553-8 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-01567-5 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226015675.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Nyquist, Mary.

Arbitrary rule : slavery, tyranny, and the power of life and death / Mary Nyquist.

pages. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-01553-8 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-226-01567-5 (e-book) 1. Despotism.   2. Slavery—History.   3. Slavery in literature.   4. Hobbes, Thomas, 1588–1679.   5. Locke, John, 1632–1704.   I. Title.

JC381.N97 2013

306.3'6209—dc23

2012043149

The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support of Victoria College, University of Toronto, toward the publication of this book.

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

ARBITRARY RULE

Slavery, Tyranny, and the Power of Life and Death

MARY NYQUIST

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

TO THE MEMORY OF MARIAN NORRGARD NYQUIST,

MY MOTHER,

AND

TO THE STUDENTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO,

FROM WHOM I CONTINUE TO LEARN

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Citations

Introduction

1. Ancient Greek and Roman Slaveries

Political Slavery and Barbarism

Tyranny, Slavery, and the Despotēs

The Tyrant as Conqueror and Antityranny

Tyranny, Despotical Rule, and Natural Slavery in Aristotle’s Politics

Roman Antityranny

Appropriation and Disavowal of Slavery

2. Sixteenth-Century French and English Resistance Theory

Servility and Tyranny in Montaigne and La Boétie, Goodman and Ponet

Spanish Tyranny, English Resistance

Collective Enslavement and Freedom in Vindiciae

Slavery in Smith’s De Republica Anglorum and Bodin’s République

Resistance

3. Human Sacrifice, Barbarism, and Buchanan’s Jephtha

Barbarism, Sacrifice, and Civic Virtue

Calvin, Cicero, and Wrongful Vows

Does Jephtha Hold the Sword?

Blood(less) Sacrifice

4. Antityranny, Slavery, and Revolution

Genesis, Dominion, and Natural Slavery

Servility, Tyranny, and Asiatic Monarchy in 1 Samuel 8

Genesis, Dominion, and Servitude in Paradise Lost

Ears Bored with an Awl in Revolutionary England

Revolution and Liberty Cap

5. Freeborn Sons or Slaves?

Debating Analogically

Freeborn Citizens and Contract

Fathers and Resistance

Antislavery and Bodin’s Preemption of Antityranny

Parker’s Antityranny and Antislavery

6. The Power of Life and Death

Brutus and His Sons: Lawful Punishment or Paternal Power?

Debating the Familial Origins of the Power of Life and Death

Debating Divine Sanction for the Power and Life and Death

Power, No-Power, and the English Revolution

Etymology as Ideology: Servire from Servare, or Enslaving as Saving

7. Nakedness, History, and Bare Life

Nakedness

Nationalization of Natural Slavery and Original Sin

De Bry’s Europeanized Adam and Eve

Privative Comparison in Paradise Lost

8. Hobbes’s State of Nature and Hard Privativism

The Golden-Edenic Privative Age

Cicero’s Savage Age

Savagery and the Euro-Colonial Privative Age

Ancestral Liberties, Inherited Freedom

Hobbes’s State of Nature and Libertas

Frontispieces

9. Hobbes, Slavery, and Despotical Rule

Liberty, Slavery, and Tyranny Discomfited

Preservation of Life, Civility, and Servitude

Hobbes’s Female-Free Family

Servants and Slaves

10. Locke’s Of Slavery, Despotical Power, and Tyranny

Antityranny, Not Antidespotism

Hobbes, Locke, and the Power of Life and Death

Reading Of Slavery

Reading Locke Rewriting Power/No-Power

Hebrew and Chattel Slavery

Slaves and Tyrants

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures

1. Hebrew slave with bored ear (1557)

2. Brutus’s coin (ca. 43–42 BCE)

3. Respublica liberata (1546)

4. Liberté (1644)

5. Hendrick de Keyser and Peter de Keyser, Aurea Libertas (1620)

6. Jan Tengnagel, Allegory of the Prosperity of the Republic . . . (ca. 1623)

7. Pieter Lastman, Jeptha and His Daughter (ca. 1611)

8. Theodor de Bry, Adam and Eve in America (1590)

9. Title page from De Cive (1642)

10. Title page from De Cive (1647 separate)

11. Theodor de Bry, How the slave who had spoken . . . (1592)

12. Title page from De Cive (1647, second edition)

13. Title page from De Cive (1649, French edition)

14. A captive or servile libertie (1557)

Table

1. Schematic overview of connections among Judges, Euripides, Buchanan, Christopherson, and Vondel

CITATIONS

REFERENCES. Bibliographical information appears when a source is first referenced in an endnote, after which only the last name of the author(s) and an abridged title will be provided. For primary sources that I cite or refer to frequently, locators or page numbers appear parenthetically in the body of the text; relevant abbreviations or codes can be found in the first endnote reference to the edition being used. Owing to this study’s length, a bibliography has not been included. Readers can use the index to locate a given author or source, the first reference to which will lead to bibliographical data.

CLASSICAL SOURCES AND TRANSLATIONS. Although I have used standard translations into English, where it has seemed important to cite the original language, I have done so sparingly in parentheses. When employing Greek and Latin terms in the introduction and chapter 1, I have followed modern scholarly conventions for transliteration or reproduction (e.g., despotēs or ius). But when these terms appear with reference to early modern texts, I use later adaptations (e.g., despot or jus).

Sources originally in Latin are cited from modern scholarly editions. Titles of sources originally in languages other than English first appear in the form in which they were published (e.g., Montaigne’s Des cannibales). Thereafter, they are given as they appear in the edition I am using (e.g., Of the caniballes, but Iephthes for Buchanan’s Latin drama). In the case of primary sources published in (or translated into) early modern English, I have retained original punctuation, spelling, italicization, and capitalization, with the exception of i and v, which I have silently changed to u and j, respectively, as well as other typographical practices that are now commonly modernized (e.g., &). Italicized words or phrases within citations from early modern texts appear in the original unless explicitly said to be mine.

INTRODUCTION

Arbitrary Rule began many years ago when I started wondering why figurative, political slavery is written about so readily, with such intensity, rhetorical ingenuity, and, occasionally, theoretical rigor, in the English revolution of the mid-seventeenth century and again in the American and French revolutions. Why do radical Western European pamphleteers and theorists represent their opposition to the existing monarchical regime (or, in the case of England’s thirteen mainland American colonies, their hostility to England) as a form of slavery? What, if anything, does this political slavery have to do with Euro-colonial enslavement and transportation of Africans across the Atlantic to the New World? By the late eighteenth century, antislavery discourse often speaks the language of opposition to political slavery. Does such double encoding occur in earlier periods? If not, when and by what means does political slavery become interconnected with objections to slavery as an institution? These questions led to others about Greek and Roman use of slavery as a figure for political oppression, and to asking how early modern humanists appropriated political slavery in addition to the barbarism with which it was often associated. Scholarship on classical and early modern political philosophy did not address the queries I had about political slavery’s imbrications with personal slavery or its discursive conventions. Arbitrary Rule arose to meet this need, however imperfectly.

In exploring these issues, I have adopted a term Kurt A. Raaflaub introduces with reference to Athenian democracy, antityrannicism.¹ Greek, and later Roman, antityranny ideology represents the tyrant’s subjects as figuratively enslaved—enslavement that seeks to dishonor and disenfranchise citizens who are meant to be free. Such figurative, political slavery can be either internally or externally imposed and has numerous significations, only some of which are relevant to a given utterance or passage. But whatever its mode, political slavery needs to be differentiated from the chattel slavery against which it asserts its claims. The benefits of elucidating their entangled interrelations will, I hope, emerge in this study, but certainly include challenging the notion that early modern resistance literature expresses inchoate antislavery sentiments. Integral to the antityranny ideology that articulates the threat tyranny poses to the democratic polis, political slavery has its own unique logic and codes, none of which arise from concern for those who are actually enslaved. At the same time, despite its apparent autonomy as a discursive formation, political servitude is not inherently independent of chattel slavery or indifferent to its legitimacy. Nor in classical Athens and Rome are political freedom and servitude within the state independent of imperial expansion. Writing of Athenian imperialism’s interrelations with its democratic formations, Raaflaub states, "Internal freedom, realized by the rule of the demos in the polis, proved an indispensable prerequisite for the polis’s external freedom based on imperial rule—which, in turn, guaranteed the continuity and stability of democratic freedom."²

Clarity about interrelations between political and chattel slavery is difficult to come by partly because in a postabolition era, antityrannicism’s vituperation against tyranny for threatening to reduce free citizens to political slaves is often mistaken for a denunciation of slavery itself. Revalorization of the ancient Greco-Roman polarity between freedom and slavery is frequently the result, all the more insidious for being inexplicit or perhaps subconscious. A not atypical desire to associate, if not equate, repudiation of political slavery with an enlightened rejection of slavery appears in Geoffrey Robertson’s Introduction to his edition of The Levellers, where he traces the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to its humble origins in the Putney Debates that took place in 1647, during England’s Civil Wars. Anyone who has been moved by the outpouring of creative, revolutionary ideas by marginalized women and men whose voices are almost never heard will share Robertson’s desire to impart the experience. Far too often, the American, French, and Haitian revolutions are discussed without acknowledging the influence of the earlier revolution of the mid-seventeenth century. Besides raising awareness of how deeply engaging much of this literature still is, though, Robertson has a narrower, nationalist agenda, revealed when he claims that central democratic principles are derived not from the slave-owning societies of Athens and Rome but rather from buff-coated and blood-stained English soldiers and tradesmen.³ Robertson is scornful of the importance Quentin Skinner and others give Roman republicanism, insisting that radicals such as John Cooke—central figure of The Tyrannicide Brief, Robertson’s gripping study of the trial of Charles I and its aftermath—derive their ideals and their fiery commitment to radical political change from their own Protestant, English communities and the Christian Bible.

Colorfully, if obliquely, contrasting the slave-owning societies of classical antiquity with slave-free seventeenth-century England, Robertson associates a native English aversion to slavery with an equally indigenous robust love of democratic freedom, expressed in the tracts published in The Levellers as a rejection of the political slavery attendant on tyranny. The larger historical context in which buff-coated English commoners assert their beliefs is thereby misrepresented. True, at the time of the revolution, England was not directly dependent on slave labor as were Athens and Rome. Despite an unsuccessful bid to reintroduce it in 1547, slavery was not legally permissible in early modern England. Alongside other Western European nations, however, England undertook numerous overseas ventures, steadily expanded its capitalist instruments and colonial holdings, and developed transatlantic plantation societies that were, unquestionably, slave societies. Situated in this ever-expanding transnational context, early modernism’s interest in political freedom and slavery—interconnected with the humanist revival of classical Greco-Roman literature—significantly contributes to the lengthy, often only indirectly acknowledged process, beginning in the fifteenth and extending into the nineteenth century, by means of which expropriation of Amerindigenous lands and transatlantic slavery became institutionalized.

Freedom (and its Roman stepdaughter Liberty) so saturates hegemonic Euro-American ideologies that it is difficult to grasp that its emergence as a political ideal is contingent on numerous historical particulars, including the institution of chattel slavery. This, though, is what Orlando Patterson challenges readers to do in his monumental Freedom in the Making of Western Culture.⁴ Patterson’s stress on Western Christianity’s appropriation of ancient Greek and Roman constructions of freedom and slavery, foreign to the Hebrew Bible, is a welcome reminder of the layered, discursive complexity of these terms. Patterson, however, tends to be more interested in personal, spiritual, and what he calls sovereignal (power over others) freedom than in political freedom, the primary focus of Arbitrary Rule. More important, in the absence of the projected second volume, Patterson’s study, which ends with the medieval period, leaves the impression that from ancient Greece onward, Western culture is in the making. Yet without early modern Portuguese and Spanish expansion, whereby Western Europe comes gradually to displace rival geopolitical centers of power, there would be no triumphal, globally imperial West, no transatlantic slavery, no apparently seamless continuity between classical antiquity and the liberal, representative governments of today. No reemergence of freedom as an ideal.⁵

Many have commented on the prodigious gulf separating the idealistic language in which tenets relating to liberty—often attached to individual, Western European nation-states—are expressed and the brutally dehumanizing practices of transatlantic colonialism and slavery. In his study of European responses to the Haitian revolution, for example, Michel-Rolph Trouillot drily remarks, [T]he more European merchants and mercenaries bought and conquered other men and women, the more European philosophers wrote and talked about Man.⁶ Yet the earlier stages of this racialized doublethink, which occur primarily in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, France, and the Netherlands, have not been explored. To apprehend these earlier stages at all requires not only a genealogical analysis of slavery as a figure for political oppression but also an understanding of its numerous affective and cognitive registers in early modern Christendom. Political slavery is in fact a significantly underanalyzed yet foundational feature of modern rights-based and liberal discourses. Its interrelations with transatlantic slavery are very complex, and can be analyzed only when political slavery itself is freshly examined.

Of course, figurative slavery—ethical, psychological, or spiritual as well as political—appears in countless cultural and historical contexts. However, slavery as a figure for distinctively political oppression poses interpretative challenges that have rarely been critically examined. Why should exclusion from political participation or the perception that arbitrary decision making has oppressive consequences be represented as slavery? And why does political slavery so frequently get paired with tyranny? This pairing will not seem curious to anyone familiar with Anglo-American antislavery literature and iconography, since the tyrannous slaveholder who cruelly abuses those under his power is an omnipresent figure. But such a figure—the slaveholder who tyrannizes his slaves—is largely alien to earlier, preabolitionist traditions indebted to ancient Greece and Rome. On the part of Western Europeans, concerted opposition to slave trading and slaveholding as social institutions begins only in the mid-eighteenth century, and then in terms that are often imbued with racialist, nationalist interests. Until its transposition to the private sphere in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, tyranny is conceptualized almost exclusively with reference to political governance.⁷

A pejorative construct that emerges in archaic Greece, political tyranny is of concern to the freeborn male citizens who collectively constitute the polis and the laws by which they are to be governed. Employed by the tyrant’s political enemies, often by his aristocratic rivals, tyranny is a term of abuse. It charges a ruler with obtaining power unconstitutionally or with ruling in defiance of laws and customs over citizens who are thereby metaphorically enslaved by his behavior. The stress on answerability implicit in antityrannicism is one measure of the vast difference between political and chattel slavery, the latter of which does not provide viable legal protections against mistreatment or misrule. Torture of slaves, for example, was considered acceptable, and though the killing of slaves was formally outlawed, criminal prosecution of slaveholders was not feasible. While perhaps subject to disapproval, a Greco-Roman slaveholder who abused his slaves (the legal head of household is male, as is ancient and early modern political philosophy’s paradigmatic citizen) did so with impunity as master of his household.⁸ When mentioned at all, such abuse of power is an individual ethical problem that may affect the well-being of the community but does not conceivably warrant structural, political change.⁹

As a polyvalent metaphor, political enslavement is effective on several grounds.¹⁰ First and foremost, in the very act of rhetorically gesturing toward its possibility, political slavery constitutes a community of free citizens whose direct participation in self-rule ensures they will not brook subjection. In denouncing tyranny’s lawlessness, those who are threatened with slavery do not call attention to the vulnerable, legally unprotected condition of chattel slaves. Rather, they polemically signal the values cherished in and by means of the political arena—in Athens, where it originates, isonomia, the equality associated with law’s rule, together, later, with eleutheria, freedom.¹¹ This ideological aim is met in later periods, too, when slavery highlights desirable features of nonmonarchical, representative, or more egalitarian, democratic government—constitutional possibilities that polemical literature may hope to call into existence—by a process of negative self-definition.

Political slavery may levy any number of other charges. It may, for example, suggest that subjects of allied or subjugated states are being unfairly taxed or otherwise economically burdened. Or, with more overt analogical intent, that citizens are being treated as if they were the ruler or government’s property, without any more claim to their belongings or wealth than those who are legally enslaved as chattels. As will be seen, the concept of property in the self, arguably the cornerstone of liberalism, arises in connection with the annihilation of property rights entailed by chattel slavery. Owing in part to widespread familiarity with polemics relating to the American War of Independence—revivified by the Tea Party—this usage is most widely recognized today. But the larger, historical-materialist context for this recognition is the centrality of private property in Euro-American liberal traditions. Indirectly tied to an opposition between voluntary and involuntary servitude that capitalism renders increasingly problematical, the notion of political consent continues precariously to support ideologies of free labor, self-proprietorship, and the right to individual property.

Preoccupation with property or economic (in)dependence, however, undervalues political slavery’s discursive plasticity, to say nothing of its polemical power. Antityrannicism’s rhetorical productivity is easier to recognize if, for the moment, we ignore important differences between ancient Greek or Roman and early modern political slavery. Language evoking political slavery can protest perceived political disenfranchisement of any kind. The metaphor of citizens-as-chattels may challenge a tyrannous ruler’s proprietary claims to the fruits of citizens’ labor, not only physical or commercial but also reproductive labor, as, for example, when he sends sons off to needless wars or sexually exploits wives and daughters. It may register the tyrant’s reliance on force, a sure sign that he fails to distinguish free from slave but also that he has abandoned rational, public discussion and the value of isēgoria, equality of speech. It may indicate that a tyrannous ruler poses a threat to citizens’ very lives, in which case he egregiously treats citizens as dehumanized slaves or animals that can be disposed of at will. At its most potent, vituperation against political slavery protests a generalized assault on the citizenry’s dignity or the humiliating loss of honor entailed in the reduction of status from free to slave. An affront or demeaning threat to collective, free status is not an incidental byproduct of antityranny discourse. It is integral to its conceptual operations and rhetorical efficacy.

Figurative, political slavery occludes features of chattel slavery that do not support its case, exaggerating carefully selected points of comparison at the expense of major socially and legally sanctioned differences. More specifically, it trivializes two features of chattel slavery that create the conditions necessary for maintaining the legal fiction that an enslaved human being can be property: first, the traumatic dislocation of those to be enslaved from homeland, kin, and cultural communities, known since Patterson as social death, and, second, the dehumanizing dishonor entailed by the ongoing instability of social identity, indefinitely perpetuated when the forming of new familial bonds is legally prohibited or undermined by the ever-present possibility of further sale or death.¹² Obscuring the immense material, experiential, and legal differences between their own political condition and those who are legally enslaved, Athenian, Roman, and, later, early modern and Enlightenment European rhetorical appeals to political slavery highlight the injustice of treating freeborn citizens as if they were, or were about to become, enslaved. Since to be enslaved is to be regarded as without honor and legal personhood, mention of such a figurative condition or hypothetical occurrence is expected to arouse indignation. At the very least, it sharpens perception of the threat that tyranny poses to the free political community’s privileges and dignity.¹³

Honor also plays an unsung part in the ideological complex I call war slavery doctrine, exploration of which is crucial to a less blinkered view of interrelations between Euro-colonialism and political theory. This doctrine, formulated by Roman jurists, locates slavery’s origins in warfare, specifically in the captor’s decision to save—that is, enslave—rather than kill the vanquished. Although formally distinct, war slavery doctrine is often conflated with the power of life and death held by the slave master, a power to which it is in any case usually related. The prevalence of this juridical complex in early modern political theory calls into question the progressive, historical narrative Michel Foucault tells in Society Must Be Defended when he contrasts the sovereign’s absolute power of life and death with the multiple mechanisms and technologies of biopower that later extend over human lives en masse so as either to coerce life from the living or permit death to occur. The right of sovereignty, Foucault sums up in a chiastic antithesis, was the right to take life or let live. And then this new right is established: the right to make live and to let die.¹⁴ Because Foucault and, later, Giorgio Agamben show little interest in either Euro-colonialism or institutional slavery, they ignore early modern political theorists’ frequent reliance on war slavery doctrine and on the individual slaveholder’s power of life and death, the latter of which is often set against that assigned the father over his children. Jean Bodin, an early modern theorist of absolutism, for example, along with later writers, including Agamben, regards paternal power over children as the prototype for sovereignty’s state of exception.

Far more pervasive than has been recognized, this ideological complex (or ideologeme) relating to war slavery helps to account for, among other things, the misleading importance ancient and early modern apologists give to warfare as a means of acquiring slaves. In Roman jurisprudence, uitae necisque potestas (the right or power of life and death—hereafter power, the more common early modern usage) is used only with reference to the individual slave master’s power. Belonging to the category of those who are under another’s authority (alieni iuris), slaves are under an unregulated, discretionary power that is captured in the awe-inspiring phrase the power of life and death. When making this point in his Institutes, Gaius grounds the power of life and death in ius gentium (right or law of nations, hereafter generally law, for the same reason)—that is, in a practice so universal as to be followed by all nations. "In potestate itaque sunt serui dominorum,—quae quidem potestas iuris gentium est: nam apud omnes paraeque gentes animaduertere possumus dominis in seruos uitae necisque potestatem esse,—et quodcumque per seruum adquiritur, id domino adquiritur. [Slaves, then, are in the potestas of their owners,—and this potestas is iuris gentium; for we find that amongst all nations alike owners have the power of life and death over their slaves,—and whatever is acquired by a slave is acquired for his owner.]"¹⁵ It is elsewhere made clear that ius gentium, responsible for the slaveholder’s power, also accounts for the acquisition of slaves through capture in warfare, another equally widespread institution, which, as practiced in the Mediterranean arena, grants victors the power to dispose of their vanquished opponents’ lives.¹⁶

That military victory confers a legitimate power to dispose of war captives’ lives is borne out in a text that, introduced by Florentinus, appears in Justinian’s Digest and Institutes, where it immediately follows a definition of slavery. This discursive ordering indicates uneasiness, Alan Watson has suggested.¹⁷ Like the power of life and death, slavery itself is initially defined so as to locate its institutional legitimacy in ius gentium: "Slavery is an institution of the law of nations [ius gentium], whereby someone is against nature made subject to the ownership of another."¹⁸ In the statement that follows, slavery’s origins in warfare are made explicit. Yet by means of a highly tendentious etymology—figura etymologica taken up by Grotius and Hobbes, among other early moderns—it offers a more high-minded rationale for slavery than ius gentium. It is claimed that the very term seruus or serui (slave or slaves), which is the substantive of seruire, to serve, derives from the verb seruare, to preserve, spare, or save: "Slaves are so called because generals have a custom of selling their prisoners and thereby preserving rather than killing them: they are also called mancipia because they are taken physically (manu capi) from the enemy."¹⁹ Since the derivation of seruire (to serve) from seruare (to preserve, spare, or save) works only in Latin, it would also seem to call attention to the laudatory civility of Roman imperialism.

What this motivated derivation brings out is the binary opposition structuring the victors’ power over the vanquished, who can be either saved by enslavement or put to death. Phrased differently, the war slavery doctrine implicit in this brief text indicates that victors hold the power to determine whether the vanquished live the social and political death of slaves or die the physical death of enemies. (In reality, there were other options—for example, ransom or impressment.) Interestingly, the victors’ power to dispose of their defeated antagonists’ lives is not characterized as uitae necisque potestas. Is this because it is a convention of warfare? Is the power of life and death itself also originally an extrajuristic power, which, once named by jurists, becomes legitimated as a power held by the slave master? Responses to these intractable questions most often appear in the form of usage and translation, attention to which is an important part of this study, albeit one that needs to be taken further.

Though not identical with the enslaver’s power of life and death, the victors’ power clearly shares the same binary structure. Further, if Roman war slavery doctrine illuminates slavery’s alleged origins on the battlefield, it may also, surreptitiously, provide an etiological explanation for the slaveholder’s ongoing, everyday disciplinary power, the power of life and death. To the best of my knowledge, nowhere is the connection between slavery’s military origins and the household enslaver’s extensive disciplinary power spelled out. By regarding the slaveholder’s power of life and death as a variable feature of war slavery doctrine, I am speculatively reconstructing a connection I believe to be implicit in many texts, philosophical and literary, both ancient and early modern, from Aristotle to Locke and beyond. Grasped as a displaced modality of the victors’ power over the vanquished, the slaveholder’s disciplinary power is not, however, pace Foucault, merely an alternative to killing: it is power exercised as a means of letting live that holds the potential for arbitrarily killing, making live, or letting die.

The claim that enslaving is a mode of saving is specific to Roman jurisprudence, but the opposition between slavery and death underlying war slavery doctrine invigorates Greek as well as Roman conceptions of military honor. If the proposed etymology of seruire features magnanimity—the virtue displayed when at the conclusion of battle the military victors dramatically dispense enslavement-as-life instead of death—courage is the virtue on display in representations of Greek and Roman military valor. Warriors appreciative of political ideals and adequately trained for battle will find the prospect of death not horrifying but an opportunity to display the choice of death-for-freedom as a noble, even rational, alternative to the ignominy attached to slavery. Not infrequently, combatants are encouraged to regard the battlefield as a stage on which they must heroically choose between dishonorable life as slaves and honorable death.²⁰ To live as a slave on the adversary’s turf is to reveal oneself as, in effect, a traitor to the cause, as someone who through cowardice gave his life not for his own people but to the enemy. Conversely, to choose death over slavery is not only courageously to assert the supreme value of freedom (over and against slavery as mere life) but also to withhold one’s life from those for whom it would be an economic asset and a trophy. War slavery ideology presupposes that the male military victors and warriors who actively make these momentous, life-and-death-determining choices are themselves free, although in reality the enslaved were frequently called on for military service.²¹

In associating war slavery with cowardice—itself not far from effeminacy and slavishness—militarized codes of honor facilitate the negative politicization of slavery under tyranny. Despite the gradual weakening of an aristocratic military ethos in Western Europe, Christian humanists are highly responsive to war slavery’s associations with defeat and dishonor. They also greatly enlarge the arena in which servility enacts itself by linking it with court culture and idolatry, the latter of which serves Euro-colonialism especially well since both Judaism and Christianity have richly developed traditions of invective against idolatry. Such continuities do not make decoding early modern discourse on political slavery any easier, however. It has long been observed that classical Greek and Roman authors do not use special terms to differentiate collective freedom or slavery—eleutheria (freedom) or douleia (slavery) in transliterated Greek, libertas (liberty) and seruitus (slavery) in Latin—from their counterparts as applied to the individual, sometimes referred to as personal freedom or slavery.²² Early modern writers steeped in Greek and Roman literature perpetuate the ambiguities that arise from this semantic superabundance.

To further complicate matters, within the category of collective, political slavery, there are two distinct slaveries, one internal to the state (where tyranny threatens citizens with slavery) and one external (where one state threatens to subjugate or enslave another), both of which involve communities. Yet internal or external political freedom and slavery are rarely explicitly distinguished, precisely because they are conceived to be interdependent. Interpretative activity directed by context and verbal cues is required to differentiate modes of political slavery as well as to distinguish political from chattel slavery. One important cue appears in chattel slavery’s association with the individual household—an association that is conventional in both ancient and early modern political philosophy. Against political slavery, which involves a collectivity, chattel slavery’s association with the individual household has implications that I repeatedly explore but which also extend beyond the historical parameters of this study. Relations between individual and communal entitlements are important to several debates not entered into here, from the origins of the notion of natural rights to the significance of the right of the people to keep and bear arms inscribed in the US Constitution’s Second Amendment.²³ It is hoped there will be many benefits to consciously noting how ancient and early modern texts signal which slavery is relevant to a given passage, when they expect readers to shift between or among registers, or when a given passage or text encourages the conflation of distinct orders of freedom or enslavement.

Conflation of analytically distinct orders is a feature of Aristotle’s discussion of chattel and political slavery, the profound effects of which on early modern debates concerning human bondage, forms of governance, and transnational relations need more intensive examination. Aristotle introduces the natural slave in book 1 of Politics when discussing the institution of chattel slavery, conceptualized in relation to the individual household master and slave. Yet having already represented barbarians as an aggregate of people who are naturally disposed to political slavery, Aristotle formulates what are, in effect, two complexly interdependent doctrines of natural slavery. As a consequence, Asiatic political subjection to an absolute monarch, linked with natural servility, becomes confusingly intertwined with the doctrine of individuals who are slaves-by-nature, meant to legitimate the widespread practice within Greece of enslaving non-Greeks, or barbaroi, as chattel. From the standpoint of those legally enslaved as individual or state-owned chattel, it obviously matters whether slavery refers to actual bondage, internal politico-cultural forms and traditions, or the collective incapacity for self-rule that was part of Athenian imperial discourse and later provided imperial Rome with a pretext for interstate domination. Writing at a time when Athenian supremacy in the Aegean was in decline, Aristotle does not discourage a bit of slippage among forms of slavery in Politics, nor, under different conditions, do his Roman or early modern heirs, which perhaps explains why this slippage so often gets reproduced in modern scholarship.²⁴

It is now generally agreed that modern liberalism’s emphasis on individual rights, together with its stress on collective, social contract as a means of securing these rights, is foreign to the classical Greek view of political society as a natural formation comprising a community of actively involved citizens. Whether owing to consensus on this issue, to liberalism’s individualist legacies, or to Cold War anxieties about positive freedom when associated with a collectivity, the extent to which early modern antityrannicism maintains the Greco-Roman emphasis on collective rather than individual agency and interests is frequently obscured.²⁵ Antityrannicism’s rhetorical strategies presuppose and at the same time actively promote a community’s political agency, the free status of which tyranny directly threatens. In both ancient Greco-Roman and early modern contexts, personal freedom is generally assumed yet not foregrounded. As will be seen, mid- and late-seventeenth-century theorization of the rights-bearing individual occurs with reference to a collectivity (for Hobbes, not free). This is true even of the slaveholder, whose power over the enslaved is exceptionally difficult to theorize since for Grotius and, following him, Hobbes and Locke, institutional slavery has a precivil origin.

Among historians of early modern political theory, Skinner has been especially interested in servitude’s interrelations with freedom, his discussion of which has had considerable influence.²⁶ Arguing that early modern English liberalism’s neo-Roman strain emerges in the 1640s, in Liberty before Liberalism Skinner draws a distinction between classical liberalism, with its fundamentally negative orientation, and its forerunner, neo-Roman liberalism, which he regards as less negative in that it considers not only force or the coercive threat of it (classical liberalism’s position) but also the condition of dependence itself as forms of constraint.²⁷ The hegemony of classical liberalism, with its focus on unjust or unnecessary interference by the state, has in Skinner’s view prevented modern Westerners from perceiving the value of the state’s ability to protect or liberate its citizens from a condition of avoidable dependence on the goodwill of others.²⁸ As this suggests, while engaging postabolition sensibilities, Skinner tends to ignore Roman republicanism’s aristocratic, masculinist character while subtly perpetuating its vilification of political slavery in the language of contemporary political science. In Skinner’s studies, figurative, political slavery appears to stand free of significant ties to actual, human bondage or to Euro-colonialism, so much so that it can be reformulated for contemporary liberalism.

Given political slavery’s polyvalence, a decision to isolate dependency as its most salient feature may involve tautology—slavery is often referred to as dependent labor—or reductionism. In any case, for many ancient and early modern writers, both vulnerability to force and unwanted dependence on a ruler’s individual, arbitrary power could and did characterize the collective, political slavery suffered under tyrannous rule. Antityrannicism’s invective plays no small part in making self-preservation central to liberal, rights-based discourses, though preservation was initially more often at stake for communities than for the individuals who comprised them, and more often aimed at safeguarding freedom than mere life. However negatively formulated, antityrannicism frequently discloses positive civic ideals and national self-definitions. In some contexts, most notably the radical literature of England’s Civil Wars, antityranny discourse led to proposals for representative or even more direct democratic political participation. It also opened onto utopian visions of economic and social equality. Pace Skinner, however, it is argued here that antityrannicism’s characteristic rhetorical and conceptual operations—vilification of the threatened reduction of a free community’s status to that of slaves or of a community’s servility if acquiescing in such a reduction—find expression in mid-sixteenth-century England, France, and the Netherlands after their initial reemergence in Renaissance Italy.²⁹

This is not to suggest that antityrannicism tidily disposes of all other categories. On the contrary, it is hoped that attention to the multifarious forms taken by tyranny’s pairing with political slavery will facilitate the drawing of finer distinctions and encourage a deeper understanding of liberalism’s filiations with ancient Greek and Roman conceptions of freedom, tyranny, and political slavery, including their interrelations with imperial expansion. It may also helpfully challenge the common practice of translating politico-philosophical texts into a set of transparent, propositional claims. Designed to protest a set of conditions that ought not to be, the rhetoric of political slavery often appears in statements that can be described as, at most, counterfactual. It has layers of condensed, sedimented meanings and a range of affective registers. In antityrannicism’s lexicon, tyranny not only challenges a community’s freeborn status by transgressing publicly constituted laws and institutions but also threatens it with public dishonor and traumatic material, social, and spiritual losses represented as unjust. Early modern writers who appropriate Greek and Roman antityranny ideology and those who oppose them are aware of its affective power, which they seek to exploit or to neutralize in countless inventive ways.

Recently, the term neoclassical has been introduced to counter the undue attention often given early modern political philosophy’s neo-Roman strains.³⁰ Given the currency of Latin as the language of elite, European education and disputation, a tendency to confine discussion to Roman sources makes a certain sense. Yet the antityranny ideology that invigorated leading Roman writers is much indebted to its Greek originators. And while knowledge of ancient Greek was comparatively restricted, Greek texts were not only being translated into Latin and the vernacular throughout the early modern period but also available in numerous synopses, digests, and compendia on which major political theorists and pamphleteers drew. In recent years, scholarship on classical Greece has analyzed several features of Athenian tragedy in connection with the development of Athenian democratic ideology and imperialism.³¹ Might early modern humanists have been receptive to these interrelations? In Arbitrary Rule, this possibility is explored in connection with a drama George Buchanan self-consciously modeled on Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis yet based on a biblical narrative of child sacrifice, Jephtha’s sacrifice of his nameless daughter as told in Judges. While this is the only sustained discussion of literary texts undertaken here, it underlines the importance of carefully specifying the ways in which a given early modern author or tradition appropriates or synthesizes classical and biblical traditions.

Like Skinner and many other scholars of early modern literature broadly conceived, I assume that historical contextualization is capable of yielding privileged insights. It can also raise theoretical and historiographic consciousness of biases underlying current interpretative practices, the most significant of which for Arbitrary Rule is the desire to sever early modern political philosophy’s ties with what Sylvia Wynter calls Euro-colonialism’s natural law charter, which sanctioned racialized subjugation, and what Walter D. Mignolo calls the Renaissance’s darker side.³² Another bias involves defense of the academic border between literary studies and political philosophy. This border still tends to be guarded despite numerous successful crossings, by David Norbrook in his study of the political meanings encoded in generic, intertextual, and stylistic choices relating to mid-seventeenth-century English radicalism, for example, or more recently by Victoria Khan, who draws out the literary, historical, and philosophical implications of the social contract’s status as human artifact.³³ Arbitrary Rule contributes to the project of challenging disciplinary separatism, although by different means.³⁴ Close textual analyses focus on specific formal properties of politico-philosophical discourse, such as the semantic changes undergone by key words such as despotism; the range of appeals made by pairing slavery with tyranny; the rhetorical devices used in defending or refuting antityranny principles, including analogy (often underrated in terms of its potential for creative, nuanced argumentation); use of singular or plural pronouns; conventions relating to the privative age (discussed briefly below); the ideologeme relating to war slavery, sometimes accompanied by the conceptual elaboration of servire’s supposed derivation of servire from servare; and the significance of the discursive order by means of which materials in a given passage or text are distributed and structured. The historical contextualization practiced here attends to both intra- and interdiscursive relations, and is therefore often more exegetically layered than ready translation into propositional discourse allows.

An attempt to find or produce propositional claims meets with special frustration when it comes to central Euro-colonialist assumptions. Especially vis-à-vis inhabitants of the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa, a secure sense of Western Europeans’ global cultural superiority is apparent in much early modern literature. In the relatively circumscribed arena of debate on political rule within the nation-state, assumptions of superiority inform discussion in ways that usually do not announce themselves. Some limits are placed on propositional discourse by the difficulty of finding acceptable terms in which to reconcile Christian humanism’s emphasis on voluntary assent to religious truths with the expansionist imperatives of early modern capitalism and colonialism. Silences or fissures that result from ideological pressures may, though, be attended by constraints that are consciously self-imposed. In a discussion that took place at the time the Virginia Company’s royal charter was being drafted—issued on April 10, 1606, the charter is referred to by Robert Williams Jr. as "the English equivalent of the Requerimiento"³⁵—a decision was taken not to publish a justification of the venture on the grounds that similar proclamations by the Spanish had resulted in messy challenges; in conflicting, often inconclusive, legal opinions; and in attempts to interfere with the subjugation of the Indians as barbars and therefore naturally slaves.³⁶ Since England would have to not only defend its treatment of Amerindigenes but also compare its title to the Americas with that of the Spaniards, it was thought best to adopt what Williams calls a strategy of silence.³⁷ Though in this instance the strategy is consciously agreed upon, the desire to avoid unnecessary provocation of critics who might raise ethical and legal issues may be a factor in other contexts where Spain’s upstart rivals combine vilification of Spanish cruelty with a preference for indirection regarding their own expansionist designs.

What might antityrannicism have to do with such discursive indirection? Or, for that matter, with Euro-colonial practices generally and plantation slavery in particular? It will be argued here that by means of antityranny ideology and the honorific status of freedom with which it is connected, Greco-Roman politico-philosophical discourse gives Western Europeans a means of representing themselves as free. Paradoxically, perhaps, this occurs even when neoclassical discourse on freedom is being opposed, since advocates of absolute monarchy tend to transvalue figurative servitude as voluntary, rational subjection. Thoroughly, unobtrusively internalized, neoclassical conceptions of freedom facilitate the consolidation of individual and national identities that are proudly founded on freedom—a value of immense appeal for those whose ancestry or wealth would otherwise disqualify them for political privileges.³⁸ At the same time, because such freedom is energized by its contrary, it aids and abets the projection of unfree identities onto non-Christian societies across the Atlantic. This applies, for example, to the slur just cited on Amerindigenes as barbars and therefore naturally slaves, in which Aristotle’s chattel slave-by-nature assumes the identity of an entire nation’s—rather, a multitude of conveniently amalgamated nations’—incapacity for self-rule.

To understand this projection requires analysis of early modern strategies for positioning selected extra-European societies in what I call a privative age, a prepolitical age that was historically remote from the European present as well as temporally prior to public, political rule. Though genealogically related to the golden age or to classical representations of primitive human society, the Euro-colonial privative age startlingly transposed features of these fictive or hypothetical eras to existing, contemporaneous societies, primarily in the Americas or sub-Saharan Africa. A new term such as the privative age is needed to underscore the extraordinarily consequential historical specificity of this transposition. Unfree identities are projected onto spatially remote non-Christian societies, the antecedent temporality of which gets associated with the prepolitical absence of laws or institutions safeguarding civility. In this context, the Greco-Roman ancestry that European humanism establishes for itself has special significance, since the historical continuities thereby created for freedom complement the temporal remoteness or pastness with which geographical distance from the New World or Africa is associated.

The privative of this era, associated with the state of nature, has yet another connotation. When chattel slavery is theorized in connection with the household, as it is from Aristotle to Locke and beyond, it becomes part of the private realm. Etymologically, the private signifies the absence or privation—from the Latin privatio—of privileges established in the public realm of law and decision making. In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt observes that owing to modernism’s enrichment of the private sphere, privacy is no longer associated with deprivation. In Athens and Rome, however, free participants in the city-state’s political institutions enjoyed a set of valued privileges lacked by those who were solely members of a household. For Arendt, the privative nature of privacy in ancient Greece and Rome lies in the household’s ties with material production and reproduction, the realm of necessity that underlies yet is inferior to the public realm where humankind’s most creative capacities find expression. Less contentiously, she associates privation with the fixed, hierarchical relations within the household as contrasted with the polis, where there is neither ruler nor ruled but instead relations among equals (that is, among freeborn, male citizens). Epitomizing this set of beliefs, Arendt writes: A man who lived only a private life, who like the slave was not permitted to enter the public realm, or like the barbarian had chosen not to establish such a realm, was not fully human.³⁹

Arendt claims that the privative, prepolitical rule of the Greco-Roman household master shares nothing with the anarchic state of nature posited by seventeenth-century political thought, most notoriously, of course, by Hobbes.⁴⁰ Though, to be fair, Arendt is interested in problematically idealized ancients, not early moderns, Arbitrary Rule finds otherwise. In a dialogue on preemptive warfare, Francis Bacon has one of his interlocutors explicate Aristotle’s doctrine of slavery with reference to nations that exist in the privative, that is, in a condition without publicly ordered social or political relations—absence alleged to prove a national incapacity for self-rule. Already a convention of European ethnographic and protoevolutionary literature, evaluation in the privative for writers such as Bacon conjures up a privative, anarchic condition to which offensive warfare is a legitimate, national response. Hobbes’s state of nature is a close relative, as is Locke’s state of war—a state where slavery is at home.⁴¹

Hobbes and Locke are often discussed from the perspective of their impact on later, eighteenth- or nineteenth-century political theories. In this study they are approached, as it were, from behind, initially from a discussion of Greek and Roman literature on political slavery, then by analyses of early modern French and English political theorists and colonialist discourses. Methodologically, Arbitrary Rule tries to convey a sense of the conflictual, interpretatively layered processes through which meanings are produced in specific historical and interdiscursive settings, and to clarify the stakes of a given set of rhetorical or interpretative strategies, whether that set is internal to an individual author’s works or appears across a number of texts sharing important assumptions or aims. It also takes on the unique challenges posed by three difficult, compacted passages—one in Milton’s Paradise Lost, one in Hobbes’s Leviathan, and one in Locke’s Second Treatise. I have chosen these passages because each in its own way articulates relations among individual, psychospiritual freedom/servitude, political freedom/servitude, whether internal or external, and institutional slavery in terms that require attunement to shifts among different discursive registers. Each in its own way also offers a defense of slavery that many modern readers and commentators have been reluctant to acknowledge.

As a field of academic inquiry, postcolonial studies often divorces itself prematurely from the early stages of Euro-colonialism. When this happens, the result is a foreshortened perspective on the conditions against which decolonization movements struggle or from which various neocolonialisms extend.⁴² At the same time, when scholars of early modernism investigate nodes of convergence among Euro-colonialism, emergent capitalism, and the rise of liberalism, they tend to focus on claims legitimating colonial conquest or expropriation of land and property rather than slavery. For example, while Locke’s Of Slavery is frequently bypassed in favor of his discussions of labor and property in land, Grotius’s appeal to ius gentium in defense of the slaveholder’s right to the power of life and death has not, so far as I know, been examined by historians of political theory, though it is the basis of the apology for chattel slavery by Hobbes in Leviathan and Locke in the Second Treatise. Justification of slavery with reference to ius gentium is similarly absent from recent considerations of Euro-imperialism and international law.⁴³

Arbitrary Rule emphasizes the plasticity of antityranny discourse, without, though, being able to give this plasticity its due. Introduced to safeguard the privileges of freeborn male Athenian citizens, antityranny discourse was early on appropriated by critics of democracy.⁴⁴ Antityrannicism is taken up in the early modern period in order to protect or enlarge the political claims of propertied citizens within increasingly centralized nation-states. It provides the conceptual and rhetorical principles for early modern theories of political resistance, which proliferate in a creative frenzy of publishing activity during the English revolution, when it is appropriated by soldiers and female as well as male commoners who mobilize for larger social and economic ends. Transvalued, it is taken up in absolutist and counterrevolutionary discourses. Yet at the same time, it is a staple feature of anti-Spanish colonialist discourses and, in a different way, in expansionist literature whenever non-Christian, extra-European societies are barbarized: the Turks, for example, regularly take the place of Athenian democratic ideology’s Asiatic barbarians in being represented as slaves to their arbitrary, tyrannous ruler. Less obviously, it informs England’s self-representation as a civilizing influence that is far kinder and gentler than its tyrannous Spanish rivals.

This study concerns the formative period of Western European colonialism from, roughly, the mid-sixteenth to the latter part of the seventeenth century. It ends with Locke’s Two Treatises, published at a time when critiques of transatlantic, colonial slavery began to appear. The majority of texts taken up here were written in seventeenth-century England, where an aptitude for holding liberty in high esteem became a defining characteristic of inhabitants. In mentioning the generous Temper and Courage of our Nation, Locke appeals to a developed, multi-institutionalized nationalism, one by no means confined to committed radicals.⁴⁵ During the course of the century, England took the lead over other Western European nations in the highly competitive transatlantic slave trade, which is differentiated with increasing clarity from voluntary servitude as Western Africa becomes the geographical origin of the women, men, and children abducted and transported to the New World. Robin Blackburn states that by the end of the seventeenth century, The English plantation colonies registered a greater concentration of slaves, and a more exclusive equation of slavery with dark skin color, than had hitherto been witnessed in any European colony.⁴⁶ In this context, where bondage occurs elsewhere, far from the metropolitan center, and to non-Christians considered less culturally developed, assertions of national self-sovereignty and natural liberties have a peculiar resonance, particularly when they receive much of their rhetorical strength from accompanying assaults upon the degrading political slavery with which freeborn subjects, very often explicitly English or Dutch, are threatened. If set against the relative scarcity of direct references to colonial slavery, the prevalence of polemical texts exploiting or responding to antityranny ideology, often for avowedly national aims, has an ethnoreligious exclusivity it is now possible to recognize as tacitly racialized.

Like other late modern studies, Arbitrary Rule engages early modern and Enlightenment legacies, including the antityranny ideology that informs both revolutionary discourse and normative theories of representative democracy. If, as proposed here, antityrannicism’s pairing of slavery and tyranny is central to debates on rights-based, liberal discourses as well as to theorization of transatlantic slavery, it will be important to rethink the terms in which these discourses get discussed, especially if they are to be the basis for contributions to contemporary political theory and practice. As an ideal, freedom needs to be further interrogated and revisioned or, perhaps, abandoned. It is hoped that Arbitrary Rule will attune students and educators to ancient, early modern, and Enlightenment slavery’s various discursive registers. And, more expansively, that it may inspire alternatives to inherited Euro-American liberalisms, or language with