Oppression and racial slavery: Abolitionist challenges to neo-republicanism (original) (raw)

2020, Contemporary Political Theory

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

Slaves, Prisoners, and Republican Freedom (Res Publica 2011)

Res Publica 17, 2011

Philip Pettit’s republican conception of freedom is presented as an alternative both to negative and positive conceptions of freedom. The basic idea is to conceptualize freedom as non-domination, not as non-interference or self-mastery. When compared to negative freedom, Pettit’s republican conception comprises two controversial claims: the claim that we are unfree if we are dominated without actual interference, and the claim that we are free if we face interference without domination. Because the slave is a widely accepted paradigm of the unfree person, the case of a slave with a non-interfering master is often cited as providing a good argument for the first republican claim and against a negative conception of freedom. One aim of this article is to raise doubts about whether this is true. The other aim of the article is to show that the prisoner—also a paradigm of the unfree person—presents a good argument against the second republican claim and in favour of a negative conception of freedom. This is called the ‘prisoner-argument’. It will be argued that neither Pettit’s distinction between free persons and free choices nor his distinction between compromising and conditioning factors of freedom can help to rebut the charge of the prisoner-argument.

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.

A Radical Revolution in Thought: Frederick Douglass on the Slave’s Perspective on Republican Freedom

Radical Republicanism: Recovering the Tradition's Popular Heritage, 2020

Focusing the American Revolution, the subsequent republican government established new political institutions to maintain the collective interests of the whole population. The political revolution was held in place by processes of public reason that reflected the values and ideas of the people that had rebelled. The black population, however, had not been part of this revolution. After emancipation, black Americans were required to accept terms of citizenship that had already been defined, leaving them socially dominated, subject to the prejudices and biases within the prevailing ideas of public discourse. Douglass argued that republican freedom under law is always dependent on a more fundamental revolution, that he calls a ‘radical revolution in thought’, in which the entire system of social norms and practices are reworked together by members of all constituent social groups – women and men, black and white, rich and poor – so that it reflects a genuinely collaborative achievement. Only then can we begin the republican project of contestatory freedom as independence or non-domination that today’s republicans take for granted.

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The Comparative Slavery Debate Revisited

“The African American Experience in Comparative Perspective: The Current Question of the Debate,” in Sherwin K Bryant, Rachel Sarah O’Toole and Ben Vinson III, eds., Africans to Spanish America, Expanding the Disapora (Bloomington: University of Illinois Press, 2012), pp. 206-222.