American Slavery and Its Repercussions (original) (raw)

Slavery and Freedom in Theory and Practice (Political Theory 44:6 (December 2016): 846-870)

The slave has long stood as a mirror image to the conception of a free person in political theory in general, and republican political theory in particular. This essay contends that while slavery deserves this central status, a more thorough examination of slavery—with greater attention to the lived experience of slaves—will reveal additional insights about freedom presently unacknowledged in contemporary republican political thought. A problem with the way slavery is often positioned with respect to theories of freedom is that, in Neil Roberts’ terms, the very possibility of slave agency is disavowed (Roberts, Freedom as Marronage, 2015), thus treating freedom as a status (some) people have, rather than something people seek. My contention here is that a republican theory of freedom can be improved through an examination not just of what freedom looks like from the perspective of those who comfortably possess it, but also from the perspective of those, like slaves, who presently lack free status. From James Scott’s work on the resistance strategies of the powerless to the “New Social History” school of historical research, a great deal of scholarly attention to the lives of slaves (in particular the ways they have exercised agency) is now available, providing a rich resource for theorists of freedom. Republican theory generally identifies two strategies for insulating freedom; protection through the law and through social norms. Slaves are denied a plausible path to either of these forms of insulation, but those did not exhaust the options for freedom-seeking. The improvisations and strategies of freedom-seeking slaves included spatial, economic, and cultural techniques. Taken together, these strategies offer a richer and more complete picture of freedom than republican has historically offered. In particular, attention to these strategies makes clear the importance of correcting the error of treating freedom as a threshold concept—a status that one either has or does not have. This error has obscured a great deal of freedom seeking activity and necessarily offers a stunted and incomplete conception of freedom.