Arbitrary Rule: Slavery, Tyranny, and the Power of Life and Death 9780226015675

Citation preview

arbitrary rule

arbitrary rule

Slavery, Tyranny, and the Power of Life and Death

mary nyquist

the university of chicago press chicago and london

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. Paperback edition 2015 Printed in the United States of America 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15   2 3 4 5 6 isbn-13: 978-0-226-01553-8 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-27179-8 (paper) 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).

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.

xi xiii 1

Ancient Greek and Roman Slaveries

20

Political Slavery and Barbarism   26 Tyranny, Slavery, and the Despote¯s   31 The Tyrant as Conqueror and Antityranny   37 Tyranny, Despotical Rule, and Natural Slavery in Aristotle’s Politics   43 Roman Antityranny   49 Appropriation and Disavowal of Slavery   54 2.

Sixteenth-Century French and English Resistance Theory

57

Servility and Tyranny in Montaigne and La Boétie, Goodman and Ponet   61 Spanish Tyranny, English Resistance   68 Collective Enslavement and Freedom in Vindiciae   71 Slavery in Smith’s De Republica Anglorum and Bodin’s République   79 Resistance   86 3.

Human Sacrifice, Barbarism, and Buchanan’s Jephtha Barbarism, Sacrifice, and Civic Virtue   99 Calvin, Cicero, and Wrongful Vows   108

vii

92

viii

contents

Does Jephtha Hold the Sword?   111 Blood(less) Sacrifice   116 4.

Antityranny, Slavery, and Revolution

123

Genesis, Dominion, and Natural Slavery   126 Servility, Tyranny, and Asiatic Monarchy in 1 Samuel 8   132 Genesis, Dominion, and Servitude in Paradise Lost   137 Ears Bored with an Awl in Revolutionary England   147 Revolution and Liberty Cap   151 5.

Freeborn Sons or Slaves?

162

Debating Analogically   165 Freeborn Citizens and Contract   169 Fathers and Resistance   175 Antislavery and Bodin’s Preemption of Antityranny   180 Parker’s Antityranny and Antislavery   184 6.

The Power of Life and Death

193

Brutus and His Sons: Lawful Punishment or Paternal Power?   196 Debating the Familial Origins of the Power of Life and Death   199 Debating Divine Sanction for the Power and Life and Death   201 Power, No-Power, and the English Revolution   206 Etymology as Ideology: Servire from Servare, or Enslaving as Saving   218 7.

Nakedness, History, and Bare Life

227

Nakedness   232 Nationalization of Natural Slavery and Original Sin   236 De Bry’s Europeanized Adam and Eve   242 Privative Comparison in Paradise Lost   247 8.

Hobbes’s State of Nature and “Hard” Privativism The Golden-Edenic Privative Age   261 Cicero’s Savage Age   266 Savagery and the Euro-Colonial Privative Age   269

257



contents

ix

Ancestral Liberties, Inherited Freedom   274 Hobbes’s State of Nature and Libertas   279 Frontispieces   284 9.

Hobbes, Slavery, and Despotical Rule

293

Liberty, Slavery, and Tyranny Discomfited   298 Preservation of Life, Civility, and Servitude   305 Hobbes’s Female-Free Family   311 Servants and Slaves   315 10.

Locke’s “Of Slavery,” Despotical Power, and Tyranny

326

Antityranny, Not Antidespotism   329 Hobbes, Locke, and the Power of Life and Death   333 Reading “Of Slavery”   339 Reading Locke Rewriting Power/No-Power   347 Hebrew and Chattel Slavery   353 Slaves and Tyrants   354 Epilogue Acknowledgments Notes Index

362 369 371 409

illustrations

Figures 1.

Hebrew slave with bored ear (1557)  149

2.

Brutus’s coin (ca. 43–42 BCE)  153

3.

“Respublica liberata” (1546)  155

4.

Liberté (1644)  156

5.

Hendrick de Keyser and Peter de Keyser, Aurea Libertas (1620)  158

6.

Jan Tengnagel, Allegory of the Prosperity of the Republic . . . (ca. 1623)  159

7.

Pieter Lastman, Jeptha and His Daughter (ca. 1611)  160

8.

Theodor de Bry, Adam and Eve in America (1590)  243

9.

Title page from De Cive (1642)  285

10.

Title page from De Cive (1647 separate)  286

11.

Theodor de Bry, How the slave who had spoken . . . (1592)  287

12.

Title page from De Cive (1647, second edition)  289

13.

Title page from De Cive (1649, French edition)  290

14.

A captive or servile libertie (1557)  291

Table 1.

Schematic overview of connections among Judges, Euripides, Buchanan, Christopherson, and Vondel  97

xi

citations

R e f e r e n c e s .  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. C l a s s i c a l S o u r c e s a n d T r a n s l a t i o n s.  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., despote¯s 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.

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introduction

A

rbitrary Rule began many years ago when I started wondering why figurative, political slavery is written about so readily, with such in­ tensity, rhetorical ingenuity, and, occasionally, theoretical rigor, in the En­ glish 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 politi­ cal 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. Scholar­ ship 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 intro­ duces with reference to Athenian democracy, antityrannicism.1 Greek, and later Roman, antityranny ideology represents the tyrant’s subjects as figu­ ratively 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, 



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only some of which are relevant to a given utterance or passage. But what­ ever 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 ex­ presses 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 clas­ sical Athens and Rome are political freedom and servitude within the state independent of imperial expansion. Writing of Athenian imperialism’s inter­ relations with its democratic formations, Raaflaub states, “Internal freedom, realized by the rule of the demos in the polis, proved an indispensable pre­ requisite 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 dif­ ficult to come by partly because in a postabolition era, antityrannicism’s vituperation against tyranny for threatening to reduce “free” citizens to po­ litical “slaves” is often mistaken for a denunciation of slavery itself. Revalor­ ization 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. Any­ one 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 Ameri­ can, French, and Haitian revolutions are discussed without acknowledging the influence of the earlier revolution of the mid-seventeenth century. Be­ sides 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 slaveowning 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, insist­ ing that radicals such as John Cooke—central figure of The Tyrannicide



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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 classi­ cal antiquity with slave-free seventeenth-century England, Robertson asso­ ciates 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, En­ gland 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 human­ ist 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 hege­ monic Euro-American ideologies that it is difficult to grasp that its emer­ gence 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 cen­ ters of power, there would be no triumphal, globally imperial “West,” no



introduction

transatlantic slavery, no apparently seamless continuity between classical antiquity and the liberal, representative governments of today. No reemer­ gence 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 dehuman­ izing 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 philoso­ phers 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 appre­ hend 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 po­ litical 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 interpreta­ tive challenges that have rarely been critically examined. Why should ex­ clusion 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 antislav­ ery 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, pre­ abolitionist 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 eigh­ teenth centuries, tyranny is conceptualized almost exclusively with refer­ ence 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



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polis and the laws by which they are to be governed. Employed by the ty­ rant’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 meta­ phorically 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 protec­ tions against mistreatment or misrule. Torture of slaves, for example, was considered acceptable, and though the killing of slaves was formally out­ lawed, 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 politi­ cal 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 to­ ward 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 cher­ ished 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 ex­ ample, 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 govern­ ment’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 slav­ ery. Owing in part to widespread familiarity with polemics relating to the American War of Independence—revivified by the Tea Party—this usage is



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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 an­ cient Greek or Roman and early modern political slavery. Language evok­ ing 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 ise¯goria, equality of speech. It may indicate that a tyran­ nous 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 con­ ditions necessary for maintaining the legal fiction that an enslaved human being can be property: first, the traumatic dislocation of those to be en­ slaved from homeland, kin, and cultural communities, known since Patter­ son 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,



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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 condi­ tion 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, specifi­ cally in the captor’s decision to save—that is, enslave—rather than kill the vanquished. Although formally distinct, war slavery doctrine is often con­ flated 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 progres­ sive, 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



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the power of life and death in ius gentium (right or law of nations, here­ after 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 cap­ tives’ lives is borne out in a text that, introduced by Florentinus, appears in Justinian’s Digest and Institutes, where it immediately follows a defini­ tion 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 state­ ment 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 highminded 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 struc­ turing 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 ex­



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ample, 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 slave­ holder’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 vari­ able feature of war slavery doctrine, I am speculatively reconstructing a connection I believe to be implicit in many texts, philosophical and liter­ ary, 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 ju­ risprudence, 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 vir­ tue displayed when at the conclusion of battle the military victors dramati­ cally 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 coura­ geously to assert the supreme value of freedom (over and against slavery as

10

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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 effemi­ nacy 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 link­ ing it with court culture and idolatry, the latter of which serves Eurocolonialism 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, how­ ever. 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 (lib­ erty) 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, po­ litical 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 in­ volve 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 ver­ bal 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 as­ sociation 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



introduction

11

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 dis­ cussion 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 intro­ duces 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 formu­ lates what are, in effect, two complexly interdependent doctrines of natural slavery. As a consequence, Asiatic political subjection to an absolute mon­ arch, 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 in­ capacity 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 per­ haps explains why this slippage so often gets reproduced in modern scholar­ ship.24 It is now generally agreed that modern liberalism’s emphasis on individ­ ual 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 lega­ cies, 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

12

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assumed yet not foregrounded. As will be seen, mid- and late-seventeenthcentury 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 discus­ sion 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 per­ ceiving 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 contem­ porary 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 col­ lective, political slavery suffered under tyrannous rule. Antityrannicism’s invective plays no small part in making “self”-preservation central to lib­ eral, 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 nega­ tively 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



introduction

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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 Re­ naissance Italy.29 This is not to suggest that antityrannicism tidily disposes of all other cat­ egories. 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 expan­ sion. 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 consti­ tuted 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 un­ due attention often given early modern political philosophy’s “neo-Roman” strains.30 Given the currency of Latin as the language of elite, European edu­ cation 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 knowl­ edge 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 com­ pendia on which major political theorists and pamphleteers drew. In recent years, scholarship on classical Greece has analyzed several features of Athe­ nian tragedy in connection with the development of Athenian democratic ideology and imperialism.31 Might early modern humanists have been recep­ tive to these interrelations? In Arbitrary Rule, this possibility is explored in connection with a drama George Buchanan self-consciously modeled on

14

introduction

Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis yet based on a biblical narrative of child sac­ rifice, 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 yield­ ing privileged insights. It can also raise theoretical and historiographic con­ sciousness 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 po­ litical philosophy. This border still tends to be guarded despite numerous successful crossings, by David Norbrook in his study of the political mean­ ings encoded in generic, intertextual, and stylistic choices relating to midseventeenth-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, al­ though 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 re­ futing antityranny principles, including analogy (often underrated in terms of its potential for creative, nuanced argumentation); use of singular or plu­ ral 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 mate­ rials 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 trans­ lation into propositional discourse allows. An attempt to find or produce propositional claims meets with special frustration when it comes to central Euro-colonialist assumptions. Espe­ cially vis-à-vis inhabitants of the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa, a secure sense of Western Europeans’ global cultural superiority is apparent in much



introduction

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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 accept­ able terms in which to reconcile Christian humanism’s emphasis on vol­ untary 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 con­ sciously self-imposed. In a discussion that took place at the time the Vir­ ginia 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 con­ texts 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 indirec­ tion? Or, for that matter, with Euro-colonial practices generally and planta­ tion 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 oc­ curs 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 individ­ ual and national identities that are proudly founded on freedom—a value of immense appeal for those whose ancestry or wealth would otherwise dis­ qualify them for political privileges.38 At the same time, because such free­ dom 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

16

introduction

identity of an entire nation’s—rather, a multitude of conveniently amal­ gamated 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 institu­ tions 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 tem­ poral 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 ab­ sence 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 pri­ vate 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 repro­ duction, 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



introduction

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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 ide­ alized 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 selfrule. 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 im­ pact on later, eighteenth- or nineteenth-century political theories. In this study they are approached, as it were, from behind, initially from a discus­ sion of Greek and Roman literature on political slavery, then by analyses of early modern French and English political theorists and colonialist dis­ courses. 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 regis­ ters. 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

18

introduction

conquest or expropriation of land and property rather than slavery. For ex­ ample, 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 Antityran­ nicism 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 ap­ propriated 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 ex­ pansionist 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 selfrepresentation as a civilizing influence that is far kinder and gentler than its tyrannous Spanish rivals. This study concerns the formative period of Western European colonial­ ism 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 cri­ tiques 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 charac­ teristic of inhabitants. In mentioning “the generous Temper and Courage of our Nation,” Locke appeals to a developed, multi-institutionalized na­ tionalism, 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 differ­ entiated with increasing clarity from voluntary servitude as Western Africa



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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 de­ veloped, 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 anti­ tyranny 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 in­ forms both revolutionary discourse and normative theories of representa­ tive 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 al­ ternatives to inherited Euro-American liberalisms, or language with which to theorize democratic resistance to—the tyranny of?—corporate capitalist, neocolonial rule.

chapter one

Ancient Greek and Roman Slaveries

T

he abolitionist and postabolitionist view that chattel slavery is fundamentally unjust was not shared by either Greco-Roman or early modern European authorities. To the overwhelming majority of such writers, slavery as lived experience was not of particular interest, much less one that called for major social reform or empathic understanding.1 Why, then, was it so important to vilify slavery? Why should citizens have expended so much energy disparaging not only slaves but the very condition of slavery? Another question to be taken up here is why slavery was so frequently associated with violence in Greco-Roman political discourse. Initially, these may seem ridiculous questions. Anyone who has given chattel slavery a moment’s thought knows that slaveholders maintained their position of power by means of systematic debasement and brute, physical force. Yet while this was true of actual, institutional slavery, in the discussion that follows I offer alternative explanatory frameworks for the specifically polemical contexts in which ancient Greco-Roman literature associates political slavery with degradation and violence. Tempted as some may be to understand political slavery as expressive of identification on the part of those who happened to be “free” with those who were not, the genealogical analysis undertaken here will critique this assumption as an anachronistic projection from later liberalism(s). In this chapter, we will be concerned primarily with interrelations in Greek and in Roman political thought between two modes of slavery: on the one hand, chattel slavery, a social institution that affected every aspect of life in ancient Greece and Rome, and on the other, political slavery, which appeared only as a rhetorical figure for an oppressive condition suffered by a political community or polis. Legal, chattel slavery tended to be

20



ancient greek and roman slaveries

21

conceptualized with reference to the individual household or its master, while political slavery invariably had reference to a political community. Political slavery itself appeared in two distinct modes. Within the polis, it represented a negative condition for the free, male citizens who expected to participate as equals in the political process, while externally, vis-à-vis other city-states, it represented a condition with which the entire community was threatened. Rarely, however, was internal political slavery explicitly distinguished from external, and the failure to articulate or acknowledge their interdependence is highly significant, as we shall see. In a further, consequential complication, Athenian democratic ideology represented political slavery as a condition for which certain populations were naturally suited while for others, capable of ruling themselves, it would be inappropriate or unjust. For Aristotle, this was true of both chattel and political slavery. Before we can explore this influential nexus of slaveries, though, we need to reflect on the distinctive character of slavery as a figure for political oppression. The trope of political slavery, which appeared in the history, philosophy, rhetoric, and tragedy of fifth-century BCE Athens, was a key element in the conceptual opposition between freedom and slavery central to democratic ideology. Not surprisingly, the opposition free/unfree did not capture the complexity of social realities. Freedom’s antithetical relations with slavery obscured the variety of both free and unfree statuses available, together with the fact that since citizenship was determined by parentage, free status alone did not make one a citizen; metics (legally free resident aliens), for example, were not citizens. Only an adult male born to an Athenian citizen—and after Pericles’s legislation of 451 BCE, both parents had to be citizens—could actively participate in politics and therefore fully benefit from political privileges.2 Yet within these limits, emphasis on the free status shared by all members of the polis minimized differentiation by ancestry or social prestige, and was thus empowering for nonelite male citizens, who, historically, were largely responsible for generating and sustaining demo­cracy’s ideal valuation of freedom.3 Despite its far more inclusive and complex policies on citizenship, the Roman Republic, too, embraced a foundational opposition between freedom and slavery.4 The distinctive features of political slavery’s figural modality can more easily be appreciated if it is compared with ethico-spiritual slavery, also figurative. Moral philosophy occasionally represented douleia (δουλει´α) in the positive sense of respectful submission to lawful order, as Plato did in the Laws.5 More commonly, however, douleia gets stigmatized as a failure

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of mastery on the part of the individual agent. Ethical slavishness or ongoing enslavement is the outcome of weakness or self-indulgence on the part of the paradigmatically “free” agent. When a higher faculty of the free self falls subject to a lower faculty, or when the free self as a whole becomes hopelessly enamored of inferior, mundane pursuits, ethico-spiritual “slavery” is the inevitable result. In Euripides’s Suppliant Women, for example, Eteocles, who is not well off, is praised for having rejected financial offers from friends “in case he should become slavishly attached to riches” (lines 874–76).6 He has exercised the praiseworthy rational control, associated with self-mastery, lacking in someone who becomes a “slave” to appetite. By means of this psycho-ethical logic, familiar to anyone acquainted with ancient Greek and Latin texts or their medieval and early modern descendants, an individual’s figurative, ethical slavery is understood as semiconsciously sought or, alternatively, tolerated because it has become habitual, in either case being somehow deserved. While sharing figurative status, however, ethical and political slavery not only differ with regard to number—individual versus collective—but also operate on asymmetrical evaluative axes. The idea of political slavery as it appeared in Greco-Roman antityranny discourse does not valorize the position of master over slave the way ethical judgments do in recommending the rule of superior over inferior and self-mastery. This is true even when members of a political community are being shamed for an apparent willingness to submit to political slavery, in which case they acquiesce in a condition of subjection to a master when there is no need to do so. Instead of the paradigmatic rule of master over slave, antityranny discourse gives pride of place to the spirited exercise of freedom by political agents who meet as equals in the polis. Conceived as collective, political self-mastership by adult free males, none of whom rules over others—or, as Aristotle puts it, who rule and are ruled in turn7—Athenian democratic self-rule was, in essence, rule by isonomia within the polis: mastership without a master.8 Despite its aristocratic ethos and its often inegalitarian political practices, the Roman Republic appropriated this feature of Greek democratic ideology, according to which collective self-rule is a condition of autonomous governance by equals. Political slavery is thus the antithesis of the rational exercise of freedom that characterizes self-rule within the city-state. If psycho-ethical slavery results from a failure of individual self-mastery, political slavery comes about when a leader fails to protect the citizenry’s freedom, instead attempting to become its master. By contrast with psychoethical slavery, slavery as a figure for the perceived subjection, dispossession, or disenfranchisement of a polity’s naturally free members does not



23

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reflect badly on those who are, or are about to become, “enslaved.” Such enslavement is attempted or perpetrated by a tyrant or group of tyrannous leaders represented as a would-be master, and it is tyranny that stands condemned. Although political slavery internal to the state is by no means a monolithic, transhistorical construct, both ancient and early modern orators and writers confidently assume that distinctly political enslavement is self-evidently offensive. To represent its very possibility is to avow a conviction that those who depict themselves (or are depicted) as threatened with enslavement deserve the continued enjoyment of their privileged, free status. Inherently polemical, allusions to political slavery consolidate the identity of those perceived to be threatened over against their tyrannous leader(s).9 The injustice of political enslavement accordingly lies not in slavery per se but rather in the attempt to enslave those who patently ought not be enslaved. What does the belief that such people should not be treated as slaves, even figuratively, have to do with attitudes toward those who are actually enslaved? Aristotle’s Politics is central to any investigation of this question, since its association of barbarism with both the personal, natural slave and Asiatic political slavery has been inordinately influential. The natural affinity for political slavery that Aristotle attributes to Asiatic barbarians tout court is essential to his discussion of household slaves-by-nature (ϕυ´ σει δοuλοι). Like political slavery, Aristotle’s natural slave is associated with barbarism, just as natural freedom from both personal and political slavery is a characteristic of Greeks. When, for example, Aristotle concedes that critics who emphasize the random, conventional character of war slavery are onto something, it is on the commonsensical ground that there is a known category of people—implicitly, Greeks—whose legal enslavement cannot possibly be warranted: “[N]o one would ever say that he is a slave who is unworthy to be a slave,” while in almost the same breath, he explicitly associates the natural slave with barbarians (βa´ ρβa´ ροι) (1255a25–32).10 A bit earlier, Aristotle argues that the personal slave’s legal status ought to suit her or his nature (for Aristotle and other ancient writers, the paradigmatic slave is male), making it clear that only the mentally deficient, implicitly barbarous, natural slave ought to be enslaved: “For he who can be, and therefore is, another’s, and he who participates in reason enough to apprehend, but not to have, is a slave by nature” (ϕυ´ σει δοuλος) (1254b21–23). Ancient Greek, Latin, and early modern writers tended to avoid overtly differentiating personal, legal slavery from political slavery. How, then, were they distinguished? By what means did auditors or readers determine which discursive context is appropriate? It would seem that addressees were ˘

˘

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chapter one

to shift between (or among) discursive registers, performing rapid mental adjustments that would have become habitual given the prevalence of the polarity free/unfree. If for the moment we limit discussion to Aristotle’s Politics, it is clear that certain of Aristotle’s assertions refer unambiguously to legal, chattel slavery. The pronouncements just cited, for example, appear in contexts where Aristotle has already established that legal slavery is being discussed. Where such clarity reigns, it is because the immediate textual environment provides cues as to the relevant social context(s). When, as in book 1 of Politics, chattel slavery is being considered systematically, an author often signals this by using singular agent nouns such as a slave, a master, a husband, or a father (the latter two where wives and children are being distinguished from slaves). Generally speaking, singular forms indicate that either the individual citizen as psycho-ethical agent or the oikos (household) with its individual master are the implied social contexts, the latter being the relevant site for chattel slavery. The individual citizen-master’s alleged superior rationality, ability to rule, and free status are highlighted whenever household slavery is evoked. Yet the household itself is not thereby associated with freedom. As a positive, political ideal, “freedom” was a priceless trait only of citizens in their capacity as active members of the polis or of the polis as a community of such citizens. Participants understood, however, that though they met in the political arena as political equals, they were masters within their own households (despote¯s designates both the household and slave master, though the head of household is not a despote¯s over his children or wife).11 The position of slave master—in ethico-spiritual discourse associated with individual agency—was therefore implicitly an attribute of the public personae of democracy’s citizens. Put another way, active participation in the polis informally presupposed that citizens were slave masters endowed with the capacities needed to rule over the enslaved. Indeed, this commonality may have eased tensions among different economic strata of the free population.12 When such slave masters assembled collectively in the polis, they were categorically disqualified for subjection to leaders who might try to treat them as slaves incapable of ruling themselves. Problematically, however, in discussions of slavery as an institution, the private household is often the primary point of reference. Why should this be? Besides facilitating focus on the individual, the practice of foregrounding the household as slavery’s site obscures from view not only differences between household and agricultural servitude but also the exceptionally life-threatening, life-shortening violence of state-sponsored slavery utilized for mining and other large-scale projects. As a convention of more system-



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atic political reflection, this practice additionally suggests that enslaver and enslaved exist primarily within a relationship, and that they invariably encounter each other within the minicommunity of the household. Deflecting attention away from the long, twisted chain of coercive practices, commercial transactions, and social sanctions that resulted in and perpetuated enslavement, the practice of situating slavery within the household has the effect of naturalizing it, since the relationship between master and slave thereby shares space with both marital and parental relations. At the same time, though, location within the household underlines the enslaved’s legal status as chattel, thereby differentiating the relationship between enslaver and enslaved from these normative familial relationships. Marital and parental relations are unquestionably sociable, while the relationship between enslaver and enslaved is only ambiguously so for Aristotle and later writers, since, as chattel, the enslaved ostensibly belongs to the same category as nonhuman animals and other possessions. Aristotle brings even the acquisition of slaves by means of warfare within the purview of the household master in Politics, where household management requires the “art” of ensuring that the necessities of life are to hand. When first introducing this notion, Aristotle says that the art of acquiring slaves is “a species of hunting or war” (1255b38–40). Whether they are to be domesticated or eaten, the beasts and fowl with which nature provisions humankind are legitimately pursued. Similarly, Aristotle argues, the enslavement of those defeated in battle is a form of hunting for human beings who are slaves-by-nature: “The art of war is a natural art of acquisition, for the art of acquisition includes hunting, an art which we ought to practice against wild beasts, and against men who, though intended by nature to be governed, will not submit; for war of such a kind is naturally just” (1256b22–25).13 Aristotle’s analogy between hunting and just warfare, which, metaphorically, involves enslaving human beings who are naturally incapable of collective self-rule, has an exceptionally important afterlife in early modern debates on political and institutional slavery. These debates often perpetuate Aristotle’s uneasy slippage between an art practiced on be­­half of the individual household and warfare that engages opposing nations. Peter Garnsey points out that compared with Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle’s Politics both marginalizes and dehumanizes the slave. He singles out the above passage for its radical erasure of any boundary between enslaved humans and nonhuman animals.14 I would add that it also subtly links the just war with a compressed version of war slavery doctrine, whereby the victor has the options of either killing the vanquished (in the case of nonhuman animals done for sacrifice or food) or enslaving them

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(the equivalent for animals of domestication). Aristotle brings both options into loose association with the household when he makes warfare a figure for hunting as a natural art of acquisition, thereby finessing the problem that later troubles early modern theorists—that is, the connection between battlefield and household, between the victor’s power over the enemies who are vanquished in a so-called just war and the individual slaveholder’s over the enslaved. Here, because warfare engages collectivities, the human animals that provision the household are referred to in plural forms. Strengthened, perhaps, by a desire to distinguish Athenian household slavery from Sparta’s state-sanctioned slavery, classical philosophy conventionally discusses ethical and legal slavery with reference to the individual household master as against political slavery and freedom, attributes of the community that constitutes the polis. Important similarities or differences between household and political slavery thus often appear in conjunction with a change in discursive number. Singular and plural forms are not all that distinguish them, though. In Aristotle’s discussion of the individual natural slave in Politics, the natural slave’s intellectual deficiency is stressed because it showcases the need for rule by a master. Incapable of self-mastery, a natural slave requires the guidance of a superior who possesses logos; for a natural master, the natural slave is, in turn, a bodily instrument or tool. Regarding political slavery, however, not rationality but comparative spiritlessness is key: collectively, or as a single political entity, barbarians are naturally given to a servile preference for absolute, monarchical rule. As “slaves” of their autocratic ruler, barbarians are believed to share a predisposition to subject themselves politically to a master—that is, to an absolute monarch.

Political Slavery and Barbarism Political slavery’s polemical power derives in no small part from an opposition between those for whom it would represent a demeaning, traumatic loss and those for whom it was supposed to be natural. Non-Greek-speaking barbarians represented the latter in two different contexts, the first being the predominantly non-Greek-speaking (that is, “barbarian”) ethnicity of Athens’s slave population. In a persuasively developed study, Vincent V. Rosivach maintains that Athenians’ negative views about non-Greekspeaking slaves originate in the second half of the sixth century BCE with the development of chattel slavery as an institution involving the enslavement of non-Greek adult males. Stereotypes and biases that took shape



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regarding non-Greek-speaking slaves thereafter worked their way into representations of political servility, the second context to feature barbaroi. In this context, which arose with the Persian Wars, the acquiescence of barbarians in absolute, monarchical rule was deemed tantamount to “slavery.” Institutional structures and ideology sustaining chattel slavery, Rosivach argues, thus predate yet are used synergistically to elaborate Athenian democratic ideology.15 Classicists are generally agreed that the barbarization of political tyranny and slavery began in earnest with the Persian Wars and continued throughout the period of Athenian hegemony in the Aegean. Edith Hall has shown how central features of Athenian democratic and imperial ideology were articulated by means of an opposition between Greeks (or Hellenes) and Asiatics or barbarians, with values considered antithetical to democracy assigned barbarians. The polarity Greek/barbarian was mapped onto that between freedom and slavery, between equality and hierarchy, the rule of law and lawlessness, rationality and infantilism, simplicity and ostentation, and so on. Ethnically diverse and geographically disparate populations were brought under the rubric of barbaroi considered radically, even essentially, inferior to Greeks, whose distinct societies were likewise made to appear unified.16 Associated both with enslavement as chattel and with political servility, “barbarism” became a complex, cross-institutional, cross-discursive phenomenon. Aristotle’s contribution to this process in Politics is exceptionally impor­tant but also difficult to unpack. Though Aristotle associates both chattel and political slavery with Asiatic barbarians in Politics’ first book, he begins with political slavery. In the second section of book 1, Aristotle opposes Greek and barbarous conceptions of rule by suggesting that barbarians are less rational, possibly less evolved culturally, than Greeks because they lack the ordered distinctions of a genuine political society, a point he elaborates in a notoriously difficult passage: “But among barbarians no distinction is made between women and slaves, because there is no natural ruler among them: they are a community of slaves, male and female” (1252b5–7). Though ostensibly referring to political slavery, Aristotle here blends political slavery into personal, chattel slavery, which is associated with the “natural ruler.” The “natural ruler” has just been defined as master of a slave, a relationship likened to that between male and female and therefore implicitly located in the household, as it continues to be throughout book 1. But in this passage the natural ruler is also implicitly a free citizen conceived along contemporaneous Athenian lines. Overdetermining

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slavery’s ties with barbarism, the erasure in this passage of differences between political and chattel slavery is ideologically motivated, and thus a clear example of the conflation of distinct orders I discussed earlier. Exposed for critique is barbarism’s presumed lack of differentiation between domestic and political rule, which Aristotle conflates with the absence in Asiatic societies of a principle of hierarchical differentiation within the household, absence that results in the emasculation of Asiatic men. Taking the polis as normative, Aristotle imagines that Athenians who are masters in their own households and free citizens in the polis would in a barbarian society become one with the paradigmatically male political “slaves” who are subject to an all-powerful übermaster. As a result, they would be—as barbarian men purportedly are—on the same level as women, since democratic ideology conceptualizes both women and slaves with reference to their place within the household. In this condition of boundarylessness, Aristotle implies, the political ruler becomes a megadespot of unmarked political “slaves,” a characterization that neatly prepares the way for his later evaluation of Greeks, Asians, and Europeans on the basis of spiritedness and rationality. The latter are qualities needed not only for internal, political self-rule but also for the external rule of other city-states or communities. In the influential passage in book 7 where this ranking occurs, Aristotle correlates an ability or inability to institute internal, egalitarian political rule with a capacity or incapacity for governing other geopolitical units. Using a tripartite division of the world, Aristotle interrelates internal and external freedom by comparing Europeans, Asians, and Greeks. Europeans, he says, are full of spirit, but wanting in intelligence and skill; and therefore they retain comparative freedom, but have no political organization, and are incapable of ruling over others. Whereas the natives of Asia are intelligent and inventive, but they are wanting in spirit, and therefore they are always in a state of subjection and slavery. But the Hellenic race, which is situated between them, is likewise intermediate in character, being high-spirited and also intelligent. Hence it continues free, and is the best-governed of any nation, and, if it could be formed into one state, would be able to rule the world. (1327b24–33)

Political slavery’s plasticity here does stellar service. On the basis of the polarity between ruler and ruled endemic to his culture, Aristotle assigns



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Hellenic “freedom” three domains, at least potentially. Hellenes are “free” in their superior, egalitarian internal self-governance, in their freedom from external rule, and in their capacity to rule over those not so blessed. Asiatic “slavery,” conversely, potentially signifies both internal and external subjection. In addition to compounding figurative freedom and slavery in this way, Aristotle gives both of them a psychological, dispositional dimension. The barbarians who collectively so lack spiritedness that they meekly accept absolute monarchical rule (and perhaps rule by victors) can thereby be described as naturally suited to subjection. Although Aristotle’s systematization of various kinds of freedom and slavery was unique, his assumptions as well as the discursive density of his formulations were shared by other writers. Complexity of the kind found in this passage often arises when “slavery” is barbarized—that is, projected onto non-Greek Asiatics—in the context of antagonistic relations between Greeks and Persians. Used polemically of Persian dominance, the “slavery” with which Athens or other city-states are threatened is strongly linked to the “slavery” presumed to characterize barbarians subject to the Great King.17 Similarly, the excellence of internal, democratic rule is conjoined with Athenian military superiority. In an often-cited passage, Herodotus posits a causal relation between Athens’s earlier rule by tyrants—associated with the weakened condition of being kept down, likened to working fearfully under a despote¯s—and its formerly unremarkable military status. Now that Athens enjoys democratic equality, Herodotus asserts, it surpasses all its neighbors (5.78).18 In depicting the weakened condition that subjection to despotism induces as a form of slavery, Herodotus gets Athens’s predemocratic condition to fit the patterned opposition between Persian despotism and democratic isonomia found elsewhere in the Histories.19 During and after the Persian Wars, Athenian democratic ideology increasingly registered a concern with interstate “freedom” and “slavery,” though this concern was not confined to Athens. Indeed, as a positive value, freedom within the polis came to be seen as interdependent with freedom of the polis from external rule and, eventually, with its rule over other poleis.20 As this indicates, internal and external political slavery can be invoked in the same passage or subtly interconnected in a number of other ways. Aes­ chylus’s Persians addresses natural (un)fitness for servitude when Queen Atossa recounts a foreboding dream in which her son seeks to restrain (metaphorically to tame) two women who are at enmity with each other, one Greek, in Doric clothing, the other, in luxuriant Persian robes, who is from the “land of the barbarians”:

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[H]e harnessed them both beneath his chariot and put a yoke-strap beneath their necks. One of them towered proudly in this gear, taking the reins submissively in her mouth, but the other struggled, tore the harness from the chariot with her hands, dragged it violently along with the bridle, and smashed the yoke in the middle. My son fell out. His father Dareios stood close by, pitying him.21

This passage alludes to Xerxes’s attempt forcibly to unite two opposing geopolitical units, the allegorical representatives of which are treated like horses being broken in. Xerxes’s act of yoking their necks together inescapably suggests enslavement, as does the reduction of status represented by their animalization. Unlike the barbarian, who willingly takes both the bit and her master’s direction, the Greek balks with such spirit that she violently dismantles the entire apparatus of subjugation. Her resistance proleptically brings about Xerxes’s fall—his fall, here, being a metonymy for Persia’s defeat by the Greeks, whom Xerxes had vainly hoped to reduce to collective, interstate “slavery” in an attempt to expand his empire. With reference to Greece, the military, interstate register of figurative slavery-byconquest is foregrounded in this passage. Yet at the same time, the natural slavishness of barbarians is allegorically manifested on the level of internal, political rule; on this level they voluntarily enact their servitude. Throughout Aeschylus’s drama, Xerxes’s military failure is bound up with the collective servility (and, on the part of Xerxes, rash godlikeness) encouraged by its mode of political rule or, conversely, with the spiritedness and love of freedom enjoyed by its Greek antagonists. When conquered, Xerxes is brought down from the heights of hubristic fantasies of mastering—metaphorically enslaving—both natural and human worlds, a shameful “fall” that mirrors the servile, ritual prostration (proskynesis) that Persian rulers exact from their subjects.22 In classical Greek literature, obeisance involving prostration before a ruler was a rite practiced by barbarians, who failed to observe proper boundaries between divine and human rule. In book 7, Herodotus has Hydarnes, a Persian general, try to persuade the Spartans Sperchias and Bulis to ingratiate themselves with Xerxes, Persia’s Great King, by prostrating themselves, pointing to his own office as the type of reward they could receive for cooperative behavior. They respond, Herodotus writes: “Hydarnes, your advice with relation to us comes from something less than an equality of position. You counsel us as one who has tried one condition but knows nothing of the other. You know what it is to be a slave, but you have no experience of freedom, to know whether it is sweet or not. If you had had such experience,



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you would bid us fight for it, not with spears only, but with axes as well” (7.135.1–3). With this lead-in, the Spartans’ refusal to prostrate themselves signifies their lived experience of rational, egalitarian political relations, cornerstone of pan-Hellenic self-proclaimed superiority over barbarians (7.136.1). In their principled rejection of Persian servility, the metaphoricity of subjects’ enslavement to their monarchical ruler is elided. Like the spirited Greek of Atossa’s dream who throws off both bit and harness, the two Spartans assertively resist induction into monarchical “slavery.” The implication, of course, is that only those lacking such spiritedness would ever voluntarily comply with the fundamentally servile practice of ritual prostration before a monarch.

Tyranny, Slavery, and the DespotE¯s Tyranny is a political concept the extraordinarily rich history of which has received significant scholarly attention. Aristotle is the first of many to offer taxonomies of tyranny, whose varied historical and textual appearances still intrigue political commentators, theorists, and artists.23 Yet tyranny’s connections with “despotism,” often used as a synonym for tyranny, tend not to be closely questioned, while its interrelations with slavery are frequently either underexamined or ignored. In this section, I initiate discussion of these terms, crucial to this study, by briefly outlining Raaflaub’s thesis regarding the emergence of political freedom as a positive construct in archaic and classical Greece. My aim continues to be the clarification of discrete registers of meaning among tyranny, political slavery—both internal and external—and chattel slavery. In this section and the next, I develop a tentative theoretical framework for interpreting the long-standing connection between the collective character of political slavery and violence. Raaflaub argues that when negatively politicized, the terms turannos and despote¯s were central to the conflictual, triadic relations among tyranny, freedom, and slavery by means of which a positive conception of “freedom” emerged in archaic Greece. The despote¯s and turannos have a complicated future before them, not least because they both initially had neutral or even positive connotations when used of a single political ruler, and could be used interchangeably with basileus (king).24 Unlike turannos or basileus, however, which applied to individual political rulers, the despote¯s was a political ruler or king only metaphorically, as the term despote¯s designated the male head of household and master of slaves. The negative politicization of both turannos and despote¯s occurred in a lengthy historical process in which slavery became ideologically inflected and antithetically bonded

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with tyranny. Painstakingly reconstructing this multiply contingent, complex process, Raaflaub argues that antithetical relations between slavery and tyranny historically preceded the emergence of an opposition between slavery and freedom. Likewise, he argues, the despote¯s would originally have been associated not so much with the opposition free/unfree, but rather with the opposition master/servant or slave.25 But by the time Aristotle writes, both turannos and despote¯s are frequently used pejoratively of oppressive, autocratic rule, though tyranny can also apply more restrictively to rule illegitimately acquired by force.26 (This meaning survives when early modern treatments of tyranny distinguish tyranny by acquisition from tyranny by practice.) Yet even when negative connotations had come to prevail in democratic Athens of the latter fifth century BCE, the tyrant and the despote¯s could still, confusingly, be referred to neutrally or even positively. This tended to happen either in antidemocratic literature or in ethicospiritual contexts, as when, for example, in Politics Aristotle refers to the soul as the despote¯s of body (1254b5). As a synonym for the turannos, the term despote¯s draws attention to the “slavery” (doulosune¯) of the tyrant’s subjects. Raaflaub explains the process of figuration whereby the term despote¯s became negatively, polemically, charged when he elucidates what the figuration brings out: “the unrestricted, authoritarian, and unaccountable power the master exercised in both spheres.”27 Because this is the basis of what becomes conceptualized as arbitrary rule, it is important to grasp the condensed, embedded logic of the “enslavement” threatened by the despote¯s as political ruler, which seems to go like this: although his rule within the household is unobjectionable, the despote¯s wrongly wields unregulated power when governing within the polis. In the latter case, he threatens the freedom of politai (male citizens) and the rule of law they have instituted for their own self-government. Household slaves are, of course, to be treated as slaves, but it is fundamentally perverse to transfer the individual, arbitrary rule of the household master to rule of freeborn citizens. This is the feature of tyranny that Aristotle singles out in Politics when to the self-interest he has made a characteristic of despotic rule in book 3, he adds arbitrariness in book 4. Aristotle associates tyranny’s arbitrariness with an exercise of individual power that is unaccountable, undifferentiated with regard to its subjects, and self-interested (1295a19–22). We will return to this passage and its discursive positioning in a later section. At present, I want to flag the centrality of this identification of tyranny with individual, arbitrary rule not only to ancient Greek and Roman but also to



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early modern, neoclassical views of freedom. Modeled on that of the household despote¯s, the tyrant’s power is arbitrary because it is discretionary, unregulated, and directed to its own individual good rather than to that of the freeborn citizens in the polis whose collective welfare a leader is supposed to advance. In later traditions influenced by antityrannicism, such arbitrariness is linked with a flouting of received laws and institutions, or, more simply, lawlessness. Yet the despote¯s’ sinister doppelgänger is not the only part the tyrant plays when reducing citizens to political slavery. He may also play the part of would-be conqueror even when it is his own people over whom he tyrannizes. Tyranny’s interrelations with political slavery are semantically layered, but tend, I believe, to draw on tensions that are captured by means of imagery or scenarios associated with these two figures: the despot and the conqueror. Even when the two are fused, or when internal political slavery is not clearly distinguished from external slavery, it can be helpful to separate analytically the model of the tyrannous would-be household despote¯s from the tyrannous would-be foreign conqueror. In the next section, we will take up tyranny’s kinship with the threat posed by external, military enemies, the context in which the would-be conqueror appears. In the remainder of this section, we will examine the despot, who takes center stage when threatening the internal integrity of the polis. By failing to distinguish the polis from his own, private household, the despote¯s insultingly subverts the polis as a community of politai. The politicization of the term despote¯s produces an unusual analogy, one that is polemical yet whose disjunctive logic opens onto the hypothetical, the fictive. As (dis)analogy, it suggests that if the ruler can be likened to the household despote¯s, this likeness reveals that something has gone seriously awry, since politai are self-evidently not household slaves. Negatively politicized in this way, the term despote¯s underscores democratic ideology’s valuation of the polis as the special preserve of freedom at the same time that it disjoins household mastership from rule over citizens. By a process of negative definition, the bad ruler’s identification as despote¯s signifies that he has fundamentally misconstrued both his position and the nature of the polis, a public arena in which free, adult men govern themselves by means of laws and equal, open discussion. If a ruler exercises despotic power in the polis, he is, then, wrongly treating citizens as if they were slaves, treating the polis as if it were a household. Were he to be innocent of all other charges, the despote¯s would still be guilty of committing the appalling error of conflating the private household with the public community of politai.

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Pursuing this further, it could be said that the despote¯s threatens the polis by failing to preserve its separation from the household. Within his own household, the Athenian citizen ruled in and received status from every one of the relations Aristotle specifies: as husband, father, slaveholder, and head of the oikos, he occupied a position of hierarchical privilege. When the leader of the polis, possessing considerable stature and power, or having become entranced by his own self-importance, mistakenly treats the public realm as his own, private household, he tacitly reduces male citizens to the position of those over whom they ordinarily rule. In attempting or figuratively effecting such degradation of the male citizenry, the tyrant threatens the very domestic hierarchies that constitute the basis of citizenship. At the same time, or rather by the same logic, the tyrant undermines the equality of relations within the polis, equality that is often represented by the rule of law as a public, collectively produced practice of justice or, in Politics, by the capacity citizens have for occupying alternately the offices of ruler and ruled. According to the sedimented, figurative logic implicit in the language of political slavery, the tyrant’s assaults on the integrity of political association and rule threaten to reduce its citizens to slaves. The notion that a boundary between household and polis—a boundary erased by despotism—is a necessary condition of the citizenry’s freedom is not uniquely Aristotle’s. Herodotus’s influential depictions of Persian despotism also presuppose Greek ideals of rationality and restraint together with a normative distinction between household and state from which tyranny deviates. In Herodotus’s famous Constitutional Debate, Otanes critiques monarchy as an institution that invariably degenerates into tyranny because it fosters the individual leader’s hybris and envy: “Take the best man on earth and put him into a monarchy and you put him outside of the thoughts that have been wont to guide him” (3.78–80). As has often been observed, with this groundbreaking insight, momentous in its implications, tyranny is understood systemically, as the inescapable by-product of political power that has been concentrated in the hands of a single ruler.28 While placing characterological defects in dynamic interaction with monarchy’s institutional supports, Otanes’s critique suggests that the very singleness of the monarch’s position of rule over many leads to grandiosity of selfconception and abuse of power. In practice, its singleness is too reminiscent of the sole rule enjoyed by the household despote¯s.29 The figure of the tyrannous despote¯s may be peculiarly well adapted to negative representations of single-person political rule informed by democratic ideology. What the tyrant does not appear to get is the specificity of political rule. The embedded logic sketched above appears most dramati-



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cally in Herodotus’s representations of Persian despots, whose outrageous, outsize desires suggest that a temptation to treat the polis as if it were a grand, potentially limitless, household—where the master’s behavior is not regulated by law—may be intrinsic to single-person political rule. Yet perverse substitution of private, arbitrary rule for the rule of law also appears as a general characteristic of single-person rule in the more somber context of Suppliant Women. Theseus generalizes when he declaims, “There is nothing more pernicious for a city than a sole ruler, above all because in such a situation there are no public laws, and one man has usurped the law and taken rulership for himself” (429–32). As Herodotus portrays the Persian despot, his eros knows no bounds, obliterating any and all differences between private and public. His first transgressive act, followed by neither remorse nor reform, generally inaugurates a destructive trajectory in the course of which he continues to extend the reach of his unaccountable power. Herodotus stages a mesmerizing yet repellent travesty of political rule in vignettes that show the tyrant substituting his own indomitable will for law. If the despot’s personal will supplants public law, his impulsive actions also flagrantly usurp the place of human language. Cambyses, for example, having murdered his brother—the first of his evil deeds, it is said—falls in love with one of his own sisters and decides he would like to marry her, though this is not permitted by Persian custom. The royal judges who take this case on at Cambyses’s insistence find no law to sanction his desire, but are able to point out (thereby saving their own lives) that, as absolute ruler, the Great King is legally permitted to do as he pleases. It is reported that Cambyses thereupon marries his sister, and, soon afterward, another, younger sister whom he murders when he takes her with him into Egypt (3.29–33). This narrative sequence illustrates tyrannical power’s drive to subordinate custom and law to its own, arbitrary ends as well as its ability to treat kinspeople as if they were not kin. Incest, often associated with barbarism, is, though, merely one expression of the Persian tyrant’s refusal to acknowledge boundaries or grasp distinctions, a refusal more often illustrated when he treats his subjects as members of a vast, extended family over whom he has sole authority. While Cambyses actually goes mad, Herodotus’s other despots also behave in a way that suggests regression to an infantilized omnipotence that precludes the possibility of rational dialogue or collective process. Cyrus the Great King, for example, practices a burlesque form of physical mutilation, often associated with barbarism, when he orders the cutting of the river Gyndes.30 Affronted when the river carries away one of his sacred horses, Cyrus decides to punish it by having his army cut 180 channels into

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each of its sides, forcing the artificial outlets to fragment the river’s flow (1.189–90). Even more delusional is Cyrus’s descendant Xerxes’s assault on the Hellespont, over which he has his engineers laboriously construct a bridge that will “yoke” Europe and Asia (linked with the “yoke of slavery” to which Persia wants to subject Greece in Aeschylus’s Persians). When a storm smashes the bridge to bits, Xerxes orders his men to punish the Hellespont with three hundred lashes and with branding, and to lower fetters into the sea. While carrying out the flogging, his men are to denounce the Hellespont for injuring its “master,” who, it should know, will cross with or without its permission, words that are explicitly said to be barbarous (βa´ ρβa´ ρa) (7.33–35). Often cited to illustrate hybris, Xerxes’s words arrogantly place him above the level of humankind, denying, in effect, that his power has any limits. Yet while challenging the gods, Xerxes’s hybris also vividly dramatizes the despotic ruler’s perverse relation to the household despot. Whips, fetters, and irons are, of course, instruments legitimately employed by the slave master in disciplining his slaves. Used by a political ruler, they signify an abuse of power, which for Herodotus’s Xerxes extends to making the Hellespont his “slave.” As these episodes indicate, at its most extreme, the despot’s grandiose desire for power leads him to alter or reduce the status of human and nonhuman obstacles to the imposition of his will. The violence this entails is one important feature of the enmity between the tyrant and his subjects to be discussed in the next section. Sometimes taking special pleasure in destroying the bond between parent and child, Cambyses and Xerxes, the most uninhibited Persian despots in Herodotus’s Histories, both engage in violence directed against sons. Cambyses, for example, responds to the Persian Prexaspes’s criticism of his excessive drinking by setting up a test of his own wits and skill: if he shoots Prexaspes’s son through the middle of the heart, he will have cleared his name; if he fails to do so, then Prexaspes’s words will have been vindicated. Having pronounced these terms, Cambyses immediately shoots the boy, cuts his heart open to make sure the arrow has actually pierced it, and then laughingly boasts of victory to Prexaspes (3.34, 3.35). Several conventional motifs relating to despotism appear in this episode: the despot’s rejection of good counsel, his immoderate desires, the pleasure he takes in devising and playing humiliating games, and the indulgence of sadistic energies. Prexaspes’s inability to protect his son from gratuitous, fatal violence illustrates how ever-present danger becomes when the ruler’s will is a law unto itself, as happens in Histories’ narratives of un-



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checked, autocratic rule, especially when fused with imperial ambitions.31 In a not dissimilar incident, when advancing on Greece, Xerxes meets with a request from his generous and devoted donor, the Lydian Pythius, whom Xerxes has formally pronounced his friend. Worried about putting all five of his sons at risk in this campaign, Pythius courteously asks that his eldest son be released from service to take care of him in his old age. Flying into a temper, Xerxes harangues Pythius as his “slave,” claims ownership of all the members of Pythius’s household, including his wife, and passes a sentence of death upon Pythius’s eldest son, whom he proceeds to have killed and cut in half, one half of his body being put on either side of the road through which the army marches (7.38, 7.39).

The Tyrant as Conqueror and Antityranny These grisly episodes of helpless parental degradation in the face of arbitrary violence directed against children emphasize a community’s vulnerability in the absence of democratically shared participation in the rule of law. Typically, the tyrant’s irrational, violent behavior is the result of increasingly frenetic attempts to enlarge or defend his power. It is sparked by dynamics internal to his stereotypical psychopathy, which spirals into paranoia when he perceives those he rules as personal enemies. But absent such psychologization, the tyrant’s hostility takes on the more impersonally hostile aspect of the foreign invader or would-be conqueror. The fact that, historically, some tyrants used force in coming to power from outside the city-state they then govern is important to the pairing of tyranny and slavery. Tyranny frequently arose from within, though, in which case force or its threat contributed to victory over competing aristocratic factions. Both paths to the acquisition of political power are relevant to depictions of the tyrant as would-be conqueror. The tyrant’s hostility toward his people cannot be explained solely with reference to the historical record, however, as it is integral to what Raaflaub calls “antityranny ideology,” which was central to the consolidation of Athens’s democratic ethos but also relevant to other forms of communally shared governance where freedom was conceived as “nonslavery.”32 In formation before the Persian Wars, which intensified interrelations between internal and external freedom, antityranny ideology crystallizes the second of the two forms of conflict that feature the polis under threat. If in the first form the despote¯s treats the polis as if it were his household, its citizens as if they were his slaves, in the second the tyrant poses the kind of threat

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to his people’s security that an external conqueror would: he behaves as if he, their ruler, were their enemy. The geopolitical boundaries transgressed by military invasion are very different from those violated when the tyrant conflates household and polis, ignoring the essential difference between political rule and the master’s rule of household slaves. Yet interstate violence, too, may threaten citizens with degradation to the status of political slaves, as we saw with Aeschylus’s Persians. To convey the enormity of tyranny’s threat to the polis, the tyrant’s resemblance to an external enemy is thus often stressed, even if he arises from within. Later antityranny traditions, too, represent the tyrannous ruler as a would-be invader who threatens to undermine the polis or even to destroy his people. To appreciate the underlying logic, we need to keep in mind two interstate practices to which the violence of political “slavery” may rhetorically refer. The first is the acquisition of slaves from among those defeated militarily, who were customarily considered subject to the victor. In ancient Greece, while non-Greek male soldiers defeated in battle might become captives sold into slavery, more often the conquered population’s women and children—valuable because more readily assimilated—were abducted for enslavement. The special vulnerability of women and the young became a feature of Athenian antityranny ideology that was often retained by Roman and early modern adaptations. Alternatives to death or enslavement received little attention in ancient Greek and Roman literature, as did alternate means of acquiring slaves, such as slave trading and slave reproduction. Yet mentioning this should not minimize warfare’s efficacy as a mechanism for enlarging slave populations as well as for intimidation. Thucydides reports grimly that in the Peloponnesian War, Athens contravened the customary prohibition against enslaving ethnic Greeks by ruthlessly subjugating Melos, a city-state that had been independent for seven hundred years, massacring its grown men, enslaving its women and children, and sending colonists in to settle it.33 The second practice to which political “slavery” may refer is the subjugation of one state by another. When tyranny is associated with foreign conquest, the acquisition of captive humans treated as chattel is often conflated with interstate “slavery.” Interstate subjection resulting from military aggression could entail damaging consequences such as the coercive extraction of tribute or forced assimilation of subject populations, along with numerous other forms of loss or subservience.34 Yet the “slavery” suffered by a conquered state—which we are in any case here considering as a figure for internal, political “slavery”—differs enormously from the lasting, traumatic dislocation from homeland, kinship networks, and linguistic and



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cultural communities that was experienced by those who were forced into bondage as chattel. Representations of tyranny-as-conquest may vividly evoke such trauma, but it is crucial that rhetorical effects not be mistaken for the realities of war slavery. Distinguishing among rhetorical charges of threatened interstate “slavery” is equally important. By their subjects and critics, Athenian, Spartan, and Roman imperialism could credibly be represented as tyrannous. As Ryan Balot points out, “[I]mperial states acted like tyrants in that they exploited their subjects for their own good, without their consent.”35 Athens itself was often polemically cast as tyrannous and its subjects as slaves when debates arose over the interstate domination it practiced within Greece during its imperial expansion after the Persian Wars.36 By its own propagandists, Athens justified its imperialism by pointing to the freedom from Persian slavery it had enabled its allies to enjoy and the egalitarian intrastate relations it had imposed.37 Yet within imperial Athens and, later, Rome, the threat of interstate military defeat in aggressive warfare could still be construed rhetorically as “slavery,” while the dangers posed internally by a potential tyrant-as-would-be-conqueror could be called upon to reinvigorate a militarized defensiveness that was part and parcel of imperial aggression and ideology. When the energies of the would-be conqueror are mobilized, his energies are acted out in ways that evoke military invasion. (Vestiges of tyranny’s association with invasion appear when in early modern and Enlightenment literature, “rights” are said to be “invaded.”) We can see this in Herodotus’s Constitutional Debate, where, critiquing one-person rule, Otanes says that when the absolute sovereign becomes tyrannous, “he turns upside down all ancestral observances, forces women, and kills men without trial” (3.80). All three charges showcase the tyrant’s contempt for social institutions and bonds established within the polity, “ancestral observances” covering a wide range of religious and social customs to which an outsider may be indifferent or hostile (possibly recalling the Persians’ desecration of Athenian temples). They are also reminiscent of the wanton destructiveness to which a society was vulnerable if assaulted militarily. The tyrant’s sexual assault of the women subject to his power most clearly calls up this situation, but the killing of citizens without trial suggests that the tyrant’s arrogant disregard of law might transform the polis into something of a battlefield. The examples Euripides’s Theseus gives of the sole ruler’s arbitrary behavior are similarly evocative. When the people rule, Theseus says, they treasure the younger members of society.

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A king, however, regards the existence of vigorous young men as a threat; he puts to death the bravest of them and those he regards as intelligent, since he is in constant fear for his tyranny. How could a city ever be strong, when its youth is mown down and harvested like the new growth of a meadow in spring? What point is there for a man to gain wealth and a comfortable life for his sons when all his efforts serve only to improve a tyrant’s life? Why should he raise his daughters at home in the proper maidenly virtues, when the ruler wants the kinds of pleasure tyrants delight in and the parents are only paving the way for their daughters’ tears? (445–56)

Editors of Suppliant Women note of the opening statement that the murder of young men who pose a threat may allude to Herodotus’s narrative where the tyrant Thrasybulus cuts down taller ears of corn as nonverbal advice (transmitted through a messenger to Periander) about the need to eliminate potential rivals (5.92).38 This works with the initial stress on powermongering insecurity. Yet in the lines following, where the young men are mown down and harvested, the loss of their lives suggests needless sacrifice in battle, a central issue in the drama. In Persians, Darius, represented as protector of his male subjects’ lives, is contrasted with his reckless son, the despotic Xerxes, unaccountable to his people yet responsible for the countless lives lost in battle (652–53). In Euripides’s less personalized representation, the tyrant is as indifferent to the safety and well-being of his subjects as are military opponents, who heedlessly take the lives of sons, plunder the inhabitants’ acquisitions, destroy their comfort, and ravish their daughters. The tyrant as external enemy may be especially important to the antityranny ideology that develops alongside the values and institutions unique to mid-fifth-century BCE Athenian democracy. Antityranny ideology posits an antagonistic relationship between the tyrant and the entire citizenry or community. “To put it simply,” Raaflaub says, “tyranny was good to think with. By the latter part of the fifth century,” he continues, “the Athenians came to define their civic identities and virtues, their democracy, equality, and liberty in opposition to tyranny, past and potential, real and fictitious.”39 Tyranny concentrated everything that was considered hostile to democracy in a single, abhorrent figure against whom the community’s energies could be organized. The ideology of antityrannicism thus acted as a cohesive force for the Athenian community, which, in Raaflaub’s words, “virtually from the fall of tyranny in the late sixth century, embarked on a new and uncharted course, a course that led it to unprecedented heights



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of power exerted in unprecedented ways by the entire citizen body both within their polis and over many other poleis but that also caused deep anxieties, insecurities, and strong tensions.”40 Formerly a matter of interest primarily to members of the ruling elite from whom the tyrant would attempt to wrest power, antityranny ideology made tyranny of urgent concern to the entire democratic polis. Significantly, it also associated militarized enmity with monarchy as an abstract construct schematically opposed to democracy (or, less often, with oligarchy as democracy’s perennial rival). The ultimate expression of antityrannicism is, of course, tyrannicide. Conceptualized as justifiable killing rather than murder, tyrannicide itself further militarizes the enmity between tyrant and polity in its sanctioning of the destruction of human life, warfare’s official métier. So important to the democratic polis were its antagonistic relations with tyranny that far from being a criminal act, the slaying of tyrants was publicly acclaimed and celebrated. Although the historical basis of their assassination of Hipparchus was questioned early on, Harmodius and Aristogeiton are the first tyrannicides to be eulogized in popular songs and to receive cult honors; they are also the first citizens to be memorialized in statues erected in the agora. The act of tyrannicide was associated with deliverance from tyranny’s oppressive threat to democratic values, which the tyrannicides heroically preserved. Legislation offering tyrannicides immunity from prosecution and extending honors to their descendants testifies to the high public esteem in which they were held.41 Antityrannicism’s centrality to Athenian democracy was sustained by numerous social and religious practices, such as public testimonies and proclamations, written curses against tyranny, and songs heroizing tyrannicides.42 Insofar as tyranny posed a threat not only to the values but to the very security of the democratic polis, tyrannicide was an ideological form of imaginary, reciprocal violence, or, in Josiah Ober’s words, of “therapeutic civil conflict” (stasis) by means of which distressing social divisions and conflicts were reenvisioned as having been resolved by a single, heroic act of militarized confrontation.43 Literary and philosophical representations that suggested a likeness between tyranny and an external enemy therefore made an important contribution to antityranny ideology. There is, however, one aspect of the tyrant’s enmity that contributed to antityrannicism without invoking figurative slavery: the tyrant’s monstrousness, which reveals itself when he greedily takes his people’s lives. In this manifestation of tyrannous hostility, which needs more attention than it is given here, the tyrant’s brutality exceeds what even the most psychopathic human could come up

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with and suggests instead bestiality or subhumanity. Polarized opposition of well-ordered government devoted to the good of the community and the single-person ruler who monstrously “devours his people” goes back to Alcaeus—even to Homer’s Iliad, where Achilles accuses Agamemnon of precisely this—and is extraordinarily long-lived.44 The figure of the tyrant as monster appears within the polis when Plato develops his antidemocratic etiology of tyranny in the Republic. It is argued that the demos (used here to refer to the poor of the polis), who habitually nurture a sense of grievance against the wealthy, are easily led to champion someone who poses as their protector. This champion, Plato says, will be transformed into a tyrant when he falsely accuses an elite citizen of a crime, assassinates him, and further seduces the demos by promising to abolish debts and redistribute land. Plato compares these acts to an archaic ritual involving human sacrifice. Figuratively, his argument goes, they involve a transgressive tasting of human flesh or blood that has been mixed in with animal, the ingestion of which transforms the political protector into a tyrant in the way that the human consumer of human flesh and blood morphs into a wolf.45 In this comparison, the tyrant’s monstrousness results from his transgressive demagoguery, responsible for his victimization of the elite. For democratic Athens, on the other hand, the monstrous tyrant was assimilated to the external enemy when the legendary Theseus was fashioned after Harmodius and Aristogeiton. Visible in vase paintings and sculpture, the modeling of Theseus’s stance and gestures on that of the tyrannicides is significant in that it associates the single, violent act of tyrannicide with a mythos of deliverance. Theseus had already become something of an Attic Heracles in performing numerous heroic exploits, including, like Heracles, vanquishing the Amazons, whose defeat was joined to the establishment of Athenian democracy, now presided over by Theseus.46 Of his numerous monster-destroying feats, most memorable was Theseus’s killing of the Cretan Minotaur, devourer of Athens’s annual tribute to Crete of seven youths and seven maidens. In dispatching the Minotaur, Theseus delivered from death not only the fourteen youths about to be sacrificed but also any future victims and therefore Athens itself. By means of Theseus’s association with Harmodius and Aristogeiton, Athens’s deliverance from Crete was made suggestively to resemble liberation from tyranny. Tyranny, monstrosity, and human sacrifice—brought together under very different auspices in Plato’s Republic—were associated in this liberatory narrative in ways that greatly influenced later antityranny discourses.



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Tyranny, Despotical Rule, and Natural Slavery in Aristotle’s Politics Aristotle’s discussion of slavery in Politics was of overwhelming importance to early modern debates on internal, political rule and on the legitimacy of colonial conquest. Even today it provokes controversy, which is another reason for giving it close attention. Though Politics systematizes many of the issues just discussed, in it chattel and political slavery are interrelated in ways that are extremely complex. Both are not only naturalized but also associated with barbarism. It might actually be helpful to refer not to a single doctrine of natural slavery but rather to Aristotle’s dual doctrines of natural slavery, since both chattel and political slavery are represented as endemic to non-Greek, Asiatic populations. Distinguishing the two forms of slavery clarifies the development of Aristotle’s argument. It also enables us to grasp the interplay between discursive registers, together with the invidious slippage between the household and polis as discursive contexts. In addition, it facilitates greater precision in specifying what kind of slavery later authors take Aristotle to be naturalizing. As mentioned earlier, Garnsey notes that in Politics Aristotle goes out of his way to dehumanize the household slave. Garnsey persuasively relates this dehumanization to Aristotle’s rejection of slave mastership as a familial correlate of properly political rule, a correlation Aristotle had accepted in Nicomachean Ethics.47 I would like to develop Garnsey’s argument by suggesting that both aspects of Politics—dehumanization of the enslaved and rejection of slave mastership as a fit analogue of political rule—are connected with its theorization of inappropriately arbitrary political power as despotical. This theorization appears in Politics, where Aristotle counterposes the naturalness of chattel slavery and the naturalness of barbarians’ collective, political enslavement under monarchy to the unnaturalness of despotical rule as a mode of political rule for free citizens. To put this differently, in Politics Aristotle delineates the features of free Greek citizens who, natural masters in their own households, are collectively capable of governing themselves as equals and naturally antipathetic to political slavery—that is, to despotical rule. Aristotle opens Politics by confuting Plato’s view that hierarchical relations within the household naturally correspond to those within the state, differences lying only in the size of the population being ruled.48 Not all kinds of rule are comparable, Aristotle declares. As his argument unfolds, though, it becomes clear that Aristotle does not reject the principle of

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correspondence between household and state but only the inclusion of the enslaver/enslaved relation in the set of appropriate correspondences of which he approves. Of the three forms of relational rule within the household mentioned by Aristotle—master over slave, father over children, and husband over wife—the latter two do have analogues in the state: the father’s rule is like royal rule, while the husband’s is like that within the more or less egalitarian politeia (often translated “constitutional” rule, which combines aristocratic with some features of democratic rule). For a single, crucial reason, slave mastership categorically cannot be a model for rule in the polis: it presupposes a subject who is naturally a slave, whereas genuine political association is undertaken by free men who are equals. Aristotle repeats the importance of differentiating kinds of rule when concluding book 1’s discussion of chattel slavery, at which point he famously claims, “For there is one rule exercised over subjects who are by nature free, another over subjects who are by nature slaves” (1255b18–20; see also book 7, 1325a27–30). Here, it is the juridical status of those who are ruled that determines the categorical unlikeness of despotic and political rule. Like other references to slavery, this may, though, be doing double duty. On the one hand, and in keeping with the discussion of household slavery Aristotle is completing, it distinguishes slave mastership in the household from rule in the polis, where those qualified to participate in public life are naturally free. Political rule cannot be analogous to slave mastership because Aristotle has already demonstrated that chattel slavery requires a master whose rationality naturally fits him for mastership (someone who is “free”) and a natural slave who is intellectually deficient (identified with the barbarian). At the same time, by means of its parallel collectivities (“subjects,” “slaves”), Aristotle’s assertion is general enough to incorporate the figurative slaves of Asiatic monarchy into his doctrine of the barbarized natural slave. Indirectly, Aristotle may be correcting a statement made in Nicomachean Ethics to the effect that Persian rule wrongly treats subjects as slaves. As it turns out, it is not wrong at all; such slavery suits its subjects perfectly.49 Persian political slavery is naturalized again in book 3 of Politics when Aristotle explains the distinctive qualities of Asiatic monarchy, which, like chattel slavery, is both legal and hereditary: “For foreigners, being more servile in character than Hellenes, and Asiatics than Europeans, do not rebel against a despotic government. Such kingships have the nature of tyrannies because the people are by nature slaves; but there is no danger of their being overthrown, for they are hereditary and legal” (1285a20–24). The implicit crossover here between chattel and political slavery occurs



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because both are considered natural to barbarians. Statements such as this, which transfer the category of the natural slave, originally situated in the household, to an entire ethnicity or nation—to “natural slaves,” plural— lend authority to later usage in which the enslavement of “barbarians” is compounded. Both national and individual, personal slavery can be made to appear natural for barbarians. Aristotle’s defense of household, chattel slavery in book 1 includes a reasoned consideration of the opposing view that slavery is merely conventional and therefore unjust. Commentators who want to clear Aristotle of the charge of having written an apology for slavery bring forward the important concessions he makes, such as that nature does not always succeed in appropriately distinguishing the bodies and souls of freemen from those of slaves, or that the warfare through which slaves are acquired might be unjust.50 Such apologies have to underplay connections between barbarians and slavery that confirm the existence of the slave-by-nature, such as, “[F]or it must be admitted that some are slaves everywhere, others nowhere” (1255a31–32). Further, they must suppress the fact that Aristotle considers objections only to household, chattel slavery. Nowhere in Politics does Aristotle question the view that barbarians might not naturally be, as in the passage discussed earlier, “a community of slaves, male and female.” On the contrary, Aristotle confidently makes this assertion immediately after inaugurating his disagreement with Plato in the opening section, backing it up by a citation from Euripides. Given the imbrication of chattel with political slavery in Politics, this discursive ordering is critical to the development of Aristotle’s argument. By mentioning the naturalness of barbarians’ political slavery first, and by placing it beyond question, Aristotle lays the groundwork for several central claims: his thesis regarding the barbarous slave-by-nature in book 1; the association of hereditary absolute monarchy with natural, Asiatic servility in the passage just cited from Book 3; and the tripartite division of geopolitical dispositionalities in book 7. Rhetorically, the naturalness to barbarians of the overdetermined “slavery” introduced near the beginning of book 1 informs each and every one of these discussions. We can turn now to Aristotle’s difficult but influential theory that deviant forms of political rule are despotic, which he elaborates in book 3. It will be helpful to compare this discussion with Aristotle’s defense of household, chattel slavery in book 1, where, having foregrounded the naturalness for barbarians of an overdetermined “slavery,” Aristotle repeatedly stresses the mutually beneficial character of the master-slave relationship. By contrast, in book 3, Aristotle suggests that household mastership itself has negative

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characteristics, the first of which is that it is self-interested: “The rule of a master [despote¯s], although the slave by nature and the master by nature have in reality the same interests, is nevertheless exercised primarily with a view to the interest of the master, but accidentally considers the slave” (1278b332–36). This feature of slave mastership is not previously mentioned in Politics. The enslaver’s self-interested, exploitative relation with the enslaved introduces a distinct, crucially important reason for differentiating it from paternal, marital rule and household rule. Key to Aristotle’s disagreement with Plato, it enables him to stigmatize as despotic political rule that is modeled on slave mastership. In book 3, Aristotle argues that in relations between husband and wife, father and children, and (an occasional fourth) master and household, rule occurs “for the good of the governed or for the common good of both parties, but essentially for the good of the governed” (1278b39–41). As in book 1, the master-slave relation is excluded from other relations within the household as a prototype for any form of natural, political rule. But this time it is disqualified not by the asymmetrical legal status of ruler and ruled but rather by the self-interested nature of slave mastership. Self-interestedness is not the only basis for exclusion, however, for in book 4 Aristotle goes on to mention a second, negative attribute of slave mastership: arbitrariness, an attribute he associates with individual will and unaccountability in a passage we looked at earlier: “This tyranny is just that arbitrary power of an individual which is responsible to no one, and governs all alike, whether equals or betters, with a view to its own advantage; not to that of its subjects, and therefore against their will. No freeman willingly endures such a government” (1295a19–23). For later, Roman republicanism and early modern resistance theory, this passage has momentous significance, summed up in the phrase “arbitrary rule.” It puts in succinct, propositional language four distinguishing features of tyrannous, single-person rule that appear in numerous literary and philosophical contexts: the capriciousness of the single-person ruler’s exercise of individual will (in Latin, arbitrium); its unaccountability; its interest in potentially exploitative self-interest rather than in the collective good of subjects; and its violation of the freedom essential to egalitarian self-rule. The phrase “against their will” is important since the use of force, appropriate to those who are chattel slaves, is diacritically degrading to freeborn citizens, whose collective identity is signaled here by the use of plural forms. As inappropriate model for the political ruler responsible to all alike, the figure of the household despote¯s haunts the formulation just cited, which significantly concludes with reference to the individual citizen, as if



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on the model of the household master/slave relation: “No freeman willingly endures such a government.” Despite his uneasiness with Athens’s more radical democratic strains, Aristotle here appeals to democratic ideology in order to underline the naturally resistant spirit of freeborn citizens.51 Again, it must be stressed that Aristotle’s portrait of the inappropriately self-interested despote¯s in book 3 does not critique chattel slavery. Written at a relatively late stage in the process of politicizing despotism, Aristotle’s Politics systematizes the embedded, ideologically encoded logic that emerged earlier, most notably, we have seen, in Herodotus’s History and in the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. According to this logic, so long as the despot’s unregulated power over the household slave is directed toward the fulfillment of private needs, there is no problem, or at least none worthy of note. It is accepted that the household master is not accountable for how he uses his power. This is not the case within the polis, however. The politicization of despote¯s in democratic discourse directs attention away from the household toward the polis, where, ideally, the ruler is accountable not only to his collective fellow citizens but also to the law. Single-person rule is not the only form of rule to be characterized as despotic, however, for Aristotle makes it the prototype of all forms of imperfect, unnatural rule. In a passage that is crucial for centuries of political philosophy and debates on tyranny, Aristotle labels all deviant forms “despotic”: “[G]overnments which have a regard to the common interest are constituted in accordance with strict principles of justice, and are therefore true forms; but those which regard only the interest of the rulers are all defective and perverted forms, for they are despotic, whereas a state is a community of freemen” (1279a17–22). Aristotle’s choice of despotic as a term for defective rule has sometimes seemed puzzling. In the context of antityrannicism, Aristotle’s language is not idiosyncratic.52 Yet puzzlement about relations between the despote¯s and tyrant may usefully register an experience of conceptual dissonance induced by reading Politics: having denied at the outset that household and political rule are necessarily similar, Aristotle proceeds to join them in book 3. They are joined, however, only negatively: for Aristotle the despote¯s as household ruler is not a model for natural, political rule, though the despote¯s alone fully illuminates its perversion. When the despote¯s rules over freeborn men who naturally constitute their own, egalitarian mode of self-governance, both he and they are engaging in activities that are unnatural or inappropriate for the polis. If Aristotle does not entirely identify despotism and tyranny, he certainly follows contemporaneous practice by associating them very closely. Tyranny, Aristotle holds, is the worst of the

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“despotic” forms because monarchy, ideally, is best. According to Aristotle’s taxonomy of forms of political rule, oligarchy and democracy are also despotic in deviating from a commitment to the public good. Yet not only in classical Athens but in Rome and early modern Europe, these forms cannot be represented as despotic with nearly the same flair and efficacy as can the individual, autocratic ruler, whose resemblance to the individual, household despote¯s is so easy to recognize. Two differences between book 1 and book 3 help to guide readers through this potentially baffling maze of distinctions, and both enhance the value of the specifically political freedom enjoyed by Greeks. The first, taken up already, involves the mutuality of the relation between enslaver and enslaved as it appears in book 1 as against the arbitrary self-interestedness of the enslaver’s rule in book 3—arbitrary self-interestedness that is perverse with reference to a collectively ordered polis. The second involves the meanings assigned the polis in book 1 as against book 3. In book 1, Mogens Herman Hansen demonstrates, the basic unit of Aristotle’s polis is the household, oikia, which includes relations between husband and wife, father and children, master and slave. Productive and reproductive ends are met by the oikos, which naturally begets other households, which in turn form a village that naturally develops into a polis. In this developmental view, women and men as well as children, slaves, and even animals are members of the polis construed as a geographic, agricultural, social, religious, productive, and reproductive community, though not as a political community.53 Such inclusivity is not possible for book 3’s polis, whose basic unit is comprised by the male citizens, politai, participating in the life of the politeia. Here the polis is a political rather than economic or social community; it is a uniquely human institution whose end, the good life, eudaimonia, by definition excludes slaves and animals. Male children, of course, are not yet capable of participating in political life, while free women, though possessing a higher degree of rationality than slaves (normatively male), are not the human beings free men are, and are therefore not differentiated by free/unfree status. In books 3 and 7, Aristotle’s discussion pertains to the polis as an exclusive, political community, considered, as Hansen puts it, “peculiar to Hellenic civilization and out of reach of barbarian peoples.”54 This, of course, is the community for which, to return to the passage just cited, “governments which have a regard to the common interest are constituted in accordance with strict principles of justice.” If the two discrepancies between books 1 and 3 are brought into relation, we can see that in book 1, where the polis is an inclusive community, emphasis falls on how



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mutually beneficial chattel slavery is to master and slave alike and on their differential juridical status. In book 3, on the other hand, where the polis is a community of privileged, politically engaged citizens, slavery is construed as an institution of primary benefit to the master. Its individual, private character is suddenly thrown into relief. As a result of this abrupt, though relative, privatization, Aristotle can stress the inappropriateness of despotic rule in the public realm, where an aggregate of politai, themselves masters of slaves, meet as equals to participate in ruling the polis. Scholarship on Aristotle stresses his unique ability to analyze and systematize basic assumptions of his culture.55 Writing of the two senses of polis, Hansen argues that the Greeks “saw the polis both as a society composed of all inhabitants and as a political community restricted to adult male citizens. But the sources show that they were perfectly capable of distinguishing the two different meanings of polis and the two different spheres.”56 Similarly, I would argue, they would easily distinguish the despot’s role in the household, where self-interestedness was to be expected, from despotic rule in a public community of free, male citizens. By postponing until books 3 and 4 his characterization of the despote¯s’s rule as self-interested and arbitrary, Aristotle is able to systematize two discrete but interrelated institutions, chattel slavery and the polis. Aristotle has no intention of disparaging the actual slave master’s satisfaction of his household’s needs by means of the enslaved. What must be censured is rule that forgets the significant difference between mastership within the household, directed toward the individual household’s good, and that within the polis, whose end is the good of those ruled. Aristotle advances the systematic character of his theorization by labeling as “despotic” perversions of natural, political rule. Dissociating and then selectively rejoining household and political rule in the very precise ways he does, Aristotle argues at one and the same time the categorical naturalness of household slavery and the unnaturalness for Greeks of despotism in the political sphere, associating enslaved barbaroi with both.

Roman Antityranny Although antityrannicism emerged in the unique conditions of Athenian democracy as it developed in the fifth century BCE, the honoring of tyrannicides was practiced in Greek poleis outside Athens.57 Central features of antityranny ideology, together with its ability to forge strong internal, political bonds—if only within the ruling class or in military battle—also appeared in Roman republicanism, and again in early modern political

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traditions that drew on Greek and Roman literature. Tyranny’s complementary negative, slavery, was also integral to antityrannicism in each of its historically distinct forms, as was the one form of tyranny that does not reduce its subjects to “slaves”—the tyrant as nonhuman, acivil monster. (In getting antityrannicism to comprise both political slavery and tyranny, I extend Raaflaub’s usage.) Interestingly, the tyrant’s monstrosity provides the strongest foundation for tyrannicide. This can be inferred from Cicero’s appeal to the tyrant’s conventional nonhumanity in De Officiis, where he lauds the Roman people’s unwillingness to tolerate tyrants, implicitly carrying on the defense of Brutus and Cassius as illustrious tyrannicides that appears in the Philippics. In a passage that was important to early modern antityrannicism, Cicero claims: [W]e do not share fellowship with tyrants. On the contrary, there is the widest cleavage between them and us, and should it lie within your power, nature does not forbid you to rob the person whom it is honorable to kill. Indeed, the whole of that noxious, sacrilegious breed should be banished from human society. Just as certain parts of the body are amputated once they begin to be drained of blood, and in their virtually lifeless condition affect other parts, so once the savagery and brutality of the beast takes human shape, it must be excised, so to say, from the body of humanity which we all share.58

The metamorphosis Cicero imagines has the beast usurping human form (rather than, as Plato has it, the human becoming wolf) without ceasing to be a beast. Getting rid of a tyrant who has become monstrous is not only no more ethically problematical than killing a nonhuman animal, Cicero implies, but altogether necessary, since it threatens the health of Cicero’s idealized res publica. In doing away with the tyrant as lawless monstrosity, the tyrant killer removes a mortal threat to the body of politically associated citizens. The tyrannicide performs an act that is honorable, not criminal, an act of killing that is not homicide. Shortly before this passage, in reflecting tendentiously on the difference between robbing a fellow citizen and a tyrant, Cicero introduces the infamous tyrant of Syracuse, Phalaris. With Phalaris in the picture, the tyrant’s monstrosity is highlighted, since, like the Minotaur, Phalaris is bespattered with the blood of children he ritually sacrifices. (Both may have connections with the worship of Baal in ancient Carthage, where the practice of child sacrifice appears to have continued longer than elsewhere in the Mediterranean area.)59 Phalaris is a human being who becomes akin to the artificial mon-



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ster he is said to create, a brazen bull under which a fire burns so as to roast the children slipped into its maw and within whose hollow metal echoing screams sound as if emitted by the bull. If not always Phalaris himself, the monstrous, specifically cannibalistic, tyrant is a recurrent figure in medieval and early modern literature (the cannibalistic tyrant makes a significant appearance in Locke’s Second Treatise). The notion that tyrannicide is not a criminal act has a similarly long life, as is evidenced by a tract published during England’s Commonwealth explicitly entitled Killing noe murder.60 A related passage on the origins of tyranny shows more clearly how Athenian antityranny ideology was assimilated to Rome’s republicanism: the tyrant’s animality becomes manifest when the king degenerates into a dominus (master), as kings inevitably do. Cicero explains that the Greeks had different terms for “king” and “tyrant,” and editors often add that in republican Rome, the Latin rex (king) signifies tyrant.61 Yet it is not so often noted that when employed polemically as a synonym for rex, dominus functions as does despote¯s. A term for the tyrant (from the Greek lexicon) just as despote¯s is in Greek, dominus designates the male householder who is master—in Latin, more precisely, owner—of, among other things, his slaves. In this way, like the despote¯s, the dominus becomes integral to Roman antityranny invective, which positions the tyrant’s subjects as freeborn citizens abusively treated as “slaves.” Given the sense of collective, voluntary association Cicero bestows on res publica, and the importance of private property in ancient Rome, the ruler who arrogates this kind of dominion to himself violates the integrity—the very public identity—of the commonwealth. Following a reference to Phalaris in De Re Publica, Cicero brings up Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, whose reduction of his people to slaves is encapsulated thus: “[N]othing belonged to the people, and the people itself belonged to a single man.” Where there is a tyrant, Cicero’s spokesperson Scipio concludes, there can be no commonwealth at all.62 The most significant point of continuity between Greek antityranny ideology and Roman lies in the negative connotations of dominus when used of a leader. The leader’s degeneration into a “master” authorizes the kind of inflammatory rhetoric that Cicero uses in the Philippics, where Brutus and Cassius are liberators who have struck off the “yoke of slavery” that hung on the Roman people’s neck and where, if Antony’s rise to power is not vigorously resisted, Romans will ignominiously have to bear an arrogant, cruel, and licentious “master.”63 Compared with Greek, however, Roman antityranny discourse distinguishes itself by a stinging stress on the shamefulness of voluntarily submitting to political servitude.64 A strongly militarized masculinity informs Cicero’s antityranny rhetoric. Cicero, for

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example, portrays Antony’s act of offering Caesar the crown as an abject request to be enslaved to the colleague he voluntarily turns into his “master”: Antony behaves both as a vanquished soldier petitioning for his life, that is, cravenly willing to accept enslavement, and as a beloved submitting to the dominant position of his homosexual lover—something, Cicero says, Antony has willingly done since a boy.65 For Roman citizens, at any rate, political slavery is so deeply disgraceful that death is to be preferred: “Nothing is more detestable than disgrace, nothing fouler than servitude [nihil foedius servitudine].”66 Cicero reiterates this patriotic claim on several occasions. “Death,” he asserts, “to Roman citizens has always been preferable to slavery.”67 Were Romans to choose enslavement to Antony rather than death, their behavior would be unspeakably shameful but would also place them in a condition they could not tolerate. “All other nations can bear slavery,” Cicero explains, because they “shun toil and pain, and, to be free from these, can endure all things; but we have been so trained and our minds so imbued by our ancestors as to refer all our thoughts and acts to the standard of honor and virtue. So glorious is the recovery of liberty that in regaining liberty we must not shrink even from death.”68 The slavery to which Cicero refers in these passages is political slavery in the form of subjection to single-person rule internal to Rome. So thoroughly militarized is the context in which liberty is either won or lost, however, that slavery’s specifically political identity can be difficult to register, as are differences between internal and external political slavery. To heighten its polemical impact, Cicero’s language often deliberately elides political slavery’s differences from actual servitude, nearly always imagined as having originated in military defeat. In much Latin, as formerly Greek, literature, military defeat is the privileged origin of chattel slavery, the legitimacy of which is enshrined in Justinian’s Institutes on the basis of its universal practice. This makes it all the more important to grasp that war slavery doctrine, highlighted by Roman jurisprudence, is not a window onto Roman sociomilitary practices, as is often assumed (Arendt, for example, says that the majority of ancient slaves were “defeated enemies”).69 Writing generally and cross-culturally of this problematical assumption, Orlando Patterson points out how many alternatives, often preferable, are open to victors who have taken the vanquished captive: “immediate massacre; torture and sacrifice, sometimes culminating in cannibalism; ransom; prisoner exchange; temporary imprisonment; serfdom; impressments in the victor’s army; colonization; and simple release.”70 Writing of ancient Roman practices, Keith Hopkins argues that though the enslavement of war captives was “an old tradition in the Mediterranean world,” this does not



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explain its growth in Italy under Roman imperial expansion: “But then so was killing captives, putting them to ransom, sparing them, exacting a single indemnity from them, forcibly evicting them and taxing them. Of all these solutions to the problems of victory, slavery was one of the least common, and usually reserved for particularly obstinate or treacherous enemies. After all, the Romans conquered lands occupied by about fifty million people and had only about two million slaves.”71 Observations such as these, distressing as they are as reminders of warfare’s brutality, clarify the ideological nature of Roman universalizing pronouncements on war slavery, to say nothing of the relentless emphasis on the high honor bestowed on those who willingly sacrifice their lives in armed defense of Rome’s liberty, or of the additional stigma attaching to involuntary servitude when it is construed as a cowardly choice of mere life over valiant death.72 On the battlefield, Roman warriors are expected to choose death rather than the defeat that becomes a metonymy for slavery, liberty’s spiritless, cowardly contrary. Life itself is valueless without “liberty,” or, as Cicero formulates this proposition negatively in a passage that exemplifies the elision just mentioned, “For life does not consist in breath: it does not exist at all in the slave” (Non enim in spiritu vita est, sed ea nulla est omnino servienti).73 Rhetorically elevating the value of liberty higher than mere animation, Cicero denies living, breathing slaves the dignity of genuine human “life.” Momentarily—yet, in this, conventionally—eclipsed is the figurative character of the slavery Cicero passionately exhorts fellow Romans to avoid: voluntary submission to single-person rule would degrade free citizens to a less than human condition, that is, to the (figurative) condition of slaves whose social and political death renders them nonhuman animals. Though much more could be said about Rome’s distinctive militarization of slavery, my interest here is in broad continuities between Greek and Roman antityrannicism. Two of Livy’s narratives memorializing republican Rome’s dedication to liberty—those featuring Lucretia and Virginia—are profoundly informed by Athenian antityranny ideology in likening the tyrant-as-antagonist to an external enemy of Rome and its citizens, whose vulnerability to enslavement is exemplified by an unprotected, virtuous woman. In Livy’s account of the republic’s origins, a decision to overthrow the tyrant Tarquinius Superbus is taken by Junius Brutus when Lucretia tells him, her husband, and her father that Tarquinius’s son gained entrance to the marital home in order to assault her sexually. Though Brutus does not kill Tarquinius Superbus, instead forcing him out of the city, Romans commemorate his liberation of Rome from tyranny just as Athenians do the famous Harmodius and Aristogeiton—that is, by a statue erected in the

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capitol.74 In modeling Rome’s Brutus on Athenian tyrannicides, this etiological narrative makes him into a liberator whose inauguration of the republic is imbued with antityrannicism. Brutus gets citizens to swear that Rome will never again be ruled by a king (on the assumption that kings inevitably degenerate into tyrants), institutes governance by rotation of consuls, and presides over the trial and execution of his traitorous sons, thereby demonstrating a disinterested commitment to the impersonal rule of law.

Appropriation and Disavowal of Slavery Greco-Roman political slavery has multiple, intersecting determinations. Discursively, it has various conceptual dimensions and rhetorical effects, none of which emerged from citizens’ direct identification with slaves. On the contrary, the polemical power of appeals to political slavery derived from its creators’ urgent, passionate need to disavow kinship with those who were enslaved. With regard to democratic ideology, antityrannicism’s pairing of slavery and tyranny demarcated the polis as an ordered, public arena for collectively exercised reason in its production and implementation of law’s rule. To threaten the participation of free men in the politeia was to threaten the very essence of political order and civility, together with Greek and, later, Roman military superiority and imperial rule. With the consolidation of antityrannicism, new forms of exclusion were instituted to reinforce the boundary between free and unfree that polemical appeals to figurative slavery could appear to have transgressed. Athenian regulations protecting the publicly heroized tyrannicides from slander, for example, also prohibited slaves from being given their names.75 Even indirectly, in the passive form of bearing a tyrannicide’s name, those whose status must remain unchanged were kept apart from figurative freedom. In a not dissimilar gesture, the Greek victory over the Persians at Plataea celebrated every four years at the Eleutheria was a festival in honor of freedom in which slaves were explicitly forbidden to participate. In his account of this celebration in his life of Aristides, available to early modern readers, Plutarch explains that “the men who are being honored gave their lives for freedom.”76 Protest against the tyrant’s attempts to degrade freeborn citizens to the condition of slaves not only endorsed existing discrepancies in status and privileges but arguably entrenched them by further stigmatizing those who were not similarly able to protest the injustice of their own degradation. Displacing the moralistic discourse of individual, psycho-ethical slavery



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onto the collective political arena, antityrannicism joined naturally valued freedom to an ability voluntarily to defend it. Because those able to exercise the privileges of citizenship were not and did not deserve to be slaves, it was at best a mistake, at worst a form of mad injustice, to treat them as if they were or could become. (This ideology reigned in the Roman Republic despite the large population of “freed” women and men—i.e., slaves who had been manumitted.) Such analogical, “as if” constructions, so important to the per impossibile reasoning that informs antityranny ideology, both naturalized the enslavement of and further disempowered those unable to represent the contingent nature of their condition. As an ideological formation, antityranny discourse denounced political slavery on the foundation of disavowal. But what exactly was being disavowed? In Slaves and Other Objects, Page duBois uses a psychoanalytic conception of disavowal to critique the defensive relation that classical studies traditionally have had to the realities and ideological implications of Greek and Roman slavery. Even when the object of meticulously conducted historical research, duBois argues, ancient slavery as lived experience is frequently ignored in academic study of high cultural texts, knowledge of which within Europe and, later, North America has for centuries been the mark of class and gender distinction.77 In her treatment of slavery as metaphor in classical political rhetoric, duBois examines the opposition between slavery and freedom as it appears in the texts of dramatists, orators, historians, and philosophers. DuBois suggests that the frequently polemical language of political slavery is effective in “manipulating the fears and anxieties of the free Greeks by threatening them with the status of their chattels, who were insistently, troublingly present—tattooed, bearing the scars of beatings and whippings, sexually vulnerable—among the furnishings of everyday life.”78 From this perspective, duBois views Greek tragedies featuring defeated Trojans as managing free, adult males’ dread of being enslaved by projecting it onto the Trojan women whose passionate responses to their pending or recent enslavement are frequently staged. Insofar as the grief and vulnerability of Trojan women such as Hecuba, Polyxena, and Andromacha were allegorically evocative of defeated Troy, they could safely awaken anxieties about potential interstate enslavement while at the same time, duBois says, “distancing it from male citizens by displacing it onto characters remote from them in time, in their class situation, and in gender.” The royal women of archaic Greece who are subjected to enslavement may also, she suggests, awaken reflection on the waning power of aristocrats, whose hold

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on politics weakened as Athens’s democracy was radicalized. In either case, duBois argues, privileged, male citizens are protected from direct identification with those who are, or are about to become, slaves.79 Though duBois does not do so, it is possible to consider such mediated, displaced identification as a means of perpetuating the disavowal intrinsic to political slavery. Where an emphasis on identification tends to highlight anxieties, however, emphasis on strategies of defense against identification may bring out the citizenry’s corresponding desire to maintain its privileges and distinction. Both dimensions of disavowal were likely at work in the development and early modern renewal of antityranny ideology. In polemically representing the tyrant as a ruler incapable of respecting boundaries and traditions or behaving like a would-be conqueror, in either case willing if not eager to treat citizens as slaves, antityrannicism provided an emotionally engaging, conceptually fertile means of reproducing the polarity between free and slave as a feature of more egalitarian, political relations. Public speakers or writers who deployed antityranny discourse were able to appropriate the traumatic experiences of those who had been enslaved while simultaneously and forcefully repudiating likeness, much less identity. Ultimately, what antityranny discourse disavows and enables is the utterly contingent, materially and culturally instituted opposition between free and unfree.

chapter two

Sixteenth-Century French and English Resistance Theory

D

avid Wootton puts resistance against tyranny at the center of his clear, epigrammatic summary of political rights as conceived by early moderns: “The key question in the minds of contemporaries was not so much the right to vote, as the right to revolt. It is from the claim that all citizens have the right to overthrow a tyrannical government and have a say in its replacement that modern democratic theory takes its origin.”1 One among a set of natural rights, the right to revolt can be relinquished or confirmed by social contract, which, scholars agree, is a distinctive feature of early modern political discourse. Approaching the development of “citizens’ rights” from another angle, Annabel Brett likewise posits a “zone of non-coincidence” between the individuals who held them and the legal order of the state.2 Of the various contexts relevant to understanding early modernism’s interest in resistance, contract, and rights, Greco-Roman antityrannicism arguably occupies a privileged position, partly because it provides a baseline against which new developments can be measured. Of course, Western European humanists appropriate this feature of classical political theory in historically unique cultural and economic conditions.3 Concentration of political power in monarchical regimes, the development of capitalist social relations, the rise of independent nation-states, and overseas colonial expansion are the most notable of the interrelated processes occurring during the sixteenth century, the period in which a polemical joining of tyranny and slavery begins to flourish. Early modern writers adapt Greco-Roman antityrannicism to its new milieu in a multitude of ways, several of which will be examined here. In a way, the absence of scholarship on the systematic pairing of tyranny and slavery attests to the success of this adaptation. Figurative slavery has been naturalized as liberty’s antonym, and not only in early modern and 57

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Enlightenment literature. Readers who engage premodern texts are frequently so accustomed to political slavery’s rhetorical energies that they may respond to them without conscious reflection. At times, however, early modern assumptions about either tyranny or servitude are so deeply embedded that allusions may be missed. Even when this is not the case, the specific conceptual and rhetorical processes at work can be misunderstood. Meeting up with a reference to either “servitude” or “tyranny,” contemporaneous readers—whether on the anxious lookout for signs of disorderly sedition or sympathetic to a critique of current forms of governance—would be eager to determine the specific kind of polemical relation between tyranny and slavery being posited. If “hints of slavery” is added to “hints of tyranny,” what Raaflaub says of allusions to tyranny in fifth-century BCE democratic Athens holds, I believe, for early modern readers of Greek, Roman, and early modern texts that involve antityrannicism: “Trained for decades in the skills of recognizing political allusions, the Athenians would have picked up hints of tyranny much more frequently and easily than we suspect.”4 For early modern Europeans, this training was, of course, provided by the Greek and Roman literature devotedly translated, published, circulated, and taught by humanist artists, intellectuals, and educators. Of the many lines of continuity between ancient and early modern antityrannicism, the most significant for present purposes is the major presupposition of rhetorical appeals to figurative, political slavery: as “free” members of a political community, those who make such appeals are not formally akin to the slaves with whom they polemically compare themselves. Generally construed on the model of Greco-Roman chattel slavery, human bondage continues to be for those who are already dishonored and degraded, not for those who can articulate their rights. Yet this brings up a major discontinuity: in the Western European nations where antityrannicism thrives (England, France, the Netherlands), chattel slavery is not practiced. As a marker of cultural distinction, the freedom gestured to by Greco-Roman political discourse lacks material, institutional grounding within the boundaries of the nationstate. Its material foundation is in the process of being instituted across the Atlantic, in the Americas, elsewhere. One aim of this chapter is to explore how the Greco-Roman polarity between free and enslaved facilitates the emergence of “free” identities on the part of new socioeconomic groups, political participants, and nation-states, together with the discursive construction of “unfree” identities for those colonized or enslaved. Antityranny sentiments and tenets are vigorously opposed on many grounds. This does not mean, as is often assumed, however, that absolut-



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ist theory opposes antityrannicism from a position of lofty, monumental solidity. The doctrine of the divine right of kings develops a traditional conception of the divine origins of earthly sovereignty so as to rationalize the unprecedentedly extensive powers that early modern monarchy increasingly claims for itself. Yet its corollary—that subjects are required by God to obey their royal rulers—is, arguably, a defensive response to justifications of political resistance articulated in the context of the Huguenot persecutions. This is George Sabine’s thesis, which he develops by explaining that since Christian authorities had always assumed political power to originate with God, “no incompatibility was felt, before the end of the sixteenth century, between the theories that power comes from God and that it comes from the people. What made the two views incompatible was, first, the development of popular right to mean specifically a right to resist and, second, the counter-development of divine right to imply that subjects owe their rulers a duty of passive obedience.”5 Promulgating the sanctity of the royal sov­ ereign, the doctrine of the divine right of kings was extremely powerful. As an “intellectual construction,” however, Sabine says, “it was hopelessly weak.” Many of royal absolutism’s formulations, he observes, start from the problematical premise that political authority is in many if not all respects analogous to paternal authority.6 In his study of English debates on political sovereignty, Gordon J. Schochet coins the term patriarchalism to characterize royalist and absolutist doctrines that systematize a correspondence between the father’s rule within the household and the king’s within the state or, more simply, between paternal and monarchical power. Schochet agrees with Sabine that “patriarchalism” develops in reaction against resistance theory, which he calls “contractualism,” and that patriarchalism insists on the naturalness of paternal and, hence, monarchical power so as to counter contractualism’s unsettling view of political rule as the product of voluntary, collective agreement on the part of the (male) citizenry.7 Schochet, however, believes that the activity of theorizing monarchical power’s interrelations with the domestic power of fathers renders explicit and conscious “a series of related attitudes and assumptions that had previously been implicitly held and imperfectly understood.”8 Because these attitudes and assumptions are deeply embedded in England’s hierarchical, status-oriented society, Scho­ chet argues, patriarchalist tenets draw their persuasive strength from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English beliefs and social institutions, all thoroughly patriarchal.9 While Sabine’s thesis has not exactly been rejected, neither has it been embraced, and its implications have not been taken seriously. Though the

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view that patriarchal royal absolutism is grounded in social realities has been disputed,10 I would like to take critique further by arguing not only that royal absolutism and antityrannicism are discursively interrelated but also that many aspects of patriarchal absolutism are significantly reactive. Schochet’s influential thesis occludes the key part played in early modern debates on sovereignty by tyranny’s partner, political slavery, with the result that analogies based on relations between master (or lord) and servants (or slaves) continue to be neglected, despite their extensive use by both royalists and antimonarchists. Against this view, I assume that argumentation based on relations of mastership and servitude is intelligible only if reencoded in the context of antityranny polemics, which provide the raison d’être of the counterdiscourse developed in divine right theory and patriarchal absolutism. When “patriarchalism” is viewed as a vestige of premodern social formations, both patriarchalism and divine right theory become part of an older, status-oriented, Christian mentalité that is challenged by a more secular, enlightened opposition to received authority and exclusionary power. Among other problems with this view is that it constructs a blind spot: “free” and “slave” are not perceived as markers of inherited status. To the extent that a fixed polarity between “free” and “slave” informs early modern resistance theory and modern liberalism, this is a real shortcoming. Additionally, the origins of the polarity free/unfree in Greco-Roman antiquity are obscured, as is the lengthy, uneven process of their naturalization within Western European colonial and political ideologies. Though they believed it to be compatible with the Hebrew Bible, early modern writers were aware that Greco-Roman antityrannicism is older than Christianity (whose Church Fathers had long ago accommodated certain of its features, leaving the boundary between pagan and Christian open to dispute). Especially in debates on sovereignty, they were also intensely interested in specifying relations between patriarchal and lordly rule (“paternal” and “despoticall” power, as Hobbes calls them). It can be hard to appreciate the indebtedness to Greco-Roman literature of early modern references to slavery, so skillfully are antityranny’s rhetorical features translated into the idiom of early modern Christian humanism. In the process of appropriating Greek and Roman notions of freedom, early modern Europeans learn to conceptualize freedom as slavery’s antonym. They also learn to regard tyranny as a threat to freedom conceived both as a juridical construct and as a value that is heroically to be defended. Despite confidence that Greco-Roman and Christian conceptions of freedom are in many ways congruent, early modern writers generally oppose freedom to



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slavery as it is practiced in ancient Greece and Rome rather than in ancient Israel. Indeed, that Hebrew slavery has special characteristics—the most important being the six-year limitation on the servitude of fellow Hebrews—makes it possible to hold that the Christian deity does not tolerate enslavement of his people, however well enslavement may suit certain non-Christians. The task of attempting a synthesis of scriptural and antityranny literature, initiated in the polemical treatises written as a result of the Marian and Huguenot persecutions, was accelerated during England’s revolution. The scripturally based discourse of what was earlier known as the Puritan revolution is now fairly well understood.11 Less attention has been given the ways Christian Scripture and Greco-Roman antityranny ideology were ingeniously juxtaposed, harmonized, or synthesized both prior to and during the revolution. Early modern resistance literature generally proceeds from the assumption that Scripture shares Greco-Roman opposition to tyranny. Some early modern resistance writers quite comfortably let Greek and Roman antityranny discourse either predominate over Scripture or stand on its own, while others want to highlight Hebrew and Christian notions of redemption. In this chapter and the next, I argue that owing to its genealogical roots in antityrannicism, significant features of resistance and social contract theory appear earlier than is usually claimed. More specifically, I would like to propose that resistance (also known as “monarchomach”) literature of the 1570s has important continuities with that produced in the 1550s during the earlier Marian persecutions. Even earlier is a text examined here, Étienne de La Boétie’s Discours de la servitude volontaire, which adumbrates many motifs that later appear in treatises advocating resistance and popular sovereignty. So, too, does a text to be taken up in the next chapter, George Buchanan’s Iephthes, a scriptural drama, based on Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis, which was written in the mid-1540s. Like other texts to be examined in this chapter, La Boétie’s treatise shows the strong influence of Greek antityrannicism. As will be seen, tenets relating to preservation of life that in later strains of liberalism refer to the individual are in this period formulated with regard to a communal love of liberty.

Servility and Tyranny in Montaigne and La Boétie, Goodman and Ponet Greek and Roman antityrannicism protests the distinctively political slavery to which tyranny degrades citizens. Yet in medieval and early modern

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European literature, “slavery” and “tyranny” are often paired in contexts that are not directly political. Having assimilated ancient Greek philosophy at a formative stage, Western Christianity frequently gives “slavery” and “tyranny” ethical or spiritual significance. So various are the contexts in which “slavery” and “tyranny” are related that their joint appearance may usefully be considered a topos that can be used for a wide variety of purposes. The following passage from Michel de Montaigne’s “De la coutume” (“Of Custome”), for example, uses the slavery and tyranny topos to elaborate a favorite humanist topic, the irrationality of subjection to custom, the deceptive authority of which often supplants that of nature or, in other contexts, Scripture: For truly “Custom is a violent and deceiving schoole-mistres.” She by little and little, and as it were by stealth, establisheth the foot of her authoritie in us; by which mild and gentle beginning, if once by the aid of time it have setled and planted the same in us, it will soone discover a furious and tyrannicall countenance unto us; against which we have no more the libertie to lift so much as our eyes; wee may plainly see her upon every occasion to force the rules of Nature.12

Slavery is not named here but is implicit in the loss of its contrary, “libertie,” and in the intimidated subjects’ gestural cowering when face-to-face with tyrannical custom. Both physical bondage and psychological servitude are evoked by the progressive, fear-induced reduction of mobility that rules out even the lifting of eyes. Like Satan, Christianity’s archetypal demonic tyrant, Montaigne’s “Custom” begins stealthily and advances to the use of coercive force only after becoming securely established. The dramatic unmasking (conveyed by discover in Florio’s 1603 translation) of Custom’s “furious and tyrannicall countenance,” tied to the theme of stealth, stages the characteristically sophisticated, psychological lesson of Montaigne’s pedagogical tyranny. In this passage, the temporal development foregrounded is primarily that of tyranny’s willing counterpart, voluntary psychological servitude, the soul-destroying effects of which are addressed by Montaigne’s dear friend La Boétie in Discours de la servitude volontaire, which La Boétie composed when young and is thought to have revised in or after 1552. Montaigne was distressed when parts of La Boétie’s treatise, which circulated widely in manuscript, appeared in Le Reveille-Matin des François, a collection of radical Huguenot tracts published in 1574; he liked to play up his friend’s youthfulness at the time the treatise was composed so as to



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extenuate its radicalism.13 Whatever its original inspiration, Discours de la servitude volontaire examines the process whereby people become complicit in their own, collective servitude, servitude that is unquestionably political. In eulogizing famous, heroic adversaries of tyranny—Harmodius and Aristogeiton, Thrasybulus and Brutus the Elder are mentioned in the same breath—La Boétie does not advocate tyrannicide, the most decisive repudiation of servile political status. Instead, he urges a radical yet pacific cessation of voluntary, political self-enslavement. A tyrant does not need to be opposed militarily, La Boétie argues, for if a nation refuses to consent to its own enslavement, the tyrant will automatically suffer defeat (DSV, 136–37).14 Tyranny is likened to a fire that grows, blazes, and destroys whatever it meets up with so long as it is fed but will turn to ashes if deprived of wood, which, metaphorically, the people’s passive obedience supplies. In another figure, tyranny is a branch that will wither and die if nourishment is withheld from its root. In La Boétie’s colorful analogies appear some of the essential materials of contractualism (even, it could be argued, of Hegel’s individualized master/enslaved dialectic): relations of hierarchical dependency are inverted, so that the majestic, apparently superior, force is shown to be dependent upon its inferior provisioners, while the appeals to natural right implicit in analogies drawn from nature— the wood consumed by fire, the water and nutrients required by a tree—expose the artificiality of political subjection for those who are “free.” La servitude volontaire bears remarkable witness to the imaginative hold that Greek antityranny sentiments and tenets could have on a young writer. La Boétie unreservedly sings the praises of Militiades, Leonidas, and Themistocles for militarily resisting their mighty barbarian oppressors, whose officers alone outnumbered the martial Greeks. Where did they receive their power, La Boétie asks rhetorically, but from their knowledge that they fought for the retention of their liberty, the battle signifying “not so much a fight of Greeks against Persians as a victory of liberty over domination, of freedom over greed?”15 La Boétie lauds Hippocrates for refusing to assist the barbarians’ attempt to enslave Greece, discusses Xenophon’s treatment of tyranny, and renarrates Herodotus’s story of the stalwart Spartans Sperta and Bulis, including their ringing speech to the benighted Persian Hydranes: “[Y]ou know nothing about liberty, what relish it has and how sweet it is. For if you had any knowledge of it, you yourself would advise us to defend it, not with lance and shield, but with our very teeth and nails.”16 La Boétie’s rendering of the concluding words of this speech captures his own belief that freedom has the capacity to recruit not only passion and valor but the spontaneity of basic survival instincts to its cause.

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La Boétie’s text was known as Contr’Un (Florio has The Against-One), a title that flags antityranny’s association between the single ruler and the tyrant, a figure invariably shadowed by the slave master.17 La Boétie opens by objecting to the words of Homer’s Odysseus, “Let one alone be master, let one alone be king,” an objection amplified a couple of paragraphs on by an allusion to the words of Herodotus’s Otanes on the dangers of singleperson rule (DSV, 131, 133). Throughout, La Boétie is sharply critical of oneperson rule, regularly associated with humiliating subjection, servitude, or slavery. How absurd it is, he repeatedly reflects, that countless adults willingly subject their necks to the yoke of a lone, mortal man whose power is really their very own. “What could he do to you,” La Boétie asks, “if you yourselves did not connive with the thief who plunders you, if you were not accomplices of the murderer who kills you, if you were not traitors to yourselves?” You sow your crops in order that he may ravage them, you install and furnish your homes to give him goods to pillage; you rear your daughters that he may gratify his lust; you bring up your children in order that he may confer upon them the greatest privilege he knows—to be led into his battles, to be delivered to butchery, to be made the servants of his greed and the instruments of his vengeance; you yield your bodies unto hard labor in order that he may indulge in his delights and wallow in his filthy pleasures; you weaken yourselves in order to make him the stronger and the mightier to hold you in check. From all these indignities, such as the very beasts of the field would not endure, you can deliver yourselves if you try not by taking action, but merely by willing to be free.18

This inflammatory passage picks up themes developed in Athenian antityranny literature: the conversion of subjects’ crops and labor into the tyrant’s luxury goods and pleasure, the sacrifice of their sons to his battles and their daughters to his bed. It may also incorporate the catalog of similar injustices in 1 Samuel 8, a text of paramount importance to early modern antityrannicism and to which La Boétie later alludes. There are no overt signs of syncretism, however. Contr’Un does not reference Scripture or Christian doctrine, being wholly preoccupied with Greek and Latin authorities. La Boétie bracingly presupposes an originary, human freedom into which all are born. The intensity with which he bewails its unjust loss is matched by his passionate belief in its natural vitality and strength. As the passage just cited indicates, La Boétie asks readers to ponder the absurdity of relinquishing such a natural gift or of weakly transferring its privileges.



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To underscore the shamefulness of voluntary servitude, he vividly characterizes the hardy resistance nonhuman animals instinctively put up when captured. Like valiant Greek or Roman warriors, many animals nobly die rather than part with their liberty, La Boétie observes. If ranks were to be established among animals, he adds, those who so resist would comprise the nobility. Others, he goes on, “when captured put up such a strong resistance by means of claws, horns, beak, and paws, that they show clearly enough how they cling to what they are losing.”19 When captive, they ceaselessly communicate awareness of all they have lost. In their listless mourning, such animals honor their memory of liberty, whereas human beings become so denatured they forget their original condition and depressively imagine that they cannot regain it (DSV, 141–42). The principle of collective liberty-preservation La Boétie expounds often appears in early modern justifications of political resistance: not mere life but freedom and honor, not the individual but the political collective stand in need of preservation. Though clearly related to Greco-Roman militarized honor/shame codes, the exemplary vitality of nonhuman animals suggests that political resistance has a natural, instinctual basis, which would motivate human beings if they were not so easily self-alienated. In A Short Treatise of Politique Power (1556), John Ponet gives the principle of collective liberty-preservation an even more focused, political spin when referring to the “knowledge of the Law of nature” with which the “Ethnicks” (ancient Greeks and Romans) were endowed when they legitimized tyrannicide. The law of nature affirming the lawfulness of killing tyrants, Ponet passionately declares, is no private Law to a few or certain people, but common to all: not written in Bookes, but grafted in the hearts of men: not made by man, but ordained by God: which wee have not learned, received, or read: but have taken, sucked and drawne it out of nature; whereunto we are not taught, but made; not instructed, but seasoned; and (as S. Paul saith) Mens conscience bearing witnesse of it.20

Like La Boétie, Ponet conjures up a universal, presocial human nature that is instinctually based on the preservation of political freedom. Ponet, however, revisions a passage by Cicero on the legitimacy of individual self-defense if one’s body or life is threatened—a passage Hugo Grotius cites when arguing that warfare has a basis in the law of nature and consent of nations.21 For Ponet, concerned with the depredations of tyranny, it is not the individual vis-à-vis other individuals or, by analogy, the nation-state vis-à-vis

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other nations, but internal, political freedom (or the body politic) that naturally seeks to defend itself. Compared with La Boétie’s, Ponet’s nature has activist, overtly political aims: in naturally seeking the preservation of the body politic, the law of nature sanctions tyrannicide. “This Law testifieth to every mans conscience,” Ponet affirms in the sentence following, “that it is naturall to cut away an incurable member, which (being suffered) would destroy the whole body.” We will return to Ponet in a moment. First, I would like to stress that in comparing human and nonhuman animals captured and held captive, La Boétie relies on his humanist training, specifically on Greco-Roman war slavery doctrine, which dictates that war captives who are not killed—defeated warriors who have become prisoners of war—will be enslaved. In recurring to the battlefield as it does so often, Discours brings Greco-Roman chattel slavery to the fore. Yet as is typical of antityranny ideology, La Boétie’s treatise is concerned exclusively with political servitude, for which it provides many examples, both internal and external. Chattel slavery is invoked only as a means of disparaging a weak-willed complicity in collective, figurative slavery, la servitude volontaire. Like other humanists, including Montaigne in the passage above, La Boétie calls on custom to explain humankind’s self-destructive tendency to betray its own essential nature. This does not detract from its shamefulness, however. Indeed, La Boétie emphasizes the irrationality of voluntary self-enslavement so he can rhetorically amplify the ignominy attaching to passive, fear-based complicity. Whether describing the superior capacity for liberty-preservation evinced by beasts or marveling at instances of egregious self-abasement, La Boétie uses Greco-Roman antityrannicism to trace the lineaments of popular sovereignty and to find a language with which to articulate nonmilitary forms of honor and shame. When characterizing Roman tyrants’ manipulation of their subjects, who protested no more than lifeless stones or tree stumps, La Boétie remarks, “Toujours le populaire a eu cela” (DSV, 156). The universality of humankind’s natural love of freedom is eulogized sporadically in Discours, since freedom is valued, if at all, by only an elite, noble few.22 Yet for readers eager to distinguish themselves by more active participation in structures of governance or to embrace their “freedom”—a value that does not presuppose hereditary nobility or wealth—the effect of La Boétie’s generalizations is to heighten the impact of “servility” and its cognates as slurs, and to breathe exhilarating, heroic life into the refusal to tolerate encroachments on collective self-governance. If La Boétie’s treatise is exceptional in referring almost exclusively to classical figures and texts, Christopher Goodman’s How Superior Powers



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Oght to Be Obeyd of Their Subjects (1558) is its match in eschewing nonbiblical sources. Like Ponet’s treatise, Goodman’s takes the radical, nonCalvinist position that political resistance may legitimately be undertaken even by those who are not magistrates. And antityranny ideology pervades it. Developed in a Protestant biblicism, Goodman’s thesis is not that remote from La Boétie’s in decrying customary conceptions of obedience that inculcate spiritless submission. People have wrongly been taught, Goodman claims, “that it was not lawful in anie case to resist and disobeye the superior powers: but rather to lay downe their heads, and submitte them selves to all kindes of punishments and tyrannye.”23 Servility is represented gesturally if not verbally. Goodman draws on antityranny discourse more directly later on when elaborating the derogatory view of human liberty implicit in prohibitions against resistance: “As thoghe [the people] were not reasonable creatures, but brute beastes: as thoghe there were no difference betwixt bonde slaves, and free subjectes: and as thoghe they had no portion or right at all in the countrie where they inhabite: but as they were altogether created of God to serve their kinges and governors like slaves.”24 Developing the notion that obedience to God, the only true “maister,” may involve disobedience to superior temporal powers, Goodman exhorts his readers to fight “manfullie for others against all powers worldly and spiritual,” and to choose a martyr’s death over the temporal rewards of passive, unthinking obedience.25 Ponet’s treatise is more representative of later resistance literature in comfortably embracing both scriptural and classical traditions. He unambivalently recommends antityranny ideology, relaying detailed knowledge of the high esteem in which the Greeks held tyrannicide. Ponet acknowledges the absence of any current positive law sanctioning tyrannicide, but finds worthy precedents for doing away with tyrants in the Hebrew Bible. It is best not to let things go so far, though, he urges in monitory words on tyranny’s degenerative dynamic: The nature of wicked Princes is much like to the Moldwarps [moles], which if they be suffered to have their snouts in the ground, and be not forthwith letted, will suddenly have in all the body; or to the Weesels, that conveyeth in his whole body, where hee hath once gotten in his head. So they, if they be obeyed in any evill thing (be it never so little) will be obeyed in all at length. What letteth, but that they may not onely send for mens goods, but for their heads also, as the Turke doth to his best Bassa, and all his Subjects when it pleaseth him? Why may not they send for the Subjects children, and cause them to be killed, baked, and

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give it to their Parents in stead of other meate: and for a second course bring into them, the heads, feete, and hands, as King Astiages did to Harpagus? All the Paper of England would not serve to set out the mischiefes that might follow, when Princes evill commandements should be obeyed and fulfilled.26

Like Montaigne, Ponet stresses tyranny’s initially insidious but ultimately unstoppable progress, while, like La Boétie, Ponet drives home the dangers of even the smallest degree of complicity. Figurative slavery does not have to be mentioned in this passage, as it is implied by the tyrant’s appropriation of his subjects’ goods, bodies, and children. In his lifelike description of (Satanic) burrowing moldwarps and weasels and in substituting the tyrannous Turk for the Persian, Ponet updates antityranny discourse, making it at home in his own contemporary Christian England (with its abundant paper). All the more surprising, then, is the deftly introduced allusion to the incident in Herodotus’s Histories involving the tyrannous Astiages’s sadistically delayed presentation of the identifying body parts—head, feet, and hands—he reserves for display until after Harpagus has unknowingly consumed the rest of his son.27 In addition to linking tyranny and cannibalism, Ponet’s casual allusion illustrates the intimate terms early modern political theorists are on with Greek antityranny literature.

Spanish Tyranny, English Resistance Before leaving Ponet’s Politique Power, I would like to look at a passage in which its antityrannicism draws on contemporary Spanish colonial conquest and the enslavement of Amerindigenes. The infrequency of references to contemporary Atlantic slavery in early modern polemical treatises makes this passage especially important. To help his readers imagine the experience of losing all their rights and liberties, Ponet hypothesizes a condition of political slavery within England. Only by way of comparison with the enslaved Amerindigenes (here West Indians) under the Spanish, however, can Ponet articulate this hypothesis, which is set up as an exercise in per impossibile reasoning. Ponet asks his readers to “imagine an untruth, that all the subjects goods were the Princes, and that he might take them at his pleasure.” He then adds two further counterfactuals: first, that the subjects were “carnall men”—that is, non-Christians without saving knowledge of God—and, second, that they had been stripped of defensive weapons and were under close military surveillance and control. What motivation would such people have to labor? Ponet asks. Would they have any desire to live or



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to reproduce when their children would be “in worse case, then unreasonable beasts”? Note that heritable status as chattels is assumed. Only at this stage does Ponet introduce the Amerindigenes. When the Spaniards had by flattery put in their foot, and by little and little made themselves strong, building Forts in divers places, they to get the gold that was there, forced the people (that were not used to labor) to stand all the day in the hot Sun, gathering Gold in the sand of the Rivers. By this means a great number of them (not used to such paines) died, and a great number of them (seeing themselves brought from so quiet a life, to such misery and slavery) of desperation killed themselves. And many would not marry, because they would not have their children slaves to the Spaniards. The women when they felt themselves with child, would eat a certain hearb to destroy the child in the womb.28

The point of Ponet’s narrative is to demonstrate that kings exist only by virtue of the active cooperation of those who create them, a tenet derived from conciliar literature and Aristotle’s comment in Politics that if the slave perishes, the master’s rule does, too (1278b35–37). If princes take their subjects’ goods and lives as their own, Ponet concludes, their subjects’ “enslavement” will cause them to die out in collective self-genocide, leaving rulers bereft and defunct: “And whereunto at length will it come, but that either they must be no Kings, or else Kings without people, which is all one.”29 Creating a scenario in which tyrannicide is not the only way out, Ponet, like La Boétie, makes the single, all-too-powerful leader dependent on the people he serves so that when they withdraw their support, his office self-destructs. For Ponet, the Amerindigenes’ passive noncompliance demonstrates the operations of “nature,” which, as for La Boétie, legitimates resistance to tyranny. Far from having created its own ruler, however, the society featured here has been militarily occupied. Additionally, its resistance is not spirited or noble-minded as was that of the ancient “Ethnicks” Ponet admiringly describes, even though they, too, were not Christians. Surrendering to a collective death wish, Ponet’s Amerindigenes are early representatives of the ideologeme that their societies are fated to become extinct. Ponet’s text has interesting affinities with Bartolomé de Las Casas’s influential Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (not translated into English until 1583), which uses antityrannicism to critique the genocidal consequences of the Spaniards’ predation but without extending its empowering assumptions to Amerindigenes. Ponet’s telltale “by little and little” indicates that

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the Spaniards are tyrants and that the Amerindigenes are literally enslaved in being removed from their own lands, stripped of weapons, and forced to provide labor at jobs and sites determined by their conquerors. Yet by calling the Amerindigenes “simple and plain men” unused to labor, Ponet presents their situation as one of overwhelming pathos rather than straightforward injustice. Each of Ponet’s parenthetical remarks stresses the novelty and strangeness of the Spaniards’ oppressive treatment from their victims’ standpoint, a technique that heightens the contrast between New and Old Worlds, between doomed innocence and coercive corruption. To put this another way, the absence of active, collective resistance on the part of Ponet’s Amerindigenes is related to the absence of rhetorical invective on his. Ponet’s sympathetic stance toward enslaved Native Americans is significantly at odds with the polemically charged outrage that is conventionally expressed—and that Ponet’s tract registers on many occasions—on behalf of those who are, or could be, directly affected by the tyrant’s abusive degradation of his subjects. As a result, the Amerindigenes’ servile status cannot adequately represent the unjustifiable assault on established privileges and freeborn status that antityrannicism requires. Another, related feature of Ponet’s carefully framed vignette is worth noting. Ponet’s self-consciously hypothetical, per impossibile scenario rationalizes the conventional Greco-Roman practice of employing external, interstate conquest and “enslavement” to signify “enslavement” internal to the state. As an analogue for tyrannous rule within the state, external conquest positions the tyrant as a hostile invader who strips freeborn subjects of their customary ways and privileges. Ponet uses the Spanish enslavement of Amerindigenes in this way—that is, to heighten the impact of imagining its counterpart within England were a tyrannous ruler to appropriate subjects’ liberty and property. Indeed, Ponet’s per impossibile framing limits the analogy’s meaning to the point being formulated: a ruler who treats freeborn subjects as slaves will eventually have no one to rule. Realization within England of the enslavement undergone by Amerindigenes is so improbable that other features of Ponet’s analogy are dismissed, put under erasure, or held in the imagination as an emblem of what, thankfully, could never happen there. On the other hand, Ponet’s belief that nature itself exposes the artificiality of political relations assumes a basic human commonality. In portraying enslaved Amerindigenes electing death over loss of liberty, Politique Power takes this commonality further, since the victims of Spanish tyranny thereby embrace Greco-Roman ideals. (In preferring death to enslavement,



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they would rank among La Boétie’s nobility.) Ponet’s Amerindigenes do not suffer the additional shame attached to voluntary servitude. In other ways, though, this passage practices disavowal of kinship, both in its framing, which refers to Amerindigenes as “carnall men,” and in the absence of rhetorical vituperation. It is a telling instance of the complex transformations undergone by Greco-Roman antityranny ideology when appropriated by Western European Christians who do not practice slavery, not within their own national borders, yet know that while Christians do not enslave fellow Christians, they are instituting the large-scale enslavement of nonChristians across the Atlantic, elsewhere.

Collective Enslavement and Freedom in Vindiciae Historians of political philosophy stress early modern resistance theory’s indebtedness to medieval natural law traditions, conciliarism, and constitutionalism.30 In early modernism’s doctrine of popular sovereignty, the rights that inhere in the community as a corporate entity threaten not merely to limit royal power but to place it under the sway of those ruled or their official representatives.31 The earlier, feudal use of analogy with Roman private law according to which the people are the “principal” and the ruler its “agent” likewise gets transformed into the doctrine that the ruler is instituted—or, more radically, created—by and for the people. Ponet uses the less secular ordain to formulate this central principle of popular sovereignty: kings, princes, and other magistrates may be the chief members of the “politique body,” yet “neither are the people ordained for them, but they are ordained for the people.”32 Implicit in this principle is the people’s right to revoke the position(s) they have instituted. As will be seen, revocation—in theory, formal deposition—may substitute for, underlie, or accompany the right of resistance. Antityrannicism has been discussed so far mainly in connection with early modern humanism’s vilification of servitude. Yet its positive counterpart, the glorification of natural freedom and of collective agency, was equally important. Roman jurisprudence regarding the unnaturalness of slavery helpfully complemented Christianity’s own doctrinal commitment to the goodness of created nature, itself the product of cultural syncretism. Stated explicitly in the Institutes, the doctrine that slavery, defined as the legal dominion of one human being by another, is contrary to nature was integral to the revival of republican Rome’s ideals.33 In the context of conflicts over state-sponsored religious creeds and practices, it was particularly

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important to emphasize the divine nature of human freedom, since it could then be argued that Christians had an obligation to resist a regime’s restriction of its spiritual exercise. Even when religious beliefs were not directly at issue, though, it may be implied that to jeopardize this natural freedom was to betray humankind’s divine origins. While it raises questions about the transatlantic slavery being instituted at this time—following the intensive Spanish debates of the early and mid-sixteenth century, such questions are generally either finessed or avoided—the Roman doctrine of natural freedom informs every facet of early modern resistance theory. Natural freedom is given a strongly juridical character in the most inflammatory sixteenth-century tract, Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos: or, concerning the legitimate power of a prince over the people, and of the people over a prince (1579). Published under the name of Stephanus Junius Brutus, the preface is dated 1576, while the dialogue between Brutus and his interlocutor is placed in 1574, the year in which Le Reville-Martin des François (with fragments from La Boétie’s Discours) appeared along with other Huguenot resistance tracts.34 The tract’s title presupposes a readership versed in the condensed, figurative usage peculiar to antityranny discourse, the relevance of which it immensely enriches. Natural in the sense of God-given, the freedom Vindiciae defends is also an attribute of the commonwealth’s citizenry conceived as a juridically free collective. In classical democratic and republican theory, the tyrant poses a threat to a political community because he substitutes his own individual will for the rule of law, thereby arrogantly positioning himself as a master whose power over his slaves is unregulated. Natural freedom as juridical right together with rule of law as tyranny’s antonym are persistently related to threatened, political slavery in this treatise, which ostentatiously uses Roman antityrannicism to theorize a right of resistance. More specifically, Vindiciae appeals in its title to a Roman rite of manumission in which the phrase vindicare in libertatem was used. Translated into English in 1648 with the subtitle A Defence of Liberty against Tyrants, the Latin title Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos is so bound up with Roman jurisprudence as to be “in effect untranslatable,” says George Garnett, whose scholarly edition includes a glossary of Vindiciae’s terms derived from Roman law, several of which pertain to slavery.35 Vindicatio is explicated as a legal action undertaken to recover something of which one claims title against another who also claims to be the legal owner (dominus). Garnett notes that vindicare (or vindicatio) in libertatem was used to assert the freedom of someone who was now wrongly held to be enslaved, about whose status a judge was to make a determination.36 In the figurative language of



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political slavery, the title Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos therefore represents a challenge to the ruler-cum-tyrant who has deprived citizens of their “free” status. The pseudonym chosen by the author brandishes antityranny principles with equal boldness in alluding to Lucius Junius Brutus, founder of republican Rome, as well as Marcus Junius Brutus, its would-be restorer.37 Integrated with this juridical construction of natural freedom is Aristotle’s contrast between natural and defective political rule, the former, like parental or conjugal rule, having the good of its freeborn subjects as its end, the latter, like the despot’s rule over the slave, serving primarily the master’s interests. Teleological premises inform Aristotle’s conception of political association and rule, the development of which organically aims at a desirable end. By contrast, early modern contractualism—in this, Vindiciae is fully representative—discovers the final cause of government in the purpose for which it is originally instituted. An originary act of instituting either dictates or reveals the institution’s true end; genesis dialectically discloses teleology. Whereas Aristotle claims that government naturally has the good of the governed as its end, early modern resistance theorists tend to argue that government is instituted for the good of the governed, a claim that gives the collective who decide to be governed the privilege of creating government for their own good. Though the novelty of this voluntarist view of government’s origins has rightly been emphasized, its unarticulated premise needs underscoring: the people who institute their own government do so because they are collectively, juridically, “free.” Reliant on juridical logic rather than actual trial or warfare, the corresponding ability formally to decreate a king—or kingship itself—is an innovative feature of early modern antityrannicism that emerges from the contingent, artificial character of political rule. In Vindiciae this right emerges from the absolute priority—chronologically, logically, politically— the people have over the leader they create. Though no king can rule without a people, Vindiciae argues, a people can and do live independently of a king, to whom they are prior in time (71).38 This is a variant of the point Ponet makes in the passage discussed earlier, iterations of which appear throughout resistance literature. Since kings are constituted not only by the people but also for the people, the Vindiciae argues, it would be absurd to claim that the people as a whole were created for the sake of a few kings. In reality, the exact contrary is the case: the king being created by and for them, the people are ipso facto greater or more powerful than he. Kings are not born, Vindiciae declares, but made—a formulation that epitomizes the constructivist, proto-Enlightenment strain of much contractualism (74).39 Though the king may appear to be powerful, his majesty is the provisional

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gift of his creators and can readily be withdrawn, as the following vividly illustrates: If the people deserts the king, he who once seemed sharp-eyed and sharpeared, mighty and active, will begin to go blind and deaf, and will suddenly fall down. He who once triumphed in splendour, will in an instant become vile to all. He who was once graced with almost divine honors, will be forced to become a schoolmaster at Corinth. Undermine only the pedestal of that Gigantic mass, and, like the Rhodian Colossus, it must collapse and shatter to smithereens. (76)

This passage appears to be indebted to either La Boétie or a common source. La Boétie writes, “I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.”40 The Vindiciae amplifies La Boétie’s scene of deposition by presenting a staggered diminishment of the king’s powers as he returns to ordinary, human stature. Yet like La Boétie, Vindiciae imagines the withdrawal of popular, creative energies to result in a dramatically literalized depositioning—a bringing or taking down—that is also a shattering of illusory majesty, grandeur likened to the human-made Rhodian Colossus. In the face of such powerfully argued constructivism, it is not surprising that royal absolutism does not try to piece the Colossus together again but rather deifies him or, as Hobbes does, constructs a sovereign megarepresentative, one without originary splendor. Is this nonviolent, formal depositioning really resistance? It is certainly different from the instinctual struggle to preserve threatened liberty represented by Aeschylus in The Persians or La Boétie in La servitude volontaire, where naturally spirited resistance is a response to attempted capture or subjection. Early modern resistance theorists tend to portray the dissolution of a contractual political relationship as either a termination of figurative enslavement or a moment of figurative manumission. Resistance occurs in a popular act of dissolution or, in an alternative juridical scenario, when a ruler forfeits his right to rule, thereby dissolving the relation between ruler and ruled on his own. In any event, political power’s artificiality appears in the contractual terms of the ruler’s appointment: should he fail to fulfill the conditions for which his office was instituted, he ceases to be a ruler. In Vindiciae the people both stipulate the conditions of the agreement between ruler and ruled, summed up by governance for their good in accordance with laws, and make their promise to obey contingent on their ruler’s fulfillment



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of an unconditional agreement to their terms (130–31, 158). Clearly, the social contract the Vindiciae draws up has a right to revolt inscribed within it. Yet, as is often observed, Vindiciae does not grant a formal right of armed resistance even to lower magistrates, much less to private individuals. Instead, it confines revolt to the people’s withdrawal from further contractual obligations should the ruler abuse the power vested in him. Unsurprisingly, the ruler’s abuse of power—or, more neutrally, his failure to perform his contractual obligations—is represented as tyrannous. Princes given to excessive, arbitrary taxation, for example, are dehumanizing their subjects, treating them as if they were slaves, since they clearly think that “whatever their wretched subjects—rather like a plough team of oxen—plough, and whatever they thresh, they plough and thresh for them” (110). As this shows, the cerebral discourse of contract law does not inhibit highly emotive utterances. As a medium for expressing shared political interests, contractualism uses the polarity free/enslaved to expose royalabsolutist tenets as an affront to rational dignity. If it is granted that the king is created for the people, Vindiciae asks, why would they put up with a life- and property-threatening tyrant? Absolutism’s promotion of such servility is both absurd and insulting: “If, I say, I want to provide for my liberty and safety, do I thereby enslave myself [memet ipse mancipo], do I thereby expose myself to the desire of a single man, do I thereby entangle myself in shackles and fetters?” (114). Note that single-person rule is directly associated with chattel slavery in this question, variants of which are a favored rhetorical device. Again, rebutting absolutism’s claim that the ruler is indeed dominus over his subjects’ property, it is asked, “Since, therefore, everyone loves his own things, and most even covet those of others, is it very likely that men would have sought out someone to whom they would willingly give everything that they had acquired with so much effort?” (110). On this occasion, the polarity slave/free is mapped onto the either/or alternatives of being without property, as is someone who is enslaved (whose master is dominus of the self and of its holdings), or being legally capable of ownership. By analogy, the free community, able to dissolve any contractual relationship that threatens its freedom, will securely hold its own common wealth (res publica). In another familiar rhetorical device, Vindiciae guarantees this stability by inverting relations between dominus and servus. The ruler is not, as absolutists claim, dominus over subjects who are his slaves. How could he be, it is asked, since they were neither defeated in war nor bought (again, assuming Greco-Roman war slavery doctrine regarding slavery’s origins)? On the contrary, in having created the king, the people are his dominus, he

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their servus. Comparing the commonwealth to a ship, Vindiciae declares that the people are its owner and the king its pilot, who differs from a common deckhand only in the degree of his responsibilities and his rank, not in kind. If the king is no less a servant of the commonwealth than its other administrators, relations between people and king are exactly the inverse of those absolutists seek to establish: “Consequently, whatever a king gains either by war or when he annexes neighbouring territory by right of war; or whatever he gains by jurisdiction, as when returns are made to the fisc, he acquires not for himself, but for the kingdom—for the people, I say, which constitutes the kingdom—just like a servant [servus] for his master [dominus]” (75). The king has another lord, too, Vindiciae states: the laws, which he is to obey as unquestioningly as slaves do their masters (domini) (104). Whether the ruler must submit, as his subjects do, to natural, divine, and positive laws is the most divisive issue separating absolutism and its opponents. In antityranny discourse, the ruler who places himself above the law signals an intention to treat those he rules as his slaves. By denying he is a peer of those who instituted his rule, he symbolically annihilates the uniquely political arena in which they author and arbitrate laws. Together with animalization, lawlessness—or violence, metonymically interrelated with lawlessness in antityrannicism—is a mobile signifier of figurative enslavement. Buchanan puts this succinctly when he says in Dialogue (1579), the most highly regarded resistance treatise of the era, “For to refer everything to the will of a single man and to transfer to him power over all the laws has the same effect as annulling them altogether.”41 At its most extreme, lawless violence—the very essence of arbitrary rule—involves the absolute ruler’s claim to hold the power of life and death over those he rules. Vindiciae claims that court flatterers celebrate this power as the power masters once had over slaves (107). If it is accepted that kings are created for the public good, they obviously cannot arbitrarily, on a sudden caprice or frenzy, be permitted to terminate the lives of those they rule. What sane human being would even contemplate such a situation? Why would a community of rational beings tolerate a ruler who could “recklessly and as often as pleased him, slaughter as many as he wished; who, consumed by anger or vengeance, might drag away anyone he met to their death, and who dealt death out, as the wise man says, with the sharp edge of his tongue?” (104–5). Note, again, the trope of affronted rationality and dignity. Note, as well, that for the sake of argument, Vindiciae concedes absolutists their premise—that slave masters hold the power of life and death over their slaves.



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The author(s) of Vindiciae position themselves as advocates of lawfulness, even as judges. Turning the tables on the tyrant’s contempt for law, Vindiciae brings tyranny to trial: “Tyranny is not simply a crime; it is the chief and, as it were, a sort of summation of all crimes.” “A tyrant,” it is matter-of-factly claimed, “overthrows the commonwealth, takes plunder from all together as a whole [universi], plots against the lives of all [omnes], breaks faith with all, and despises the entire sacred obligation of a solemn oath. So he is more wicked than any thief, robber, murderer, or sacrilegious person, to the same extent as it is worse to harm many and all together [universi] than individuals [singuli]” (155). Since, in overthrowing the commonwealth, the tyrant commits treason, all in all the tyrant is guilty of treason, theft, murder, breach of faith, and sacrilege. (Ponet’s catalog of crimes includes adultery and rape.) Vindiciae’s congeries is not quite as much of a hodgepodge as it seems, since breach of faith and sacrilege relate to treason, which is what the tyrant commits when violating the trust that binds ruler to ruled. Though not spelled out, the penalty for treason is forfeiture of life and goods. This criminalization of the tyrant is another means of deposing him, related to yet distinct from the dissolution of contract. In Goodman’s treatise, where the ruler is evaluated on religious grounds (prompted by Mary’s Catholic rule), armed resistance is the duty of magistrates and people. Resistance is legitimate because a tyrant guilty of transgressing communally instituted laws is not a ruler anyway: “[I]t is all one to be without a Ruler, and to have such as will not rule in Gods feare. Yet it is much better to be destitut altogether, then to have a tyrant and murtherer. For then are they nomore publik persons, contemning their public auctoritie in usinge it agaynst the Lawes, but are to be taken of all men, as private persones, and so examyned and punished.”42 When Milton writes in defense of Charles I’s trial and execution, he cites related passages by Goodman and uses similar logic. In rising up against the king and establishing the supremacy of Parliament, Milton argues, the people of England have renounced their oaths of supremacy and allegiance, “which in a word is an actual and total deposing of the King, and the setting up of another supreme authority over them.” In taking up arms against him “in thir sev’n years Warr,” they have gone much further than “unkinging the enemie to the State.”43 What makes a ruler an enemy of the state? In revolutionary England, with its unique cacophony of antityranny charges, a tension develops between the criminalization of tyranny and the tyrant’s monstrosity. As enemy, the tyrant is often said to “devour” his people. In its most pointed reference to the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre, Vindiciae represents

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the tyrant’s cannibalism as an egregious violation of the king’s ideally benevolent, paternal care of his subjects: [W]hat, I ask, shall we say of that father who will cry out tragically with Atreus that the parent is himself his children’s grave? What shall we say about that prince who is so invigorated by the slaughter of his untried subjects that he kills many thousands in a single day and is never gorged with blood; who, following the example of Caligula (who was called the Phaethon of the world for this reason), frequently wished that the people had one neck, so that he could sever it with a single blow? Will it not be permitted to invoke the aid of the law against this madness, and to wrench, as from a tyrant, that sword which he received in order to guard the law and protect the good, and which he has unsheathed to kill the good in contempt of the laws? (109)

If even the Roman slave master’s power had legal limits placed on it, as Vindiciae has just argued, the ruler’s tyrannous behavior carries him first beyond analogy with the father and then with the despot into a realm of sheer monstrosity. The tyrant is usually opposed to the father, shepherd, or other caregiver who is devoted to the welfare of those he looks after. Buchanan, for example, presents the tyrant as a ruler “who does not bestow a father’s love on his subjects but crushes them under his arrogant dominion [sed superba dominatione premat], who thinks that his flock is entrusted to him not for safekeeping but for gain” (Dialogue, 89). Buchanan follows Cicero in associating the tyrannous ruler’s refusal to be bound by law with a subhuman, monstrous savagery. Tyrannous violence, Buchanan states, “is more unnatural than poverty or disease or death or all the other evils which can befall men in the natural course of events” (156). Ultimately, the tyrant is an enemy of both the state and humankind. Even the generally conservative Thomas Maitland, Buchanan’s interlocutor in the dialogue, concludes that someone who resists law tout court has no place in human society: I think they must be regarded as the enemies of God and of men, and must be classed as wolves or some other type of dangerous beast rather than as human beings. If anyone rears such beasts, he is rearing destruction for himself and for others; whoever kills them benefits not only himself but the whole community. If I were allowed to pass a law, I would order, as the Romans used to do in seeking expiation for mon-



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sters, that men like that should be banished into desert lands or drowned in the sea far from the sight of land, lest even the contagion of their dead bodies infect living men; and that those who killed them would have rewards decreed to them, not only by the people as a whole but by individuals, as commonly happens in the case of those who have killed wolves or bears or have caught their cubs. (89)

Editors note that in Education of a Christian Prince, Erasmus similarly bestializes the tyrant, likening him to the lion, bear, wolf, and eagle. Erasmus also compares the legislated honors received by antiquity’s tyrannicides to the contemporaneous public awards given those who do away with wolves and bears.44 In both cases, the heroic slayer is doing the community a public service in ridding it of a public enemy (a figure of importance to Locke’s Second Treatise).

Slavery in Smith’s De Republica Anglorum and Bodin’s République A sophisticated apologist for England’s mixed monarchy, Thomas Smith has no interest in stirring up unnecessary controversy or encouraging resistance. Written between 1562 and 1565 when he was England’s French ambassador, De Republica Anglorum firmly counsels toleration of bad rulers since, like Montaigne, Smith believes that meddling with existing governments is “always a doubtfull and hazardous matter.”45 Yet, for this very reason, Smith’s use of antityranny discourse is evidence of how integral it can be to moderate antiabsolutism. Because not strongly polemical, antityrannicism’s contribution to Smith’s argument has not seemed significant. The centrality of the polarity free/unfree to the following passage, for example, is often overlooked: A commonwealth is called a society of common doing of a multitude of free men collected together and united by common accord & covenauntes among themselves, for the conservation of themselves aswell in peace as in warre. For properly an host of men is not called a common wealth but abusive, because that they are collected but for a time and for a fact: which done, ech divideth himself from others as they were before. And if one man had as some of the olde Romanes had (if it be true that is written) v. thousande or x. thousande bondmen whom he ruled well, though they dwelled all in one citie, or were distributed into diverse

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villages, yet there were no common wealth: for the bondman hath no communion with his master, the wealth of the Lord is only sought for, and not the profit of the slave or bondman.46

Smith’s definition of a commonwealth in the opening sentence highlights the importance of consent to the formation of civil society. It has been argued that Smith here innovatively asserts that civil society is constituted by “individuals” rather than by “the ‘people’ as a corporate entity,” as was usual in Continental theory, thereby inaugurating a distinctly English emphasis on the individual as the locus of rights.47 As I read this passage, however, Smith’s definition, which draws on Cicero, is concerned to distinguish collectively free from collectively enslaved. In doing so, it furthers a subtly developed critique of French absolutism. Smith first differentiates “a multitude of free men collected together and united by common accord & covenauntes” from “an host of men,” implicitly free, who transiently gather without such a unifying accord; since the members of such a community will disband, they are a “common wealth” only abusively—that is, misleadingly. With this first distinction, Smith identifies “commonwealth” with a nonnomadic, settled geopolitical entity such as the city-state. Smith then further distinguishes the “commonwealth” proper from a community of “bondmen” who share a common “Lord.” (In Politics, Aristotle, too, specifically disqualifies a community of slaves, equivalent to animals, for political association [1280a32–34].) In explaining why neither geographical situation nor unity under a common ruler qualifies these bondmen for membership in a commonwealth, Smith goes to Aristotle, though without naming him: “[F]or the bondman hath no communion with his master, the wealth of the Lord is only sought for, and not the profit of the slave or bondmen.” This is how Aristotle views the despote¯s, or slave master, when discussing defective rule in Politics. So crucial is Aristotle’s analogy between chattel and political slavery that Smith devotes the remainder of the chapter to its elaboration, paraphrasing Aristotle’s comparison of the chattel slave to the slaveholder’s tool, and arguing that where the “wealth” of only the owner is at stake, “there is no mutuall societie or parte no law or pleading betwixt thone and thother.”48 To illustrate the instrumental status of the enslaved, Smith mentions the carpenter’s saw, chisel, or gouge and the husbandman’s plow, cart, horse, or ass, all familiar, local English implements and animals. In the passage just cited, by contrast, Smith goes to ancient Roman latifundia for an example of a multitude of living bondmen. England, it is implied (and later affirmed at some length), has no slaves.49 Smith next reproduces Aristotle’s motivated



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slippage—mainstay of antityrannicism—between chattel and political slavery, substituting early modern barbarous Turks for Persians or Asians, as is customary at this time.50 Having established the lack of mutual society between lord and slave, Smith goes on to discuss the Turkish prince, who, if he actually considers his subjects to be “his bondmen and slaves,” rules not a commonwealth but rather “an infinite number of slaves or bondmen among whom there is no right, law nor common compact, but onely the will of the Lords and segnior.” “Sure,” he concludes, “none of the olde Greekes would call this fashion of government . . . politei¢an.”51 Written before the radicalism sparked by French religious conflicts, Smith’s restrained critique of political slavery is an instance of the antityrannicism Bodin seeks to undercut in République, or so I would like to propose. This aim is not immediately obvious, since Bodin sometimes discusses tyranny in conventional terms and also occasionally appeals to antityranny discourse to defend liberty. Bodin’s theorization of monarchy, however, fundamentally revisions Aristotle’s conception of despotic or tyrannous rule, integral to antityranny discourse. More specifically, Bodin challenges Aristotle’s theorization of political slavery by introducing a tripartite schematization of monarchical rule.52 There are three forms of monarchy, Bodin argues: lordly, royal, and tyrannical. Bodin not only mentions lordly monarchy first but regards it as the first form to appear in human history. Everyone knows, he says, that monarchy first arose in Assyria with Nimrod, who initially reduced freeborn people to servitude. The world was soon thereafter populated with slaves, Bodin goes on, which is why the Hebrew Scriptures refer to the subjects of Assyrian and Egyptian kings as slaves, and why the Greeks call themselves free as opposed to enslaved barbarians.53 Bodin claims that the lordly monarch becomes “lord of the goods and persons of his subjects, by law of armes and lawfull warre; governing them as the master of a familie doth his slaves.” Under royal monarchy, by contrast, the monarch obeys the laws of nature, while subjects, who obey the monarch’s laws, enjoy “their naturall libertie, and proprietie of their goods.” Finally, under tyrannical monarchy, the ruler disregards both natural and international law and “imperiously abuseth the persons of his free borne subjects, and their goods as his owne” (2.2.199–200). In Bodin’s account, as in Aristotle’s, chattel and political slavery are conflated. If Bodin wants to undermine antityrannicism, why does he retain this overdetermined usage, together with a fairly conventional view of tyranny? Bodin criticizes Aristotle’s far from tidy classification of five forms of royal rule by pointing out various inconsistencies. His critique is not disinterested, however, as he sharply protests the lack of clear demarcation

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between magistrates and kings, taking special issue with Aristotle’s definition of a king, said to be one “who chosen by the people, raigneth according to the desire of them his subjects: from whose will (as hee in another place saith) if he never so little depart, he becommeth a tyrant” (2.3.206). Though citing book 3 of Politics, where Aristotle theorizes despotic rule, Bodin does not indicate which passage he has in mind, no doubt because this is a tendentious epitome of Aristotle’s defective, despotic rule. Bodin continues, in a passage elucidating what is at stake: Which his description is not only without reason, but also daungerous: for that soveraigne power which he said to bee most proper unto a king, must so needs fall, if the king could nothing command against the liking and good will of his subjects; but must to the contrarie be constrained to receive lawes of them. In briefe it should be lawfull for the people to do all things; and the most just and best kings should so be accounted for tyrants: neither were a king to be reputed of any thing else, than as of a meane magistrat, unto whome power were to bee given, and againe taken away at the peoples pleasure. Which are all things impossible, and no lesse absurd also, than is that which the same Aristotle saith, That they are barbarous people, where their kings come by succession. (2.3.206)

Aristotle’s conceptualization of despotic rule as arbitrary rule by a single person or collective whose self-interest outweighs the good of the polity— and who thereby rules as the master does the enslaved—is recast as a theory of radical popular sovereignty leading to irresponsible lawlessness and anarchic change. In the passage following, Bodin continues to deride Aristotle’s view of barbarism, taking particular offense at its disparagement of Asians, Persians, and Egyptians, “from whom all humanitie, courtesie, learning, knowledge, and the whole source and fountain of good laws and Commonweales have sprung: and so at last,” he remarks sarcastically, “none but Aristotle with some handfull of Greekes should bee free from barbarisme”—a point Robert Filmer echoes by claiming that Aristotle “reckoned all the world barbarians except the Grecians.”54 This unusual valuation of those the Greeks deem barbarians provides a major clue to Bodin’s strategy (adopted by Filmer and Hobbes), which is to neutralize the negative connotations of both absolute monarchy and political slavery. His account of monarchy’s origin in Nimrod, for example, seems to collapse chattel and political slavery, but not in order to stigmatize those who are politically enslaved, as antityranny discourses do. On the contrary,



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Bodin mitigates the servility of Nimrod’s subjects—of lordly monarchy’s subjects generally, whether Asian, Persian, or Turkish—by explaining that they are enslaved because they have submitted to their victor’s greater force, thus making their servitude in some sense voluntary. Although Bodin accepts Aristotle’s view of the greater feistiness of Europeans, he translates it into the proposition that they are superior warriors, and thus less likely to be defeated or to submit militarily (2.2.202). Despite his repeated claim that not the acquisition but the exercise of monarchical power is important, in the case of lordly monarchy the means of acquisition matters. The lordly monarch, as Bodin puts it in the definition already cited, comes to power “by law of armes and lawfull warre; governing them as the master of a familie doth his slaves.” This definition encapsulates Bodin’s strategic neutralization of Aristotle’s despotical rule. If a ruler acquires his position by force, it is not surprising that he rules his people as the master does his slaves. What is objectionable in that? To quell any anxieties, Bodin explains: But yet here might some man doubt whether the lordly Monarchie be not a Tyranny, considering that it seemeth to be directly against the law of nature, which reserveth unto everie man his libertie, and the sov­ eraigntie over his owne goods. Wherunto I aunswere, that of auntient time it was indeed against the law of nature to make free men slaves, and to possesse himself of other mens goods: but if the consent of all nations will, that that which is gotten by just warre should bee the conquerours owne, and that the vanquished should be slaves unto the victorious, as a man cannot well say that a Monarchie so established is tyrannicall: seeing also wee read that Jacob the Patriarch, by his testament leaving unto his children certain lands that hee had gotten, said that it was his owne, for that he had got it by force of armes. . . . For otherwise, if we will mingle and confound the Lordly Monarchie, with the tyrannicall estate, we must confesse that there is no difference in warres, betwixt the just enemie and the robber; betwixt a lawfull prince and a theefe; betwixt warres justly denounced, and unjust and violent force. (2.2.203–4)

Bodin’s defense of lordly monarchy is ingenious, and makes this passage central to later theorists. Basically, Bodin transfers the defense of chattel slavery offered by Roman jurisprudence—which posits an original human freedom that nations have agreed to violate by enslaving war captives as chattel—to civil society, where it rationalizes the lordly ruler’s treatment of his justly vanquished subjects as political servants or “slaves.” An erudite

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legal theorist, Bodin cautiously avoids referring to Roman war slavery doctrine and jus gentium, which are tied too closely to chattel slavery, instead quickly shifting to Hebrew precedents in order to justify including conquered lands as spoils of just war. As a result of this focus on national servitude, Bodin can differentiate lordly monarchy, the result of warfare, from tyrannous violence. In effect, Bodin transforms the time-honored bipolarity of good and tyrannous rule into one between lordly and royal monarchy on the one hand and tyranny on the other. Bodin’s revisioning of Aristotle has many implications. In stressing lordly monarchy’s lawfulness—it comes into being through “law of armes and lawfull warre”—Bodin minimizes differences between royal and lordly monarchy. Granted, subjects of a royal monarch are “free”—that is, able to exercise ownership of their persons and property. In theory, however, the royal monarch can claim ownership, which differs from the lordly monarch’s only in that it is not exercised, at least ordinarily. Bodin’s partnering of lordly and royal monarchy has the effect of blurring the boundaries of absolutism, which can be a feature of lordly or royal monarchy and yet is inoffensive in neither. We can see how little separates the two by checking out the list of nations Bodin considers ruled by an “absolute Soveraigne”: “the true Monarques of Fraunce, of Spain, of England, Scotland, Turkie, Moschovie, Tartarie, Persia, Aethiopia, India, and of almost all the kingdoms of Affricke, and Asia, where the kings themselves have the soveraigntie without all doubt or question; not divided with their subjects” (2.5.222). Only the first-named European nations are not included in Bodin’s earlier discussion of lordly monarchy. Bodin’s tripartite schema rescues absolute monarchy from its barbarization in antityrannicism. Though Bodin does not transcend the Eurocentrism of his time, he does challenge some biases inherited from ancient Greece and Rome. What opponents of absolutism deride as barbarous pomposity and idolatrous self-deification, for example, Bodin regards more sympathetically as majesty, which, though greater in a lordly monarchy, is indispensable to absolute royal monarchy as well. In any case, the subjects of an absolute monarch, whether lordly or royal, have no jurisdiction over their sovereign. Bodin is clear that it is unlawful for them “to attempt any thing either by way of fact, or of justice against the honor, life, or dignitie of the soveraigne: albeit that he had committed all the wickednes, impietie, and crueltie that could be spoken” (2.5.222). Further, both the royal and the lordly monarch are properly kings, whereas the tyrant is the antithesis of the true king. Minor deviations from ideal, kingly rule should not be confused with full-blown tyranny, because, in reality, Bodin insists, most mon-



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archs with tyrannous tendencies will be a mixture of bad and good. In the same vein, he pronounces the name king to be sacred, and has harsh words for interpreters who sloppily mix “these two incompatible words together, a King a Tyrant: which so dangerous a doctrine hath bene the cause of the utter ruine and overthrow of many most mightie empires, and kingdoms” (2.5.220). To summarize, in differentiating lordly, royal, and tyrannical monarchy, Bodin accepts the crucial polarity between freedom and slavery; he also uses the slavery and tyranny topos in ways that at first glance appear compatible with antityrannicism. Yet Bodin greatly reduces the significance of the polarity free/enslaved in order to temper antityranny’s barbarization of absolute monarchy. He does this, first, by attributing the status of the lordly monarch’s subjects as “slaves” to their defeat in a just war rather than to natural servility; second, by criticizing Aristotle for his pejorative views of Asiatics; and, third, by making absolute sovereignty applicable to both the lordly and royal monarch. As a consequence of this revisioning, absolute royal and lordly monarchy (both usually considered tyrannous in antityranny ideology) are not all that different. Together, royal and lordly monarchy are contrasted with the unbridled evil of true tyranny, which, in reality, rarely appears. If a tyrant does emerge, Bodin argues, only a foreigner can lawfully contest the power of a tyrannous absolute sovereign. When it comes down to it, the freeborn subject is no more free lawfully to resist the absolute sovereign than is the servile subject of the lordly monarch. Smith (who died in 1577, a year after the first French edition of République) would likely have been irked by Bodin’s inclusion of England in the list of nations ruled by an absolute sovereign. Smith opens chapter 8, on the “Absolute King,” by critiquing a rendering of Greek terms that weakens antityranny’s disparagement of absolute power. Absolute power, Smith argues, is dangerous to those ruled and to the ruler, who is likely to become insolently swollen with pride. Smith accepts the basic antityranny principle that absolute power leads to tyranny, paraphrases Otanes’s portrait of the tyrant, and concludes by pointedly leaving the French language out of the antityranny tradition to which England proudly belongs. “In Greeke, Latine, and English a tyrant is counted he, who is an evill king, & who hath no regard to the wealth of his people, but seeketh onely to magnifie himself and his, and to satisfie his vicious and cruell appetite, without respect of God, of right or of the law: because that for the most part they who have had that absolute power have beene such.”55 In the preceding chapter, Smith writes disapprovingly of the change in France from a law-abiding “administration royall” to the present “absolute and tyrannicall power and government.”56

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Aristotle argues that the household master’s relation to his slave does not qualify as a model for rule over citizens in a polis for two reasons: first, it is a relation between free and unfree, and, second, it is oriented primarily toward the good of the ruler rather than of the ruled. In his definition of a commonwealth, Smith affirms both these propositions in order to maintain a pejorative view of absolutism. When discussing England’s fourth estate, the category of person who is ruled but does not actively rule, Smith mentions “day laborers, poor husbandmen, yea marchantes or retailers which have no free lande, copiholders, and all artificers, as Taylers, Shoomakers, Carpenters, Brickemakers, Brickelayers, Masons, etc.” For Smith, such people contribute to the commonwealth by holding local offices even if they generally have “no voice nor authoritie.”57 Even the qualified freedom of Smith’s English “free men” is not, then, entirely abstract. Like other early modern theorists, Smith represents both slave master and tyrant as someone involved “only” in individual self-interest. Smith does not, however, present a complementary idealization of the good ruler devoted exclusively to the common good. Later in the treatise, speaking of primitive times, Smith explains how the father, who eventually became “an absolute and perfect king” over the villages and cities who consented to be ruled by him, was initially honored by his offspring, whom he loved and nourished as from his own body; “ech paine put upon them,” Smith says, “he tooke as put upon himselfe.”58 But those days are past. In chap­ter 7, when defining the king and the tyrant, Smith offers a remarkably sober definition of the single ruler who “doth administer the common wealth by the laws of the same and equitie, and doth seeke the profit of the people as much as his owne.”59 Smith suggests a balance between the ruler’s selfinterest and dedication to the public good that is closer to Aristotle’s discussion of the master/slave relation in Nicomachean Ethics than to that in Politics. Such a moderate royalism may be uninspiring, but Smith employs enough antityranny ideology to ensure that limited monarchy cannot be mistaken for either lordly or tyrannous rule.

Resistance How is slave resistance represented, if at all? And what of resistance on the part of indigenous Americans? These questions deserve much more attention than they will be given here. John Christopherson (who appears as a playwright in the next chapter) treats slave insurgency as one reprehensible example of needless tumult in An exhortation to all menne to take hede and beware of rebellion, which associates slavery with poverty. Christopherson



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uses Orosius’s account of two Sicilian slave wars of the second century BCE to claim that the slaves rebelled to win their liberty (a suspect term) and to become rich. The ensuing death of many thousands demonstrates the pointlessness of rebellion motivated by poverty, which, if willingly accepted, brings spiritual health, Christopherson counsels.60 Later Christopherson pronounces the Protestant doctrine permitting divorce on spiritual grounds to be the work of Satan. If this “liberty” were to be granted, “it would pitie anye good mans hart,” he says, to imagine the resulting “disorder & disobedience.” Surely, Christopherson gloomily predicts, servants would try to control their masters, children their parents, wives their husbands, and subjects their magistrates.61 Generally speaking, early modern resistance theorists tend to avoid discussion of slave insurgency, with which they would not want their own, legitimate acts of protest and revolt to be compared. Adopting the distancing devices used in the antityrannicism of their Greco-Roman forebears, freeborn citizens threatened with figurative slavery confidently disidentify with the living, breathing women, men, and children who were in the past or are at present enslaved. A common approach is to mention legal rights that even ancient slaves enjoyed, the implication being that the rights of “free” citizens must a fortiori be beyond question. An influential version of this analogy appears in Theodore Beza’s Du Droit Des Magistrates (1574). Declaring that the obligations of a subject to his ruler are not greater than those of a child to his father, a slave to his master, or a freedman to his patron, Beza introduces a famous passage from De Officiis where Cicero poses the question of a son’s responsibility to the state vis-à-vis a treasonous father. Should the son remain silent? Cicero asks, before elaborating an unambiguous “no.” If his father cannot reasonably be dissuaded from his treasonous course, Cicero advises, then the son has a responsibility to report his father, even if it means placing his father’s life at stake.62 Cicero’s counsel is often appropriated in the form of the severe early modern dictate that resistance against tyranny is a duty. Beza, though, goes on to argue that, like sons, slaves have stronger ties to the state than to masters, first claiming that Roman law freed a slave whose master did not provide for him and then that a slave was also entitled to denounce a treasonous master. “And who is more culpable of treason,” Beza asks rhetorically, “than a tyrant openly violating all law human and divine?”63 This quicksilver, polemical shift from negligent slave master to tyrant is typical of the value early modern disputants, like their classical models, place on the political arena as the citizenry’s preserve. The rights of slaves in ancient Rome are not of intrinsic interest. Slaves

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and freedmen are invoked to reject the belief that different hierarchical relations are symmetrical or, more often, patriarchal absolutism’s tenet that the son’s obligation to obey his father, like the subject’s to the ruler, is beyond challenge. In this spirit, Vindiciae follows Beza by granting both sons and slaves a degree of legal independence from their hierarchical superiors. Vindiciae denies that fathers in civilized countries any longer enjoy unlimited powers over their children—the very powers Bodin would like to reinstate—instancing the often-mentioned Emperor Hadrian’s banishment of a father who had murdered his son as proof that in imperial Rome fathers did not enjoy immunity from prosecution. Citing specific sections of the Digest, Vindiciae follows Beza in mentioning legal protections slaves had against the neglect or abuse of their masters (108–9). The point, however, is polemically to magnify the outrageous culpability of the ruler who fails to act as a nurturing father. If even slaves had some protection against mistreatment, how much more appalling is the condition of free subjects who are mercilessly slaughtered by their ruler, as has just occurred in the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre. Ancient Greek and Roman codes of honor continue to offer imaginatively captivating representations of spirited resistance against political slavery and its contrary, political servility. Whether acquired through habituation to subjection or through natural proclivities, which can be individual, communal, or national, servility is associated with dishonor, cowardice, and effeminacy. Above all, servility is linked with susceptibility to the coercion that liberty naturally, spiritedly resists but to which it ought not in any case be subjected. Coercive force is most evident when employed by the state and directed against religious practices. But liberty is associated with freedom from coercion in numerous other contexts, as well. In the passage cited earlier, for example, Montaigne shows how habituation to custom’s authoritarian, eventually tyrannous, regime results in timorous quailing; liberty is lost and custom takes over, not in the least concerned if the opinions and actions it dictates violate nature. Humanists generally present independent, rational inquiry as signifier as well as guarantor of liberty, the servile counterpart of which is blind obedience to authority or custom. In his treatise on resistance, Buchanan, expatiating on the “tyranny of habit” (consuetudinis tyrannis), asks his interlocutor to reflect on the many occasions where “in accordance with reason you have abandoned the inveterate customs of so many centuries, and have thus been able to learn from your personal experiences that no path is more strewn with dangers than that public highway which they bid us follow. Look closely at that



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road, I beg you; how much destruction, how much carnage you will see on it!” (Dialogue, 109). By this criterion, inhabitants of societies generally considered prepolitical are deemed uniformly servile and likely to be engaged in destructive practices. The very act of situating such societies in an ahistorical, precivil state ensures that reason’s liberatory insights are perceived to be unavailable. In Thomas Hackett’s dedicatory epistle to Sir Henry Sidney, which introduces André Thevet’s The new found worlde (Englished, 1568), Hackett commends the inventors of “Artes and Sciences wherewith mankind is beautified and adorned, without the which giftes he were but naked, barbarous and brutish, yea and a servile creature.”64 The implication that inhabi­ tants of the New World illustrate this desolate, privative condition informs much literature on the Americas and Africa, and affects the common use of “custom” for ethnographic description of practices that are regarded as “barbarous and brutish.” Understood as that which has not been subjected to enlightened critique, custom is explicitly linked with bestiality in William Cunningham’s The cosmographical glasse (1559). Humankind enacts its likeness to God when producing “Science, and Knowledge,” Cunningham says, since it differentiates itself from beasts, who remain “in all things ignorant, except in such as ther senses and custome teach them.” Cunningham describes the Irish as “sauvage, wilde, & beastly,” and “given to sorcerie, superstition, & witchcraft.” Africans are “blacke, Sauvage, Monstrous, & rude,” yet thanks to European influence, “where the Spaniardes, Portugalles, Italians, & other do frequent, the people are sumwhat more civill, modest, & reasonable.”65 Montaigne adopts his culture’s practice of projecting the Americas into an earlier historical era, but is unusually sensitive to indigeneity’s association with barbarism and servility. In “Des cannibales” (“Of the Caniballes”), after presenting an idealized account of the absence of female rivalry in Brazilian polygamous marriages—which he compares with eminent polygamous marriages in the Hebrew Bible—Montaigne adds, in defense of Amerindigenes: And least a man should thinke that all this is done by a simple and servile or awefull dutie unto their custome, and by the impression of their ancient customes authoritie, without discourse or judgement, and because they are so blockish and dull-spirited, that they can take no other resolution, it is not amisse we alleage some evidence of their sufficiencie.66

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The evidence Montaigne brings forward proves a verse he cites to be “altogether Anacreontike”; this, together with signs that their language has other affinities with Greek, wittily shows that they are not literally barbaric in the sense of non-Greek-speaking.67 Yet Montaigne’s very defense reveals how deeply engrained at this time are associations between, on the one hand, rational critique, civility, and liberty and, on the other, acceptance of custom’s authority, barbarism, and servility. Equally unconventional is Montaigne’s depiction of Amerindigenes’ active resistance to Spanish military conquest as not only surpassingly courageous but honorable because it gives preservation of liberty priority over mere life—as, in short, heroic by familiar Greek and Roman standards, a point underscored by numerous comparisons with ancient heroes. In “Des coches” (“Of Coaches”), Montaigne imagines thousands of men, women, and children time and again facing overwhelming, life-endangering dangers “for the defense of their Gods and liberty [ pour la défense de leurs dieux et de leur liberté].” They would, he says, “more willingly [ plus volontiers]” endure death itself than “basely to yeelde unto their domination, of whom they have so abhominably beene abused.”68 Their willingness to sacrifice life for the sake of their community’s “liberty” and to endure death rather than shameful submission (shamefulness owing to the Spaniards’ dishonorable behavior) makes them exemplars of the ancient Greek spiritedness La Boétie extols. Montaigne’s reconstruction of Spanish conquest is a moving, imaginative alternative to representations such as Ponet’s that sentimentalize Amerindigenes’ death-doomed passage to oblivion. Of course, self-sacrifice for the sake of embattled, collective freedom is not the same as ritual human sacrifice, which, together with cannibalism, is habitually offered as proof of Amerindigenes’ savagery and, hence, their location in an antecedent, privative age. Indirectly, many early modern references to cannibalism frame it as a right of war—the victors’ power of killing or sparing—that Amerindigenes have turned into an unnatural, barbarous rite. Rather than enslaving those who are vanquished, which requires that victors civilly forbear—as Grotius later puts it, drawing on Roman war slavery doctrine—taking their lives, victorious Amerindigenes not only kill but also ingest their captives, thereby outrageously lumping human animals, nonhuman animals, and vegetable life together.69 In “Of the Caniballes,” Montaigne rewrites this ideological construction of New World practices, crucial to the rationalization of transatlantic slavery. Montaigne tempers, or ironizes, the horror cannibalism usually provokes by comparing it favorably to the ingestion of living human flesh that occurred in France’s recent religious wars. Further, he patterns the invin-



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cible courage of Amerindigenes on classical antiquity’s idealization of fortitude in the face of imminent, certain death; stresses the disinterestedness of Amerindigenous warfare (motivated by sheer commitment to honor, not by territorial or material gain); and, most important, presents it as a victimless ritual: those who are killed and ingested voluntarily elect this fate over ignominious surrender, nobly choosing death over dishonor. Montaigne, it could be said, reimagines cannibalism both as a noble preference for physical death over cowardice and as a meaningful, nonexploitative alternative to slavery. In doing so, however, he has no more intention of condoning cannibalism than his teacher Buchanan does human sacrifice, reimagined in his drama Iephthes, to which we now turn.

chapter three

Human Sacrifice, Barbarism, and Buchanan’s Jephtha

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ention his name and you’ll be met with blank stares. Jephtha is virtually unknown these days. In early modern Europe, by contrast, he was a well-known military commander honored in Christianity’s New Testament as well as the central figure of a conflictual scene of human sacrifice narrated in the book of Judges. One of ancient Israel’s judges, Jephtha was also a representative of Israel’s premonarchical mode of self-governance, which, especially for Dutch and English varieties of republicanism, had something of republican Rome’s simplicity and primitive vigor. Grotius mentions Jephtha in his discussion of the just war, of which the war Jeph­tha successfully wages against the Ammonites is, for Grotius, a model.1 Jeph­ tha’s unsuccessful attempt to negotiate peace—he deploys messengers to tell the king of the Ammonites that the land is rightfully Israel’s—is believed to establish the justice of Israel’s claim to the disputed territory. Its justice receives the indisputable seal of divine approval when “the Spirit of the Lord came upon Jephthah” as he journeys unto the children of Ammon to subdue them (Judges 11:29).2 In Milton’s Samson Agonistes, Jephtha’s verbal and military defense of Israel’s rights are equally praised.3 Jephtha is much more central to Locke, who gives him two different roles. In the First Treatise, Locke introduces Jephtha, an illegitimate son who wheels and deals his way into becoming Israel’s ruler, to rebut Filmer’s dictum that patriarchal rule is hereditary.4 In the Second Treatise, Jephtha’s military action against an unjust aggressor represents a determination— given the absence of a relevant, earthly sovereign empowered to adjudicate between Israel and the Ammonites—to entrust affairs to the Supreme Judge. Since Locke assumes (a common assumption) that conflicts between states lack any arbiter, representatives of Western European states who believe themselves justly aggrieved are all potentially in the situation of Jephtha. In 92



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the like absence of a legitimate civil sovereign, Locke asserts, anyone may arrive at such a decision.5 So thoroughly does Jephtha’s predicament serve as an emblem of that suffered by an individual or people without benefit of due judicial process that variants of “he was forced to appeal to Heaven”— referring to Jephtha’s messengers’ words, “The Lord the Judge be judge this day between the Children of Israel and the Children of Ammon” (Judges 11:27)—come to represent, in a kind of shorthand, the right of armed resistance. Although in earlier chapters of the Second Treatise, the relevant context is, arguably, colonialist as well as political, in later chapters the phrase accrues a distinct antityranny ring; an “appeal to Heaven” sanctions the military resistance that may have to be taken up against a magistrate who has, in effect, ceased to rule, thereby becoming a tyrant.6 In Leviathan, Hobbes also refers to Jephtha, but not as the inspired military general admired by Grotius and Locke. Hobbes introduces Jephtha to support his claim that “nothing the Soveraign Representative can doe to a Subject, on what pretence soever, can properly be called Injustice or Injury.” The “Soveraign Representative” may, for example, exercise the power of life and death over a subject innocent of wrongdoing, Hobbes says, “and yet neither doe the other wrong: As when Jeptha caused his daughter to be sacrificed.”7 Like Filmer, though in his own contractualist fashion, Hobbes identifies the father’s sovereignty with the monarch’s, so that Jephtha’s taking of his daughter’s life represents sovereignty’s essentially suprajuridical, discretionary character. Remarkably, Hobbes does not mention Jephtha’s vow, though in Judges and for both Judaic and Christian commentators over the centuries, it is this vow that leads Jephtha to sacrifice his daughter. In selecting this scriptural story to illustrate the absoluteness of sovereign power, Hobbes is being more than usually provocative. Yet just how provocative can be grasped only in the context of the unanimity with which early modern commentators condemn the rashness of Jephtha’s vow and its fulfillment. Even when, in an alternative interpretation, it is denied that literal sacrifice occurs, the rashness of Jephtha’s vow is censured and the unspeakable horror of human sacrifice—derogatory to both Jephtha and God—is assumed. Initially sparked by Hobbes’s and Locke’s allusions, my interest in Jeph­ tha increased when I learned that George Buchanan’s tragedy Iephthes sive votum (Jephtha or the vow), first published in 1554, is today considered the product of his earlier, largely aesthetic rather than political, commitments. Since my own reading of it had suggested otherwise, I began to wonder if historians of early modern political philosophy and literary critics were not placing undue weight on political treatises for evidence of political

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radicalism. Buchanan is now best remembered as the author of the 1579 radical treatise A dialogue on the law of kingship among the Scots. During his lifetime and well into the seventeenth century, however, Buchanan was also widely regarded as Western Europe’s preeminent neo-Latin poet. Buchanan’s translations of Medea and Alcestis establish his expertise in both Greek and Latin, but even without them his immersion in Greek literature would be evident. Like the sixteenth-century French and English authors discussed in the last chapter, Buchanan draws on both Greek and Roman antityranny figures, histories, and texts. Buchanan self-consciously models Iephthes on Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis, the drama from which Aristotle quotes in the opening passages of Politics when introducing his overdetermined doctrine of natural, political slavery. Barbarians, Aristotle claims, do not distinguish between women and slaves “because there is no natural ruler among them: they are a community of slaves, male and female. That is why the poets say—it is meet that Hellenes should rule over barbarians—as if they thought that the barbarian and the slave were by nature one” (1252b5–10).8 The words Aristotle attributes to the poets are spoken by Euripides’s Iphigenia, who continues, “For they are slaves and we are free” (1400–1402).9 In the context Euripides creates for Iphigenia’s speech, these lines are both exultantly high-minded and terribly ironic. Not only is Iphigenia a young Greek woman unable to exercise the privileges available to a free Greek man but the slaughter to which Agamemnon consigns his daughter is also conventionally barbaric. Such ironies do not, of course, suit Aristotle’s purpose, which is to map the polarity Hellenes/barbarians onto that between free men/slaves, both chattel and political. As we will see, Buchanan remaps this polarity onto that between God’s chosen people, the Israelites, and the idolatrous Ammonites, though he also transposes many of Euripides’s ironies. For early modern humanists indebted to the Greco-Roman literature with which Hebraic and Christian traditions have been assimilated, human sacrifice was practiced only by barbarians or idolaters. In colonialist literature, both barbarism and idolatry were regularly invoked in discussions of the ritual human sacrifice associated with indigenous societies. Often regarded as a by-product of human sacrifice, anthropophagy—the Greek term for what Euro-colonialism, following Columbus’s lead, calls “cannibalism”—did not occur only outside European Christendom, however.10 For Protestantism, debates about the Eucharist provided an opportunity to stage a righteous revulsion against anthropophagy as a barbarous feature of Roman Catholic worship. Questions about the status of the sacramental body and blood that European Christians ritually consume were thus posed



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within a transhistorical and transnational arena. In this charged yet capacious context, what did humanists make of Jephtha, the military leader of Judges 11 who ritually sacrifices his only daughter?11 In the early modern period, Jephtha’s sacrifice of his daughter was the subject of works ranging from learned biblical commentaries and the high-cultural tragedies discussed here to the ballad cited by Shakespeare’s Hamlet.12 Later, Joost van den Vondel responds to Buchanan’s drama in Jeph­ tha of Offerbelofte (1659) (Jepthah or the Sacrifice-Vow)—a drama to be discussed here—which in turn is the model for George Handel’s oratorio Jeph­tha (1752). The bloodcurdling tension and gendered, intergenerational conflict created by Jephtha’s vow became a means of exploring ideologically freighted interrelations between New and Old Worlds, public and domestic realms, as well as among military, political, parental, and religious modes of power. Las Casas refers to Jephtha’s sacrifice of his daughter when he defends Amerindigenes against the charge of engaging in unnatural behavior, viewing their sacrifice of human beings as an innocent, pious error, while Francisco de Vitoria more conventionally condemns Jephtha’s vow and sacrifice, thus furthering his argument that both anthropophagy and human sacrifice violate natural law and, because injurious to their victims, may legitimate warfare against their Amerindigenous practitioners.13 Despite the Christian perspective, in none of the dramas featuring Jeph­ tha studied here are resolutions sought in a reductive anti-Judaism. On the contrary, all are engaged in the humanist project of appropriating classical forms so as to dignify biblical subjects, making every effort to remain faithful to the Hebrew text and historical context as well as to classical models. At the same time, the belief that Jephtha and Agamemnon were basically contemporaneous creates considerable distance between the Hebrew-patterned-onGreek protagonist and these early modern texts, a distance that projects both the Hebrew narrative and its Greek counterpart back onto a much earlier, pre-Christian era. Indeed, their awareness that Euripides wrote at a critical distance from the prehistorical episode involving Agamemnon and Iphigenia may even have suggested an analogy between classical Athenian and their own, Christian representations of archaic societies. In following Euripides’s drama so closely, Buchanan, especially, explores the possibility that human sacrifice is a universal if archaic practice, which, when involuntary, is reprehensibly barbaric—a position later explicitly affirmed by Bodin in République. Yet Buchanan also suggests that when voluntary, sacrifice of life for the common good may unite the best in scriptural and Greco-Roman traditions. Buchanan’s one other original drama, Baptistes, was translated into

yes

yes

yes

yes

Sacrifice associated with impiety

yes

yes

Sacrifice associated with barbarism

yes

Mother tries to dissuade father from sacrifice

yes

Father’s determination to sacrifice associated with military milieu

yes

yes

yes

yes

yes

Priest and other counselors try to dissuade father from sacrifice

yes

yes

Father deceives mother about impending sacrifice

yes

Daughter initially protests her sacrifice

Daughter immediately consents to her sacrifice

Dialogue employs stichomythia

yes

yes

Initial dialogue between father and daughter hints at or reveals forthcoming sacrifice

Iphis

judge

Iphigenia

king

Daughter receives name

judge

yes

Father is ruler at time of sacrifice

yes

Buchanan

yes

yes

Father is or has been military commander

Euripides

Father delivers people from national “slavery”

Judges

Attribute

t a b l e 1 . Schematic overview of connections among Judges, Euripides, Buchanan, Christopherson, and Vondel

yes

yes

yes

yes

king

yes

Christopherson

n/a

yes

yes

yes

yes

yes

n/a

n/a

n/a

Ifis

judge

yes

yes

Vondel

yes yes yes yes yes

Daughter gives high-minded, patriotic speech in public arena before sacrifice

Daughter insists on voluntary nature of her sacrifice

Participants in ritual moved by wonder at heroine’s courage and magnanimity

Father weeps and covers face just before sacrifice

Father’s response is anticipated dramatically

Priest performs sacrifice

yes

yes

Daughter laments she has only one life to offer in sacrifice

yes

yes

Father performs sacrifice

yes

yes

Daughter reverses stand on sacrifice (1) in order to spare her parents conflict (2) for sake of nation

yes

Father offers to sacrifice himself

Father expresses conflict

yes

yes

yes

yes

yes

yes

yes

yes

yes

yes

yes

yes

yes

yes

yes

yes

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English and published as a text validating resistance against tyranny during the preliminary stages of the English Civil Wars in 1641. Not having been similarly conscripted, Iephthes is generally thought to be less politically engaged, though for decades after its publication in 1554, Buchanan’s tragedy was extraordinarily successful.14 What scholarship there is on this drama tends to foreground the topical issue of religious vows.15 This is hardly surprising, since Buchanan not only included vow in its subtitle but also, under examination by the Inquisition, mentioned Iephthes in connection with debates on vows.16 Discussion has been constrained, however, by the assumption that Buchanan does not expose his hero to serious criticism, an assumption I intend to challenge. In doing so, I shall emphasize features of Greco-Roman antityrannicism informing this early work, thereby bringing it closer to Baptistes and Dialogue. As I understand it, Buchanan’s Iephthes uses a civic humanist variant of antityranny ideology to critique Jephtha’s determination to sacrifice his daughter, thereby undermining an identification of paternal right with military power and political sovereignty as well as the notion that a political ruler stands in privileged association with the Deity. These are views that play a prominent role in later absolutist doctrines of sovereignty and that inform another play discussed in this chapter, John Christopherson’s nearly contemporaneous drama on Jephtha’s sacrifice.17 Although it has occasionally been mentioned in conjunction with Buchanan’s Iephthes, Christopherson’s play, originally in Greek, has not been examined alongside it, nor has the possibility been raised that these plays could be in dialogue with each other. (The range of dates editors have proposed for composition is quite close: between 1543 and 1547 for Christopherson’s, and between 1542 and 1545 for Buchanan’s.) There is no evidence that the two authors were acquainted, and at the time the plays were written, Christopherson was in England and Buchanan in France. It seems astonishing, however, that at roughly the same period Buchanan and Christopherson should choose precisely the same subject matter for a sacred drama on Jephtha they each model on Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis (hereafter Iphigenia). (For a schematic overview of the connections among Euripi­ des’s Iphigenia and the representations of Jephtha’s vow in Judges, Buchanan, Christopherson, and Vondel, see table 1.) One or both texts could conceivably have circulated in manuscript (Christopherson also produced a Latin version), and either drama could have been described by an acquaintance who had attended a performance or had read it. Although denominational and ideological differences were not as fixed or charged in the 1540s as they were later to become, had they known of each other, Christopherson and Buchanan certainly would have been aware of sharply conflicting values.



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(Christopherson, already a conservative Roman Catholic, became one of the chief figures behind the suppression of Protestantism under Queen Mary and notoriously played an official role in exhuming and burning the remains of Paul Fagius and Martin Bucer.)18 The purpose of this chapter, however, is not to advance a conjectural argument regarding an intertextual relationship between the two dramas, but rather to tease out the ideological implications of early modern interpretations of the Jephtha narrative. My primary interest is in demonstrating how, when read in conjunction with both Christopherson’s and Vondel’s plays, Buchanan’s representation of Jephtha’s plight articulates what emerges only later in polemical and theoretical texts as an opposition between militarized patriarchal absolutism and justifications of political resistance, the latter of which gives pride of place to the tyrant who can be resisted, not the father whose authority is beyond dispute. This suggestion may gain plausibility if it is recalled that at some point in the decade or so between Iephthes’s initial composition and its publication in 1554, La Boétie composed Discours de la servitude volontaire, and that La Boétie’s closest friend, Montaigne, was Buchanan’s student. As I have intimated, another interpretative context is the anxiety about ritual human sacrifice stimulated by European contact with Amerindigenes, which created a pressing need to differentiate among Christianity’s theologically central human sacrifice; the self-sacrifice for honor of ancient, pagan Greece and Rome; and the ritual practices of non-Christian, New World societies, which become constructed as prehistoric or archaic.

Barbarism, Sacrifice, and Civic Virtue In Judges 11, Jephtha, having recently agreed to become Israel’s military leader, sets sacrifice in motion just before initiating battle against the Ammonites, when he vows that in the event of victory, he will offer to the Lord as a burnt offering—literally, a holocaust—whoever (alternatively “whatever”) he sees coming out of his house upon his return. Coming home from battle, he is greeted by his only daughter, who is joyfully celebrating his victory. Jephtha rends his clothes upon seeing her, and, after he tells her in anguish of the vow he has made, she responds: “My father, if thou hast opened thy mouth unto the Lord, do to me according to that which hath proceeded out of thy mouth; forasmuch as the Lord hath taken vengeance for thee of thine enemies, even of the children of Ammon” (Judges 11:30–36). Jephtha grants her request to mourn her virginity before she dies by retiring with companions to the mountains for two months (37–38), and, when she returns,

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Jephtha “did with her according to his vow which he had vowed” (39). The episode ends by stating that the daughters of Israel will lament the fate of Jephtha’s daughter for four days each year (40). As can easily be imagined, this narrative has been the occasion of tense debate, the stakes of which are sharpened by the denunciations of child sacrifice in Leviticus 18:21, Deuteronomy 12:31, 2 Kings 17:17 and 17:31, and Jeremiah 19:5. (In Jeremiah, Baal is mentioned; in Leviticus, Moloch, god of the Ammonites.) That Jehovah may not always have abominated human sacrifice is a possibility that neither Jewish nor Christian commentators have been eager to entertain.19 Jephtha’s appearance among the roster of saints in Hebrews 11:32 complicates matters considerably. For early Christianity, a typological reading in which Jephtha’s sacrifice of his own flesh foreshadows the Father’s sacrifice of his Son proved the most satisfactory means of dealing with this episode, even though such a reading draws attention to the centrality of human sacrifice in Christian theology, a source of embarrassment to early Church Fathers. Because its heroine voluntarily sacrifices herself for the sake of her people, Euripides’s Iphigenia seems almost to have been written to provide a Greek model for Christian tragedies based on this Hebrew narrative. In all three of the plays discussed here, Jephtha’s daughter becomes a type of Christ by following in Iphigenia’s footsteps. Buchanan’s heroine, however, is significantly and consistently more like Euripides’s than are either Christopherson’s or Vondel’s, a singularity that indicates Buchanan’s willingness to embrace Greek political values in his drama. Buchanan’s privileging of Euripides’s text appears immediately in the way his presentation of the initial encounter between father and daughter differs from Christopherson’s. Both dramatists have Jephtha’s daughter greet her father just as Iphigenia does: lovingly, touchingly unaware of his dilemma, hints of which confusedly begin to appear in a dialogue self-consciously reminiscent of the Greek stichomythia. When Buchanan’s heroine finally learns what her father intends, like Iphigenia she at first protests against it—even appealing, as does Iphigenia, to memories of the physical intimacies of childhood. Only much later, in a sudden reversal patterned on Iphigenia’s—a reversal to which Aristotle draws attention in Poetics—does she heroically resolve to sacrifice herself. Christopherson, on the other hand, has Jephtha’s daughter immediately consent to her death without protest, as she does in Judges. Furthermore, although Christopherson, following the story in Judges, does not give Jephtha’s daughter a name, Buchanan provides her with “Iphis,” a derivative of “Iephtha,” which, as Sharratt and Walsh suggest, unmistakably brings her Greek counterpart to mind.20



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Vondel adopts a version of this innovative naming—Ifis—and many other features of Buchanan’s drama that are congenial to early modern republicanism. For both Buchanan and Vondel, the heroine’s self-sacrifice occurs in a dramatic context associating human sacrifice, barbarism, and tyranny. On the one hand, Buchanan and Vondel exploit Christian vocabulary and iconography, thereby associating the Iphigenia figure’s sacrificial death with that of the Son. On the other, within their dramas the primary beneficiary of this redemptive violence is, ironically, Jephtha himself. The young female protagonist of Buchanan and Vondel plays a heroic part that both emphasizes and then transforms the barbaric impiety of her father. As a result, although her death does permit the performance of Jephtha’s vow, it simultaneously undermines that performance’s religious rationale. In providing fulfillment as well as critique, Buchanan and Vondel are clearly indebted to Euripides, the stunning vitality of whose Iphigenia is communicated through sharply ironic perspectives and unexpected turns. Like Euripides’s tragedy, their dramas contrast the self-pitying recklessness of the father (Agamemnon, Jephtha) with the heroism of the daughter (Iphigenia, Iphis, and Ifis), a contrast that in Iephthes and Jephtha is overtly politicized by Jephtha’s transgression of law. Hoping to preserve her father’s honor through her heroism—like Iphigenia, Iphis is nothing if not father-identified—the self-sacrificing daughter, associated with the simpler interiority of the domestic realm, critiques the flawed representative of the public sphere. An ironic contrast between the paternal ruler’s absorption in his personal agony and his daughter’s consciousness of the public good thus becomes central to Buchanan’s drama and, to a lesser degree, Vondel’s. Euripides’s Iphigenia formulates her resolve to sacrifice herself by proclaiming that Greece now depends on her alone, since the voyage to Troy cannot take place without her sacrifice. Addressing Clytemnestra, she says, “You bore me for the common good of the Greeks, not for yourself alone,” and goes on to argue the injustice of sacrificing Achilles and other men in war if she, a comparatively worthless woman, is not willing to lay down her life to make possible the sacking of Troy (1385–91). Casting herself as liberator, Iphigenia clinches the defense of her determination to die with the grandly patriotic claim cited earlier: “It is right that the Greeks should rule barbarians, mother, and not barbarians Greeks. For they are slaves and we are free.” Because Iphigenia is the only character onstage who heroically articulates such public mindedness and whose actions have the potential to forge communal bonds, even if only in the displaced context of Euripides’s audience,21 with these words she provides the drama’s devastatingly ironic perspective

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on the petty-mindedness of the idle military figures who are stalled at Aulis without purpose or vision. What, then, is the public end for which her early modern sister, Jephtha’s daughter, dies? In the absence of an immediate social objective, the Christian Iphigenia’s self-sacrifice is imbued with Judaic and Christological conceptions of redemption. For Buchanan and Vondel, spiritual redemption merges with the Greco-Roman antityranny discourse introduced into the Judges narrative by Josephus, a first-century Hellenistic Jewish historian. Josephus uses this discourse to structure Israel’s relations with the Ammonites (“[H]e destroyed many cities, carried off spoil, and delivered his countrymen from a servitude which they had borne for eighteen years”) and again when commenting on Jephtha’s daughter’s assent to being sacrificed: “But she without displeasure learnt her destiny, to wit that she must die in return for her father’s victory and the liberation of her fellow-citizens.”22 Vondel’s Jephtha claims to have liberated Israel from eighteen years of enslavement,23 the exact figure Josephus employs, and in Buchanan’s prologue the Angel announces that Israel has been lying fearfully under the “yoke of slavery” (servitutis sub iugo) (6–9).24 Likewise, in the first choral ode of Buchanan’s play, the slave-like status of Israel (referred to as Isaac’s descendants) is repeatedly bemoaned. Their nation, meant to rule other nations, “endures unhappily the bonds of slavery under the barbarian” (servitii vincula barbari infelix patitur); its people have become “the property of Ammon” (manci­ pium sumus Ammonis) (155–56, 165–66). Indeed, in Buchanan’s Iephthes, Israel’s enslavement is viewed as a punishment for its repeated lapses into idolatry, lapses for which Iphis hopes her death will atone. In placing her community’s needs above those of her individual self, Buchanan’s Iphis is most like Euripides’s Iphigenia.25 Toward the end of her first exchange with her father, Iphis proposes paying “our vows,” the plural pronoun indicating her identification with her people (531); she even refers to Jephtha’s “children,” graciously sharing her familial status with the Hebrew women who attend her (552–53). Most important, Iphis regards her self-sacrifice as a ritual of communal expiation. Initially she presents it as expiation for the deaths of Israel’s enemies (1294–96). But in her final speech she prays that her blood will atone for Israel’s unfaithfulness: “I wish,” she says, emphasizing the insufficiency of her offering in her address to the divine father, “that I could shed this blood more often, and if the salvation of my parents and fellow citizens lies in me, I wish that I could turn the force of your fury and anger repeatedly on myself with a thousand deaths” (1419–23). In her very last words, addressed to the Priest, she claims that her death will free her people, her father, and herself (in this order)



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from her father’s vow (1427). In marked contrast to his daughter’s absorption of self into community, Jephtha first appears onstage in solitary communion with the Deity, communion he concludes by reaffirming the vow made before battle. This scene, entirely of Buchanan’s invention, underscores the individualized character of Jephtha’s vow, which does not get rethought even in the calm aftermath of victory. If compared with Euripides’s Agamemnon, Buchanan’s Jephtha is a man of his word, he is nevertheless equally incapable of considering the domestic impact of his decisions. For both military leaders, strategic forethought appears to be a precipitate solely of militarism. Buchanan also adopts Iphigenia’s closing structure. Having taken place offstage, the daughter’s sacrifice is reported to her mother by a messenger, whose representation of the event recalls the sacrifice of Euripides’s Poly­ xena as well as Iphigenia:26 the heroine’s suddenly enhanced beauty, virgin modesty, and bravery in the face of imminent death is heavily aestheticized. In addition, Buchanan’s Jephtha reproduces the gesture Agamemnon performs as Iphigenia enters the grove of Artemis, where she is to be slain. Agamemnon’s gesture—he turns his head away from his daughter, bursts into tears, and draws his robe before his eyes—had been memorialized in numerous visual representations and in the words of Cicero.27 Again imitating Euripides, Buchanan has foreshadowed this moment of grief-stricken rupture of the paternal gaze. Having joyfully come forth to greet her father, Iphis asks, “Why, father, do you turn your frowning eyes from me?” (498), and, after she learns that he intends to sacrifice her, she marks the same gesture: “Why do you avert your face?” (1226). Yet Buchanan’s representation of this dramatic gesture diverges from Euripides’s in one key way: Jephtha’s sudden emotion is linked to his recognition of the savagery he has initiated. This association is intimated a bit earlier in the drama when Jephtha responds to Iphis explaining the expiatory significance she gives her impending sacrifice, exclaiming, “My daughter, now at last to my grief I realize how foul, savage, and grim was the purpose I contrived in rashly orphaning myself of such an offspring” (1297–99). In this speech, Buchanan prepares his audience for Jephtha’s gestural selfexpression at the moment of actual sacrifice, while a bit earlier the process of growing self-critical consciousness is conveyed when in offering to sacrifice himself, Jephtha refers to “that impious sacred promise which I vowed against God’s wishes” (1240–41). Yet by contrast with Iphigenia, where Agamemnon’s final emotional crisis occurs before Iphigenia delivers her rousing last words, in Iephthes, Jephtha’s is positioned after Iphis’s concluding speech, to which it is a response.28

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Buchanan’s reordering magnifies the conceptual register of Jephtha’s gesture, which appears to be prompted not only by the imminence of his daughter’s death but also by her explication of its other-oriented significance. A privileging of hearing over sight, of verbal communication over ritual practice, is, of course, typical of Protestantism. As Buchanan presents it, Iphis’s speech effects what amounts to a conversion. The pattern introduced in the exchange just cited—Iphis’s eloquently expressed heroism followed by Jephtha’s self-condemnation—repeats itself in the climactic moment (conveyed by the messenger) in which Jephtha reproduces Agamemnon’s weeping and covering of his eyes: As she spoke these words, her father who for long had appeared bloodthirsty and more savage than a tigress, was suffused with tears and covered his eyes with his garment, and condemned both himself and his rash vow. The priest, overwhelmed with weeping, could scarcely loose the passage of her breath, and the hushed crowd was for long numb in sorrowful silence. (1428–34)

Because Buchanan’s text has nothing more to say about Jephtha’s experience, readers are free to speculate that Jephtha has passed from something like what Christianity conceives as the severity of the Old Law to the charity of the New, or that he has, by means of Iphis’s eloquent words, grasped the significance of human blood sacrifice when performed magnanimously, or that he has recognized, in a moment of anagnorisis, the enormity of his error and the tragic nature of Iphis’s death. In this remarkable passage, Buchanan makes Jephtha’s emotional demonstrativeness curiously metonymic, as if the transformation affects Jephtha’s bodily appearance. With dramatic compression and sudden, unexpected force, his gesture makes unmistakable the barbarous nature of Jephtha’s intransigence. Although the language of “savagery” appears throughout Buchanan’s drama, even modifying the harsh reversals of fortune or fate, it is applied with special consistency to Jephtha’s proposed sacrifice. Conversing with Iphis after the prologue, Storge, whose name in Greek suggests parental love and nurturance, recounts a dream of violence that has left her oppressed by foreboding: I saw a pack of wolves rushing at full speed with bloody, foaming, savage jaws, and raging with bent claws, dash pell-mell for the peace-loving flocks bereft of shepherds. Next the dog, faithful guardian of the fearful fold, drove off the wolves; and then returning to the weakling flock



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which was still half-dead in recollection of that trembling fear, it tore the shrinking lamb from my arms and mangled it with merciless teeth. (94–102)

Buchanan’s classically minded auditors would recognize the allusion to Hecuba (the first of Euripides’s dramas to be translated into Latin), which similarly opens with a prologue followed by Hecuba’s fearful ruminations about her dream: “For I saw a dappled hind being torn pitilessly from my lap and slaughtered by a wolf’s bloody jaw” (90–91).29 In Hecuba’s dream the “wolf” is Achilles’s ghost, which demands the sacrifice of her daughter Polyxena. In Storge’s more disturbing dream, the lamb’s life is taken by its protector rather than by the wolves that initially threaten it; having fended off the wolves’ attack, the dog returns to act out their savagery. As such, the dog anticipates Jephtha’s movement from the battlefield, where he successfully defends Israel’s territory, to his home, where he threatens his daughter’s life. Through the figure of the dog gone feral, Storge’s dream may offer an oblique and condensed representation of a Greco-Roman commonplace regarding single-person rule, namely, that without constraints the ruler may degenerate from protector of his people into a lawless, bloodthirsty tyrant. If so, Buchanan associates Jephtha’s radical alteration with his movement from the military to the domestic arena. Euripides’s Heracles may have provided Buchanan with a model for this transformation, as it features a martial hero who returns home from accomplishing feats abroad only to murder his children in a fit of madness.30 As Iphis comments, Jephtha displays a barely suppressed and uncharacteristic bellicosity when he returns home from war: “But now he is harsh, tetchy, grim, aggressive, still announcing on threatening face the disturbances of war” (554–56). And later, Jephtha refers first to his “madness” (dementiae), thus recalling the dog of Storge’s dream, and then to his “folly” (stultitiae) (1301–5). The narrator’s comparison of Jephtha to a “tigress” likewise complexly evokes Jephtha’s inexplicable movement from protector (evoked by the tiger’s femaleness) to predator, threatening to murder its own offspring. For Storge, the true nurturer, Jephtha’s resolve is a form of madness that violates natural law: “If you are so pricked with raging madness that you have thrown off the spirit of a parent to his children, allow a mother’s kindness at any rate to love what it is the greatest crime to fail to love, to preserve what it is the greatest sacrilege to destroy, what it is worse than any parricide to have willingly betrayed, what it is more monstrous than the savagery of beasts to slay with one’s own hand” (1192–99). Later in the

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same exchange she even prays that their nation might return to its former state of political “enslavement” under the Ammonites, enemies who would at least have spared Iphis a sacrilegious death: “The arrogance of a mad enemy would have raged less oppressively against us than the victory of your father” (1286–87). Albeit in abbreviated, figurative fashion, the language Buchanan uses to depict Jephtha’s transformation—from bloodthirsty, savage beast to weeping, veiled, self-condemned father—validates Storge’s perspective, if not her relentless indictment of her husband (which, like Clytemnestra’s, may by patriarchal norms seem improperly unrestrained). Indeed, when the Chorus reflects on the death awaiting Iphis, it, too, uses the language of savagery: In the spring of the first flower of her tender years, after being raised for splendid hopes, she is not seized and snatched away by enemy warfare after the capture of our land, nor will a grim contagion sent from heaven destroy her; but her father will slay her, and as victim she will stain the grim altar [ patrio sed mactatu / victima diras imbuet aras]. Set in the place of brute cattle, she will pour from her throat a warm wave of blood, her young limbs cut down by the steel—the limbs which no barbaric foe is to assail, and which the savagery of a mountain bear would not dare to rend with merciless teeth. (798–810)

By comparing the sacrifice with Iphis’s enslavement, or even rape, by Israel’s enemies—an alternative fate that could easily have been hers (and which Euripides’s Hecuba explores)—the Chorus further underscores its arbitrariness. Here and elsewhere, Buchanan graphically describes the moment of blood sacrifice so as to emphasize its brutality. In addition, as Peter Sharratt argues, the Latin word mactatu (slaying) constitutes an allusion to Lucretius’s famous condemnation of religious superstition, in which he contrasts the splendid marriage for which Iphigenia was destined with the grim murder suffered at her father’s hand.31 (Note that the Chorus assumes, as does Jephtha, that he himself will slay his daughter.) If blood sacrifice reduces Iphis to the status of an animal, the corollary, of course, is that it makes Jephtha monstrous. Monstrosity is an attribute of the tyrant in Buchanan’s Dialogue, because the tyrant, who chooses his own good over that of his people, refuses to be bound by human laws. Along with other humanists, Buchanan considers tyrants to be dangerous, subhuman beasts (most commonly likened to wolves) whose threat to humankind warrants strenuous opposition, even elimination. Iephthes has no interest



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in legitimizing armed resistance, yet clearly associates tyranny, wolves, savagery, and lawlessness. At issue in the play’s sophisticated debate between Jephtha and the Priest is the sovereignty of natural and divine law, which Jephtha arrogantly proposes to transgress: “How is it open to you,” the Priest pointedly asks Jephtha, “to carry through what our sacred mother nature forbids, what our love of kin struggles against, and what God loathes?” (863–66). While child sacrifice is abhorrent, the Priest claims that even the sacrifice of animals is not pleasing to their deity, who values inward purity alone (897–99), an observation that echoes Heliodorus’s Ethiopika, a Greek fictional narrative that was exceptionally popular in this era. Though the Priest addresses Jephtha as ruler, Buchanan makes comparatively little of Jephtha’s political standing. It is not so much his abuse of sovereign power as the sovereignty Jephtha assigns his own private vow that is at issue. Buchanan ingeniously balances the challenge his drama poses to the irrevocability of marital and religious vows for Roman Catholicism with a critique of the radical Protestant emphasis on the sovereignty of individual conscience (a critique the Roman Catholic Vondel develops in his drama). In effect fetishizing his own vow and so turning it into a transcendent decree, Jephtha, it is implied, practices a repellent form of religious absolutism, even antinomianism, which involves setting up his own self-appointed religious practice. In Buchanan’s drama, only Jephtha believes that his vow is causally related to the recent military victory, a view occasionally found in biblical exegesis. Neither the Chorus nor any of the other characters presume to possess such intimate knowledge of the divine will—a detail that again suggests Iephthes critiques an unthinking adherence to both custom and religious individualism. Because human sacrifice is at issue, the Priest, and implicitly Buchanan, condemn practices not in accordance with the rational, humanist principles identified with natural and divine law. Iephthes also engages issues that later become theorized as patriarchal absolutism by critiquing Jephtha’s belief that his daughter’s life is his to sacrifice. Storge challenges Jephtha’s assumption of privileged paternal rights, repeating (although Sharratt does not point this out) the Lucretian verb for slaying. In response to Jephtha’s question “Is my daughter not my own?” Storge responds, “Yes, but your possession is qualified by mine. Since she is a shared pledge of love, why can the father alone slay her, and why cannot I protect her life?” (1166–68; Est, sed etiam ut sit mea. / commune pignus cum sit, uni cur patri / mactare, vitam mihi tueri non licet?). Surely, she argues, if the bond of parental love is arbitrarily divided, the mother should

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have more than an equal right to protect her daughter from the father’s plan voluntarily to destroy her—“if destroy is the right word—when he slaughters the daughter at whose death he stands boasting in the ostentation of his monstrous behaviour” (1183–84). In this bitter attack, Storge represents Jephtha’s project as a form of honor killing. Storge again raises the issue of the father’s power of life and death, soon to become central to debates on sovereignty, in her final protest against Jephtha’s unequal division of rights over Iphis. Though she does not use the precise Roman legal expression for this supposed power, potestas vitae necisque, the Latin is not that remote: “[F]or you can exploit or misuse the life or death of our daughter” (ut tu uti abuti morte vitafiliae possis), leaving all the grieving and heartbreak to her mother (1202–4). In this heated, dramatic exchange over the continued life or death of a daughter, Buchanan thus introduces issues regarding the sovereign’s sword, protection, natural law, and the right of self-preservation—issues that would be debated for many decades to come. Indeed, in some of Storge’s speeches we can glimpse features of the formal, propositional gender equality (compatible with many patriarchal views and formations) of such later political theorists as Milton, Hobbes, and Locke.

Calvin, Cicero, and Wrongful Vows But what do vows have to do with these weighty issues? Very generally speaking, Jewish and Christian traditions tend to censure the rashness of Jephtha’s vow as well as its perverse—given the revocability of wrongful vows—fulfillment. Josephus’s judgment on Jephtha’s sacrifice, which implicitly contrasts the Hebrew deity with pagan gods, is representative: it is “a sacrifice neither sanctioned by the law nor well-pleasing to God; for he had not by reflection probed what might befall or in what aspect the deed would appear to them that heard of it.”32 In considering Jephtha’s vow foolish, rabbinic, patristic, and medieval exegetes take it for granted that Jephtha’s daughter is sacrificed. With the conjunction of humanism and colonialism in early modern Western Europe, however, an alternative reading, proposed by Kimhi in the twelfth century and circulated in print in 1485, gained broad acceptance. Jephtha brings about not his daughter’s physical but her social death: he sacrifices her social, reproductive future when he dedicates her life to the Lord. This interpretation, favored by Hebrew scholars, was taken up in the early modern period by both Protestant and Roman Catholic commentators.33 Possibly because it complemented Christian Europe’s self-construction as a superior civilization, its dissemination did not follow sectarian lines. Jean Bodin, who denies that the sacrifice actually oc-



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curs, introduces Jephtha when discussing human sacrifice as a practice now discredited among civilized peoples. Jephtha, Bodin states, is reported to have sacrificed his daughter unto almighty God, much about the same time that Agamemnon king of the Greek sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia (whereof some well learned men have made Tragedies) although that he sacrificed nothing unto God but the virginitie of his daughter; as the Hebrew text plainly declareth; and as Rabbi Levi, and the other Hebrew interpreters all agree.34

A marginal note mentions Euripides, whose Iphigenia is miraculously whisked away to safety, a deer being sacrificed in her stead; the implication is that Jehovah, like Euripides’s gods, does not permit the sacrifice to take place. Protestant exegetes who accept this reading of Jephtha’s sacrifice reject the implication that Jephtha’s dedication of his daughter reflects divine approval of religious orders. Nevertheless, connections between the parental dedication of a child to God and figurative sacrifice are so well established within Roman Catholicism that Protestants insisting on the literalness of Jephtha’s sacrifice find ways of barbarizing figurative interpretations such as Bodin’s. Luther, for example, associates the Roman church’s idolatrous consecration of virginity with Moloch, heathen deity of child sacrifice who is frequently linked with the Ammonites.35 By and large, Protestantism takes a dim view of religious vows. As Jean Calvin puts it in the Institutes (1536), because they are a form of “willworship,” vows testify to the “private madnesse” into which humankind falls when trying to redeem itself.36 Jephtha’s is one of two biblical examples Calvin provides of vows that rashly exceed natural human limits (as, of course, do the monastic vows against which he polemicizes), the first being the vow of the conspirators in Acts 23, in which “they made the lyfe and death of a man subject to their power.” Calvin thus associates—if only indirectly—Jephtha’s vow with a power over life and death properly held only by magistrates or rulers. “So,” Calvin continues, “Jephthe suffered punishment for hys folly, when with hedlong heate he conceived an unadvised vow.”37 Similarities between Calvin’s and Buchanan’s language regarding Jephtha’s vow were pointed out long ago by Carl Fries, who suggests that Calvin’s remarks may have influenced Buchanan’s choice of subject and dramatic conception.38 Calvin’s condemnation of Jephtha’s vow was widely circulated with the publication in 1547 of Certayne Sermons, or homelies, which were appointed by King Edward VI to be delivered orally from the pulpit and were republished periodically under Queen Elizabeth. Even if

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Jephtha were not explicitly named in chapter 7, “Against Swearyng and Perjurie,” it would be clear that his vow fails to meet two of the three criteria required for lawful oaths. As it is, Jephtha keeps company with the very conspirators against Paul mentioned by Calvin, and with Herod, whose vow likewise leads to murder: “Thus the promyse, whiche he made foolishly to God, against Godes eternal will, and the lawe of nature, most cruelly he perfourmed, so committying against God, double offence.” In order to make Jephtha’s oath irredeemably “fonde and unadvised,” it is implied that he makes it after his victory over the Ammonites, and it is described as a promise “of a foolishe devocion unto God.”39 (Note the remarkable resemblance between this ordering and Buchanan’s, to which it may be indebted.) The nature of vows, promises, or oaths was also debated in contexts more explicitly about political sovereignty. Are oaths of allegiance necessarily irrevocable? Oaths sworn in connection with a sovereign were increasingly the occasion of serious debate, with the dominant royalist view being that they are by definition unconditional. Does this mean these oaths are to be honored despite changed circumstances and without consideration of the sovereign’s actions? Resistance theorists, of course, answered these and related questions in the negative. Thus, in Dialogue Buchanan insists upon the mutuality of the pact between sovereign and subjects. Because the people’s oaths are conditional upon the sovereign’s promise to honor the law or the justice it signifies, his subjects are absolved of an obligation to obey him should he fail to do so. Such an emphasis on the supremacy of contract or law in essence removes the sovereign from the protected, sacred sphere in which absolutists prefer to see him enthroned, transforming him into a mortal whose relations with others are radically contingent. Insofar as classical views of political liberty inform early modern resistance literature, it embraces Cicero’s condemnation of Agamemnon’s fulfillment of his vow. (As reported in Euripides’s Iphigenia among the Taurians, Agamemnon vows that he will sacrifice to Artemis the year’s most beautiful new arrival, an honor Calchis confers on Iphigenia.) In De Officiis—part of the official curriculum in English grammar schools in the mid-sixteenth century—Cicero uses this as an example of a vow it is not honorable to perform: “It would have been better not to keep his promise than to perpetrate such a grisly deed.”40 What is truly honorable, Cicero argues throughout this treatise, is not separable from what is useful to other human beings, and especially to the state. For classically trained humanists, Cicero’s judgment on Agamemnon’s vow would provide another reason for condemning Jephtha’s sacrifice. It would also create a complex, layered inheritance that would make Jephtha an especially apt subject for scriptural tragedy. Given their in-



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terest in Euripides’s dramatic works, Christopherson and Buchanan would almost certainly have been familiar with Cicero’s view of Agamemnon’s sacrifice, as would Vondel, whose words often serve the Dutch Republic in prominent, public memorials. Buchanan and Vondel repeatedly indicate that the act Jephtha intends to carry out violates natural law (which, when it comes to protecting one’s offspring, all creatures obey), divine dictates, and ancestral practice. And although all three dramas follow the biblical narrative by having the daughter adopt her father’s view of the irrevocability of his vow, none of the characters Buchanan or Vondel invents gives Jephtha’s vow anything like the sacred, inviolable status he does. In having Jephtha defend unlearned, popular devotion to ancient rituals against the Priest’s passionate rationalism, Buchanan characterizes him as an opponent of reformation.41 On the part of a ruler, Jephtha’s unwillingness to reflect critically on his people’s customary fulfillment of vows would have signaled trouble to anyone schooled in Erasmian humanism. The drama’s support of the Priest’s humanism is further underlined when he echoes Sisimithres (886–99), an Egyptian gymnosophist appearing in the concluding episode of Heliodorus’s Ethiopika, where he successfully dissuades the Ethiopian king Hydaspes from performing a traditional, ritual sacrifice of a virginal war captive—who, this being romance, turns out to be his daughter. In the context of Israel’s continuous backsliding into idolatry, endlessly repeated in the book of Judges and frequently evoked in Buchanan’s drama, Jephtha’s rigid adherence to custom is worse than suspect. In commentaries, sermons, and the Institutes, Calvin repeatedly links superstitious custom, idolatry, and the corruption of human nature. Twice in a brief speech, the Priest compares Jephtha with a tyrant, one who refuses to acknowledge the “one undiluted form of the honorable”—the Priest’s second of three references to a single, universal divine truth (987–97; 938–46). That tyranny is inseparable from madness is a commonplace. In its critique of religious superstition, Buchanan’s drama goes further, associating Jephtha’s madness with tyranny, and tyranny with custom, itself connected to Israel’s recurrent falling in with the practices of its non-Israelite, idolatrous neighbors.42

Does Jephtha Hold the Sword? This leads to a question that commentators on Buchanan’s Iephthes have not explored. On what or whose authority does Jephtha act? Is it significant that Jephtha is a ruler at the time of the sacrifice? If so, does he sacrifice his daughter as a father, a ruler, or a father who is also a ruler? In Judges, when asked to lead the Israelites in battle, Jephtha responds by demanding

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that he become ruler should he be victorious, a condition that is granted. In Christopherson’s Jephthah the Israelites spontaneously offer Jephtha regal scepter and crown before hearing from the messengers or entering battle.43 Buchanan’s protagonist appears as Iephthes imperator in the dramatis personae, a title that echoes the Agamemnon imperator in Erasmus’s translation of Iphigenia;44 the military register of imperator is reinforced by retrospective references to Jephtha as “commander” and “leader.” When the action begins, Buchanan’s Jephtha holds the “chief place among the people” (populi principem locum tenes), a position that is clearly not royal, the term king (rex) being reserved for the deity (682; see also 673, 737). This terminology reflects the antimonarchical bias of antityranny ideology. Similar locutions appear in Vondel’s Jephthah: in the “Sprekende Personagien” Jephtha appears as “protector” (landvoogd), “judge” (reehter), and “general” (veld­ heer), although when the action opens, he acts as judge with a grand court (hof ) and respectful attendants. No matter how the new office is conceived, however, all three dramatists indicate that the transition from commander to ruler has occurred by the time the central action begins. When Jephtha meets his daughter, he encounters her not only as father and successful military leader but also as Israel’s chief magistrate, thus setting the stage for a highly dramatic confrontation between public and domestic arenas. Modeled in varying degrees on Euripides’s Iphigenia, though without its last-minute redemption of the daughter, all three dramas place the child sacrifice offstage. Yet how can the hero’s perpetration of this multiply transgressive murder possibly be reconciled with the early modern desire to locate barbarism outside European Christendom? In ways to be explored in the next section, Jephtha’s daughter herself provides the primary means of resolving this problem, in part by facilitating a Christological metamorphosis of her father’s act. In keeping with their recuperative, historicizing project, the three dramatists also employ a distinctively literary strategy to manage the problem of a hero who engages in human sacrifice. All of them create a tumultuous affective bond between spectators (or readers) and the central protagonist by amplifying Judges’ representation of Jephtha’s expressive response to suddenly encountering his daughter: Jephtha rends his clothes and protests the fate he has imposed on her. Intensely attached to his daughter, their Jephtha, warrior turned ruler, is not only rigidly pious but painfully alive to his own internal conflicts; his effusive and nearly ceaseless verbalization of his suffering makes it impossible to regard Jephtha as a callous, unfeeling murderer. Buchanan’s Jephtha, for example, anxiously anticipates the passionate, tearful responses of his wife and daughter in a speech (851–55) very similar



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to one given by Agamemnon in Iphigenia (454–68). Agamemnon, however, has already presented himself as pitifully changeable and peer-dependent; responding, in panic, to a situation he had tried to avert, he blames his dilemma on Paris and hopes to manipulate Menelaus into rescuing him. By contrast, Buchanan’s Jephtha is the soul of constancy and has no aim other than self-expression. Furthermore, his self-pity, unlike Agamemnon’s, does not alienate the spectators’ ability to identify with him. If Euripides’s protagonist is not only repeatedly discredited but also upstaged by Achilles, the Jephtha of these plays is a man of honor, even if honor involves nothing more than adhering blindly to his own word. The sincerity of Jephtha’s belief in his vow’s irrevocability is beyond question. Often chillingly inhumane when defending himself to those who protest his decision, in dialogue with his daughter, and as the moment of sacrifice approaches, the Jephtha of all three dramas is also a figure of pathos. His conflicted determination to fulfill his vow intensifies both his hatred of himself and his bond with his daughter, to the point where he offers to sacrifice himself in her stead. By dramatizing the paternal leader’s inner conflict before he either sanctions or performs the murder, Buchanan, Christopherson, and Vondel produce a highbrow early modern equivalent of today’s slasher film, in which the primary interest lies in anticipating the female victim’s bloody death.45 This can result in ghastly moments, such as Vondel’s Jephtha’s self-pitying exclamation to his daughter that he cannot bear to think his own hand will sever her fair head and snow-white throat.46 Both Christopherson and Vondel—whose protagonists perform the sacrifice themselves—manage to keep Jephtha’s wife offstage in the critical decision-making scenes in order to give him full affective rein. In the absence of the victim’s mother, Jephtha’s dilemma can take up the available dramatic space. Moreover, given the intensity of his conflict and the circulation of an alternative, nonsacrificial interpretation of the story, the possibility that Jephtha will change his mind is present until the murder actually takes place. (That is why, for instance, the appearance of Jephtha holding the bloody sword with which he has just slain his daughter at the beginning of act 5 of Vondel’s play is so shocking.) Even more emphatically than Buchanan, Vondel condemns both Jephtha’s vow and its perverse fulfillment. After he has sacrificed his daughter, Vondel’s Jephtha suffers a major attack of self-recrimination. Humbly following the counsel of the Court Priest and Steward, he leaves his post to seek absolution from the High Priest in Siloah, and, in the speech with which the drama concludes, the Court Priest envisions a time when Jephtha will be glorified and revered (a prophecy to be fulfilled when he is named among the saints in Hebrews 11:32).

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Jephtha’s inclusion in Hebrews 11:32 sets a limit to any form of radical critique regarding the story in Judges. A marginal note on Judges 11:30 in the 1560 Geneva Bible, for instance, both condemns Jephtha’s performance of his vow and then qualifies the condemnation by explaining that “here we se that the sinnes of the godly do not utterly extinguish their faith.” Christopherson’s drama even refuses to censure its sacrificer-hero, although in this, I believe, it is unique among early modern literary treatments of the story. For Christopherson, vows are irrevocable, a stance obviously relevant to contemporary debates on religious and marital vows. In a treatise written while serving Queen Mary, Christopherson thus castigates the “lewd priestes” whom Luther and his followers have seduced into “their wycked acte in marrying, and their abominable inceste and adoultery therein.”47 If religious and marital vows only were at stake, however, why would Christopherson go out of his way to create a distinctly royal Jephtha? In his Exhortation, which was written in response to Thomas Wyatt’s uprising, Christopherson lays all threats to England’s social order at Protestantism’s door. At the same time, he touches upon virtually every conservative or royalist theme developed in the latter part of the sixteenth century so as to showcase the categorical ungodliness of any resistance to God’s anointed: “[F]or-whosoever maketh warre agaynste hys prince, he maketh warre agaynst God.”48 On several occasions, Christopherson tries to warn his readers against references to political “slavery” that are often used, he argues, to foment sedition, as when recent rebels were told that the queen was to marry the Catholic Phillip II “of set purpose to make us slaves.”49 Indeed, Christopherson views all attempts to resist oppression as signs of a demonic infatuation with “liberty.”50 It should come as no surprise, then, that although the Ammonite ruler in Christopherson’s Jephthah is called a “tyrant,” the play avoids entirely the rhetoric of political enslavement (474). In a doubly motivated appropriation of Euripides’s Iphigenia, Chris­ topherson gives Jephtha’s vow the status of an inviolable, divine decree to which Jephtha must submit if he wishes to maintain his spiritual integrity. Given this premise, Jephtha must struggle to conform his will—that is, to suppress his daughter’s claims on his affections—to the absoluteness of the vow-as-law. Whereas Buchanan and Vondel stress the stubbornness of Jephtha’s belief in his vow’s irrevocability, Christopherson’s Jephtha bewails his stubborn reluctance to carry through with the action God requires (1048–53). In this way, the agony of Christopherson’s Jephtha resembles the Passion of Christ or, more topically, the martyrdom of Thomas More, whose unwillingness to disavow the true church in an oath to his Protestant sovereign may inform Christopherson’s representation of Jephtha’s vow.



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Such correspondences do not hold for long, however: except with regard to his illegitimacy, Jephtha is not himself a victim of injustice or violence. On the contrary, it is he who wields the sword that ends his daughter’s life. Although Jephtha twice fails to follow through with his sword’s fatal stroke—at which point he again offers to substitute himself for his child, thereby provoking the crowd to urge him to stop delaying—on the third try he succeeds:

And so at last

His sword, descending, smote his daughter dead. The blood gushed forth, and with its noble stream Deluged the altar. For an instant’s time The body writhed. Then all burst into tears Of bitter lamentation for the maid. They stood about her, and her dauntless deed Filled them with wonderment. (1144–50)

Earlier, this Jephtha had imagined slashing his daughter’s throat with his own hand (“Accursed thought! To look her in the face, / To pierce her throat—’tis more than I can do” [1054–55]) as—in a gesture imitating Hecuba’s Polyxena—she offers up both throat and bosom (1133–34). Instead, at the moment of her death, Christopherson’s heroine bows before the altar, positioning herself as if for decapitation. Furthermore, the writhing of her body, a gruesome detail not found in other versions, cannot but suggest the spectacle of public execution—that is, juridical rather than sacral violence. Not only is Christopherson’s Jephtha not officially a priest, but no priest shares the stage with him. In Christopherson’s drama, Jephtha’s wife voices the only objections to the sacrifice, but her views are so unworthy of being taken seriously that her husband calls her a fool and orders her into the house. Before proceeding to the altar, Jephtha prays for God’s acceptance of his sacrifice (1093–94), becoming in effect both priest and king. Although Christopherson’s royalism may indeed have been selective (he did not accept the sovereignty of the Protestant King Edward VI), his drama nonetheless seems to be a protoabsolutist text that unabashedly grants its royal protagonist the prerogative of acting outside the law—in this case, both the divine law prohibiting murder and natural law, which, ideally, absolutists generally conceded, should constrain the ruler. To my knowledge, apart from Hobbes, no other early modern treatment permits this representative of sovereign power to exercise the sword with such complete impunity.

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Blood(less) Sacrifice Within these diverse interpretative contexts, many features of Buchanan’s Iephthes seem designed to intensify the ironies attending Jephtha’s status as “liberator” of his people from national “slavery.” As mentioned earlier, Israel initially suffers under the “yoke of slavery” to the Ammonites because it has violated its covenant with God. As military leader, Jephtha successfully delivers his people from what Buchanan’s Chorus refers to as “the bonds of slavery beneath the barbarian” (155–56). Political “slavery” is the opposite of the freedom prerequisite for Israel’s destined role as ruler of nations (3–5). Like other humanists, Buchanan assimilates biblical notions of idolatry to Greco-Roman codes of “barbarism,” conventional markers of which represent the Ammonites with “Scythian” bows and arrows and in ignominious flight; even their spilt blood, which swells the waters, is barbarous (316–20, 354, 468). In Buchanan’s play Jephtha’s conviction that God exacts the fulfillment of his vow thus threatens to return his community to barbarism, dissolving the very differences between Israelite and non-Israelite his victory was supposed to reestablish. That sacrifice of Iphis conflicts with Israel’s privileged position as God’s chosen people is further underlined by Buchanan’s decision to call the Hebrew nation the “house of Isaac” or “Isaac’s descendants” and address members of the Chorus as “daughters of ancient Abraham.” So how can Jephtha remain a celebrated national liberator and a man of God if he proceeds with his sacrifice—if barbarism and heroism are irreconcilable? In part, I have suggested, Buchanan manages this by staging Jephtha’s conversion at the scene of Iphis’s sacrifice. Even before this moment, however, Buchanan arrests Jephtha’s regressive movement: by voluntarily laying down her own life, Iphis prevents her father from behaving barbarously. Significantly, Buchanan’s Jephtha does not attempt to persuade Iphis to consent to the sacrifice (as does Euripides’s Agamemnon), thus making her offer appear all the more autonomously motivated. Of the three dramas considered here, only Buchanan’s follows Euripides in getting the Priest, not the father, to officiate, and, once Iphis takes charge of the situation, the Priest steps in to perform the rite, thereby dissociating Jephtha from the sacrifice. The sequence in which Jephtha’s interlocutors debate him—his friend first, then the Priest, and finally Storge—finesses the question of exactly who has authorized the sacrifice. Like Iphigenia’s, on which it is based (though Euripides involves Achilles), Iphis’s decisive offer intervenes in a tense debate pitting father against mother. By doing so, it both protects her father from her mother’s wrath and dutifully reestablishes



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the patriarchal order, shoring up her father’s authority against her mother’s forceful critique. The vow demands her life, she says, which she offers “to you my father and to my land” (redo patri, redo patriae meae) (1317–18). In representing Iphis’s sudden capitulation, Buchanan appropriates Iphigenia’s speech to Clytemnestra (“You bore me for the common good of the Greeks, not for yourself alone” [1387–88]), using language that is almost as patriarchal as Christopherson’s, whose daughter, addressing her father, likewise says, “I give myself to death for those who live. It was for this that thou didst give me life” (1125–26).51 Although Buchanan’s is by far the most restrained of the three dramas discussed here, when it comes to physical violence, it alone portrays Jephtha’s daughter being sacrificed as if she were an animal—that is, by slitting her throat. In representing this ritual, however, Buchanan achieves effects altogether contrary to what one might expect from such literal, bodily slaying. Iphis’s innocence, loyalty to her father, and communally motivated selflessness transform blood sacrifice into an ethereal rite of passage from mortality to immortality, from selfhood to a pure spirituality that Iphis comes close to embodying even when alive. When Iphis pronounces herself “vowed to death, a victim consecrated” (1321), she suggests that her voluntary offering gives her a formally recognized status that now makes it acceptable for the Priest to perform the sacrifice. Buchanan may here be revisioning the Roman devotio, a propitiatory ritual dedication of a leader or soldier to the gods, often made just before the opening of battle. The messenger implies that Iphis’s self-sacrifice—expiatory and therefore postwar— is not the first such ritual in which her people have participated, a startling suggestion that raises the possibility that Buchanan may be synthesizing Hebraic sacrifice and Roman ritual (1435–37). In any case, Buchanan’s daring invention of a Hebraic tradition of self-sacrifice formally counteracts the vow Jephtha makes before military conflict begins. In this regard it is especially noteworthy that unlike her counterpart in both Christopherson’s and Vondel’s dramas, Iphis does not consider her consecration tantamount to a transfer of ownership: she continues to claim her earthly, familial identity.52 (Such a transfer, common in ritual sacrifice, makes the victim the property of the god to whom it is sacrificed; for both Roman Catholic dramatists, Iphis is no longer a daughter at the time she is slain.) On the contrary, Iphis’s consecration empowers her to assume for herself the role of priest or, at least, formal mediator. Whereas Christopherson’s royal Jephtha utters the prayer beseeching God to receive the proffered sacrifice, Buchanan gives this prayer to Iphis (1413–23). By synthesizing Roman rituals of military sacrifice, Hebraic expiatory sacrifice,

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and Greek conceptions of the soul’s imprisonment in the body (Iphis asks the Priest to “loose the hindering barrier of my body”), Buchanan gives Iphis’s death the capacity to transform the barbarism of human sacrifice into a unifying, civic-minded ritual (1426). That is why the astonished pleasure that spectators take in Iphis’s heroism and her mother’s reflected glory is stressed by the messenger, who thereby seems to confirm the Chorus’s earlier prophesy that Iphis’s heroic act on behalf of her nation will generate everlasting renown (1435–44; 1331–39). It may be that Iphis’s self-sacrifice acquires such power because of its implicit Christological framework. Yet it could just as readily be argued that Buchanan appropriates Greek tragedy in order to give this antique precursor of Christian sacrifice a powerfully community-based, political inflection. If early modern theories involving pacts, contracts, and powers held in trust are to be worth anything, entrance into ritual or institutional forms must be free in the sense of voluntary. Accordingly, the literature of resistance insists that consent not be coerced and that no political ruler, including the prepolitical father, be said naturally to hold the power of life and death. So sensitive were issues relating to paternal power, especially as exercised over sons, that in Paradise Lost Milton invents a scene in which, responding to the one Father who legitimately holds such power, the Son (and future Messiah) does not consent to his own death but rather voluntarily offers to sacrifice himself for the sake of humankind. Thus, although Buchanan’s Iphis recuperates patriarchal norms, she does not, so it is imagined, authorize her father’s power of life and death over her. Were Iphis merely to consent to the death he exacts, her sacrifice would presumably remain barbaric, since it would be dictated by her father’s reckless will. Instead, like her Greek counterpart Iphigenia, Iphis goes to the altar passionately claiming her decision to be her own, as if the opportunity of transforming a lowly female life into a gift for a deity and glory for her nation cannot enthusiastically enough be seized.53 An interesting irony of Buchanan’s concluding scene is that by intervening as she does, Iphis places herself in the company of Roman republicanism’s ideal paternal leaders: Brutus the Elder and Virginius, both of whom relinquish their own paternal claims on their children for the greater good of the state. Willingly forsaking father, mother, friends, and her own reproductive future for the sake of her people, Iphis serves the same principles they do; her self-sacrifice redeems not only her father’s vow but also his very humanity, thereby enabling him to continue in his role as Israel’s ruler. Like Brutus, then, Iphis ensures the continuity of the newly liberated state, which her father has threatened to return to barbarism. Further, by explic-



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itly offering to expiate her people’s “madness,” which is tied in her concluding speech to their abandonment of their divine Father, she implicitly aligns her father’s mad project to murder her with the collective madness—that is, the constant backsliding into idolatry—for which she dies (1416–19). Twice in the closing sequence, Iphis is masculinized, a positively evaluated gender-crossing indebted to Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis (animi ni­ mium virgo virilis [1333] and animi virilis [1410]). Additionally, as remarked earlier, Iphis is associated with the Polyxena of Euripides’s Hecuba and Seneca’s Troades. Although Polyxena—like Iphigenia and her Renaissance counterpart—could be said to internalize the violence of her oppressors, in Hecuba especially her words and gestures ironically undermine the conventional opposition between barbarian and Hellene. Herself a representative of the defeated Trojans, the captive Polyxena claims the free status conventionally enjoyed by Greek male citizens and thereby exposes their comparative barbarity. Insofar as Polyxena’s heroism enacts a publicly recognized form of resistance, it figuratively liberates her not only from impending enslavement but also from its attendant, ongoing violence. Similarly freed from the barbarism of ritual sacrifice, Iphis’s willing sacrifice of self is close to the “heroic martyrdom” Milton eulogized more than a century later in Paradise Lost, a martyrdom that is construed as a civilized form of heroism not dependent upon outmoded forms of military valor. Judging from the changes he makes, Vondel was critical of Buchanan’s drama for letting Jephtha off the hook so easily or, perhaps, for giving Iphis too much self-determination. It may have seemed to Vondel that Iphis’s heroic stance is more than suspiciously pagan, too completely an anticipation of the Son’s sacrifice,54 or both. Overtly condemnatory yet bound to ritually displaced or sublimated forms, Buchanan’s self-conscious accommodation of classical, Hebraic, and Christian attitudes to human sacrifice is both highly original and heterodox. In spite of these differences, Buchanan and Vondel—and Christopherson, too, for that matter—are as one when it comes to honoring Jephtha’s stature as deliverer of his people. All three dramas celebrate successful military action against a rival, idolatrous nation, whose territorial claims are rejected. Buchanan and even more so Vondel make generous use of the notion of political enslavement that was so important to emergent theories of political resistance, intra-European warfare, and colonial conquest. Generically, Jephtha’s triumph over Israel’s enemies gives him the elevated status from which the reversal required by tragedy begins. However uncertain the role played by Jephtha’s vow, it is simply assumed—by Jephtha’s contemporaries within these texts as well as by the dramatists’

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intended audiences—that Israel’s God has a direct hand in its victory over the Ammonites. Nor does it seem to matter that this particular military venture is exceptionally bloody: as recorded in Judges, and variously reproduced with celebratory detail in all three dramas, Jephtha destroys numerous cities “with a very great slaughter” (Judges 11:33). Buchanan’s text initiates an Erasmian critique of Israel’s militarism and possibly of peacetime rule by military leaders. His Iphis seeks expiation for the recent deaths and, unlike Christopherson’s text, Iephthes exempts elders, women, and children from the slaughter. Yet nowhere is it suggested that wholesale murder is unnecessary or wrong. Indeed, Jephtha’s friend Symmachus extols him for having achieved victory “without blood, without damage to your army, and without harm to yourself,” all such losses being borne by the Ammonites alone (676–77). Although peace may be said to be preferable to war, emergent Western European nation-states were only too eager to identify themselves with the ancient Hebrew nation whose enemies are, on divine authority, justly to be opposed. In proclaiming her willingness to die, Iphigenia says to her mother: “Will countless warriors, with their shields their bulwark, will numberless oarsmen dare to strike against the enemy and die for their fatherland when Greece is wronged, and shall my life, my single life, prevent all this?” (1387–91). Iphis wishes she could suffer “a thousand deaths”—providing in effect a veritable army of sacrificial victims. Buchanan’s Chorus makes a related point when contrasting Iphis’s heroism with the servility of those who, unwilling similarly to sacrifice their lives, are the “disgrace of your age,” the “shame of your race,” “despised by the present generation and doomed to be unknown to the age to come” (1354–60). Willingness to lay down one’s life by taking up arms is, of course, the primary mode of sacrifice demanded by the state. Only by means of such sacrifice has Israel been liberated from national “slavery” to the Ammonites. When Iphis’s manly Greek counterpart Polyxena bares her bosom—giving her sacrificer, Achilles’s son Neoptolemus, the option of striking her in the chest, as he would kill a man, or slitting her throat, as he would a sacrificial victim—Neoptolemus chooses the latter, which also happens to be associated with femaleness,55 and cuts Polyxena’s “windpipe” with his sword. Buchanan also specifies (unlike Vondel and Christopherson) the throat as the locus for sacrificial slaughter. In the case of Iphis’s death, though, it is not blood (as with Polyxena) but the breath of life—the body’s invisible trace as it disappears into an originary, divine spirit—that is released. In a passage delicately gesturing toward but avoiding representation of the act of



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sacrifice, not a trace of barbarous violence, not even an instrument of death or a drop of blood, remains: “The priest, overwhelmed with weeping, could scarcely loose the passage of her breath” (1432–33). Voluntary, virginal, and pacific, Iphis’s self-sacrifice is presented as the contrary of the savage end her father inaugurates before entering battle. Although the Chorus indicates that Iphis’s heroic self-sacrifice may be an alternative form of military service that even in the absence of tyranny involves the spilling of human blood, Buchanan may have wanted its bloodlessness to signify annulment of the cultural and spiritual slavery that still binds Israel after Jephtha has brought its national slavery to an end. What does his staging of Iphis’s sacrifice suggest about Buchanan’s attitude to reports of ritual human sacrifice in the Americas? Although the famous Valladolid debate did not begin until 1550, Buchanan could have heard accounts or read manuscript versions of Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda’s and Las Casas’s starkly opposed views before revising Iephthes for publication in 1554. Judging from his poetry on Spanish and Portuguese colonialism, Buchanan would have been interested in the debate.56 In developing his view that military conquest of Amerindigenes is justified, Sepúlveda compares them with the Canaanites, Amorites, and Perizzites whom the Israelites were divinely charged with exterminating for their violation of natural laws and worship of false idols. In further support of interstate, Euro-colonial conquest, Sepúlveda makes it appear that the capital punishment Leviticus 20:4–6 orders for anyone complicit in sacrificing children to Moloch is to be meted out to Israel’s enemies, not to Israelites. In assuming the righteousness of Israel’s war against the Ammonites, Buchanan in some measure perpetuates this ideology. Yet he also returns the Leviticus text to its original Jewish auditors, who were guilty of tacitly approving the Ammonites’ ways. This is one implication of the drama’s strong emphasis on the expiatory significance of Iphis’s sacrifice. In appealing to Euripides’s emphasis on his heroine’s voluntary selfsacrifice, Buchanan reinforces his culture’s condemnation of the ritual sacrifice of children, prisoners of war, or slaves, none of whom have a say in the matter. Like other European humanists, Buchanan associates such rituals with idolatry and barbarism, even if to avoid a dangerous topicality Iephthes omits reference to the Ammonites’ Moloch. Luther, we have seen, mentions Moloch when vilifying parental oblation of children to religious life in a convent or monastery, while Protestant polemicists generally invoke ritual human sacrifice and its alleged New World accompaniment, cannibalism, in order to disparage the Roman Eucharist as a barbaric celebration

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of cannibalized body and blood. By stressing the bloodlessness of Iphis’s self-sacrifice, Buchanan concedes Protestantism’s charges, just as by highlighting its voluntary character, he critiques the barbarism of customary, involuntary human sacrifice. It could also be argued, though, that Buchanan’s drama to some degree enlists Greco-Roman ideals in the service of normalizing ritual sacrifice. Immaculately voluntary and bloodless, the sacrificial death Buchanan’s heroine suffers is, after all, executed by a priest. The effects of the ritual Buchanan devises are both poignant and ambiguous. Heroically submitting to sacrificial violence, Iphis ennobles the ritualized deaths undergone in the past by countless sacrificial victims along with any that may be taking place in the present of Iephthes’s production. In exonerating Amerindigenes, Las Casas argues that when performed for the welfare of the entire state, the reverent sacrifice of fellow humans should not be judged as unnatural or unreasonable.57 By providing Iphis’s ritual sacrifice of self with a prehistory and associating it with male, military self-sacrifice, Buchanan dignifies, humanizes, and perhaps even universalizes it. In this way, Iephthes prepares the way for Montaigne’s revisioning of cannibalism. Yet at the same time, by autonomously determining the significance of the death she chooses for herself, Iphis lays claim to what is in the process of becoming “propriety” in the self. Transmuting honor suicide into self-sacrifice on behalf of community, Iphis’s death looks ahead to the civic contractualism of Buchanan’s radical heirs.

chapter four

Antityranny, Slavery, and Revolution

H

ad it not been for Greco-Roman antityranny ideology, there would have been no English revolution, no execution of King Charles I. This, at least, is what Hobbes implies in Leviathan when inveighing against Greek and Roman authors for their mystification of “liberty” and “slavery” alongside their glorification of tyrannicide. In the better known of the two passages in which he assails classical literature, Hobbes diagnoses the pernicious effects of imbibing Greek and Roman political ideals as “Tyrannophobia,” a pathological aversion to strong government. When those living under a monarch read this literature, Hobbes says, they entertain the delusional belief “that the Subjects in a Popular Common-wealth enjoy liberty; but that in a Monarchy they are all Slaves.” Only if the reading of such books is stringently regulated under the guidance of “discreet Masters” should it be allowed.1 Earlier, in the passage less often cited, Hobbes proclaims Aristotle and Cicero to be ideologues rather than rigorous theorists of political institutions. Far from being drawn from “Nature,” the principles they espoused are those of the governments under which they lived. This, Hobbes explains, is why Aristotle, transcribing these principles in Politics, opposes liberty and slavery as if they were constitutional attributes, with “liberty” a possibility only in democratic states and those who live under monarchy mere “slaves” (2.21.111). In this deconstructive analysis of “liberty” and “slavery,” Hobbes urges readers to understand that the connection between, on the one hand, liberty and democracy and, on the other, monarchy and slavery is artificial. It is ideological as well as historically contingent. Hobbes’s critique of antityrannicism targets both its ideology and its appropriation, thereby emphasizing his contemporaries’ historical remove from ancient Greece and Rome. Besides in this way drawing attention to the paganism of his opponents’ two primary authorities, Aristotle and Cicero, 123

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Hobbes occasionally highlights linguistic issues relating to translation. While the Latin servus, for example, can be translated into English as either “servant” or “slave,” Hobbes observes that this distinction is not meaningful in ancient Rome, where servi are what in Western European languages would be designated slaves (from Slavs, the major geosocial source of slaves in medieval Europe). When Hobbes mentions this in Elements of Law, however, he introduces a distinction ostensibly based on Roman social practice between servi who are physically unbound and those who are bound. “The Romans had no such distinct name [as slave], but comprehended all under the name of servus; whereof such as they loved and durst trust, were suffered to go at liberty, and admitted to places of office, both near to their persons, and in their affairs abroad; the rest were kept chained, or otherwise restrained with natural impediments to their resistance.”2 This distinction, maintained in all three major treatises, in effect reinstates that between servant and slave (with the unbound servant/slave being a figurative citizensubject). While the terms vary considerably, other early modern writers often oppose, on the one hand, positive derivatives of servus such as voluntary service to God or the Christian church together with European servants whose voluntary labor is increasingly linked to wages and, on the other, slavery as a degraded, involuntary condition based on force. An underlying polarity between free and unfree—serviceable both to free labor ideology and to transatlantic slavery—is maintained despite revisions of ancient terminology. As antityranny discourse begins spreading like wildfire in the 1640s and 1650s, Filmer and Hobbes expose for critique the nonscriptural sources of its language and tenets. “Because the Scripture is not favourable to the liberty of the people,” Filmer says in Patriarcha, “therefore many fly to natural reason and to the authority of Aristotle.”3 In a text published in 1648, Filmer laments the practice of seeking the origins of government in heathen “inventions or fictions” rather than Scripture, and comments that neither “tyrant” nor “slave” appears in the Hebrew Bible.4 Hobbes’s genealogical critique in Leviathan indirectly severs antityrannicism from the Christian inheritance to which it has been assimilated. As Hobbes presents it, his own philosophical practice is without debts to ancient authorities. Yet in De Cive and Leviathan, his spare discourse is accompanied by biblical exempla and scriptural proof texts (often in contexts that are, at best, radically heterodox). Unlike the lionized Greco-Roman theorists, Hobbes’s own political philosophy is drawn from “Nature.” To insinuate that Western Christendom has been taken in by GrecoRoman pagans is to unsettle the very foundation of laudatory discourse on



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liberty. Resistance literature’s widespread appeal lies in its skillful synthesis of Greco-Roman antityrannicism with Christian doctrine and scripture. Though some features of this synthesis go back to the Greek New Testa­ ment and the Church Fathers, new forms of integration emerge in mid- to late sixteenth-century England, France, and the Netherlands, and in startlingly creative applications during the English revolution. Fairly well known is the knack radical Protestantism acquires for popularizing scriptural narratives that showcase Jehovah’s approval of heroic resistance against tyranny, with Ehud, Jehoida, and Jehu eulogized as the Hebrew counterparts of Harmodius and Aristogeiton. There are, though, countless other ways in which Greco-Roman antityrannicism is made congruent with Christianity. In this chapter, we will examine early modern interpretations of specific biblical texts that appear to validate or contest important Greco-Roman teachings or ideals. Debate on the following topics—in order of discussion—relies heavily on scriptural texts: the (il)legitimacy of political “dominion” and of natural or political “slavery” (the grant of “dominion” in Genesis 1:28); the status of the first monarch and his subjects (Nimrod’s single-person rule narrated in Genesis 10:8–10); the Creator’s attitude toward absolute, monarchical rule versus protodemocratic theocracy (the Israelites’ desire to be ruled by a king in 1 Samuel 8 and the “law” of fraternal rule in Deuteronomy 17–20); and the origins of institutional slavery (the curse of Canaan in Genesis 9:25). While biblical commentators, pamphleteers, and theorists all assume that biblical and classical traditions can somehow be harmonized, in these texts—with the exception of Genesis 9’s curse—radical exegetes find antityranny principles authored by God himself. In the final sections, we will turn to antityrannicism’s appropriation of two juridical rituals designed to regulate relations between masters and slaves, one Hebraic and one Roman. The Hebraic ritual was centered on an individual’s voluntary entrance into a condition of slavery, while the Roman ritual formalized the individual slave’s release from legal servitude. In the Hebrew Bible, legislation on servitude prescribed a ritual for the Hebrew servant who chose to remain with her or his master rather than to leave in the seventh year as was legally permitted. To visibly mark this altered, servile status, the servant was to have her or his ear bored with an awl to the door of the master’s house. This ritual was taken up in early modern debates on voluntary as opposed to involuntary servitude, where it analogically suggests voluntary, collective subjection to absolute monarchy. The Roman ritual, by contrast, was appropriated by antityrannicism in the late Roman Republic, or rather at the time of its abortive rebirth. At the conclusion of the Roman ceremony in question, the formerly enslaved individual

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was awarded a pileus, or (as it later became known) liberty cap, as a visible sign of manumission. Immediately after the assassination of Julius Caesar, the liberty cap was employed as an icon of the “free” status collectively enjoyed by citizens who had been delivered from “slavery” to tyrannous Caesar. When early modern nation-states utilized this icon, they thus selfconsciously inserted themselves into Greco-Roman antityranny traditions. Revived in the Italian Renaissance, the liberty cap reappears in early modern Dutch iconography as a visual marker of collective liberation from both intrastate and interstate slavery. One of the authors to be examined here in connection with the Hebrew servant’s voluntary self-enslavement is Milton, easily early modernism’s most proficient, rhetorically compelling unifier of scriptural exegetical tra­ ditions and Greco-Roman antityrannicism. In a passage from Paradise Lost explored in the third section, Milton dexterously collocates the various scriptural texts just mentioned (except for 1 Samuel 8) with antityranny po­ lemic. Throughout his political tracts, Milton masterfully deploys the invective against unmanly servility that is especially important to Roman antit­yrannicism. In Eikonoklastes, ritualized boring of the Hebrew servant’s ear is featured in a scathing rhetorical attack on the special shamefulness of collective servitude voluntarily entered into by freeborn people. As is typical of ancient and early modern antityranny polemic, such servility is associated with herds or packs of animals that meekly follow a leader; animals without a sense of dignity or awareness of rights; members of the lower classes; and, of course, slaves, whose animalization by discursive contagion contributes in numerous, subtle ways to early modernism’s revisioning of natural slavery.

Genesis, Dominion, and Natural Slavery Both critics and advocates of absolutism were highly attuned to Aristotle’s theorization of tyranny as single-person rule that resembles the master’s relation with the enslaved. What was made of Aristotle’s natural slave? Centuries of Western Christian theology had relegated slavery to the position of a secondary but inescapable condition brought about by human conduct in the Fall. Did the synthesis of Greco-Roman antityrannicism with early modern Christianity have any effect on this general, orthodox position? It may be a surprise to learn that key theorists of royal absolutism extended their criticism of Aristotle’s conception of tyranny and his barbarization of servility to his doctrine of natural slavery. Bodin, for example, directly challenges this doctrine by setting it against the “Lawyers” who “hold servitude



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to be directly contrarie unto nature; and do what they can to maintaine libertie.”5 Bodin’s lawyers are the Roman jurists and their followers whose teachings on natural freedom support his argument that Hebrew laws programmatically safeguard human freedom and forbid slavery. Although Filmer and Hobbes are not eager to “maintaine libertie,” they, too, often explicitly attack Aristotle’s natural slave. Their purpose, however, is not to oppose institutional slavery as Bodin does. To counteract rabble-rousing proclamations, they seek to neutralize the affective charges held by “liberty” and “slavery,” or to subvert the very opposition between the two as sociolegal categories. Hobbes retheorizes Greco-Roman “liberty” as more or less equivalent to anarchic “license” or, within civil society, to bodily mobility, while making civil servitude an ordinary, everyday occurrence. In a related move, Filmer counters the doctrine of natural freedom with the claim that all human beings are born into subjection. Bodin has similar objectives in developing his tripartite schematization of monarchy and in advocating the abolition of slavery, two central features of his theory that undercut antityranny’s foundational polarity. Hobbes’s hostility to Aris­ totle’s conflation of absolute monarchy with tyranny or despotical rule, a constant in all three of his major theoretical works, is anticipated by Bodin and shared by Filmer.6 Writing during the civil wars as England’s foremost parliamentarian and resistance theorist, Henry Parker responds in Jus Populi to Bodin’s critique of Aristotle by analyzing what he calls Aristotle’s “error” regarding natural servitude. Since advocates of resistance typically rely on Aristotle’s conception of tyranny, this concession is not easily made. Parker notes that “it is much controverted, whether Servitude be agreeable to Nature, or no? And as Naturalists doe generally hold it affirmative; so our Civilians are strong for the Negative.” Openly siding with “our Civilians,” Parker rewrites Aris­ totle so as not to appear entirely at odds with him. Aristotle, he explains, failed to differentiate servitude pertaining to “order in Nature, or that power which Man hath over sensitive and vegetable things” (an allusion to the Genesis 1:28 grant of “dominion”—knowledge of which Aristotle lacked) from “that Jurisdiction which intends Publique good, and the distributing to every man that which is his own” (46).7 Though in Jus Populi Parker mentions Bodin respectfully, and endorses his view that institutional slavery should be abolished, he does not think Bodin’s congratulatory reference to lawyers’ views goes far enough. Parker asserts: “We must understand also, that when Lawyers maintaine all men to have been equall by Nature, and free; their meaning is, that no violent, noxious, unvoluntarie inequalitie, or restraint, had its introduction from

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Nature” (36). With its amplified stress on a coercive threat to liberty, Par­ ker’s formulation makes all Greco-Roman slavery, including war slavery (naturalized in Roman jurisprudence as jus gentium), incompatible with natural liberty. This introduces a uniquely radical theorization of anti­ tyrannicism to which Parker adheres elsewhere. In this passage, Parker is unusually precise in demarcating areas of agreement and disagreement with Aristotle. While not willing entirely to reject Aristotle’s notion that some people might need to be governed by others, Parker categorically rejects the legitimacy of a master’s “Dominicall-power” (33–41). Parker’s use of Dominicall-power is interesting. Before continuing, we need briefly to examine the terms used in early modern debates on slavery and tyranny. When opening his discussion of the power of masters over servants or lords over slaves, Parker formally introduces the Greek term Despoticall and the Latin Herile. Why, then, does he use Dominicall-power in his extensive treatment of chattel slavery? Primarily, this is owing to Latin’s long-standing hegemonic status in European learned communities.8 Even early modern humanists with extensive training in Greek use the Latin dominus for the Greek despote¯s, though despotical becomes more prevalent later in the seventeenth century. Initially, however, early modern usage of despotical applies neutrally to household or slave mastery, whereas dominium has strong, pejorative associations with tyranny in Roman republicanism. Like the power of the despote¯s, that of the dominus is semantically tied to the household, or domus, over which he rules. Either dominium, which in Roman law denotes ownership by the head of household, or dominus can in certain contexts specify slave mastership. As Latinists have observed, both tyranny and despotism are of Greek origin. Dominium is their Latin equivalent, signification Cicero and other advocates of republicanism exploit when characterizing the tyrant’s offensive reduction of his subjects to the status of “slaves.” Against the res publica, or commonwealth, in which, its supporters hold, public wealth is held in common, the monarch who conceives of himself as dominus of his people arrogates ownership to himself. To counteract such pejorative constructions, endemic to antityranny ideology, Rome’s Caesars reinforce an alternative set of connotations connecting the dominus with paternal benevolence, legitimate magistracy, and reassuringly stable political rule, connotations early modern royal absolutists continue to promote. Such positive meanings usefully carry over to the dominium used of Rome’s external, interstate rule of colonized nations, and are perpetuated by Rome’s early modern heirs in their legitimation of colonial expansion resulting in “dominions.” Conflicting attitudes toward and



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usage of dominium in early modern imperial, political, philosophical, and theological discourses need much more attention.9 At present, I would like to focus on the crucial appearance of this term in the ceremonial presentation to humankind of their dominion (related to the Vulgate’s dominium) over the rest of creation in Genesis 1:28: “and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” As biblical commentators regularly point out, this gift of dominion is renewed after the flood in Genesis 9, where it is worded somewhat differently, with an emphasis on nonhuman creatures’ fear of their human lords. Hobbes brazenly applies the term dominion to all forms of legitimate rule, but without reference to these Genesis texts. Only Walter Raleigh, to my knowledge, finds confirmation of Aristotle’s doctrine of the natural household slave in the Genesis grants of dominion. Without any show of reconciling Aristotle with Christian doctrine, in History of the World Raleigh affirms the naturalness of “masterlie” rule, which, he claims, “God gave unto Adam,” and which has been extended to “a great part of Mankinde,” since there are so many “whose disabilitie to governe themselves, proves them, according unto Aristotles doctrine, to be naturallies slaves.” Raleigh caustically dismisses the notion that slavery died out with Christianity and testily comments that since slavery is no longer practiced in England, “there are growne up a rabble of Rogues, Cutpurses and other the like Trades; slaves in Nature, though not in Lawe.”10 For Raleigh, the lawfulness of “dominion” over natural slaves is a no-brainer. Filmer, translating Raleigh’s audacious claim into patriarchalist terms, famously makes the divine grant of dominion in Genesis 1:28 the scriptural basis of monarchical absolutism. In theory, at least, God institutes monarchy with these words, which Filmer reads as having been addressed to Adam. When Adam receives the divine grant of “dominion,” he is made absolute, royal “lord” of his children, whose subjection to him, Filmer argues, in no ways differs from subjection to a monarch.11 Despite its shakiness, this exegesis gives patriarchalism a welcome scriptural foundation for claims about the dominion natural to monarchy. In Jus Populi, Parker formulates a representative royalist take on the Genesis grant of dominion so as to rebut it: “Man in his innocence received dominion over the creatures immediately from God; and shall we deny that the most noble, and excellent government over men is from God, or say it is by humane constitution?” Parker’s response to this generic, royalist exegesis is: “God did not create so vast a distance betwixt man and man, as betwixt man and other irrationall creatures: and therefore there was not at first

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the same reason of subjection amongst the one as the other. Yet we except nothing against order, or a milde subjection amongst men: we onely say that such servility as our Adversaries would now fain patronize in Gods name, was never introduced by God, Nature, or any good men” (8). For Parker, as for other radicals of the time, what matters is the categorical distinction between human and nonhuman: the divinely authored grant of dominion applies exclusively to “irrationall”—that is, nonhuman—“creatures.” What, though, of Nimrod’s rule? Appearing in Genesis 10:8–10, Nimrod is regarded as the first earthly monarch by early modern Christians, who take Genesis to be an accurate if compacted record of the world’s origins. As Genesis has it, Nimrod, whose Hebrew name can be glossed “rebel,” was the chief architect of Babel and thus the founder of Babylon. Though the modifier “a mighty hunter before the Lord” is debated, it introduces a link between tyranny and political slavery that may recall Aristotle’s claim that the acquisition of slaves in warfare is a species of hunting (1256b22–25).12 In any case, it is generally agreed that Nimrod comes to power by means of force, which makes him a tyrant by acquisition. For royalists or royal absolutists, Nimrod’s means of acquiring power, if regrettable, matters less than how his rule disproves the tenet that political rule is a human, popular construct. Filmer acknowledges that Nimrod wrongly seized the rights of other father-lords in enlarging his empire but then, turning an obstacle to theoretical consistency into an absolutist platform, argues that “all those that do attribute unto him the original of regal power do hold he got it by tyranny or usurpation, and not by any due election of the people or multitude, nor by any paction with them.”13 Nimrod’s method of gaining the first, royal throne is irrelevant if it owes nothing to popular initiative, election, or consent. Opponents of royal absolutism do not cut Nimrod this much slack. For Christian antityrannicism, Nimrod is not simply the first of human tyrants but originates the barbarous, Asiatic absolutism vilified in classical Greece. Descended from the cursed Ham (sometimes Cham) and his son Cush, Nimrod is first in the roster of human absolutist rulers-cum-tyrants. Ponet associates the Asiatic king requested by the Israelites in 1 Samuel 8 with Nimrod, first of the Gentiles’ tyrants. Nimrod, he explains, “for his rebellion against God, and devouring of Gods people was called The stout Hunter before, or against God” (Genesis 10:9)—the ruler’s cannibalistic “devouring” of his subjects being one of antityrannicism’s favorite tropes. Extending this antipathy to monarchy itself, a later writer asserts that the “despoticall domination of that great hunter Nimrod,” usurped by violence, can be called “the first pattern of Royalty, dispersed throughout most parts



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of the World.”14 Early modern Christian humanists have learned from their Greco-Roman teachers that subjection to coercive force unmistakably marks the difference between freeborn and slave. As the first ruler metaphorically to enslave human beings, Nimrod effects a degradation in human status. Even Raleigh, who is not especially hard on Nimrod, observes that “he first brake the rule of Eldership and Paternitie, laying the foundation of soveraigne Rule, as [Julius] Caesar did.”15 Nimrod’s monarchy, like the monarchy the Israelites introduce after the reign of judges, institutes a fall. Lost—though not necessarily forever—is the gentle fraternal rule that occurs under direct, divine guidance. Extolling the simplicity of this primitive, egalitarian government, John Cooke, the lawyer representing the state’s prosecution of Charles I, contrasts the tyrannous, usurping Nimrod with the gentle rule of God through Samuel, saying “that when good Samuels rule the people, it is God that rules in them and by them, and there is nothing so contrary to the gracious Nature of God as the violence, oppression and Legall Thefts of the wicked Nimrods of the world.”16 Nimrod is also associated with the loss of egalitarian society and the end of divinely mediated rule in the anonymous Light shining in Buckinghamshire (1648), a leveling tract infused with visionary, apocalyptic language that vehemently protests all economic and social inequalities. Light shining opens by commenting on the Genesis grant of dominion: “[T]he creature Man was priviledged with being Lord over other inferior creatures, but not over his own kinde; for all men being a like priviledged by birth, so all men were to enjoy the creatures alike without propriety, one more than the other.” Lording it over his own kind specifically means, the author claims, “to enclose the creatures to his own use, to the impoverishing of his neighbours.”17 The grant of dominion, which for Filmer authorizes monarchy, for Light shining is a communal “Charter” prohibiting the impoverishment of some people by others who lay claim to “propriety,” since dominion over inferior creatures is granted equally to everyone. As promised in its subtitle, A Discovery of the main ground, originall cause of all the slavery in the world, but cheifly in England, the author explains oppression’s origins— “the Slavery of the one, and Tyrany of the other”—by envisioning a murderous condition where the greedy strengthen their opposition to godly laws and brotherly freedoms by appointing Nimrod as military head and king.18 Despite this focus on Nimrod as prototypical monarch, the author of Light Shining is not under the illusion that constitutional change will bring an end to all the figurative slavery in the world. As is true of other tracts agitating for revolutionary economic and social change, the king is merely one

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representative of a “tyranny” conceived so broadly that it embraces social injustice of every kind.

Servility, Tyranny, and Asiatic Monarchy in 1 Samuel 8 How does this stress on human freedom and the quest for social justice square with Christian teachings on political rule? As a royalist writing in 1662 pointedly asks of the English regicides, marveling that they could approve the Lord’s Prayer, “if theirs be the kingdom, the power and the glory, if they have power to make and unmake kings, then what or where is Gods power?”19 What or where, one might also ask, is human sinfulness? If ordinary mortals have the power to make and unmake kings, has the Fall in any way limited human freedom? Early modern Protestantism gives the Christian doctrine of Original Sin a higher profile than it had ever had, and magnifies divine grace to the nth power. Yet sometimes sinfulness and grace can assume displaced, protosecular forms. For example, the claim Vindiciae makes of tyranny—that it is a summation of all crimes—is one conventionally used of the first human sin. Similarly, I would like to suggest, opponents of absolutism tend to transpose the Christian doctrine of the Fall into a more politically relevant, historical key when commenting on two passages of Scripture that are often interrelated as they are in Light shining: the tyrannous rule first introduced by Nimrod and the servility evinced by the Israelites’ desire for a king in 1 Samuel 8. Early modern discussions of sovereignty unanimously assume that po­ litical power originates with God. Yet does he confer it directly or indirectly? Does he favor a specific political form? What part does human decision making have in the establishment of political governance? All of these questions seem to be addressed in 1 Samuel 8:11–22. Referred or alluded to in countless pamphlets and official declarations, for advocates of popular sovereignty or substantially republican, representative government, 1 Samuel 8 articulates antityranny ideology, while for advocates of royal absolutism, it divinely ordains monarchy. Yet all parties agree that the Israelites step out of line when they ask Samuel, whose sons have become corrupt, to be ruled as other nations are—that is, by a king. Troubled by the request, Samuel confers with Jehovah, who advises him to let them have their way but not to take the insult personally: it is he, their Lord, who is being rejected. Addressing the Israelites as directed, Samuel outlines what to expect should their demand be met, using the formulaic “he will



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take from you” to list six categories of people, labor, and goods to which the king will help himself. In the King James version, cited here, Samuel opens the catalog with the statement “This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you”—the translation of the Hebrew here rendered “manner” is contentious—and concludes with, “and ye shall be his servants.” Like everything else he says, Samuel’s final words—“And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the Lord will not hear you in that day” (8:18)—have no effect, as the people persist in demanding a king (8:19–20). Among the debates to which this narrative is related are whether kings have the right to rule in this way, whether God approves of such rule, and if its subjects have the right of resistance. Johann Sommerville has shown that numerous English and Continental writers explicated absolutist principles with reference to 1 Samuel 8, which then illustrates a king’s right to govern with impunity, even contrary to law if he thinks it necessary. Virtually every claim for royal discretionary power was formulated with reference to this text, including the position that a king does not need the consent of subjects to “take from” them their property.20 To support the tenet that subjects owe their rulers “simple and absolute obedience” regardless of the content of their commands, Hobbes quotes several verses of 1 Samuel 8. Of verse 11, cited as “This shall be the Right of the King who will command you,” Hobbes asks, “Surely such power is absolute? Yet God himself calls the right of the king.”21 Because it originates with God, much is at stake in the translation of the phrase Hobbes and other absolutists render “right of the king.” In his attack on absolutism, Ponet relies on the Coverdale Bible’s “This shall be the right or Law of the King that shall rule over you,” variants of which absolutists frequently employ. As early as 1560, though, the Geneva Bible registers its protest by rendering it with maner: “This shalbe the maner of the King that shal reigne over you.” A marginal note explains, “Not yt Kings have this autoritie by their office, but that suche as reigne in Gods wrath shulde usurpe this over their brethren contrary to the Law. Deu. 17, 20.”22 Drawing on a commonplace theological distinction, the note implies that though God may permit unjust rule as a punishment, he would not ordain it. This reading, however, does not necessarily imply a right of resistance, which Calvin explicitly disallows with reference to this text. More radical is the note’s appeal to the “Law” of fraternal rule in Deuteronomy 17, where it is predicted that Israelites will want a king but commands that they select one from among their “brethren.” A ruler is forbidden to amass

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horses, wives, silver, or gold for himself; to return his people to Egypt; or to depart from the words of the law, all of which is summed up in verse 20, “That his heart be not lifted up above his brethren.” Not all the ins and outs of this interpretative battle are relevant to understanding the congruence between Greek antityranny ideology and anti­ absolutist exegesis of 1 Samuel 8—congruence so striking that even James I acknowledges it, just as the King James Bibles uses “manner” of the king, not “right.” For early modern commentators who have internalized antityr­ anny precepts, 1 Samuel 8 self-evidently concerns tyranny and slavery. In his one allusion to this text, which he does not name, La Boétie refuses to grace the proposed ruler with the title of king. He always becomes angered, La Boétie confesses, when reading about the Israelites, who for no reason at all appointed a tyrant (qui, sans contrainte ni aucun besoin, se firent un tyran).23 For antiabsolutists, the “servility” inherent in the Israelites’ desire for a king cannot be separated from the “tyranny” outlined in Samuel’s monitory depiction of kingship. The “other nations” the Israelites want to imitate are the Eastern nations Athenian ideology directly associates with barbarism and thus with both political and personal slavery. Needless to say, disparagement of Asiatic monarchy derives some of its rhetorical power from Protestantism’s endless vilification of a profane, orientalized papacy. Simultaneously insulting God and manifesting its own servility, Israel’s decision to replace judges with kings results in the loss of divine, fatherly governance. In John Diodati’s words, “[T]hey will have an absolute, constant, powerfull, and pompous King; in contempt of the sweet and fatherly government of Judges, in whose person God reigned.”24 Drawing on Aristotle to amplify this opposition, Diodati says that the “only end” of God’s fatherly rule through Samuel was his people’s “safety,” an end perverted by “earthly Kings,” who usually “raigne by force, aiming at their own profit and pleasure.” In an interesting aside on his own historical moment, Diodati observes that kingdoms ruled by absolute power “encreaseth dayly, more and more.”25 Idealized in this line of interpretation is Israel’s premonarchical, more intimately theocratic, government in which brethren rule over brethren—as laid out in Deuteronomy 17—in a way that resembles the more fraternally, horizontally organized rule distributed among citizens of democratic Athens, where the polarity ruler/ruled does not apply, or the ostensibly self-governing Romans of the republic. For opponents of absolutism, when syncretized with Greek and Roman antimonarchical formations, Deuteronomy 17 lays down a divine “law” regarding political rule. Deuteronomy 17 and 1 Samuel 8 are more often alluded to than overtly referenced, which may be why their frequent juxtaposition



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has not received more comment. Under divine governance, Parker claims, Israel would never have experienced tyranny: “[I]t was impossible for their chief lord to oppresse, or do injustice, or to direct his thought to particular ends, contrary to theirs.” “This shews,” Parker goes on, “how impious and stupid a Frenzie that was in the Israelites, which made them weary of Gods Headship” (45). Yet their decision to replace God with a king does not give kings licence to violate the Deuteronomic “law” of political rule, much less, Parker adds in a dig at Charles I, whom parliamentarians hold responsible for instigating England’s Civil Wars, “to employ their Treasure, Horses or Arms against their Subjects” (46). Loss or threatened loss, including loss of status, is at the very heart of antityranny ideology, which is why 1 Samuel 8 seems so perfectly to instantiate it. When it is not dramatizing the social and psychological dynamics of the tyrant’s progressive degeneration, antityrannicism dwells on behavior that recklessly exposes subjects to harm and loss. In the situation 1 Samuel 8 foretells, the catalog of losses includes subjects’ say over the destinies of sons and daughters, fields, vineyards and olive orchards, their menand maidservants, asses, and most worthy young men, who will be put to work for the king. In addition, one-tenth of their seed and vineyards will be handed over to the king’s officers and servants—a feature that repeatedly gets taken up in debates over tithes. Their children, the fruits of their labor, and their belongings are not all the Israelites lose, however, since, we have seen, they also lose the guidance of Jahweh and the beneficent rule of brethren. Not surprisingly, when read through antityranny’s lens, Samuel’s final words summing up the Israelites’ status as the king’s “servants” suggest a reduction to the status of “slaves.” In The Trew Law of Free Monarchies, James I supports the proposition that “Monarchie is the trew paterne of Divinitie” with detailed exegesis of 1 Samuel 8, verses 11–20 of which are cited in full. Since they themselves have requested a monarch, God has Samuel foreshadow the risks his people may in the future suffer under monarchy, “thereby,” James says, “preparing them to patience, not to resist Gods ordinance.” James explicitly structures the exchange between the Israelites and Samuel as a “contract” involving full knowledge on the people’s part of the privileges they may have to forego. Since they are told in verse 18 that the Lord will not pay attention to any future complaining, they are, in effect, agreeing that it is not “lawful” to resist. Put more firmly, they are agreeing that resistance is unlawful. That they respond to this rejection of future appeals by openly avowing a desire for a king (verses 19–20) constitutes, James says, “consent” to Samuel’s “proposition,” consent James further amplifies. Conceding that their

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request for a king is an “importunate suit,” James makes this an additional ground for nonresistance or, as he puts it, against “casting off also rashly that yoke, which God at your earnest suite hath laid upon you.” With these moves, James cannily co-opts contractualism so that the people themselves authorize their own nonresistance while God retains sole power of appointing the king. James co-opts antityrannicism with equal flair by skillfully demonstrating how well the slavery and tyranny topos explicates the intolerable reign Samuel describes. “As if he would say,” James writes of 14 and 15, for example, “the best and noblest of your blood shall be compelled in slavish and servile offices to serve him.” The self-consciously exegetical “as if” preempts actual affirmation of antityrannicism at the same time that it concedes the aptness of its terms. Avoidance of declarative affirmation is also the hallmark of James’s summary commentary: [W]hat liberty can broiling spirits, and rebellious minds claime justly to against any Christian Monarchie; since they can claime to no greater liberty on their part, nor the people of God might have done, and no greater tyranny was ever executed by any Prince or tyrant, whom they can object, nor was here fore-warned to the people of God, (and yet all rebellion countermanded unto them) if tyrannizing over mens persons, sonnes, daughters and servants; redacting noble houses, and men, and women of noble blood, to slavish and servile offices; and extortion, and spoile of their lands and goods to the princes owne private use and commoditie, and of his courteours, and servants, may be called a tyrannie?26

James has apparently been too well educated by his tutor Buchanan to ignore antityrannicism’s power. By employing the interrogative mode, James appropriates antityrannicism without exactly making it his own, carefully delimiting its exegetical relevance. Even if what subjects have to endure may be called a tyranny—as Hobbes does later in his treatises, James foregrounds the act of nomination—the resulting servility is confined to the nobility and is in any case to be endured. It is simply part of the bargain. Radically divergent interpretations of this biblical text develop from a perceived correspondence between Scripture and antityranny ideology. So critical is 1 Samuel 8 that, arguably, the title James gives his work—The Trew Law of Free Monarchies—alludes to it as well as to Buchanan’s Dialogue. In Buchanan’s dialogue, his royalist interlocutor Maitland fears that what Buchanan denounces as the tyrannous destruction of laws, “God calls



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the law of kingship” (my emphasis; Deus legem regni vocat), another variant of 1 Samuel 8:11’s “the right of the King”). “The authority of that passage,” Maitland says, without citing either text or chapter and verse—knowledge of the precise passage in question can simply be assumed—“influences me more than all the arguments of the philosophers.” Maitland points out that God refers to a “king,” not a “tyrant,” which gives Buchanan a chance to explain that God characteristically uses the language of the people he addresses, even though here obviously describing tyranny. For Buchanan, the text underscores the un-European servility of the Israelites’ clamoring for a king.27 In his treatises defending the trial and execution of Charles I, Milton recurs so often to antityranny exegesis of 1 Samuel 8 and Deuteronomy 17 that the texts develop a fugue-like accompaniment to his polemical pyrotechnics. Exhilarated by the success of popular resistance against tyranny, Cooke proposes turning 1 Samuel 8 into the new republic’s manifesto in Monarchy, no creature of Gods making, &c. wherein is proved by Scripture and reason, that monarchical government is against the minde of God (1652). Cooke declares the text to be “the Statute Law concerning Kings where it cleerely appears that the first generation of Monarchs and the rise of Kings, was not from above, not begotten by the Word and Command of God but from the peoples pride & importunity; they were mad for a King to be like unto the Heathens.” Like Deuteronomy 17, 1 Samuel 8 has become a “law”—even, now, “the Statute Law concerning Kings.” The story of the Israelites’ impetuousness and its frightful consequences “deserves to be written in Capitall letters of Gold,” Cooke says, “and if it were convenient to appoint the reading of it but once a moneth in the publique meeting places.”28 People could then regularly be reminded of the “insanity & madness” that possessed the Israelites when they rejected honest rule by their religious brethren and God to “inslave themselves to the Arbitrary and lawless Lusts of one man and his posteritie.”29

Genesis, Dominion, and Servitude in Paradise Lost A ruler’s wrongful claim to “dominion,” loss of fraternal rule, and the fraught relations among natural, penal, and political slaveries come together when Milton introduces Nimrod into Paradise Lost (1667).30 Milton’s Nimrod is an early modern royalist avant la lettre in that he purports to rule by divine right (“claiming second Sovrantie”). Equally important to the anti­ tyranny discourse Nimrod’s entry inspires is the phrase “arrogate Dominion

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undeserv’d / Over his brethren,” an allusion to the Deuteronomic “law” of fraternal rule:

till one shall rise

Of proud ambitious heart, who not content With fair equalitie, fraternal state, Will arrogate Dominion undeserv’d Over his brethren, and quite dispossess Concord and law of Nature from the Earth, Hunting (and Men not Beasts shall be his game) With Warr and hostile snare such as refuse Subjection to his Empire tyrannous: A mightie Hunter thence he shall be styl’d Before the Lord, as in despite of Heav’n, Or from Heav’n claiming second Sovrantie; And from Rebellion shall derive his name, Though of Rebellion others he accuse. (12.24–37)

Milton’s Nimrod not only hunts “Men not Beasts,” but in turning them into enemies by “Warr,” he hunts men as beasts, as “game.” So unmistakably does Nimrod reduce human to nonhuman that the adjective tyrannous is nearly redundant. Like other political theorists exploring the origins of tyranny and slavery, Milton must contend with Aristotle’s doctrine of natural slavery, which he does here. In book 1 of Politics, Aristotle discusses the slave-by-nature in connection with nature’s provision of nonhuman animals for human use. Whether tame or wild, Aristotle says, animals can be used for labor, for food, and in the form of the various products made from them. Acquisition, Aristotle has argued, is an “art,” which, being employed for the acquisition of slaves in a just war, indicates slavery’s naturalness: “[T]he art of war is a natural art of acquisition, for the art of acquisition includes hunting, an art which we ought to practise against wild beasts, and against men who, though intended by nature to be governed, will not submit; for war of such a kind is naturally just” (1256b). Possibly with this text in mind, Paradise Lost revisions Aristotle’s declaration by emphasizing human resistance to subjection in the face of an unjust, tyrannous war. For Aristotle, war-ashunting has as its object the submission of those whom nature intends for enslavement but who refuse to submit. Likewise, in Paradise Lost Nimrod uses his art (“hostile snare”) to capture “such as refuse / Subjection to his Empire tyrannous.” Milton’s emphasis on a collective refusal of subjection



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springs from his passionate, never-extinguished commitment to a natural, divinely sanctioned right of resistance. Significantly, Nimrod is here not said actually to kill his human prey. They thereby become, as they are when acquired with Aristotle’s “art,” prisoners of war available for enslavement. Far from being natural, however, in Paradise Lost the subjection resulting from Nimrod’s hunting is fundamentally unnatural as well as illegitimate since his is obviously not a just war. In this passage, Milton critiques Aristotle’s defense of natural slavery, as Parker does when referring to Aristotle’s “error.” Like Parker, he also rewrites it, though to a different end. Evoked by Nimrod’s reduction of humankind to beasts, chattel slavery is rejected as—with reference to divinely created origins—unnatural. Yet because this reduction involves the violent, traumatic loss of a previously enjoyed freedom, chattel slavery is also the figurative point of reference for the oppression that results. Figuratively, the distinction between freeborn and enslaved emerges in Paradise Lost’s depiction of a primitive condition of “fair equality, fraternal state,” a condition Nimrod’s hunting brings to a tragic end. If it is so central, why is the term slavery not used—or at least its less novel, Latinate ancestor, servitude? Politically savvy readers would, after all, immediately associate coerced political subjection, explicitly “tyrannous,” with political slavery.31 It could be that at this time, when Milton is under scrutiny by Restoration censors, slavery and servitude are too in­ flammatory. Alternatively, Milton avoids this usage until he can differentiate political from actual, sociolegal slavery, which, according to Christian commentators, first enters human history when Noah curses Canaan, descendant(s) of his son Ham. This is the explanation I would like to advance. In Genesis, however, this curse precedes the emergence of Nimrod’s tyranny (the story of Noah’s curse is given in Genesis 9:12–27, while Nimrod arises in 10:8–14). Nimrod, as mentioned, is one of Ham’s descendants, his son Cush’s son. According to Genesis, Paradise Lost’s divine source, the curse should, then, already have occurred. So the real question is why Paradise Lost brings the curse of Ham in well after having narrated the rise of Nimrod’s tyrannous rule. Why does Milton present these two episodes in exactly the reverse order in which they appear in Genesis? This narrative repositioning is very important to Paradise Lost’s treatment of slavery. For by postponing the story of Noah’s curse until after Michael and Adam discuss Nimrod’s tyranny, Paradise Lost can foreground the inviolability of human freedom so as to set Christianity against the heathen doctrine of natural slavery. Natural freedom is preemptively defended not, however, because Milton wants to critique institutional slavery (on

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the contrary, he later defends it) but rather because he wants to safeguard political freedom, conceived as political slavery’s antithesis. Paradise Lost assigns narrative priority to Nimrod’s story in order to give pride of place to a specifically political freedom and slavery. Political slavery is differentiated from its more punitively oppressive counterpart only later, when the curse of Canaan comes in. Highlighted by this revision of Aristotle, political freedom is the subject of the passage that immediately follows: O execrable Son so to aspire Above his Brethren, to himself assuming Authority usurpt, from God not giv’n: He gave us onely over Beast, Fish, Fowl Dominion absolute; that right we hold By his donation; but Man over men He made not Lord; such title to himself Reserving, human left from human free. (12.64–71)

Milton here has Adam explicate the divine gift (“donation”) of “dominion” recorded in Genesis 1:28, which, as is conventional, makes Paradise Lost’s Eve and Adam “lords” of creation. Adam, who receives it directly, insists on its precisely delimited character: “He gave us onely over Beast, Fish, Fowl / Dominion absolute; that right we hold / By his donation.” Confined to nonhuman animals, this “dominion” does not belong to the categories of rule discussed by Aristotle (who from Milton’s perspective lacks divine revelation on the absolute priority of human freedom, the “error” Parker addresses). As Adam expounds it, “dominion absolute” applies to only two forms of rule: human over nonhuman nature and the Deity’s over his creation. So categorical is Adam’s pronouncement that the claim he deduces—most likely a formulation of what earlier gets referred to as the “law of nature” (12.29)—appears to have the status of an immutable truth: “Man over men / He made not Lord”; or, restated, “human left from human free.” Together with the rewriting of Aristotle’s defense of natural slavery, this represents as irreducibly biblical the view, central to the early modern and Enlightenment literature of political resistance, that other forms of “dominion” are social, not natural. Milton writes as one of what Parker calls “Civilians.” Here as elsewhere in the political literature he and his fellow radicals author, when qualifying rule or “dominion,” absolute is the contrary of conditional or consensual.



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That the creator alone is appropriately “Lord” over human beings is a principle to which Protestant antityrannicism adheres with special tenacity. In this passage, Lord has particular resonance, partly because the “lord” (with its feudal and aristocratic connotations), in contradistinction to the “master,” rules over slaves. (The word is similarly charged in Eikonoklastes when Milton castigates Charles I for the obduracy of his will, “that would have bin our Lord” [181].)32 Usurpation is a charge Milton explicitly brings against Nimrod (“to himself assuming / Authority usurpt, from God not giv’n”). In animalizing his prey, thereby metaphorically enslaving them, Milton’s Nimrod transgresses both limits placed on human “dominion.” As a consequence, while only political slavery is overtly at issue, it is not possible to elide the discursive dependency of political “slavery” on literal, human bondage. From whatever angle Adam’s speech is approached, slavery haunts it as a disallowed possibility. Rhetorically, Adam’s speech does more than establish the tyrannous nature of Nimrod’s rule: it makes large, general claims on behalf of human freedom. Adam’s central assertion—“but Man over men / He made not Lord; such title to himself / Reserving, human left from human free”— opens up a grand, expansive vision that apparently embraces all human relations. Animal lordship, which is legitimate, is sharply set over against the dominion of “Man over men,” making interspecies rule the only kind of absolute sovereignty in which humankind can engage (a point underscored by the parallelism of “human from human” and “Man over men”). What of household forms of human rule over human? Marital rule, which does not involve such “dominion,” is not mentioned, nor is parental rule. Does this mean they are prohibited? Like Parker, Locke, and other radical theorists, Milton does not here include such forms of rule partly because they are household or private rather than political, partly because they do not in any case involve “absolute” dominion. What of despotical or masterly rule, which definitely is lordship? Were legal slavery here considered, the law of nature Adam espouses presumably would not apply; Milton, like Locke, would likely view it a form of household rule not relevant to the topic under discussion. Owing to the transposition of Nimrod’s and Noah’s stories, however, it is simply not at issue. The conventions of contemporary radical discourse confine Adam’s assertion to a specifically political freedom. As occurs consistently in antityrannicism, the target is one-person sovereignty exercised over fellow citizens conceived as a political collective. “Man over men / He made not Lord” is how Adam puts it, not “Man over man” or “Men over men” (my emphasis). John Lilburne

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uses a similar locution in his own sweepingly egalitarian declaration, also made in commenting on the Genesis grant of dominion: And unnaturall, irrationall, sinfull, wicked, unjust, devilish, and tyrannicall it is, for any man whatsoever, spirituall or temporall, Clergy-man or Lay-man, to appropriate and assume unto himself, a power, authority and jurisdiction, to rule, govern, or raign over any sort of men in the world, without their free consent [my emphasis].

For Lilburne, as for others steeped in antityranny ideology, the individual who presumes to rule in this way usurps “the Office and sovereignty of God, (who alone doth, and is to rule by his will and pleasure).”33 Literal enslavement is addressed in the lengthy excursus on liberty, slavery, and tyranny the Archangel Michael delivers in responding to Adam’s indignant speech on Nimrod’s rule. This excursus knits the tyranny introduced by Nimrod to the slavery Christian commentators believe to have been instituted by the curse of Canaan. Because the curse of Canaan is about to appear, for the first time since the telling of Nimrod’s story, Paradise Lost uses the word servitude.

Justly thou abhorr’st

That Son, who on the quiet state of men Such trouble brought, affecting to subdue Rational Libertie; yet know withall, Since thy original lapse, true Libertie Is lost, which always with right Reason dwells Twinn’d, and from her hath no dividual being: Reason in man obscur’d, or not obeyed, Immediately inordinate desires And upstart Passions catch the Government From Reason, and to servitude reduce Man till then free. (12.79–90)

Three different modes of servitude are delineated, with this excerpt presenting the first and most interior while the most exterior, appearing later, comes last—the last being actual human bondage. In keeping with Christian theology’s privileging of inward states, institutionalized by the classical learning of the Church Fathers, the first servitude is ethico-spiritual (86–90). Tyranny is reserved for the second mode



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of servitude, the oppression specific to political society that antityranny discourse considers “slavery”:

Therefore since hee permits

Within himself unworthie Powers to reign Over free Reason, God in Judgement just Subjects him from without to violent Lords; Who oft as undeservedly enthrall His outward freedom: Tyrannie must be, Though to the Tyrant thereby no excuse. (12.90–96)

While the emphasis remains on divine punishment, “Therefore” acts as a pivot between the first and second modes of servitude, which are causally as well as analogically related. Relative to ethico-spiritual servitude, subjection to tyranny is “outward,” though enthrall is as close to enslave as the language of this passage comes. Juridical language, which presents tyranny as a “Judgement just,” does not preclude judgment on the tyrant. By implication, it does not prohibit resistance. In his Defence of the People of England (1651), Milton finds in even the most severe divine punishment an occasion for collective self-liberation. Rebutting Salmasius, Milton concedes that God permitted King Nebuchadnezzar to penalize Israel by reducing it to slavery, but confidently argues that resignation is hardly the only appropriate response to penal tyranny: That he allowed them to be in such a position, I would not deny, but I never heard that he delivered them over to it. Or if God gives people into slavery whenever a tyrant is more powerful than his people, why may he not likewise be said to set them free whenever a people are more powerful than their tyrant? Shall the tyrant claim his tyranny as something received from God and we not claim our liberty likewise from him? (117)34

Should resistance against tyranny be denied, all of civil society would be annihilated, Milton argues, and humankind as a whole would be reduced “almost to the condition of four-footed animals: since tyrants, if they are lifted up above all law, will hold equal right and power over both the species of beasts and of men” (118). Compared with such powerful claims, which appear throughout Milton’s treatises on tyrannicide, the language in Paradise Lost is noticeably restrained. Tyranny’s unnaturalness, however,

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is consistently maintained, both in the opening remarks that refer back to Nimrod’s “affecting to subdue Rational liberty,” where affecting stresses the categorical impossibility of actually subduing it, as well as in the undeservedly that modifies enthrall. The hereditary consequences of the Fall are not particularly disabling if, as Paradise Lost asserts, rational liberty cannot be subdued. What, then, about penal slavery, the third mode of servitude? Unlike the first two modes of servitude, the second and third are not interrelated. Yet somtimes Nations will decline so low From vertue, which is reason, that no wrong, But Justice, and some fatal curse annext Deprives them of thir outward libertie, Thir inward lost: Witness th’ irreverent Son Of him who built the Ark, who for the shame Don to his Father, heard this heavie curse, Servant of Servants, on his vitious Race. (12.97–104)

Yet, which suggests difference, actually introduces a complete disjunction. The third form of enslavement is not a further consequence of subjection to tyranny, as it could be. Causally, it therefore stands alone. What about analogically? Here there is continuity, as the same basic structure—divine punishment meted out to human fault—appears, while in both political and institutional slavery, the loss of “outward libertie” is a penalty for the loss of “inward” (though the emphasis on a decline in “virtue” makes this inward failing appear less inward). Parallel construction makes political servitude and human bondage analogues of a sort: the “outward freedom” enthralled by the tyrant corresponds to the “outward libertie” surrendered by those who become “Servant of Servants.” But the correspondence goes no further. For where the tyrant “undeservedly” enthralls the political subject, whose outward liberty is illegitimately alienated, those who are actually enslaved are said to suffer no “wrong.” Initially, it might seem that they are guilty of no “wrong,” but their moral degeneration alone works against such a reading. The tortuous syntax of “that no wrong, / But Justice, and some fatal curse annext” can be disentangled only if it is understood that a contrast between political and actual slavery is here being established. As if anticipating a charge of illegitimacy, Milton employs the language of defense. Though in the case of political servitude the tyrant is in the wrong, there is “no wrong” (my emphasis)—in either the ethical or legal sense—involved in this third, irremediable mode



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of servitude. To further this legitimacy, actual bondage is directly rather than permissively brought about: “Justice, and some fatal curse annext / Deprives them of thir outward libertie.” Nothing mitigates the juridical sentence that is executed on those condemned to be “servants of servants.” Milton not only leaves out mortal conquerors and slave masters but also severs the curse from its Genesis speaker Noah, leaving the impression that its penal efficacy originates with God. While the curse’s speaker may be ambiguous, its association with divine “Justice” is not.35 The third mode of slavery is set apart in two additional ways. First, despite the claim that “true Libertie” has been lost as a result of the Fall, the generic subject of both ethico-spiritual and political modes of servitude retains certain vestiges of freedom. For example, the word free appears in both sections. Similarly, as has been suggested, political subjection is represented so as to imply a right of resistance. By contrast, the “curse” appears to ratify a state of irrevocable loss (“Thir inward lost”). A division is thus erected between nations whose penalty is merely undeserved tyranny and those destined for slavery (the curse is “fatal”). Second, the first two modes of human servitude are joined grammatically by the third-person singular pronoun, giving them a shared, individual subject. Though there is nothing unusual about a singular ethico-spiritual “Man” (“hee permits,” “within himself”), it is surprising that political servitude, too, involves the third-person singular pronoun, since, as I have been emphasizing, tyranny is possible only with regard to a collectivity, polity, or state. In this excursus, however, tyranny oppresses a third-person singular, generic man (“Subjects him,” “His outward freedom”) whose identity is thereby continuous with his ethico-spiritual forebear. The third-person plural, signifying membership in a collectivity, is reserved for the anomalous third mode of servitude, in which entire “nations” are accursed (“their outward libertie, / Thir inward lost”). In itself, the shift from singular to plural pronouns separates off the first two modes of servitude from slavery, the third. Forming their own self-enclosed unit, the first two modes of servitude and freedom are grammatically associated with a generic, representative individual who enjoys ethical and political liberty. Soon to become familiar as the basic unit of liberal discourses, this individual emerges, significantly, at the very point where unmarked, revocable loss of freedom splits off from its stigmatized, irrevocable counterpart. By contrast with this individual, the degenerate “nations” meriting enslavement do so as an undifferentiated collective, just as the curse falls not on the individual whose act prompts it but on “his vitious Race,” which remains unnamed.36

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Why are “Nations”—plural—subject to the curse of Ham? Historically, exegetes apply the Hamitic curse to a particular nation, members of whom are generationally fated to become slaves. In its original context, it has been argued, Noah’s curse may rationalize the servile status of Canaanites within Israel.37 Over the centuries, Jewish, Muslim, and Christian traditions have assigned Ham a wide variety of ethnic and geographic identities: Syrians, sub-Saharan Africans, and Balkan Slavs have all been “Canaanites,” while Persians, Mongols, Jews, and Indigenous Americans have been associated with Ham.38 In the early stages of Euro-colonialism, the Hamitic curse alights on Amerindigenes, while with the development of the transatlantic slave trade, it is sub-Saharan Africans who are said to be divinely accursed. At the time Milton writes, Western Europeans associate the Hamitic curse with sub-Saharan Africans, an identification Paradise Lost may assume its readers will make and certainly does nothing to counteract.39 Race, in the phrase “vitious race,” does not have the pseudoscientific sense to be developed in nineteenth-century European discourses. It is rather a synonym for lineage or nation. When the loaded intensifier vitious is used with reference to the curse of Canaan, though, the phrase “vitious race” certainly resonates with schemas positioning Africans at the bottom of a racialized hierarchy. It is possible that Paradise Lost’s third mode of slavery also legitimizes colonial conquest. In this case, the servitude in question would be the “enslavement” by conquest of one nation by another, with chattel slavery being a possible but not necessary outcome. Understood in this way, Milton’s exegesis would diverge from orthodox, Christian interpretation of the curse of Ham. But it would follow much Euro-colonial linguistic practice, which tends to locate both freedom and “slavery” at the level of the nation (the “Americas” and all of “Africa” being referred to as nations), thereby conflating personal and national (in)ability to rule. If the plurality of “nations” affected by Milton’s Hamitic curse refers to military subjection, the language of defense would invoke just war doctrine interpreted through the belief that the Deity blesses particular nations with victories or punishes them for spiritual perversity. In a treatise published in 1649, for example, Antony Ascham represents the subjects of Asiatic absolute monarchy as so bereft of community or rights that they can be compared only to slaves in ancient Rome or “those who were anciently excommunicated, of whom it was said, That they had wolves heads, that is men might kill them as pardonably as they might Wolves.” An entire people can be reduced to such abjection, Ascham explains: “For God many times finding some nations grossely peccant and obnoxious to his severest Justice, instead of destroying them, gives them up as a prey to another Crowne.”40 Although Ascham does not men-



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tion particular nations here, his remarks would certainly fit the dominant Commonwealth attitude toward the Irish and the Caribbean nations Cromwell sets out to vanquish in his Western Design. Milton’s poetic exegesis of the Hamitic curse shares the motivated ambiguity of many utterances associating slavery and barbarism. In Greco-Roman traditions chattel slavery generally stands in complex, interdiscursive relation to political slavery, whether internal to the city-state or effected by interstate conquest. In classical Athens, the barbaroi are naturally suited to chattel slavery as well as naturally predisposed to internal, political slavery and, possibly, rule by Greeks, while in the empire of Rome’s late republic, unfitness to rule appears as a justification for conquest. At the time Paradise Lost is published (1667), the institutionalization of chattel slavery in English colonies has been consolidating itself for several decades. Because the civil status of forcibly enslaved Amerindigenes and Africans has such a complex, lengthy process of material and legal structuration, however, chattel slavery is still often subsumed under the interstate “enslavement” of their nations, as it formerly was for Spain. Though it is important to disambiguate slavery’s slippery ideological usage, doing so is not always easy. In the passage above, it may not be possible. If, for example, Ireland is one of the “nations” cursed with penal servitude, its servitude would take the form of national subjection to England. On the other hand, since external, interstate enslavement of Africa is not yet a sparkle in England’s imperial eye, if Africa is one of the cursed “nations,” the servitude in question would be the chattel enslavement of its inhabitants being transported, as Milton writes, to the New World. The plural form leaves room for maneuver as well as for doubt.

Ears Bored with an Awl in Revolutionary England With the lifting of censorship during the English Civil Wars comes an extra­ ordinary outpouring of antityranny literature. Antityrannicism’s rhetorical possibilities are seized on by a variety of voices and communities whose interests initially seem to coalesce. Slaves and Slavery start appearing every­ where, within countless tracts and in numerous titles and subtitles. To choose a fairly temperate example, A Declaration by the House of Commons (1647) recounts the king’s several attempts to use foreign military aid to “enslave” the English, Irish, and Scottish, catalogs his numerous acts of appropriating public funds and lands under the rubric of “Oppression and Slavery,” and, finally, mentions his determination to “make us worse then Slaves” by refusing to call Parliament, with physical torture or death the

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penalty for any who chose to “act as men above meer slaves.”41 An Arrow Against All Tyrants and Tyranny, shot from the Prison of New-gate into the Prerogative Bowles of the Arbitrary House of Lords, and all other Usurpers and Tyrants whatsoever (1646), the title of a tract by Richard Overton, captures something of the radical energies that find expression, as does the Tyranipocrit—the malignant offspring of the tyrant and hypocrite—whose subtitle reads, Discovered with his wiles, wherewith he vanquisheth. Written and printed, to animate better Artists to pursue that MONSTER (1649). Though by far the most prominent tyrant is, of course, the excoriated and formally criminalized King Charles I, his is not the only tyrannous rule. Monarchy itself, the Presbyterian majority in Parliament, the clergy, the nobility, the House of Lords, lawyers, and the landowners responsible for enclosing the commons—all reduce their subjects to abject “slavery.” Despite being written from widely divergent social locations and with competing class interests and political aims, the multitude of tracts, pamphlets, and broadsides espousing antityrannicism have one feature in common: they assume the natural, rightful liberty of the English. Liberty is the basis of Protestant England’s identification with ancient Israel as a nation destined to be delivered from its bondage, as it was earlier for the Netherlands. Antityranny literature has several ways of keeping liberty under the spotlight, one of which is to flag premonarchical Israel’s affinities with republican Rome. (Israel’s unsettled journeying under divinely guided patriarchs and judges is by one writer referred to as Ambulans Respublica.)42 Another is to stress Jehovah’s protection of his chosen people’s liberty. Bodin, for example, contrasts Roman and Hebraic laws regarding disciplinary violence, noting that the latter “forbid to chastise slaves with whips (which the Roman laws permitted) and willeth the slave to be enfranchised, if his maister shal break any lim of him” (1.5.44). In Deuteronomy 15:15, Israel’s providential departure from Egypt is recalled to remind masters how highly their deity values release from bondage. At the end of six years they are to release their own debt slaves, fellow Hebrews who are, in effect, indentured servants. What, then, of the exception made regarding servants who choose to remain with their masters out of love (so it is said, Deuter­ onomy 15:16, which revises earlier legislation that did not include women, Exodus 21:7–11)? As a sign of newly established status, the servant who elects continuing servitude is to have her or his ear ceremonially bored through to the master’s door with an awl (Deuteronomy 15:17). Even this condition is not really permanent, Bodin observes, differentiating Hebrew from GrecoRoman slavery, because such slaves or their children would automatically be set free in the year of Jubilee, which occurs every fifty years.



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Figure 1. Hebrew slave with bored ear. From Claude Paradin’s Heroical Devices (1557). Photographed from the 1591 edition.

This scriptural instance of voluntary entrance into perpetual servitude is taken up in debates on sovereignty, with Grotius and others citing it as proof that subjection to absolute power or to an obligatory nonresistance can be freely chosen. Behind this position lies exegesis of the servant’s decision to remain bound as a figure of the good Christian’s committed service to the divine Lord. Appearing in an emblem under the rubric of Servitus libera (“Free service”), the servant’s decision is explicated as what every Christian, “a free servant under the law of grace,” ought to do: “offer his eare to God, that he may make it capable, and obedient to his commandements” (fig. 1). Interpretation informed by antityrannicism, by contrast, either denies the possibility of such a choice, vilifies the servant who elects perpetual servitude by employing the disparaging idiom of servility, or sees the boring as a degrading tyrannous assault or punishment. Whatever antityrannicism’s emphasis, perpetual slavery—which in ancient Israel otherwise applied only to non-Hebrews—is modeled on Greco-Roman chattel slavery. As emblems of shameful, servile branding, mutilated ears often make an appearance during the English revolution. In 1647, John Wildman protests the grandees’ negotiations with Charles I, saying, “What would such an agreement with the king amount to lesse, then boring of our eares for perpetuall vassalage to his will, or lust?”43 The dramatic potential of the self-enslaved-with-bored-ear servant is interestingly realized in a sermon delivered at Saint Paul’s Cathedral in 1642 by Thomas Gage, “The Tyranny

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of Satan, Discovered by the Tears of a Converted Sinner.” A convert from Roman Catholicism, a supporter of the parliamentarians and, later, of Crom­ well, Gage uses the Deuteronomic text to deliver an ethico-religious message with political overtones. Gage sets before his auditors “the tyranny of Satan over my miserable and afflicted soule” in the hope that when hearing of his former “slavery,” they will fear yielding to Satan’s subtle temptations. Gage first cites Deuteronomy 15:12, which he calls God’s “Command of release”: “And if thy Brother, an Hebrew man, or an Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years, then in the seventh yeare thou shalt let him go free from thee.” Gage adapts the Deuteronomic “Command of release” to Greco-Roman antityrannicism by suggesting that the command is violated not by slave masters possibly reluctant to let go of their help (the text’s addressees) but by the slave who chooses to remain with her or his master.44 The naturally free servant’s decision to remain with his (demonic) master is thus sinful as well as servile: In a morall and spirituall sense, Learn here, Deare Brethren, how as God commanded a release for debts and for servants, so doubtlesse he expecteth that thy Soule shall not be always under any other master but himself. If therefore the Devill have been thy Master for some time, thinke for a release, think of releasing thy self from him; do not say, deare soule, unto the Devill, I will not go away from thee, because I love thee, because I am well with thee; which if thou doest, then will Satan make use of this Law of God for himselfe and for his own ends; then will he marke thee in the eares for a perpetuall slave, with an Awl he will boare thine eares thorow, and fasten them to a wall, to that wall which thy iniquities have put between thee and God.

Gage structures this psychomachia so the sinner is torn between a freedomloving deity and a demonic chattel slave master. Gage neatly fuses his story of the soul’s enslavement to Satan with the Christian Testament’s dictum about not serving two masters, thereby pitting the divine against the satanic slave master, who craftily tries to perpetuate servitude. A typical tyrant, Satan will use God’s law “for himself and for his own ends,” an emphasis on Satan’s tyrannous will that underscores the violent mutilation involved in the boring “thorow” of ears. The moral of Gage’s reading is that Satan’s tyranny can be resisted, even overthrown. His own deliverance from the bondage of Romanism is living



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proof. While Gage’s Satan may suggest both the pope and Charles I, after the king’s execution, Milton makes no bones about identifying Charles I as a tyrant. Written in response to Eikon Basilike, a tract supposedly written by Charles I before his death, Milton’s Eikonoklastes addresses the cowardly souls who are deploring their compatriots’ recent acts of successful, manly resistance. Those who long for another king, Milton says, reveal themselves “to be by nature slaves, and arrant beasts.” Their recent pursuit of liberty must have been merely the agitated fighting of animals who had no actual use for it, as they are now ready “to be stroak’d & tam’d again, into the wonted and well pleasing state of thir true Norman villenage, to them best agreeable” (211). Words can scarcely convey Milton’s contempt for the servility of countrymen who desire to subject themselves collectively to the arbitrary rule of one, single man. In the damning language with which Eikonoklastes concludes, Milton returns to the notion of slaves-by-nature. Eikon Basilike’s maudlin sentiments could not possibly persuade men of reason, he says, because they were designed to catch the worthles approbation of an inconstant, irrational, and Imagedoting rabble; that like a credulous and hapless herd, begott’n to servility, and inchanted with these popular institutes of Tyranny, subscrib’d with a new device of the Kings Picture at his praiers, hold out both thir eares with such delight and ravishment to be stigmatiz’d and board through in witness of thir own voluntary and beloved baseness.

The single slave of the Deuteronomic text to which Milton alludes has become a “herd” of slaves who behave as if one, not only getting “both” ears bored but also masochistically offering them up to be “board through,” as if eagerly embracing both physical pain and degradation. What the “rabble” and the “herd” collectively do not grasp is the shamefulness of their behavior judged from the perspective of valiant, rational, freeborn citizens. In the sentence following, which concludes the pamphlet, Milton expresses the hope that those who are misled by specious good may “bethink themselves, and recover” (230). Those “begott’n to servility” may already have sealed their fate.

Revolution and Liberty Cap Neither the Hebrew nor Christian Bible can bestow much authority on the ritual for which the liberty cap is the central icon, as both ritual and icon are

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known to be distinctly Roman. Appropriated by Roman antityrannicism, the cap formerly referred to as the pileus cap was known in the American revolution as the liberty cap and in the French as le bonnet rouge. The pileus cap apparently began life as the Phrygian bonnet, which was associated in Greek literature and iconography with ancient Troy and, more generally, with Asiatic societies. Little seems to be known about the process of its emergence as an emblem of free/unfree status. But the pileus cap (pileus being a Greek term) was integral to Roman rites of manumission, a ritualized transaction by means of which liberty was legally awarded someone who had been enslaved. In the last stage of one version of this rite, the enslaved individual was to don the cap as a sign of freed status. Informing this practice is the assumption that headwear is a mark of privilege, like the new status awarded by this ritualized juridical process. As an icon, the pileus cap may be the most important early instance of an elite European group’s appropriation of the cultural artifacts and rituals of those they exploit or oppress. The first significant visual representation of the pileus as an emblem of specifically political liberty appears on a coin commemorating the assassination of Julius Caesar. Located in the center of the coin, the pileus cap has a dagger on either side and beneath it the inscription “Ides of March” (fig. 2). With this clue, the daggers indicate that tyrannicide is being celebrated and that the pileus cap signifies liberation from the collective, political slavery to which Julius Caesar had reduced Romans, who have now formally been freed. Antityranny ideology presupposes that even the worst tyrant is incapable of altering the status of those he rules, try as he might. If freedom is to be honored, however, the tyrant’s attempted degradation must be taken seriously, which is what the pileus cap does when united with tyrannicide, as occurs in this famous commemorative coin. The slaying of the tyrant Julius Caesar is represented not as an act of irrational violence or murder but as the restoration of civic lawfulness, which the tyrant—the people’s collective, tyrannous dominus—had tried to undermine. (Bodin mentions this coin and its liberty cap, together with Suetonius’s account of caps donned by “common people” after the death of Nero, 1.5.33.) By patterning collective liberation from tyranny on the individual Roman slave’s manumission, the pileus cap retrospectively demarcates the new era of political liberty from the previous era of political slavery. For antityranny ideology, the indisputable partition it erects between unfree and free is formal manumission’s major asset. Antityrannicism’s fundamentally polemical, constructivist character is theatrically displayed in its



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Figure 2. Anon., Brutus’s coin (ca. 42–43 BCE). Photograph: © Trustees of the British Museum.

appropriation of a ritual so integral to the institution of Roman slavery. Whether manumitted by the state (manumissio censu), by private testament (in testamento), or by legal fiction (vindicta), those who were legally enslaved were expected to take part in a prescripted narrative of personal, not collective, recovery of freedom. Further, while a slave freed by a citizen could become a Roman citizen (not the case in Greek city-states), the metamorphosis of enslaved to freed was not actually completed in this rite. Freedwomen and freedmen continued to have legal obligations to their former masters; freedmen could also have specific civic liabilities, such as not being permitted to serve militarily or to hold public office.45 Under such conditions, the pileus cap, while heralding a new era of personal liberty, did not so much signal the end of servile status as it put this status under erasure, as it were. To don it was to mark a transition undergone but still in a sense ongoing. Orlando Patterson suggests that, generally, rituals of manumission attempt to manage the contradictions arising from the arbitrary yet intelligible legal status conferred on the enslaved.46 This is especially true of manumissio vindicta—the mode of manumission relevant to visual representations of the liberty cap (and the mode of manumission relevant to early modernism’s Vindiciae), where the claimant’s (that is, the enslaved’s) freedom is ritually deemed to have been improperly alienated. In vindicating the claimant who is to be manumitted, this rite may appear to validate the doctrine of an original, universal human liberty later formalized in

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Roman jurisprudence. Patterson refers to it as a “collusive mode of manumission” that can also be found in Athens and was devised to circumvent the problem that manumission has no real economic or legal equivalence.47 If manumissio vindicta suggests that the master’s ownership was merely a provisional, legal fiction, this fiction is created, maintained, and, on discrete, carefully selected occasions, self-consciously exposed by slaveholders, who themselves—under the auspices of a judge—proffer liberty as a gift. In this context, it is significant that in Roman and early modern visual representations, the Roman Libertas does not actually wear the pileus cap but rather holds it in her hand. In her other hand Libertas holds a spear, which is commonly identified as the rod (vindicta) used in Roman manumissio vindicta.48 In ceremonial performance of manumissio vindicta, the rod is laid on the to-be-manumitted slave’s head by the presiding magistrate, who ceremoniously pronounces him or her to be free (vindicavit in libertatem). Yet in keeping with the double gesture of appropriation and dissociation in which I am interested here, Libertas herself holds the rod, and does not appear to be the recipient of the pileus cap, which she proudly bears. If we keep in mind the centrality of the hand as an emblem of ownership and authority in ancient Roman culture, it appears that Libertas, symbolically in possession of ritual paraphernalia, is precisely not in the position of the enslaved to be freed. In manumissio vindicta, the individual to be freed is literally held by the master’s hand until the master formally delivers words of release, hunc hominem liberum volo; turns the to-be-manumitted individual around; taps her or him with the rod; and then literally lets her or him go from his hand (misit manu—the origin of the term). The pileus cap along with its attendant rod or pike reappear in later periods of political or national revolution that have been influenced by GrecoRoman antityranny ideology. Revival of antityrannicism in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, including this major icon of liberation from tyranny, coincides with the historical period in which various democratic and republican formations appear alongside the institutionalization of Euro-colonialism and transatlantic slavery. As a visual icon, it appears in many iconographic collections, where its origins in juridico-ritual manumission of chattel slaves are frequently explicated. Andrea Alciatus’s immensely popular Emblemata (Emblems)—over two hundred editions were published in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries alone—contains a representation of Brutus’s coin as the emblem “Respublica liberata” (fig. 3), with a Latin text explicating the two icons:



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Figure 3. “Respublica liberata” (after Brutus’s coin). From Andrea Alciato’s Emblems (1546). Photographed from the 1621 edition.

Caesaris exitio, ceu libertate recepta, Haec ducibus Brutis cusa moneta fuit. Ensiculi in primis, queis pileus insuper astat, Qualem missa manu servitia accipiunt.49 After the death of Caesar, as if freedom had been restored, This coin was minted by the Brutus faction. In the foreground, there are daggers above which is a cap Such as slaves receive when they are set free.

Note the self-consciously figurative “liberty” given Brutus’s appropriation of the manumission rite. More often, the liberty cap’s connection with tyrannicide is not mentioned or invoked. Indeed, in a 1644 French edition of Cesare Ripa’s Iconologie, while holding the liberty cap in her left hand, Liberté bears a scepter in her right hand rather than a rod or the deadly daggers. In the accompanying

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Figure 4. Liberté. From Cesare Ripa’s Iconologie (1644).

text, which explicates the ritual of which “un Bonnet” is a part, “Le Sceptre” is said to signify “l’Empire de la Liberté,” which has connotations of both ethico-spiritual autonomy and a capacity for political rule (fig. 4).50 The Dutch develop a nationally specific version of the liberty cap that appears on public monuments commemorating liberation of the Netherlands from Spanish tyranny. Both intrastate and external, interstate slavery are at stake in the language used to assert Dutch independence from Spain in the 1581 Act of Abjuration (Plakkaat van Verlatinghe), which announces the deposition of King Philip II in an opening statement that denies subjects are created for the benefit of a prince, to serve him as slaves (als slaven te dienen). Rather, a prince exists only for their sakes: It is clear therefore that if he acts differently and instead of protecting his subjects endeavours to oppress and molest them and to deprive them of their ancient liberty, privileges and customs and to command and use



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them like slaves, he must be regarded not as a prince but as a tyrant. And according to right and reason his subjects, at any rate, must no longer recognise him as a prince (notably when this is decided by the States of the country), but should renounce him; in his stead another must be elected to be an overlord called to protect them.51

Here are proclaimed the tenets of early modern resistance theory as they cluster around the central antityranny principle that a free people whose ruler tyrannously treats them as slaves are naturally entitled to defend their liberty: the conditional relationship between ruler and ruled; the people’s welfare as the sole end of government; the connection among tyranny, oppression, and violence; the tyrannous ruler’s illegitimacy; and the people’s right to acknowledge the termination of his office by withdrawing their allegiance and support. Being both Spanish and Roman Catholic, Philip II is ideal for the role of tyrant as external enemy of the state. The Act of Abjuration charges the king of Spain with having sought to deprive the Netherlands “of their ancient freedom and to bring them into slavery under Spanish rule.”52 In this statement, the slavery in question is national servitude, the means interstate conquest. Yet the same rhetoric applies to the internal, civil slavery that results when the ruler-cum-tyrant tries to strip people of their privileges—the “stripping” a figurative replication of the violent, humiliating removal of clothing from those who are in the process of being literally enslaved. When it adapts the pileus or liberty cap to its new conditions, the Low Countries’ antityrannicism blazons its distinguished, ancient lineage—lineage that may also have eased any pangs of conscience that attended its early involvement in slave trading.53 William of Orange, considered the leader of the revolt against Spanish rule, was assassinated a few years after the Act of Abjuration and buried in the Nieuwe Kerk in Delft, where, later (1614–20), a marble and bronze tomb was commissioned to commemorate him. Like the Roman Libertas, one of the four virtues standing guard on this monument, this Liberty holds the liberty cap in one hand and the rod in her other.54 Its burnished gold spectacularly set off by the darkened bronze, this Liberty’s cap exhibits the prosperity of the newly independent Dutch. Unmistakably burgherly, it could not possibly be mistaken for the pileus cap awarded newly manumitted Roman slaves (fig. 5). The same burgherly liberty cap appears in another visual representation reproduced here: Allegorie auf die Herrschaft des Prinzen Moritz, ca. 1623, by Jan Tengnagel. Here, the liberty cap appears atop a pike or spear, which presumably serves as a reminder that freedom has been achieved through victory in battle (fig. 6).

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Figure 5. Hendrick de Keyser and Peter de Keyser, Aurea Libertas (Golden Liberty) (1620). Tomb of William the Silent, New Church, Delft.

Perched atop a pike or spear, the liberty cap cannot help but disconcertingly remind spectators of the severed head for which it may well be a substitute. Where or when this particular configuration first appeared is not certain.55 But in this position—which it frequently assumes in both American and French revolutionary iconography—the liberty cap is not so much a gift awarded in manumission as a trophy won in battle. Standing erect on the site of victory as a treelike scaffold for armor and, in the place of the bodiless figure’s head, a helmet, the Roman battlefield trophy may very well be the origin of this iconic liberty. Visually, the resemblances are



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certainly strong. Even without this conjectural, material relationship, the cap that appears between daggers to celebrate Brutus’s restoration of the republic’s liberty through tyrannicide is markedly different from the cap perched on a pike, the latter signifying liberty achieved through military victory. In either form, of course, the liberty cap’s political significance is mediated through antityranny discourse and traditions. The liberty-cap-on-pike’s status as trophy may be conveyed by an early modern Dutch painting on the subject of Jephtha’s return from victorious battle. A severed head atop one spear, a headless helmet swinging on another, and a second plumed, headless helmet together with other valuable war gear proudly displayed as booty on a third appear in Pieter Lastman’s painting on this subject (fig. 7). Further headless trophies are perched on spears held by the band of Israelites marching forward. That victory has brought death to some Ammonites but enslavement to others is indicated by the seminude figure in the foreground, modeled on Michelangelo’s sculpture of an enslaved male, the first of several enslaved Ammonites. Lastman’s slave does not have the defiant torsion of Michelangelo’s sculpted figure; his feet shackled, his hands bound, and his eyes downcast, he walks along without external coercion. Lastman, who has several paintings on subjects

Figure 6. Jan Tengnagel, Allegory of the Prosperity of the Republic under Maurice of Orange (ca. 1618). Photograph: Courtesy of the Museum Het Prinsenhof.

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

from the Hebrew Bible, seems deliberately to have avoided the anachronism of a Roman liberty cap in this ancient Hebrew setting. He may, though, wish to suggest a divinely authored, Hebraic prefiguration of the liberty cap, one that is appropriate to the triumphant moment of Jephtha’s liberation of Israel from “slavery” (Buchanan’s term) under the Ammonites. Considered in this way, Lastman’s headless hats may contribute to the project of synthesizing Greco-Roman antityrannicism and Scripture. In adapting the nationally branded, Dutch version of the Greco-Roman pileus cap for frontispieces to De Cive (to be taken up in chapter 8), Hobbes, on the other hand, draws attention to the violence encoded in the nonscriptural liberty hat perched atop a spear. If, for now, we speculate further on the disturbing connection between the severed head, helmet, or armor as war booty, and the liberty cap, we can see that Liberty’s best-known accessory may indirectly threaten more than tyrannicide. Associated on the national level with the Netherlands’ armed struggle for independence, the liberty cap commemorates victory over opponents together with the triumph of collective self-rule. Transposed into the terms of war slavery doctrine, it may hint that death is still a possibility for the war captives who—so the Roman war slavery ideology refurbished by Grotius holds—are generously offered continuing life as slaves. Within the Western European cities that are centers of power and where death sentences are passed (for “capital” crimes, the term itself indicating



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decapitation), the severed heads that appear on pikes bear visible, monitory testimony to the legitimate disciplinary power held by the nation-state, especially over traitors resisting its authority. Colonial conquest and the disciplinary power claimed by slaveholders have a much less secure basis. It is all the more important, then, that colonial disciplinary power be showcased or performed. In these representations, the hands holding pikes, war trophies, and liberty caps indicate that the Euro-colonizers’ power is not without official backing. In the Atlantic colonies, punishment of individual or collective acts of resistance—acts ranging from attempted suicide, abortion, or escape to more assertive attempts against slaveholders’ property or lives—often enabled the courts themselves publicly to demonstrate slaveholders’ private, discretionary power. As the British colonies extended and racialized the principle of “petit treason,” mutilation and display of the enslaved’s severed bodily parts became increasingly common, with the head atop a pole or pike having special resonance.56 Richard Ligon, for example, reports that one Colonel Walhoud, having lost a few of his slaves to suicide, severed one of their heads and set it on a twelve-foot-high pole.57 Publicly celebrating political liberty, whether internal, national, or both, the liberty cap plays a crucial role in distinguishing legitimate resistance on the part of an acknowledged political collectivity from the unthinkable, illegitimate collective resistance of those who have been subjugated or actually enslaved.

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t is easy to trivialize or ignore the analogical argumentation early modern European political theorists inherit from the ancients. For many people, a vague awareness that the patriarchal family has been equated with the state fosters the impression that fathers and husbands were once upon a time the same as kings, but that times have changed. The role similitude plays in early modern political debate needs to be better understood if key argumentative strategies are to be appreciated, together with the potential for creative variation many pamphleteers and theorists—including Hobbes and Locke, sometimes viewed as liberating philosophy from antiquated epistemologies—find in a fairly fixed set of analogies between household and state.1 By attending to shifts in language, emphases, and modes of comparison, many of which accommodate individual to collective identities, I hope to highlight this potential while clarifying the meanings attached to both royal and tyrannous power, especially in the literature of revolutionary England. Clarification is possible, though, only if we regard antityrannicism’s pairing of tyranny and slavery, together with political slavery’s uneasy, shifting relations with different kinds of servitude, all of which assume a “master” or “lord” whose power is distinct from yet related to the father’s. Analogy’s importance to early modern debates has received attention. It is often assumed, though, that royal absolutism, which generates analogies between kings and fathers, has roots reaching into an archaic past while contractualism and resistance theory look resolutely ahead, having sprung full-grown from early modernism’s mercantilist head. It is also sometimes implied that patriarchal absolutism has a special affinity with analogical argumentation. Such assumptions minimize the patriarchal householder’s threefold status as husband, father, and master or lord, though all three 162



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offices may illuminate sovereignty in the state. In recent decades, studies of the intense discursive warfare that arose in revolutionary England have yielded fascinating analyses of analogies involving marital and political rule.2 When despite its hierarchical structure the marital relationship is represented as a partnership or cooperative unit, it can effectively challenge royal absolutism’s more severely hierarchical bonds. Read as a command to honor and obey the royal as well as biological father, patriarchalism’s “honor thy father,” for example, is readily countered with the corrected “honor thy mother and father,” as Locke does in the Second Treatise. Generally, though, as scholars have observed, conjugally based analogies are a bit dicey for advocates of popular or representative government insofar as they position citizen-subjects analogically as wives, unquestionably their husbands’ inferiors. Wives may in some sense be citizens, but unlike sons, they are not eligible for active participation in official political institutions, which means they are not potentially analogical political agents. Neither, however, are “free” wives the analogically unfree individuals that female and male slaves are in antityranny discourse (though the close association between effeminacy and servility often suggests otherwise). For many writers, reflection on the origins of political power raises the burning question: how or in what human relationship does the power of life and death originate (a power Christian orthodoxy assigns the Creator over his creatures)? While Bodin discusses eras and societies in which husbands wield considerable disciplinary power, he does not find the answer to this question in the husband’s rule over his wife, but instead argues that the power of life and death naturally belongs to fathers. Not all his followers are as keen to restore this power as is Bodin, claiming Roman practice as his model. Yet the notion that the power of life and death has its origins in paternal power is for many the veritable cornerstone of patriarchal absolutism, even if it dramatically conflicts with early modern social realities and sentiments. The status-based polarity between “free” and “slave”—complementary cornerstone of antityrannicism’s analogies—likewise lacks juridical grounding within Western European nation-states. Analogy’s programmatic propulsions are not necessarily dissociated from social realities, however. Relevant, obviously, to colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade, the polarity free/unfree is also central to emergent capitalist social relations and free labor ideology. Analogies drawing on employer/employee contracts, which become more and more frequent, testify to changes that the new, transnational economy is bringing about, many of which require inhabitants of European nation-states to be “free” to contract their service or labor. Used to challenge monarchical absolutism, analogies that liken the

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citizenry to the nation-state’s employers enhance the standing of individual citizens as contracting agents who are also “free” members of a national community. Of course, contracts also have more traditional contexts. In addition to popular sovereignty’s well-established relations with conciliarism and constitutionalism, there is the tenet—central to Athenian democratic discourse—that law’s rule safeguards equality. To use contractual language is often implicitly to invoke the rule of law. As will be seen, in direct response to patriarchal absolutism, antityrannicism often privileges fraternal relations and, when referring to paternal rule, subjects it to contractualist or law-based analogies. Even when fathers and sons are absent, however, radicalism’s analogies generally speak to two commitments: on the one hand, a sharp separation of household from state, while on the other, and at the same time, the privileged nature of political rights. This is not the case, generally, for patriarchalist royal absolutism, which tends to work with a single, all-purpose paradigm. Analysis of analogical discourse has sometimes been impeded by the attention given Filmer’s claim that fathers and kings are actually one and the same—that is, are genetically identical or homologous rather than analogous. Filmer, patriarchalism’s best-known theorist, develops this thesis with reference to Genesis 1:26– 28, the divine grant of dominion to Adam, original father and monarch in one. Much as he would like it to, however, the unitary, hereditary identity Filmer posits between fathers and kings does not transcend the conditions of analogy any more than the doctrine of the divine right of kings, on which it is modeled. This observation is not available exclusively to disenchanted, secular moderns. Participants in early modern debates on sovereignty also occasionally reflect metadiscursively on the figurative character of polemical language. Samuel Rutherford, for example, rejects the royalist view “that the Kingly power is essentially and univocally that same with a paternall or fatherly power.” Citing scriptural passages that encourage kings to be revered as fathers, Rutherford insists that kings are “but fathers metaphorically,” which he explains by saying, “By office, because they should care for them as fathers doe for children, and so come under the name of fathers in the fifth Commandment.” Interestingly, Rutherford goes on to make a point that tells significantly against antityranny’s representation of the tyrant as a subhuman monster, an analogy used to legitimize armed resistance. Quoting biblical texts that speak of cruel rulers as leopards, lions, and wolves, Rutherford says, “If then tyrannous Judges be not essentially and formally Leopards and Lyons, but only metaphorically, neither can Kings be formally fathers.”3 Yet such even-handed critical reflexiveness is relatively rare because the set of analo-



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gies referenced here provide the very terms in which urgent, contentious issues are debated. Critical intelligence manifests itself not in exposing the limitations of analogy or in transcending it but in creating novel, transformative analogical relations. Even Hobbes, antityrannicism’s most rigorous critic, assumes political slavery’s figurative status yet ensures that his own theory meaningfully relates to both ancient and early modern practices regarding servitude and slavery.

Debating Analogically In early modern political discourse, as in Greco-Roman, tyranny is a category of political rule, one that is central to the development of specifically political claims and analyses. Tyranny is not generally used of relations within the household and, when it is, normally has some purchase on relations of rule within the state. Similarly, in texts concerned primarily with political relations, an analogy that involves the household will ordinarily be frugally tailored to suit the polemical needs of a specific, local argument. In The Obstructors of Justice, a tract written to defend the trial and execution of Charles I, for example, John Goodwin unfolds the following, proportional analogy: “A King, and a Tyrant, are as specifically distinct as a lawfull husband, and an adulterer.” If “king” and “tyrant” are two species of the same genus, a king who degenerates into a tyrant is obviously no longer king, a point Goodwin illustrates by arguing that neither God nor human society would ordain an adulterer the “head of the woman” or claim that an attempted rapist holds “superioritie over” his female victim. “So neither,” writes Goodwin, making the conclusion explicit, would they “ordain by Law, or otherwise, that a Tyrant should be the politick head of a body of people (collectively taken) or that such a body as this should acknowledge him for their Superiour” (31–32).4 At the time Goodwin writes, adultery is cause for legal separation in England, a social reality that supports his argument that if the king violates his covenant with the people, they have a right to remedy their situation. The law—whether divine, natural, customary, or positive may be unstated—often plays an important role in analogy’s illumination of a right or obligation. Like other radicals, Goodwin seeks to undermine royalism’s ability to exploit the widely held belief that both marital and political relations are divinely instituted as permanent and irrevocable. More constructively, Goodwin’s usage underlines the contingent reversibility of relations of super- and subordination. Though he does not grant the king any intrinsic superiority, Goodwin argues that privileges of “Superiorship” are lost

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when the superior party violates the terms of agreement, which gives those to whom he is collectively contracted “a Lawfulnesses of right or power, to compel him to the terms of his agreement; or to make satisfaction for his violation of them.” Until that occurs, his position of superiority is “forfeited unto the people, and they made the Superiour hereby” (31). But Goodwin is not satisfied with this. If the superior party engages in impious, sinful behavior, this, too, gives the injured party the upper hand: “[T]hey must needs, by the contraction of such guilt upon them, fall beneath their Inferiours, who are innocent, and turn the Relation of Superioritie and Inferioritie between them, upside down” (ibid.). This appeal to guiltiness explains why he introduces the figure of the rapist, who initially seems to complicate the argument from covenant since a man who attempts a woman’s chastity by force is not violating a contract (Goodwin presupposes nonmarital assault). Two slightly divergent analogies, then, unfold from Goodwin’s initial proposition. Where king and husband forfeit their contractual positions by violating the terms of their covenant (which Goodwin calls both “civil” and “sacred”), king and rapist lose the superiority associated with their status (sovereignty for the king, male supremacy for the rapist) by engaging in unethical, impious acts. Unwilling to reduce “Superiorship” to a matter of contractual obligation, Goodwin appeals to the violation of female chastity to characterize the populace as “innocent” and, in a world turned upside down, superior. Like other analogies based on gender, Goodwin’s likens the male citizenry to innocent maidens and wives. Since Goodwin does not return to the analogy between kings and guilty rapists or husbands—an analogy that exhausts itself in the logic of contingent status—the issue it raises appears not to be of significant independent interest to him. Indeed, Goodwin’s analogy is typical in the snugness with which it fits its polemical purpose. Whether relations between political ruler and ruled are likened to or contrasted with carefully delineated private relations (marital relations in the household or gender relations outside both household and political arena in Goodwin’s case), the point is to illustrate the true nature of political relations. In Goodwin’s analogy, an appeal is made to an assumed consensus on marital or gender relations (an adulterer loses his position as “head of the woman,” a man who attempts a woman’s chastity no longer has “superiority” over her) in an effort to establish consensus on a hotly debated political principle (a tyrant who violates his people’s trust loses his sovereignty over them). If consensus on a given household relation cannot be assumed, a writer may attempt to create it, as Bodin does in advocating the return of the father’s power of life and death over his children. This is Milton’s aim, too, in



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the divorce tracts he writes during the early stages of the revolution. In the second, 1644, edition of Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643), Milton addresses members of Parliament with the request that they change existing laws so as to permit a man who is oppressed by his marital situation to divorce with a right of remarriage just as a freeborn people can legitimately resist a tyrannous government that is determined on their “unworthy bondage.” As he puts it, “[A]s a whole people is in proportion to an ill Government, so is one man to an ill marriage.”5 In deploying this analogy, Milton transposes to the domestic realm the logic of legitimate political resistance, the central principle of which is that a ruler instituted for the good of the people rules only so long as he meets the conditions of their trust. With this transposition, Milton hoped to recruit radical consensus on the conditionality of political rule to legislation on marriage and divorce, thereby bringing marriage into conformity with its original institution, as he interprets it, and with antityranny principles. In Milton’s case as in Bodin’s, interest in a “private” relationship cannot be extricated from ideological assumptions regarding political rights and rule. An earlier version of Milton’s analogy appears briefly in Parker’s Observations (1642), which, in turn, draws on the tenet central to sixteenthcentury French and English antityrannicism: the ruler, created for the people’s good, is subservient to the people, not they to him. Being dependent on the people, “the Head Politicall” receives more “subsistence” from the people, metaphorically the body, than it gives, Parker states, and thus “has no being when that is dissolved, and that may be preserved after its dissolution” (19).6 This is the point La Boétie, Ponet, and Vindiciae make when integrating embryonic contract theory with Greco-Roman antityrannicism: without the people’s ongoing consent or active support, the king qua king vanishes into thin air. Inversion of king/subject relations takes a new turn, though, when Parker adds woman’s creation “for the assistance of man” to the more familiar analogy between servants hired “for their Lords mere attendance” (an antiaristocratic touch) and the more august institution of a ruler “for the good of all” (ibid., my emphasis). This is the innovative inversion that Milton works from in the divorce tracts and that Parker theorizes more lucidly in Jus Populi (1644). Liberated from the principle that the ruler’s superiority over his people resembles that of the husband over his wife, the logic of “creation for” ingeniously places the ruler in the wife’s position as both chronologically later and ontologically dependent on the man for whom she is created. For Milton, reformation of marriage laws thus aims to protect the privileged, free status and active participation in public life of male citizens.

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Reception of Milton’s divorce tracts indicates that even radical contemporaries (excepting Mrs. Attaway, who promptly ditched her unsanctified husband for one more saintly) were not prepared to approve the application of antityranny principles to the marital relation. Yet when the same analogy appears in Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, it is comparatively conventional in being suited to public, political ends. Developing a point about accountability that is similar to Goodwin’s, Milton argues analogically that if a subject who is guilty of crimes must “forfet” his inheritance, then so, too, should a king guilty of “crimes proportional” “forfet” his title and inheritance to the people. (Forfeiture and its cognates are crucial to Locke.) Another embedded analogy then appears: “unless the people must be thought created all for him, he not for them, and they all in one body inferior to him single, which were a kinde of treason against the dignitie of mankind to affirm.”7 The thought that the people are “created all for” the ruler is offensive to the Creator but also to masculine dignity because it places the people in the position of woman, created for man. Here Milton amplifies the analogy that inspires the divorce tracts using the familiar device of affronted rationality. Compared with the divorce tracts, Milton’s usage in Tenure confines the analogy’s significance to relations in the political arena. Employed in this way, the analogy is part of English radicalism. Parker, for example, opens Jus Populi by asserting that if Paul considers woman inferior because she was created both of and for the man, then the Spirit of God obviously supports using “the same form of arguing in the case of a people, and their Prince” (1–2). Goodwin, who approvingly mentions Milton’s Tenure in Obstructors of Justice, uses this analogy for the same end. Citing Paul’s comments on the Genesis creation story, “The man was not created for the woman, but the woman for the man,” Goodwin finds analogous ontological priority and privilege in the people’s relations with their ruler. In his words, “[I]t being evident that the people were not made for Kings, but Kings for the people, it follows merrily upon the same wheel, that the people have the precedency in honour before the king” (11). Later in this chapter, we will examine two major critiques of institutional slavery that are similarly imbricated in analogical discursive practices. Bodin’s proposal in République that slavery be abolished, and Henry Parker’s similar proposal in Jus Populi, which is overtly indebted to Bodin’s, should be known more widely than they are. Today, while Bodin’s abolitionist text is occasionally mentioned in scholarship on slavery, Parker’s is virtually unknown. It is possible, though, that they influence early mod-



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ern political theorizing more than is recognized. Bodin’s characterization of “lordly monarchy” certainly affects the semantic vicissitudes of “despotism” in ways that need further examination. Even if only negatively, as a position to be ignored or tacitly revisioned, Bodin’s opposition to slavery may be equally important to later theorizing. Filmer, Hobbes, and Locke are acutely aware of what is at stake ideologically in interrelations among paternal power, legal slavery, and antityranny discourse, as is Parker, though from an entirely different standpoint.

Freeborn Citizens and Contract What part does legal slavery play in early modern debates on sovereignty? How do relations among freeborn sons, fathers, enslavers, and enslaved get configured in appeals to political slavery? These questions are occluded when framed by patriarchalism and contractualism, royalism and parliamentarianism, or related polarities that exclude antityranny discourse. They are also suppressed by the dominant practice of taking figurative, political slavery as already read—that is, as having its vexed relations with chattel slavery neutralized by its immediate, discursive intentions. Even when antityrannicism is being rejected, early moderns carry on the GrecoRoman practice of conceptualizing rule with reference to a distinction between household slavery and the state. We need to look at the terms they use in doing so before the implications of this practice can be teased out. The following passage from an English text that critiques reliance on “similitude” and defends ecclesiastic power is a good place to start: “The Philosophers note, that there is a double regiment in man: the one politicall or civill, the other despoticall; the one like the authority of Princes over their subjects that are freemen, the other like the authority of Lords over their bondmen and slaves.”8 Unusually, despoticall here applies to the slave master’s rule. Because the Greek “despotism” was for so long translated by the Latin “dominium,” “despot” and its cognates continue to be used sparingly even after Greek texts are published and Greek becomes established as part of the curriculum. Masterly (or maisterly) or lordly are common adjectival substitutes for despotical. Lordly is the term Knolles uses to render Bodin’s seignoral in The Six Bookes of the Commonweale. Yet some writers like to use seignoral instead of lordly, while dominical is also used as a synonym for lordly, as, occasionally, is the Latin herile. The English version of a French edition of Aristotle’s Politics (1598) uses masterly, lordly, or signiorall instead

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of despoticall. It thus differentiates husbandly and fatherly from maisterly society, which means that where the passage cited above opposes politicall or civill to despoticall, it sets politicall apart from maisterly.9 Because master can designate the ruler of household servants as well as slaves, its meaning is highly context-dependent. If a writer wants to differentiate the rule of servants from that of slaves—as Locke, for example, does in Two Treatises—master is used for rule of servants, lord for slaves. Sometimes, as a result, despotical is explicitly equated with lordly, as in “Despoticall or Lordly dominion.”10 Only when used of political slavery does despotical begin to appear as a synonym of tyrannical. In protesting their treatment as “slaves,” the Greek and Roman male heads of household who author antityranny discourse dissociate themselves from those who are enslaved in part because they write not only as fathers, husbands, and householders but also as slave masters. The differential treatment of children and slaves is a practice the social utility of which is well understood; it is presupposed in countless ways in the Greek and Roman literature read by early moderns. For example, Mitio, one of the father figures in Terence’s Adelphi, opens the drama by contrasting the short-term efficacy of force with the lasting benefits of gentle nurture, which promotes desire and the internalization of virtue: “The dutie of a father is this, rather to accustome his sonne to doe well voluntarily, then through the feare of an other: for in this thing a father and a master differ one from the other: and he that wots not this, let him confess that he knoweth not how to governe and beare rule over his children.”11 Though often played out in relation to sons and slaves, opposition between rule by rational persuasion and rule by force and fear structures early modern discussion of virtually all interpersonal and political relations. During England’s revolutionary era, Parliament is asked to reform numerous areas of individual and collective activity, from religious worship and military conscription to the collection of taxes and the exclusivity of monopolies. Whatever the cause, Parliament is urged to create legislation that will honor the dignity of free citizens—that is, legislation preserving a clear boundary between voluntariness and compulsion, “liberty” and “slavery.” If a good parent knows the difference between fathers and masters, wise legislators understand the importance of distinguishing citizens from slaves—or, since England itself has no slaves, the import of treating them as “freeborn” En­ glishmen. Magistrates or rulers who disdainfully override the privileges of the freeborn, or who refuse to acknowledge any distinction between “free” and “slave,” tacitly reduce the citizenry to abject “slaves,” thereby revealing their own degeneration into tyrants.



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It goes without saying that for antityrannicism, even the slightest hint of likeness between ruler and “master” or “lord” is cause for consternation. For the collectivity who have freely created him and by means of whose continued consent he governs, a ruler’s self-nominated lordship is either an outrageous affront or an absurdity. Whenever expressed, hostility toward a ruler’s pretense of being master or lord (dominus) reveals how thoroughly internalized is the pregiven significance of “freedom” and “slavery.” Protestantism, with its low tolerance for idolatry, gives this hostility an additional, righteous charge: the ruler who elevates himself over his people usurps the position of God. There is, categorically, only one true king, one true lord and master, and to imagine otherwise is blasphemous. The corollary, of course, is that those who have been redeemed as “sons of God” enjoy an ennobling freedom incompatible with rule by a mere human being. In An arrow against all tyrants (1646), indebted to Parker, Richard Overton uses universalizing language to describe such powers as divinely planted in humanity. “Every man by nature being a King, Priest and Prophet in his own naturall circuite and compasse” is worthy of participating in a representative government that is fraternally organized along lines recommended in Deuteronomy 17:20.12 A nation worthy of its name does not need kings, Milton says in Eikonoklastes, for its people are “architects of thir own happiness; and whether to themselves or others are not less then Kings” (176). At the very least, this establishes that magistrates and rulers are mere ministers or servants. Ponet, for example, ventriloquizes the Deity’s final judgment on tyrants as they are consigned to hell by labeling them “Masters”: “[Y]ee were Masters, and not Ministers, ye were Bearebaytours, and not Bailiffes, ye were Stroyers, and no Stewards.”13 The contrast between “Masters” and “Ministers” is a commonplace of early modern antityrannicism, used to explicate the endlessly debated New Testamental dictates on submission to the powers that be: such powers are themselves ministers of God or, even better, ministers of human, natural, and divine laws. More radically, if good rulers are ministers, they are servants who can be compared to other employees, whether wage earning or not. Analogies between contrac­tual employment and relations of rule within the state make citizens a collectivity who act as an employer or, better, master of a communal household (since it is the master who employs servants). By emphasizing mutual, contractual obligations, these analogies provide a ready-made rationale for exiting a given political relationship, exiting being the nonviolent form of resistance that is theorized in scenes of hypothetical deposition-by-withdrawal or in the logic of contingent status. More aggressively, they make thinkable the termination of contracts involving kings or representatives as public

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servants. For many, what is most disturbing about this logic is its postulation, first, of dangerous, potentially irresolvable conflicts of interest between rulers and those ruled and, second, of a right to assess and resolve this conflict independently on the part of those whose collective interests are at stake. Paradoxical inversion of the master/servant relation, which has quite a history, derives from the tenet that the people are the “principal” and the ruler the “agent” in the contractual relation established by the institution of government. Not themselves subject to the whims of a household “master,” the people occupy the position of employers who have contracted the services of a ruler or representative. A mercantilist, businesslike view of royal servitude is provided by Goodwin when he outlines the terms of employment set by the king’s masters: Now the King bears the Relation of a politicall Servant, or vassal, to that State, Kingdom, and people, over which he is set to Govern; as appeareth by those three essentiall characters of servitude, inseparably attending his office; 1. Regulation or appointment of work; 2. Wages in consideration of his work, duly and faithfully performed; 3. And lastly, an obnoxiousnesse to a laying aside, by the people, when they see it meet. (11)

Goodwin’s elaboration of the material implications of the analogy between ruler and servant strikes a new, antiaristocratic (not merely antimonarchical) note with its plain, workaday job description. When Goodwin places vassal in apposition to politicall Servant, he is underlining the voluntary nature of the servitude whose characteristics he outlines. Strictly speaking, vassalage does not fit the contract Goodwin draws up, designed for “work” done for “wages,” but the vassal’s insecurities share something with the wage laborer’s—and, now, the king’s—worries about being laid off (obnoxiousnesse has the sense of being liable to judgment in obnoxiousnesse to a laying aside, by the people). Goodwin’s modernization of royal servitude may be compared with the imaginative twist Milton gives the king = servant analogy in Tenure when he defends the people’s right to change rulers or government: And surely they that shall boast, as we doe, to be a free Nation, and not have in themselves the power to remove, or to abolish any governour supreme, or subordinat, with the government it self upon urgent causes, may please thir fancy with a ridiculous and painted freedom, fit to coz’n babies; but are indeed under tyranny and servitude; as wanting that



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power, which is the root and sourse of all liberty, to dispose and oeconomize in the Land which God hath giv’n them, as Maisters of Family in thir own house and free inheritance. Without which natural and essential power of a free Nation, though bearing high thir heads, they can in due esteem be thought no better than slaves and vassals born, in the tenure and occupation of another inheriting Lord. Whose government, though not illegal, or intolerable, hangs over them as a Lordly scourge, not as a free government; and therefore to be abrogated.14

Polar opposition between servitude and freedom informs every move in this passage, in which oeconomize—a verb deriving from the oikos, or household—applies to the nation. Though numerous forces interact to make the national political economy “domestic,” in this passage Milton reworks early modern radicalism’s conventional inversion of king/subject relations in such a way that “Maisters of Family” govern in the state. Milton is not here comparing the individual household master to the political ruler (an identification antityrannicism rejects) but rather transforming this analogy as Goodwin, Overton, and other radicals of the time do so as to create a community of citizens who are figuratively “Maisters” of the nation-ashousehold. The nation’s adult, male citizenry are a collectivity of household masters whose right to dispose of irresponsible officeholders—metaphorically, domestic servants—is constitutive of their freedom, or, in Milton’s words, is the “root and sourse of all liberty.” In this instance, the individual household disappears from view to make male citizen-“Maisters” heads of a single, communal household, the nation-state. For illustration of political government’s representative nature, comparison of the ruler or representative with a tutor or pedagogue is a favorite. Having introduced the principle that power remains with the people even after delegated to representatives, Overton applies it to members of the House of Commons, to whom the people have collectively communicated power they individually possess. Their representatives, Overton says, are “their absolute Commissioners, and lawfull Deputies, but no more.” More succinctly, their representatives are the people’s “own naturall proper, sovereign power,” the retention of which Overton clarifies through analogical discourse: So that such so deputed, are to the Generall no otherwise, then as a Schoole-master to a particular, to this or that mans familie, for as such an ones Mastership, ordering and regulating power is but by deputation, and that ad bene placitum, and may be removed at the parents or Head

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masters pleasure, upon neglect or abuse thereof, and be confer’d upon another (no parents ever giving such an absolute unlimited power to such over their children, as to doe to them as they list, and not to be retracted, controuled, or restrained in their exorbitances). Even so and no otherwise is it, with you our Deputies in respect of the Generall, it is in vaine for you to thinke you have power over us, to save us or destroy us at your pleasure, to doe with us as you list.15

“Mastership” is here a position entirely outside the household. Overton’s complicated analogy equates “particular” with “Generall” by comparing the rights of individual heads of family (“this or that mans familie”) regarding a “Schoole-master” with the rights of those collectively desiring political representation vis-à-vis their parliamentary representatives (“such so deputed”). Overton’s “Schoole-master” has responsibilities toward students who are from numerous, distinct families. Not a private tutor, the “Schoole-master” can be removed by parents or “Head master” (mention of whom ensures the public, collective aspect of the institution). The phrase “absolute unlimited power”—doing whatever one pleases without restraint in “exorbitances”—is conventionally used of tyrannous, arbitrary rule, while “to save us or destroy us at your pleasure” refers to the power of life and death. Overton can safely assume consensus on the flat-out refusal of parents so much as to contemplate any schoolmaster’s possession of such power over students. At one point in an anonymous pamphlet critiquing Parker’s Observator, its royalist author tackles relations between household hierarchies and political rule by alluding to an ironic reply Lycurgus allegedly gave a citizen who expressed interest in a more democratic state: “Do you first,” Lycurgus dismissively quips, “establish a democracy in your own house.” Like Lycurgus, Parker’s opponent expects the ludicrousness of transferring democratic principles to the household to be self-evident. [T]ell me, Sir, might you be persuaded to follow Licurgus his advise, to try this Discipline at home, before you offer it to the Commonwealth? Could you be contented that all your Servants together, or the Major part of them had power to turne you out of your Mastership, and place your Steward in your roome; or your Children in like case despose you from your Fatherhood? No I warrant you, the case would soone be altered. And when the greatest part of the sheep dislike their Sheepheard, must he presently put up his Pipes and be packing?16



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The triumph of disgruntled sheep over their piping shepherd carries the deflationary logic of Lycurgus’s riposte even further. Yet the reductio ad absurdum is revealing. Antityranny ideology mobilizes opposition to tyrannous rule in the state, not the household, and has no particular interest in challenging the domestic hierarchical relations that underpin the status of male citizens. Indeed, it frequently draws on existing hierarchies or asymmetries between “private” and “public.” At the same time, by continuing to use analogical discourse, it encourages new, critical perspectives, perspectives that can lay it open to critiques of this kind. When analogies constructed by antityranny discourse harmonize relations between the household and state, however, it is on the basis of contract or law, not nature. What Parker calls the opposition between “Naturalists” and “Civilians” can be perceived in his critic’s comments, which imagine the obedience of servants and children to be as natural as the bleating of placid sheep. Yet antityranny’s appeal to collective action is acknowledged. Though the central issue of the commonwealth ruler’s accountability is skirted, the revolt its author hypothesizes involves not an individual servant, child, or sheep but the rising of servants, children, and sheep en masse.

Fathers and Resistance Rhetorical appeals to tyranny and slavery obviously do not depend on knowledge of Aristotle’s Politics or other Greek and Roman antityranny texts. Similarly, early modern political commentators and theorists can draw on Aristotle’s distinction between good and defective government without appealing to the polarity free/unfree. For example, neither freedom nor slavery figures when Peter de la Primaudaye contrasts a “good commonwelth,” whose governors rule for the “publike profit of the citizens and the benefit of the whole civil societie,” with a “corrupt” one, which “seeketh only the increase of private commoditie having no care of publike profit.”17 In this era, no one would question the tenet that government is supposed to be for “publicke profit” rather than for rulers’ “private commoditie.” Contested, rather, is who determines what is profitable for the public, a question usually debated with reference to the origins of political power. Royalists generally stress the divine origins of the monarch’s power so as to associate divine and royal power as closely as possible: ordained by God, monarchs are earthly representatives who partake of his power. From an antimonarchical perspective, such mystifying propositions try to seduce Christian citizens into giving a monarch the obedience and devotion owed

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exclusively to their creator. In Jus Populi Parker epitomizes this attitude in his phrase “our State-Theologues” (21). Antimonarchist critique exposes the fraudulent, constructed character of any divinization of monarchy, refusing to acknowledge even verbally the blasphemous suggestion that the monarch is akin to God. When Ponet, for example, blasts royal absolutism, he asks whether those “Rulers in the world” who “would be taken for gods (that is, the ministers and Images of God here on earth)” have any right to claim extralegal, discretionary power in order to “use their subjects as men do their beasts, and as Lords do their villaines and bondmen, getting their goods from them by hooke and by crooke, with sic volo, sic jubeo, and spending it to the destruction of their Subjects.”18 Though apologists for royal absolutism usually say that rulers will make every effort to honor natural and divine law, Ponet represents this as a claim to immunity from prosecution implicit in the desire to be taken “for gods.” Make-believe on such a grandiose scale inevitably leads to treating citizens as animals or slaves—the analogy on which antityrannicism turns. Patriarchal royalism supplements the figure of the monarch whose power originates in God—and the attendant analogy between king and Deity—with that of the father, who is thereby also God’s earthly representative, the king’s double, or himself a king. This is especially true of Filmer’s well-publicized version, where God officially grants “dominion” to an Adam who is simultaneously father and king. In its more moderate forms, patriarchalism foregrounds the analogy between paternal and royal rule found in Plato and retained by Aristotle’s Politics. More systematic articulations of absolutism formally reject Aristotle’s theory of disjunctive orders in order to affirm the natural correspondence of familial with political rule—the view Aristotle rebuts in Politics. Naturalization of monarchy is not patriarchalism’s only goal, however. In uniting paternal and royal forms of power, it achieves an additional, ideological aim: rejection of specifically political rights or claims. In greatly amplifying the commonplace analogy between father and king, patriarchalism tries to foreclose the disturbing possibility—opened up by the tyrant’s potential affinity with the household slave master—that ruler and ruled may have seriously conflicting interests. Patriarchalism’s insistence on the likeness, or even identity, of father and king is meant to provide the strongest possible rationale for outlawing political resistance. In explaining why armed political resistance is not only unadvisable but unlawful, Bodin uses the analogy of a son’s duty to his father. Opening with the assertion that divine law dictates that children who speak evil of their parents be put to death, Bodin then develops a syllogism



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that begins with the premise that “no impietie can be so great, no offence so heinous, as to be revenged with the killing of ones father.” Cicero, though, says that our nation ought to be dearer to us than our parents, which leads Bodin to conclude: “Wherefore the prince whom you may justly call the father of the country ought to be unto every man dearer & more reverend than any father, as one ordained & sent unto us by God. I say therefore that the subject is never to be suffered to attempt any thing against his sovereign prince, how naughty & cruel soever he be: lawful it is, not to obey him in things contrarie unto the laws of God & nature: to flie and hide our selves from him; but yet to suffer stripes, yea and death also rather than to attempt any thing against his life or honour.”19 The divine law to which Bodin refers is also mentioned in the chapter on paternal power (with a note to Exodus 21), where he argues in favor of restoring the power of life and death that fathers formerly held over their children, and of denying sons any legal redress against fathers’ exercise of their power. Here as in that chapter Bodin writes as if this divine law were still to be observed. The analogical implication is that subjects who revile— or, worse, take up arms against—their prince violate “the laws of God & nature” and should be put to death. Bodin argues that subjects have no jurisdiction over even the most miserable, tyrannical ruler; only someone who is not a subject—that is, someone from another nation—can lawfully oppose a tyrant. If this prohibition is not scrupulously observed, he prophesies, “tyranny” will appear everywhere: “O how many Tirants should there be; if it should be lawfull for subjects to kill Tirants? How many good and innocent princes should as Tirants perish, by the conspiracie of their subjects against them?” (ibid.). James I propounds the same lesson Bodin does but makes it even tougher for sons actively to resist paternal misrule by arguing that the father’s authority, explicitly likened to the monarch’s, is simply not open to challenge. So unacceptable is the least inclination to resist the father’s authority, James I sternly avers, that no reasonable person would countenance it even in the hypothetical case “that the father hated and wronged the children never so much.” “Yea,” he asks rhetorically, “suppose the father were furiously following his sonnes with a drawen sword, is it lawfull for them to turne and strike againe, or make any resistance but by flight?”20 Elaborating Bodin’s use of analogy in arguing the inviolability of royal power, James I makes flight the only acceptable response sons should have to a father who threatens their lives. Self-preservation, an issue central to theories of natural right and legitimate political resistance, is so much less important than the preservation of royal sovereignty that Bodin recommends a resigned

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acceptance of whipping or self-sacrificial death in lieu of any threat to the sovereign’s “life or honour.” James allows self-preservation, but only in the passive form of flight. Opponents of royal absolutism tend to question not the father’s authority but rather the assumption that monarchical rule is naturally akin to paternal. In a passage in Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio (1651) to which Filmer objects, Milton, like Bodin and James I, uses an example of paternal aggression, though one given a very different spin. Defending the right of collective, political resistance—resistance recently exercised in the trial of Charles I—Milton declares that neither fathers nor monarchs can engage in unlawful behavior with impunity: We endure a father, even a fretful and harsh one; we endure a king also. But we do not also endure a father who is a tyrant. If a father kills his son, he will pay the penalty with his life: why will a king not likewise be subject to the same most just law if he has destroyed the people, that is to say his own sons? Especially so that while a father cannot stop being a father, a king can easily stop being either a father or a king.21

Milton opens this passage by conceding both the virtuousness of endurance and the likeness of fathers and kings, gesturing, rhetorically, to widely shared values. Concessive analogy, however, leads with compelling logic to incriminating equality before the law: tyranny, here identified as criminal behavior, should not be endured. Though the office of tyrant is not ordinarily open to fathers, Milton uses the analogical discourse of patriarchalism to bring fathers and kings before the bar. In claiming that a father who kills his son would be convicted of homicide, Milton takes a position on the centrality of legal process that is typical of antityranny ideology (and of special importance to the father’s purported possession of the power of life and death over his children). Milton undercuts the legal immunity that patriarchal absolutism gives kings by getting the “same most just law” to install a formal, legal equality that levels kings with fathers, and fathers with anyone else committing murder. In the place of James I’s father hotly in pursuit of his sons, who are advised to resist by fleeing, Milton asks his readers to imagine a father legally convicted of and capitally punished for murdering his son. (Note that the household son is singular, whereas James I, pressing the analogy with political subjects, uses the plural “sonnes.”) With this scenario Milton neatly sidesteps the issue of individual self-preservation, focusing instead on the recent civil wars in which the king militarily “destroyed the people, that is



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to say his own sons.” Milton identifies the king’s subjects as his collective “sons” at the very moment the king is convicted of ceasing to behave like a benevolent, protective parent. In the concluding sentence of this passage, Milton insists on the artificial, constructed character of relations between subjects and kings. Using patriarchalist assumptions to overturn them, Milton argues the conditionality of the king’s status not only as king but also as figurative, analogical “father” of his people. Unlike the king’s figurative fatherhood, natural fatherhood cannot be undone. Parker uses a similar tactic in Observations, where the very naturalness of the father/son relation sets it apart from that of king/subject. Entirely indebted to the father, the son cannot claim that his father owes him anything, Parker argues, while on his part the father performs “all his offices meritoriously, freely, and unexactedly.” This is not the case with the king, who is under an obligation for which he was created, namely, to serve the people. The other household relations—that between husband/wife and master/servant—are similarly distinct from relations in the state, which have specifically civil, collective ends. Parker continues to set political against familial relations by concluding that tyrannous rulers, “insulting in common servilitie, rather than promoting common securitie,” commit unforgivable sins, which, affecting an entire community, are “such as the unnaturall father, the tyrannous husband, the mercilesses master is not capable of committing” (19). Along the same lines, Parker argues that no subject’s act of treason against the state is comparable to the ruler’s violation of his people’s trust. Referring to John Hotham, who was condemned for following Parliament’s instructions at a time when Parliament was at war with King Charles, Parker argues that this judgment is “contrary to the clearest beames of humaine reason, and the strongest inclinations of nature, for every private man may defend himself by force, if assaulted, though by the force of a Magistrate or his owne father” (16). Imagining a scenario similar to those invented by Bodin, James I, and Milton, Parker makes both individual and collective self-defense a natural right, yet at the same time, like Milton in Tenure, he levels father and magistrate. A different tack is pursued by William Bridge in a pamphlet published shortly after Parker’s in which he critiques Henry Ferne’s patriarchalism, conventional in deriving the naturalness of monarchy from paternal rule. Bridge cites Continental theorists who differentiate the naturalness of paternal from the voluntary, human origins of “civill power.” Bridge takes this commonplace distinction in a new direction, however, by arguing that if paternal government leads by nature’s guidance to regal, “then Kings should and ought to rule as arbitrarily in their Kingdomes,

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as Fathers doe in their Families.”22 Ruling “arbitrarily” here means without regulation by law or public accountability, which for antityrannicism characterizes political rule that illegitimately rules free men as the slaveholder does his slaves. Most unusually, however, Bridge substitutes the father for the master. We can view this as a rhetorical inversion of Bodin’s privileging of paternal power as the basis for monarchical. Alternatively, we might regard it as opening up a startlingly new perspective on paternal rule (of increasing interest in decades to come) by acknowledging it to be discretionary and therefore as unregulated as is the master’s—a perspective that Parker creates regarding all private relations in Jus Populi. Committed to claiming and enlarging specifically political rights, proponents of popular sovereignty rebut attempts to assign these rights an origin in the household. The public arena is the privileged site for the conceptualization and exercise of political rights, which relations within the household should analogically illuminate. Goodwin, for this reason, argues that if a father violates a civil contract with his son for payment of a sum of money on such and such a day, so long as the contract is “valid in Law and conscience,” the son can prosecute the father for nonperformance. The son, Goodwin claims, “by the Law of Nations, and by the civil Law, hath a right of power to compel him thereunto” (31). In an even more visionary variant, in the Putney debates, Thomas Rainborough counters the royalist dictum that the divine commandment to honor one’s father and mother applies to political rulers, saying, “[T]he great dispute is, who is a right father and a right mother?” Rainborough, the Putney debate’s most ardent opponent of property-based restrictions on the franchise, revisions analogical readings of the fifth commandment: “And for my part, I look upon the people of England so, that wherein they have not voices in the choosing of their governors—their civil fathers and mothers—they are not bound to that commandment.”23 As with Milton’s identification of the nation’s citizenry as “Maisters of Family in thir own house and free inheritance,” roles associated with the household metamorphose into models for collective, civil self-rule.

Antislavery and Bodin’s Preemption of Antityranny Early modern resistance theory privileges voluntary, contractual relations that are public over and against those within the household insofar as they have status-bound obligations. There is, however, an unstated exception to this practice: antityrannicism’s rhetorical embrace of the master’s free-



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born position vis-à-vis the enslaved, the basis of a collective right of resistance. Disturbed by the divisiveness this threatens, even advocates of limited monarchy may eulogize paternal power because it erects political sovereignty on the patriarchal family, the foundation, in theory, for a unified body politic where ruler and ruled have shared interests. As sovereign ruler, it is argued, the king has no interests apart from those of his subjects with whose welfare he identifies his own as does a loving, involved father. Or if he does have independent interests, they are “private” and therefore irrelevant. In a statement with which probably very few, if any, would disagree, Bodin, citing Xenophon in support, says, “[T]he best prince nothing differeth from the best father” (2.4.212). Only royal absolutists, however, are confident that this ideal is to be honored even when it is not being realized, and that loyalty, devotion, and willing obedience are natural responses to the political sovereign’s power. Bodin’s aggrandizement of paternal power is related to his severe critique of that held by the slaveholder, or so I would like to argue. The interest in discrediting antityrannicism evident in his revisioning of monarchy informs Bodin’s recommendation that slavery be abolished. In advancing his views on both issues, Bodin rounds on Aristotle, repudiating his authority and subverting the bipolarity between “free” and “slave.”24 Additionally, of slavery as an institution, like Las Casas before him, Bodin registers the threat posed to the European nation-state’s sovereignty by the independent sites of power created by colonial expansion. These sites are epitomized by the private, colonial slaveholder whose power is only as legitimate as slavery itself. Bodin several times mentions how Charles V’s decree outlawing slavery was ignored by settlers eager to continue the exploitation of Amerindigenes. Such insistence reveals an anxiety, based on Spanish experience but also highly prescient, about the threat to centralized, monarchical power posed by its colonial representatives. Not far into book 1, chapter 5, “Of the power of a Lord or Maister over his Slaves, and whether Slaves are to bee suffered in a well ordered Commonweale,” Bodin rejects Aristotle’s doctrine of natural slavery. How can it be agreeable unto nature to have wise men serve fools, or the good the bad? Bodin asks. By means of harrowing incidents drawn primarily from ancient Greek and Roman sources, Bodin illustrates the ruthlessly self-interested, capricious behavior of slaveholders and the social destructiveness of all the reprisals and uprisings of the enslaved. Despite slavery’s profitability, Bodin argues, in societies where slaves significantly outnumber enslavers (figures for which he provides), the slaveholding classes live in perpetual fear. Bodin has no respect for their concerns. Demonstrating how, historically,

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slaveholders deliberately subvert legislation meant to curtail their rights or protect the enslaved, Bodin repeatedly underlines the arbitrariness of their rule. The historical record proves that even manumission is another means to exploit dependents’ labor, or, when effected on a large scale, to satisfy a community’s immediate military needs or political ends. Taking up the objection that if the laws were more rigorous, the cruelty of masters would be moderated, Bodin responds that there can be no law more just than the Deity’s law prohibiting Hebrew masters the use of physical brutality. But even if the laws themselves were strict, he asks, who will prosecute the lord for the slave’s death? Bodin poses a series of powerful, rhetorical questions that drive home the appalling social implications of the enslaved’s legal status, which inevitably places the murder of slaves outside the law. In another empathetic passage, Bodin presents sexual exploitation as a socially destructive outcome of the enslaver’s unregulated power. Though initially using sensationalist language (“the poore slaves” are vulnerable to “the execrable and profuse filthinesse of both sexes”), Bodin then reminds readers that regarding such abuse only “the thousand part thereof were written.” With this observation, Bodin opens up to silent commemoration the unrecorded experiences of the multitudes of women, men, and children who have been violated over the centuries. And the written records of brutality we can access, he continues—without irony?—are “the histories of the most civill people that ever were in the world” (36). Passages like this enact a moving break with centuries of complacent acceptance of institutionalized slavery on the part of those who have produced written records. Even more exceptional is Bodin’s rejection of jus gentium as a justification for slavery. First, though, he takes the controversial position that universality, the basis of jus gentium, is no guarantee of legitimacy. Human practices that have always and everywhere been accepted, Bodin argues, are not thereby necessarily agreeable to natural and divine law. As evidence, Bodin produces ritual human sacrifice. It is a brilliant choice, since Bodin’s contemporaries would warmly assent to the statement that nothing could be more barbarous or inhumane. They would be equally pleased to find they were no longer among those who have throughout history “covered the same with the vaile of pietie and religion: as yet unto this our age they of Peru and Brasiles doe, and certaine other people upon the river of Plat; unto which so prophane sacrifices our auncestors for all that with great devotion resorted” (1.5.35). With this reference to “our auncestors,” Bodin introduces the notion that selected contemporary societies are not coeval with present-day Western Europeans, who have progressed beyond the heathenish “prophane sacrifices” of yore. Employing what is, in effect, an En-



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lightenment perspective, Bodin argues that defenses of slavery that equate the widespread consent of nations with naturalness could just as easily be used to rationalize human sacrifice. Bodin’s main thesis is that chattel slavery endangers the stability and well-being of a commonwealth, instancing “so many inconveniences of rebellions, servile warres, conspiracies eversions and chaunges to have happened unto Commonweals by slaves; so many murthers, cruelties, and detestable villanies to have been committed upon the persons of slaves by their lords and masters: who can doubt to affirme it to be a thing most pernitious and daungerous to have brought them into a Commonweale; or having cast them off, to receive them again?” (1.5.44). Alarmed by the recent reintroduction of slavery in the Iberian Peninsula, which is where European enslavers initially took the West Africans captured for transatlantic trade,25 Bodin presents it as an interruption of Europe’s lengthy period without slavery, dating, he says, from the mid-thirteenth century and brought about initially by Islam. Evaluated from the progressivist perspective his critique of jus gentium opens up, this return to a practice long abandoned is a distressing sign of reversion to a less enlightened, possibly barbarous, past. For Bodin, the slavery practiced in ancient Greece and Rome only goes to show why slavery should be abolished. His attitude toward lordly, Asiatic monarchy, the political “slavery” condemned by Aristotle, and contemporaneous Turkish servitude is strikingly different. Bodin says he does not regard as slaves the Christian youths taken by the Turks for tribute because they are incorporated into the Turkish royal family. Indeed, the Turks realize one of the most important humanist ideals, he implies when adding, “[T]he Turkes almost alone of all other people measure true nobilitie by virtue, and not by discent or the antiquitie of their stocke; so that the farther a man is from virtue, so much the farther hee is (with them) from nobilitie” (1.5.44). Even when conceding that it curtails liberty, Bodin refuses to disparage lordly monarchy. Lordly monarchy, Bodin argues, tends to be of longer duration than not only tyrannous monarchy but also royal. Its praiseworthy stability he accounts for by its greater majesty and by the fact that “the subjects hold not their lives, goods, and libertie, but of the sovereign prince, who hath by just warre conquered them; which plucketh downe the courage of subjects, so that the slave acknowledging his condition, becommeth humble, abject, and having as they say a base and servile hart.” Freeborn men, he continues in a passage that oddly echoes Aristotle, just would not stand for this. Were a ruler to try to make people who are “freeborn and lords of their owne goods in a royall Monarchie” into slaves, or take their property away, such people would not tolerate it, Bodin

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declares, “but easily rebel, being noble harts, nourished in libertie, and not abastardised with servitude” (2.2.204). As this language indicates, Bodin does not repudiate the heroic ideals associated with Greek and Roman liberty despite his rejection of Aristotle’s theorization of political slavery and tyranny. Yet in what could well be regarded as counterrevolutionary discourse, Bodin reserves the condemnatory language of cruelty for chattel slavery, and, unusually, uses tyranny of the slaveholder’s essentially private, unregulated power. Not lordly monarchs but individual, household slaveholders are labeled tyrants. Among other signs of their cruelty is the way they deliberately keep their subjects “low”: “[T]yrants hold it for a rule in policie,” Bodin says, “[t]hat one cannot be too severe unto his subjects, so to keepe them low and obedient” (2.5.44). Judged from its oppressive effects, the slave master’s rule is not that different from the lordly monarch’s, which Bodin describes in very similar language but which he opposes to tyrannous monarchy.26 This particular double standard Bodin sets up when he transposes anti­ tyrannicism’s condemnation of political slavery, of which he disapproves, to the domestic household, where the slaveholder exercises private, tyrannous rule. If this transposition’s aims are summarized, we can see just how much work analogical argumentation can accomplish. By proposing that slavery be abolished, Bodin seeks to dismantle antityrannicism’s foundation, the formal opposition between free and unfree. At the same time, Bodin’s delegitimization of the household slaveholder’s power removes the slave master from competition with the father, whose absolute power over his children becomes the positive, household analogue of that held by the sovereign within the state. Further, by confidently locating tyranny within the household, where it is the result of slave mastership, Bodin locates oppression in a social status Western Europeans have generally banned for themselves rather than in royal monarchy, his preferred form of absolute monarchical rule. Because individuals who exercise an unregulated, private power over slaves may regard themselves as equals of their nation’s sovereign ruler—a possibility Spanish slavery in the New World confirms—Bodin’s willingness to label them tyrants underlines slavery’s dangerousness, since, he has shown, resistance against this tyranny on the part of the enslaved poses a threat to a well-ordered commonwealth.

Parker’s Antityranny and Antislavery Parker’s originality as a theorist of popular sovereignty in the form of parliamentary supremacy has received recognition. Both Observations and Jus



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Populi incorporate numerous strands of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century radicalism into a cogent, well-unified defense of collective, natural rights. Yet, as mentioned earlier, modern scholars seem not to have registered Parker’s critique of chattel slavery, though in Jus Populi he advances a proposal that slavery be abolished, and, going further than Bodin, advocates immediate emancipation. In Jus Populi, Parker’s strongly argued opposition to slavery does not engage England’s increasingly aggressive development of its Atlantic plantocracy. Parker does not so much as mention the transatlantic slave trade (though the chattel slavery he takes as his model would not apply elsewhere). Parker, like Bodin, engages slavery largely as it affects the composition and integrity of the commonwealth and because consideration of slavery is essential to the kind of systematic theory Jus Populi provides. It is also possible, though, that the depth of Parker’s engagement with slavery points to debates about the legitimacy of transatlantic practices for which there is little written evidence. Especially in New England, where, as Robin Blackburn puts it, “there was no plantation staple” and thus little demand for slave labor, misgivings about England’s increasing involvement in the capture and sale of Africans were occasionally expressed. In 1641, for example, the Massachusetts court passed a resolution outlawing the enslavement of any except “lawful Captives in Just Wars” and ensuring treatment compatible with “the Law of God established in Israel.” Blackburn attributes the antislavery sentiments expressed at this time to “a fear of the logic of slaveholding,” an explanation that in the absence of further evidence works as well as any other for Parker’s sustained critique.27 Yet inclusivity, not fear, is the note Parker repeatedly strikes. The numerous arguments Parker marshals against chattel slavery are not only exceptionally incisive but also part of an original theorization of the household’s relations with the state—so original as to begin to undo analogical discourse itself. Parker frequently assumes the standpoint of the enslaved, and is consistently egalitarian in denying any and all differences between freemen and slaves. Within the emergent, Euro-colonial context, Parker’s views constitute unequivocal condemnation of English practices in the Caribbean. This is worth keeping in mind, since both Hobbes and Locke refer to the slave master’s power with despoticall, the term Parker uses, yet do so in defending the legitimacy of this power. Midway through Jus Populi, Parker takes up the question of whether legitimate civil power, which he calls “jurisdiction,” has an origin in any of the private, household relations presumed to be natural. Regarding each relationship separately considered, his answer is that it does not. Throughout

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this treatise, Parker distinguishes “order,” which is divinely ordained for the unfallen, natural creation, from “jurisdiction,” which refers to coercive power humanly instituted within civil society. Jurisdiction is basically synonymous with rule of law. For his discussion of household relations, Parker adopts Bodin’s ordering in Commonweale by discussing first marital, then parental, then despotical rule. Parker, though, adds a fourth kind of power, fraternal, which gives him a chance to question the principle of primogeniture and to assert the high value of naturally egalitarian relations between brothers (implicitly endorsing egalitarian rule). What Parker calls “Despoticall power,” last to be discussed, is given disproportionately lengthy attention. Where he has five pages for reflection on the other three powers (marital, parental, fraternal) combined, Parker devotes six pages to despotical power alone. Parker offers a definition of despotical power that he attributes to Aristotle but is very much his own. In Politics, Aristotle does not bring up the slave master’s self-interestedness when discussing chattel slavery in book 1. This aspect of mastery is relevant only to political rule, taken up in book 3, where it is analogous to defective modes of political rule, especially to tyranny as a perversion of monarchy. Parker, by contrast, relates the master’s self-interestedness directly to the entire extinction of the slave’s “propertie” rights. Yet Parker’s language does not suggest that the relation between self-interested master and slave is figuratively political. Throughout his discussion, the slave’s relation to his master (“Lord”) clearly pertains to the household: A slave (according to Aristotle) is he, who is so wholly his Lords, as that he hath no propertie remaining in himselfe: he only lives, or hath a being to his Lord; but is as dead, nay nothing to himself. Whatsoever may be acquired by him, whatsoever may accrue any other way to him, it rests immediately in his Lord: and his person, his life, all that Nature hath endowed him withall, is so his Lords, that at discretion he may be beaten, tortured, killed, or libidinously used, &c. His very Lord is not called his, as he is called his Lords: for he is his Lords absolute possession, as a horse, or any reall or personall chattel is. (36)

Parker’s statement that the enslaved “is as dead, nay nothing to himself” powerfully represents slavery as social murder or death. By contrast with the concept of social death made familiar by Orlando Patterson, for whom alienation from homeland and community is central, Parker’s foregrounds the enslaved’s loss of “propertie” in the self. Respectfully (mis)using Aristo-



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tle to refute Aristotle (having acknowledged Aristotle’s “error” about slavery’s naturalness), Parker makes this loss part of the very unnaturalness of slavery. Despotical (also “Dominicall”) power, he writes, “has no eye at all upon the good or conservation of the slave, or at least, none but secondary; the very definition of it leaves the slave utterly disinherited of himself, and subject to his masters sole ends: Now that which tends not to the preservation, is not naturall, but violent, and consequently, to be abhorred” (37). Parker’s language here and throughout his discussion of despotical rule is far from the neutral, hierarchical language Aristotle uses of the slave-bynature. For Parker, despotical rule is unjust because the enslaved’s natural right to property in the self—specifically in “his person, his life, all that Nature hath endowed him withal”—is violated by his lord. Having established its injuriousness, Parker goes on to argue that there is no human condition “so servile or brutish, as to require an Arbitrary subjection,” an assertion that sweepingly dismisses volumes of learned rationalization of institutional slavery (37). Like Bodin, Parker is interested in slavery’s effects on the commonwealth; when touching on the threat of risings on the part of numerous slaves treated with cruelty, he explicitly directs the reader to Bodin. Parker, though, is not concerned about the danger slavery poses to social stability. Instead, in an unprecedented, visionary gesture, he extends antityrannicism’s preoccupation with dispossession and loss to the commonwealth and beyond. Despotical government injuriously divests not only the individual slave of its propertie in self but also “the more publike and sublime propriety; which the Common-wealth, the Society of Mankinde, nay God himself has in the parties enslaved.” Parker’s expansive vision has human beings constituting “propriety” held by both God and the entire human community (37). A natural right to one’s self is at the same time a political right—held, however, not only by the self but also collectively by a community, humankind, and the Creator. Although Parker is keen on the state’s “common and reciprocall right” to the individual’s self-propriety, he frequently extends this vision beyond the borders of the nation-state. It informs many of the arguments Parker brings forward to support his thesis that slavery has no foundation in nature since it is not “in any kind profitable for the Slave, good for the State, or expedient for Mankinde” (36). Nature itself, Parker insists, introduces “no violent, noxious, involuntary inequalitie, or restraint” (36). With this claim, Parker drives a thick wedge between nature and the Roman jurisprudential appeal to jus gentium, on which Grotius, among others, draws, and to which the Massachusetts resolution just cited alludes. Parker extends Bodin’s critique of war

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slavery doctrine to a categorical rejection of the enslavement of war captives. Though Bodin contemptuously rejects this doctrine when discussing actual bondage, he contradictorily utilizes it in theorizing “lordly” monarchy, traced to the subjects’ military defeat in a just war. Unsurprisingly, Parker rejects this defense of monarchical absolutism. Indeed, opposition to Bodin’s “lordly” monarchy silently animates the next section of Jus Populi, in which Parker canvasses human history for precedents of the legitimate exercise of arbitrary power in the state. Again, he cannot find any justification for arbitrary rule. Mere force, Parker argues, proves nothing—a position usually associated with Jean Jacques Rousseau. Interestingly, Parker uses this principle to conjecture that Nimrod may not be the tyrant that fellow radicals make him out to be. Against the royalist view that Nimrod’s reign establishes the primacy of monarchy and the irrelevance of popular consent, but equally against the typical antityranny view that Nimrod inaugurates tyranny, Parker stresses the inconclusiveness of “the dark Labyrinth of our primitiveRecords before the Flood,” raising the possibility that Nimrod may be the charismatic figure of Cicero’s De Inventione, or that he acted in concert with others. Parker also suggests that consent of some sort must have played a part, an argument associated with reason-of-state theory, to which Parker often has recourse (13–14, 44).28 Parker’s aim, though, is to keep attention focused on the collective origins of human government and to deny that absolute rule is divinely sanctioned or resistance against tyranny prohibited. Like Milton in Paradise Lost, Parker does not want to suggest that humankind would passively have accepted single-person, tyrannous rule. “[I]f custome,” he says in one of many balanced, chiastic constructions, “may make that necessary which was indifferent, yet it cannot make that just which was unjust” (54). In Paradise Lost, we have seen, Milton tactically reverses the chronological ordering of Nimrod’s rule and the curse of Canaan so as to provide a systematized account of human servitude in all its fallen forms, including chattel slavery, represented as divinely penal. Parker’s unusual exegesis of Nimrod’s rule is also motivated by an interest in chronology as it bears on origins. Where Bodin argues that Nimrod’s rule inaugurates lordly monarchy—historically, the first form of monarchy in his view—Parker disqualifies Nimrod for any of the positions ordinarily assigned him in order to locate the true origins of monarchy in the Israelites’ shameful clamoring for a monarch in 1 Samuel 8. By sidelining Nimrod, Parker integrates contemporary antityranny’s position on this text into a coherent view of ancient Israel’s history: there are no “footsteps of Tyrannie, or of absolute Royalty,



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nay, nor of Royalty itself, till the peoples cursed ingratitude and folly introduced it: We must go beyond God and Natures Workmanship and impressions, before we can discover any thing but Parentall Majestie, or gentle Aristocracie, or compounded or mixed Monarchie” (47). Parker’s discussion of chattel slavery is consistent with both his advocacy of popular sovereignty and his denial that force can institute anything. Parker argues strongly for the right of resistance yet in Jus Populi is also interested in countering the various theoretical bases of royal absolutism. More systematically than any other early modern theorist, Parker rejects the principle that sovereignty in the state has either an origin or fit analogue in relations within the household. While not expunging analogy from his discourse, Parker makes every effort to redirect theorization of sovereignty to the political arena, where laws are collectively generated and enforced. This systematization, together with Parker’s unusual critique of chattel slavery, results in an innovative emphasis on the absence of “jurisdiction” within the household. Though Parker considers slavery an illegitimate form of household rule, he uses public, political criteria to do so. Where other forms of subordination—the wife to the husband, the child to its parents— lay natural restraints on the superior’s use of coercive power, the enslaver’s power over the slave has no such natural basis, and can therefore only be assessed as a vacuous, unjust political form of human-on-human dominion. Parker hurriedly traces slavery to the curse laid on “Cham’s posterity,” mentioned at the end of a summary of scriptural texts either implying the equality of free and enslaved or supporting his firm rejection of enslavement. Reading the curse conventionally as a sign of divine penalty, Parker stresses slavery’s sinfulness, saying we cannot “impute the sin of that slavery which ensued upon that curse, to God, as the proper and immediate cause thereof” (40). By contrast, it will be recalled that in Paradise Lost Milton has the Archangel Michael assert that “no wrong / But Justice” is involved in the divinely sanctioned curse (12.98–99). (Of course, Paradise Lost was published over twenty years later than Jus Populi, at a time when slavery was well established in British colonies; but even in Of Reformation [1641], Milton uses Slaves and Negro’s as synonyms.)29 For Parker, the separation of private “order” from public “jurisdiction” corresponds roughly to that between natural bonds, whether ordered hierarchically or not, and those artificial bonds that are forged within the state. Unlike marital, parental, or fraternal relations, despotical rule lacks the sanction of both order and jurisdiction. Since it also lacks divine sanction, it is utterly without legitimacy. In developing this position, Parker denies despotical rule the anomalous

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status it enjoys in antityranny ideology, where it provides the deluded tyrant with his household template. Without acknowledging that he does so, Parker thereby departs radically from Aristotle, who remains an authority for resistance theorists, all the more so for being criticized by royal absolutists. While this does not prevent Parker from vituperating tyranny’s threatened reduction of citizens to slaves, it does provide a different foundation for tyranny’s injustice. Locating properly political power entirely in the public domain of collective lawmaking, Parker considers relations within the household in terms of the degree to which each subordinate—wife, child, enslaved—is exposed to potential abuse and the remedies available. Parker thus systematically shifts attention from ruler to ruled, from holder of illegitimate power to the victim of that power. As a consequence, Parker represents the chattel slave as uniquely exposed to wrongful harm and without means of redress. The opening up of this perspective seems to me genuinely new, historically. It marks a dramatic break with the elite, male citizenry’s rhetorical dissociation from actual slaves on which Greek, Roman, and early modern antityranny discourses depend. Parker’s brief synthesis of chattel with political slavery also registers this break. In an astonishing passage, Parker represents the enslaved as the paradigmatic subject under absolute, arbitrary power—and therefore as the paradigmatic subject requiring the protection of public jurisdiction or law. Refuting absolutism’s view that rulers need be bound by nothing more than natural and divine laws, Parker argues that such “Bounds” can act as mere “imaginary Lines”: They serve onely to discover to the Subject what his Right is, but they have no strength at all to protect him from wrong. Those slaves that are sold, and forfeited to the worst of Bondages, as we have proved before, have a Divine and Naturall claim to safety, and freedom from abuses, as other Subjects have; yet want of some Politicall remedy, exposeth them to miseries far worse then death, and detrudes them often into a condition below beasts. The same slaves also are equally intitled to their lords courtesie, as the best of Subjects are: there is no safety nor freedom from abuse which depends upon meer will, as an Arbitrary power, but the poorest slave is as capable of it as the freest Subject. (51)

Parker recounts the high offices often given to slaves and freedmen over “men ingenuously [i.e., free] born,” especially in imperial Rome, and then declares, “If there be any difference then betwixt the most ingenuously-born subject and the lowest-purchased caitiff, it is onely in this, That the one hath



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a stronger circumvallation of human Policy to secure him, than the other; and that he is not left so merely to divine, naturall and discretionary pretences, as is the other” (ibid.). Given the context, caitiff’s original meaning, “captive,” is stressed in the phrase “lowest-purchased caitiff,” whose price is determined by the market. In practice this means, as Richard Ligon writes of Africans sold upon arrival in Barbados, “the strongest, youthfullest, and most beautifull, yield the greatest prices.”30 Parker’s emphasis falls on the contingencies of birth and accident that ought not deprive anyone of “some Political remedy.” (Circumvallation derives from the Latin circumvallare, to surround with a rampart, continuing the figure of needed defenses.) As a formulation of natural rights, this is as radical and as unreservedly inclusive as any to be found in much later, antislavery literature. Its very extraordinariness raises questions, however. Is Parker here using the figure of the slave in order to conceptualize the irreducible rights—simulta­neously natural, divine, and political—of the “free” subject? Is he advocating on behalf of those enslaved, specifically those currently enslaved through transatlantic trafficking? The conventions of analogical argumentation, which require generalization and abstraction, make it difficult if not impossible to answer this as an either/or question. My sense is that Parker is offering a considered response to contemporary practices, one consistent with his inclusive, democratic vision, but that he wants to integrate it theoretically with his denunciation of political slavery. In the opening sentence of the passage cited above, Parker equates the household slave, conventionally represented as an individual, with the individual citizen-subject. But he also equates plural “slaves” with “other Subjects.” In this slippage, Parker theorizes the individual subject in relation to antityranny’s collectivity of freemen whose tyrannous ruler threatens them with degradation or loss. Parker’s slaves are being denied what “other Subjects” enjoy, which implies that they are also citizen-subjects. What they are denied is what in any case they naturally possess—that is, “A Divine and Naturall claim to safety, and freedom from abuses.” Parker’s mention of an entitlement to “their lords courtesie” in the final sentence may seem odd unless we follow the movement of his argument, which separates enslavement as a traumatic condition involving loss of liberty, sale, and degradation—the topic of the second sentence—from the settled condition of slaves within households, where they are under the despotical power of “lords.” Inclusion of both stages of enslavement shows that Parker has entered empathetically into the experience of those enslaved. Yet Parker introduces this domestic scene in order to drive home the life-threatening exposure to harm involved in subjection to any ruler’s

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“meer will, as an Arbitrary power,” language conventionally used of tyrannous political rule. Slavery here has its conventional, household identity but is evaluated by criteria suited to the polis. In his unique synthesis of chattel and political slavery, Parker creates a perspective in which analogy’s lines converge in a vanishing point, one where the need for civil protection is shared by freeborn and enslaved, both of whom are, or rather ought to be, citizen-subjects.

chapter six

The Power of Life and Death

H

ow does such a grand phrase come to stand for something so brutal as killing? To ask an entirely different question, why did it become so important to early modern theories of political sovereignty? At the time of Charles I’s trial and execution, in a pamphlet war focused on the origin of state-sanctioned penal power, the pseudonymous Eutactus Philodemius refers to “this great, yea the greatest Ingredient of supremacy, viz. Power of life and death.”1 Also known as the sword of justice, the right to take life and to grant reprieves was long considered central to magistracy. In early modern discussions of sovereignty in the state, the power of life and death was conceived as a disciplinary power tied—in ways that were contested— to official legislative and judicial bodies. The phrase itself translates the Latin potestas vitae necisque (sometimes jus vitae ac necis), which was often used of a lawful discretionary power ancient Roman fathers purportedly held over their children. Only one, though the most extreme, of the Roman father’s rights, the right to take or grant life typified patria potestas, power the Roman paterfamilias held over his children even during their adulthood. According to the second-century jurist Gaius, whose Institutes were frequently cited in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature, scarcely any other nation gave fathers the power over their children that Romans did. Yet in his catalog of paternal powers, Gaius himself says nothing of potestas vitae necisque, the legal and sociological basis for which has been questioned in recent years.2 Bodin, however, not only takes the legitimacy of this power’s exercise for granted but seriously proposes that it be reintroduced. Taken to be a stabilizing feature of Roman society, it grounds Bodin’s aggrandizement of paternal rule, his chapter on which bears the title “Of the power of a Father, and whether it be meet for the Father to have power of life and death over 193

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his children, as had the auntient Romans.” Bodin denies that Rome is the anomaly Justinian’s Institutes claimed it was: this power is universal, he claims, and is endorsed by nature and God, as well as honored by Persians, upper Asians, Hebrews, Celts, and West Indians before conquest by Spain. According to Caesar, Bodin reports, Frenchmen, too, had the power of life and death over their wives, children, and slaves. Regarding Rome, Bodin says that Romulus legitimated the father’s right “to dispose of the life and death of his children, without condition or exception thereunto adjoined; and that whatsoever they got, was not theirs, but their Fathers.”3 With unmistakable, analogical intent—since it concerns supralegal, discretionary power—Bodin claims that ancient Romans so revered this power that it was “not only sacred and inviolable, but also to have been lawfull for him [i.e., the father] either by right or wrong to dispose of the life and death of his children, even contrarie to the will of the magistrats and people.” Offering as support incidents in which paternal power and “privat judgement” handily trump legislation or the oaths of public officials, Bodin urges the inescapable conclusion: “[T]he Romans in their estate, made greater reckoning of the power of the father, than of the lawes themselves, which they called Sacred.” In Bodin’s estimation, the Roman Republic succeeded as it did because Romans “were of opinion that domesticall justice and power of fathers, were the most sure and firme foundation of lawes, honour, vertue, pietie, wherewith a Commonweale ought to flourish” (1.4.23). Likewise, Bodin argues, Rome’s sad “declination” came about when magistrates enlarged their jurisdiction by extinguishing the father’s awesome power (1.4.24). Bodin’s extravagant claims about the social benefits of Roman fathers’ disciplinary power contributed, Richard Saller argues, to a set of stereotypes about the unfeeling harshness of Roman patriarchal relations, especially those between freeborn Roman fathers and children. For present purposes, most significant is Saller’s emphasis on the social distinction between freeborn sons and slaves that parents were expected to instill with every word and gesture. Symbolically and most likely in practice, Saller says, whips and other disciplinary instruments were associated with the enslaver’s power over the enslaved, while freeborn sons were not to be threatened with physical violence, much less subjected to it, but encouraged to internalize an appropriate sense of dignitas. However important patria potestas may have been to Roman patriarchal ideology, Saller argues, a wealth of evidence suggests that actual, everyday relations among free fathers, mothers, and their children were strongly affectionate, and that the opposition between pater and dominus was deeply ingrained.4



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More recently, the Roman father’s potestas vitae necisque has met up with an even greater challenge. The common view that this power is legally enshrined is no more than a potent, ever-revitalized myth, argues Brent Shaw, who finds no support in commonly cited juristic sources for the belief that Roman fathers were legally entitled to dispose of their children’s lives. Investigation of cases in which such power is alleged to have been exercised reveals, Shaw says, “not actual acts of killing done by fathers who were exercising specific powers that they held as patres, but rather ideological interpretations of their actions.”5 Shaw speculates that widespread belief in the Roman father’s primordial customary powers was created and sustained by Roman fathers in conjunction with the state as a means of containing the demands and pressures of familial dependents, especially wives and sons.6 As a result, the phrase potestas vitae ac necis became a powerful rhetorical trope for sweeping, unregulated authority, one to which other authorities could appeal. Shaw observes in passing that the power of life and death is given ju­ risprudential sanction in only one instance: the slave master’s power over the enslaved. The passage in question, attributed to Gaius, appeals to ius gentium in explaining the nature of a slave’s subject to an owner’s power (cited in this book’s introduction): “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” (1.52).7 Although this passage is important to Shaw’s thesis only as negative evidence, it is crucial to an understanding of early modern debates on sovereignty, interstate conquest, and transatlantic slavery. Though in this era vitae necisque potestas was often used of paternal power, many writers were aware that this phrase referred to the slaveholder’s power over the enslaved. As will be seen, Grotius makes the most of this ambiguity by getting sovereign power to embrace both the father’s and the slaveholder’s power of life and death. The slaveholder’s vitae necisque potestas has its own ambiguities, however, since it often serves as a nearly invisible shuttle joining a domestic, disciplinary power to the military victor who, according to war slavery doctrine (which has the same binary structure), enjoys the power to save or destroy. Rhetorically, the phrase “the power of life and death” is an instance of hendiadys, from the Greek, meaning “one by means of two,” a rhetorical figure that uses a conjunction to combine two words, often substantives, adjectivally. A figure often used by Shakespeare, hendiadys appears, for example, in The Tempest’s “What seest thou else / In the dark backward and

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abyss of time?” (my emphasis).8 The adjectival effect given the two words is often curiously alogical, perhaps because a mental operation to locate symmetry finds no more balance than an attempt to fix the subordination of one word to the other. As hendiadys, “the power of life and death” is unusually, indeed treacherously, slippery. Read disjunctively, outside the constraints of hendiadys, the underlying either/or creates a life-and-death-determining drama in which the power holder has the power to preserve life or to bring death. Read conjunctively as required, life and death either become mortal synonyms (with the power to take life pairing up with the power to bring death) or frighteningly equivalent (with the power to preserve life bleeding into the power to postpone death). When used with reference to the slaveholder’s power, the conjunction of life and death in potestas vitae necisque makes this power supremely arbitrary regarding not only its ends (life and death) but also its duration. The uncertainty regarding its temporal reach—with foreboding alternatives ever present, to be enacted at any time, for almost any reason—is an aspect of the experience of enslavement for which there is abundant evidence. Reflecting on this arbitrariness as a cross-cultural phenomenon, Orlando Patterson suggests that slavery is generally conceived as a substitute for violent death, either in warfare or as capital punishment. Because this reprieve is not equivalent to a formal pardon, however, enslavement frequently becomes what he calls a “conditional commutation” of a death sentence.9 As we shall see in later chapters, Patterson’s language suits Hobbes’s appropriation of potestas vitae necisque for his theorization of consensual submission to sovereign power, as well as Locke’s for his defense of chattel slavery. In what follows, I plan to explore how the power of life and death is taken up in early modern politico-philosophical debates on the origins of the right to punish malefactors with capital punishment, or, more generally, the right to take life; on the individual or collective right of self-enslavement; and on the right to discipline voluntary servant-subjects as against those enslaved by force.

Brutus and His Sons: Lawful Punishment or Paternal Power? Discussions of sovereignty and of the Roman father’s power invariably mention Brutus the Elder and his sons. A notable recent example occurs in Homo Sacer, where Giorgio Agamben invokes Brutus’s execution of his sons to support his genealogical inquiry into sovereign power: “[T]he magistrate’s imperium is nothing but the father’s vitae necisque potestas



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extended to all citizens.”10 Representing the execution of Brutus’s sons as an exercise of the Roman father’s legal power over his children, Agamben perpetuates a tradition of interpretation that magnifies paternal power in its oneness with a supreme power or an abstract state. Agamben relies on Latin accounts that are critical of Livy’s narrative of the execution of Brutus’s sons or otherwise committed to stressing the unity of Brutus’s paternal and political powers. In the context of early modern debates on sovereignty, Agamben’s brief précis would be recognizably absolutist. It is close to that of Bodin, for whom Brutus’s execution of his sons unproblematically exemplifies the exercise of patria potestas. Bodin, though, at least refers to the sons’ violation of “publick lawes” (1.4.28), even if he does not mention Brutus’s position as consul at the time that his sons are put to death, whereas Agamben leaves the impression that Brutus executes his sons arbitrarily, in his private capacity as father.11 A very different view of Brutus emerges in Livy’s famous narrative of the republic’s origins. As Rome’s first consul, readers are told, Brutus is required to take on the responsibility of presiding at the execution of his own sons, who are among the conspirators caught scheming to join Tarquin in overthrowing the new republic. In accounting for their treachery, Livy represents the sons’ viewpoint ironically, at the same time opposing the vagaries of arbitrary rule, based on the royal ruler’s corrupt, psychosocial games, to the impartial rule of law, whose egalitarian, suprapersonal character is an essential feature of republican ideology. (The notion that the law, passionless, is “wisdom without desire” appears in Politics 1287a5.) The pampered, ruling-class youths, Livy explains, had begun to resent the loss of privileges they had enjoyed under Tarquin: This license they missed, now that all enjoyed equal rights, and they had got into the way of complaining to each other that the liberty of the rest had resulted in their own enslavement [suam vertisse servitutem]. A king was a man, from whom one could obtain a boon, whether it were just or unjust; there was room for countenance and favour; a king could be angry, could forgive, could distinguish between friend and enemy. The law was a thing without ears, inexorable, more salutary and serviceable to the pauper than to the great man; it knew no relaxation or indulgence, if one exceeded bounds.12

Several kinsmen and other highborn citizens are also condemned to death, yet the spectators focus on Brutus and his two sons, whose shameful treachery contrasts with their father’s heroic role as founder of the republic, father

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of his fatherland (pater patriae), now charged with safeguarding its liberty. As the lictors carry out the punishment, stripping, flogging, and beheading the conspirators, Livy reports that the attention of the spectators is riveted on the father, specifically on the emotions his countenance reveals: “[T]hrough it all men gazed at the expression on the father’s face, where they might clearly read a father’s anguish, as he administered the nation’s retribution.”13 In foregrounding his position as consul, Livy’s narrative shows Brutus dissociating himself from his familial, paternal position. As Livy puts it, Brutus is obligated by virtue of his position to execute what, as father, he ought not even to have looked upon.14 Far from exercising patria potestas, Livy’s Brutus officiates at the exercise of publicly held and performed disciplinary power, conceived as fraternally organized (within, of course, the ruling class) so as to protect the common good. The whole point of Livy’s narrative is to illustrate the suprafamilial character of fidelity to the state and juridical process: like the law itself, the consul makes no distinction between his sons and the other conspirators who are put to death. The state’s exaction of Brutus’s sons’ lives enacts an inviolable, indeed defining, principle of republican governance, a principle that Brutus adheres to by subordinating personal affect—in the ideologically charged form of the paternal bond—to the exercise of law’s impersonal power. Praiseworthy subordination of familial emotion demands, however, that emotion be revealed, which is why Livy’s spectators (and, implicitly, readers) watch the conflict between paternal love and civic justice as its expresses itself on Brutus’s face. For early modern antityrannicism and the resistance theory it informs, Brutus is a hero. In his Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio (1531; Discourses on Livy), Niccolò Machiavelli refers to Brutus as the “father” of “Roman liberty.”15 The moral of Livy’s narrative of the execution of Brutus’s sons—that the ruler or good citizen must value the state’s claims over private bonds—is taken even further by George Buchanan, who includes Brutus the Elder among a number of Roman worthies so adamantly opposed to tyranny that they do not balk at murdering intimate relations.16 Along with other resistance theorists, Buchanan presents tyrannicide as a noble, public duty. Machiavelli’s emphasis is rather different. The scene of execution comes up when Machiavelli discusses the severity demanded in maintaining the republic’s newfound liberty, as against acquiring it, for which the imbecility Brutus adopted during the tyrannous rule of the Tarquins was required. The scene is rare, Machiavelli claims, “in all of recorded history: to see a father sit as judge and not only condemn his sons to death but to be present at their execution.”17 Machiavelli is not really interested



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in the psychodynamics of this scene, though, or in the shamefulness of the sons’ betrayal. Not only in this chapter but also earlier, the “sons of Brutus” become general, semiallegorical representatives of those—notably those who have enjoyed special privileges under monarchy—who are actively antagonistic to a state that is free. It is as necessary to the continuance of a new republic to eliminate them as it is for a tyranny to get rid of an ardent republican, Machiavelli argues, invoking the two Brutuses (inverting historical sequence) with cool, aphoristic concision: “Anyone who creates a tyranny without killing Brutus, and anyone who creates a free government and does not kill the sons of Brutus, will not sustain himself for long.”18

Debating the Familial Origins of the Power of Life and Death The law’s extrafamilial, collective origins, guarantor of its impersonality, are insisted upon by early modern resistance theorists, often by vividly conjuring up the alternative: demeaning vulnerability to the arbitrary power of a solitary ruler who, being human, will exercise power capriciously. In addressing the question of whether the ruler holds the power of life and death over his subjects, for example, Vindiciae emphasizes how dangerous it would be to entrust such power to a single individual. How secure would people be were they to hand over the preservation of their lives to a mere mortal, “who is accustomed to change by the day, the hour, and the minute, shaking off the bridles of reason thousands of times each day, as he is prey to different passions? ”(104–5).19 Nothing could possibly make up for living with such fear. Not kings, who are only ministers and stewards of the laws, Vindiciae declares, but the laws themselves hold the power of life and death over a nation’s inhabitants. Only if the voice of the law, interpreted and protected by a body of representatives, has convicted someone can the sword be drawn against her or him. The same goes for keeping the sword sheathed, or clemency (106). Vindiciae refers indignantly to absolutists who compare the monarch’s subjects to slaves over whom the enslaver holds the power of life and death (104). Bodin, too, rejects the view that sovereignty in the state has its natural basis in the slaveholder’s power. But he first seriously considers the possibility, not wanting to dismiss it out of hand since, pace Aristotle, he wants the nation’s sovereign power, necessary in the case of capital crimes, to have a natural correlate in that of the individual householder (1.5.34). For Bodin that individual is, of course, the father, not the slave master. Why, though, is the underlying assumption so important? While analogical

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argumentation that assumes the naturalness of familial and political power holders lends support to various principles of order, it also seeks to deny legitimacy to a self-identified, independent political body that challenges a unitary sovereign power. More specifically, by conceptualizing the state as an enlarged and extended family, absolutism counters a collectivity’s desire to represent itself as distinct from and opposed to the tyrant who threatens it with political slavery. To this end, Bodin argues that slavery is incompatible with a wellordered commonwealth, using ancient sources to create disturbing vignettes of slaveholders preoccupied with their own liberty; to reveal how masters’ interests are served even when ostensibly humane legislation is passed; and to demonstrate that slavery is uniformly destructive of social order. Bodin could not make the conclusion he draws any clearer: the relation between household slaveholder and enslaved is not legitimate as a form of rule, much less as a model. Fathers, by contrast, are portrayed as naturally inclined to rule their children tenderly, with a loving regard for their development and concern for the welfare of family and nation. Fathers exercise the power of life and death over their children in a considered, constructive manner, being naturally reluctant to exercise it at all (1.4.27–28). On the father’s manifold powers, Filmer follows Bodin closely, using many of his examples and occasionally cribbing whole passages.20 Institutional slavery is not of particular interest to Filmer, however. Comfortably elastic, Filmer’s paternal power expands to take in servants and slaves as well as sons. Generally taking the Abrahamic family as his model, Filmer observes that the words subject, slave, and tyrant are not in Scripture, asserting, “A son, a subject and a servant or a slave, were one and the same thing at first.”21 Like Filmer, though with unique emphasis on despotic power, Hobbes, too, trivializes the status differences between freeborn children and servi on which antityrannicism relies for its rhetorical vilification of tyranny. A foreglimpse of Hobbes’s leveling of those subject to absolute power (to be taken up further in chapter 9) appears in the following passage from The Elements of Law on the “absolute subjection” of children to the adult who has nurtured and preserved them: Children therefore, whether they be brought up and preserved by the father, or by the mother, or by whomsoever, are in most absolute subjection to him or her, that so bringeth them up, or preserveth them. And they may alienate them, that is, assign his or her dominion, by selling or giving them in adoption or servitude to others; or may pawn them for hostages, kill them for rebellion, or sacrifice them for peace, by the law



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of nature, when he or she, in his or her conscience, think it to be necessary. (Elements, 2.4.8)

The rights Hobbes here includes under parental rule are in shocking excess of those conventionally assigned the Roman father, even if presumably based on them. They also go well beyond what Hobbes details in De Cive and Leviathan, which may try to avoid putting readers off as this passage likely would. Imaginatively attractive as some seventeenth-century parents might find a precivil condition in which they hold absolute power, the specific acts envisioned here imply that affective bonds are virtually nonexistent. Although Hobbes does not later qualify the sameness of children, servants, and citizens who are subject to the power of life and death, he does in later works omit disturbing particularities.22 Pawning for hostages, killing for the specific wrong of rebellion, and sacrificing for peace are additions to the powers early moderns usually associate with patria potestas. In differing degrees, they all relate to war, and are clearly devised as analogues of what Hobbes regards as rights held by the absolutist state.

Debating Divine Sanction for the Power and Life and Death At this point we need to examine an argument Hobbes omits from Leviathan, as it clarifies the natural, nonscriptural origin of “dominion.” In both Elements of Law and De Cive, Hobbes explicitly denies that “dominion” over animals, included in this power, requires scriptural authorization: Right over non-rational animals is acquired in the same way as over the persons of men, that is, by natural strength and powers. In the natural state, because of the war of all against all, any one may legitimately subdue or even kill Men, whenever that seems to be to his advantage; much more will this be the case against animals. That is, one may at discretion reduce to one’s service any animals that can be tamed or made useful, and wage continual war against the rest as harmful, and hunt them down and kill them. Thus Dominion over animals has its origin in the right of nature not in Divine positive right. For if no such right had existed before the publication of holy scripture, no one could rightly have slaughtered animals for food except someone to whom the divine will had been revealed in the holy scriptures; and the condition of mankind would surely have been very hard, since the beasts could devour them in all innocence, while they could not devour the beasts. Since therefore it

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is by natural right that an animal kills a man, it will be by the same right that a man slaughters an animal.23

Hobbes here follows Grotius’s De jure belli ac pacis (1625), which less directly undermines the tenet that the Creator’s power of life and death is transferred only by direct donation or appointment.24 Referring to the right to punish as an “antient Liberty, which the Law of Nature at first gave us” (2.20.8.5), Grotius draws on numerous classical authors to suggest that good men likely exercised this right over “the brute creation” before the Flood and God’s donation (2.20.9.3). Both Grotius and Hobbes are denying the significance usually attached to the discrepancy between Genesis 1:28–30, where the grant of dominion is confined to vegetable nature, and the grant delivered to Noah after the flood in Genesis 9:1–4, where it includes the right to take the lives of nonhuman creatures for the purpose of eating their flesh. It is the latter Hobbes refers to as “Divine positive right.” Despite the practical reasons Hobbes offers for considering human dominion over nonhuman animals a right of nature, he is essentially clearcutting received restrictions on human “dominion” so as to create a larger, unobstructed area for the exercise of a natural right of self-preservation (which for Grotius yields a right of punishment). Hobbes must challenge Christian orthodoxy on this issue if an individual’s right to take life is to inhere in the state of nature. If this power has any divine origin for Hobbes, it would presumably lie in the first grant, which royalism generally believes to sanction human-on-human forms of dominion. But Hobbes’s concluding statement, which judiciously gives human and nonhuman animals exactly the same “natural right” of cross-species killing, does not support this. Overdoing Grotius, it prepares the way for the further leveling that takes place when Hobbes positions children, servants, and political subjects alike under a sovereign holder’s power of life and death. In a curious irony, Hobbes, Aristotle’s critic, thereby creates the potential for agreement with Aristotle on the naturalness of hunting animals and acquiring slaves. (Significantly, the passage just cited appears in Hobbes’s chapter on the master’s rights over servi.) By contrast, Parker, Milton, and other resistance theorists find in the divine grant of dominion (Genesis 1:28–30) a categorical separation between human beings, who are not subject to human dominion, and vegetable and nonhuman nature, which is (though initially this does not include the eating of flesh). Paradise Lost has the unfallen Eve and Adam on an orthodox vegetarian diet in Eden, where, as in the golden age, human and nonhuman animals live together peaceably. For the fallen Adam’s speech on the divine prohibition (which is



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what it amounts to) against human-on-human “dominion,” Milton’s Adam starts with “beasts,” as the second Genesis grant does, thereby updating the initial grant for humankind’s new, fallen circumstances. Milton’s concern, however, is to delineate differences between human­ kind and its Creator: where the Creator possesses absolute dominion, in­ cluding the power of life and death, over all his creatures, humankind holds this power only over “beast, fish and fowl” (12.67–71).25 In The First Treatise, Locke develops this line of argument, first satirically. Rejecting Filmer’s doctrine that the grant of dominion in Genesis 1:28–30 gives Adam kingly powers, Locke says that Adam, “as absolute a Monarch as he was, could not make bold with a Lark or a Rabbet to satisfie his hunger, and had the Herbs but in common with the Beasts, as is plain from 1 Gen. 29 and 30.” Of the grant to Noah and his sons, Locke writes more soberly, “[T]hey had then given them the utmost Property Man is capable of, which is to have a right to destroy any thing by using it; Every moving thing that Liveth, saith God, shall be Meat for you, which was not allowed to Adam in his Charter.”26 If the Deity so carefully regulates the right to kill nonhuman animals, what is the basis of the state’s right to punish criminals by taking their lives? Ponet’s answer to this question neatly suits other tenets of popular sovereignty: in declaring that murder be punished by murder, God institutes “politick power.” Like that permitting the eating of beasts, this ordinance is delivered in Genesis 9: “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man” (9:6). For Ponet, the political power thereby instituted gives humanity the authority to make and execute laws extending to capital punishment; such power implicitly includes “authority over goods, lands, possessions, and all such things as might breed controversies and discords.”27 In his annotation on the phrase “by man shall his blood be shed,” Henry Ainsworth places a conventional limit on this right, “that is, by the Magistrate; whose power is here established, for killing all willful murderers,” adding the Calvinist stricture, “but private men may not use the sword.”28 For royal absolutism, it is important that the power of life and death not be considered a political power in Ponet’s sense, which is why Bodin’s conferring it on the father is so warmly received. After invoking the fifth commandment, “Honour thy father and mother,” Bodin cites passages from the Hebrew Bible that give parents a discretionary right to sentence stubborn and disrespectful children to death. Elders are to be present at the public stoning of Deuteronomy 21:18–21 only, Bodin says, that the death not be hidden (21–22). When the Anglican Church’s 1606 Convocation Book

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takes this up, the analogical assumptions of the second commandment are spelled out: “[S]ubjection of Inferiours unto their Kings and Governours, is grounded upon the very Law of Nature.” Translated into absolutist dictates, the parental right to issue sentences of death to incorrigible children, “awarded by God himself,” sanctions capital punishment for subjects who commit “such Offences against their Kings and Rulers, being the Heads and Fathers of their Commonwealths and Kingdoms.”29 Though these texts provide patriarchal absolutism with its strongest foundation, it is easy to object, as Henry Parker does, that such a law was never universal nor, at present, is it anywhere “in force.”30 Another difficulty, one Filmer’s patriarchalism exposes, is that Adam, the one parent who ought to qualify for such power, did not exercise it when he should have. Filmer argues that the power of life and death was granted Adam, father-cum-monarch, in the initial Genesis grant of dominion. If Adam had monarchical power, critics of patriarchal absolutism ask, why did he not go after his son Cain for murdering Abel? When he, too, raises this question, Parker echoes the later Genesis text demanding retribution for bloodshed: “Adam ought to have arraigned Cain at his Bar, and to have required blood for blood.” This is not mere point scoring, however. Not only did Adam not arraign Cain, Parker goes on, but rather “the whole stock of Mankinde then living, were the Judges that Cain feared: and there is reason why they should be more competent for such a tryall then the Father himself.”31 Parker then makes a case for the greater impartiality of a collective, judicial process compared with the bias of parents trying a child of their own. Though this is a familiar argument for rule of law, Parker applies it to a time prior to political association. Parker’s move has radical implications, and shows how he, like Hobbes, though for contrary reasons, affirms natural rights that precede the Deity’s official ordinance of Genesis 9: even before the institution of political power in Genesis 9:6, the power of life and death was inherent in human society. Parker mentions Cain earlier in Jus Populi when refuting a royalist thesis that “potestas vitae & necis” derives from one who gives life and therefore only from kings, who receive this power from God. Parker objects that such a view discredits all government that is not monarchical, and then hypothe­ sizes a situation in which the power of life and death is exercised by “the community”: [T]he power of life and death in a legall sence is committed to man by God, and not to Kings only. For if the Crowne of England were escheated, the community even before a new restauration of government, during



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the inter-regnum, might joyne in putting to death murderers and capitall offenders, and perhaps this it was which Cain stood in feare of. Nay it may be thought ex officio humani generis, they ought to prosecute all the common disturbers of mankind. And if this without some orderly tribunal were not lawfull, or possible to bee done, yet what right or power is there wanting in the people to erect such a Tribunall.32

In this passage, theory seems to be both engaging and preparing the way for the revolution’s new political formations. Worth noting is Parker’s identification of the generic man to whom God commits the power of life and death with the community in which political rule originates and that is capable of establishing its own provisional tribunal in the absence of an officially constituted political authority. Judah’s pronouncement of the death sentence on his daughter-in-law Thamar is another Genesis narrative used to demonstrate the patriarchal origins of the power of life and death. As Filmer summarizes it, Judah “pronounced sentence of death against Thamar, his daughter-in-law, for playing the harlot. ‘Bring her forth,’ saith he, ‘that she may be burnt’ ” (Genesis 38:24).33 Judah does not carry out his sentence, but his language indicates he nevertheless holds a discretionary power of life and death, or so it is argued. Yet as the biblical story unfolds, when Thamar is brought forth into an informal, judicial space, she discreetly reveals that Judah himself is responsible for her pregnancy. Motivated by Judah’s denial of her reproductive rights as widow of his son, Thamar had earlier concealed her identity when Judah had sexual relations with her, he being under the impression she was a prostitute. Commentators hoping to find support for paternal power in this story have to skip over several indelicacies. And if Judah had exercised his power, the result would scarcely have been edifying. In any case, the narrative is commonly with less strain read as an illustration of Judah’s lustful wrongheadedness, acknowledged when he exclaims that Tamar has been more righteous than he (Genesis 28:26). In the context of such exegetical battles, in which patriarchal absolutism does not have too much going for it, Hobbes’s reference to Jephtha’s sacrifice of his daughter in Leviathan takes on a different aspect. Unlike Judah, whose sentence is not carried through, Jephtha ensures that his daughter’s life is taken. As Hobbes puts it, Jephtha “caused his daughter to be sacrificed (2.21.109).” Contentious as it is, Hobbes’s selection of Jephtha’s sacrifice sidesteps some of the nasty pitfalls of Judah’s narrative. Further, in emphasizing sacrifice rather than capital punishment, it lucidly illustrates Hobbes’s thesis regarding the extrajudicial, extraethical basis of absolute

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sovereignty. The power of life and death may be exercised even on an innocent subject, Hobbes insists. Finally, in the sacrifice of Jephtha’s daughter, Hobbes may be analogically demonstrating the sovereign representative’s right to sacrifice the lives of his subjects in war. In the passage on parental power cited earlier, Hobbes includes among the father’s extensive, natural rights the right to “sacrifice them for peace.” As was observed, this passage appears only in Elements of Law, which leads me to reflect that in Jephtha’s sacrifice of his daughter (which appears for the first time in Leviathan), Hobbes may have found the perfect exemplum of the father’s power of life and death.

Power, No-Power, and the English Revolution The power of life and death takes front and center stage in a tense, highstakes pamphlet war that opens shortly before the trial and execution of Charles I and continues for over a year thereafter. In a stern critique of the Remonstrance, which demands that the king and his chief instruments be brought to justice for their criminal acts, Henry Hammond, an eminent royalist divine, publishes an address to Lord Fairfax and the Council of War that includes an appeal to spare the king’s life.34 Hammond’s Humble Address (hereafter HA) prompts two major responses, both written to defend the king’s trial and execution: the pseudonymous Eutactus Philodemius’s The Original and End of Civil Power (hereafter OE) and John Goodwin’s The Obstructors of Justice (referred to here as OJ). Hammond replies to the former in A Vindication of Dr. Hammond’s Addresse (hereafter V), to which he appends a reply to Goodwin’s tract.35 Goodwin apparently does not reply, but E.P. does in An Answer to the Vindication of Doctor Hamond (hereafter AV), which is where the exchange ends.36 We will be spending some time with this set of tracts because it relates the power of life and death to both the (im)possibility of voluntarily entering into slavery and the right to authorize capital punishment. (Important in itself, this exchange is also relevant to Locke’s Two Treatises.) Participants in this debate take it for granted that the Creator holds the power of life and death over his human and nonhuman creatures. So the question becomes, how do rulers and magistrates come to hold and exercise this power? Hammond argues that it is imparted to magistrates or a ruler by God, while Goodwin and Parker claim that the people themselves have it naturally. Especially explicit in its focus on these two issues is the final exchange between Hammond and E.P., where title pages advertise their opposed positions. Hammond’s Vindication, which names E.P. and the Exceptions he



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has taken to Hammond’s Addresse, is subtitled: Concerning The Power supposed in the Jew, over his own Freedome. The No-power over a mans own Life. E.P.’s Answer to this pamphlet is subtitled Wherin is endeavoured to be cleared What Power Man hath. 1. Over his own Liberty, (which is) his ALL. 2. Over his own Life, for which he will give that ALL. Encapsulated very briefly, the debate concerns the (im)possibility of giving away either one’s liberty or one’s life, with each participant holding that one but not the other can be relinquished. Hammond affirms that both individuals and communities have the power to enter slavery voluntarily, but denies that they hold the power of life and death over their own lives. E.P., on the other hand, argues that no one can legitimately become enslaved, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, but that each person does hold the power of life and death—believed by Goodwin, Hammond, and E.P. to be the basis of the state’s coercive power. E.P.’s tracts have long been attributed to Antony Ascham. Richard Tuck, however, has questioned this attribution, and, emboldened by his skepticism, I have become increasingly certain that Ascham is not their author. In my view, Ascham’s language, concerns, and sources are generally so different from E.P.’s as to make his authorship of these tracts untenable. As Tuck points out, E.P. favors elective, representative government, and shows an attachment to republicanism that does not appear in Ascham’s published works.37 E.P.’s The Original and End of Civil Power, for example, has three references to Brutus’s expulsion of Tarquinius Superbus and subsequent establishment of a new form of Roman rule. But there are other fundamental differences. In Of the Confusions and Revolutions of Governments, though Ascham critiques Hobbes for requiring that the individual’s natural right to punish be renounced on entrance into civil society, his view of the state of nature is quite close to that of Hobbes. Involving undifferentiated, communal entitlement, humankind’s natural condition is definitely one of asociality. Those who live “brutishly in mere Nature,” Ascham maintains, must be prepared to “live in perpetuall war” (later described as a “state of war”).38 Like Hobbes, Ascham sees natural inequality in “force” giving rise to “dominion,” which in turn arouses the fear that leads to the initial, rudimentary contact; he even approvingly cites Hobbes’s view that “Supreme irresistibility” is the ground for obedience to God.39 By contrast, in a marginal note to An Answer, E.P. evaluates Hobbes’s principles harshly even as he notes that Hobbes is in agreement with him on one issue: “Mr. Hobbs, one of this Doctors party, though a man of dangerous, and unsound principles in other respects, yet in this agrees with E.P. That power of coertion, of the Sword, and consequently of Life, is transferred

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from the People to the Magistrate” (AV 16). Hobbes is also identified as a dangerous adversary in the earlier Original and End, where E.P. takes Hobbes to task for his portrayal of humankind’s natural state, saying, “[H]erein this gentleman hath much injured, yea committed an intellectual rape upon nature.” E.P. specifically disputes Hobbes’s view that there is no basis for “distinct propriety” in the vicious competitiveness of the natural state (OE 15). Although in arguing the naturalness of “Meum and Tuum” E.P. affirms the bourgeois preoccupation with property that E. B. Macpherson analyzes, he also, as J. P. Sommerville points out, employs a tactic introduced by the Levelers when countering the Grandees’ fearmongering.40 Since private property is natural, as is demonstrated by the eighth commandment (so the argument goes), extending the franchise would not inevitably lead to a radical redistribution of wealth or violent disorder. In any event, E.P.’s condemnation of Hobbes’s “intellectual rape” is the other side of his idealizing insistence on the naturalness of human sociability. Change should not be feared, he counsels, as even anarchy is preferable to the lengthy tyranny the English have endured, while anarchy can only be “momentary”: “[T]here is inviscerated into man a prompt inclination, and a love to Society and Company; and this ushers in Government, which necessarily follows as the thread doth the needle” (OE 27). Colorful figurative language such as this appears regularly in E.P.’s tracts but not in Ascham’s. I doubt that Ascham would refer to reason as “the Apocalypse or Revelation of Nature” or as “having upon it the fair Impress of Natures Signet” (OE 2). In “To the Reader,” E.P. refers to his belief “That the People are the Womb of all Powers; and that from thence all Powers have received their warmth and lively vigour, and do continually receive their Nutriment” (OE A5), and goes on to theorize the process by which the people as a whole come to be represented by those in government: All Soveraignties and Royalties are virtually in the People, though it be formally in him or them whom the People set up over themselves: And that Majesty or Soveraignty that is united in one or more persons by the Peoples consent is dispersedly in broken and scattered Rayes amongst the Community, or the Universality of the People; and that vigour which every particular person hath in himself, is naturally inherent in him, derived immediately to him from God, no creature on earth being the mediate instrument of it. And though the People by their consent do contract those scattered Rayes of Power, and concentrate them into one or more persons, as best agrees with their own Temper, and Constitutions of Policy; yet they do not thereby pass away, or transfer to



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their Rulers or Magistrates their proper Rights and Interests, but such an Efficacy, Vigour and Vertue, as to preserve their Rights distinct, and to punish mutual Intrenchments thereupon. (OE 4–5)

Using the language of optics as a figure for representation, E.P. brings “contract”—in the phrase “contract those scattered Rayes of Power, and concentrate them into one or more persons”—into a vitalist rather than legal semantic field. To “contract” is an effect of “consent” but without the legal connotations of binding or closure, and is thus in keeping with E.P.’s view that the people not only institute but also actively preserve a given form of civil rule, which they can also dissolve. Though largely a defense of the Commonwealth against its royalist and Leveler detractors, Original and End offers a theory of representative democracy with potentially radical implications. Its explicitly egalitarian, vitalist conception of original power may present a subtle challenge to the exclusionary practices of the new regime. Henry Parker employs similar figures, and a follower, or possibly Parker himself, may have written the tracts published under the pseudonym Eutactus Philodemius.41 In Jus Populi, for example, Parker uses participial constructions to suggest the active, ongoing nature of representation. He speaks of the magistrate’s “honour and glory” flowing from the people “without wasting it self, in the act of flowing”; of Honor lying in Honorante and power likewise in Potestante rather than in Potestata; of “rayes of Majestie” “most immediately streaming from the consent of the people.”42 He also draws on a visual trope introduced by Grotius in developing his own figure of representation-as-contraction.43 There are several other stylistic and conceptual similarities between Parker’s earlier treatises and E.P.’s. In both Jus Populi and Original and End, for example, the unusual “moliminous” appears in conjunction with the undeveloped potential and dangers of mass participatory democracy. Additionally, Parker, an ardent advocate of parliamentary sovereignty, occasionally indicates the need to institute a more inclusive mode of representation, as E.P. does in Original and End. Parker also consistently emphasizes the historical variability of forms of government, arguing that no one form—certainly not monarchy, as royalists claim—can claim intrinsic superiority. In Original and End this view appears in a delightful variant of the irrationality trope: “It is obvious to every man, that hath not been born, and bred up in a Bottle, and never looked into the world, but through a hole, That no one specificall form of Government is divine or naturall in its rise or root” (OE 12–13). The pseudonym Eutactus Philodemius also suggests a Parkerian or Parker: Eutactus means “well ordered,” Philodemius, “lover of the people.”

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The transliterated Greek (as opposed to Latin, linked with Roman forms of governance) reinforces the association with democracy conveyed by Philodemius. At a time when democracy is frequently a dirty word, E.P. speaks approvingly of the “democraticall advantages” the people have to preserve themselves should the king prove tyrannous (OE 24). In Jus Populi, Parker had stated, “The truth is, both Monarchy, and Aristocracy, are derivative formes, and owe a dependence on Democracy, which though it be not the best, or most exact forme for all nations and Empires at all times, yet it is ever the most naturall, and primarily authenticall; and for some times and places the most beneficiall” (my emphasis). Parker goes on to criticize the Roman republic for failing to provide some vehicle of consent or representation for plebeians, who were left “a vast, rude, confused, indigested heap of the vulgar.”44 In Contra-Replicant, canvassing various means of resolving current conflicts, Parker throws off a remark that shows how strongly he holds to the principle of inclusivity, since its result may not be what he would wish: “[B]ut cursed be that man for my part, that next after God, would not referre the arbitration of this difference to the publick vote of the people. And yet we know there is a great deal of servility in the people.”45 These earlier texts by Parker convey a committed, if qualified, love of the people. In the dedicatory epistle to Original and End, addressed to Parliament and Council of State, E.P. suggests he will mediate between the dangerous extremes of Populacy and Magistracy (by which he means absolutism— i.e., tyranny), mediation that is also conveyed by his pseudonym. E.P. sets himself the formidable task of defending the new regime, including the supremacy of the Commons and the role of the army, against both royalists and Levelers (not named), while envisioning “the people” so as to gesture toward universal franchise. The treatise proper opens with an inclusive definition of “the people”: “Now by People I mean, every single or particular person within any Nation or Kingdom, high and low, noble and ignoble, rich and poor, bond and free, without any limitation or restraint to any individual person whatsoever” (OE 3). Reiterating this definition, E.P. rejects usage of demos that would restrict it to the poor as well as interpretation of people that would confine it to an elite few. In language like that used to criticize Roman treatment of plebeians but that also expresses a common bias against mass participatory democracy, E.P. disparages the notion that “the bulk of People, in their moliminous confused Body, were the Supreme and Soveraign Power” (OE A3). E.P. imaginatively compares this “moliminous” body to the void and formless chaos that was given form by God’s fiat, and to the letters of the alphabet when



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haphazardly thrown about. Both comparisons reveal how the people’s power and majesty “confusedly lies in the bulk of the People,” where it remains “useless and unprofitable” until it is “gathered into one place, regulated and intrusted in the hands of one or more persons to be managed and acted by them” (OE 7, 9–10). They corroborate E.P.’s high valuation of representative government yet imply that representation needs a different basis. Later, E.P. correctly identifies the Commonwealth’s new government as “aristocraticall,” and concludes the second pamphlet by exhorting readers (using the intimate thou), who may wonder why they are not yet enjoying “our Jubile of Peace, freedom, plenty, and security,” to accept the limitations of the current regime. Even government “the finest, and most refined on earth,” E.P. says, “will have some course thread of irregularity, nay, of Oppression in it, it will have its Remissions and Intentions, some mixture of bad with good” (AV 18). Two continuities between Parker’s earlier work and E.P.’s pamphlets are especially important to this dispute with Hammond. First, Parker’s systematic consideration of slavery in Jus Populi, where he denies slavery both natural and civil legitimacy, is congruent with E.P.’s position in this debate, where slavery looms large because of its analogical potency. Second, the thesis Parker earlier formulates in Observations regarding the power of life and death as a power naturally oriented toward communal welfare anticipates the argument E.P. develops in his pamphlets. To the royalist objection that Parliament is seizing “an arbitrary unlimitable power to unsettle the security of all mens estates,” Parker responds in Observations: “[E]very man has an absolute power over himself; but because no man can hate himself, this power is not dangerous, nor need to be restrayned: So every State has an Arbitrary power over it self, and there is no danger in it for the same reason.”46 This grounds the very thesis that E.P. enters the fray to defend against Hammond. Though distinctive, Parker’s thesis in Observations is closely related to early modern resistance literature’s widely disseminated notion—both rhetorical trope and tenet—that a community of rational beings would not voluntarily submit to political injury or to absolute, arbitrary rule. Its roots in antityrannicism appear somewhat more conventionally in the following passage. [I]t is not just nor possible for any nation so to inslave it selfe, and to resigne its owne interest to the will of one Lord, as that that Lord may destroy it without injury, and yet to have no right to preserve it selfe: For since all naturall power is in those which obay, they which contract to

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obay to their owne ruine, or having so contracted, they which esteeme such a contract before their owne preservation are felonious to themselves, and rebellious to nature.47

The figure of the sole ruler whose arbitrary will likens him to the slaveholder or “Lord” is a staple of resistance literature, as is the tyrant’s threatening reduction of his people to “slaves.” An interesting development takes place in this passage, though. Instead of the familiar trope of irrationality, Parker formulates a proposition making such voluntary subjection a violation of nature (“felonious to themselves, and rebellious to nature”). Invective against hypothetical insults to the intelligence of freeborn people who naturally seek to preserve themselves becomes a categorical statement about what nature will and will not permit. The assertions that “no man can hate himself,” and that it “is not just nor possible for any nation so to inslave it selfe” (my emphasis) introduce a new element into anti­ tyranny discourse, one that gives the rights inherent in popular sovereignty a grounding more in “naturall power” than in juridical freedom (a gift of divine creation in Christian adaptations). In this debate, both Hammond and E.P. respond to an influential passage in which Grotius propounds a distinctive version of the doctrine of nonresistance: And here we must first reject their Opinion, who will have the Supreme Power to be always, and without Exception, in the People; so that they may restrain or punish their Kings, as often as they abuse their Power. What Mischiefs this Opinion has occasioned, and may yet occasion, if once the Minds of People are fully possessed with it, every wise Man sees. I shall refute it with these Arguments. It is lawful for any Man to engage himself as a Slave to whom he pleases; as appears both by the Hebrew and Roman Laws. Why should it not therefore be as lawful for a People that are at their own Disposal, to deliver up themselves to any one or more Persons, and transfer the Right of governing them upon him or them, without reserving any Share of that Right to themselves? Neither should you say this is not to be presumed: For the Question here is not, what may be presumed in a Doubt, but what may be lawfully done? (1.3.8.1)

Though echoing Bodin about popular sovereignty’s dangerous mischiefs, Grotius displaces Bodin’s patriarchal absolutism with an emphasis on voluntary servitude. This is not merely a clever move in an analogical chess



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game but interconnected with Grotius’s favorable attitude toward Eurocolonial expansion, slavery, and absolutism. By valorizing voluntary servitude, Grotius enhances the attractions of “free” service or subjection while underlining its essential difference from involuntary servitude. While elsewhere Grotius discusses circumstances in which nonresistance may not apply, in this passage he postulates a complete transfer of rights, key to the absolutist doctrine of nonresistance. As Hobbes, I believe, perceived, in this and related passages Grotius alters the patriarchal modality of absolutism’s discourse by promoting lordly (that is, despotic) power as absolute political rule’s primary familial analogue. This is not obvious, since Grotius both prepares for and deflects attention from this momentous alteration by generally pairing paternal with despotical power. In his opening discussion of “right,” for example, Grotius includes “A Power either over our selves, which is term’d Liberty; or over others, such as that of a Father over his Children, or a Lord over his Slave” (1.1.5). This pairing occurs throughout De Jure Belli ac Pacis. In the passage cited above together with others we will turn to shortly, however, only lordly power is relevant. Not coincidentally, with regard to the power of life and death, while examples of its exercise by fathers can be drawn only from ancient texts with reference to the distant past, lordly power, authorized by ancient Greeks and Romans, is actually being exercised in European colonies at the time Grotius writes. As a strategy for disabling resistance, positive valuation of despotic power goes to the source of antityrannicism’s rhetorical invective, namely, the tyrant’s degradation of his freeborn people. Yet in the above passage, Grotius carefully frames this in liberal terms that emphasize the individual’s or nation’s freedom to choose whichever form of governmentality it prefers. Under some circumstances, Grotius goes on to argue, a people may choose to transfer their own sovereignty to another nation, as when the Campanians yielded themselves and their belongings to Romans. Grotius provides other examples of voluntary self-enslavement, whether on the part of the Hebrew servant to a household master or of a political entity to an arbitrary ruler such as Augustus Caesar. Citing Aristotle, Grotius states that just as some people are naturally slaves, so, too, are some nations, such as the Cappadocians, who preferred to remain under a king when offered their freedom (1.3.8.1). Natural slavery here becomes voluntary interstate slavery. Grotius’s arguments and examples are often recirculated or rebutted.48 In Jus Populi, for example, Parker formulates the very thesis E.P. defends in the power/no-power debate before disagreeing openly with Grotius: “[T]he

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people could conferre no more on the Emperour, then what it had in it selfe; and no man will say, that the people had any power to destroy it selfe.” This tenet—that people cannot give away what they do not have—appears over and over again in discussions of what and how sovereignty is transferred or delegated to representatives. What they cannot confer, Parker argues, is the power of destroying themselves. Having earlier established the unnaturalness and unlawfulness of slavery, Parker here merely asks, rhetorically, “What end could the people have”—an “end” in keeping with human rationality, that is—“in inslaving themselves, or giving away the propriety of themselves?” As for Grotius’s claims about the Campanians, Parker insists that they were simply requesting political integration with Romans, which they obtained. The Campanians were not, Parker says, “at all differenced in freedome from the Citizens of Rome themselves.” At stake is a general principle, supported by the historical record, “that no Nation yet ever did voluntarily or compulsorily embrace servitude, or intend submission to it.”49 At the moment Hammond raises it, the question of who legitimately possesses the power of life and death has an unprecedentedly divisive significance, since the trial and capital punishment of Charles I are being planned, executed, and then defended. Hammond argues that disciplinary power—specifically “a power of putting capitall Malefactors to death, and so a power over every (call it Subjects or Free-mans) life in case of capitall crime”—originates with the Deity, who communicates it to the sovereign ruler. Since God “superinvests” the office of supreme power with the power of life and death, it is not “part of the naturall Liberty,” meaning that it is “neither inherent naturally in that community of men . . . nor consequently by them communicable to any Representative” (HA 10). Hammond has many objections to popular sovereignty, but throws out a challenge that sums them up: “I should but aske this one question, Whether ever any man were by God or nature invested with power of his owne life; I meane, with power to take away his owne life, or to kill himself?” Over every other aspect of one’s own person one possesses natural, divinely bestowed power, but not, Hammond asserts, over one’s own life. One may, for example, lance his or her own body if necessary, or, regarding individual freedom, may “by act of his owne will, part with it irreversibly” (HA 9). In this first tract, the two issues that later become distinct are still merged. Why does Hammond regard this particular question as such a clincher? Modern readers are not likely to see its tactical value, as suicide is no longer self-evidently divinely prohibited or criminalized. In addition to assuming consensus on this, Hammond invokes the principle I just mentioned, that



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people can part with—meaning transfer or delegate—only what they have. As John Goodwin points out in his response, Obstructors of Justice, Hammond’s argument relies on “the Authority of this topique Maxime: Nihil dat quod non habet: Nothing gives that to another, which it hath not it self” (OJ 23). (Locke, too, relies on this maxim.) Both Goodwin and E.P. maintain that human beings do have such power over their own lives, but they would not dream of claiming that an individual can terminate her or his own life. When Hammond suggests that E.P. is proposing such a right, E.P. recognizes this as a charge of atheistic blasphemy. The individual subject’s right of self-preservation plays a surprisingly small part in this debate. For Hammond, the right of self-defense can be “parted with and deposited” to the ruler, and may even be, he concedes hurriedly at one point, the basis of the ruler’s defensive military power (V 20). But he does not regard this either as a juridical power (as Locke does) or as involving the power of life and death (as Hobbes does). None of the participants argues that individuals hold a natural, disciplinary power, which is the position that Locke takes up. It is one’s power over one’s own life that is at issue. Goodwin and E.P. both want this power to be understood socially or politically, so that it is forbidden only the isolated individual regarding himself or herself. Directly rebutting Hammond, Goodwin, for example, argues: [T]hough no man [i.e., no particular or individual person considered apart by himself], hath by nature any such power over his own life, as is here mentioned; yet as a Member of a Community, or politique society of men, he hath, not simply a power, but a necessity lying upon him by way of duty, in order to the peace and civil good of this community, to consent with others, that his life also shall be taken from him by the hand of Justice, as well as any other mans, in case he shall wrong the community by any crime deserving death. (OJ 23–24)

By conceptualizing this power in relation to the social contract, Goodwin assigns it to the people. The ruler or magistrates who exercise “the hand of Justice” are exercising power that is the “off-spring or naturall issue” of the people’s natural power over their own lives. As authors and executors of the law, the people do not “formally” possess the power over their own lives, Goodwin grants, but nevertheless hold it “radically and virtually,” meaning “they may render themselves to a Magistrate & to laws, which if they violate, they must be in hazard of their lives.” On the basis of this social,

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collective understanding of disciplinary power, Goodwin concludes, “it is a noonday truth, that men by nature have such a power over their lives, as voluntarily according to a due course and process in Law, to expose them to the stroke of publick Justice, in case they shall offend that community, whereof they are Members, by any crime, or crimes, worthy death” (OJ 24). E.P.’s argument is not dissimilar, but he tends not to absorb the individual citizen entirely into the community, and repeatedly stresses the conditional status of collective ends. Like Goodwin in the passage just cited, E.P. reformulates Hammond’s question. Refashioned, the question is, “Whether God or Nature hath invested man with such a power of his own life, as freely to consent, and willingly to expose the same, as a private man, to death, for a greater, a publiker good, (viz.) for the preservation of societies, and of the lives of many others?” (OE 19; see also AV 14). E.P., like Goodwin, uses the verb expose to shift the debate from terminating one’s own life to risking it for a collective good. For E.P., though, the risk is not entirely a product of the social contract, or of consent to be governed by laws that punish certain crimes with death. “Nature,” E.P. says, though “vitiated,” is “yet so ingenious, that (though it doth detest an unnatural self-destruction) it doth much more abhor the destruction of communities of men, and societies” (OE 20). Instancing Christ’s consent to his own death for the sake of humankind, E.P. finds in nature’s own impulses something very like heroic self-sacrifice (OE 19). This is one area where Hammond agrees, though the willingness to lay down one’s own life is for him an expression of obedience or service, while death, should it occur, is always the responsibility of the “intruder” rather than the “sufferer” (V 17). The second issue on which Hammond and E.P. disagree fundamentally, the power of self-enslavement, leads to interestingly divergent views of both liberty and Hebrew slavery. One’s life is not one’s own, Hammond argues, yet one can certainly choose to become a slave, even a perpetual slave. Like Grotius, Hammond presents a decision to enter servitude as an exercise of freedom, a matter of preference, or a response to difficult, perhaps dire, circumstances. Both barbarous and civilized people have made this choice “when subjection seemed better for their turnes” (HA 15). In Vindication, Hammond rebuts E.P. by saying that those who have chosen servitude clearly believe it is preferable to its alternatives, and that they “did part with their Liberty upon adequate exchanges, such, as they (which were the fittest judges what themselves thought) did conceive to be the full worth of the commodity they parted with” (V 9). In both pamphlets, Hammond basically develops the position Grotius stakes out in the passage cited earlier—“It is lawful for any Man to engage



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himself as a Slave to whom he pleases; as appears both by the Hebrew and Roman Laws”—even using Grotius’s very examples (HA 14–15; V 8–9). In Vindication, Hammond follows Grotius in bringing forward “the Jew in Moses’s supposition, that loved his Master, and preferr’d his service before his manumission, (I shall adde my selfe also, who professe to prefer (in my choice for my self) subjection before absolute Liberty, nay, before Soveraignty it selfe)” (V 8). Portraying himself as a latter-day Hebrew servant exemplarily preferring loving service over manumission, Hammond here engages in royalism’s typically honorific valuation of voluntary servitude, which Hobbes has already audaciously taken to new heights. In qualifying Liberty with absolute, and in linking liberty with a desire for sovereignty, Hammond scores polemical points against popular sovereigntists for trying to appropriate exactly what they condemn. From Hammond’s vantage point, E.P.’s position self-contradictorily curtails the very liberty that he defends. Hammond and E.P. dispute the (im)possibility of voluntary enslavement with primary reference to ancient Hebrew rather than Roman slavery, and each proposes an interpretation of Deuteronomy 15:12 and Exodus 21:6, which set forth codes for the treatment of Hebrew servants. The ancient Hebrews’ power (or no-power) of self-enslavement thereby becomes the basis for the analogical argumentation used to theorize a set of political privileges and obligations. Unlike Hobbes in Leviathan or Locke in Two Treatises, neither has an interest in advancing a thesis about actual, institutional slavery per se, though E.P. relies on Parker’s thesis that slavery should be abolished, being neither natural nor justly civil. At one point in this debate, E.P. comments on the ideologically motivated “parallel” Hammond sets up between monarch and slave master in suggesting that the Hebrew servant was his master’s “propriety,” the master his “Lord proprietory.” Hammond’s “design,” E.P. claims, “by this opinion of the Jews freedom, being wholly in his Masters power without release, is easily seen, it is but by way of parallel, to put our Persons and Estates in the absolute dispose of the Royal Will without possibility of recall” (AV 13). E.P. claims that Jehovah—“a favourer of the liberty of his people”—institutes the year of Jubilee so that Hebrew servitude is ever only temporary, even when entered into voluntarily (AV 12). E.P. also argues that the servant’s decision may not be fully voluntary, since it appears he has a wife and children, cohabitation with whom “was a greater bent upon his will, then his love to his Master” (AV 13). Like his radical contemporaries, E.P. assumes that Jehovah endorses Greco-Roman ideals of liberty by prohibiting chattel slavery for his people, and regards the boring of the servant’s ear as a sign of divine displeasure or punishment (AV 9). Citing numerous eminent Hebrew and

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Christian commentators on the Hebrew Bible, E.P. makes the year of Jubilee, in which all debtors and slaves are released, central to the vision of native liberty he sets against Hammond’s defense of voluntary subjection. It is offensive to use slavery of Hebrew servitude, E.P. argues before launching into conventional antityranny invective against Hammond’s self-representation as someone who willingly prefers subjection to absolute liberty: “[T]his is a word [slave] well becoming them that would not out of necessity, but out of choice, and with all their industry make themselves so” (AV 10). Just as E.P. and Goodwin theorize the power of life and death as a communally oriented, natural power, E.P. construes liberty as a natural capacity for participation in the common good. E.P.’s opposition to slavery informs his inclusive vision of “the people,” whose freeborn status is natural, civil, and universal. One detail of this exchange—a detail uncannily central to Locke’s “Of Slavery”—highlights how much is encoded in its analogical argumentation. In Original and End, E.P. cites a statement Hammond makes in his initial tract, which in E.P.’s appears: “That the Jew, under Gods own Government, might wholly give up himself and his freedom to his Masters Will (the power of life being onely exempted) and by having his ear bored, might of a free man, become a slave for ever” (OE 5). Though a marginal note gives the page number of the original, E.P. is not actually reproducing Hammond’s words: inserted are his own in the parenthetical “(the power of life being onely exempted).” E.P.’s insertion presents his own indictment of chattel slavery, his knowledge of differences between Greco-Roman and Hebraic modes of servitude, and his conviction—which is Parker’s in Jus Populi—that the power of life and death cannot be held by one human being over another, which for him explicitly delegitimizes slavery.

Etymology as Ideology: Servire from Servare, or Enslaving as Saving In its preoccupation with juridical power, the power/no-power debate does not have recourse to the battlefield. Frequently, however, galvanized by threats to salus populi (welfare of the people), including the primacy of collectively instituted laws, antityrannicism represents the tyrant as a hostile would-be conqueror even if he does not threaten to engage his people in battle. The tyrant assumes this role whenever his actions are perceived to subvert his citizen-subjects’ status as his freeborn equals. Increasingly, the ruler who tyrannously oversteps the boundaries of his office is said to “invade” or to “encroach” on the citizenry’s rights. Such invasion is a displaced form of internal warfare against the ruler’s own people, the desired end of which



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will be their reduction to abject, powerless slaves—or so the ruler’s intentions are polemically represented. When the tyrant actually directs violence against his own people, as Charles I does in 1641 when entering Parliament to arrest five of its members or when he later takes up arms against them, he is perceived to morph from arrogant would-be slaveholder to rampant killer, destroying rather than preserving his citizen-subjects’ lives. Death or enslavement are the options decreed by war slavery doctrine, for which military conflict is a prerequisite. Early moderns follow Greek and Roman authorities in assuming that the concentrated, supralegal power held by the individual slaveholder or interstate conqueror depends in some way on war slavery doctrine. Florentinus and later Gaius juxtapose the individual slaveholder’s power of life and death over the enslaved, which is contrary to nature but established by jus gentium, with the power of the military victor, who decides whether to kill or to enslave those who have been vanquished. In both juristic texts, the slaveholder’s power is presented before the victor’s. Slavery is first defined, with the slaveholder assigned the power of life and death, before the military victor’s power is explicated etymologically: the word servi (slaves), substantive form of servire (to serve) comes from servare (to save). If, how, and why the two powers are related is not specified. Grotius defends chattel slavery using war slavery doctrine, which he explicates by means of this authoritative, seemingly timeless, etymological figure. Following Grotius, Hobbes and Locke, too, make use of it. Yet appeals to this etiology have long appeared in approving discussions of slavery. Most significantly, since he thereby brings it into the Christian fold, Saint Augustine assumes its validity in The City of God when with reference to the so-called just war he says, “[T]he latine word Servus, had the first derivation from hence: those that were taken in the warres, being in the hands of the conquerours to massacre or to preserve, if they saved them, then were they called Servi, of Servo.” Vives’s annotation adds that “Florentinus the Civilian” also says that servi are called Mancipia “of manu capti, to take with the hand, or, by force,” and directs the reader to “Institutes, lib. 4” and “Iustinians Pandects lib. 1.”50 But what exactly does this etymological ideologeme convey? Alan Watson suggests that its location right after the admission that slavery is against nature gives it an apologetic, justificatory character: “[S]laves are persons who have received a benefit—their lives have been preserved when they would otherwise have been violently ended.”51 The already positive connotations of servare, to save, are enhanced by its unstated alternative, to kill or destroy, thereby adding luster to the priority servare has over its

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supposed derivative servire. Given the apparently complementary relation of the two terms in this etymological etiology of slavery, the ennobled servare may even bestow a reflected glow on the ignominious servus (slave). The priority given servare seems in addition to be temporal, even narratological: the military victor saves and as a consequence the vanquished serves. What sort of causal relation, if any, is implied? Is it to be imagined that the vanquished serve out of gratitude? Or a sense of obligation? Indebtedness of some kind appears to link servare to servi, constituting another, major sign of this etymological figure’s ideological function. Rhetorically, the balanced complementarity suggested by servare and servire connotes a certain reciprocity: the victor willingly saves, the vanquished willingly serves. Yet there is no symmetry whatsoever between the two actors in this minidrama: the victor who elects to save rather than kill enacts a beneficial, even magnanimous, choice of preserving rather than destroying, while the vanquished has no choice but to serve. Only “unskilfull Grammarians” criticize Justinian’s etymology, declares Bodin. But if the etymology is all right, its underlying ideology is not. In his wholesale rejection of slavery, Bodin critiques this doctrine’s connection between saving and enslaving. Stressing its implicitly juridical character, Bodin ridicules the doctrine’s attempt to rationalize the extraction of labor and brings out its injustice when applied to an unjust war, as Augustine does when regarding all involuntary servitude under the umbrella of divine penalty for sin: As for them that thinke it a charitable courtesie, in unjust warres to have saved the lives of their prisoners whome they might have killed, it is the charitie of theeves and pirats, who brag themselves to have given life unto them whome they have not deprived of life. For oftentimes it commeth to pass in unjust warres, (as are for most part those that are made by the mightie) that good men are most miserably and shamefully enforced to serve the wicked. And if the vanquished have wrongfully and without cause (as theeves) made warre, why then put they them not to death? why take they not of them exemplarie punishment? (1.5.34–35)

Bodin comes up with other scenarios, mercilessly debunking the supposed justice of war slavery doctrine with forceful arguments that are rarely engaged by writers captivated by slavery’s etymological ideologeme. Bodin critiques war slavery doctrine in this way partly because he assigns the power to generate, preserve, and take life to the father, a ruler within the household whose singularity becomes the basis for single-person



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rule in the state. In his written judgment on the case of the postnati of Scotland, Francis Bacon distinguishes four natural, precivil modes of “originall submission” to single-person rule. The first is patriarchal, while the second involves submission to an individual of superior excellence able to create a cohesive community. The third, Bacon says, “the most usuall of all, was Conduct in warre, which even in nature induceth as great an obligation, as Paternity. For as men owe their life and being to their Parents, in regard of generation: So they owe that also to Saviours in the warres, in regard of preservation.” The biblical proof texts Bacon uses indicate that the “preservation” (here rhetorically parallel to parental “generation”) he has in mind is military deliverance from military foes. To have averted slaughter at an enemy’s hands means the military savior “wants little of being King.”52 These three modes of submission are all voluntary. The fourth, Bacon says, is “an enforced submission” which is Conquest, whereof it seemed Nymrod was the first president, of whom it is said, Ipse coepit potens esse in terra, et erat robustus venator coram Domino. [He began to be a mighty one in the earth; he was a mighty hunter before the Lord.] And this likewise is upon the same root, which is the saving or gift as it were of life, and being, for the Conqueror hath power of life and death over his Captives, and therefore where he giveth them themselves, he may reserve upon such a gift, what service and subjection he will. All these foure submissions are evident to be naturall and more ancient than law.53

The thorny problem of obligation that is inherited by Hobbes is here easily resolved: having bestowed the gift of life, the conqueror has a right to “reserve upon such a gift, what service and subjection he will.” Despite continuities among these modes of submission, Bacon uses the phrase “power of life and death” only of the fourth, involuntary submission. Its appearance in the context of “Conquest” is indebted to Bodin’s theorization of “lordly monarchy,” which Bodin, too, calls upon Nimrod to illustrate. Yet Bacon appropriates lordly monarch in a manner that directly opposes Bodin’s antislavery position, since Bacon would certainly have known that in conjunction with war slavery doctrine, the etymological derivation of servire from servare conventionally applies to chattel slavery, always considered involuntary, as is Bacon’s fourth “enforced submission.” Bacon’s conflation of military conquest (externally imposed political slavery) with chattel slavery was no doubt serviceable to English colonial settlements in the New World, as it previously had been to Spanish. It is also important

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to the vicissitudes of despotism as a term, since in conflating the two orders of servitude that Bodin keeps distinct, Bacon’s “lordly” or “despotical” applies to both. Earlier, Bacon follows Aristotle when defining Natura servus (natural slave) as an individual who is “able of body, and improvident of mind” and therefore fit for household servitude under a master, “a very model of a King.”54 Debates about etymology may be confined to grammarians, but knowledge that saving and enslaving are interconnected is not esoteric or the preserve of a learned elite. In the passage just cited, for example, the act of “saving” is assumed to require the recompense of “service,” yet without explicit reference to Latin or Roman doctrine. Though more research needs to be done in this area, my impression is that when military contexts are mentioned or represented, early modern readers and spectators understand the act of preserving life to be an expression of the victor’s power to kill or to save, and, further, that “saving” may be causally related to servitude, individual or national. In Titus Andronicus, for instance, the general Andronicus’s daughter Lavinia beseeches Tamora, a former war captive, to spare her, “for my father’s sake, / That gave thee life when well he might have slain thee.”55 Without a grasp of the victor’s power of choosing whether to kill or to save—that is, enslave—his defeated opponents, whether as individuals or collectively, countless theatrical expressions, gestures, and structural patterns in early modern drama would lose their significance. That naturall signifies, as Bacon puts it, “more ancient than law” is especially important to the power of life and death that, following Roman jurisprudence, Euro-colonialism assigns the slaveholder. Slavery’s universality, or, rather, its inscription in jus gentium, gives it a legitimacy that is conceived to be independent from—often understood to be prior to—the legislation of a given civil society. Since warfare is another apparently natural, universal institution, Roman war slavery’s doctrinal association of military victory and the acquisition of slaves readily supports early modern efforts to naturalize slavery. Significantly, however, while the enslaver’s power of life and death is often implicitly a by-product of the military victor’s right to kill or save the vanquished, this is not the case for Grotius. Grotius strongly emphasizes the priority of the slaveholder’s potestas necisque vitae to local, civil legislation in a section of book 3 of Rights of War and Peace to which both Hobbes and Locke are indebted. Yet he does not thereby diminish the victor’s power. Grotius uses war slavery to illustrate past philosophical awareness that jus (right) and justitia (justice) do not necessarily coincide since slavery can result from an unjust war (e.g., 3.10.1, 3.10.2). Reflecting on the doubleness of licebit—permissible license—earlier in book 2, Gro-



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tius mentions numerous instances of killing legitimated by the right of nations, citing the derivation of servire from servare (citing Donatus this time) as evidence of a natural right to kill (3.4.10.1). Though we cannot here enter into the all the particulars of Grotius’s treatment of servitude, it is worth recalling that he treats voluntary slavery in ways that are analogically satisfying to royalists such as Hammond. This is especially important given commentators’ tendency to overlook or misconstrue Grotius’s distinction between voluntary slavery—readily available for analogical theorization—and war slavery, less so.56 Aware that a right of resistance on the part of the voluntarily enslaved would have analogical implications, Grotius considers active resistance impermissible but concedes that flight may be warranted under conditions of extreme cruelty. (Patriarchal absolutism can likewise tolerate flight from a raging father or tyrant.) Because the voluntary slavery Grotius treats is “perfect and utter Slavery” (2.5.27.2), ancients and apostles are agreed that even such flight is discouraged. The opposing view is traced “to the Error of those who rejected every Subjection, both private and publick, as a state inconsistent with the Liberty of Christians” (2.5.29.2). Proof that voluntary slavery is “perfect” chattel slavery appears when Grotius grants the slaveholder the power of life and death, even while acknowledging that its exercise is incompatible with strict justice: But no Masters, (if we judge by the Rules of full and compleat Justice, or before the Tribunal of Conscience) have the Power of Life and Death over their Slaves: Nor can one Man have any Right to kill another, unless he has committed some capital Crime. Tho’ by the Laws of some Nations, the Master, who upon any Account whatever, kills his Slave, does it with Impunity; as indeed Kings, who have an absolute and uncontrollable Power, may every where do it. (2.5.28)

Grotius’s strictures start to loosen almost immediately. Despite the contrast drawn between the immunity granted the enslaver (by nationally specific positive laws) and the king (universally), Grotius engages in analogical discourse, going on to cite Seneca in support of the likeness between slave and political subject. Having turned his discussion in a permissive direction, Grotius continues indirect, analogical argumentation by bringing in (more than usually questionable) Greek and Roman support for parents’ power of life and death over their children. Grotius’s discussion of involuntary slavery’s much harsher, hereditary status in book 3 features the enslavement of war captives as authorized by

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Roman jurisprudence. Grotius specifies the “Persons” who can be enslaved in this way—“not only they who surrender themselves, or submit by Promise to Slavery, are reputed Slaves; but all Persons whatsoever taken in a solemn War, as soon as they shall be brought into a Place whereof the Enemy is Master” (3.7.1.2)—and then under “Effects” details the acts for which the enslaver enjoys immunity from prosecution by his possession of the power of life and death: But the Effects of this Right are infinite, so that there is nothing that the Lord may not do to his Slave, as Seneca the Father said, no Torment but what may be inflicted on him with Impunity, nothing commanded him but what may be exacted with the utmost Rigour and Severity; so that all manner of Cruelty may be exercised by the Lords upon their Slaves; unless this Licence is somewhat restrained by the civil Law. It is allowed by all Nations to the Lord, to have Power of Life and Death over his Slave, we are told by Gaius, (the Lawyer.) He also adds, that this large Power had been limited by the Roman Laws, that is, in Countries which are under the Dominion of the Romans. Hither we may refer that of Donatus upon Teren. What may not a Lord lawfully do to his Slave? (3.7.3.1)

Grotius makes the same point as before, in book 2, about the unregulated nature of this right, but this time does not add that its exercise violates strict standards of justice or that the enslaver’s natural immunity from prose­ cution is somehow improper, leaving it to his choice of words to suggest it may be precivil. Only after having set forth the limitless effects of potestas necisque vitae does Grotius take up servire’s supposed etymology. In Grotius’s treatise this ordering has a special purpose: it makes the enslaver’s disciplinary “Right” of life and death independent of the military victor’s right to kill or enslave. The implications of such independence are, to use Grotius’s language, “infinite.” For one thing, it makes this right available for voluntary slavery, an unusual conjunction that is crucial for Grotius’s analogical theorization of nonresistance (adapted by Hobbes). For another, it provides grounds for deeming this “Right” transferable by sale, which is problematical if this right is tied too closely to military victory. In Institutes, we have seen, the act of saving (servare) is associated with clemency, perhaps even with aristocratic largesse: to save (servare) is to confer a benefit in response to which the recipient is to serve (servire). Grotius drops these associations together with any interest in the recipient’s perspective. As he appropriates the ancient Roman ideologeme, the act of



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saving is advantageous to the enslaver, from whose rational, mercantile point of view it is regarded. Not intrinsically meritorious, the victor’s decision to save by enslaving is to be motivated by the benefits accruing from the slaveholder’s extensive right—a right that in Grotius’s presentation is independent of and prior to whatever occurs on the battlefield: “Now this large Power is granted by the Law of Nations for no other Reason, than that the Captors being tempted by so many Advantages might be inclined to forbear that Rigour allowed them by the Law, of killing their Prisoners, either in the Fight, or some Time after” (3.7.5.1). Note that Grotius explicitly extends the temporal duration of the victor’s power; the noncriminal right to kill that belongs to the battlefield remains a “right” until a decision is made to forswear it. One might say that the slaveholder’s power of life and death is for Grotius the greatest conceivable war booty so long as the victor has the foresight to grasp its potential. Grotius brings in the etymological derivation of servire from servare to underscore this point: “The Name of Slaves, Servi, (Pomponius tell us) arose from this, that Generals sold their Prisoners, thereby preserving them from Death.” Returning to the notion that such preservation involves being “inclined to forbear” exercising the rigor of the law—that is, the right to kill—Grotius stresses the mercantilist advantages that motivate such forbearance: “[F]or there is no Sort of Agreement to engage them to it, if we only respect this Law of Nations, but a Motive drawn from Interest” (3.7.5.1). Having stressed the limitless disciplinary rights associated with the enslaver’s power of life and death, Grotius presents the victor (or general) who refrains from exercising the right to kill as someone able to keep in mind the manifold social and economic advantages that follow from the future possession of such power. In Grotius’s subtle exegesis, the benefit that this Roman ideologeme once defensively conferred on the enslaved becomes a benefit for the enslavers. Furthermore, motivated by interest, enslaving-as-saving is a sign of civility: the victor, motivated by knowledge of the immense disciplinary power held by the enslaver, appears to act from a perception of both individual and social economic profits. A victor not sufficiently stirred by slavery’s benefits to forbear killing his captives is for Grotius barbarous (3.7.6.3). Set against the act of killing—fully legitimate yet impulsive, shortsighted, lacking in any calculation of future benefits—the voluntary act of saving testifies to a capacity to transcend the moment and the elemental passions of warfare. In this way, it seems perfectly to illustrate Albert Hirschman’s thesis that “interests” were perceived to lend capitalism a civilizing, regulatory spirit.57 Were Grotius’s juxtaposition of acivility and the uninhibited

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killing of captives to evoke cannibalism, as it could easily do, slavery’s civility would be further reinforced. However the killing is imagined, as foil to enslaving-as-saving it underlines the emphasis Grotius places on the selfrestraint involved in refusing to exercise the right to kill. For those keen to find slavery defended, this would mitigate the license acknowledged to be an aspect of this not fully proper right. The favorable consideration Grotius gives war slavery doctrine in this section of Rights of War occurs at a time when Dutch reservations about trafficking are being set aside.58 Considering Grotius’s immense prestige throughout Western Europe, his endorsement of the slaveholder’s unlimited, unregulated power undoubtedly played an important role in rationalizing the transatlantic trade and the steadily increasing reliance on enslaved Africans’ labor in the Americas. Unlike Vitoria, Bodin, and Gentili, in Jure belli ac pacis, Grotius theorizes as if at a studied, disinterested remove from recent and ongoing European colonial expansion. Regarding slavery, his points of reference are exclusively classical. By raising the positions he takes above the contemporary fray—including Bodin’s condemnation of slavery, nowhere engaged—Grotius’s classicizing makes them all the more acceptable. Grotius’s recuperation of Roman war slavery doctrine was invaluable, though in very different ways, to Hobbes and Locke, who followed Grotius in choosing to ignore Bodin’s critique of slavery’s naturalization as jus gentium, together with his argument that the apparent universality of a practice—human sacrifice being the test case—does not automatically make it conformable to natural and divine law. Like Bodin, Parker rejects justifications of slavery that draw on jus gentium, relying on arguments from nature to delegitimize “Dominicall-power,” which, he says, originates in an injurious and violent divestment of a natural, transnational “propriety” in self. Yet however forcefully presented, the arguments Bodin and Parker advanced for the abolition of slavery were deeply embedded in political discourses regarding sovereignty in emergent, Western European nation-states. Like Las Casas’s passionate defense of the rights of Amerindigenes, they did not interrupt the triumphal progress of the imperatives that made New World plantation slavery an unprecedented, unmatched exercise of brutally exploitative power. Both progress and brutality were significantly enabled by early modernism’s multidiscursive representation of a privative age whose inhabitants were not coeval with Western European explorers, settlers, and rulers. By what means the privative age is conjured up and how it signifies are concerns of the next two chapters.

chapter seven

Nakedness, History, and Bare Life

N

egative comparison is an important feature of a wide variety of Euro-colonial texts.1 In exposing what the extra-European nation in question is missing, negative comparison may cast either a flattering or critical light on its European counterpart, in either case affirming Europe’s advanced, civil identity. That negative comparison may rely on conventions and tropes relating to a first or golden age is often duly noted. Yet the profound transformation these undergo when transferred to a previously unknown geographical or spatial register has not really been stressed, nor have their precise operations been closely examined. As a result, it has been difficult to appreciate the contribution negative comparison makes to early modern political, racialist, and protoevolutionary discourses. Perhaps it might be fairer to say that absence of reflection on early modernism’s adaptation of ancient tropes testifies, backhandedly, to the ease with which the dominant, Eurocentric imagination automatically associates less “developed” societies—language that is not only current but hegemonic—with a temporally remote primordial age. Modes of negation need to be specified in order to understand how, across opposed political positions, certain societies—most consistently those located in the Americas, though increasingly including sub-Saharan Africa—are positioned as temporally remote from contemporaneous early modern Europe. As they first appear in Hesiod’s Work and Days and in Genesis, narratives of an originary, once-upon-a-time state of perfection represent loss and degeneration in a temporal modality. Well into the nineteenth century, Christian commentators assume that the creation and Fall of Eve and Adam occurred at a determinate time in the historically distant past. The golden age—likely, it was believed, the biblical story as dimly apprehended by unenlightened pagans—also concerns a temporally remote, 227

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bygone era.2 Yet with Western European expansion, the newness of the New World is signaled by a historically unique conflation of temporal and spatial modalities: societies geographically distant from those in Western Europe are viewed as remote temporally. To put this another way, evocations of an Edenic or golden age that refer to actually existing societies give a spatial, geopolitical dimension to the conventional disjunction between past and present. By means of a cluster of conventional markers, physically and culturally unfamiliar societies are assigned a temporality that is anterior to the European writer’s or artist’s present. Models of cultural evolution that position societies on a developmental scale from least to most complex are the most authoritative means of disavowing the equivalent reality and contemporaneity—what Johannes Fabian calls the “coevalness”—of European and extra-European societies at any given historical moment. The hierarchically organized “allochronism” (from the Greek allos, meaning “different,” and khronos, “time”) Fabian examines in Time and the Other is that implicit in anthropological theorizing and practice, which, he argues, are complicit with European colonialism.3 As a scholarly discipline, anthropology has been singularly effective in promoting the childlike or “primitive” status of extra-European cultures, as is indicated, Fabian observes, by the phrase “contemporary ancestors,” coined by Elman Service when commenting on an anthropological study made in the 1960s of the ad hoc, small-scale mode of combat practiced by the Yanomamö in southern Venezuela. By contrast with societies that have already adapted to modern civilizations and warfare, “[t]he Yanomamö,” Service claims, “seem more like pristine savages, our contemporary ancestors, acting out their untrammeled Hobbesian destiny.”4 Fabian uses Jacques Bossuet’s Discours sur l’histoire universalle (1681) to exemplify pre-Enlightenment fidelity to a universal Christian history from which later anthropological texts depart, owing, Fabian argues, to the secularization of time that is a prerequisite for evolutionary theory as well as for other defining features of anthropology.5 Against this, one might point out that secularization is a remarkably uneven process, while developmental constructs are definitely used in the inaugural stages of European expansion and colonization. It has been suggested, for example, that a protoevolutionist schema appears as early as the sixteenth century in José de Acosta’s widely translated and reprinted Natural and moral history of the Indies (1588).6 Early formations such as this are often overlooked in discussions of later evolutionist discourses, perhaps because radical linguistic and cultural changes make it so easy to disregard continuities. The transvaluation undergone by “primitive” may be the biggest stumbling block. In early



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modern literature “primitive” has a positive connotation, which creates cognitive dissonance for modern readers accustomed to the strong, negative values it has acquired in anthropological and economic discourses that oppose “primitive” to “advanced.” For humanism generally and for Protestantism most insistently, “primitive” (from primus, meaning “first”) has the sense of an original simplicity uncontaminated by the accretions of human custom, error, or mere ratiocination. “Primitive” is therefore often associated with the almost equally honorific “ancient.” The revered point of origin to which “primitive” overwhelmingly applies is the early Christian church, whose practices, beliefs, or leaders create a standard for judging the present, or which a process of reformation might hope to restore. When primitive modifies liberty or freedom, it tends to be in the context of divinely created, unfallen freedom, presumed to be lost or regained within Christianity’s redemptive framework. As a result, what is “primitive” is frequently part of a continuous historical trajectory forged for and by European Christian humanist and Protestant discourses, a trajectory that may not readily or even conceivably include extra-European, pagan societies. Savage, on the other hand, together with its synonym wild, is usually linked with negative, threatening divergences from European norms, much as the term primitive later comes to be. At times, “savages,” together with their unmodified liberty, are located entirely outside an assumed historical framework, in which case their savagery can appear so endemic as to warrant forceful intervention in the form of conquest and some form of enslavement. That the ancestors of those living in now civilized European nations once lived in roughly comparable conditions confirms the developmentally anterior historicity of Amerindigene and similarly alien, non-Christian societies. Though Hobbes does not figure in Time and the Other, he takes Europe’s previously barbarous past as clear evidence of humanity’s dismal natural state. “[W]e know” of this condition’s hostility, Hobbes claims in Elements of Law, “both by the experience of savage nations that live at this day, and by the histories of our ancestors, the old inhabitants of Germany and other now civil countries, where we find the people few and short lived, and without the ornaments and comforts of life, which by peace and society are usually invented and procured” (1.14.12). Hobbes is by no means unique in associating present-day “savages” with the forebears of Europeans. In his influential New Found Worlde (English, 1567), André Thevet reports the opinion that Europe’s first inhabitants “went all naked, only their secret parts covered, as we read of our first parents.”7 Andrew Hadfield observes that the engravings accompanying Holinshed’s 1577 edition of the

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Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland depict the Scots and Picts, descendants of the barbarous Scythians, as nearly naked, armed with bows and arrows, and vulnerable to the superior military might of the victorious Britons, one of whom sports a musket.8 In a volume of engravings to be discussed later in this chapter, Theodor de Bry explains his decision to conclude his representations of Algonkian Virginians with those of ancient Picts and Britons, saying they show “how that the Inhabitants of the great Bretannie have bin in times past as savage as those of Virginia.”9 “Somewhere in the back of the mind of every inquirer,” Margaret Hodgen says of early ethnographers, “was the conviction, never analyzed and never questioned, that a European or Eurasian culture was, and must be, older than an American culture.”10 The relative youthfulness of nonEurasian cultures has several, conflicting associations. A figure for the irrepressible vitality that is gradually extinguished by the wear, tear, and reduced vigor of age, youthfulness may have the positive valence of primitiveness. As a feature of the New World, and, later, of Africa, language relating to childhood or youth often suggests what is socially untouched or irreducibly natural (as in Service’s “pristine,” above). Just as often, however, newness is associated with defective maturity or perpetual, involuntary childlikeness. In colonialist agendas featuring Christianity’s civilizing mission, extra-European youthfulness provides occasions for educability and guidance, which, if resisted, necessitate disciplinary measures or, worse, the use of military force. These ambivalent attitudes would not have felt wholly unfamiliar, even if awakened by novel, geopolitical societies, because the habit of projecting youthful educability and recalcitrance back into the past had long been ingrained in members of the Christian church and was freshly inculcated by Protestantism, endlessly preoccupied by differences between Old and New Dispensations. Though Hebraic society was believed to be the origin of all others, the Old Dispensation is presumed to have suited the comparatively unsophisticated, childlike ethos of ancient Israel, which instituted severe observances and crude, engaging ceremonies with typological significance that only later, historical fulfillment discloses. By analogy with ancient Israel and antique pagan societies, including pre-Christian Europe, contemporaneous “savage” societies could therefore be regarded as developmentally earlier than their present, Euro-Christian counterparts. This is implicit in Bodin’s thesis that human sacrifice, though once almost universally practiced, is nevertheless contrary to natural and divine law.11 Within this schema, it was possible to interpret practices such as human blood sacrifice as inchoate intimations of the Eucharist. For example, following Las



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Casas’s view that such ritualized blood sacrifice is an error rather than a sin or crime, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz represents it as uniting the transcendent “God of Seeds” worshipped by Mexican indigenes with divinely created, earthly vegetable and human materials, thereby mirroring the single, definitive sacrifice of the Son.12 This capaciously condescending attitude is not very common, however. Nor do all that many representations of extra-European societies situated in a primordial past conjure up an unproblematically Edenic or golden age. If the perfect harmoniousness of Eden or the golden age exemplifies what Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas call “soft” primitivism, the natural state Europeans like to imagine for their extra-European contemporaries is frequently “hard” as adamantine rock. Most notoriously for Hobbes, humanity’s natural condition, illustrated by societies in “America,” is never-endingly violent and without any recognizable signs of civil order. It is manifestly prepolitical. By contrast, natural states associated with the “soft” Edenic or golden age lack only civilization’s negative, undesirable attributes, miraculously exhibiting an ideal affinity for social order and pacific relations between human and nonhuman nature. Such paradisiacal conditions may be prehistorical or prepolitical but not prior or antithetical to social order. Despite this crucial disparity, in early modern European literature and visual culture, both “soft” and “hard” primitivisms associate primordial, prehistorical time with contemporaneous extra-European nations. Both this chapter and the next will analyze early modern visual and textual conventions that project New World and African societies into a precivil past. In diverse print and visual media, identifiable conventions—rhetorical iteratio suggesting privation (the focus of the next chapter), erasure of social institutions and of history, figures such as the Amazons, scenarios featuring the practice of human sacrifice, and, generally, indications that force rather than persuasion holds sway—signify the precivil character of the society in question. Taken together, these conventions enable Europe to position itself vis-à-vis what I would like to call the privative age—privative signifying the prepolitical absence of the privileges and stabilizing order associated with the public arena in Greco-Roman traditions. Whatever form this age takes (whether “hard,” “soft,” or mixed), its effect is to contrast a condition of privative, static ahistoricity and acivility with the ostensibly developed social norms of the European nation(s) whose perspective is being visually or textually inscribed.13 Applied to an existing, extra-Eurasian society (or to Ireland, often similarly “savage”), the implication is that it has not yet departed from a condition civilized Europeans long ago left behind. The society presented under the sign of privation is thereby divorced from its own

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history at the same time that Western Christendom is installed in an ongoing, civilizing process, a process that perpetuates the westward translatio imperii and studii while propelled by capitalism’s economic imperatives.

Nakedness Nakedness frequently typifies denizens of the privative age, and is certainly the most common visual convention used to suggest privation. Unlike, say, lawlessness, which has to be deduced from tendentiously reported social practices, nakedness is presented as an observable, material phenomenon that is immediately, undeniably apprehensible. Yet despite its familiarity, the nakedness assigned Amerindigenes and Africans does not naturally signify privation or anything else, which is why we need to think about the range of meanings nakedness has in early modern literature. Though related to the absence of other values that are often cataloged along with it—letters, laws, monetary exchange, weapons, implements, and so on—lack of clothing is uniquely polyvalent. The rough taxonomy that follows is offered in the spirit of inviting further reflection on its multiple meanings and associations. At the “soft,” pre-Romantic end of the spectrum lies what one might think of as nakedness-as-natural simplicity—that is, nakedness as the entirely positive product of nature untouched by either custom or art. As a signifier of natural simplicity, nakedness most persistently evokes the innocence of infants who come into a world utterly new to them and by which they have not been shaped or corrupted. Idealized, natural nakedness is to clothing as honesty is to deception in signifying the absence of human artifice. In early modern representations of the New World that assimilate it to the golden age or Eden, the nakedness assigned Amerindigenes often suggests natural, unadulterated simplicity. As a feature of “soft” primitivism, the absence of clothing metonymically signifies the absence of doubleness, dissimulation, duplicity, guile, and Old World superficiality, typified by its frenetic overvaluation of silver and gold, which are, after all, merely natural metals. Yet while providing Europeans with opportunities for satiric jibes at their societies’ hypocrisy, idealization of Amerindignenes’ nakedness is in practice difficult to sustain. This is partly owing to the authority of the Genesis creation and Fall narratives, where nakedness does not survive the Fall. Marriage is divinely instituted in prelapsarian Eden, clothing after Eve and Adam fall. We will return to the Genesis narrative shortly. In addition to the authority of Scripture, there are, of course, the powerful fantasies and



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anxieties about unregulated, promiscuous sexuality that nakedness arouses. For that reason alone, the absence of attendant shame attributed to Americans or Africans is often more disturbing than the absence of clothing. In any case, for early moderns the nakedness of indigenous Americans and Africans usually either implies or is explained by shamelessness, which, in turn, suggests a lack of reflexive consciousness of the kind Christianity associates with a sense of sinfulness and ancient Greece and Rome link to codes of honor. The Amerindigenes’ nakedness is a “defacement,” it is claimed, “For in the Acknowledgement of Nakednesse, was the first Sense of Sinne.”14 The absence of psychological interiority is implicit in Eurocolonialism’s allochronism and at the same time a powerful effect of the objectifying exteriority with which privative age nakedness is generally represented. Nakedness-as-shamelessness, which we might place in the center of the spectrum of nakedness’s meanings, is sometimes described with the same seeming ethnographic detachment as is the absence of appropriate, European clothing. In History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, Jean de Léry follows André Thevet in stressing how the Tupinamba shamelessly go about as naked as the day they were born (26, 57).15 Though he considers the possibility that the few elderly men who cover their penises do so out of a residual sense of shame, Léry believes it unlikely (57–58). The Tupinamba are so accustomed to uninhibitedly exposing their genitalia and buttocks that they stubbornly resist their visitors’ persistent attempts to initiate them into European clothing practices (27–28). Léry has difficulty sustaining his usual composure when describing the special incorrigibility of the women, who say that clothing is inconvenient when swimming as they do a dozen or so times a day, an appeal that for Léry poorly disguises their unquenchable desire to be naked rather than expressing a rational, practical preference. As further evidence of their perversity, he notes that even female prisoners of war who are compelled by the whip to wear clothing act out their shameless love of nakedness by secretly stripping at night (66). By associating the nakedness of birth with shamelessness rather than simplicity, Léry gives it the negative connotation of pre- or asociality. Nakedness is natural for newborns emerging from the womb, but that is the point: for adults who ought to know better or who have other options, it is embarrassingly unnatural. Viewed in this way, Euro-colonialism’s emphasis on nakedness strategically infantilizes entire societies, which are portrayed as reluctant or unable to leave behind their earliest, human experience. On the part of adults, nakedness signifies a regressive attachment to a universal, originary condition as well as absence of socially induced consciousness

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of the treacherously anarchic, asocial energies of adult sexuality or, more generally, the absence of socially induced shame. The absence of interiority is brought out by frequent references to spiritual blindness, which may allude to Genesis 3:7, where the eyes of Eve and Adam open to see their nakedness. Of Virginia’s indigenous people, one colonist writes in 1613 that they have “the eyes of their understandings yet blinded,” and then describes them living “naked in body, as if the shame of their sin deserved no covering: they esteem it a virtue to lie, deceive, and steal, as their Master the Devil teacheth them.”16 The word nakedness, which does not require conventional linguistic markers of negation (e.g., no clothing, without clothing), tends to signal on its own the absence of properly civilized interiority. This, presumably, is why nakedness or its cognates get used even when clothing is mentioned. In a formula that is endlessly repeated, appearing in virtually every account of people living in warm southern climates, inhabitants are said to be naked, except for, or naked, save, followed by a description of an item of apparel, the material of which it is made, and where it is placed, most often so as to conceal genitalia or private parts. It is worth noting how the formula initially totalizes nakedness, thereby nearly removing the incidental item(s) in question from the category of clothing. The impression that nakedness is the core, fundamental condition for which a given item of apparel (generally made to appear both skimpy and flimsy) is a mere cover is further intensified when, as often happens, nakedness or cognates are preceded by all, altogether, or stark. The resulting emphasis on privitives, secret, or private parts has the tensions typical of voyeurism, since the pseudoethnographic formula used to convey it makes public the item that is formally excluded by a totalizing nakedness, thereby drawing attention to what should, it is believed, be private. At the same time, the terminology for genitalia (privities, privie parts, and so on) adds to the cumulative impression that the societies in question live in a privative age—that is, an age lacking the privileges available only under publically organized, political rule. Brazenly yet unknowingly displaying the absence of a distinction between private and public, a distinction that is regarded as the sine qua non of civilization, nakednessas-shamelessness epitomizes the state of nature as a privative, prepolitical condition. This is not exactly how nakedness-as-simplicity works when used as a trope for intra-European personal honor. Within Western European contexts, where full-bodied clothing is normative, metaphorical nakedness has an unmistakably social, even public, dimension that makes it a figure for



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what might be considered an ideal, utopian transparency rather than mere simplicity. Metaphorical nakedness-as-transparency is consequently encoded by means of shame/honor polarities derived from Greco-Roman traditions, as, for example, when it is invoked by Montaigne in the preface to his Essayes. The unadorned, imperfect, “naturall forme” in which the author presents himself is an approximation of the ideal “nakedness” of Amerindigenes, “those nations which yet are said to live under the sweet liberty of Nature’s first and uncorrupted laws.”17 Nakedness here—like the freedom Milton’s Eve and Adam enjoy from “troublesome disguises” in Paradise Lost (4.740)—paradoxically signals the presence of spontaneous, uncorrupted ethical integrity, the absence of artificial goodness or false modesty. Instead of suggesting a privative, childlike shamelessness, nakedness-as-transparency signals a self-consciously public presentation of unimpeachable honorableness. Here there is no “naked, except for” which calls attention to privities. On the contrary, nakedness is all: nothing is hidden because there is nothing to hide. At the other end of the spectrum from nakedness-as-simplicity and its imaginary civil partner, nakedness-as-transparency, there is, finally, a third matrix of associations: nakedness-as-vulnerability, possibly as abject vulnerability. Not related specifically to infancy, nakedness of this kind is a condition of defenselessness that is often represented in military terms. Indeed, in early modern and Enlightenment literature, nakedness is frequently a synonym of unarmed, though it may easily be mistaken for unclothed. In the literature of exploration and expansion, nakedness in the sense of unarmed often means without European explosive weaponry. Behind this identification of nakedness with a condition of defenseless exposure to violent, physical harm lie two traumatic, publicly dehumanizing conditions, both of which are familiar to early modern spectators and readers: that of the criminal who has been stripped naked for whipping and that of the prisoner of war who has been stripped of clothing in the process of enslavement. In the context of the transatlantic slave trade, nakedness has another function, as Richard Ligon, writing of Barbados, explains: “When they are brought to us, the Planters buy them out of the Ship, where they find them stark naked, and therefore cannot be deceived in any outward infirmity.”18 Whether in penal or military contexts, to be stripped naked is symbolically to be reduced involuntarily and publicly to a natural, precivil, even subhuman condition. It is also forcibly to be reminded that markers of social identity are no longer relevant, and that social protection is not available. To the extent that it is associated with social spectacle and ownership, the nakedness produced by coercive stripping is viewed from a position of

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exteriority, a position that strengthens the stigmatizing bond between unarmed nakedness and abjection. Or, one might argue, it strengthens the bond uniting nakedness, abjection, and what Giorgio Agamben in Homo Sacer calls “bare life,” understood as life that is not sacrificed or murdered but taken, killed. Would visual or verbal representations of Amerindigenous or African nakedness evoke these associations for early modern spectators or readers? If not, how might nakedness-as-vulnerability signify to participants of Euro-colonialism? These questions are raised by an illumination printed in L’Entreé de Henri II à Rouen le 1er Octobre 1550, a lavish ceremonial procession for which fifty indigenous Brazilians were brought to Rouen. Participants in a masque of Neptune performing a vision of French imperial rule are in costume, while the citizens of Rouen are attired as befits their various ranks. The Brazilians, however, are without clothing. In addition to the occasional headdress, some of the Brazilians are shown with shields, bows, and arrows, weaponry that was employed in a lifelike mock battle not unlike the gladiatorial fight that had recently been staged for the king in Lyons.19 The spectacle’s organizers presumably required the Brazilians to perform nakedness imagined as a whole-body condition, even though at this time visual representations or reports usually include mention of a supplementary item of apparel. Such nudity could also, though, even if subliminally, suggest invasive stripping. Beyond this, I would argue, in the autumnal chill of October—the month announced in the illustration’s title—the absence of clothing bears spectacular witness to the colonizing nation’s coercive power. By getting the captive Brazilians to play at being armed even while performing nakedness in conditions that are hostile to it, the fête’s producers evoke the additional meaning of disarmed, defeated—that is, successfully subjugated. On the streets of Rouen, in a chilly space designated as public, the unclothed Brazilians are made to signify their ongoing attachment to a privative age.

Nationalization of Natural Slavery and Original Sin By the sixteenth century, it is generally accepted that indigenous Americans not only can but ought to be Christianized in the process of colonization. Yet perplexing uncertainties remain as to how their unregenerate condition relates to Christian redemptive history. Their likeness to the naked progenitors of humankind before the Fall is a commonplace of the Edenic-



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golden America that appears in many early modern representations. Yet how can this be? If, as is falsely but doggedly maintained, agriculture is not practiced in the New World, its inhabitants would seem to have escaped the consequences of the curse God lays on Adam’s relation with the ground. Could Eve’s penalty, painful childbirth, likewise not have fallen on certain nations of women? Reports of comparatively painless, trouble-free birthing and extraordinary fertility on the part of American and African women might suggest this possibility.20 Could either the creation of humankind or its Fall be less than universal? To raise such a question explicitly would, of course, be heretical, as was the theory of polygenesis first developed by Paracelsus in response to accounts of Amerindigenes and, later, the theory of pre-Adamite creation advanced by Isaac La Peyrère. These theories, however, especially when they are dignified with scientific or prescientific status, can too readily detract from the host of less heterodox yet not fully explicable questions that tend to hover uneasily around representations of the Americas’ relation to Genesis. Granting their inclusion in the single, divine creation, might the Americans’ continuing, close temporal proximity to the first age indicate that collectively they have remained spiritually and socially stagnant, or, worse, that under the influence of Satan they have continued to fall or degenerate?21 Alternatively, being outside the Christian dispensation, might they perhaps feel the effects of the Fall less acutely just as they understand them less fully? Such partial, undeveloped musings are compatible with prevailing views of corruptible nature, Christian orthodoxy, and the racialization made possible by allochronism. In theory, all humankind falls in Adam, which means that everyone suffers equally the congenital penalty of a diminished capacity to know and do the good. Yet signs of fallen deficiency appear to be more visible in nations that have not yet received divine revelation. In many ways, it is suggested, such nations remain at, or even lower than, the primitive level of their fallen progenitors, whose European descendants long ago moved on. Not nearly enough has been said about the distinctively European characteristics usually given the innumerable early modern visual and textual representations of Eve and Adam, who thereby appear to be the true progenitors not only of Western Christianity but also of the future that lies before them, a future that leads, ineluctably, to the moment at which such representations are enjoyed by early modern European Christians. Indications of sub- or alter humanity usually occur not in the propositional discourse of systematic theology, where they would have to be confuted, but rather in verbal and visual representations that glorify European

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conquerors and dehumanize their subjects, often by demonizing what are taken to be their social or religious practices.22 To later, critical eyes it is obvious that the sense of entitlement communicated in Euro-colonial expansion has a large nexus of supports, and that insofar as Christianity is given a privileged position in rationalizing a host of exploitative projects, it becomes conjoined with ideological expressions it cannot fully avow. It may not be openly asserted, for example, that the image of God shines with special luminosity in the countenance of individual Western Europeans, but it is certainly often enough intimated that Indigenes as a whole retain only the faintest, barely discernible glimmers of unfallen goodness. Exploring theological traditions relating to the Genesis creation and Fall stories, Agamben has recently suggested that the supernatural gifts enjoyed by prelapsarian humanity, which theological traditions often represent as a garment or clothing, act as a supplement to created nature, illuminating and sacralizing an originary nakedness.23 In Euro-colonialist contexts, however, traces of this supplement appear only in certain populations. According to the Christian doctrine of Original Sin (often confused with the first—that is, original—act of sin), loss or disfiguration of the divine image constitutes human nature’s heritable vitiation, an effect of divine punishment. In the Augustinian formulations that become orthodox in Western Christianity, the juridical penalty for the first human sin, responsibility for which rests squarely with humankind, is, precisely, hereditary privation: attenuation or loss of an original, divinely created goodness, blessedness, and divine likeness that is genetically inscribed in human nature. Not the individual Adam (and Eve, considered less crucial to this process) but the entire human race represented in him is visited with a penal vitiation of its essence. The product of a need to differentiate itself from the dualistic structures of Manichaeism, the Augustinian doctrine of Original Sin absorbs elemental, cross-cultural symbols of pollution, defilement, and infection into a rigidly legalistic, rationalized theological schema that preserves the goodness of the Creator at the expense of turning him into an omnipotent, retributive judge.24 Unlike redemption, the universality of which theologians had debated for centuries, Original Sin’s inclusivity has never been in doubt. Yet there are signs that in the early modern period, some of Original Sin’s burden is transferred to extra-European shoulders, where it has a cumbersome, supplementary status. With its stress on animallike ingestion of human parts, for example, the cannibalism attributed to Amerindigenes suggests mass defilement by irrational, transgressive appetites, a less lurid form of which



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is a crucial component of Original Sin. Insofar as susceptibility to Satan’s wiles is Original Sin’s primary symptom, Amerindigenes’ religious rituals dramatize an unchanging, collective inability to resist deception. Francisco de Vitoria states as a matter of fact that “no nations have ever practised human sacrifice unless they were already idolaters. After the demon led them into the first great error of worshipping false gods, the same demon also persuaded them to worship them with these wicked sacrifices.”25 Paul Stevens has shown how ancient Israel’s codes of pure/impure, the basis of its own sense of national election, are appropriated in Euro-colonialist discourses and recruited for a nation-based rhetoric of corporeal pollution. Satan, curse, and transmittable barbarism are viscerally conjoined in a letter John Rolfe writes to justify his decision to marry Pocahontas, desires for whom he has been struggling against so mightily that they seem “wicked instigations, hatched by him who seeketh and delighteth in mans destruction.” Immediately before this confession, Rolfe describes Pocahontas as “one whose education hath bin rude, her manners barbarous, her generation accursed.”26 The phrase “her generation accursed” highlights sexual reproduction as the site—the present, bodily site—of pravity, ineradicably tainting Amerindigene progeny. Rolfe may have in mind the curse Noah lays on Ham’s descendants. But his language, together with the absence of scriptural proof texts, pulls heritable sin into a racialized vortex of pollution. In its new Euro-colonial contexts, this racialized Hamitic curse historically falls first on Amerindigenes, then on Africans. Awareness of this historical relay, however, is not registered in seventeenth-century literature, which often pairs Amerindigenes with Africans as denizens of a common, precivil era. As Euro-colonialism expands, the Hamitic curse magnetizes other elements of early modern racialization, which, as many have cautioned, appears in several cultural and physical (as well as temporal, I would add) modalities. In Augustine’s influential exegesis in The City of God, the Genesis curse is significant as the first biblical passage to use language pertaining to servitude. For Augustine this shows that human sin, not divine nature, inaugurates servitude, which is an effect of the Fall. Like Original Sin itself, servitude is essentially a divine penalty or, more exactly, a penal condition, which Augustine draws on war slavery doctrine to rationalize. Had Adam and Eve not sinned, Augustine claims, slavery—Englished as penal servitude in a 1610 translation of The City of God—would never have occurred. When, in Paradise Lost, Milton has Noah’s curse inaugurate servitude for unspecified “nations,” he follows the increasingly common Euro-colonialist practice of nationalizing different modes of slavery. In the context of the

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degeneracy Milton creates for the Hamitic curse, the term vitious race (12.104) is heavily moralistic; but it is cognate with the Augustinian view that Original Sin vitiates created human nature in the sense, cited by the Oxford English Dictionary, of “to render incomplete, imperfect, faulty; to impair or spoil.” In Euro-colonialist discourses, the nation-as-race tends to be the site of a curiously supplementary vitiation. Over and over again, natural slavery is located not in fitness for personal slavery—still in the process of being given legal, civil status—nor in a predisposition to submit to absolute, autocratic rule (these being the two major modes it assumes in Aristotle’s Politics) but rather in a nation’s alleged inability to govern itself. In his influential Relectio de Indiis (On the American Indians, 1538), Vitoria canvasses arguments for and against the justice of subjecting Amerindigenes to Spanish rule, opening with the question whether, as natural slaves, using Aristotle’s definition of the chattel slave in Politics, book 1, they can properly be said to have ownership of their lands. Vitoria’s conclusion is that because chattel slavery is a civil, legal institution, Amerindigenes are not slaves in this sense, even though collectively they are mentally deficient and incapable of self-rule.27 For Vitoria the strongest case for military intervention is based on the universality of an alleged natural right to travel and settle in foreign lands. If Amerindigenes inhospitably frustrate this right, he argues, defensive war is the legitimate result.28 Additionally, though, Vitoria makes a tentative argument for humanitarian war using antityranny discourse. If a tyrannous ruler or customs demand the death of innocent subjects for human sacrifice or cannibalism, other nations may declare war against such “tyranny” and, if necessary, institute regime change.29 In what Robin Blackburn calls the baroque period of Euro-colonial slavery, the unstated premise of natural slavery on a national scale—unstated because self-evident, the Amerindigenes being represented as children and beasts—is that as European Christians, the Spanish are collectively natural rulers. In a dialogue Francis Bacon creates on the just war (a dialogue that deteriorates into an unfinished monologue on the right of preemptive war), this premise is discussed in connection with Aristotle’s doctrine of natural slavery. Zebedaeus defends the truth of Aristotle’s assertion that gross, natural inequalities invest those who are superior with the right to rule. This holds “both in particular Men, and Nations.”30 Only nations, however, not particular men, are of interest to him and his interlocutors. Zebedaeus observes that any effort to establish who is naturally worthy of ruling is open to dispute, since governance requires much more than



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the intelligence Aristotle uses as a criterion for mastership. Because any particular nation’s claim may be challenged (a veiled reference to intraEuropean rivalry), Bacon’s focus on the Turks in this dialogue adroitly avoids justification of preemptive warfare in the comparative, presumably with Spain’s conquests, and therefore safeguards the exceptionalism England develops in representing its own colonial expansion.31 Zebedaeus lights upon the following solution: Therefore the Position, which I intend, is not in the Comparative, that the Wiser or the Stouter, or the Juster Nation should govern; But in the Privative, that where there is an Heape of People, (though we terme it a Kingdome, or State,) that is altogether unable or Indigne to governe; There it is a just Cause of Warre, for another Nation, that is Civill, or Polliced, to subdue them: And this, though it were to be done, by a Cyrus or a Caesar, that were no Christian.32

Ancient pagan, imperial practices could not be more enthusiastically lauded. Lest Christianity’s privileged position as overseer of colonial expansion be jeopardized, however, Zebedaeus indicates that his understanding of privative is indebted to Christian doctrine. Going to the “donation” of government in Genesis 1:26, Zebedaeus cites Vitoria on the connection between the “Right” of rule and the image of God so as to assert the contrary: “Deface the Image, and you devest the Right.” Using juridical language appropriate to divine penalty for sin, Zebedaeus presents defacement as evidence of “Forfeiture, or Reseisure.” “[S]ound Interpreters,” Zebedaeus repeats, “expound this Image of God, of Naturall Reason; Which if it be totally, or mostly defaced, the Right of Government doth cease.”33 The universality promised by creation in God’s image is here conveniently both affirmed and denied. Defacement of the divine image— the effect of penal withdrawal of divine goodness—accounts for depravity that has become second nature, issuing in violations of both natural law and the law of nations. God’s treatment of the Canaanites, for example, shows that “there are Nations in Name, that are no Nations in Right, but Multitudes only, and Swarms of People.” Such nations have no real title to their territories.34 Later, Zebedaeus defends Spanish conquest of the Americas on the ground that by sacrificing and eating human creatures, Amerindigenes had “forfeited [their territory] by the Law of Nature.”35 Nearly two centuries after Vitoria’s Relectio de Indiis, Daniel Defoe’s eponymous protagonist in Robinson Crusoe (1719) agonizes over whether

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he has the right to wage war against the Amerindigenes who have committed the “Offence” of cannibalism. Crusoe accounts for this “unnatural Custom” by reflecting that they have been Suffer’d by Providence in his wise Disposition of the World, to have no other Guide than that of their own abominable and vitiated Passions; and consequently were left, and perhaps had been so for some Ages, to act such horrid Things, and receive such dreadful Customs, as nothing but Nature entirely abandon’d of Heaven, and acted by some hellish Degeneracy, could have run them into. (my italics)36

Spiritual privation again has the status of a supplementary Original Sin the externalized pravity of which renders the Amerindigenes virtually nonhuman. After several internal battles, the terms of which are similar to Vitoria’s, Cru­ soe decides—provisionally, it turns out, since when Christian Europeans are later threatened, such scruples vanish—that he has no right to in­augurate a humanitarian war or to act as executioner of the law of nature. As in Paradise Lost, where the divine curse falls on “nations,” Defoe gives penal deprivation a national—that is, racial—character. Their “crimes,” Crusoe reflects, “were National, and I ought to leave them to the Justice of God, who is the Governour of Nations, and knows how by National Punishments to make a just Retribution for National Offences.”37 The same confidence in “national Vengeance” for “national Crimes” is expressed again later, when Crusoe muses that the Amerindigenes’ “barbarous Customs were their own Disaster, being in them a Token indeed of God’s having left them, with the other Nations of that Part of the World, to such Stupidity, and to such inhumane Courses.”38 Given Defoe’s attitude toward transatlantic slavery, and the cannibalism attributed to Africans as well as Amerindigenes, “that part of the World” may include Africa, also often considered a “nation.” With the aid of a telescope, Crusoe can tell that the “Cannibals” who visit his island are “stark naked.” Yet despite the sweltering heat, the thought of disrobing unnerves Defoe’s protagonist, who finds that the sun’s rays are even more insufferable without protective clothing, yet also confides, “I could not go quite naked; no, tho’ I had been inclin’d to it, which I was not, nor could not abide the thoughts of it, tho I was all alone.”39

De Bry’s Europeanized Adam and Eve An engraving of Adam and Eve by Theodor de Bry gives subtle, visual representation to the awkward, disjunctive temporality encoded in early



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Figure 8. Theodor de Bry, Adam and Eve in America (1590). Reprinted by permission from the Royal Ontario Museum, © ROM.

modernism’s privative age. The engraving serves as frontispiece to the first, multilingual (Latin, French, English, and German) volume of de Bry’s hugely influential, multivolume collection of accounts and illustrations of Euro-colonial ventures (fig. 8). Published in 1590, this inaugural volume opens with the English Thomas Harriot’s A Briefe and True Report of the new Found Land of Virginia, first published in 1588. While Harriot’s text is illustrated with engravings that de Bry models on John White’s drawings of Virginia’s Algonkian nation, the frontispiece appears to be de Bry’s own creation, as is the accompanying epistle “To the gentle Reader,” which opens:

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Although (frendlye Reader) man by his disobedience, weare deprived of those good Gifts wher with he was indued in his creation, yet he was not berefte of wit to provide for hym selfe, nor discretion to devise things necessarie for his use, except such as apparatyne to his souls healthe, as may be gathered by this savage nations, of whome this present worke intreateth. For although they have noe true knowledge of God nor of his holye worde and are destituted of all lerninge, Yet they passe us in many thinges, as in Sober feedinge and Dexteritye of witte, in makinge without any instrument of mettall thinges so neate and so fine, as a man would scarcely beleve the same.40

Inclusivity is the note on which de Bry begins and the spirit with which he continues, with deprivation a universal, human penalty, as the juridical doctrine of the Fall dictates. However, in addition to the implication that the “savage nations” are closer in time to the Fall, once they are mentioned, privation becomes peculiar to them, and negation effects an implicit comparison with their European betters: “[T]hey have noe true knowledge of God nor of his holye worde and are destituted of all lerninge.” In this context, “destituted” is a further, particular consequence of universal deprivation. Though destitution (from the Latin destitutio) in this sense appears regularly in discussions of the Fall, the Fall is ostensibly no longer at issue in de Bry’s text. Logically, absence of true knowledge of God is a historical accident unrelated to the absence of “learning,” as is evident from the high regard early modern humanists feel toward the intellectual accomplishments of pagan Greek and Roman cultures. Both divine revelation and “learning,” however, are made to seem absent owing to the Fall, in part by being so sharply differentiated from natural “wit” and “discretion”—not damaged by the Fall—the exercise of which results in products necessary to survival but not to spiritual well-being. In this area, Christian readers know without being told that what the Virginians come up with is the work either directly of Satan or of a perverted, fallen spirituality. In the engraving, the exquisitely graceful, elongated Eve and Adam, the sheen of whose light skin signifies a glory not yet diminished, have initiated the process of falling. The inward, subjective decision to transgress, which in Protestant readings of the Genesis story constitutes the critical moment of the defection (and de Bry is passionately, polemically Protestant), has already been made. De Bry catches the nonhuman animal creation at the very moment it participates in the human Fall: both lion and tiger grimace threateningly, as if involuntarily beginning to snarl, while the mouse and hare, poised to flee, have turned their backs on them. Ovid mentions



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the golden age’s fearless hare in Metamorphosis.41 With the passing of the golden age comes the silver, when shelters are first built. As Ovid has it, “In plashed Bowres, and Sheds with Osiers bound. / Then, first was corne into long furrowes throwne: / And Oxen under heavy yokes did growne.”42 Silver age shed and ox appear in the representatives of fallen humanity de Bry depicts in the middle distance. Behind Adam is a lean-to bound with natural materials, a shelter that resembles those Harriot describes in True Report as covered “with barkes” or “with artificial mattes made of long rushes,” and which contains a mother and her child.43 The mother-child dyad behind Adam represents humankind’s postlapsarian condition, as does the male figure behind Eve, who enacts the penalty of earning bread by the sweat of his brow. These fallen figures of the middle distance have been identified as Amerindigenes and read allegorically, as if they gesture toward the “fall” of Edenic indigeneity brought on by contact with Europeans, notably, of course, the Spanish.44 This is to overlook or misidentify many of the details de Bry includes in his frontispiece. Immediately disqualifying de Bry’s male laborer for Amerindigenous status are his full head of hair, beard, and mustache. Well before de Bry creates this image, facial hair becomes a signifier of Europeanness, while shaved heads and the absence of facial hair are invariably signs of Amerindigeneity. (Like other ethnographers, Harriot mentions the practice of removing male facial hair and calls attention to its comparative sparseness on male Amerindigenes.)45 De Bry’s laborer’s hair is recognizably that of the foreground’s Adam, though less curly, lustrous, and springy (these are fallen, bad hair days). The garments worn by both the female and male figures also diverge from those Amerindigenes are usually shown wearing when not depicted as naked. Throughout several volumes of illustrations, de Bry himself regularly portrays Americans wearing loin coverings comprised of feathers. Comparatively speaking, then, de Bry’s fallen figures conform more closely to European clothing conventions. At first, superficial glance, they may even seem to have donned material that is woven, or cloth. On reflection, however, it is evident that de Bry attires his fallen couple in animal skins—undoubtedly the very skins the Hebraic-Christian Creator provides after he has passed judgment on the two transgressors in Genesis 3:21. In this case, though, de Bry would appear to synthesize Genesis with True Report, which describes the Algonkian “clothed with loose mantles made of Deer skins, & aprons of the same rounde about their middles; all else naked.”46 Finally, the tilling of the ground in which the male figure engages is precisely the activity Americans are generally said to neglect, the alleged

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absence of agricultural labor being what renders their lands “waste.” Given the prevalence of this ideologeme, together with the knowledge that Jahweh punished Adam by cursing the ground, forcing him to labor for his food by the sweat of his brow, readers are invited to identify this laborer with Adam. Yet since White’s drawings give evidence of Algonkian agriculture, de Bry’s male tiller may also underline the likeness of the Algonkian to the postlapsarian Eve and Adam. That the laborer employs the limb of a tree as a hoe is compatible with Harriot’s emphasis on the absence of metallic implements: “[H]aving no edge tooles or weapons of yron or steele to offend us withal, neither know they how to make any.” Significantly, all the passages from True Report I have cited in conjunction with de Bry’s engraving—those regarding shelter, clothing, and implements—are found in the opening paragraphs of “Of the Nature and Manners of the People,” which, concerned about his readers’ misconceptions and anxieties, Harriot introduces to encourage settlement. Harriot says he wants this section to reassure readers “how that [the “naturall inhabitants”] in respect of troubling our inhabiting and planting, are not to be feared; but that they shall have cause both to feare and love us, that shall inhabite with them” (ibid.). For de Bry’s readership, the Creator’s curse falls on an Eve and Adam who inaugurate Christian, redemptive history. Christianity’s recuperative trajectory is suggested by the female figure’s visual, positional resemblance to the Madonna (of whom Eve is a “type” in Christian theology), the blessed mother who brings her divine son into the world within a humble stable not unlike this natural-growth shelter. Yet owing to the resulting typological overlay, de Bry’s fallen female is more strikingly hybrid than his male, who is strongly associated with a Europeanized Adam. On the one hand, the fallen Eve-figure’s likeness to the iconic, European Mary is reinforced by the way she holds her infant, who is cradled in her arms rather than carried on her back or shoulder as is generally the case in visual depictions of New World mothers. On the other hand, the fallen female is shockingly unlike the Madonna of medieval and early modern European visual culture in that both her breasts are uncovered, unclothed, naked—a condition that inescapably signifies the privative age of the New World (or in other contexts Africa). Strongly connoting Amerindigeneity, the fallen female’s exposed, uncovered breasts nearly disrupt the typological relation of fallen Eve and Mary that de Bry otherwise evokes. The unity of fallen humankind is affirmed by de Bry’s syncretism, which works, however, by contrasting the obviously Europeanized Eve and Adam of the foreground with the unevenly hybridized figures of the middle dis-



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tance. These ambiguously creole figures are the falling Europeanized Eve and Adam’s fallen counterparts or, perhaps, their descendants, but at the same time suggestive of the contemporaneous Amerindigenes who are the objects of Harriot’s study and of de Bry’s engravings. Insofar as they are the latter, they are not quite the gentle reader’s progenitors the way Eve and Adam are, or even the reader’s ancestors, but rather the reader’s present-day, contemporary ancestors.

Privative Comparison in Paradise Lost Similarly complex is a brief simile alluding to early modern Amerindigenes in book 9 of Paradise Lost—a simile that has been read as evidence of Milton’s anti-imperialist stance.47 The simile appears with reference to Eve and Adam, who have just become aware of a shocking psychic change, experienced when they awaken from their first fallen sexual encounter. This lovemaking takes places unceremoniously, outside their bower, in the open, on the ground, as if human sexual activity were no different from bestial. Following centuries of exegesis on Genesis 3:7, “And the eyes of them both were opened and they saw that they were naked,” Milton stresses the inward, psycho-spiritual dimension of this opening of their eyes. In a classic moment of peripeteia and anagnorisis, Adam and Eve become aware that they are “destitute and bare / Of all thir vertue” (9.1063–64) owing to their deity’s penal withdrawal of his original, spiritual gifts.48 Bodily nakedness is involved merely as a displaced, outward site for this painful awareness of shameful destitution, whose intensity derives from its inwardness. Though Milton has both characters initially stunned into silence by their discovery, Adam explicates its doctrinal meaning (9.1067–84) before lyrically lamenting their multiple losses:

since our Eyes

Op’nd we find indeed, and find we know Both Good and Evil, Good lost, and Evil got, Bad Fruit of Knowledge, if this be to know, Which leaves us naked thus, of Honour void, Of Innocence, of Faith, of Puritie, Our wonted Ornaments now soild and staind, And in our Faces evident the signes Of foul concupiscence; whence evil store; Even shame, the last of evils; of the first

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Be sure then. How shall I behold the face Henceforth of God or Angel, earst with joy And rapture so oft beheld? those heav’nly shapes Will dazle now this earthly, with thir blaze Insufferably bright. O might I here In solitude live savage, in some glade Obscur’d, where highest Woods impenetrable To Starr or Sun-light, spread thir umbrage broad, And brown as Evening: Cover me ye Pines, Ye Cedars, with innumerable boughs Hide me, where I may never see them more. But let us now, as in bad plight, devise What best may for the present serve to hide The Parts of each from other, that seem most To shame obnoxious, and unseemliest seen, Some Tree whose broad smooth Leaves together sowd, And girded on our loyns, may cover round Those middle parts, that this new commer, Shame, There sit not, and reproach us as unclean.

So counsel’d hee, and both together went

Into the thickest Wood, there soon they chose The Figtree, not that kind for Fruit renown’d, But such as at this day to Indians known In Malabar or Decan spreds her Arms Braunching so broad and long, that in the ground The bended Twigs take root, and Daughters grow About the Mother Tree, a Pillard shade High overarch’t, and echoing Walks between; There oft the Indian Herdsman shunning heate Shelters in coole, and tends his pasturing Herds At Loopholes cut through thickest shade: Those Leaves They gatherd, broad as Amazonian Targe, And with what skill they had, together sowd, To gird thir waist, vain Covering if to hide Thir guilt and dreaded shame; O how unlike To that first naked Glory. Such of late Columbus found th’American so girt With feather’d Cincture, naked else and wilde Among the Trees on Iles and woodie Shores.



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Thus fenc’t, and as they thought, thir shame in part Coverd, but not at rest or ease of Mind. (9.1070–1120)

One reason for quoting this lengthy passage is to indicate how prominent is Adam’s passionate verbalization of individualized shame. Like the Adam in de Bry’s engraving and in most other early modern representations of the Fall, Milton’s Adam bears the brunt of anguished human consciousness (de Bry’s Eve appears about as vacuous as Milton’s at this point). Adam’s plaint introduces the theme of guilt- and shame-induced self-concealment that is such a striking feature of the Genesis story, where, after covering their nakedness, Eve and Adam try to hide themselves and then to evade individual responsibility when interrogated by their divine judge. Stricken, ashamed, dying to hide, casting blame elsewhere—Eve and Adam’s childlike attempts to avoid responsibility are stressed by commentators on the Genesis narrative. As Milton presents it, Adam’s proposal that they hide their genitalia (the first instance of concealment in Genesis) is nearly as wrongheaded as his desire to be hidden in darkness by the boughs of pines and cedars, a regressive shunning of sociability that is linked with savagery (“O might I here / In solitude live savage” [my emphasis]) and further privation (in the sense that private is public’s lesser contrary). Indeed, the two forms of concealment are clearly interconnected, as the repetition of cover, hide, and broad indicates. Adam’s plaintive, apostrophic “Cover me ye Pines,” “Hide me” is echoed in his directive “to hide / The Parts of each from other,” to gird their loins with leaves that “may cover round / Those middle parts,” while his longing to be sheltered from the gaze of superiors by “umbrage broad” is picked up in “some Tree whose broad smooth Leaves” (my emphasis). All three words appear again in the concluding section with its two similes, which depict their extra-European subjects—representatives of nations undergoing British settlement and expansion—entirely from the outside, with camera-like detachment. By drawing the “Indian Herdsman” and “th’American” into the narrative action, Paradise Lost universalizes the Fall, at the same time acknowledging the historical situatedness of its Englishlanguage readers. Like de Bry’s tiller of the ground, who is attended by cattle, the “Indian Herdsman” is a representative of the life of labor, while the intricately roofed and pillared walkway created by the banyan trees is an example—again, comparable to de Bry’s hut—of the shelter required in postlapsarian climates. The trees’ cool interior is the real-world, physiologically necessitated counterpart of the shade Adam seeks in his fantasized

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“savage” retreat from interaction with the divine. (An early modern text describes the trees being used by the Indians “for coverture against the extreme heate of the Sun, wherewith they are grievously vexed,” coverture falling in precisely with Milton’s emphasis here.)49 Beginning with Eve and Adam’s selection of the banyan tree and ending with their gathering of its leaves, the simile of the sheltered herdsman is integrated into Paradise Lost’s ongoing narrative action. That involving the “American,” on the other hand, preemptively assumes the completion of the girding of the protagonists’ waists, which, significantly, is not presented in narrative time. Paradise Lost’s readers are discouraged from visualizing Eve and Adam in their new attire, being offered instead the brief, cinematic clip of “th’American so girt / With feather’d Cincture.” The effect is subtly to dissociate Eve and Adam’s act of covering their genitalia from the American, an effect intensified by the epic narrator’s interjection, “vain Covering if to hide / Thir guilt and dreaded shame; O how unlike / To that first naked Glory.” In the affective form of exclamation, this negative comparison expresses the narrator’s inward vision of Eve and Adam’s “first naked Glory,” lost but still remembered in its original plenitude of signification.50 Readers can participate in this memory by recalling the epic’s first, ceremonial presentation in book 4 of Adam and Eve “with native Honor clad / In naked Majesty,” whose godlikeness is in part conveyed by signifiers of European lightness, Adam’s “fair large Front” and “Hyacinthine Locks,” Eve’s loosely curled “golden tresses” (4.289–90, 300–301, 305–6). The externality of this initial presentation contrasts with book 9’s modest reluctance to represent Eve and Adam covering their genitalia, while its emotive recollection underscores the ethico-spiritual meanings assigned original nakedness. In drawing attention to the difference between original and fallen nakedness, the narrator trains readers’ attention on the Fall’s theology. It also stresses the futility of covering the sexual organs if motivated by shame—that is, by a desire for self-concealment. If interiority has a privileged status in European constructs of individual selfhood and civility, the doctrine of the Fall provides what may be its most fertile ground. According to this central, Christian doctrine, what has irretrievably been lost can be known only dialectically by the negative process of tracking subjective responses to its remaining traces.51 To sustain this emphasis on ideal, affectively poignant meaning, neither the narrator’s inward recollection of Adam and Eve’s first, blessed nakedness nor its leafloined counterpart is rendered visually. Though book 9’s simile works by means of a strongly visual analogy—the repetitive “gird,” “girt” draws attention to waist as well as material covering—it restricts external viewing



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to the American’s body. This body’s status as spectacle is much enhanced by the presence of an embedded spectator, Columbus, whose sighting of these representatives of fallen humanity readers are to share. The sense of dislocation effected by the simile derives in part from this sudden invitation to spectatorship, in part from the absence of discourse pertaining to the American’s interiority. Why are the Americans so girt? What has motivated the covering up of their sexual parts? Is it shame? Is it a custom inherited from their forebears? Or has it been invented independently? The narrator’s if in “vain Covering if to hide” indicates what is implicit in the carefully plotted parallelism of this passage: Adam’s decision is more complexly motivated than he is aware, a self-deceptive desire for self-concealment accompanying, or even masking, his stated concern with the sexual “Parts” as conspicuous site of psycho-spiritual pollution. What this fixation on bodily parts attempts to relieve is awareness of inward pollution, of the metamorphosis that in Adam’s earlier words makes “Our wonted Ornaments now soild and staind.” The absence of even the most oblique commentary on the American’s motivation, together with the pictorial quality of the simile, suggest that readers are to find a corresponding lack of subjective complexity in the concealment of sexual parts with “feather’d Cincture.” By drawing an analogy between the American’s self-covering and that of Adam and Eve, the fig-leaf simile indicates a shared preoccupation with genitally focused shame and therefore a common participation in the Fall. Milton’s American is not, after all, naked. Formally, the unity of humankind is affirmed.52 On the other hand, this unity rests on what Milton’s Protestantism regards as a reductive understanding of human fallenness— that is, a puerile preoccupation with outward or ceremonial religious performance. Furthermore, in ways that are now familiar, the unity of humankind is riven: the inhabitants of the New World are positioned outside Paradise Lost’s increasingly linear narratives. This occurs, first, by associating the time of the Fall (some six thousand years earlier), with the Amerindigenes of the early modern era. In a complication typical of Paradise Lost’s baroque, perspectivally mobile temporalities, the early modern American thereby remains engaged in the very simple, handmade self-covering—leaves and feathers are both natural materials—in which Eve and Adam ceremoniously engage millennia before. Unlike the Indian herdsman, who is contemporaneous, “at this day” with the production of Paradise Lost, the American is identified precisely as discovered “of late” by Columbus, likely to ensure a vision of (to cite Service again) “pristine savages” unaffected by contact with Europeans.

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Simplicity is conveyed poetically by the simile’s striking use of monosyllabic, non-Latinate diction: “naked else and wilde / Among the Trees on Iles and woodie Shores,” with wilde, interestingly, an indigenous, En­ glish equivalent to Adam’s savage (in addition to its incessant connection with Amerindigenes). Another such indigenous form appears in the phrase “broad as Amazonian Targe,” where Milton has substituted targe for the Amazonian shield with which the broad banyan leaf is compared in contemporaneous texts; though shield is also indigenous, it has figurative, religious associations that targe lacks. Foreshadowing the emergence of warfare, the “Amazonian Targe” evokes a time significantly earlier than the historical moment of Paradise Lost’s production, since the Amazons found of late in the New World and in Africa are usually associated with those of archaic Greece. In addition to usage that is often archaizing, targe is associated with nonmetallic materials. The diminutive target is the word Harriot chooses for the shields of bark devised by the Americans; it is also used of those held by the ancient inhabitants of Great Britain, illustrations of whom de Bry adds to his reproductions of White’s drawings. Bereft of ammunition for their firearms and to this extent sharing the condition of the Caribbean “savages,” Defoe’s Spaniards devise “targets of wood” in Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.53 The “targe” is not, of course, an offensive weapon but rather an instrument manufactured to provide protection. In ways that need to be teased out, Milton employs theological and colonialist discourses to convey Eve and Adam’s newfound psychological defenselessness and its dialectical counterpart, defensiveness. Earlier, the narrator likens the Deity’s withdrawal of his original gifts of “Just confidence,” “native righteousness,” and “honour” to the removal of a protective “veil” (9.1054–56). When this figurative veil is withdrawn, Adam and Eve become aware of having been “naked left / To guiltie shame” in the sense of being “destitute and bare / Of all thir vertue” (9.1057–58). In Milton’s representation of the Fall, the nakedness to which the eyes of the Edenic pair are opened is not their literal unclothedness (in elaborating the doctrine of the Fall, Augustine definitively dismisses this notion) but rather this startlingly unfamiliar psycho-spiritual defenselessness. Quintessentially both metaphorical and subjective, the psycho-spiritual nakedness Eve and Adam encounter in their anagnorisis retrospectively gives meaning to the altered sexual desires they have just acted out as a foretaste of physical mortality. Physically, only their faces reveal evidence of this radical subjective change, loss that, in Adam’s words, “leaves us naked thus, of Honour void, / Of Innocence, of Faith, of Puritie” (9.1074–75).



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In Paradise Lost, the bickering that soon begins may be the most obvious manifestation of the resulting psychological defensiveness (with its projections, distortions, and self-exculpating evasions), but the covering of sexual parts with leaves is the first. The narrator’s summary, “Thus fenc’t,” indicates that the covering of leaves is a defense (fence derives from defense), while “and as they thought, thir shame in part / Coverd” stresses its bathetic, displaced character. Interestingly, the phrase Milton uses of the American’s nakedness inverts the order of the formulaic naked, except discussed earlier: “girt / With feather’d Cincture, naked else and wilde.” By naming the garment (the “feather’d Cincture”) first, before the totalizing “naked else and wilde,” Milton strengthens the parallelism between Amerindigenous and postlapsarian covering of genitalia. At the same time, in the context of Paradise Lost’s exploration of a newly discovered internal defenselessness, the inversion highlights the fragility of the “feather’d Cincture” as external defense, and thereby plays lightly on nakedness-as-vulnerability. Evoked in part is the vulnerability to Spanish aggression to which Columbus exposed Amerindigenes. Drawing on the anti-Spanish sentiment so crucial to the development of English national and colonial ideologies, Milton fleetingly permits the American surprised by Columbus to appear as a figure of pathos. Even this register of the simile’s meaning, however, operates by means of a hierarchical ordering of spiritual over physical, since the survival at stake for Adam and Eve is clearly inward, spiritual survival. The inadequacy of Eve and Adam’s bodily covering—visualized, in any case, by means of the American—to their actual spiritual condition is analogous to the inadequately defended American, positioned, temporally, just prior to the late fifteenth-century encounter. This apparent lack of interior reflection, the equivalent of the shamelessness attributed to Amerindigenes, is the second means by which Milton suggests that his American is not his implied readers’ ancestor as Eve and Adam are. If anything, the American is an ancestor who is contemporary. Does absence of a defensive consciousness of guilt have something to do with the solitariness of the single American (and the single Indian who precedes)? Solitariness may underline continuities between these two figures and the agonized longing for solitude Adam has just expressed. But the girt American is most immediately linked with the leaf-covered Eve and Adam, which suggests a difference between the sociability of their relationship and the American’s asociality. Exegesis of Genesis gives commentators a chance to discuss marriage as the first human society, a view that Paradise Lost ingeniously amplifies. It also presents the Fall as a public event of global

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as well as cosmic significance—the primary purpose of the simile involving the American. In its ungendered solitariness, the American, however, appears by contrast to be entirely “private”—that is, prepolitical—without the privileges of the civilized, epic heroism of Adam and Eve. Milton’s isolated American—caught pictorially as if in movement, on the go—fleetingly anticipates Rousseau’s precivil, solitary “savages.” In addition to stressing the rudimentary, privative character of their external self-covering and to placing them developmentally at the stage of the newly fallen Adam and Eve, Paradise Lost leaves early modern Amerindigenes there by remedying its protagonists’ inept self-covering. This, the third means of excluding Americans from its linear narratives, occurs when the Son himself clothes Eve and Adam. Based on Genesis 3:21, in which Jahweh outfits Eve and Adam in coats of animal skins, Milton has the Son respond “pitying how they stood / Before him naked to the aire, that now / Must suffer change” (10.211–13). Exposure “to the aire” is specified to sharply distinguish this physical nakedness, with its practical, material needs, from the nakedness to which Adam and Eve’s eyes were earlier opened. The provision of clothing, strictly utilitarian, foreshadows the Son’s later acts of charity; he “thought not much,” the narrator says, “to cloath his Enemies” (10.219). It therefore can be—and self-consciously is, historically—imitated when European colonizers benevolently offer to clothe the pitiable, outward nakedness of their subjects, also potentially or actually “enemies.” But why are Eve and Adam the Deity’s enemies? The term suggests that Milton militarizes juridical constructions of the Fall, one implication of which is that the loss of supernatural virtues involves the victor’s exercise of invasive, penal stripping. To put it as starkly as this language invites: as “enemies,” Eve and Adam have been spiritually stripped, which is what happened when they were “naked left / To guilty shame.” This stripping is not, however, preparation for spiritual enslavement, as it very well could be. Adam and Eve’s status as enemies is altered and their exposure to further injury brought to a halt with Milton’s invention of another act of clothing, this one categorically inimitable:

Nor he thir outward only with the Skins

Of Beasts, but inward nakedness, much more Opprobrious, with his Robe of righteousness, Arraying cover’d from his Father’s sight. (10.220–23)

As with the simile in book 9, inward nakedness is privileged over outward. Invisible to human eyes, the “Robe of righteousness” provides the only



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means of contending with human guilt and shame: it conceals spiritual nakedness from the Father’s view. In making use of leaves “broad as Amazonian Targe,” Eve and Adam had been hoping to create a shame-repellent invisibility cloak, something that would diminish visible exposure to judgment and ease their sense of vulnerability, alienation, and loss. Like everyone outside the Christian dispensation, they had got it all wrong. Once having become the Deity’s juridical “enemies,” Eve and Adam cannot effectively defend themselves against hostility, whether intrapsychic, interpersonal, or interspiritual, but instead exhibit mere defensiveness. Fortunately for them, though, they are recipients of divine grace, the unmerited gift of righteousness that restores the spiritual virtues forfeited by the Fall. Arrayed inwardly with a covering that is effective—an immaterial robe that to a certain extent replaces lost innocence, likened to a veil—they are able to enter the process of regeneration, which in their case directly coincides with the linear movement of human history. Not only in Paradise Lost but throughout his poetic and political writings, Milton posits an original Edenic-golden state or primitive origin from which there is both a falling off and a passionately sought though never realizable return. A “first naked Glory” compounded of classical and Christian ideals is the condition in which liberty flourishes. Once it has been lost, servitude in all its guises sets in, and partial, this-worldly practices become custom. Regeneration and, in the political sphere, reformation, revolution, or colonization is always, however, a possibility, which is why the primitive condition of glorious, luminous transparency has to remain accessible, even if only to inward vision. The Christian doctrine of the ontological goodness of created nature serves the same universalizing function for Milton as does the state of natural warfare for Hobbes. To safeguard this apparent universality, and for entirely opposed reasons, ideologically, neither Hobbes nor Milton identifies the primitive human condition directly with America. In Paradise Lost, the American appears only when the Fall has occurred. In Leviathan, Hobbes refers casually to the “idolaters of America,” and, like Harriot, later credits Amerindigenes with a lower-level, practical rationality: “The Savages of America, are not without some good Morall Sentences; also they have a little Arithmetick, to adde, and divide in Numbers not too great: but they are not therefore Philosophers.” To illustrate just how great the distance is between such rudimentary reason and true philosophy, Hobbes employs an involved simile tying the spontaneous appearance of these simple, undeveloped “naturall plants of humane Reason” to a precivil era in which humankind “fed on Akorns, and drank Water.” (Acorns, which appear in Ovid’s golden age, are a staple food of the Greco-Roman first age.)

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Having constructed a temporal, developmental hierarchy, Hobbes then asserts that in such a time, “there was no Method; that is to say, no Sowing, nor Planting of Knowledge by it self, apart from the Weeds, and common Plants of Errour and Conjecture.”54 Hobbes associates civil privation with America and yet universalizes it, on this occasion to advance his argument that philosophy arises only in urban centers whose governments have produced peace and the mother of philosophy, “Leasure.” In an era of colonial expansion, when the doctrine that America lies uncultivated predominates, “planting” is a potent, resonant figure for the production of genuinely philosophical knowledge. Within Milton’s Eden, Eve and Adam spend part of their time gardening. They also engage in ongoing intellectual discrimination that is a figurative form of “Planting” in Hobbes’s sense, according to which “Knowledge” is produced “apart from the Weeds, and common Plants of Errour and Conjecture.” Hobbes’s political convictions and Milton’s could not be more opposed. Yet as much as Hobbes’s “philosophy,” Milton’s “right reason” is the privileged product of European Christendom’s civilizing process, arraying some inwardly, thus restoring to a degree the unblemished divinity their Fall has marred, leaving others, such as the American, only partly clad and fully precivil, “naked else and wilde / Among the Trees on Iles and woodie Shores.”

chapter eight

Hobbes’s State of Nature and “Hard” Privativism

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or most people, the phrase “state of nature” conjures up Hobbes’s harsh view of precivil humanity. Not so widely recognized are the protoracialist connections Hobbes finds between the state of nature and the precivil condition of America’s “savages”—connections that often inform subsequent social contract theories. In Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité, for example, Rousseau regards both Amerindigenes and Africans as “savages” living in humankind’s natural state. Are Hobbes’s assumptions about the New World those of his culture? If so, what makes his discussion of humanity’s natural state in chapter 13 of Leviathan so memorable? In exploring these questions, we will look at Hobbes’s employment of a rhetorical convention involving iterative, negative comparison. As a recurrent feature of early modern Euro-colonial discourse, negative iteratio derives from two canonical Roman texts, Ovid’s evocation of the golden age in Metamorphoses and Cicero’s narrative of the emergence of civil society in De Inventione. At the time of European expansion, expropriation of land, and enslavement of Amerindigene and, later, African peoples, this particular rhetorical scheme has previously undreamt of meanings and repercussions. Hobbes’s precivil age has occasionally been treated as ethnographically meaningful, more often as somehow realistic. Commenting on Hobbes’s inversion of the golden age topos in Leviathan’s thirteenth chapter, one writer says it negatively catalogs “the benefits of civilization that were unavailable to primitive man.”1 Another reads this passage in Leviathan as a “brilliant parody of the golden age topos of classical pastoral. All of the negatives that are charged with nostalgic value in literary renderings of this theme from Ovid to Milton are recharged here with the fearsome force of realism.”2 While Hobbes’s negatives are certainly charged with fearsome force, the notion that Hobbes’s state of nature is opposed to the golden age as realism is 257

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to idealism or fantasy ignores the very features of its rhetorical artistry that signal its affiliation with Euro-colonial ethnography. Of course, realist effects are often produced by ironic or parodic inversion of idealizing rhetorical strategies. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130, “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun,” and the antics of Cervantes’s Don Quixote exemplify this kind of “realism.” The rhetorically patterned negation used to evoke the privative age, however, has a unique mission historically: to naturalize Europe’s selfrepresentation as bearer of civilization and simultaneously erase the history as well as the complexity of specific extra-European societies. Its historical specificity needs to be emphasized. In highlighting the absence of civilization’s essential characteristics, early modern representations of ostensibly natural, precivil societies persistently position such societies in a temporally distant era. This is true even of idealizing critique of the sort that appears in Montaigne’s often-cited “Of the Caniballes,” though this critique must be differentiated from an emphasis on privation that reinforces conventional views of European civility or serves directly to advance colonial conquest. Whatever the brand of primitivism—whether “hard,” “soft,” or shifting between, as frequently occurs—however, rhetorically patterned emphasis on privation contributes to the project of rationalizing European supremacy, even if the discursive context in which it appears does not overtly forward such ends. The temporal dimension of Hobbes’s state of nature rarely gets discussed. Yet the natural condition he envisions is not only conceptually but also temporally prior to civil society. In De Cive, Hobbes situates the state of nature “outside” civil society in a catalog opposing its fateful risks with the plentiful benefits of life “within.” “To sum up,” Hobbes concludes, “outside the commonwealth is the empire of the passions, war, fear, poverty, nastiness, solitude, barbarity, ignorance, savagery; within the commonwealth is the empire of reason, peace, security, wealth, splendour, society, good taste, the sciences and good-will.”3 A condition of fearful insecurity in which natural, formal equality results in competitive violence, Hobbes’s state of nature is characterized by an unreflective asociality that exhausts itself in the struggle for survival. Though Hobbes continues to use spatial figuration in Leviathan, all three of his major political treatises also invoke a temporal model to suggest that the state of nature occupies an earlier, more primitive historical register than the more developed civil state. Further, as scholars are increasingly stressing, reliant as it is on rigorous subtraction, the state of nature is for Hobbes also an empirical reality.4 Not surprisingly, given the reports of natural a- or incivility circulating among his contemporaries in oral, visual, and written representations of the New



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World, “America” best exemplifies this wasteful, insecure state for Hobbes, sometimes allusively, sometimes explicitly, though Europeans, too, formerly lived in such a precivil condition. In Leviathan, Hobbes provides the single most influential early modern example of the notion that in presentday American “savages,” Europe encounters its contemporary ancestors. Temporality is foregrounded in the paragraph immediately preceding chapter 13’s central, best-known passage on the state of nature, where Hobbes elaborates the principle (appearing in Elements of Law and De Cive) that the experience of anxiously awaiting aggressive conflict is itself a feature of war: For warre, consisteth not in Battell onely, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the Will to contend by Battell is sufficiently known: and therefore the notion of Time, is to be considered in the nature of Warre; as it is in the nature of Weather. For as the nature of Foule weather, lyeth not in a showre or two of rain; but in an inclination thereto of many dayes together: So the nature of War, consisteth not in actuall fighting; but in the known disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is Peace. Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withall. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short. (1.13.62)

By including in his definition of war the “tract of time” in which hostilities are anticipated, Hobbes invites his readers—actually encourages them to take time—to experience imaginatively the dreaded loss of all the valued, familiar properties of civility should they live during the “time, wherein” (simulta­ neously a “tract of time” and a historical epoch) the productive possibilities of civilization are canceled by the fight for survival, no holds barred. The anaphoric no establishes its iterative pattern only gradually in this passage. Hobbes initially elaborates phrases, so that “no place for Industry”

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is causally and associatively linked by way of its “uncertain” “fruit” to “no Culture of the Earth”; “no Navigation” is immediately amplified by “nor” in “nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea”; and “no Instruments of moving” similarly amplified with “removing such things as require much force.” At this point, amplification is increasingly curtailed so that the pace of anaphoric negation picks up—acceleration that seems to mimic the ruthless despoliation of all civil goods. The resulting rhetorical privatio concludes with the spare “no Arts; no Letters; no Society,” negatives that increase the rhetorical force of negation’s absence in “continuall feare, and danger of violent death,” to say nothing of the goose-bump bare adjectives “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short” that modify the “life of man.” In illustrating his thesis that fearful anticipation is a component of war, every item Hobbes catalogs, from “no Culture of the Earth” through “no Society,” appears under the threatening clouds of pending annihilation. As a consequence of this temporal orientation, such features of the state of nature can, in turn, be associated with a threatened regression to an earlier, more primitive state. Hobbes goes on, in a passage to be discussed later in this chapter, explicitly to associate such regression with the condition of civil war, the ongoing threat of which he so often and vividly brings home to his readers, and elsewhere to the unregulated, hostile competitiveness of relations between states. More generally, though, the effect of Hobbes’s stress on temporality is to suggest that the state of nature is one from which civil society emerges but also one to which a commonwealth can at any time return if it does not take appropriate measures to establish a secure basis for itself in absolute sovereignty. Throughout Leviathan, civil society threatens to “return” to its primitive, natural state or to “relapse” into a condition of anarchy. Examination of iterative, rhetorical negation’s dual ancestry will clarify the distinctive relations Hobbes creates among the state of nature, a privative era, and the New World. In what follows, we will look at early modern instances of a privative age that whether “soft” or “hard,” utopian or dystopian, is projected onto an antecedent temporality. We will also reflect on how the notion that Western European nations left incivility behind ages ago interacts with the assumption that they are Greco-Roman civility’s rightful heirs, and thus peculiarly equipped to transmit the antique arts and knowledge that Christianity has refined to nations unable to govern themselves. Despite his antipathy to Greco-Roman antityrannicism and to his radical compatriots’ preoccupation with “liberty,” Hobbes not only shares



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but also exploits his culture’s assumptions about its privileged, civilized status. In the final section of this chapter, attention will be given the frontispieces designed for De Cive over a period that begins in 1642, as the En­ glish revolution was getting under way, and extends into the early stages of the Commonwealth, when Libertas is outfitted with a Dutch liberty cap.

The Golden-Edenic Privative Age Rhetorically patterned negation evoking a precivil era appears regularly in early modern representations of extra-European societies, unfamiliar features of which come to signify the absence of, and frequently the temporal anteriority to, more civilized formations. In Early Anthropology, Margaret Hodgen has shown that by the latter sixteenth century, patterned negation had become formulaic, its basic elements being, in her words, “ ‘no (or without) kings or magistrate, government, commonwealth, rule, commanders; no arts (or occupation); no traffic (or shipping, navigation); no husbandry (or agriculture, tillage, tilth, vineyards, sowing, or planting); no money (or no exchange, gold, riches); no weapons (no war, knives, pikes, swords, etc.); no clothes (naked); no marrying (no wedding, no respect of kindred); no bourne or bound (without waies or bounds).’ ”5 As this catalog indicates, the topos of a privative, precivil era acts as a remarkably compressed medium for negative cultural comparison while remaining elastic in its capacity to include new categories or items and to drop others.6 Hodgen presents formulaic negation as a neutral, nonevaluative convention. She does so, I assume, not because it actually gets used this way but out of awareness that formulaic privatio appears in both “soft” and “hard” versions of the privative age. I would like to develop the insight implicit in Hodgen’s presentation by exploring the interplay between immediate context and the affective claims of rhetorical negation when applied to an extra-European society. Despite its formulaic character, iterative negation’s rhetorical effects are variable and context-dependent. We will begin with the idealized privative age, which is more easily recognized because related to the golden age, the mythic first of the five ages mentioned by Hesiod and embellished by numerous later writers. That the topos of civil privation as used in the early modern period conventionally signals an earlier moment, developmentally, is largely owing to this ancestry, although, as will be seen, Cicero gives it a competing, equally notable lineage. Employed with reference to a primitive, blessedly trouble-free era, iter­ ative negation associates naturalness with the absence of civilization’s

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more oppressive features. In literary representations of the golden or Edenic age, negation serves to put under momentary erasure what becomes recognizably a sign of the present time’s degenerate badness the moment it is named. Ovid, for example, uses the evocative “lips with blood undy’d” when referring to the golden age, making the carnivorous practice of eating flesh distressing evidence of prior, more harmonious relations between human and nonhuman animals, relations now known only by contraries (in George Sandys’s 1626 translation): “Then Fowle through aire their wings in safetie ply’d: / The Hare, then fearelesse, wandred o’r the plaine; / Nor Fish by their credulitie were ta’ne.”7 Another influential passage in the Metamorphosis uses repetitive negation to catalog the golden age’s multitudinous absences, in the process conjuring up an originary condition of self-sufficient, naturally ordered peace: The Golden Age was first; which uncompeld, And without rule, in faith and Truth exceld. As then, there was nor punishment, nor feare; Nor threatening Lawes in brasse prescribed were; Nor suppliant crouching pris’ners shooke to see Their angrie Judge: but all was safe and free. To visit other Worlds, no wounded Pine Did yet from Hills to faithlesse Seas decline. Then, un-ambitious Mortals knew no more, But their owne Countrie’s Nature-bounded shore, Nor Swords, nor Armes were yet: no trenches round Besieged Townes, nor strifefull Trumpets sound: The Souldier, of no use. In firme content And harmlesse ease, their happy daies were spent. The yet-free Earth did of her owne accord (Untorne with ploughs) all sorts of fruit afford.; Content with Natures un-enforced food, They gather Wildings, Strawb’ries of the Wood, Sowre Cornels, what upon the Bramble growes, And Acornes, which Jove’s spreading Oke bestowes. (book 1, lines 89–118; my emphasis)8

The repetitive, almost incantatory negation that appears in this passage becomes a conventional feature of literary evocations of the golden age and, in Christian adaptations, of prelapsarian Eden. In idealizing textual appearances such as these, where the language of negation modifies attributes of a



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taken-for-granted, degraded present, the negatives of the golden age produce a singularly bittersweet Verfremdungseffekt. Animated by the phantasms of nostalgia, golden-Edenic discourse is often accompanied by defamiliarizing irony or satire, and thereby tends to function as does a double negative: the negatives logically (though not for readers experientially) cancel one another out, yielding a positive. Thus precariously poised, this vision is marked by the ineluctable movement of the blessed past into the tumultuous, civilized present: what once was is simultaneously, and threateningly, “not yet” (nondum, which appears twice in the Latin). When used to evoke a golden privative age, the early modern practice of double negation works to make privation signify natural simplicity and plenitude, including natural, ethico-spiritual innocence, limited as it must be in the absence of divine revelation. While such plenitude can appear outside the New World—a pithy example occurs in a mid-sixteenth-century text, The Fardle of Façions, on the ostensible absence of laws among the Brahmans: “Ther can no lawe appiere because none offence appeareth”9—it is, of course, a standard feature of early representations of the Americas. That attributes of the golden age or Eden could manifest themselves in an actual, earthly location is so utterly disorienting that simple wonder and longing—longing that often translates itself into a desire for commercial interchange and settlement—are the responses initially elicited by descriptions matching Ovid’s most closely.10 In his well-circulated text on the New World, Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, for example, explicitly invokes the golden age when stressing the love of liberty and absence of superfluous goods enjoyed by “inhabitants of these Islandes.” The accompanying catalog of privatives concludes with reiterated negation relating to law and concern for the future: “So that if we shall not be ashamed to confesse the truthe, they seeme to lyve in that goulden worlde of the whiche owlde wryters speake so much, wherein men lyved simplye and innocentlye without enforcement of lawes, without quarrelling, Judges, and libelles, contente onely to satisfie nature, without further vexation for knowledge of thinges to come.”11 Paradoxical double negation here benignly, halfheartedly, critiques the author’s own society, which sadly lacks such naturally harmonious social relations. At the same time, it completely obliterates Amerindigenous political and religious institutions; methods of social regulation; and practices, whether agricultural or hunting, oriented toward ecological sustainability. It also subtly infantilizes Amerindigenes in much the way the conventions of pastoral do its shepherds and goatherds: poor is as common in ethnographic as silly is in pastoral literature. Though it enables critique, and can

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challenge colonialist practices or assumptions, idealization of precivility also reinforces Euro-colonial hierarchies. A temporary, rhetorical inversion of bipolar relations between barbarism and civility or between simplicity and artificiality transparently projects its own positionality, its own, idealizing nostalgia and attendant critical, even satirical, edge. Influential instances of double negation appear in Las Casas’s Destruction of the Indies, the preface to which presents Americans as by nature without duplicity; without aggressive, antisocial impulses such as resentment or any hankering after revenge; as lacking not only material possessions but also acquisitive impulses; and as enjoying a diet equaling that of the Desert Fathers in its simplicity. In such instances, spiritual plenitude and natural abundance marry to shower natural, civil privation with paradisal blessings that are, coincidentally, precisely those of “primitive” Christianity: not-having becomes part of an exemplary, virtuous condition of not desiring what is harmful or inessential.12 Though Las Casas elsewhere uses ethnographic detail to represent Amerindigenes’ nations as self-governing, with their own, distinctive social and religious practices, in this text he foregrounds the tragic assault on their pristine innocence by tyrannous, greed-driven Spanish. The best-known idealizing instance of rhetorical privatio appears in Montaigne’s “Of the Caniballes,” where civil privation is again overtly associated with the fabled golden age. In this essay the negative language of privation signifies the ideal absence of the vices, corruption, and superfluity that “art” inevitably introduces into an “originall naturalitie”: It is a nation, would I answer Plato, that hath no kinde of traffike, no knowledge of Letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrate, nor of politike superioritie; no use of service, of riches or of povertie; no contracts, no successions, no partitions, no occupation but idle; no respect of kindred, but common, no apparel but naturall, no manuring of lands, no use of wine, corne, or mettle. The very words that import lying, falshood, treason, dissimulations, covetousness, envie, detraction, and pardon, were never heard of amongst them.13

Here the multiplying negatives effect a virtual cancellation of contemporaneous European social realities, clearing a space for mental transport to a simpler, more authentic way of life. Significantly, however, Montaigne does not place this nation outside a shared, human history, instead associating it with ancient Israel (regarding polygamy, their wives are compared to Leah, Rachel, and Sarah, who generously promoted their husbands’ honor



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by sponsoring additional sexual partners), ancient Greece, and Rome (ibid., pp. 254–55). Although such analogies with familiar, ancient cultures continue to project Amerindigenes into a disjunctive past, they have the comparatively pacific effect of including them in a single, comprehensive human history. A similar dynamic operates in the much-cited passage from The Tempest, where Gonzalo, referencing the golden age, envisions planting a commonwealth “by contraries”:

for no kind of traffic

Would I admit; no name of magistrate; Letters should not be known; riches, poverty, And use of service, none; contract, succession, Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none; No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil; No occupation, all men idle, all, And women too, but innocent and pure; No sovereignty— (2.1.145–54)

Though Shakespeare is clearly indebted to “Of the Caniballes” for specific phrases of this speech, we need not assume that Montaigne is Shakespeare’s only source, given the prevalence of negative comparison in travel or ethnographic literature at the time.14 Even more than the patterned language they share, these examples of early modernism’s golden privative age are joined by their ironic critique of contrasting, present-day realities. If Gonzalo’s speech is too parodic to open up idealized vistas, its very inability to do so encourages the casting of a severely disenchanted gaze on the fictive island’s far from harmonious communities—a gaze much like the one Montaigne’s readers are to give the self-satisfied certainties of barbarously war-torn, present-day France. It may be safe to say that in the early modern era, owing to its golden age genealogy but also to conventions that become established early on, idealizing use of iterative negation with reference to a privative age includes, gestures toward, or leads to ironic or satiric reflections on the author’s own society. Of course, idealization can occur by other means, and a given passage need not consistently idealize the society in question to produce ironic or satiric effects. Then, too, some representations of the privative age invite mixed, often conflicted, responses to signs that a society lacks civility and the Christianity that ought to accompany it. The following passage from Thomas Harriot’s A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia,

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for example, switches suddenly from an ambivalently positive to an openly negative evaluation of privation: Dowbtless yt is a pleasant sighte to see the people, sometimes wadinge, and goinge sometimes sailinge in those Rivers, which are shallowe and not deepe, free from all care of heaping opp Riches for their posterite, content with their state, and livinge frendlye together of those thinges which god of his bountye hath given unto them, yet without givinge hym any thankes according to his desarte. So savage is this people, and deprived of the true knowledge of god.15

Conveying a conventionally satiric jibe at the greed-driven, civilized present, the phrase “heaping opp Riches for their posterite” also calls attention to the absence of concern for the future that is commonly assigned aboriginal societies (and which in Hobbes is evidence of defective rationality). With the turn at “yet without givinge hym any thankes,” the uneasiness such perfect contentment is to stir up in readers (a disapproving distance is dictated by “Dowbtless yt is a pleasant sighte”) can righteously discharge itself in judgment on the absence of true religious knowledge and worship.

Cicero’s Savage Age The “savage” counterpart to the golden privative age associated with the New World is, if anything, more prevalent in Euro-colonial literature but has not clearly been identified, partly because its genealogy has been obscured. Surprisingly, in their magisterial exploration of ancient and early modern primitivism, Lovejoy and Boas do not include Cicero’s De Inventione even though, well known throughout medieval and early modern Christendom, it includes a highly influential story of civilization’s emergence from an earlier, asocial condition. In Cicero’s fable, a charismatic leader effects the momentous transition to civilization by inspiring people who live in a mobile, animallike condition to enter one that is settled, socially organized, and productive. Here, as with the golden age, an earlier, primitive era is conjured up by a catalog of privatives: For there was a time when men wandered at large in the fields like animals and lived on wild fare; they did nothing by the guidance of reason, but relied chiefly on physical strength; there was as yet [nondum; my emphasis] no ordered system of religious worship nor of social duties; no one had seen legitimate marriage nor had anyone looked upon children



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whom he knew to be his own; nor had they learned the advantages of an equitable code of law.16

Like the golden, Cicero’s precivil age is marked by absence. Here, though, civilization itself has gone missing. Compared with the poignant regret awakened by loss of the golden age’s harmonies, distress is the affect aroused by this era’s privations: lacking is everything of value to a normatively human society. Unlike the pleasing social order of the golden age, Cicero’s primitive condition lacks even rudimentary social formations such as meals, religion, families, and habitations. Brute strength or force—the contrary of the rational persuasion practiced by the civilizing outsider— reigns uncontested. Thanks to Cicero’s charismatic figure, this condition does not last. The privative era Cicero depicts is clearly precivil or savage because the boundary between human and animal—the boundary taken to be foundational to human society in Greek and Roman politico-philosophical traditions— has not yet been instituted. In Cicero’s brief fable, humans differentiate themselves from animals only when reason and eloquence intervene from without. The charismatic outsider who brings about this transformation recruits the reason and eloquence he instantiates to a civilizing end, inaugurated when he persuades precivil nomads to form a cohesive social unit. Perceiving their latent potential, he also instructs them in useful occupations. Though initially resisting their induction into civility (“[T]hey cried out against it at first because of its novelty,” Cicero says), his rapt auditors eventually become civil, gentle people. Unlike the golden age, which is one of a series of interconnected ages, the Ciceronian savage age is the polar opposite of the civil era that supersedes it. Referring to this passage, Richard Tuck argues that Cicero’s sharp division of natural from civil orders is central to theories of natural rights introduced by early modern humanist legal and political theorists.17 Tuck’s argument can be extended by stressing the immense attractiveness of this passage as an epitome of Euro-colonialism’s civilizing enterprise, which must proceed toward its successful ending even if those who are not yet civilized resist. Cicero’s story reinforces the otherwise problematical conception of rights as at once natural and universal yet for some nations properly exercised only within a recognizably European civil order. At the same time, it has obvious merits for opponents of popular sovereignty’s glorification of natural freedom such as Hobbes. Understandably, De Inventione most often appears in discussions of early modern humanism’s fascination with classical rhetoric. Yet selective

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attention to Cicero’s influence on early modern education helps to perpetuate what Peter Rose calls the “structured silences” of Cicero’s rhetorical practice in relation to Roman imperialism. Like other scholars of ancient Rome, Rose relates the dissolution of the Republic to its imperial expansionism, which permits opportunistic generals to undermine the late Republic’s increasingly depoliticized, internally competitive oligarchy.18 It is a mistake, Rose argues, to regard Cicero as an advocate of Rome’s republican ideals against the destructive forces unleashed by its imperialism. Through carefully contextualized analyses, Rose demonstrates precisely how Cicero, “far from being the perspicacious and heroic defender of Republican freedom was from one end of his career to the other fully complicitous in the contradictions that destroyed the Republic.”19 In De Provinciis Cicero formulates a defense of preemptive aggression against Gallic barbarians that is especially pertinent. Praising Caesar for his determination to put a stop to any resistance against their Roman rulers the barbarous provincials might in the future devise, Cicero refers to the barbarians as “men unknown to us or known only as wild, savage and warlike—tribes which no one who ever lived would not wish to see crushed and subdued.” As Rose points out, this rationalization of conquest contradicts Cicero’s earlier representation of Rome’s empire as harmoniously administered for the good of its ostensible allies.20 Cicero’s endorsement of conquest does, though, suit his adaptation of Aristotle’s doctrine of natural slavery in the third book of De Republica (lost, which makes Augustine’s recording of this passage in The City of God the only source).21 Cicero’s indebtedness to Aristotle’s doctrine has been observed—Anthony Pagden points out its profound importance to modern ideologies of empire22—but not his transposition of Aristotle’s doctrine from the household to the state, which seriously compounds the already complex category of natural slave. We have seen that Aristotle’s use of figurative political slavery in Politics is overdetermined in its implication of barbaroi. Yet while Aristotle is confident that Asiatic barbarians are as a whole naturally predisposed to political servility, his primary discussion of intellectual deficiency as a disabling condition requiring rule by a master takes places in book 1 with reference to the individual household. It is this incapacity that makes for the natural slave. By contrast, Cicero introduces his version of natural slavery in a discussion of the justice or injustice of imperial expansion in the conquest of entire societies, specifically, of course, “barbarians” or “provincials.” That empire be extended over certain naturally slavish people is not unjust, Cic­ ero argues, because to be ruled is beneficial for them. Done properly, con-



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quest removes the “right to do injury” from “wicked people,” thereby doing them and their victims a service. Cicero’s reflections appear only in a fragmentary manner, so it is not clear whether the conquerors administer corrective or preventative justice. In either case, Cicero’s inclusion of natural slaves in connection with just war doctrine differs from Aristotle’s defense of chattel slavery in two ways: first, as mentioned, it situates enslavement in a transnational rather than domestic or civil arena; and, second, it postulates dangerous transgressiveness or criminality rather than, as Aristotle does, deficient humanity as a signifier of natural slavishness. With its emphasis on uncontrolled wickedness, Cicero’s adaptation of Aristotle’s views on natural slavery is available for just war doctrine as well as for the Christianized conceptions of penal justice that insidiously inform it. Though distinct from the rhetorically patterned negation used in De Inventione, Cicero’s nationalization of natural slavery can also easily be accommodated to depictions of a savage, privative age. For these reasons it is important to early modern Euro-colonialism, which locates barbarous violations of natural law and natural slavery at the level of the nation. Cic­ ero’s authority is great, but this passage is perhaps more authoritative than most because cited by Augustine. Cicero’s view that certain people, given to injurious wickedness, need to be conquered—reduced to “slaves” with appropriate “masters”—by those who are properly civilized easily falls into step with the notion that certain nations (formerly the ungodly “heathen nations” vilified in Scripture) suffer a supplementary form of the heritable penalty known as Original Sin.

Savagery and the Euro-Colonial Privative Age In “hard” versions of the privative age, not-having or not-doing become the defining features of the society being disparaged. Critique does not complicate the hierarchical relationship between European and extra-European societies in representations of a savage privative age. The most consequential instance of this ideological formation is the doctrine that uncultivated land is res nullius, which thereby legitimately becomes the possession of those who cultivate it.23 Marked solely by negation, land used for hunting and gathering rather than agriculture—agriculture, when practiced, is nearly always ignored—is said to be empty in lacking not only cultivation but also permanent residences. A contemporary of Hobbes, Anthony Ascham, categorizes lands over which people roam under the heading “Civill vacancy,” from which he concludes “[T]his is a cleere case for all Planters, that those wastes, or asperi montes, which the Natives make no use of, nor

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can receive any damage by their being possest by others, may be lawfully impropriated by them.”24 Derogatory use of iterative negation to evoke a privative age appears in 1436 with reference to the Guanches of the Canary Islands, whose enslavement helped to prepare the way for Portuguese trafficking expeditions to West Africa. Humbly protesting the papal prohibition against the colonization of the Canary Islands, King Duarte I of Portugal represents their inhabitants so as to encourage Pope Eugenius IV to intervene: The nearly wild men who inhabit the forests are not united by a common religion, nor are they bound by the chains of law, they are lacking normal social intercourse, living in the country like animals. They have no contact with each other by sea, no writing, no kind of money or metal. They have no houses and no clothing except for coverlets of palm leaves or goat skins which are worn as an outer garment by the most honoured men.25

Although the palm leaves and goatskins in the concluding sentence are to lend Duarte’s account ethnographic authenticity, its emphasis on animalistic, asocial vagrancy recalls De Inventione, to which it is likely indebted. That the lack of marine travel—in the golden age a mark of respect for natural limits—signifies a natural incapacity for civility shows how intent on diagrammatic dehumanization the “savage” privative age can become. In 1612, stopping at the Cape, the English Ralph Standish applies the same formula—substituting without for no—to its African inhabitants, who appear similarly undeserving of the fertile land they leave waste. Standish presents them as “bruitt and savadg, without Religion, without language, without Lawes or government, without manners or humanittee, and last of all without apparell, for they go naked save onelie a pees of a Sheepes Skyn to cover their Members.”26 (Note also use of the “save onelie” formula.) Iterative negation’s animalization sometimes turns into an outright denial that people living in the New World or Africa are fully human. This occurs in the famous debate between Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda on the question of whether it is just to use force in converting Amerindigenes to Christianity. In arguing the affirmative, Sepúlveda employs patterned negation in a wholly pejorative manner. Derisively referring to Americans as homunculi, a term suggesting not only diminutive stature but also artificial origins, Sepúlveda insists that Amerindigenes lack the rationality and dignity of the Europeans with whom he contrasts them. Eulogizing Europeans’ “wit, magnanimity, temperance, humanity and religion,” Sepúlveda



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says of the homunculi: “Scarcely a trace of humanity can be discovered in them. They not only have no learning but do not even use or know letters; they retain no monuments of great deeds (apart from an obscure memory of some things, consigned to pictures), no written laws but certain customs and barbarous manners.”27 At this point Sepúlveda leaves negation to vituperate the animality evident in barbarous practices such as cannibalism and continuous warfare. Numerous instances of dehumanizing iterative negation could be provided. So adaptable is the dystopian version of the privative age topos that it can apply to Africans, the Irish, Turkish infidels, or Amerindigenes, among others.28 In Touching an Holy War, Bacon has Martius argue that the Turks are more barbarous than other pagans or infidels. Comparing them with the more socially and culturally developed Peruvians and Mexicans, Martius characterizes the Turks as: A Heap of Vassals, and Slaves: No Nobles, No Gentlemen, No Free-men, No Inheritance of land, No Stirp or Ancient Families: A People that is without Natural Affection, and, as the Scripture saith, that Regardeth not the desires of Women. And without Piety or Care towards their Children: a Nation without Morality, without Letters, Arts, or Sciences; That can scarce measure an Acre of Land, or an Houre of the Day: Base and Sluttish in Buildings, Diets, and the like: And, in a word, A very Reproach of Humane Societie.29

The marshaling of known, civil goods under the anaphoric no and without aims at a comprehensive disapprobation comparable to that later achieved by Hobbes, though here ostensibly with reference to a single society. Designating the entire populace a “Heap of Vassals, and Slaves,” the opening sentence calls attention to the absence of a ruling class. If the absence of “Nobles,” “Gentlemen,” and “Free-men” were merely to reinforce the random, disorderly aggregation suggested by Heap, this privation might not be more noteworthy than any other. It would recall Smith’s claim about mere geographical aggregation: “For properly an host of men is not called a common wealth.”30 But lack of an elite stratum likely revisions Aristotle’s reflections on barbarism in Politics, where the absence of “natural rulers” is evidence of natural political slavery (1252b5–7). The Turks, too, then, are essentially a collectivity of natural “Vassals, and Slaves.” The catalog of privatives that follows amplifies this opening claim, which in context develops into the proposition that “where there is an heap of people (though we term it a kingdom or state) that is altogether unable or indign to govern,

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there it is a just cause of war for another nation, that is civil or policed, to subdue them.” In this argument, where reasoning “in the privative” foregrounds the justice of preemptive war, force is needed to establish political order for those who allegedly cannot themselves create it. Such reasoning also promotes quasi-juridical justifications of offensive war. As it emerged in early modern international law, the conception of a common, universal humanity subject to a single, juridical standard—which one might naïvely expect to encourage impartiality—often rationalized Euro-colonial aggression by positioning nations that were “civil or policed” as judges and executioners of the law of nature or nations.31 In the context of European expansion, and under this ideological pressure, both natural law and jus gentium took on something of the positivity of civil law, though it was government officials and militia who interpreted, policed, and enforced them. Even so, juridical language and sensationalist, racialized portrayals of subhuman behavioral norms are more common than fully fledged theorization of a right to punish. Vitoria, for example, concludes that the only violation of natural law for which the Amerindigenes can be prosecuted in a just war is the inhospitable defense of their lands. Yet in the process of reaching this decision, Vitoria repeatedly uses privative formulations to depict Amerindigenes as less than fully human practitioners of incest, sodomy, cannibalism, and human sacrifice, all of which violate natural law; he also often suggests they are naturally if not legally slaves.32 In the late sixteenth century, Alberico Gentili, professor of civil law at Oxford, approves Spain’s military aggression against the Amerindigenes, whose violations of normative human nature place them on a par with beasts, against whom war is legitimate.33 But even bestialization may not go far enough. Arguing that some nations “are occupants de Facto, and not de Iure, of their Territories, in respect of the Nullity, of their Policy, or Government,” Bacon’s speaker in the concluding section of Touching an Holy War introduces pirates, monsters, and foreign tyrants as examples of “Communes Humani Generis Hostes”—the enemies of humankind whom it has long been regarded as a human duty to “prosecute.”34 Approved, it is implied, by Greek and Roman authorities, the necessity of eliminating enemies of humankind lies beyond dispute, so much so that Locke, too, assumes it. As sanctioned by jus gentium in Roman jurisprudence, the captor’s provisional, discretionary power to kill or to enslave his captives takes place on the battlefield, not in the court. Yet insofar as war slavery doctrine is bound up with just war doctrine, it, too, easily gets caught up in the vast, sticky web cast by juridical reasoning in the privative. Having cited Ro-



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man jurists on the victors’ right to everything belonging to the defeated enemy, including its people, for example, Vitoria adds that the prince who wages a just war “becomes ipso jure the judge of the enemy, and may punish them judicially and sentence them according to their offence.”35 This rationalization of slavery prompts Bodin to take war slavery doctrine to the courtroom, where, if a war is either just or unjust, he argues, the doctrine can only result in manifest injustice: the vanquished in a just war should rightly be punished, while in an unjust war they ought to go free. To sidestep such difficulties, Grotius and Hobbes both represent the captor’s power in nonjuridical terms, though Grotius sketches in a socioeconomic context for the victor’s decision making. Locke, however, awkwardly annexes war slavery doctrine to a juridical right to punish, and is thereby perhaps more representative of Euro-colonialist ideology. Tension between strictly military and penal constructions of servitude appears in a little-known text, A New Survey of the West-Indies by Thomas Gage, who became an important adviser to Cromwell in planning the Western Design.36 In one of many mininarratives, Gage recounts Cortés’s defeat by the Tepeacacs, allies of the Mexicans and Culhuacans, who, having repulsed Cortés, abducted twelve of the vanquished Spaniards “and sacrificed them alive to their Idols and eat their flesh.” Cortés gets several chiefs from another nation to assist him in avenging these deaths (which are, however, in keeping with war slavery as jus gentium), and with them confronts the Tepeacacs, demanding that they “now yield themselves to the obedience of the Emperour and King of Spain his Master.” The Tepeacacs refuse, arguing that they had slain the invading Spaniards “for good and just cause” since they were entering their country without permission, and threatening the Spaniards with the same fate unless they clear out. Cortés, Gage says, continues to seek peace but, when the Tepeacacs remain recalcitrant, wages war and defeats them, losing not a single one of his men.37 There are two accounts of what happens next, Gage says, but they both reduce the Tepeacacs to some kind of slavery. In the first, Cortés sentences the towns that had been privy to the murders to perpetual captivity and enslavement, while in the second, which criminalizes the Tepeacacs alone, Cortés “corrected them for their disobedience, being Sodomites, Idolaters and eaters of mans flesh, and chiefly for example of all others. And in conclusion, they were condemned for slaves.” Regarding the right to punish, there is not much to choose. The victorious Cortés holds the power to kill or to enslave, yet his office appears to be juridical. In Gage’s narrative, Cortés the vengeance seeker is gradually refashioned into a failed peacekeeper and then an executioner of the law of nature whose life-determining

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judgments are made on impersonal, juridical grounds. Gage deplores the erroneous beliefs popery inculcates in Amerindigenes but clearly approves of the way Cortés has “pacified” the entire province by the end of the battle, and extols the civilizing effects of Spanish conquest. In more than one instance, colonization has made “people who formerly had been eaters of Mans flesh, now as civill and politick, as loving and courteous as any in this rode.”38 By the mid-seventeenth century, the time Gage writes, it is a commonplace that large-scale violations of natural law occur in a privative, precivil age. It also seems obvious that natural law, divinely authored, is fully legible only to European Christians, whose confessional differences often do not matter in contexts such as this, as they would detract from Western Christendom’s authoritative stance vis-à-vis ostensibly universal, natural laws. Of the justifications of this stance that have been given over the centuries of European rule, those emphasizing privation are perhaps most pernicious because least conspicuously self-serving. This makes it all the more crucial to situate the “hard” privative age in a network of conventions that tie precivility to an incapacity for self-rule.

Ancestral Liberties, Inherited Freedom We will now turn to conventions that support Europe’s corresponding selfconstruction as an older, wiser exemplar of civility, having long ago outgrown the privative age. Of what is this self-construction comprised? One major component is early modern Western Europe’s self-representation as ancient Greece and Rome’s natural heir. So widely known as a marker of European identity as to seem barely worth mentioning, this inheritance not only enhances the value but also indirectly establishes the antiquity of European civility. Another is silent reschematization of Aristotle’s tripartite division of the human race. In the service of further securing Western Europe’s civil maturity, early moderns pull Greece into Western Europe’s geopolitical boundaries (not the natural home it has been made to seem) and assign themselves the very position Greece formerly held. The inhabitants of European Christendom, now Greece’s cultural heirs, therefore hold the honor of being the only people to exercise their love of freedom in governing themselves by law and consequently the only people fit to govern others. In a comment made with reference to 1 Samuel 8, Buchanan asserts that “the peoples of Asia are more servile in spirit than Europeans.”39 Though done so subtly as almost to escape notice, Buchanan here rewrites Aristotle’s tripartite division of humanity. In Aristotle’s schema, the Greeks alone are capable of both self-rule and ruling others, while Asiatic barbarians, though



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clever, are prone to servility, and the highly spirited Europeans lack the intelligence requisite for self-rule. In his matter-of-fact revision, Buchanan does not reject Aristotle’s schema—regarding natural servility, Asians are still badly off—but he does ignore Aristotle’s distinction between Greeks and Europeans, thereby casually supplanting Aristotle’s tripartite division with a polarity between Asians and Europeans, who have inconspicuously incorporated “Greeks.” Or to put this another way, the “Greeks” have been rechristened “Europeans” to honor the status Europeans now enjoy as heirs of the simultaneously spirited and intelligent Greeks. This revisioning suits early modern visual representations of the world’s four continents—America, Asia, Africa, and Europe—in which Europe regularly appears as the undisputed ruler of the other three. Buchanan is not alone in reconfiguring Aristotle’s schema. Despite his critique of Aristotle’s orientalist barbarism and his unwillingness to disparage Asiatic, “lordly,” absolutism, Bodin occasionally relies on classical Greek biases. When explaining why “royal” is to be preferred to “lordly” monarchy, for example, Bodin mentions that the lordly rule practiced by Persian and other Asiatic kings was rejected by nations “instructed in civility.” In a similar assertion, Europeans are contrasted with both Africans and Asians: “[T]he people of Europe more couragious, and better souldiers then the people of Africke or Asia, could never endure the lordly Monarques.”40 In statements such as this, Bodin basically reworks Aristotle’s pejorative view of European spiritedness so that it becomes the basis for an instinctive, natural resistance to “lordly Monarques” shared with ancient Greece and Rome. Although it does not always appear in such lucid, propositional form, this transvaluation of European spiritedness works its way into many representations of European fitness for rule. Add-ons to the category of naturally servile Asians are not infrequent. Like Buchanan, Milton, for example, joins 1 Samuel 8 to Aristotle’s distinction between good and tyrannous rule, associated with Asiatic barbarism: “[G]enerally the people of Asia,” Milton begins, “and with them the Jews also, especially since they chose a King against the advice and counsel of God, are noted by wise Authors much inclinable to slavery.”41 Given the allusion to 1 Samuel 8, the English word slavery here clearly references internal, political slavery, to which Europeans, like ancient Greeks, are naturally averse. Milton’s addition of Jews may also suggest that Christianity is in part responsible for Europe’s alignment with its Greco-Roman forbears, though the anti-Judaism of this passage may owe something to Cicero as one of its unnamed “wise Authors.”42 Bodin’s pairing of “Africke” and “Asiatics” is more common, though.

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In his Cosmographie in four books (1652), Peter Heylyn mentions in one breath “the effeminateness of the Asiaticks, or the crueltie or implacableness of the African Nations.”43 Later in the seventeenth century, in a treatise whose antityrannicism shares much with Locke’s, Algernon Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government presents the tenet that human “Liberty” consists in being ruled only by laws to which consent has been given as the principle in which the Grecians, Italians, Spaniards, Gauls, Germans, and Britains, and all other generous Nations ever lived, before the name of Christ was known in the World; insomuch that the base effeminate Asiaticks and Africans, for being careless of their Liberty, or unable to govern themselves, were by Aristotle and other wise men called Slaves by Nature, and looked upon as little different from Beasts.44

For his catalog of “generous” European nations, individually named, Sidney brings pre-Christian Athenians and Romans in under the names of “Grecians” and “Italians.” At the same time, Sidney rewrites Aristotle and other unnamed “wise men” by claiming that Africans, too, are “Slaves by Nature.” By adding “Africans” to the “effeminate Asiaticks” whose internal, political self-governance is at issue, Sidney reproduces Aristotle’s slippery, double encoding of slavery. Though political rule is Sidney’s ostensible topic, cues relating to chattel slavery—the very term Slaves by Nature as well as the dehumanization of “little different from beasts”—dominate the concluding clauses, where “Africans” are the last mentioned. One of the things Spaniards, Gauls, Germans, and Britains have in common is their history as former Roman colonies. Even where aspects of Romanization were apparently resisted, pride is taken in the civility it bequeathed. For the early modern English, what galls is memory of the “Norman Yoke,” or the Roman papacy’s yoke, not necessarily that imposed by ancient Rome.45 As it gathers momentum over the revolutionary era, English protest against the “Norman Yoke” is accompanied by passionate defenses of England’s “ancient liberties.” The antiquity of these liberties is slightly ambiguous. On the one hand, gesturing to a pre-Norman, sometimes pre-Roman, past, appeal to “ancient liberties” evokes something of the primitive, naturally feisty character that the ancient Greeks and Romans attribute to Europeans. On the other hand, these ancient—or often “ancestral”—liberties are almost invariably plural. Where “liberty” usually has the potential to decline into its bitterly reviled, nasty cousin “license,” “liberties” gesture toward privileges that are secured by law. Metonymically, the “liberties” are the very laws that guarantee individual, civil,



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and national liberty, thereby making the English “free.” Even if currently threatened, these liberties are, or ought to be, ineradicable, not just because they are natural but on account of their revered history, sanctioned and bound up with the ordered civility of the ancients. Ancient liberties have a collective, increasingly national, identity, an identity with a history that includes civilization by Rome. In the course of the seventeenth century, liberty becomes an attribute of England as a whole, one that often appears as a collective, legal status that is natural, inalienable, and also, significantly, hereditary. Ancestral liberties help legitimate the claim that the English are “freeborn.” While in ancient Greece or Rome such a modifier would indicate the citizenry’s actual legal standing, in seventeenth-century England it is primarily a figure of speech: the “freeborn” have no “slaveborn” English counterparts. Rhetorically, proclamations that the English are “freeborn” often emerge in antityrannicism’s polemical assault on tyrannous rule in its treatment of citizens as “slaves.” Initially, the national basis of this freeborn status most frequently appears in contexts where this degradation is being challenged or, more positively, where the commonwealth’s consensual basis is being affirmed. Thomas Fairfax, for instance, claims that the violence recently done to Parliament by Charles I has been done “in that to all the freeborne Subjects of England that are or hereafter shall be.”46 Gradually, though, the heritability of this “free” status becomes a commonplace. Laudatory allusions to “ancient” liberties—as well as to the “ancient” constitution whose importance J. G. A. Pocock has memorialized—accompany England’s self-representation as a “free” nation whose members are “freeborn.”47 Genealogically, the term freeborn gestures to the legally heritable status enjoyed by individual Greeks and Romans. Transposed to the national plane, the English are “free” or “freeborn” not only because they have preserved a naturally spirited, precivil love of freedom and do not permit the enslavement of citizens but also because they are a people with history, a history that includes their former conquest and acculturation by Rome. Without necessarily denying that England formerly may have had barbarous ways, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers of all political persuasions are generally eager to emphasize England’s aptitude for civility as well as the history involving the creation of its own charters, jurisprudence, and laws. The notion that freedom is heritable on a national level has affective power that far exceeds overt, propositional formulations. Widely disseminated during the English Civil Wars, hereditary freedom becomes a common, national treasure during the very period when heritable chattel slavery is becoming entrenched in English colonies.

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Yet freedom is also represented as a “birthright,” which means it has Hebraic as well as Greco-Roman ancestry. For example, The Humble Remonstrance of 1641 is prefaced with the claim that “the Rights and Priviledges of Parliament are the Birth-right and Inheritance not onely of themselves, but of the whole Kingdome.”48 The term birthright is most popularly known by the story of Esau’s selling to Jacob his birthright, meaning the set of entitlements customarily granted the firstborn son. Despite their very different genealogies, birthright and freeborn are often used interchangeably to signify heritable, national liberty, the value of which is partly owing to their restricted, exclusionary character. Heritable, national liberty is also enhanced by the fact that chattel slavery had no basis in En­ glish common law and continued to lack any jurisprudential foundation long after it was institutionalized as a set of practices in England’s colonies. To an extent, England’s self-representation as a nation of the “free” could be said to substitute for the jurisprudential reasoning unavailable regarding the hereditary enslavement installed in Atlantic plantations. At the least, once conceptualized as hereditary, freedom as a national good contributes to a shared perception of essential, racialized differences between the English and the Africans enslaved in their colonies. Its ideological power appears in the debate that took place in 1659 regarding a petition Marcellus Rivers and Oxenbridge Foyle present to Parliament, addressed as “the representative of the freeborn people of England.”49 Accused of participating in a royalist rising against Cromwell, the English Rivers and Foyle claim to have been sold into “slavery” in Barbados. By this time, the practice of coercively transporting political prisoners and other undesirables (notably the Irish) to the colonies, and to Barbados in particular, was in decline owing to increases in the abduction, trade, and importation of Africans. The involuntary servitude that British outcasts endured was usually extremely harsh, besides being in some respects like chattel slavery. Yet because it was, in theory if not always in practice, limited in duration by contract, it was a form of “white” servanthood that was differentiated from slavery as a permanent, irremediable condition, associated with the Africans who had no expectation or means of terminating their captivity.50 In referring to their condition as “slavery,” Rivers and Foyle exploit knowledge of this differential racialization of servants and slaves together with England’s self-identification as a “free” nation of “freeborn” citizens, identities paradoxically secured by the volley of invective against political slavery discharged during the revolution. As it is recorded, discussion of their petition inspires passionate defense of liberty as an ancestral, national



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entitlement. “Our ancestors,” one speaker declares, “have ever been tender of the liberties of Englishmen,” while another declaims, “Our ancestors left us free men. If we have fought our sons into slavery, we are of all men most miserable.” Another proudly claims, “We are the freest people in the world.” Christian and Greco-Roman identities are syncretized by a speaker who reminds his auditors of “Paul’s case,” an allusion to Acts 22:25, where Paul asserts his status as a free Roman in order to challenge the centurion about to beat him. “A Roman ought not to be beaten,” this speaker asserts, and then says, “We are miserable slaves, if we may not have this liberty secured to us.” Agreeing with him, another speaker says that if this encroachment on English liberty is ignored, “our lives will be as cheap as those negroes.”51 Accused of having sold the two Englishmen, Mr. Noell says in his defense that the service is not all that hard: “The work is mostly carried on by the negroes.”52 The petitioners themselves protest the “arbitrary power” that was used to sell them into slavery, and warn that a like “unlimited power” could at any time be used against any of the English, as currently happens “amongst the cruel Turks, to sell and enslave those of their own country.”53 This is the language of antityrannicism. Sir Henry Vane takes this protest against arbitrary rule to be an expression of solidarity with “the old cause”54—understandably, because though aggrieved at the loss of their personal liberty, the petitioners protest intrastate political power, not the arbitrary power of slaveholders. Not once do the petitioners refer to Barbados’s steadily growing population of enslaved Africans, though they would daily have experienced its manifold repercussions. Preserving their distance from those who were actually enslaved, the two royalists spark a debate the emergent, transatlantic context of which liberates references to ancestral liberties and freeborn English from partisan loyalties to the “old cause.” A decade earlier, the eminent royalist Henry Hammond had grudgingly acknowledged that the political subject may have to be considered free when he drops the parenthetical “(call it Subjects or Free-mans)” into his protest against the impending trial and execution of Charles I.55 No longer attached to political radicalism, the notion of national, hereditable liberty is one of the lasting legacies of the English revolution.

Hobbes’s State of Nature and Libertas This could not but displease Hobbes, as for him such “liberty” misleadingly conflates personal and interstate freedom. “[B]y the specious name of Libertie,” Hobbes instructs readers, people are led to “mistake that for

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their Private Inheritance, and Birth right, which is the right of the Publique only” (2.21.110). Hobbes’s theorization of sovereignty systematically undercuts antityranny ideology in order to demystify its discourse on liberty. Hobbes rejects Aristotle’s conceptualization of tyranny along with his barbarization of Asiatic societies, critiques the Greco-Roman association of monarchy with tyranny and slavery, and rejects the polarity of free/unfree that underwrites antityranny ideology. For Hobbes, it makes no sense to speak of civil subjects as freeborn or of liberty as an individual or national birthright. True, everyone in the state of nature enjoys natural freedom. But such freedom leads only to anarchic conflict. The whole point of entering civil society is to renegotiate the terms on which individual liberty can be exercised. Once civil society is instituted, Hobbes argues, liberty becomes a matter of whatever is legally permitted by the state (with the exception of bodily self-defense, which is not relinquished). In another passage from chapter 21 that has received much attention, Hobbes takes his demystification of liberty further by claiming that the liberty possessed in the state of nature is the same as that which one state holds vis-à-vis other states: a lawless interstate war of each against each. The Athenians and Romans were “free,” Hobbes provocatively claims, as if it were an indisputable truth, only in the sense that their sovereign representative “had the Libertie to resist, or invade other people.”56 In my view, commentators may not have taken the full measure of Hobbes’s aim here, which is to deny the very existence of the intrastate collective, political liberty and slavery treasured by antityrannicism. In this astonishingly tendentious proclamation, Greco-Roman liberty applies only to the individual and the nation, both of which Hobbes represents as maximally given to the pursuit of momentary gain. Significantly, Hobbes demonstrates this claim by recurring to the iterative negation he used in chapter 13: For as amongst masterless men there is perpetuall war, of every man against his neighbour; no inheritance, to transmit to the Son, nor to expect from the Father; no propriety of Goods, or Lands; no security; but a full and absolute Libertie in every Particular man: So in States, and Common-wealths not dependent on one another, every Commonwealth, (not every man) has an absolute Libertie, to doe what it shall judge (that is to say, what that Man, or Assemblie that representeth it, shall judge) most conducing to their benefit. But withal, they live in the condition of a perpetuall war, and upon the confines of battle, with their frontiers armed, and canons planted against their neighbours. (2.21.110, my emphasis)



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Inserted, briefly, between the anarchic ferocity of privative personal and interstate liberty, what Hobbes calls “the right of the Publique”—what for antityrannicism would be intrastate political liberty—is held by the “Common-wealth” (that is, the “Man” or “Assemblie” who represents it) only insofar as it is not subject to another state. Written out of the script is the complex interplay between intra- and interstate freedom and slavery that enabled freedom as a positive value to appear in classical Athens and that currently facilitates England’s emergence as a major colonial power. Hobbes’s pretense, here, is that contemporary radicals confuse individual personal freedom and individual political freedom (in the phrase “not every man”), whereas he is blankly refusing to recognize the collective political liberty asserted by antityranny discourse. Hobbes programmatically focuses attention on the individual, a rhetorical strategy that is frequently reproduced by modern commentators. In the passage above, the two references to a collective—“masterless men” and “States, and Common-wealths”—both precede a reference to “perpetuall war.” Hobbes makes use of the plural only in order to open up a collective space for intensely chaotic and destructive one-on-one conflict. The designation “masterless men” suggests that human beings in the state of nature share the condition assigned the Turks in the passage by Bacon cited above or the Amerindigenes in “hard” versions of the privative age: without knowing it, they are natural servi in need of being ruled. Without overtly advocating colonial expansion, Hobbes works with many Euro-colonialist assumptions, just as despite his wholesale rejection of radicalism’s glamorized liberty, Hobbes inventively revisions resistance’s theory’s contractualism so as to make sovereignty by institution a creative act of communal self-fashioning and the sovereign representative an artificial construct. To specify the distinctiveness of Hobbes’s appropriation of Euro-colonialist discourse, we need to return to chapter 13 of Leviathan, where Hobbes observes evidence of the state of nature in the daily lives of contemporary Europeans, as when they distrustfully lock their doors at night before going to sleep. Are these signs of a condition that has not sufficiently been left behind or of privative nature’s incursions into the civilized present? Without resolving this unnerving ambiguity, Hobbes argues that these signs of humanity’s originary, ineradicable hostility should not be viewed as good or bad because they preexist ethical categories. Hobbes’s supraethical decriminalization of natural violence has the effect of heightening the state of nature’s fearful insecurities, since it suggests that laws against theft are as meaningless as locks on doors unless backed by superior, sovereign force. Hobbes then continues:

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It may peradventure be thought, there was never such a time, nor condition of warre as this; and I believe it was never generally so, over all the world: but there are many places, where they live so now. For the savage people in many places of America, except the government of small Families, the concord whereof dependeth on naturall lust, have no government at all; and live at this day in that brutish manner, as I said before. Howsoever, it may be perceived what manner of life there would be, where there were no common Power to feare; by the manner of life, which men that have formerly lived under a peacefull government, use to degenerate into, in a civill Warre. (1.13.62)

In its very offhandedness, the phrase “in that brutish manner, as I said before” signals something of the complexity of the relations between Hobbes’s state of nature and “America.” On the one hand, the phrase invites readers to consider America the most apt, perhaps even the completely obvious, historical exemplar of the state of nature, with brutish serving as a shorthand expression for the entire catalog of ills associated with the state of nature, which has been given its more general definition two paragraphs “before.” Besides actually appearing in the phrase that concludes Hobbes’s earlier privative catalog—“solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short”—the word brutish is a signal feature of literature disparaging Americans or Africans. On the other hand, the entire phrase—“in that brutish manner, as I said before”—acts as a reminder that the state of nature is to be identified neither directly nor exclusively with America, however well America exemplifies it. This is why, after mentioning the inhabitants of America as exemplars of the condition outlined “before,” Hobbes goes on to associate their state with what he refers to as “the manner of life, which men that have formerly lived under a peacefull government, use to degenerate into, in a civill Warre.” By introducing this possibility only after having made explicit the association of the state of nature with America as well as other unnamed, precivil societies—an association, it must be stressed, implicit in the early modern privative age topos itself—Hobbes maximizes the rhetorical import of the threat of regression he attaches to civil war. Another way of putting this is that Hobbes avoids making his own, earlier version of Locke’s claim that “in the beginning all the World was America.”57 The state of nature is not a primitive, global occurrence on the order of Noah’s flood: it “was never generally so, over all the world.” Nor is it simply a matter of uneven development. The disjunction Hobbes installs between abstract condition and its instantiation in America is an ingenious strategy for awakening fear of loss in



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his readers, as it creates the possibility that civilized nations can “degenerate into” such a condition. If antityrannicism has a central, vital source of rhetorical power, it lies in the fear of loss—of honor, of freeborn status, possessions, even life itself, to say nothing of the many natural “rights” that these entail. In creating the potential for a return to the privative age, Hobbes could be said to invent a complementary fear of loss for absolutism. This fear Hobbes exploits rhetorically to make the radical step of transferring autonomy to an absolute sovereign appear necessary. Hobbes represents civil war as a regressive condition, one in which civility, formerly enjoyed, is lost. In doing so, he stimulates his compatriots’ anxiety regarding not only ongoing, civil insecurity but also the superior, European nation-state’s fitness to rule other nations. If a return to the state of nature is possible, even minor regression could deliver a blow to England’s imperial aspirations. In devising this sophisticated rhetorical maneuver, Hobbes is aware of the uses to which “hard” rhetorical privation can be put, and of the company he keeps in his take on the privative age.58 The radically pejorative character of Hobbes’s appropriation nevertheless needs stressing. Even by the low bar set by Euro-colonialist discourses, Hobbes’s claim that “the savage people in many places of America, except the government of small Families, the concord whereof dependeth on naturall lust, have no government at all” is outrageously reductive. Vitoria, for instance, acknowledges that Amerindigenes possess reason “because they have some order (ordo) in their affairs,” examples of which he provides. Hobbes’s privative age is not merely, or vaguely, dystopian but is designed to recall a bygone European era that New World human-on-human violence enacts on the contemporary, global stage. His “no government at all” assigns “savage people” to an age that is radically privative—that is, without any “Publique.” It should also be noted that at this time, however generalized the features or formulaic the language, the privative age topos conventionally has reference to a particular locale. Even Gonzalo has an isle. That Hobbes’s state-of-nature-as-war has no such geopolitical particularity contributes significantly to its oracular, universalizing force. By omitting geographical or historical specificity, Hobbes represents the condition as essentially generic, potentially applying equally to all human beings at any and all times. For academic philosophy, this has been its preferred significance. Hobbes’s use of patterned, rhetorical negation also, however, calls up the privative age associated with extra-European nations, especially those of America, associations he goes on to make explicit. Throughout chapter 13’s famous passage, Hobbes does both: the pseudoethnographic language of the privative

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age topos evokes the actual existence of such an asocial, primitive society while its generic, universal potentiality is contrariwise affirmed. The condition Hobbes depicts does not, of course, merely lack rule but is actively, belligerently hostile to it. Hobbes’s representation of natural human violence draws on the discourse of savagery that develops in response to active resistance on the part of Amerindigenes to English and French conquest.59 That “industry” occurs only when the “fruit thereof ” can be identified is an assumption born of the investment in legally recognized, individual ownership of property by Hobbes’s society. By means of a network of associations so often invoked that they crystallize into a set of commonplaces on “savagery”—just how widely accepted can be judged from the subtlety of their exploitation here—socially instituted geographical mobility is associated with the absence of permanent settlements, which, in turn, is associated with asociality, life in the wilds, and, finally, as befits inhabi­ tants of the forests, with animality. Hobbes also, however, unites this discourse of savagery with a profoundly secularized version of the fallen human depravity with which Protestantism is so preoccupied, converting, along the way, a frequently idealized, natural nonacquisitiveness specific to the Americas into a naturally aggressive human acquisitiveness that only capitalist states can hope to regulate, as C. B. MacPherson has argued.60 In these and many other ways, Hobbes transmutes heavily evaluative, contemporary discourses into the seemingly neutral language of political philosophy in which he posits a general, abstract condition of uninhibited competitiveness. Such a condition is not only antithetical to civilization but also remote, developmentally, from the present. In the universalizing context Hobbes creates, the privative age represents a primeval condition to which even the most civilized societies can regress.

Frontispieces De Cive’s division into three sections—“Libertas” (Liberty), “Imperium” (Rule or Dominion), and “Religio” (Religion)—is indicated on the title page of early editions, though with differences that merit discussion. In the manuscript and the first edition (1642), “Religio” is represented by the Last Judgment, well populated supernaturally, while both “Libertas” and “Imperium” appear as individual figures (fig. 9). Imperium wears a scepter, bears a sword in her left hand, and scales of justice in her right; she wears a long, flowing, toga-like robe and sandals on her feet. In the landscape that appears behind her are a small number of people employing scythes in agricultural



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Figure 9. Title page from De Cive (Paris, 1642).

labor, behind whom, in the distance, a city lies. Libertas, unmistakably Amerindigene, by contrast is scantily clad, does not stand upright, and is without head- or footwear. In addition to bearing an elongated bow and spear, De Cive’s Libertas is ambiguously gendered. Though her hair is pulled back and her legs are slightly bent, possibly signifying femininity, her breasts are not visible, her waist is uncharacteristically thick, and on her countenance appears an unpleasant scowl. (In this way, she resembles Matoake, commonly known as Pocahontas, as represented in an engraving made while she was in

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London; she is portrayed with a severe, slightly threatening masculine bearing and gaze, the departure from European codes of femininity suggesting resistance to her Christianization as Rebecca.)61 In his description of this plate, Howard Warrender refers to Libertas as “a savage,” a term that avoids assigning gender.62 A separate issue of the 1647 edition (hereafter referred to as 1647 separate, to distinguish it from the 1647 second edition) contains a related illustration in which Libertas is more—I hesitate to say unambiguously, yet that may be so—masculine,

Figure 10. Title page from De Cive (Amsterdam, 1647 separate).



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Figure 11. Theodor de Bry, How the slave who had spoken ill of me was himself eaten. From Hans Staden’s Narrative (1592).

with a head that is mostly shaved and legs that are comparatively straight (fig. 10). In both illustrations, Amerindigenous figures engaged in warfare appear in the landscape behind Libertas. In the earlier, first edition, two fires and spits appear faintly in the middle distance on the right against a fortified area on the left.63 Arising from the first spit appears a sketchily drawn human arm, unmistakable signifier of cannibalism, by this time almost de rigueur in representations of New World “savagery.” This particular image duplicates one of de Bry’s widely circulated portrayals of ritual cannibalism (fig. 11). Its dismembered arm is even more distinct in 1647 separate, which also positions the bows and arrows of the warring Amerindigenes slightly more prominently. Agricultural scythes (accoutrements of Imperium) and military weapons (of Libertas) are obviously set in symbolic opposition, as, implicitly, and in keeping with the opposition between life within and without civil society posited by De Cive, are the fruits of industry and the horrors of war.

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In many respects, the Libertas of the 1642 and 1647 separate editions resembles early modern representations of “America,” one of four continents figured as queens. In such representations, America, like De Cive’s Liberty, not only wears little clothing but has a masculine, martial stance, reinforced by the bow and arrows she carries together with spear or club. Resemblance to an Amazon is occasionally created by a belt strapped across America’s right breast (the breast Amazons were supposed to have seared), while “savagery” is signaled by a dismembered limb or head (the head being more common) at her feet.64 De Cive’s earliest Liberty is associated with cannibalism, but does not assert her dominion over a dismembered human part in this way. Even this form of rule is absent. The benefits of civil society are reserved for Imperium, who is patterned on Europe, invariably represented as unquestioned ruler of the three other continents—Asia, Africa, and America—because alone bearing the insignia of both civilization and power (though Europe is conventionally Christian in ways De Cive’s Imperium is not). Further, where America is frequently accompanied by treasure and animal life symbolic of its wealth, De Cive’s Liberty is deprived of such conventional trophies. Imperium, not Liberty, is the site of symbolic plenty. Amazonian Libertas does not appear in the 1647 second edition’s frontispiece, which differs dramatically from its predecessors (fig. 12). Liberty has not disappeared, but has been made over so as to fit in with Dominion, who remains female throughout all variants, and Religion, who has also morphed into a female figure. In this new, less frequently discussed representation of De Cive’s tripartite structure, Religion, Dominion, and Liberty appear as three graces, all of whom wear full-length gowns. The resulting emphasis on similarities discourages polarization of Liberty with Dominion. Feminized and civilized, Liberty has been transformed so as to represent “Liberty” as internal to Europe’s self-understanding of its own (threatened) civility. Yet whereas Religio is veiled and Dominion wears a crown, even with her makeover Libertas alone has no headdress, in this respect remaining like her privative, American forebear. (In later variants of this illustration, Liberty’s hair is progressively unbound.) What, then, of the dark, broad-rimmed hat Liberty bears upon her bent, raised arm, where it drapes her hand? To say that this hat does not match Liberty’s classically inspired outfit is to make a statement as absurdly indecorous as the hat itself. Two detailed studies of the illustrations accompanying various editions of De Cive have identified the hat as the classical pileus or liberty cap.65 It can, I think, be identified more precisely as the Dutch liberty cap. As the frontispiece declares, Hobbes’s text is published



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Figure 12. Anon., title page to De Cive, Second Edition (Amsterdam, 1647). Photograph: Courtesy of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.

in Amsterdam, which would encourage such identification since the Dutch liberty cap was a well-established icon of the republic. This does not necessarily diminish the hat’s incongruity, however, since the three figures are not Dutch. While De Cive’s Religion, too, is more than a little eccentric in appearance, with her hat-adorned forearm, its Liberty looks downright goofy. Why has Hobbes chosen the Dutch liberty hat as an accessory for Liberty? Strongly associated with the Greek and Roman antityrannicism that

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Figure 13. Anon., title page to De Cive (French edition, 1649). Photograph: Courtesy of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.

receives new life in the English Civil Wars—much to Hobbes’s consternation—the liberty cap that first appears in the 1647 second edition of De Cive thereafter accessorizes its Liberty. Its position alters, however. Beginning with the frontispiece of the 1649 edition, instead of resting on Liberty’s hand, it perches on the very tip-top of the lengthy spear she holds in her right hand (fig. 13). Of course, 1649 is the year in which Charles I is exe­ cuted. Interestingly, this new, lofty location closely resembles the triumphal position the liberty cap is awarded on Dutch public monuments as



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well as in the iconography of the American and French revolutions—whose relations, historically, with the English revolution of the mid-seventeenth century Hobbes could only have regarded bitterly as evidence of the perverse attractiveness of Greco-Roman ideals. In these contexts, though, as in the Netherlands of the late sixteenth century, the Libertas who holds the liberty cap aloft represents the intensely desirable end of militarized revolutionary struggle. It has been suggested that in providing Libertas with a liberty hat in the second edition of 1647, Hobbes hopes to mislead authorities in Holland who might prevent publication.66 A related argument could be made about the 1649 edition: in giving the liberty cap a more triumphal placement, Hobbes seeks to placate England’s victorious, republican regime. Hobbes’s liberty hat may also, however, be an ironic, iconographic conceit, which is how I prefer to understand it. Interpreted in conjunction with Hobbes’s political philosophy, like the earlier, Amerindigene Libertas, the pseudocivil Libertas signifies the delusive conviction that liberty has positive value outside the sovereign’s absolute rule. Though the length and placement of her

Figure 14. A captive or servile libertie. From Claude Paradin’s Heroical Devises (1557). Photographed from the 1591 edition.

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spear suggests an affinity with her Amerindigenous forebear, there are no overt signs of warfare in the second and later editions’ depictions of Liberty. This may, though, enhance the violence encoded in the Dutch liberty cap atop the pike, which celebrates liberty’s victory over slavery and tyranny. Symbolically, this victory is the product of violence, achieved militarily by the Dutch and the English parliamentarians, as well as by tyrannicide in England. Tyrannicide is the occasion for the first, celebratory appearance of the liberty cap on Marcus Brutus’s coin. Appian’s critical account of Julius Caesar’s assassination reports that the assassins put the liberty cap on top of a bloody pike, and an emblem referencing Appian’s narrative would likely have been known to Hobbes (fig. 14). If read alongside the privative, Amerindigene Libertas and the subversion of antityrannicism that Hobbes undertakes in his major treatises, the civil Libertas of the second and later editions appears to be a witty, visual epitome of Hobbes’s counterrevolutionary discourse. Functioning as a parodic pileus, the Dutch liberty hat held by Libertas suggests that Hobbes is ready with a critique of Marx’s famous remark on repetition, elaborated with reference to the English and French bourgeois revolutions. Gracing its purposes with the heroic ideals of the past, the revolutionary crisis initially has the stature of tragedy, Marx says, while the unheroic reality that emerges reproduces its features as farce.67 For Hobbes, however, the first, great European revolution, iterating Greco-Roman ideals and then Dutch, is already both tragedy and farce.

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or Hobbes, the violence that occurs in the absence of sovereign power is evident in interactions that occur among nations, in the “savage” nations of America, and in internecine warfare. Each exemplifies Hobbes’s state of nature, which is temporally as well as conceptually prior to civil society. Should the rights of sovereignty be removed, Hobbes argues in Leviathan, “the Commonwealth is thereby dissolved, and every man returneth into the condition, and calamity of a warre with every other man, (which is the greatest evill that can happen in this life)” (2.30.175). In such passages, Hobbes stimulates a fear of losing all that civil society now offers. Fear is vital to Hobbes’s defense of the absolutist state. Yet the threatened loss of civil society’s benefits is clearly different from the unremittingly fearful conflict endemic to the state of nature. Hobbes’s fear is not quite so homogeneous as is sometimes supposed. Richard Tuck argues that for Hobbes human beings “are fundamentally self-protective, and only secondarily aggressive—it is fear of an attack by a possible enemy which leads us to perform a pre-emptive strike on him, and not, strictly speaking, the desire to destroy him.”1 While this formulation accurately reflects Hobbes’s own ordering, it bestows unproblematic reality on the antecedent danger to which fear and thereby aggression are alleged to be legitimate responses, besides downplaying Hobbes’s references to a natural desire for dominion. Regarding Hobbes’s theorization of sovereignty’s origins, fear needs to be parsed, as it were, since in the form of irrational affect, it is experienced only by those who consent to subjection. When considered from the vantage point of its holder, Hobbes’s sovereign power does not arise from an immediate experience of fear, much less the visceral fear of murder that Leo Strauss notoriously claims to be for Hobbes “the root of all right and therefore of all morality.”2 293

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In the chapter on the state of nature in Elements of Law, his first political treatise, Hobbes discusses the “right of nature” on which dominion grounds itself, a right at this point considered apart from the concept of sovereignty: A man therefore that hath another man in his power to rule or govern, to do good to, or harm, hath right, by the advantage of this his present power, to take caution at his pleasure, for his security against that other in the time to come. He therefore that hath already subdued his adversary, or gotten into his power any other that either by infancy, or weakness, is unable to resist him, by right of nature may take the best caution, that such infant, or such feeble and subdued person can give him, of being ruled and governed by him for the time to come. For seeing we intend always our own safety and preservation, we manifestly contradict that our intention, if we willingly dismiss such a one, and suffer him at once to gather strength and be our enemy. Out of which may also be collected, that irresistible might in the state of nature is right. (1.14.13)

Just as Hobbes extends the definition of war so as to include the anxious anticipation of open hostility, so self-preservation here embraces precautionary measures aimed at the continued enjoyment—elsewhere even the enlargement—of “present power.” To “take caution” is to preempt possible future threats, using coercive means if necessary. Hobbes makes his originary ur-rule general enough to comprise what he elsewhere designates parental and despotic forms of dominion. This ur-rule, however, is far from being sui generis, as would befit a precivil condition, an abstract metaphysical principle, or, for that matter, Hobbes’s originality. The struggle Hobbes depicts in this passage and elsewhere in his major treatises is modeled on Roman war slavery doctrine, Hobbes’s adaptation of which for his theorization of sovereignty it will be the aim of this chapter to explore.3 It will be argued that Hobbes’s appeal to war slavery, integrally related to his state of nature, does not so much reveal essential features of humanity as it provides the juridical terms required for his contractualist construction of absolutism. Much confusion has resulted from a failure to grasp the ideological import of Hobbes’s use of this juridico-military doctrine and the discretionary power with which it is frequently associated. Though his adaptation has distinctive formal contours, they belong to a recognizable scenario featuring the military victor’s life-or-death decision-making power over those who



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have been vanquished. Derived from ancient Greek literature as well as from Roman jurisprudence, where it appears under the auspices of jus gentium, the doctrine that chattel slavery originates in military captivity and is therefore a life-preserving alternative to death is validated by Grotius in De Jure Belli ac Pacis. Unlike Grotius, however, Hobbes directly assimilates war slavery doctrine to the disciplinary power of life and death (potestas vitae necisque) held by the slaveholder or despot. Hobbes’s amalgamation of military victor and household slaveholder appears in the above passage when, for example, the agent temporarily blessed with “irresistible might” is said to hold another captive with the power “to do good to, or harm,” a moderate, potentially captive-friendly synonym for the slaveholder’s power of life and death, and again when the “adversary,” said to be “subdued” (a military term), becomes the prototype for the infant or otherwise disadvantaged being who is detained. A similar dramatic encounter is regarded from the captive’s point of view in Elements when Hobbes defends the legitimacy of covenants entered into through fear: “For who would lose the liberty that nature hath given him, of governing himself by his own will and power, if they feared not death in the retaining of it?” Slavery, the conventional alternative to threatened death, is here epitomized by loss of liberty and self-governance, loss that is assumed to be preferable to death. A military context is even more clearly evoked by the query immediately following, which joins the victor’s power to kill or to save with the vanquished’s obligation to keep his word: “What prisoner in war might be trusted to seek his ransom, and ought not rather to be killed, if he were not tied by the grant of his life, to perform his promise?” (1.15.13). Both questions bind the contractual character of the subject’s submission to the doctrine of war slavery, to the victor or the despot’s power, and to the militarized encounter on which they depend. Presupposing a legitimate, causal connection between the victor’s power and a condition of contractual servitude, this encounter becomes what I want to consider Hobbes’s central, ritualized drama, ideologeme, or, to use another figure, ruling conceit, by means of which he theorizes sovereignty’s origins. It could be argued that Hobbes’s naturalization of war slavery, like the state of warring human nature for which it is perfectly outfitted, is the product of the resolutive-compositive method in vogue at the time. It does not follow, though, that readers need abstract Hobbes’s originary, militarized encounter from the various historically specific institutions, debates, and events his writings engage.4 Tuck has discussed a context I consider crucial for understanding Hobbes’s deployment of this particular juridico-military

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schema, namely, apologies for the use of force in the service of colonial expansion and the protection of national commercial interests. But Tuck does not critically examine Hobbes’s treatises in this context.5 Even less consideration has been given to Hobbes’s interest in transatlantic slavery, for which conquest and war slavery doctrines generally offer the legitimization that English jurisprudence signally fails to provide.6 Another, national context, relevant only to Leviathan, has been discussed in studies of debates on de facto rule during the postregicide era, when Hobbes’s theorization of the commonwealth by acquisition becomes influential.7 Early modern, Western European debates on sovereignty and natural rights provide yet another context in which issues relating to coercive force and the possibility of voluntary self-enslavement loom large.8 The latter context will initially receive attention here, as it is indispensable to reencoding Hobbes’s generative use of war slavery, reencoding that is important to a more complete understanding of Hobbes as well as to a demythologization of his state of nature. Hobbes, it is agreed, adopts two tenets of contractualism and resistance theory: the human origins of sovereignty and the constitutive power of consent. Given the extraordinary impact, historically, of Hobbes’s contractual absolutism on a variety of ideological formations, it is important to understand his peculiar assimilation of paternal to what he calls “despoticall” power and the synthesis of both with contractualism. As Hobbes construes it, the submission that constitutes natural (what Leviathan calls “acquired” as opposed to “instituted”) sovereignty is most apparent in the overtly militaristic context that he makes relevant to despotic rule. Hobbes’s usage of despoticall acknowledges its Greek origins as a term for the household despote¯s. Yet following Bodin’s translation of this term into “lordly” monarchy, achieved through military conquest, and Bacon’s more recent conflation of conquest, lordly monarchy, and slave mastership, Hobbes also consistently associates the scene constituting despotical rule with lifethreatening battle if not the battlefield. In this distinctive form, despotic rule provides Hobbes with the model for other modes of sovereignty. Hobbes’s stress on maternal power has intrigued commentators, who have occasionally made Hobbes a protofeminist advocate of Mutterrecht. Traditionally, Hobbes observes, fathers, not mothers, institute civil society, with the result that civil men have dominion over their children. Yet in the state of nature, mothers hold the power of life and death over their offspring. Hobbes takes this idiosyncratic position primarily in order to advance the contractualist basis of his theory of absolutism, which cannot affirm the naturalness of paternal, and hence monarchical, power. Contractualism alone is not responsible for the mother’s extraordinary power, how-



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ever. A naturalization of paternal power provides no grounds for opposing the state of nature to the state of civil society and therefore none for arguing that absolute sovereignty be acceded to out of fear. If fathers were naturally capable of providing dominion (which on occasion Hobbes suggests they are, though not when evoking the state of nature), the state of nature would not be quite the chaotic, combatant-face-combatant state that Hobbes so relishes portraying, with the result that civil society would not appear so entirely, irresistibly, advantageous. In all three major treatises, Hobbes presents Amazons as historical exemplars of maternal right, exemplarity that would be disturbing for his contemporaries in its evocation of the precivil, atavistic condition that Hobbes so often gets “America” to represent. When Hobbes refers to Amazons, he specifies those of ancient, Greek record; in De Cive, for example, he says, “[W]omen, in the person of the Amazons, did at one time wage wars against their enemies and handled their offspring as they pleased, and there are several places today where women have sovereign power” (2.9.3). Hobbes need not specify contemporaneous “savage” societies, because precivil societies, of which the ancient Amazons are in any case exemplars, generally have well-established links with female rule, while the present-day Americas and, occasionally, Africa, are frequently associated with Amazons. A state of nature in which sexually promiscuous women are solely responsible for determining both paternity and the continued existence or nonexistence of their offspring would have filled most of his readers with fascinated horror, horror that Hobbes’s dispassionate, scientifically neutral language merely intensifies. Despite extensive consideration of parental power, Hobbes has markedly little interest in conjugal relations per se. But this way of putting it does not do justice to Hobbes’s striking disregard of the marital unit, of wives, and of patriarchal mothers. Remarkably, Hobbes does not so much as mention either wife or mother when defining the family as a unit in De Cive’s following statement: “The father of the family, the children and the slaves [servi], united in one civil person by virtue of paternal power is called a family” (2.9.10).9 That this is not merely an oversight is evident when the same formulation reappears in later editions, as well as in Leviathan, where, again, wives and mothers do not merit so much as a casual nod. Hobbes asserts that with regard to the “Rights of soveraignty,” a large family is structurally the same as a little monarchy, “whether that Family consist of a man and his children; or of a man and his servants; or of a man, and his children, and servants together: wherein the Father or Master is the Soveraign” (2.20.105). Why does the mother, so prominent in the state of

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nature, disappear from the patriarchal family of civil society? Uneasy with this state of affairs, for which run-of-the-mill masculinism does not appear to account, commentators have often tried to ignore or obscure it. Alternatively, Hobbes’s perplexing omission of wives and mothers inspires Carole Pateman to posit her own, conjectural history of the conquest by men of women, who thereby become their servants.10 In what follows, I offer a very different understanding of Hobbes’s family, which, I propose, is female-free precisely insofar as it correlates subjecthood with servitude. Owing in part to an emphasis on patriarchalism that neglects the claims of despotism, the absence of wives has not been seen to be integral to Hobbes’s theorization of servants as paradigmatic subjects. Many aspects of Hobbes’s family, an originary body politic, result from his overdetermined construction of war slavery as a medium for the power of life and death, a medium that enables the covenant of obedience to appear as a form of self-preservation and additionally distinguishes unbound servitude-as-subjecthood from bound servitude-as-slavery. Indebted to Grotius’s discussion of actual, institutional slavery as a product of warfare, Hobbes’s investment in war slavery, I shall argue in the final section of this chapter, also enables him to provide a defense of Atlantic slavery in Leviathan.11

Liberty, Slavery, and Tyranny Discomfited First, we need briefly to consider the interdependency of the theoretical and rhetorical aims mobilized by Hobbes’s opposition to antityrannicism. Both tyranny and its complement, political slavery, feature in Leviathan’s diatribe against Greek and Roman authors for their idealization of liberty and tyrannicide. Though he does not pull any rhetorical punches when characterizing antityrannicism’s harmful effects, Hobbes is aware that analytic self-consciousness alone will not do much to dampen enthusiastic belief in the value of liberty. Numerous features of Hobbes’s absolutism are painstakingly concocted as an antidote to the madness that results from imbibing popular notions of freedom as political slavery’s noble antonym or tyranny’s antagonist. Designed to counteract the passions aroused by antityrannicism, Hobbes’s absolutism stirs up a set of anxieties that it reassuringly promises to allay. For absolutists committed to undercutting contemporary claims regarding tyranny, objections to Aristotle’s Politics are de rigueur. Hobbes, however, turns opposition to Aristotle into a fine art. Whether in the field of natural science, ethics, metaphysics, or political philosophy, Aristotle’s immense authority has, it seems, spawned considerable intellectual murki-



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ness, which Hobbes sets about to dispel. The single most important feature of Hobbes’s critique is his rejection—formulated clearly in Elements and appearing thereafter—of the distinction Aristotle draws in Politics between despotic rule, perversely oriented toward the satisfaction of the ruler’s needs, and political rule, held for the good of those who are governed (2.5.1). This distinction is crucial to early modern theories of resistance in providing a basis for the identification and castigation of tyranny. For this reason, it is unacceptable to Hobbes even in the simpler, well-established form of the distinction, authorized by both Plato and Aristotle, between monarchy as a normative, and tyranny as a deviant, kind of rule. In Hobbes’s view, this distinction, along with those related to it, is totally specious. “Monarchy” and “tyranny” merely register affective responses to what is perceived as good or bad government and are therefore expressive rather than demonstrative. These terms are without reference to distinct forms of government, since “one and the same monarch is given the name King to honour him, the name of Tyrant to damn him” (De Cive, 2.7.3). There would be little point to divesting tyranny of its authority, however, if its counterpart, political slavery, were to continue in office. In the literature of resistance, rule resembling the slave master’s disgracefully seeks to reduce its freeborn subjects to the position of political slaves. Though some proponents of popular sovereignty imply that monarchical rule of any kind tyrannizes, it is widely agreed that absolute monarchy (figuratively) enslaves its citizens. Hobbes is by no means the first to try to counter the powerful appeal of such argumentation; Robert Filmer, too, challenges his contemporaries’ inflammatory use of slavery, and critiques Aristotle’s dissociation of despotical from parental and conjugal rule.12 Like Bodin as well as Filmer, in Elements Hobbes goes to its source, Aristotle’s doctrine of natural chattel slavery. The principle that some are born to rule, others to serve not only vitiates Politics, Hobbes claims, but has offered generations a pretext for restless competitiveness. Hobbes counters Aristotle by insisting that for the sake of social harmony, nature declares we are to consider one another equals (1.17.1). Although later writers and activists may use the principle of natural equality for egalitarian purposes, Hobbes subjects this principle to absolutist ends. In the contexts Hobbes creates for it, the equality he posits as a universal, natural condition is scarcely an improvement on the subjection into which Filmer has everyone born, since it gives rise to nothing but dispossession, violence, and instability. Natural equality, while throwing into relief the artificiality of civil society, precludes easy, unreflective recourse to antityranny ideology, though to understand how this works requires further analysis.

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Like tyranny, slavery is for Hobbes a term his opponents use in an incendiary, expressive fashion. Proponents of mixed government, Hobbes says in Elements, “in hatred” of absolute subjection call it “slavery.” “And supposing it were so,” he asks rhetorically, “how were this condition which they call slavery eased thereby?” Given the indivisibility of sovereignty, Hobbes argues, not at all: “[T]hey are as absolutely subject to [their representatives] as is a child to the father, or a slave to the master in the state of nature” (2.1.16). In this and related passages, Hobbes registers his response to the pervasiveness of contemporary appeals to antityrannicism. Hobbes does not operate solely on rhetorical terrain, however. Both political slavery and tyranny are evacuated conceptually, which is one of the most stunning accomplishments of Hobbes’s theory of representation as well as of his systematization of sovereign power.13 As the above citation indicates, Hobbes denies the validity of any distinctions among despotic, paternal, and political rule. Just as categorically as Aristotle asserts the difference of despotic from either paternal, conjugal, or good political rule, Hobbes asserts their essential sameness (omitting conjugal rule), claiming in Leviathan that “the Rights and Consequences of both Paternall and Despoticall Dominion, are the very same with those of a Soveraign by Institution; and for the same reasons” (2.20.104). Central to Hobbes’s theorization of sovereignty, dominion is a term given great rhetorical power by the role it plays in contemporaneous debates. When applied to political relations, believed to be naturally free, dominion is a term of opprobrium for proponents of republicanism or popular sovereignty; it signals the perversion of such relations by rule that is or has become arbitrary. In antityranny discourse signaling the master’s proprietary rule over his slaves within the domus, “dominion” has no business, as it were, in the public sphere, where “free” adult citizens govern themselves. An important feature of Hobbes’s neutralization of this radical take on “dominion” is his frequent use of the Latinate servant for the Latin servus instead of the comparatively recent, emotionally charged slave. Pivotal for Hobbes’s theorization of unbound as opposed to bound servitude, this substitution drily denies that “slavery” is anything to get worked up about. Though the Latin servus is open to either translation, context determining the choice to be made, in early modern debates on sovereignty, its vernacular deployment is highly charged. Unfortunately, the significance of Hobbes’s usage, consistent throughout Elements and Leviathan, both of which were written in English, has not been captured in the authoritative, Cambridge edition of De Cive, which translates servus as “slave.”14 Though meant to underline the similarities Hobbes self-consciously creates



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among political subjecthood, servitude, and chattel slavery, this translation obscures Hobbes’s transvaluation of servitude, for him the positive counterpart of what populists anathematize as “slavery,” together with the ambiguous relations Hobbes constructs between political servitude and chattel slavery. The transformation of “slaves” into “servants”—of which bound servants, considered genuine servi by Hobbes, are a subset—is very much connected with Hobbes’s leveling of all forms of subjection. De Cive proclaims the essential sameness of dominion and subjection wherever they occur, calmly, evenhandedly obliterating differences among children, servants, and political subjects. “Children,” Hobbes goes so far as to assert, “are also released from subjection in the same ways as subjects and slaves [servi]. Emancipation is the same thing as manumission and disowning is the same as banishment” (2.9.7). To liken the parental act of disowning and the act of banishment, effected by the state, is to remain within the conventions of patriarchal absolutism. Explicitly to correlate emancipation and manumission is another thing altogether. For unlike the correspondence between children and subjects, which is conventional, that between children or subjects and servi constitutes an assault on the very conception of individual and collective freedom promulgated by Greek democratic ideology, classical republicanism, and any of their popular derivatives. This, I am arguing, is an assault Hobbes is delighted to mount. Yet the correlation of children and citizens with servi gives political subjecthood what would seem to be a decidedly negative character. How does Hobbes contend with servitude’s negative associations for his readers, privileged Europeans, some of whom are involved, whether directly or indirectly, in transatlantic slavery and who, in any case, are masters of servants? To approach this question, we need to examine the role played by analogical discourse. Hobbes shares with his contemporaries the assumption that what holds true of the child vis-à-vis parental rule must also hold of the citizen vis-à-vis political rule. Claims made with reference to those subject to the rule of the father consequently apply analogically to citizens of the commonwealth. For early modern liberalism generally and for John Locke most systematically, the paradigmatic familial subject is the male child who is to outgrow his need for governance, at which point he will achieve parity with his father. Such children, who are naturally free, are understood to have the position of liberi—that is, freeborn Roman children, whose status within ancient Rome is very precisely constructed in opposition to those who are enslaved. Generally speaking, patriarchal absolutism subverts this bipolarity by aggrandizing paternal power. Hobbes, following this practice, enjoys provocatively trivializing differences between liberi and enslaved. In

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Elements he also simultaneously reduces and amplifies paternal power over liberi: “For both the state had power over their life without consent of their fathers; and the father might kill his son by his own authority, without any warrant from the state” (2.4.9). Hobbes, this indicates, makes use of patriarchalist conventions, insisting more programmatically than Bodin on the equivalence of paternal and state sovereignty. Yet Hobbes is unique in assimilating both paternal and state sovereignty to despotical (that is, the victor’s and/or slaveholder’s), which in both Elements and De Cive receives priority. Given the proliferation of discourses drawing on antityrannicism in mid-seventeenth-century England, it is not surprising that Hobbes wants to rid his opponents of their favorite figural identity, namely, freeborn citizens unjustly threatened with degradation to the status of “slaves.” Hobbes, however, chooses an approach very different from Bodin’s thoroughgoing critique of slavery as an institution. As Hobbes theorizes sovereignty, slave mastership is its prototypical form. One of Hobbes’s greatest challenges is therefore to render the relation between lord (dominus) and servant or slave (servus) an acceptable analogue to that between political sovereign and citizen-subject. Substituting “servant” for “slave” is certainly one very effective means of purging “slavery” of the vitriolic aspersions ordinarily cast on it. Hobbes goes well beyond this, though: political servitude is made an unobjectionable, ordinary, perhaps honorable, condition. Even when servitude unambiguously resembles the condition of chattel slavery, Hobbes gives it a neutral or even positive spin. Transvaluation is evident whenever Hobbes gives analogies between children or political subjects and unbound servants/slaves a rationally detached character. This occurs frequently in De Cive, where claims about chattel slavery are systematically applied to political subjecthood, the benefits of which are stressed. In discussing the master’s absolute dominion over the servus, for example, Hobbes argues that though the servus cannot claim his own property against his master, he does have a right to hold individual property vis-à-vis his fellow servants. Such “dominion” is of interest to Hobbes only insofar as servants are analogous to citizens, who, in turn, are analogous to unbound chattel slaves. Nor is it an aspect of servitude (voluntary or involuntary) normally considered in early modern political literature, whereas the citizen-subject’s property rights are, naturally, of paramount importance. Hobbes does not rely entirely on analogy but openly asserts that regarding the sovereign representative, civil subjects have no more claim on their belongings than do servi, “For those who have a Lord [Dominus] do not have Dominion, as was proved at 8.5. And the commonwealth by its formation is the Lord of all the citizens” (2.12.7). Hobbes’s language assures



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his readers that there is nothing at all shameful about such conditional ownership, as it is simply the necessary outcome of subjection to an absolute sovereign. Because the advantages of membership in a commonwealth vastly outweigh its drawbacks, civil subjection’s likeness to servitude is to be regarded dispassionately, as a neutral fact of existence. Far from being, as advocates of political resistance proclaim, an abhorrent condition to be avoided at the cost of life itself, servitude becomes in Hobbes’s representation an unremarkable condition of subjection experienced by servi who are analogically citizens. One of Hobbes’s most effective strategies for divesting “liberty” of its glory and “slavery” of its capacity to stigmatize is his conceptualization of liberty as freedom of movement, the basis of the distinction he draws between the unbound and the bound servant. In both Elements and Leviathan, the term slave is associated with the bound servant, which frees up the unbound servant for likeness to the citizen-subject. The unbound servant, Hobbes declares, is one who can be trusted not to misuse his bodily mobility. For this distinction, Hobbes cannily appropriates Roman jurisprudence, which he gives an ethical spin by opposing trustworthiness to untrustworthiness. In Justinian’s Institutes, immediately after the term servi is said to be derived from servare (to save), the term mancipia is explained with reference to the customary practice of taking the vanquished physically captive (manu capi) by the victor.15 Elsewhere, Gaius distinguishes res mancipi from nec mancipi on the basis of how full ownership was conveyed; res mancipi, transference of which required rigorous, ceremonial formality, includes land, houses, domesticated animals, and slaves.16 Though Hobbes is not much interested in the formalities of the transaction, his bound servant, like the Roman slave, is property alienable by sale and thus comparable to animals. Further, as Hobbes was aware, mancipium—connoting physical apprehension—is often used in Latin literature to signify a slave, thus strengthening the connection he develops between bound servitude and Greco-Roman chattel slavery.17 Insofar as hindrances to bodily movement are “external and absolute,” Hobbes asserts in De Cive, all servants and subjects who are not in bonds or prison are “free.” This is not so much a novel, idiosyncratic definition as it is a radical transvaluation of liberty: unbound servitude is the liberty of those who can be trusted to remain servants—that is, those who voluntarily consent to their servitude. Measured against the exalted notions eloquently advanced by his opponents, such liberty is pitifully diminished. The following passage, where Hobbes chastises those who pine after some grander, imaginary “liberty,” reveals the ruthless logic of Hobbes’s identification of

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civil subjecthood and servitude, conceptualized very much as chattel slavery usually is but for the servant’s freedom of movement on entering into a covenant of obedience: And this is what civil liberty consists in; for no one, whether subject or child of the family or slave [servus throughout; my addition], is prevented by the threat of being punished by his commonwealth or father or Master, however severe he may be, from doing all he can and trying every move that is necessary to protect his life and health. I find no reason for a slave to complain on the ground that he lacks liberty, unless it is an affliction to be restrained from harming himself and to keep the life which he had lost by war or ill fortune or even by his own idleness, together with all his food and everything needful for life and health, on the condition of being ruled. Anyone so restrained by threats of punishment from doing all he wants to do is not oppressed by servitude; he is governed and maintained. In every commonwealth and household where there are slaves [servi] what the free citizens and children of the family have more than the slaves is that they perform more honourable services in commonwealth and family, and enjoy more luxuries. (2.9.9)

More starkly than in Leviathan, Hobbes here endorses the essential sameness of civil citizen-subjects, children, and unbound servants. In the circumstances Hobbes imagines, the servant/slave—whether initially taken captive “by war or ill fortune or even by his own idleness”—has nothing to complain about since whatever his master imposes by way of discipline constitutes an alternative to the termination of life, which is the sovereign’s prerogative (“unless it is an affliction to be restrained from harming himself and to keep the life which he had lost”). The shift from servus to a generalized “[a]nyone so restrained” shows that the experience of an originary captivity is not consistently at issue, though. Actually at stake is radicalism’s bipolar opposition between “slavery” and “liberty,” which Hobbes methodically undoes so as to subvert its affective associations and to establish servitude as a positive model for civil subjecthood. Hobbes theorizes civil society in such a way that citizenship is not the contrary of servitude, even though in societies with servi (in the final sentence ambiguously servants or slaves), servi will be distinguished from citizens. As a result, some of Hobbes’s servi are citizens while some are not eligible for citizenship. (Only in the originary condition of captivity do unambiguously bound servi appear in this passage.) In any event, the disciplinary restraints and liberties enjoyed by citizens and servi clearly differ merely in degree, not kind.



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In this passage, differences among civil subjects, children, and servi are trivialized if not erased. Given the focus on servitude, along with the conventionality of the analogy between children and citizen-subjects, the effect of this tripartite equivalence is to invite Hobbes’s primarily male, propertied readers to apply what is said of servitude in general to their own condition as subjects: “Anyone so restrained by threats of punishment from doing all he wants to do is not oppressed by servitude; he is governed and maintained.” It must be emphasized, though, that at the moment this analogy takes over, servitude becomes figurative. For although the male citizens who are Hobbes’s civil subjects have at one time literally been children, they are not—and fully know they are not—literally captives, prisoners, or in servitude, even if they could temporarily suffer such fates. To a large extent, Hobbes’s servitude is just as figurative—just as dependent on a self-consciously metaphorical application of institutional servitude’s attributes to civil subjects who consider themselves “free”—as is that to which Hobbes’s radical counterparts repeatedly appeal.

Preservation of Life, Civility, and Servitude Because Hobbes is committed to theorizing the state’s coercive power, servitude originating in military defeat nevertheless remains a constant, nonfigurative point of reference for his construction of civil subjecthood. Central as is resistance literature’s rhetorically rousing deployment of antityrannicism’s pairing of slavery and tyranny to Hobbes’s theorization of servitude, it does not fully account for the attractions of the war slavery encounter nor for the ingenuity of Hobbes’s adaptation of Grotius. As has been stressed, according to Roman jurisprudence, jus gentium sanctions the victorious military party’s enslaving of its captives. War slavery is often represented in early modern literature as an accepted, contemporary practice. Yet when promulgated in elite theoretical discourse, as Grotius does in De Jure Belli, its authorities are Greek or Roman, which helps to preserve its esteemed status as jus gentium. In Grotius’s presentation, the slaveholder’s unregulated, disciplinary right of life and death over the enslaved is independent of the victor’s right to kill or to enslave the vanquished. As a result, when the victor reaches a decision to enslave so as to save, he does so having assessed the benefits accruing to the slaveholder to whom the enslaved will be sold and, presumably, the gains enjoyed by the slaveholder’s society. Grotius’s discussion of both voluntary and involuntary servitude prepares the way for Hobbes, who makes the slaveholder’s power of life and death the basis of his theorization of sovereignty, every mode of which

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manifests this power. How dependent Hobbes’s conception of sovereign power is upon this juridical right as a feature of war enslavement has not been appreciated. Nor has the unusual theoretical prominence Hobbes gives to what the war slavery doctrine merely suggests: when the victor’s decision results in the preservation of life rather than death, the enslaver’s disciplinary power is an extension of the lawful murder that is withheld. In effecting this synthesis, Hobbes departs from Grotius in two crucial ways. First, uniting the victor’s decision to destroy or to preserve life with the slaveholder’s disciplinary power of life and death, Hobbes creates continuity between the dramatic moment of voluntary subjection that constitutes sovereignty and the ongoing threat of punishment or annihilation. Second, as was seen in the passage I first cited from Elements, Hobbes understands the victor-cum-slaveholder’s unregulated “right” to life and death over the vanquished to be a preemptive use of force. It is essentially a forethoughtful extension of the principle of self-preservation (extended to preservation of power). Even without detailed comparative analysis, it can be seen that where Grotius emphasizes how the material incentives offered by institutionalized servitude should move the victor to forbear disposing of a potential slave’s life, Hobbes draws attention to how a decision to preserve a captive’s life gives the captor’s power disciplinary scope—scope that, in turn, preserves his power. Grotius’s belief that this right is from one perspective a kind of injustice and its exercise license informs Hobbes’s emphasis on the amorality of the natural “right of the sword” or the “right of war” and the extrajuridical nature of sovereign power. Like Grotius, Hobbes is thus able to conceptualize the victor’s power of life and death independently of the subject’s consent to such power. Hobbes’s most radical innovation, however, is to theorize consent as constitutive of sovereignty itself. Though we will see that for Hobbes such consent is also relevant to institutional slavery, its primary significance lies in his accommodation of contractualism to absolutism. Against resistance theorists (later to include Locke) who assert the impossibility for freeborn men of self-enslavement, Hobbes theorizes submission to absolute, sovereign power as an act of voluntary entrance into servitude that is simultaneously an act of self-preservation. Hobbes manages this by transplanting war slavery, an institution sanctioned by jus gentium, to the state of nature—intrinsically for him a state of war—from which it provides an exit. As sovereignty’s necessary precondition, war slavery enables Hobbes to synthesize absolutism, civil society, contractual servitude, and self-preservation. Yet this is possible, it should be observed, because Hobbes adopts Grotius’s view that the captor’s enslavement of his captives involves



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forbearance. Hobbes, too, civilly forbears imagining a scenario in which the right to extinguish life is actually exercised. Instead, he correlates the power holder’s threatening right to extinguish life with the subject’s fear, which, in the act of covenanting, is both allayed and, as it were, focalized by means of the sovereign representative. More positively, he imaginatively correlates the sovereign representative’s capacity to preserve life (and sovereign power itself) with the subject’s commitment to self-preservation. Neatly foregrounding both the sovereign holder’s power and the subject’s self-preservation, despotic power is prototypical for Hobbes in large part because it is completely, consistently natural. In all three texts, Hobbes distinguishes three modes of sovereignty, one artificial (a collective creation resulting in the commonwealth by design) and two natural, the first, despotic—though not, problematically, always so designated—being a product of warfare, the second, parental, of biological reproduction.18 The special naturalness of despotic power appears in a number of passages. Its potent presence is evident when maternal power is explicitly derived from the slaveholder’s. Hobbes proceeds as if demonstrating the truth of a theorem: And so we must return to the natural state, in which because of the equality of nature, all adults are to be taken as equal to each other. There by right of nature the victor is Master of the conquered; therefore by right of nature Dominion over an infant belongs first to the one who first has him in their power [ potestas]. But it is obvious that a new-born child is in the power of his mother before anyone else, so that she can raise him or expose him at her own discretion and by her own right. (2.9.2)

Its special status is equally evident in the ur-despotism that appears in the first-cited passage from Elements, as well as when, later in that text, Hobbes rebuts those who deny that a master and servant form a little body politic (2.5.1). Whether it is held in precivil or civil society, despotic power remains true to its origins in “Naturall force,” and can therefore reveal the essence of absolute dominion. As Hobbes puts it in Elements (agreeing with Grotius, who, however, follows Roman jurisprudence in assigning the power of life and death to jus gentium), “[T]he restriction of absolute power in masters proceedeth not from the law of nature, but from the political law of him that is their master supreme or sovereign” (2.3.6), or, similarly in De Cive, “[W]henever the Master’s power over their slaves [servi] in a commonwealth is absolute, it is thought to derive from a right of nature, not established by the civil law but prior to it” (2.8.8). As Hobbes constructs it, despotic power has significant advantages

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as a prototype for other modes of dominion. First, the starkly opposed choices it offers the vulnerable party—death or submission to the irresistibly mighty—correspond to the fear and self-preservation to which Hobbes gives pride of place. Second, it dramatically reveals sovereignty’s formal dependence on covenant. In Elements, Hobbes argues that the “covenant from him that is overcome, not to resist him that overcometh” gives the victor “a right of absolute dominion over the conquered.” Hobbes more clearly specifies the contractual origins of this little body politic in De Cive when arguing that despotic dominion is constituted by consent: “[I]f, on being captured or defeated in war or losing hope in one’s own strength, one makes (to avoid death) a promise to the victor or the stronger party, to serve him, i.e. to do all that he shall command. In this contract the good which the defeated or weaker party receives is the sparing of his life, which could have been taken from him, in men’s natural state, by right of war; and the good which he promises is service and obedience” (2.8.1). The parallelism of the concluding sentence stresses the mutuality of the “good” contracted, mutuality that arises from the power holder’s offer to preserve life as the perfect complement of the subject’s interest in self-preservation (though in formally establishing sovereignty, the act of covenanting actually establishes a relation of ongoing, radical inequality). Hobbes’s state-of-nature-as-war is, of course, the ideal setting for despotic dominion’s privileged naturalness. In the commonwealth by institution— the only form of sovereignty initiated by those who become subject—the holder of sovereign power retains the natural “right of the sword,” a right renounced by those who unite in quitting the state of nature’s destructive liberty. On the basis of the naturalness of the right of the sword, Hobbes represents the sovereign by institution retaining rather than acquiring what becomes a gargantuan—or, more properly, leviathan—privilege. For its crea­ tors, Hobbes depicts the act of instituting the commonwealth as an agreement to surrender the “right of killing” or the “right of the private sword,” together with the “right of private judgement” to which it is closely related. In transferring individual sovereignty to the representative of sovereign power, subjects agree to “lay down” such natural rights, the right of individual, physical self-preservation excepted. The language Hobbes uses of this transfer is strongly suggestive of military surrender or pacification. To “lay down” one’s sword or arms is to perform a gesture signifying a voluntary cessation of further military activity. The collective act of instituting the commonwealth involves an abstract, contractual version of gestural, military surrender: a laying down not of the sword but of the “right of the sword.” Only by transferring their natural



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rights, Hobbes argues, can people reduce the natural vulnerability to harm from one another that comes with living in the state of nature. The consequence, however, is that they become subject to the power of a single, sovereign representative who is virtually indistinguishable from the Greek or Roman slave master—that is, the despote¯s or the private dominus. In a passage in De Cive where he contrasts life “outside” civil society, where passion rules, with reason’s rule “inside” civil society, Hobbes at one point cheerfully concedes that the sovereign ruler possesses the right to his subjects’ lives and property: “Outside the commonwealth anyone may be killed and robbed by anyone; within a commonwealth by only one person” (2.10.1). Given the sheer magnitude of the threat posed by the state of war, it is, clearly, eminently reasonable to choose subjection to a single, sovereign holder of absolute power. Before going further, we need to reflect briefly on despoticall, a term Hobbes uses sparingly.19 As Hobbes was aware, citing this usage in Elements, Aristotle uses despotical (despoticw¢V) pejoratively in distinguishing deviant forms of political rule (all of which are modeled on the self-interested rule of the master [despote¯s] over his slave) from rule oriented toward the good of those who are governed. Understood to refer either to “lordly” political rule or to the household master’s power over his slaves or servants, despotical occasionally (though rarely compared with tyrannous) appears as a synonym for arbitrary political rule in seventeenth-century English advocates of popular sovereignty. Nothing if not rigorous in eschewing such usage, Hobbes uses the Greek term only in the neutral sense of the master’s rule over the servant as inaugurated by warfare, thereby furthering his transvaluation of servitude. Though seldom used in Elements, despotic rule refers to the lordship acquired by the victor when the vanquished subject themselves. Paired with paternal as a mode of natural dominion, despotical can modify kingdom. Both paternal and despotical units are conceived as familial modes of dominion that gradually expand into larger political entities. The master, it is imagined, remains one and the same while his servants multiply, in this way being exactly like the father vis-à-vis the patrimonial kingdom (2.3.2). In Leviathan, Hobbes first uses the word despoticall when inaugurating his discussion of war servitude as a mode of subjection: “Dominion acquired by Conquest, or Victory in war, is that which some Writers call despoticall, from Despo¢thV, which signifieth a Lord, or Master, and is the Dominion of the Master over his Servant” (2.20.104). “Dominion acquired by Conquest,” the more inclusive meaning in this equivocal statement, draws the reader back to the discussion of “A Common-wealth by Acquisition,”

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which opens chapter 20, while the term despoticall refers more narrowly to household servitude originating in warfare. In deference to the Greek, Hobbes uses despoticall only of the master’s dominion over his servants, thereby creating symmetry between paternal and despotical dominion. (Hobbes’s linguistic rigor has not, I believe, been noted.) Hobbes does not draw attention to this in Leviathan because he wants to establish the oneness or identity of dominion acquired by military victory, whether exercised in the household or in the commonwealth. To this end, despotical rule appears exclusively in relation to the battlefield. At the same time, Hobbes scrupulously avoids using “despoticall” of dominion over subjects of a commonwealth acquired by force on the grounds, I assume, that it has not grown out of a smaller unit (the only unit to which the Greek term properly applies) the way Elements’ “kingdom despotical” does. In this way, “despoticall” orients itself toward “paternall” dominion. Whether the despot and father are mentioned separately or together, the family thereby instituted (in a passage part of which was cited earlier) is “a little Monarchy; whether that Family consist of a man and his children; or of a man and his servants; or of a man, and his children, and servants together: wherein the Father or Master is the Soveraign.” What is at stake in the likeness of parental to despotic power? Whether pairing or distinguishing them, Hobbes, I believe, wants to emphasize their common possession of the power of life and death, a power crucial to any absolutist theory of sovereignty. For patriarchal absolutists such as Bodin and Filmer, the power of life and death is ideologically constructed as a natural, paternal power. Said to be part of the Roman father’s extensive powers over his children, potestas vitae necisque is revisioned as a universal feature of paternal rule. Absolutist theorists cannot help but be aware, however, that potestas vitae necisque is formally assigned the slave master in Roman jurisprudence. Bodin responds to the ideological minefields linked with these potentially conflicting claims by dissociating paternal from despotical power in order decisively to privilege patriarchal power. Filmer, on the other hand, absorbs the slave master’s power into the father’s, which is all-important. By contrast, Hobbes implicitly models parental on despotic power while at the same time maintaining their correspondence (paternal much more consistently than parental). As we saw earlier in Elements, where the infant appears cheek by jowl with the subdued adversary, this may on occasion presuppose an ur-despotism in which both despotic and paternal rule participate. Less conspicuously, such an ur-despotism also appears in Leviathan when Hobbes explains the role of “Natural Force” with reference to both



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paternal and despotical dominion, “as when a man maketh his children, to submit themselves, and their children to his government, as being able to destroy them if they refuse; or by Warre subdueth his enemies to his will, giving them their lives on that condition” (2.17.88). Notice that paternal precedes despotical dominion here, just as it does in chapter 20 of Leviathan, “Of Dominion Paternall, and Despoticall.” This composite chapter represents a significant departure from both Elements and De Cive, in each of which Hobbes devotes one chapter to the master’s dominion over the servus, which precedes a separate chapter on parental dominion. Where in the two earlier texts the slave master’s dominion is clearly the prototype on which paternal dominion is modeled, Leviathan obscures this innovative precedence, giving the relation between dominus and servus a more conventionally patriarchal character. In the passage from Leviathan just cited, both paternal and despotic dominion get defined by the exercise of the power of life and death, as if functions of an ur-despotism. Their fusion is a reminder that originally or potentially they may be held by one and the same individual (in the patriarchal family, the father is also the “lord”). Hobbes equitably distributes the power of life and death: the father is able to “destroy” his children if they refuse to submit, while the victor is credited with “giving” the vanquished life. Precisely these starkly opposed options are, according to war slavery doctrine, conventionally offered by the military victor, who is able either to take or to spare the lives of (a euphemism for enslave) those he has vanquished. Emphasizing the irrelevance of biological reproduction to his conception of paternal power, Hobbes associates paternal power not with the generation of new life, as is conventional for patriarchal absolutism, but with the ability to take the lives of his children, while the victor’s “giving” of life involves the gratuitous prolonging of an already existent life, a life that is threatened with imminent death.

Hobbes’s Female-Free Family With regard to sovereignty’s origins, Hobbes’s absolutism is patriarchalist only in this circuitous manner. Does this emphasis on the father’s power of life and death not contradict Hobbes’s claim that dominion over children is originally held by the mother? Hobbes’s inconsistencies on this matter are in my view motivated by the pressures of differing rhetorical needs. In the above statement, for example, paternal and despotic powers are identified as products of “Naturall force” so as to contrast them with the uniquely voluntary character of the commonwealth by design. In Leviathan’s systematic

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discussion of “Dominion Paternall, and Despoticall,” on the other hand, Hobbes hands “Naturall force” over to the mother. As was argued earlier, in making the mother rather than the father the holder of dominion, Hobbes safeguards the consent required for his contractualism. If the “Naturall force” to which children submit is originally held by the mother, paternal power becomes artificial, just as is the sovereign’s power in the commonwealth by design. At the same time, however, Hobbes’s assumption that civil society is patriarchal permits him to provide paternal power with a displaced point of origin in nature. Hobbes makes it clear that in the transition to civil society, maternal power gets transferred to the paterfamilias, who thereby holds what is in origin a natural power. By giving paternal dominion both natural and artificial origins, Hobbes designs a curiously hybrid absolutism, one that plays the maternal force of barbarous, precivil nature off against the disciplined dominion of patriarchal, civil society. With the aid of familiar, colonialist tropes, Hobbes maintains the artificial, contractualist character of his absolutism and associates its official, civil identity with a welldressed, Europeanized patriarchal order. At the same time, in retaining, indirectly, the father’s association with “Naturall force,” Hobbes makes paternal dominion correlative with despotic. In discussing maternal dominion, Hobbes ingeniously transposes urdespotism’s setting, replacing the battlefield with, as it were, a naked hearth or mountainside. Hobbes also, of course, creates a complementary scene of submission on the part of the child whose life has graciously been prolonged. In Hobbes’s account as it appears in Leviathan, the mother naturally has the ability either to “nourish” or to “expose” her infant, alternatives that are patterned on the Roman patria potestas, which legitimates exposure, as well as on the military victor’s power of ending or sparing the defeated enemy’s life. Again, seeing the Infant is first in the power of the Mother, so as she may either nourish, or expose it; if she nourish it, it oweth its life to the Mother; and is therefore obliged to obey her, rather than any other; and by consequence the Dominion over it is hers. But if she expose it, and another find, and nourish it, the Dominion is in him that nourisheth it. For it ought to obey him by whom it is preserved; because preservation of life being the end, for which one man becomes subject to another, every man is supposed to promise obedience, to him, in whose power it is to save, or destroy him. (2.20.103)



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Hobbes expects his readers to know that in ancient Greece and Rome such exposure could result in the child’s enslavement, additional evidence of the parental power’s close proximity to despotical. The concluding sentence of this passage, where the moral of the story is driven home, erases differences between paternal and despotic rule, or, more precisely, among children, servants, and the subjects of sovereign power who are Hobbes’s primary concern. For this reason, Hobbes avoids even the sketchiest narrative of infanticide or exposure resulting in death. Death is threatened but averted; the infant who has been exposed (not killed) is found and nourished. Submitting to the dominion of its protector, the child remains vulnerable, however, not to the risk of repeated exposure but to the general, abstract exercise of sovereign power. In a process that is more fully elaborated when he discusses despotical power, Hobbes transforms a scene of momentary, dramatic vulnerability into a principle of ongoing, lifelong dependency upon the sovereign for “the preservation of life.” This principle, so central to Hobbes’s theorization of sovereignty, bears directly on the question posed earlier: why are women absent from Hobbes’s family? Indeed, this principle dictates the answer, which is that wives and mothers, not being subject to absolute dominion, cannot properly illustrate the structure and significance of sovereign power. Adult women have no place in Hobbes’s theorization of sovereignty, I propose, because they do not submit to anyone’s dominion. In none of Hobbes’s major theoretical works is the mother said to be subject to dominion or absolute sovereignty.20 Exempt from absolute rule, the wife is therefore absent from Hobbes’s construction of the family, which, as has been seen, features the paterfamilias in combination with either his children or his servi or with both children and servi. Hobbes privileges a restricted conception of the patriarchal family in which the father is significant only insofar as he is the equivalent of, or identical to, the slaveholder. It is as if he is reclaiming the Latin famulus, origin of the English family, in order to emphasize the membership of servi but especially in their likeness to children. Examined from this perspective, Hobbes’s construction of the patriarchal family highlights both the holders and the subjects of absolute, sovereign power only insofar as they reveal the obedient disposition required of civil subjects. It might be objected that adult women are absent because they are not citizens. Yet children and actual servants are not citizens, either; in their submission to absolute dominion, they are simply analogous to civil subjects. If formulated in terms of Hobbes’s own conceptualization of subjecthood, the real issue is that adult women do not occupy the requisite position

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of radical dependency on their husbands for the preservation of their lives. Although she may be subject to her husband, the wife does not subject herself to his dominion absolutely. Subjecthood for Hobbes originates in one of two ways, either in force or in social covenant, neither of which is relevant to the wife’s subordination. Like the servus, the wife is represented as an individual who is subject to another. Her subordination does not originate in force, however, but is a matter of contract or convention. Like the subject in the commonwealth by design, her subordination originates in consent. Yet she consents only to abide by the terms of her marital contract. Furthermore, the wife’s consent lacks any social, collective aspect or the determination to evade a threat of death, either one of which is necessary to the constitution of civil subjecthood. Hobbes precludes a scene of female consent within a collectivity (even that as small as the family) by defining the family as he does as well as in the origins he provides for it. On the one hand, viewed (tautologically) as a feature of civil society, the patriarchal structure of the family is a by-product of the conventionally patriarchal institution of commonwealths. On the other hand, like the commonwealth by design, the family can emerge by means of the union of its members (members who do not include the mother or wife), a union that constitutes the father and/or the despot as a sovereign power. In the first case, the patriarchal family’s civil character is ensured by its appearance within civil society, whereas in the second, the patriarchal family is itself a kind of civil society. In both cases women are not actively involved. Even though paternal dominion has only a mediated relation to natural right, Hobbes can still claim that both paternal and despotic dominion originate in “Naturall force.” Within the state of nature, if heterosexual relations producing children are contractual, such contracts will last only so long as they last. Within civil society, by contrast, patriarchal marriage has the productive security that absolute sovereignty bestows on its institutions. The conclusion to be drawn is that—for the purposes of theoretical rigor—Hobbes’s wives enjoy a privileged position, being spared the threat of patriarchal force, including the sentence of death, to which subjects of absolute power are vulnerable. Contingent on the male head of household’s status as a subject within civil society or as a sovereign power within the family, the husband’s rule over his wife lacks access to a point of origin in the state of nature, where the power of determining life and death arises. Qua husband, the head of the patriarchal household is therefore not properly a holder of sovereign power, with the result that his wife cannot be a representative subject of such power. In the larger-than-life drama in which



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the life-and-death stakes of absolute submission and dominion get played out, wives and patriarchal mothers do not share the stage with subjects, children, or servants.

Servants and Slaves In transvaluing servitude—creating sustainable, systematic analogies among children, servants, and civil subjects—to further his innovative absolutism, does Hobbes ignore contemporaneous transatlantic slavery? This is a difficult question, in part because it has not seriously been raised. Yet it is not, I think, unanswerable, though I am acutely aware that the interpretative difficulties involved make what follows controversial. In a way, the most telling evidence that Hobbes offers a defense of Atlantic slavery is provided by Locke, who is indebted to chapter 20 of Leviathan for his own apology in “Of Slavery.” In spite of obvious, hugely important differences, elements of Locke’s theorization of “despotical” rule in The Second Treatise result from his appropriation of Hobbes’s discussion in Leviathan, though the practice of reading Locke’s despotical as a synonym for tyrannical has obscured this lineage. Given the strong opposition to absolutism that animates The Two Treatises of Governments, Locke’s willingness to seize upon and adapt central features of Hobbes’s theorization of despotical rule indicates that he thought it to have persuasive force and practical utility with regard to Atlantic slavery. The special status Hobbes confers on the war slavery doctrine suggests that slavery had long captivated his imagination. Like other members of England’s merchant and elite classes, Hobbes would have known that the burgeoning Atlantic plantocracy required various forms of support, including ideological. War slavery doctrine’s position in Hobbes’s writings coincides with the period of England’s rapidly accelerating involvement in transatlantic slave trading and in plantation slavery. More specifically, Noel Malcolm has shown that Hobbes briefly held land in Virginia through Lord Cavendish, and had official responsibilities for the Virginia Company and, perhaps longer, the Somers Isles Company, which founded Bermuda in 1612.21 If relations between servanthood and chattel slavery are painstakingly managed in Hobbes’s theory, so throughout the seventeenth century are those between indentured servitude and African slavery in England’s Atlantic colonies. In Bermuda, for example, though not originally designated “slaves,” Africans and Amerindigenes were consigned to servitude that was formally tantamount to lifelong enslavement: against the six- to ten-year

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indenture period given Europeans, they were assigned a period of four score and nineteen—that is, ninety-nine—years.22 While terminology was in comparative flux until the mid- to latter seventeenth century, racialized distinctions between term-limited and permanent servitude had been established in the early stages of settlement, with irreversible status—a crucial attribute of chattel slavery—automatically assigned enslaved Africans.23 Circumstantial, extratextual evidence is not all, however. Five features of Leviathan’s discussion of slavery also suggest the relevance of New World slavery. First, in Leviathan, servanthood is set apart from slavery more emphatically than in earlier treatises. In all three major works, Hobbes creates two forms of servitude, one that includes physical liberty, one that does not. In Elements, when discussing the right of resistance possessed by the bound servant, Hobbes explains his avoidance of the English slave: “The Romans had no such distinct name, but comprehended all under the name of servus” (2.3.3). An external sign of the performance or nonperformance of covenant, the presence or absence of physical liberty is what distinguishes the unbound from the bound servant. When making this point in De Cive, Hobbes explains how physical liberty is interconnected with covenant, trustworthiness, and true service: “Not every captive in war whose life has been spared is understood to make an agreement with a master, because not everyone is trusted to be left with enough natural liberty to be able to run away or refuse service or cause trouble or loss for his master if he should take it into his head to do so” (2.8.2). By differentiating the unbound from the bound servus in this way, Hobbes radically qualifies the rational, contractual principle informing his three modes of dominion. To put this another way, regarding no other mode of dominion does Hobbes create two distinct groups, one of which comprises subjects of absolute dominion who have not covenanted subjection and are therefore untrustworthy. Members of this group are potentially or naturally resistant to civil society’s dominion. In chapter 20 of Leviathan, though, Hobbes sets the unbound servant so far apart from the bound that he threatens to undermine their shared membership in servitude. In the following passage, Hobbes’s most thorough treatment of despotical rule, the bound servants’ place is explicitly occupied by Slaves.24 Dominion acquired by Conquest, or Victory in war, is that which some Writers call despoticall, from Depo¢thV, which signifieth a Lord, or Master, and is the Dominion of the Master over his Servant. And this Dominion is then acquired to the Victor, when the Vanquished, to avoyd



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the present stroke of death, covenanteth either in expresse words, or by other sufficient signes of the Will, that so long as his life, and the liberty of his body is allowed him, the Victor shall have the use thereof, at his pleasure. And after such Covenant made, the Vanquished is a servant, and not before: for by the word Servant (whether it be derived from Servire, to serve, or from Servare, to Save, which I leave to Grammarians to dispute) is not meant a Captive, which is kept in prison, or bonds, till the owner of him that took him, or bought him of one that did, shall consider what to do with him: (for such men, (commonly called Slaves,) have no obligation at all; but may break their bonds, or the prison; and kill, or carry way captive their Master, justly): but one, that being taken, hath corporall liberty allowed him; and upon promise not to run away, nor to do violence to his Master, is trusted by him. It is not therefore the Victory, that giveth the right of Dominion over the Vanquished, but his own Covenant. Nor is he obliged because he is Conquered; that is to say, beaten, and taken, or put to flight; but because he commeth in, and Submitteth to the Victor; Nor is the Victor obliged by an enemies rendring himselfe, (without promise of life,) to spare him for this his yeelding to discretion; which obliges not the Victor longer, than in his own discretion hee shall think fit. And that which men do, when they demand (as it is now called) Quarter, (which the Greek called Zwgri¢a, taking alive,) is to evade the present fury of the Victor, by Submission, and to compound for their life, with Ransome, or Service: and therefore he that hath Quarter, hath not his life given, but deferred till farther deliberation; For it is not an yeelding on condition of life, but to discretion. And then onely is his life in security, and his service due, when the Victor hath trusted him with his corporall liberty. For Slaves that work in Prisons, or Fetters, do it not of duty, but to avoyd the Cruelty of their task-masters. (2.20.103, 2.20.104)

For the first time, Hobbes does not fold the English slave back into the Latin servus. Slaves are distinct from servants, even as the parentheses and “commonly called” self-consciously flag the term’s Englishness. More extraordinarily, Hobbes applies the ideologically charged etymology of servus, which Grotius, following Roman practice, applies to chattel slavery, to servant alone, exclusive of slaves, which thereby become etymologically foreign to both servire and servare. This ingenious revisioning of received Roman doctrine and contemporary practice further underscores slavery’s conceptual separateness. At the same time it reflexively reveals an aspect

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of Hobbes’s ruling conceit that has all along informed his positive valuation of voluntary servitude: the intimate, life-enhancing interrelations between servare and servire. What, then, of slavery? Although slavery falls under despotical rule, the slave categorically does not serve. In Leviathan, Hobbes is willing to jeopardize what has up to this point in his political philosophy seemed a unified, internally differentiated servitude, together with its corollary, an undifferentiated despotical rule. In the context of Hobbes’s transvaluation of servitude, the effect of the sharper polarization of voluntary servitude and slavery is certainly to enhance the likeness of voluntary servanthood and civil subjecthood. Under the fraught, postregicide circumstances in which he writes, it is especially important to clarify civil subjecthood’s consensual basis under “conquest,” and to theorize the resistance some royalists continue to offer a regime to which they may choose not to covenant subjection.25 In both the passage just cited and in “A Review, and Conclusion,” which explicitly addresses the current political situation, Hobbes denies that “Victory” itself constitutes sovereignty: “It is not therefore the Victory, that giveth the right of Dominion over the Vanquished, but his own [i.e., the Vanquished’s] Covenant.”26 This claim unmistakably elevates rational, contractual subjection over physical coercion. Hobbes may have decided that his earlier formulation—that unbound and bound servanthood differ in degree, not kind—did not adequately highlight servanthood’s origins in covenant under conditions of “conquest.” By opposing the servant and slave as they respond to a situation of military “Victory,” Hobbes strengthens his identification of citizen-subjects with servants of the state. By highlighting servanthood’s contractual character, he emphasizes its likeness to civil subjecthood in the commonwealth by design.27 If this had been Hobbes’s primary objective, however, it could have been met by a more nuanced opposition between the unbound and bound servus. Set against the immediately preceding, comparatively straightforward treatment of parental dominion in chapter 20, the section on despotical dominion in Leviathan goes well beyond nuance in its mind-boggling complexity. Where the dramatic encounter between the vulnerable infant and all-powerful mother is disposed of in a single paragraph, Hobbes devotes three complexly interrelated paragraphs to relations between military victor and vanquished. By reformulating the opposition between unbound and bound servant as one between servant and slave, Hobbes prepares the way for the second distinctive feature of Leviathan’s treatment of slavery, namely, the commodification of the enslaved. (This feature, incidentally, makes it evident that the slave is not a stand-in for the resistant royal-



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ist.) While De Cive numbers captives, prisoners, and workhouse detainees among its bound servants, the above passage refers only to slaves. Closely, syntactically related, the “captive” here becomes the “slave,” who in turn awaits the appearance of an “owner.” That this “owner” is distinct from the “victor” recalls Grotius’s reference to military generals selling their captives. The presence of an “owner” involving purchase and sale inescapably gestures toward the Atlantic slave trade, besides indicating the precivil state the commodified slave shares with animals. Later in Leviathan, when Hobbes returns to the two orders of servitude, slaves are said to be “bought and sold as Beasts” (4.45.358). Commodification is therefore related to the third feature of Hobbes’s discussion in this passage, which is slavery’s association with the state of nature against servanthood’s with civil society. These associations are insidiously reinforced by Hobbes’s contrast between the single, covenanting Servant and the consistently plural Slaves (chaotic aggregation being a sign of precivility). On the level of philosophical reflection, however, Hobbes’s argument pivots on the value of covenant—a word often used in contracts for indentured servitude—as a signifier of civility.28 The servant distinguishes him- or herself from slaves by the performance of covenant. Elsewhere in Leviathan, Hobbes has the victor proactively offering prisoners of war preservation of life on the condition of covenanted subjection (2.21.114). In this section, though, the initiative—and therefore the onus of differentiating servant from slave—lies with the vanquished. Because Hobbes’s servant, not the master, initiates the covenant, the master does not save the servant in an act of chivalrous rescue. Yet the moment the master trusts the servant with physical liberty, the servant begins to enjoy life “in security,” which pretty much amounts to being saved. Enjoying life in security means having “his life given”—giving, as has been seen, being the verb used earlier of the despotic power of life and death as a function of “Naturall force.” Not having had their lives “given” in this sense, slaves, by contrast, remain indefinitely, perpetually fearful that their lives will be taken. An abject, adrenaline-charged existence bent on nothing more than avoiding death is, of course, just what Hobbes’s state of nature has on offer. Unlike contractual servanthood, slavery remains in the precivil condition of war. As Hobbes structures this passage, discussion of the servant precedes that of the slave, thereby replicating the way the performance of covenant permits the servant to exit the scene of warfare. Once the covenant has been described, its ceremonial, performative effect stressed (“And after such Covenant made, the Vanquished is a servant, and not before”), and the

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causal relation between trustworthiness and liberty established, the servant disappears from Hobbes’s discussion (except for the summary in the penultimate sentence). Having reached the decision that the benefits of covenant are worth placing life and liberty at the victor’s service, the servant formally surrenders the right of resistance and is awarded physical liberty. Having, in effect, been saved, the servant need not be discussed further. Against the clarity of the servant’s narrative closure appear the various militarized acts of surrender (“rendring himselfe,” “yeelding to discretion,” and demanding “Quarter”) that do not result in security of life or liberty. If Hobbes’s discussion of slavery seems opaque, it is in part owing to the nonprogressive return of the battlefront and the scene of surrender in the second and third paragraphs. This passage’s central, interpretative crux arises in the second paragraph, where it is claimed that the vanquished is not “obliged because he is Conquered; that is to say, beaten, and taken, or put to flight; but because he commeth in, and Submitteth to the Victor.” The contrast between coercive force and voluntary submission is clear. Yet the second clause poses difficulties because though Hobbes elsewhere treats submission as a metonym for covenant, they here appear to be different.29 If distinct, both submission and its various synonyms (“rendring himselfe,” “yeelding to discretion,” and demanding “Quarter”) would have a subcovenantal status throughout this passage. Hobbes seems to imagine a situation in which the vanquished has the option of becoming either a servant or a slave, though he refers only to the interval of time before the would-be servant opts for covenant’s higher destiny (“And after such Covenant made, the Vanquished is a servant, and not before” [my emphasis]). Observe, in this connection, that Hobbes consistently uses vanquished when gesturing toward the moment prior to the establishment of status. In this reading, the second paragraph concerns the absence of covenant in the earlier, precovenantal stage of the dramatic, militarized encounter when the vanquished sues for life. Hobbes appears to envision a two-stage process. In the first, the vanquished submits in the sense of formally acknowledging the victor’s superior might together with a desire to live (rather than to continue risking life in battle). In signaling a voluntary cessation of military activity, the act of surrender signals provisional nonresistance as well as a consensual recognition of the opponent’s victory. Whereas this surrender is the only form of submission the noncovenanting vanquished—that is, the slave—performs, it temporally precedes the servant’s formal covenant of nonresistance, which is an independent act of submission constitutive of civility. Significantly, in his marginal comment on this passage, Hobbes uses



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the more inclusive consent rather than covenant: “Not by the Victory, but by the Consent of the Vanquished.” As becomes more evident in the third paragraph, surrender (first-stage submission) and its synonyms are tantamount to consent but not to constitutive covenant. Hobbes, it would seem, creates continuities between slavery and unbound servitude as well as a radical discontinuity. For this reason, the critical “because he commeth in, and Submitteth to the Victor” applies to both slave and potential servant, who are situated back on the battlefield, a point of origin they must share if despotical power is in some way to apply to both. Does this mean that slaves are in some way “obliged”? On the one hand, Hobbes pointedly contrasts the servant’s covenanted obedience with the slave’s lack of obligation. When differentiating them in the opening paragraph, Hobbes states categorically that slaves “have no obligation at all.” On the other hand, Hobbes implies that the act of surrender is itself a meaningful “Submission,” as a consequence of which the victor temporarily refrains from killing his enemies. In this rudimentary form, submission is the basis of both actual and eventual, metaphorical enslavement (that is, voluntary servitude). However, such consent is, as it were, lowercase; it does not hold over time; it does not bind because it is the sort of contract that befits the state of nature. And it does not constitute actual sovereignty as Hobbes theorizes it. Hobbes signals its subcovenantal status by referring to the “victor” rather than the “master” in the second and third paragraphs. For those who become servants, this lower-order consent is prelude to the more rationally strategized covenant, which secures a condition free from the threat of impending death. They voluntarily serve and can therefore be saved. For those who perform only the inferior, ad hoc contract—those who merely render themselves, yield to discretion, or compound for life—there is only an impermanent reprieve because the victor is at liberty to exercise the power of life and death that in Hobbes’s adaptation of war slavery doctrine he continues unconditionally to hold. Their consent cannot deliver them from the war zone that is Hobbes’s state of nature. Expressed in terms of a rational calculus of ends, the renunciation of resistance is well worth the benefits received when covenanting. Why, then, do not slaves, too, covenant? Unsurprisingly, Hobbes does not raise this question, either here or in other discussions of servitude’s two forms. Yet responses may be sought in examples of subcovenantal consent Hobbes provides elsewhere, the most relevant perhaps being the “concord” Hobbes mentions in Leviathan’s evocation of the state of nature in chapter 13: “For the savage people in many places of America, except the government of small Families, the concord whereof dependeth on naturall lust, have no

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government at all; and live at this day in that brutish manner, as I said before” (1.13.63). A refusal to recognize Amerindigenous social formations as any kind of “government” is essential to Hobbes’s state of nature. In this passage, “naturall lust” produces the “concord” that even animals are able to achieve, such concord therefore being a subcivil version of patriarchal marriage as well as the covenant associated with civil society. Regarding Hobbes’s distinction between unbound and bound servitude, that slaves do not covenant is to be accounted for in terms of other, naturalized absences systematically associated with the privative age, including the lack of concern for the future Hobbes frequently attributes to the “savage” inhabitants of America. Hobbes diverges from Greco-Roman norms regarding slavery by ceding the vanquished who have not covenanted subjection a natural, inalienable right of resistance. Though much has been made of this right, in many respects its function is diacritically to mark the ever-resistant slave off from the voluntary servant. The latter is presumed consciously to weigh the penal consequences of disobedience. Despite his antipathy to antityrannicism’s foundational opposition between free and slave, Hobbes in this way produces his own idiosyncratic version of it. Insofar as a right of resistance belongs to the state-of-nature-as war, it stigmatizes those who are (apparently indefinitely) slaves by making the potentially never-ending exercise of this right in self-defense an antagonistic state that is somehow native to them, as if involuntary servitude aptly represents an animallike incapacity for rational choice. To put this another way, Hobbes retains not only the category of the unfree servant but also its demeaning associations with the animalized body, associations that are strengthened by his use of slave. In the process whereby Hobbes’s servant secures physical liberty and life (becoming analogous to the citizen), rationality, covenant, and liberty of body are united in radically minimizing the significance of mere force. For the bound servant, or what Leviathan calls the slave, however, bodily fear so predominates that service cannot by definition be voluntary. Hobbes makes this point in De Cive, too, but less emphatically. Safeguarding his transvaluation of servitude, Hobbes claims that the labor that bound servi perform is not actually service (conceived as the voluntary honoring of a master), nor can people of this sort be considered proper servi “because they serve in order to avoid beatings, not on the basis of an agreement” (2.8.4). Involuntary servi are not actually renamed, however. As is typical of Greco-Roman representations of slavery, fear of physical harm on the part of the enslaved is the abject counterpart of noble freedom’s highmindedness. When discussing covenant in the passage above from Levia-



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than, Hobbes refers to “the present stroke of death,” a slightly displaced, civilized representation of the “present fury of the Victor” used of the stateof-nature-as-war. Rhetorically, the victor’s “fury” prepares for the taskmasters’ “cruelty,” introduced in the last sentence with regard to slavery: “For Slaves that work in Prisons, or Fetters, do it not of duty, but to avoid the cruelty of their task-masters.” Again, this vividly evokes the fear-based, propitiatory cycle—an ad hoc compounding for life that results in fear of further, even fatal, violence—to which enslavement is bound. Fourth, in this passage Hobbes places as much, if not more, stress on the unconditional nature of the victor’s power as on the constitutive role of covenant. Hobbes repeatedly hastens to correct any impression that the victor has an obligation to spare—that is, to continue sparing—the vanquished’s life. He even engages in wordplay on discretion, from the Latin discretio: “Nor is the Victor obliged by an enemies rendring himselfe (without promise of life,) to spare him for this his yeelding to discretion; which obliges not the Victor longer, than in his own discretion hee shall think fit” (my emphasis). The phrase “yield to discretion” occurs specifically in military contexts where it signifies an offer of surrender; “at discretion” is used in the same way. The phrase “in his own discretion,” however, evokes privileges associated with unconstrained, individual agency, and thus applies to the victor’s privilege of exercising the power he holds over the vanquished’s life whenever and however he sees fit. Though such “discretion” appears in many contexts at the time Hobbes writes, it plays a major part in debates on sovereignty, where antiabsolutists associate it with arbitrary rule, the contrary of the rule of law. Hobbes’s entire project is, of course, designed to protect the sovereign’s discretionary power. In this passage, though, Hobbes defends the extralegal, discretionary power of the “Victor,” who is free of obligation not only at the dramatic moment of surrender but also thereafter. The situation in which Hobbes places the enslaved is roughly that sketched in the passage from Elements with which this chapter began. Yet if Hobbes there represents an ur-despotical coercive power potentially inclusive of both parental and despotical, with reference to the enslaved, he represents the slaveholder’s power as in a sense protodespotical in being the unruly, violent precursor to despotical power proper, which is ceremonially constituted by the servant’s covenant. Because this protodespotical power originates in the state of nature, the vanquished remains an enemy even after submitting (“Nor is the Victor obliged by an enemies rendring himselfe”). For Hobbes, this is the status of royalists who choose to live secretly under Cromwell; formally an “Enemy of the State,” they can justly be put to death (Leviathan, “Review,” 491). Yet by giving the “Victor” such

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discretionary power, Hobbes simultaneously elaborates the fiction, which pervades literature on Atlantic slavery, that slave mastery originates in warfare. He makes the slaveholder’s continuing, disciplinary exercise of the power of life and death an extension of the military victor’s. The absoluteness of the victor’s power of life and death is not in any way qualified, as it is when the vanquished covenants service. Instead, even when transferred by sale, the power held by the master involves an interminably open-ended, disciplinary extension of the power of life and death—that is, the gratuitous preservation of life together with the threat of death—over the vanquished. In England’s colonies, such power is not only the very basis of the unregulated, private character of the slaveholder’s power but also a power exercised, for the most part, with impunity. Further indication that the colonial slaver’s interests are at issue in this passage appears, finally, in the emphasis given the two forms of slave resistance that required most vigilant preemptive discipline, escape and rebellion. Unusually, Hobbes mentions these when discussing the servant’s physical liberty as the desirable, contractual by-product of trust: the servant is “one, that being taken, hath corporall liberty allowed him; and upon promise not to run away, nor to do violence to his Master, is trusted by him.” This stress can readily be connected with Atlantic slavery as practiced in both Bermuda and Virginia, the two colonies immediately relevant to Hobbes. Owing to the relative absence of large plantations, slavery was practiced with less brutality in Bermuda than in either Virginia or the Caribbean colonies. Even so, in 1623 Bermuda passed the first racialized legislation in an En­ glish colony, “An Act to restrayne the insolencies of the Negroes.” This act, reenacted in Bermuda for well over a century, was soon imitated in other English colonies. It prohibited liberty of physical movement and assembly without the express permission of the master (passes were later required) and attached specific forms of branding or mutilation for first and repeated violations.30 In 1647 a Bermuda law prohibited baptism of blacks, while after an uprising in 1656 (later, of course, than the publication of Leviathan), the governor of Bermuda issued a proclamation legitimating the murder “then & there without mercye” of blacks who were out after sunset without a pass—an instance in which the slaveholder’s power of life and death was extended to other members of the white community who might come upon them.31 As Hobbes consistently theorizes involuntary as opposed to voluntary servitude, a servant who is under the indefinitely extended, absolute dominion of a master and whose bodily liberty is regulated in this way would clearly be a bound servant (or, in the language Leviathan sanctions, a



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slave). Not having covenanted obedience, she or he remains in the state of nature, where a propensity for violence remains the norm. Accordingly, the right of resistance Hobbes prominently assigns those who are enslaved possesses the uninhibited brutality to be found in the state of nature. In the absence of covenant, Hobbes says, slaves “may break their bonds, or the prison; and kill, or carry way captive their Master, justly.” Instead of being allowed “to escape,” the phrase Hobbes uses of chapter 21’s prisoner of war, slaves are represented breaking, killing, or abducting. Note, too, the almost imperceptible escalation of violence in the shift from breaking bonds to breaking prison, and then from forced reclamation of physical liberty to retaliation against “their Master.” In relation to the compliance expected of subordinates within a status-oriented, hierarchical society, such resistance would appear even more alarming than the “dominion” Hobbes gives the natural, Amazonian mother. For Atlantic slaveholders, it represents what violent disciplinary methods are meant to preempt. At a radical remove from actual social relations within any contemporaneous Western European nation, despotical dominion as Hobbes conceives it—that is, servitude originating in warfare—legitimates the extralegal power held by the slave master at the same time that it contributes ideologically to the militarization and bureaucratization of sovereignty claimed by the state. Hobbes’s dispassionate language regarding servanthood forges a connection between the formal equality of human beings in the state of nature and the disciplined sameness of children, servants, and civil subjects, who not only obey but also agree to serve. Interestingly, the “cruelty” Hobbes, like Grotius, ascribes to the slaves’ “taskmasters,” while permitted in the state of nature and especially relevant to the license enjoyed by the slave master, violates the (for Hobbes nonbinding) laws of nature. Cruelty thus conveys slave mastery’s extralegal status yet also Leviathan’s controlled, civil distance from the slaveholder’s intemperance and physicality. Where his contemporaries often oppose the Egyptian “taskmaster’s” cruel treatment of his slaves to their deity’s rewarding spiritual discipline, Hobbes compares enslavement’s abjection with civil servanthood, whose “chains,” he famously notes, are “Artificiall.”

chapter ten

Locke’s “Of Slavery,” Despotical Power, and Tyranny

D

avid B. Davis’s view that Locke is the last major European political theorist to defend slavery is often repeated. But does Locke defend slavery? And if so, does his defense really make sense? On these questions there is no consensus.1 In his edition of Locke’s Political Writings, for example, David Wootton claims that the arguments of the Second Treatise “could easily be developed to support democracy and to demonstrate the illegitimacy of chattel slavery,” illegitimacy that, in his view, is the only defensible conclusion to be drawn from Locke’s discussion.2 Wootton is of course aware of Locke’s active involvement in the development of policy and legislation regarding Euro-colonial slavery, as are the generations of readers who have benefited from Peter Laslett’s edition of Two Treatises.3 For many commentators, however, Locke’s personal investment in New World plantocracy merely makes his discussion of slavery all the more baffling. Locke’s reasoning in “Of Slavery” falls so below par that it has seemed best to ignore it altogether or to conclude, on the basis of comments made in “Of Conquest,” that Locke opposes hereditary slavery, and perhaps slavery itself, at least in theory. Those who want Locke to be consistently liberal have sometimes found a condemnation of slavery in the ringing words that open Two Treatises: “[S]lavery is so vile and miserable an Estate of Man, and so directly opposite to the generous Temper and Courage of our Nation; that ’tis hardly to be conceived, that an Englishman, much less a Gentleman, should plead for’t.4 The English gentleman in question is Robert Filmer, who defends royal absolutism by arguing that the state into which all are born is subjection to paternal-cum-monarchical power. Far from pleading for the legitimacy of transatlantic slavery, Filmer avoids any serious consideration of it. His aim, instead, is to put a stop to the rhetorically inflammatory appeals to politi326



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cal slavery in which advocates of popular sovereignty provocatively engage. Appeals to “slavery” such as Locke’s exemplify the very usage Filmer would like to abolish. In the tradition of Greco-Roman antityrannicism to which Two Treatises belongs, the collective subjection of free citizens to the arbitrary rule of an absolute monarch is a condition of abject degradation that is persistently represented as political slavery. So well established is this figural identity in the Western European literature of political resistance that a whole cluster of politically encoded associations is evoked by terms that originally relate to chattel slavery. Despite some lingering reluctance, historians of political theory are increasingly willing to explore interrelations between early modern European liberalism and Euro-colonialism. Barbara Arneil and James Tully have authored groundbreaking studies of Locke’s Two Treatises as it relates to En­ glish colonial ventures in the Americas, while Uday Mehta has shown how Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding contributes to Euro-American liberalism’s exclusivity.5 More recently, David Armitage has demonstrated that Locke’s active involvement in revisions of the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina extends into the period of his composition of Two Treatises. As secretary for the Proprietors of Carolina from 1669 to 1675, and as both secretary and treasurer of the English Council for Trade and Foreign Plantations, Locke has, in Armitage’s words, “a more thorough understanding of his country’s commerce and colonies than that possessed by any canonical figure in the history of political thought before Edmund Burke.”6 Further, Armitage points out, because he was one of the authors of Fundamental Constitutions, Locke’s major contribution to political philosophy, Two Treatises, has direct, verifiable relations with colonial administrative practice. The most notable point of intersection appears in article 110 of the Fundamental Constitutions: “Every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his Negro slaves, of what opinion or religion soever.”7 Closer to the language Locke uses in Two Treatises is that of an earlier, unpublished version, which refers to the slaveholder’s “absolute arbitrary Power, over the Lives, Liberties and Persons of his Slaves, and their Posterities.”8 Though historians and political theorists often mention article 110 in connection with Locke’s investment in transatlantic colonialism, they have been concerned primarily with Locke’s theorization of labor and property in land rather than with slavery. In part, this is because the majority of Locke’s references to America either relate to property or actually appear in chapter 5, “Of Property.” By contrast, chapter 4, “Of Slavery,” does not mention either America or Africa, the two relevant geopolitical areas. Yet

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there are other reasons for preferring to hold “Of Slavery” at arm’s length even while gesturing toward isolated passages. Locke is scarcely alone in using different discursive registers in ways that create interpretative dilemmas for modern readers. “Of Slavery” presents unique challenges, however, chief among which are its unusual methods of distinguishing political from institutional slavery and the way it jarringly shifts, without familiar cues, from analogical, political discourse to a consideration of slavery per se, the legitimacy of which is asserted. In terms of discursive density and meticulously wrought logical and rhetorical progression, the passages by Milton and Hobbes examined earlier (from book 12 of Paradise Lost and from chapter 20 of Leviathan) are comparably complex. Locke would have been familiar with these passages, which, like “Of Slavery,” rely on widespread representations of the privative age inhabited by “barbarous” nations. “Of Slavery” draws on such representations in utilizing a peculiarly abstract, theoretical language designed to rationalize, at one and the same time, a radical right to resist tyranny and a right to exploit those who have been enslaved. Though the exact nature of Locke’s indebtedness to the literature of England’s revolutionary era continues to be debated, it has persuasively been argued that Locke both appropriates and conservatively undercuts midcentury radicalism. On a number of issues, ranging from eligibility for the franchise to the brutal penalties he recommends for the unemployed poor, Locke takes up positions that are diametrically opposed to the demands passionately articulated by Levelers, Diggers, Agitators, and other seventeenth-century radicals.9 Yet Locke also not only begins from egalitarian, natural rights principles but invokes them to support an uncompromisingly radical antityrannicism. As David McNally points out, the term radical is often applied to Locke without acknowledging the social conservatism that it often supports. “[T]he only approach which can decipher the full texture of Locke’s thought,” McNally says, “is one which captures the unique interaction of these two elements of his political thinking—and the overriding unity which Locke attempted to impose upon their potentially uneasy relation.”10 The tension between Locke’s narrowly political radicalism and his defense of social and economic inequalities is nowhere more evident than in “Of Slavery.” In what follows I demonstrate both how “Of Slavery” coheres and how carefully Locke has integrated his defense of slavery with other, central features of Two Treatises. Later in this discussion I suggest that the unstable unity Locke imposes on his defense of antityrannicism and of slavery is illuminated by a debate regarding the power of life and death that was sparked by the imminent trial and execution of Charles I (the “power/



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no-power” examined in chapter 6). My aim is to persuade readers that far from being half-baked or incidental, Locke’s defense of slavery is skillfully integrated with his theorization of the state of nature and the state of war, together with the civil subject’s right to resist tyranny.

Antityranny, Not Antidespotism The interpretative challenges of “Of Slavery” have been disastrously compounded by a failure to appreciate the distinction Locke draws in Two Treatises between tyrannous and despotical rule. In his chapter “Of Tyranny,” Locke defines tyranny in conventional, antityranny terms—that is, as the ruler’s irresponsible substitution of private for public ends (2.18.199). Because it consists in an abuse of the power by which citizens have consented to be governed, tyranny appears only within civil society, where it involves violation of the law: “Where-ever Law ends, Tyranny begins, if the Law be transgressed to another’s harm” (2.18.202). Using conventional antityr­ anny discourse, Locke represents those oppressed by tyranny as political slaves. In the same disparaging, satiric vein with which he opens the Two Treatises, Locke attacks apologists for royal absolutism as “those Egyptian Under-Taskmasters,” who “whilst it seem’d to serve their turn, resolv’d all Government into absolute Tyranny, and would have all Men born to, what their mean Souls fitted them for, Slavery” (2.19.239). Only somewhat less rhetorically, when arguing that absolute monarchy is incompatible with civil society, Locke decries the degraded condition of “the Subject, or rather Slave of an Absolute Prince” (2.7.91). Together with his radical forebears and contemporaries, Locke conceptualizes tyranny in terms that legitimate resistance, which is the primary concern of “Of Tyranny” and the subsequent, final chapter, “Of the Dissolution of Government.” “Despotical” power is an entirely different matter, however: against despotical power there is no right of resistance. This is because “despotical” designates legitimate possession of the power of life and death over the enslaved or the justly conquered. Though Locke would have known that the slaveholder’s power of life and death is legitimated by Roman jurists, his own usage is indebted primarily to Hobbes, who systematically relates despotical power to its origins in warfare. Though it is like tyranny in being incompatible with civil society, despotical power for Locke is nonetheless a distinct, legitimate form of power. In this, despotical rule differs from tyranny as well as from absolute monarchy insofar as it is tyrannous. To indicate that despotical power is one of several forms of legitimate power, Locke, like Hobbes, uses only the adjectival form, despotical, which first

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appears in chapter 4, “Of Slavery.” Slavery is again at issue when despotical power is considered at greater length in chapter 15, “Of Paternal, Political, and Despotical Power, Considered Together.” The third context in which despotical power comes up is in chapter 16, “Of Conquest,” where despotical power is the power a conqueror holds over those of the conquered who are guilty of unjustly opposing him in an unjust war. In this chapter, Locke differentiates “perfect Despotical Power” from every conceivable illicit variant, industriously closing off every avenue of potentially invasive rule from those who do not deserve it so as to preserve liberal subjects’ freedom from arbitrary, coercive power.11 Whatever the context, for Locke despotical power involves the power of life and death over those who are subject to it, a power Locke invariably describes as “absolute.” In “Of Conquest,” for example, Locke asserts that the conqueror “has an Absolute Power over the Lives of those, who by an Unjust War have forfeited them,” a power he calls “purely Despotical” (2.16.178). At one point, Locke refers to those subject to this despotical power as “slaves” (2.16.189), though this is not household slavery but monarchical rule acquired by military conquest, rule that is equivalent to what Jean Bodin calls “lordly monarchy.” Despite this theoretically respectable, ideologically motivated consistency, commentators treat tyranny and despotism as if they are interchangeable for Locke. For example, although the power of life and death, not monarchy, is under discussion, Laslett annotates chapter 15’s section on “despotical” power with materials on absolute monarchy and tyranny, going so far as to propose that Locke has James II in mind when vilifying the despot.12 Nowhere, however, either in this chapter or elsewhere in Two Treatises, does Locke disparage either the despot or despotical power. Laslett’s authoritative notes do much to obscure the cogency—to say nothing of blunting the impact—of Locke’s theorization of slavery. At the same time, they also, paradoxically, prevent readers from grasping the militancy of Locke’s conception of resistance, as will be seen in later in this chapter when Locke’s reflections on household, despotical power in chapter 15 get more detailed consideration. Should Two Treatises take any responsibility for this conflation of tyrannous and despotical rule? Though their fusion is likely a postabolition phenomenon, Locke may encourage it by introducing an unsettling, novel feature into his discussion of arbitrary rule: language that is conventionally strongly affective gets used in a neutral, dispassionate fashion. Specifically, Locke employs language normally associated with the abominations of tyranny when discussing despotical rule as a legitimate form of absolute do-



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minion, characterizing both by the exercise of “Absolute, Arbitrary Power.” In spite of their clearly established differences—in terms of the right of resistance, they are complete, polar opposites—tyranny and despotical rule are occasionally referred to by means of the very same neutral language. To the extent that they are, tyranny and slave mastery become eerily, disturbingly alike, if not equivalent. This equivalence occurs, however, only at the very apex of theoretical abstraction, where arbitrary, absolute power robs its subjects of their most essential rights. Basically, what tyranny and despotical rule share is all that is signified by dominion in Hobbes’s major theoretical works, which, in a related, polemically motivated tactic, divests dominion of the inflammatory associations with injustice it carries in radical literature. Locke, however, strips arbitrary, absolute power of its negative connotations only when treating despotical power; solely in this context does the language of arbitrary rule decline affective or ethical response. The significance of such systematic selectivity cannot be overstated. With this strategy, Locke uses an ostensibly value-free conception of arbitrary rule in defense of chattel slavery while retaining solidarity with the radical tradition that energetically opposes a vilified political slavery for citizens. Locke consistently both links despotical rule with the power of life and death and represents it in dispassionate, propositional language. In chapter 15, for example, Locke provides the following definition: “Despotical Power is an Absolute, Arbitrary Power one Man has over another, to take away his Life, whenever he pleases” (2.15.172). Observe that Locke here defines despotical power as a relation between individuals. In keeping with conventions of political philosophy that go back to Aristotle, both “Of Slavery” and “Of Despotism” represent despotical power with reference to abstract individuals whose social roles ultimately map onto those of the household slaveholder (or Lord, the term Locke, like Hobbes, uses) and slave. Yet, unlike Hobbes, Locke is not reluctant to apply despotical directly to a conqueror’s rule over a body of subjects. Indeed, he has more to say about the conqueror than he does about the enslaving lord. Locke does not, however, draw attention to the differing circumstances—national for the conqueror, household for the slaveholding lord—in which despotical power gets exercised. To flag them might threaten the theoretical unity of the power of terminating life—the basis of the abstract identity between just conqueror and lord. In “Of Conquest,” Locke produces an array of distinctions, subcategories, and circumstances limiting the conqueror’s despotical power to those of the conquered who unjustly acted against him. Assidu­ ously defending the rights of those who are deemed innocent, Locke is

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arguing by the end of the chapter that a conqueror lacking “lawful Title” to “Dominion” over such people is an “Aggressor” if he attempts to invade their rights. As an aggressor entering “a state of War against them,” such a conqueror—basically a tyrant-by-acquisition—“has no better a Right of Principality, he, nor any of his Successors, than Hingar, or Hubba the Danes had here in England; or Spartacus, had he Conquered Italy would have had; which is to have their Yoke cast off, as soon as God shall give those under their subjection Courage and Opportunity to do it” (2.16.196). Locke further legitimates armed political resistance with reference to Hezekiah’s revolt against the Assyrian king to whom he had formerly done homage. Lumping Spartacus, leader of the largest recorded slave insurgency in the ancient Mediterranean world, together with barbarous invaders of England and heathenish Assyrian conquerors, Locke raises hypothetical slave insurgency to the level of unjust national conquest—itself a traditional, neoclassical figure for internal, political tyranny—self-evidently requiring that it be overthrown. Of course, Locke is not alone in assuming that slave insurgency of the kind led by Spartacus is a priori illegitimate. The purpose of plantation societies’ increasingly complicated legislation regarding racialized slavery— with much of which Locke had every reason to be acquainted—is to either preempt or retaliate against ongoing, daily resistance and the frequent uprisings launched by enslaved Africans. By insisting that the institution of slavery is categorically not political, however, Locke denies the enslaved any right of resistance. Political power, a product of the “free” people who have united collectively to create civil society, can be exercised only for both individual and collective good. By definition, Locke claims, political power “cannot be an Absolute, Arbitrary Power over their Lives and Fortunes, which are as much as possible to be preserved” (2.15.171). When political power ceases to preserve such lives and fortunes, it can legitimately be resisted. Enslavement, however, occurs in a state of war, which Locke, like Hobbes, separates off from civil society, and which obviously has no consensual, preservative end. More stringently than Hobbes, Locke denies that consent of any kind is relevant to despotical power. Astonishingly, even self-preservation is not a right for the enslaved according to Locke’s formulations in “Of Despotism,” where the enslaved is presumed not to be “Master of his own Life”; the enslaved is thus incapable not only of contract but also, it is implied, of preserving her or his own life, said to be the prerogative of someone who is “Master of himself, and his own Life” (2.15.172). Like Aristotle and his early modern heirs, Locke insists on the distinctiveness of political rule. Locke, however, counterposes political to all forms



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of familial rule, not just the slaveholder’s. The power of the lord over his slaves belongs with the father’s (or parents’) rule over his (or their) children, the husband’s rule over his wife, and the master’s rule over servants. Locke makes this clear in the Second Treatise’s well known introductory passage: “That the Power of a Magistrate over a Subject, may be distinguished from that of a Father over his Children, a Master over his Servant, a Husband over his Wife, and a Lord over his Slave” (2.1.2). Like other relations within the patriarchal household, the lord’s power is exercised in private, among unequals. At the same time, however, despotical power does not fully belong to this familial set. For by contrast with other familial relations, the enslaver’s disciplinary power extends to the taking of its subject’s life: alone among other forms of private rule, it entails the power of life and death. Owing to discursive conventions that go back to Aristotle and are given new purchase by Hobbes, Locke assumes the unique, hybrid character of despotical power: a private or household power, it nevertheless has a temporal point of origin in the power the victor gains in warfare (which Locke, too, assumes to be “just”). Whenever formally discussing political rule, to be exercised for the common good, or tyranny, always a collectively suffered wrong, Locke posits a plurality or community of subjects. This is also the case regarding despotical power in “Of Conquest,” where conquerors are sometimes and the conquered are always plural. In chapter 15, which immediately precedes “Of Conquest,” however, despotical power is defined as a relation between individuals (“Power one Man has over another”). When so defined, despotical power is conceptualized with reference to legal slavery and, implicitly, the household, where ownership of each and every individual slave—each being individual chattel—resides with a single enslaver or “lord.” Consistently, then, Locke’s despotical rule has both public and private dimensions. In “Of Slavery” and chapter 15, despotical rule is exercised in the private household by an individual enslaver, yet remains mystifyingly military in origin.

Hobbes, Locke, and the Power of Life and Death Before we can proceed to “Of Slavery,” we need to investigate Locke’s unusual theorization of the power of life and death. For reasons that will become clear, Locke associates this phrase, which he does not actually use, with war slavery doctrine. Like other theorists of sovereignty, Locke assumes the power of life and death to be the basis of state disciplinary power. In holding that in civil society it belongs to the law itself—what he calls “the

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legislative Power”—rather than to any individual or sovereign, Locke takes a position that aligns him with advocates of popular sovereignty. When formally defining “Political Power,” the first thing Locke mentions is “a Right of making Laws with Penalties of Death” (2.1.3). In Locke’s state of nature, which revises that of Hobbes, however, everyone possesses something akin to a right of life and death. Whereas for Hobbes the limitless violence and anarchy of humankind’s natural condition necessitates the institution of a single, absolute holder of sovereign power, for Locke the individuals who hold such power naturally regulate its exercise according to the law of nature. Not immediately an expression of self-preservation, the right to take life is intrinsically juridical in Locke’s state of nature. Locke encourages readers to contrast his lawful state of nature with that of (the unnamed) Hobbes, whose unregulated human nature stands in harsh, polar opposition to civil society. As he sets it forth, Locke’s civil society does not diverge sharply from its naturally lawful, sociable origins, with which it has valued continuities. Regarding the power of life and death, however, Locke’s natural human condition is not that far from Hobbes’s in that it, too, includes a right to take human life. Yet neither of the two distinct forms this right assumes for Locke resembles Hobbes’s right of selfpreservation. Locke’s natural individual holds, first, a specifically disciplinary right that extends to killing, and, second, a defensive, martial right to take the lives of those who have initiated a state of war. For Locke, the second, martial power does not inhere in the state of nature because the moment warlike aggression occurs, the state of “nature” becomes the state of “war.” When an individual’s life and liberty are threatened, that individual rightly wields martial power by engaging in conflict initiated by the aggressor. Although the exercise of this martial power is a natural right, Locke argues that the Hobbesian state of war is distinct from the state of nature and may also erupt within civil society itself. Unlike earlier resistance theorists, who theorize the power of life and death in relation to a community’s legislative power, Locke gives both juridical and martial modes of this power to the individual subject outside civil society. In chapter 2, “State of Nature,” Locke posits a natural right to punish transgressions of “the Law of Nature.” Because it concerns collective, human needs for “mutual security” and has the social purpose of deterring others from wrongdoing, this natural, juridical right allegedly has as its end “Preserving all Mankind.” Locke says that this natural, juridical power is distinct from “Absolute or Arbitrary Power” in having the moderate ends of “Reparation and Restraint.” It is, though, an irreducibly indi-



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vidual right in all of Locke’s formulations, most notably in the definitive “[E]very Man hath a Right to punish the Offender, and be Executioner of the Law of Nature” (2.2.8). Locke fears his readers will find this “a very strange Doctrine” (2.2.9). And no wonder, since it grants individuals a disciplinary right—one that extends to capital punishment—in the absence of formal charges, defenders, prosecutors, juries, judges, or courts.13 Yet if for the moment we grant that killing a murderer is a reasonable means of securing the safety or principles of humankind, why does Locke so stress the transgressor’s monstrous subhumanity? A transgressor, Locke argues in “The State of Nature,” does not merely violate natural law but breaks his ties with humanity. Locke describes the transgressor’s dangerous subhumanity three times in this chapter, upping the ante so that on the third occasion the transgressor, previously a “noxious Creature,” is written up in nearly apocalyptic language as “a Murderer” who “hath by the unjust Violence and Slaughter he hath committed upon one, declared War against all Mankind, and therefore may be destroyed as a Lyon or a Tyger, one of those wild Savage Beasts, with whom Men can have no society nor Security” (2.2.11). At this point Locke introduces the first murderer, Cain, whose fear of capital punishment at the hands of his contemporaries Henry Parker mentions when arguing that “the power of life and death in a legall sence is committed to man by God, and not to Kings only.”14 Locke’s mention of Cain’s fear similarly works to validate a natural, human right to determine and execute criminal justice: And upon this is grounded the great Law of Nature, Who so sheddeth Mans Blood, by Man shall his Blood be shed. And Cain was so fully convinced, that every one had a Right to destroy such a Criminal, that after the Murder of his Brother, he cries out, Every one that findeth me, shall slay me; so plain was it writ in the Hearts of all Mankind. (2.2.11)

Both Parker and Locke are committed to theorizing a God-given, human right to dispense penal justice, including capital punishment (specified by Parker’s “power of life and death”). Differences between them are therefore revealing. The first, and most obvious, is that Parker construes this exclusively as a communal right. Further, if in some sense prepolitical, for Parker it is so only contingently and temporarily. When hypothesizing the absence of an “orderly tribunal,” he immediately imagines the collective creation of an equivalent institution. Locke’s right, by contrast, is an individual right

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obtaining outside collectively instituted juridical remedies. Finally, Locke’s emphasis falls heavily on the “right to destroy such a Criminal,” earlier phrased as the right to “destroy things noxious to them” (2.2.8).15 Defending his hypothetical, communal tribunal, Parker suggests “ex officio humani generis [on the part of humankind], they ought to prosecute all the common disturbers of mankind.”16 Though his executioner of the law of nature likewise is meant to act on behalf of humankind, Locke seems strangely preoccupied with the degenerate “noxious Creature” who poses a threat to all of humanity. Indeed, the murderer who has “declared War against all Mankind,” and “with whom Men can have no society nor Security,” may be, precisely, the enemy of humankind (hostis humani generis), a phrase Locke does not use but is clearly relevant. This particular Roman juridical status was initially assigned pirates and others who operated outside the jurisdiction of any particular state. It is also a status Cicero gives the tyrant who refuses to recognize the constraints of natural, human, or divine laws. Locke would have known that sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury resistance theorists were willing to draw the obvious conclusion from Cicero’s depiction of the monstrously antisocial tyrant: a ruler who degenerates so far is no ruler but a monstrous enemy of humankind who must be annihilated before he sheds any more blood. But antityrannicism is not the only context for Locke’s “strange” doctrine. Euro-colonial justifications of military aggression also appeal to the category of hostis humani generis. Locke’s many references to “America” show that he shares the dominant early modern view that its denizens inhabit a precivil temporality or privative age. As Anthony Pagden observes, in comparing the state of nature’s transgressor with “one of those wild Savage Beasts, with whom Men can have no society nor Security,” Locke uses conventional language for animalizing and criminalizing Amerindigenes.17 Representation as enemies of humankind is often implicit in imperialist constructions of natural and international law. Bacon, for example, in his dialogue on the justice of preemptive warfare, introduces the plural hostes humani generis in connection with the human sacrifice and cannibalism whose practitioners “forfeited” their territory by the law of nature, prosecuted justly by the Spanish (whose “Cruelties” are lamented pro forma).18 In De Jure Belli, Grotius, too, lumps cannibals together with pirates—anciently recognized as enemies of humankind—and the various tyrannous monsters from whom Hercules liberated humanity (monsters that also illustrate Bacon’s hostes humani generis).19 In theorizing a natural right to execute the law of nature, Locke provides a rationale for taking the lives of extra-Europeans (initially Amerindigenes,



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later Africans) construed as subhuman, monstrous transgressors. In “State of Nature,” Locke illustrates this right’s naturalness by asking, initially, on what other grounds a state might prosecute a criminal who is an alien, but then, as Tuck observes, segues into the unrelated issue of Amerindigenes’ violation of natural law: “Those who have the Supream Power of making Laws in England, France or Holland, are to an Indian, but like the rest of the World, Men without Authority: And therefore if by the Law of Nature, every Man hath not a Power to punish Offences against it, as he soberly judges the Case to require, I see not how the Magistrates of any Community, can punish an Alien of another Country, since in reference to him, they can have no more Power, than what every Man naturally may have over another” (2.2.9).20 Though Locke, like Hobbes, here correlates individuals and nations in the state of nature, in lieu of Hobbes’s war of each against each Locke posits a juridical right that targets criminal violation of the law of nature rather than the positive laws of England, France, or Holland (incidentally, the three nations most aggressively pursuing colonial policies and the slave trade). If nature sanctions capital punishment, and if to commit murder in the state of nature is to declare “War against all Mankind,” how is Locke’s state of nature different from his state of war? Or, put another way, what distinguishes a natural juridical from a natural martial form of the right to kill? Martial right is discussed in chapter 3, “The State of War.” Unlike the juridical right outlined in “State of Nature,” martial right lacks a moderate, ameliorative purpose or collective social end. Its purpose is not reparation, not restraint, but sheer annihilation. Locke hypothesizes an aggressor who, seeking the innocent party’s enslavement, inaugurates a state of war. The “Right of War” is the right to destroy this aggressor, though it emerges only in the absence of a superior judge or a social compact. Locke’s description of the aggressor’s bestial lawlessness in “The State of War” is virtually the same as that used of the transgressor in “The State of Nature.” What differentiates the two is the end Locke attributes to the aggressor, whose use of force in “State of War” anticipates the complete subjugation and thus enslavement of his victim: For I have reason to conclude, that he who would get me into his Power without my consent, would use me as he pleased, when he had got me there, and destroy me too when he had a fancy to it: for no body can desire to have me in his Absolute Power, unless it be to compel me by force to that, which is against the Right of my Freedom, i.e. make me a Slave. (2.3.17)

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Locke presents this conclusion as eminently reasonable, but since it applies even to a thief who plans to take only a coat, his deductions seem to proceed by extravagant leaps, if not by a persecutory imaginative process. By what logic does threatened enmity, or the use of force, necessarily—even hypothetically—entail enslavement if it occurs in the absence of “a common Superior on Earth”? Locke’s purpose, I believe, is to provide an appropriately dramatic scenario for the war slavery doctrine he obliquely incorporates into the state of nature, thereby turning it into a state of war. As with the juridical right to impose capital punishment, Locke projects the martial right to kill from the innocent victim’s standpoint. But the stakes are different in the state of war because slavery (according to the war slavery doctrine on which Locke relies) is war’s universal, legitimate alternative to martial death, the other option mentioned (“and destroy me too when he had a fancy to it”). Throughout “State of War,” Locke’s innocent, liberal subject is in a strictly defensive position. This subject needs to protect both freedom and life from the fierce aggressor who threatens it with slavery, and consequently has, Locke says, the right to “kill him if I can; for to that hazard does he justly expose himself, whoever introduces a State of War, and is aggressor in it” (2.3.18). Here and in several other passages, Locke gives the liberal subject permission to reciprocate the aggressor’s violence by killing him. The major question then becomes, does such legitimate violence entail compelling the aggressor to become a slave? Locke deliberately withholds a straightforward answer to this question. In “State of War,” Locke introduces war slavery doctrine but does not actually defend its implementation. He theorizes the right to kill an aggressor but stops short of defending a right to enslave. This, I propose, is the looming lacuna at the center of Locke’s discussion of slavery. It is clear from other passages in Two Treatises and “Of Slavery” itself that Locke assumes that the slaveholder’s power is based on natural right. Distinguishing servants from “Slaves,” Locke defines the latter as “Captives taken in a just War” who are “by the Right of Nature subjected to the Absolute Dominion and Arbitrary Power of their Masters” (2.7.85). This proposition regarding “Right of Nature,” however, does not extend to the conqueror’s prior decision to enslave his captives rather than kill them. In “State of War,” the only “Right of Nature” Locke theorizes is the right of killing, known as the “Right of War,” which is a selfpreservative, defensive right. A desire or intention to enslave characterizes the enemy, not the liberal subject. How, then, does this subject become “Master” in relation to a slave over whom it legitimately holds despotic power? Locke does not—ideologically



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speaking, he cannot—rationalize this process for the simple but crucial reason that to do so would seem to validate political slavery. Given the conventions of analogical argumentation, were Locke to represent the liberal subject electing to enslave someone, he would inevitably seem to endorse absolute monarchy-cum-tyranny. A right to enslave on the enslaver’s part would analogically entail a right on the part of the ruler to treat his people as if they were slaves. Locke therefore theorizes a right of killing and a state of war but not a decision to enslave rather than to kill. At the same time, following ancient and early modern proponents of war slavery doctrine, Locke assumes that the liberal subject does have this option open to him. But to assume is not to represent. We have seen that in using war slavery doctrine for his central ideologeme, Hobbes creates a scenario in which the victor’s exercise of power is interrelated with the performance of covenant on the part of the vanquished (though not to the vanquished who does not covenant and is enslaved). Such a scenario would be the kiss of death, so to speak, to Locke’s liberalism, as it would imply the possibility of voluntary consent to political slavery. For the sake of consistency, then, Locke claims in both analogical and unilogical registers that an individual’s voluntary subjection to another’s absolute, arbitrary power is not possible. As a result, Locke’s liberal subject, explicitly entitled only to kill, is not represented choosing to enslave his antagonist, nor is the criminalized captive shown to consent to enslavement. For Locke, slavery is the ultimate consequence of coercive force, and, as such, is incompatible with both natural and civil freedom. The individual to be enslaved can part with her or his freedom only because she or he must part with it when subjected to force: the to-be-enslaved has no choice. Locke states this categorically when he says just war is the only means of instituting slavery: “And thus Captives, taken in a just and lawful War, and such only, are subject to a Despotical Power, which as it arises not from Compact, so neither is it capable of any, but is the state of War continued” (2.15.172). More positively, with reference to the liberal subject, in “State of War” he says, “To be free from such force is the only security of my Preservation” (2.3.17), again indicating that the enslaved has no way to preserve her or his life.

Reading “Of Slavery” We can now attempt a reading of this chapter, which becomes less perplexing if we understand Locke to be participating in a debate about the (im)possibility of voluntary political self-enslavement. Against Hobbes and

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other royalists, Locke argues in “Of Slavery” that no one can voluntarily enter into or consent to political slavery. This argument is predominantly analogical as it pertains to the political subject’s relation to one-person, monarchical rule (which in antityranny discourse threatens to reduce citizens to slaves). “Of Slavery” opens by eulogizing the natural condition of freedom from the “Dominion” of any human “Will,” and by rebutting Filmer’s conflation of liberty and license.21 By spelling out the negative connotations of political “Dominion,” Locke situates his discussion polemically, signaling a commitment to oppose political slavery to freedom. “Freedom” is defined in the well-known passage that follows (often quoted without acknowledging its origin in “Of Slavery”): 22. . . . But Freedom of Man under Government, is, to have a standing Rule to live by, common to every one of that Society, and made by the Legislative Power erected in it; A Liberty to follow my own Will in all things, where the Rule prescribes not; and not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, Arbitrary Will of another Man. As Freedom of Nature is to be under no other restraint but the Law of Nature.

This language is conventionally analogical. Arbitrary rule has the negative traits ordinarily associated with tyranny, where the individual leader’s will, usurping the place of law, makes him a figurative household slaveholder or lord. Given Locke’s explicit concern with “Government,” the hypothesized “Arbitrary Will of another Man” clearly belongs to the would-be tyrant. On the other hand, the phrase “another Man” suggests that these strictures apply to any situation, public or private. And without “Absolute,” arbitrary rule does not seem as outrageous or intolerable as it usually does. As modifiers, “inconstant, uncertain, unknown” emphasize the unpredictability of the ruler’s “Arbitrary Will” rather than the danger it poses. While subjection to such a will is demeaning and potentially a condition of figurative slavery, it is not directly threatening to either property or life. In any case, it is a condition that does not actually pertain in civil society. By omitting Absolute as a modifier, Locke clears the path for a smooth, imperceptibly gradual transition from the “Arbitrary Will” of the political tyrant to the slaveholder’s despotical rule. Political liberty and its contrary, political slavery, continue to be—initially—the dominant context for the power that is “Absolute” as well as “Arbitrary” in the opening phrase of the two subsequent, centrally problematical sections of “Of Slavery,” here cited in their entirety:



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23. This Freedom from Absolute, Arbitrary Power, is so necessary to, and closely joyned with a Man’s Preservation, that he cannot part with it, but by what forfeits his Preservation and Life together. For a Man, not having the Power of his own Life, cannot, by Compact, or his own Consent, enslave himself to any one, nor put himself under the Absolute, Arbitrary Power of another, to take away his Life, when he pleases. No body can give more Power than he has himself; and he that cannot take away his own Life, cannot give another power over it. Indeed having, by his fault, forfeited his own Life, by some Act that deserves Death; he, to whom he has forfeited it, may (when he has him in his Power) delay to take it, and make use of him to his own Service, and he does him no injury by it. For, whenever he finds the hardship of his Slavery out-weigh the value of his Life, ’tis in his Power, by resisting the Will of his Master, to draw on himself the Death he desires. 24. This is the perfect condition of Slavery, which is nothing else, but the State of War continued, between a lawful Conqueror, and a Captive. For, if once Compact enter between them, and make an agreement for a limited Power on the one side, and Obedience on the other, the State of War and Slavery ceases, as long as the Compact endures. For, as has been said, no Man can, by agreement, pass over to another that which he hath not in himself, a Power over his own Life. I confess, we find among the Jews, as well as other Nations, that Men did sell themselves; but, ’tis plain, this was only to Drudgery, not to Slavery. For, it is evident, the Person sold was not under an Absolute, Arbitrary, Despotical Power. For the Master could not have power to kill him, at any time, whom, at a certain time, he was obliged to let go free out of his Service: and the Master of such a Servant was so far from having an Arbitrary Power over his Life, that he could not, at pleasure, so much as maim him, but the loss of an Eye, or Tooth, set him free, Exod. XXI.

The opening stress on “Freedom from” invasive or arbitrary rule in sec­ tion 23 suggests a continuing preoccupation with political liberty, even more so in being tied to a denial that one can “part with” this freedom. Such denials are de rigueur in discussions of the theoretical bases of natural rights, sovereignty, and the social compact. “Preservation” is similarly a familiar feature of such theorization, though generally regarding the preservation of the people as a whole. Despite Locke’s individualistic formulations, the language of section 23’s opening sentence is recognizably that of

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early modern antityrannicism. At the same time, by adding “Absolute” to the “Arbitrary” rule mentioned in the preceding section, Locke introduces the issue of the enslaver’s power over the life of the enslaved. Strategically, the enslaver’s power to terminate or preserve life has been reserved for this section, in which, eventually, a unilogical treatment of slavery comes to predominate. That a free people would not willingly institute their own enslavement is the central, a priori truth early modern appropriation of Greco-Roman antityranny ideology is licensed to purvey. Subjection to absolute monarchical power is tantamount to political slavery, which, in the language of a well-worn trope, rational beings would have to be insane to institute for themselves. Read alongside other radical treatises, Locke’s second sentence is conventional in stressing the irrationality of voluntarily taking up such a vulnerable, life-threatening situation, “under the Absolute, Arbitrary Power of another, to take away his Life, when he pleases.” So familiar is the argument that no self-respecting, reasonable individual would, in Locke’s words, “part with” or “give” his freedom for such a purpose, that the unusual character of some of Locke’s formulations does not immediately register. Assent to the propositions articulated in the first three sentences of sec­ tion 23 would likely readily be given by readers sympathetic to basic, radical principles and accustomed to the language in which they are expressed. To follow the unfolding of Locke’s argument, we need to notice the cues he gives readers regarding the subject-position with which they are to identify—a subject-position that is nearly always singular, even when reference is made to social roles or members of a group. As is generally recognized, in Two Treatises Locke usually showcases the individual subject divested of distracting inessentials such as gender, ethnicity, class position, nationality, historical moment, and so on. This practice differs from the radicalism on which he draws, where the primary unit of popular sovereignty is a collectivity, however understood. More important, in the two chapters preceding “Of Slavery,” Locke systematically dichotomizes the innocent and the culpable, the victim and the transgressor or aggressor, the just and the unjust war, so as to invite readers to interpellate themselves as individual, liberal subjects who are potentially innocent victims. For example, in “State of War” Locke declares that the safety of the innocent should be given priority, and continues: And one may destroy a Man who makes War upon him, or has discovered an Enmity to his being, for the same Reason, that he may kill a Wolf or



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a Lyon; because such Men are not under the ties of the Common Law of Reason, have no other Rule, but that of Force and Violence, and so may be treated as Beasts of Prey, those dangerous and noxious Creatures, that will be sure to destroy him, whenever he falls into their power. (2.3.16)

Here the hostile aggressor is not only thoroughly dehumanized but multiplied, becoming an even more threatening host of “Men,” “Beasts of Prey,” or “dangerous and noxious Creatures.” Readers are subtly directed to identify with the “one” who is given permission to kill (“destroy”) them. Moreover, while the innocent, victimized “one” is Locke’s civil subject, the irrational, bestial aggressor(s), instigator(s) of “War” and “Enmity,” is (are) associated with the vicious substratum of humanity that Euro-colonialism places in a precivil, privative age. When the singular “Man” morphs into “dangerous and noxious Creatures,” the threat posed to the lone, civil subject’s life is ratcheted up, becoming more warlike. The state of war is made to seem less hypothetical, less figurative, more a fearful reality. In passages like this, Locke could be said to construct the Euro-colonial civil subject. Locke often invites readers to identify closely with the treatise’s individual subject by using the first-person singular pronoun to represent the philosophical subject’s ostensible universality. In “State of War,” for example, when Locke argues that anyone who uses illegitimate force initiates the state of war, he begins with a thief and his victim, “a Man,” but then transforms this third-person individual into a representative “I”: “And therefore it is Lawful for me to treat him, as one who has put himself into a State of War with me, i.e. kill him if I can” (2.3.18). Not merely a persona for the impersonal theorist, this “I” assumes an irresistibly representative status. On the authority and example of this “I,” readers are invited to interpellate themselves as lawful holders of an extracivil right to kill. “Of Slavery” introduces this representative “I” with the appearance of the firstperson possessive in “my own Will”—the only first-person pronoun in this section. The unexpected my has the complex effect, rhetorically, of eliciting identification with this ideal, self-actualizing individual on the grounds of the impersonal theorist’s authority. In several ways, then, the theorist’s “I” becomes representative of the community of rational, freeborn citizens “under Government” whose privileged, diversely entitled status needs to be safeguarded. In chapters 2 and 3, “State of Nature” and “State of War,” this subject is consistently given two characteristics that are directly relevant to chapter 4, “Of Slavery”: it is innocent of wrongdoing, and its right to punish or to kill is theorized in relation to a criminalized aggressor. This discursive

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structure significantly strengthens the impression that the primary subject of the abstract, hypothetical transactions outlined in “Of Slavery”—the individual who cannot part with his freedom—is the “free,” Euro-colonial, civil subject whose active participation in public life demands appropriate conditions. What I earlier referred to as an unannounced transition occurs at section 23, line 9. “Indeed” appears to introduce higher-level demonstration of the preceding, which is the very opposite to what actually happens. Far from developing his analogical argument against voluntary enslavement, Locke abruptly introduces an individual subject who eventually becomes enslaved, “having, by his fault, forfeited his own Life, by some Act that deserves Death” (lines 9–10). The change is difficult to process because the “he” who up to this point represents the liberal subject is suddenly a different, culpable individual—so culpable that the death he merits ends in slavery. Literal slavery jumps into sharp, single-topic focus when judgment is passed on the individual to be enslaved, who, implicitly, is the dehumanized extra-European of the previous two chapters. The very abruptness of the to-be-enslaved individual’s antagonistic, criminalized separation from the implicitly European liberal subject strengthens the impression that this individual has become a “genealogical isolate,” the term Orlando Patterson uses of the socially dead person who has been formally alienated from family, culture, and heritage.22 The liberal European subject unable to part with his own freedom, on the other hand, now occupies the position of holding the power of life and death over his criminalized counterpart: “[H]e, to whom he has forfeited it, may (when he has him in his Power) delay to take it, and make use of him to his own Service, and he does him no injury by it” (lines 10–13). The shift in perspective here is just as jarring, and as telling, as that which occurs in Paradise Lost’s defense of slavery, which is also formulated in penal, juridical discourse. There is, all at once, “no injury”—the phrase that exactly corresponds to Paradise Lost’s “no wrong”—involved in extracting “Service” from an individual who is being threatened with death. The very abruptness with which the language of penal condemnation is introduced signals a shift in the kind of “slavery” now under discussion. Unambiguously the topic of the concluding paragraph, actual, chattel slavery remains the primary focus of attention for “Of Slavery,” though analogical aims continue to be met. Missing from Locke’s “Of Slavery” is an account of the liberal subject’s acquisition of despotic power. By eliding representation of a dramatic encounter such as Hobbes provides, Locke mystifies the origins of slave



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mastership, though the two chapters preceding “Of Slavery” are meant to establish its naturalness. Especially unclear is the relation between natural, juridical power—relevant to the juridical language of “fault,” “some Act that deserves Death,” “forfeited”—and despotic power, which originates only in the state of war, and is separate from both natural and civil society. The liberal subject assumes the new role of slaveholder with the utmost obliquity: first, in the guise of indirect object—“to whom he has forfeited it”—and then parenthetically, “(when he has him in his Power).” Together with the other juridical terms, the repetition of “forfeited” (reiterated in “Of Conquest” and chapter 15) stresses the liberal subject’s juridical role, which becomes despotical power in a process that is, and remains, inexplicable. As elsewhere in the Second Treatise, slavery and the state of war are mutually constitutive in section 24. In “State of War,” the aggressor is said to have “exposed” his life to destruction, while in “Of Conquest,” his life becomes “forfeited.” If we assume the treatise is theoretically consistent, Locke must be positing an aggressor who threatens the innocent subject’s life and freedom. In “Of Slavery,” when slavery first comes into singletopic focus in section 23, however, it appears to be the product of juridical judgment. The to-be-enslaved is criminalized prior to becoming subject to despotical power. The very opaqueness of the to-be-enslaved’s inaugural “fault,” together with its distance from Locke’s discussion of the just war on which slavery is to be founded—a discussion that occurs in section 24— gives Locke’s suddenly introduced defense something like the eerily irrational quality of a curse. By foregrounding penal, juridical language, Locke’s discussion could be said to provide a secular, philosophical counterpart to the curse of Canaan, and, arguably, given the pervasive nexus of penalty, slavery, and Africanness at the time, subliminally recalls it. If Locke expects his readers to identify the to-be-enslaved with the implicitly extra-European, bestialized antagonists of the preceding two chapters, the sequential nexus confusingly binding juridical to despotical power may gesture toward an untold tale. When the Euro-colonial juridical subject takes up the task of punishing the extra-European transgressor of natural law, this subject may interpret any resistance on the part of the to-becolonized as an aggressive attempt on the juridical prosecutor’s life and liberty. In the Euro-colonial subject’s view, should the transgressor resist with anything like force, she or he will become an aggressor whose entrance into the state of war legitimates the liberal subject’s corresponding transformation into a slaveholder. Likewise, should the extra-European subject who is already enslaved resist the enslaver’s disciplinary power, the enslaved

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will again become an aggressor perpetuating the state of war in which slavery occurs. Whether Locke’s readers are to supply such narratives or are meant simply to concatenate fault, punishment, and absolute subjection, it is important to grasp the distinction, initially fudged in section 23, between death as a juridical sentence and the slaveholder’s power of life and death, which Locke conventionally refers to as “an Absolute, Arbitrary, Despotical Power.” This power obtains only outside civil society, and is as limitless as the state of war itself. Despite the interpretative difficulties it raises, Locke’s bleeding of juridical into despotical power has another important ideological dimension. War slavery doctrine, which has a venerable lineage that goes back to imperial Rome, gets enslavement to signify a gracious proffering of the gift of life, thereby mitigating the juridical reality that the slaveholder’s power of life and death deprives the enslaved of social identity, civil status, rights, and futurity. Unlike Grotius, who distinguishes potestas vitae ac necis from war slavery doctrine, Hobbes conflates them in his central ideologeme. Throughout his three major treatises, Hobbes revisions the significance of both war slavery doctrine and the power of life and death by transposing them onto relations of political servanthood and sovereignty, while in Leviathan he briefly considers the doctrine’s significance for actual slavery. Locke follows Hobbes in synthesizing war slavery doctrine with the power of life and death. But for the same reason he does not represent the liberal subject in the act of enslaving, Locke does not—cannot—represent the decision to enslave rather than kill as an act of saving or preservation of life. The strictly proprietary, disciplinary function of Locke’s despotical power is thereby exposed. As Locke cryptically theorizes it, the deferral of death is a supplement to the victor’s right to kill. From the enslaved’s perspective, it results in an indefinitely prolonged social death accompanied by the ongoing threat of physical death. There is no ambiguity about the connection between the deferral of death and the extraction of unfree labor in “Of Slavery”: the despotical enslaver-subject’s decision to “delay” taking the enslaved’s life permits him to “make use of him to his own Service.” By implying an interrelation between juridical and martial, despotical power, Locke suggests that the enslaver’s disciplinary power is, if not equivalent to, then certainly a by-product of the right of war, a war that, conveniently, does not actually require officially recognized warfare. Though the juridical subject’s acquisition of despotical power is not, cannot, be represented, Locke clearly places the slave master’s disciplinary exercise of despotical power outside the purview of civil society.



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Reading Locke Rewriting Power/No-Power Locke worries that his doctrine of a natural, juridical power that includes killing might seem strange. Even stranger, however, is his doctrine that one cannot exercise what seems to be a similar power over one’s self: “For a Man, not having the Power of his own Life, cannot, by Compact, or his own Consent, enslave himself to any one, nor put himself under the Absolute, Arbitrary Power of another, to take away his Life, when he pleases.” The phrase “not having the Power of his own Life” is, in effect, the major premise of the syllogistic reasoning that unfolds in the opening three sentences of section 23: no individual has the power of life and death over her- or himself (a power later defined as despotical, and that the lord has over the slave); one cannot give away what one does not have; therefore, one cannot voluntarily enter the condition of slavery. Locke appeals to the absence of a right over one’s own life three times in sections 23 and 24. This nonright is clearly very important. But what, exactly, is the right that individuals do not have? It is often assumed that by “the Power of his own Life” Locke means the power to terminate one’s own life—that is, suicide—and that Locke appeals to the common, Christian belief that self-murder is divinely prohibited as a species of murder as well as a sin against the Creator’s gift of life. The first difficulty “Of Slavery” presents is that Two Treatises has already theorized two distinct forms of a natural right to take life, one juridical, the other martial. On what ethical basis is it all right for individuals to kill others but not themselves? Significantly, this question is dodged by Locke, and to a large extent by commentators. When rebutting the notion that natural liberty is equivalent to license in “The State of Nature,” Locke stipulates that the natural individual “has not Liberty to destroy himself” (2.2.6). The question If homicide, why not suicide? is thereby dogmatically preempted. Is there a more reasonable basis for distinguishing homicide from suicide? Or, perhaps, is self-murder not the only issue here? In arguing that it is not, I will return to the “power/no-power” debate of the mid-seventeenth century. Examined in the context of this debate, Locke’s stress on “the Power of his own Life” is part of a carefully designed strategy for integrating his theorization of antityrannicism with a defense of transatlantic slavery. In “State of Nature,” when claiming that the law of nature instructs human beings not to injure one another without good reason, Locke reminds his readers that they are “all the Workmanship of one Omnipotent, and infinitely wise Maker; All the Servants of one Sovereign Master, sent into the World by his order and about his business, they are his Property, whose

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Workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one anothers Pleasure” (2.2.6). Locke is concerned with the individual’s treatment of others here. But by referring to human beings as the “Property” of their Maker, Locke lays the groundwork for the proposition that one is not free to dispose of one’s own life (2.2.6). In the passage just cited, Locke adds that one is also not meant to hold one’s life at “anothers Pleasure”—a phrase that speaks directly to the absolute, arbitrary, power of both slaveholder and tyrant. That the creator is the only “Lord” of humankind is a commonplace of resistance theory, though ordinarily it is used to deny that an earthly sovereign is a representative of the divine. In developing its corollary—that the Maker is a “Sovereign Master” whose creatures are his “Property”—Locke boldly literalizes the Deity’s “dominion” over his creatures, who become, in effect, their creator’s slaves. Locke thereby grounds the impossibility of voluntarily alienating one’s own freedom on the liberal subject’s status as “Property” of the “Sovereign Master”—not, as Parker and other radicals do, on humankind’s essential nature. Locke has perhaps learned from Hobbes the tactical advantage of transvaluing slavery. One cannot enslave oneself, according to the principle Locke devises, because the “Sovereign Master” is already proprietor of one’s life. With this formulation, the “Man” of Locke’s preliminary assertions is placed within the protective bonds of an asocial, spiritual yet proprietary relationship with his creator, a divine master who will not permit him to transfer his freedom to a mortal. Status as divine property has several advantages, the most important being that it legitimates the tenet that one cannot alienate one’s freedom and life. At issue is the very topic debated by Hammond, E.P., and Goodwin—that is, the (im)possibility of voluntarily electing degraded, unfree human status. By conferring property status on the human creature, Locke makes the creature’s freedom the property of his “Sovereign Master,” who, like Greco-Roman slaveholders, has formal, legal possession of any property his slave claims. For the human creature, formally in the protected position of divine slave, freedom is paradoxically the most valuable of the Master’s gifts, one he is not permitted to give away. In “State of War,” Locke argues that one’s “Freedom” is the “Fence” to one’s ability to preserve one’s life (2.3.17). He makes the same point, though negatively, in the opening sentence of section 23. The impossibility of parting with “Freedom from Absolute, Arbitrary Power” is qualified, juridically, with the phrase “but by what forfeits his Preservation and Life together.” To understand how this impossible possibility plays out in “Of Slavery,” where freedom is bound up



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with the power of life and death, we need to return to the power/no-power debate. Affirmations or denials regarding what people can “part with” are a regular feature of debates on sovereignty in the state. Given early modern political philosophy’s preoccupation with origins, claims about what can and cannot conditionally be given away, transferred, or delegated are central to theorization of the reach of natural as well as artificial power. The principle that one cannot part with what one does not have is as important to royalist as it is to resistance theories. Referred to by Goodwin as a “maxim,” Locke appeals to it in asserting that one cannot part with one’s freedom. Locke’s thesis in “Of Slavery” is similar to that of E.P., who argues that no individual or collective can voluntarily pass away its own freedom: “Therefore that absolute and unreserved resignation of a mans Native Liberty and Right out of himself into any other person whatsoever, without any just condition, or adequate exchange . . . can have no rise or origination from God or reasonable Nature.”23 But E.P. stakes his claim against the possibility of voluntary slavery on the ends of government, which are to preserve and protect those who institute it: It is irrationall to think, that any man, or men can give to another, that which they have not in themselves, for a power to ruin themselves they never had; and it is unnaturall, that any people should set up over themselves any one person, or collectaneous body of men to be Lords Proprietaries of their Rights and Interests, and to hold an imperial and Prerogative scourge over their backs, and keep them in a remedilesse condition, by laboring to work them to an embased flexibility to his or their wills, and so to emasculate their spirits, so as ever to prevent their free uttering of their just aggrievances.24

E.P. synthesizes the have-in-order-to-give maxim and the principle that rational beings create government for their own good with his own, principal argument that human beings cannot voluntarily bring about or assent to their own destruction. They cannot part with a right to destroy themselves since they have never had it, such a right being incompatible with the dictates of reasonable nature. Though novel in its emphases, E.P.’s argument draws on familiar antityranny tenets when he pits the tyrannous rulers who as political slaveholders “hold an imperial and Prerogative scourge over their backs” against the “remedilesse condition” of their political slaves.

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E.P. may well be alluding to the English colonies when representing the “Lords Proprietaries” as slave masters, in which case this is an important antislavery allusion to African bondage. For present purposes, it is key to indexing Locke’s divergence from E.P.’s midcentury antityrannicism. (Locke, it should be noted, is not only secretary to the Lords Proprietors of Carolina but manages to become a lord himself.) Though no opponent of mercantilism, Henry Parker, whose views are extremely close to E.P.’s, consistently opposes actual slavery, going so far as to advocate its immediate abolition in Jus Populi. Although Parker is primarily concerned with demarcating specifically political rights, he not only steadfastly maintains the unnaturalness of slavery but also develops a lucid, theoretically coherent critique that is continuous with his other principles, including his commitment to democratic representation. By contrast, in “Of Slavery,” Locke goes out of his way to get liberal, antityranny principles to subserve his defense of transatlantic slavery. Recruiting radical principles to this end, Locke merges the tenet that one cannot part voluntarily with one’s freedom with the royalist principle that no human being naturally holds the power of life and death. Locke, one could say, subjects the radical principle regarding liberty to what E.P. calls an embased flexibility. This “embasing” takes place when Locke rejects the claim that human beings naturally possess the power of life and death—made by both E.P. and Goodwin in theorizing the collective origins of state power—instead taking up the royalist Hammond’s position regarding the “No-power over a mans own life.” Hammond, though, argues that because only the Deity holds this power, only the Deity can formally transfer it to an approved sovereign. Locke obviously has no sympathy with this position, since he assigns humankind two forms of a natural right to kill. Yet Locke appropriates not only Hammond’s claim regarding the “No-power over a mans own life” but also the notion that the “Sovereign Master” holds this power over his human creatures, not the creature over its own self. Put more directly, Locke assimilates Hammond’s royalist “No-power” to a conception of liberty as propriety in oneself: the “No-power” over one’s own life is obviously not available for voluntary exchange. As a result, Locke divorces the power of life and death from questions about the origins of properly political power—specifically, juridical or disciplinary power—being addressed in the midcentury debate. Reframed in “Of Slavery,” the power of life and death is critical not to political slavery but to actual, transatlantic slavery—as despotical power. Though there is no evidence that Locke was acquainted with the power/ no-power debate,25 direct knowledge would not be a prerequisite for his de-



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vious bricolage because the issues involved were widely discussed. I find it tempting to speculate that Locke was familiar with E.P.’s contributions. Adamantly denying the possibility of voluntary, collective slavery together with the legitimacy of chattel slavery, E.P. also explicitly denies that the slaveholder wields the power of life and death. E.P. certainly presented Locke with the very contradictions he had to finesse. A related treatise by the influential royalist John Maxwell, originally published in 1644 and republished in the 1680s, might also be relevant. In this treatise Maxwell rebuts a collectivist version (possibly from one of Parker’s tracts) of the doctrine that authoritative juridical process is natural to humanity by asserting, “God onely hath the Power of man’s Life. No man hath Power over his own Life. Whoso taketh away the Life of man, in God’s Justice and Ordinance his Life is to be taken away again.”26 Interestingly, Maxwell also attacks those who cite God’s sentence on Cain for evidence that this power is precivil—a position Parker takes and that Locke develops in “State of Nature.” Like Hammond in the later debate, Maxwell argues that this power belongs only to “God’s Deputy”—that is, “he in whom is Sovereign Power,” which derives directly from God. The difficult, passive construction Locke uses in the sentence opening section 23—“he cannot part with [Freedom from Absolute, Arbitrary Power], but by what forfeits his Preservation and Life together”—becomes clearer in the context of the power/no-power debate. As I understand it, Locke is asserting that freedom from arbitrary power is parted with only forcibly, by coercive conversion into enslavement. This would seem tautological were it not for Locke’s need to deny that voluntary, figurative slavery is possible. Note, however, that the identity of what the individual cannot part with gradually alters: “Freedom from Absolute, Arbitrary Power” is replaced by “Power of his own Life,” which is then replaced by “he that cannot take away his own Life.” The phrase “take away” is close to, but significantly different from, the customary expression for self-murder, which is to “take” one’s own life. But besides lining up in seemingly logical correspondence with “give away” as a synonym for “part with,” “take away” is precisely what despotic power involves: “the Absolute, Arbitrary Power of another, to take away his Life, when he pleases.” By substituting “Power of his own Life” for freedom, Locke thus gradually, imperceptibly slips the liberal subject who cannot part with or “take away” God-given freedom and life into the position of the Euro-colonial subject who holds a limitless, discretionary power to “take away” (or not) the life of the enslaved. If there is “no injury” in the despotical ruler’s exercise of power, then the enslaved does no wrong in precipitating her or his own death—the only

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form of resistance Locke permits. But in what does it consist? Many planters took preemptive disciplinary measures against suicide because it destroyed valuable property. So even if it were not forbidden by Christian doctrine, Locke would not sanction suicide. Lacking the power of one’s own life involves a prohibition not against self-murder per se but rather against transferring ownership of one’s self (as property of the Sovereign Master) to another. Though one cannot voluntarily give away power over one’s life, once forcibly enslaved, one can provoke one’s lord into exercising his right to take away the life that is anyway no longer one’s own. (In other words, the “lord” who holds the power of life and death—which Locke, like Hobbes, conflates with the victor’s power to enslave or kill—may exercise it by killing with impunity.) Locke refers to the “Death he desires,” momentarily bestowing agency on the enslaved. Yet given the way Locke joins juridical with martial right, in resisting the slaveholder’s will, the enslaved provokes the death she or he ostensibly deserves. In summary, situating “Of Slavery” in the context of the power/nopower debate makes it easier to gauge the pressure of Locke’s desire to defend simultaneously the right of political resistance against tyranny and the institution of chattel slavery. None of the participants in the earlier debate shares this double agenda, with reference to which almost every feature of Locke’s argument needs to be understood. Locke appropriates royalism’s “No-power over a mans own Life” to protect the liberal, Euro-colonial subject’s natural freedom because it enables him to argue that a voluntary transfer of this “No-power” is not possible. At the same time, this very “No-power” enables Locke to show how when the liberal subject enters into social relations with a criminalized antagonist, both right and might are on this subject’s side. In the movement of his argument, Locke transforms the liberal subject’s positionality. Out of the blue, Locke’s innocent liberal subject, initially enjoying a negative freedom, a divinely sanctioned “No-power” over his own life, comes to hold “despotical power,” the power of life and death, over the enslaved. It should also be noted that the despotical power of life and death held by Locke’s enslaver—following Roman jurists, designated power—exceeds the “Right to destroy that which threatens me with Destruction” outlined in “State of War.” For Locke, not limited to self-preservation or the preservation of humankind as is the juridical right to kill, the slave master’s power involves a right to withhold such destruction, substituting the threat of death as a means of extracting labor. As with despotical power’s acquisition, Locke avoids explicitly theorizing deferral of death as an exercise of



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despotical power so as to safeguard the liberal subject’s positionality. Because Locke’s despotical power does not save or preserve, however, he lays bare its coercive, dehumanizing, disciplinary function more starkly than does any other theorist.

Hebrew and Chattel Slavery In the final paragraph of “Of Slavery,” Locke continues to focus on actual servitude, while the subtext concerns the impossibility of voluntary selfenslavement. Though he begins with a concession regarding “Jews, as well as other Nations,” Locke does not treat voluntary enslavement on the part of a community, as do discussions indebted to Grotius. What unfolds is a rhetorically amplified contrast between individual, voluntary self-sale as practiced among Jews and “the perfect Condition of Slavery” as conducted in the state of war. Rarely without polemical purpose, emphasis on the distinctiveness of ancient, Hebraic servitude is conventional among resistance theorists. Locke is not alone in rejecting the term slavery for the servitude undergone by individual Jews, nor in stressing biblical evidence of its impermanence and of strictures against disciplinary violence. Locke’s point, however, in highlighting these features is to demonstrate the Hebrew servant’s freedom from despotical power: unlike the chattel slave, the Hebrew servant does not lie “under an Absolute, Arbitrary, Despotical Power.” Significantly, this statement exempting the Hebrew servant is the first occasion on which despotical power is named, not only in “Of Slavery” but in the Second Treatise. At this stage in “Of Slavery,” Locke relies on readers to supply the notsaid. The argument initiated in this section appears to contrast nations that practice an innocuous form of self-sale with those that do not. When the Hebrew servant, consigned merely to “Drudgery” (servitude is clearly about labor) turns out to have been free from “Absolute, Arbitrary, Despotical Power,” she or he ends up in the same position as Locke’s liberal subject. Just as the liberal subject who cannot part with its freedom retains a privileged relation with a proprietary Sovereign Master, the Hebrew servant who remains free from despotical power demonstrates the Sovereign Master’s special regard for his people’s freedom. Ancient Israel, God’s chosen nation, is the site of affective national identity for many Western European Protestant nation-states, and in especially powerful ways for English and Dutch varieties of republicanism, both elite and popular.27 On a level that at the time Locke writes is profoundly commonsensical, Israel is associated

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with a network of English privileges that facilitate colonial, mercantile, and numerous other national enterprises. For the sake of preserving the apparently inclusive abstractness of his juridical discourse, Locke has omitted overt markers of differential susceptibility to enslavement up to this point in “Of Slavery.” In the last paragraph, however, Locke specifically exempts Israel and other “Nations” from “the perfect condition of Slavery.” What “Nations” place slaves under despotical power? is a question overwhelmed by the general contrast between indentured servitude and slavery.28 Ultimately, this may be the most significant import of the reiterated, overdetermined “cannot,” which safeguards the liberty of God’s chosen people and, a fortiori, of the English, or certainly those English savvy enough to appreciate what is theirs by right. Indirectly, the conclusion to be drawn from Locke’s exemption rationalizes the enslavement of Africans. In Paradise Lost, some “nations” deserve bondage when they decline too far from virtue, the Deity’s curse of Canaan being the paradigmatic instance of a justly enslaved “vitious race.” Locke likely expects his chosen readers to negotiate servitude’s different registers by implicitly racializing both native liberty and contemporary, transatlantic slavery, offering in “Of Slavery” a compactly rationalized counterpart to his contemporaries’ Africanization of the curse of Canaan.

Slaves and Tyrants To introduce further complications will, I fear, tax readers’ patience, strain credulity, or detract from the analysis just offered. Yet I have so far downplayed certain features of Locke’s “despotical power” that are important not only to Two Treatises as a whole but also to early modern colonial and political discourses. First, a few further general comments on Locke’s indebtedness to Hobbes’s theorization of despotism. By now it should be clear that Hobbes and Locke share a commitment to synthesizing a theorization of natural and civil rights with a defense of transatlantic slavery. Locke’s inspiration for attempting this synthesis in “Of Slavery” is surely Hobbes’s equally condensed discussion of “despotical power” in Leviathan. Their defenses are made possible, as well as exceptionally complicated, by their common reliance on strategic shifts between analogical and unilogical discursive registers regarding slavery together with tacit assumptions about the privative age, warfare, and Euro-colonial civility. The political servitude against which Locke declaims is, of course, just what Hobbes systematically presents as the normative basis of familial and



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civil subjecthood. In theorizing a contractual foundation for absolutism and servitude, Hobbes subverts his adversaries’ representation of monarchy as a form of rule that inevitably results in degrading political slavery. Given the appalling risks of the natural state, Hobbes makes subjection to the absolute power of the sovereign representative an act of supreme rationality. For Locke, utilizing antityranny discourse as his radical predecessors have, such subjection would irrationally undo the very raison d’être of civil society, and is therefore unthinkable, impossible. The absolute monarch permitted to exercise his power tyrannously becomes for Locke the figurative slaveholder or lord whose power is not properly political. Responding to advocates of the specifically political “lord,” perhaps even alluding to Hobbes’s construction of civil subjecthood, Locke caustically retorts: “As if when Men quitting the State of Nature entered into Society, they agreed that all of them but one, should be under the restraint of Laws, but that he should still retain all the Liberty State of Nature, increased with Power, and made licentious by Impunity. This is to think that Men are so foolish that they take care to avoid what Mischiefs may be done them by Pole-Cats, or Foxes, but are content, nay think it Safety, to be devoured by Lions” (2.7.93). That Hobbes and Locke begin from premises that are diametrically opposed needs no further elaboration. Yet they share more than an acute awareness of all that is at stake in appropriations of antityranny ideology: like Grotius, both consider despotical power primarily from the perspective of its holder. We have seen that Locke’s liberal subject is presumed to be innocent and fair-minded. In “State of Nature” this subject’s naturally reasonable juridical power is contrasted with the conventional excesses of the tyrant’s “passionate heats” and “boundless extravagancy of his own Will” (2.2.8; extravagant and exorbitant regularly appear in the context of arbitrary rule). In “The State of War,” however, the liberal subject gains access to rights that are discontinuous with civil society. In the following passage, Locke introduces Jephtha, who in Judges takes up arms when verbal negotiations between Israel and the Ammonites have broken down. Had there been any such Court, any superior Jurisdiction on Earth, to determine the right between Jephtha and the Ammonites, they had never come to a State of War, but we see he was forced to appeal to Heaven. The Lord the Judge (says he) be Judge this day between the Children of Israel, and the Children of Ammon, Judg. 11.27. and then Prosecuting, and relying on his appeal, he leads out his Army to Battle: And therefore in such Controversies, where the question is put, who shall be Judge?

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It cannot be meant, who shall decide the Controversie; everyone knows what Jephtha here tells us, that the Lord the Judge, shall judge. Where there is no Judge on Earth, the Appeal lies to God in Heaven. (2.3.21)

Like Grotius, who mentions this battle in connection with the just war, Locke relies on readers’ confidence that Israel’s cause is just, though elsewhere Locke counsels caution in ascertaining justness (2.16.176). The verse following the one Locke cites from Judges reports that “the Spirit of the Lord came upon Jephthah and he passed over Gilead, and Manasseh, etc.” on the way to defeating the Ammonites. A version of the question “who shall be Judge?” is often employed to critique resistance theory. Locke’s answer involving an “Appeal . . . to God in Heaven” recurs throughout Second Treatise. Its indirectness and solemn biblical origins—Jephtha, it should be recalled, is among the saints lauded in Hebrews 11:32—would not prevent knowing readers from recognizing that Locke’s reference legitimates armed resistance. (The words Locke cites as Jephtha’s “appeal to Heaven” in Judges belong to the emissary; Locke reassigns them to Jephtha to bolster their authority.) Only in the treatise’s final chapter are Jephtha and his appeal to heaven applied explicitly to resistance against a tyrannous ruler or government (2.19.240–42). Yet their earlier appearance in “State of War” and “Of Conquest” invokes antityr­ anny ideology, which often represents the tyrant’s enmity to his people by likening him to a foreign conqueror. Locke’s antityrannicism acquires a peculiarly individualistic cast, though, when Jephtha alone is mentioned (rather than Jephtha as general of the Israelites). Locke asserts in the concluding paragraph of Two Treatises that the power individuals give to civil society when entering it thereafter remains in the “Community or Common-wealth.” The impression lastingly left, however, is of a community of isolated individuals, any one of whom might boldly take action. Earlier, I discussed Locke’s animalization of the state of nature’s transgressor and the state of war’s aggressor primarily insofar as it legitimates the liberal, Euro-colonial subject’s action against those who are to be disciplined or enslaved. Bestiality, however, also has long-standing associations with the tyrant’s descent into monstrous asociality. Greco-Roman antityranny ideology conventionally portrays the tyrant acting outside or against the law, whether seduced by flatterers or led by his own increasingly insatiable passions. Because he is a ruler, the tyrant’s lawlessness directly affects his subjects, who are often said to be robbed, destroyed, devoured, or trampled underfoot by him. So monstrous does the tyrant become in violating his responsibilities that he loses his very humanity. Ever degenerating,



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he resembles or morphs into a predatory animal, most frequently, of course, a wolf. Even Bodin, who does not countenance intrastate political resistance, contrasts the good monarch’s self-giving nurturance with the tyrant’s animalistic depredations: [T]he one chargeth his subjects as little as he can, neither exacteth anything of them, but when the publike necessitie so requireth; whereas the other drinketh his subjects blood, gnaweth their bones, and out of them also sucketh even the marrow, so by all means seeking to weaken them: the one advanceth unto the highest degrees of honour the best and most virtuous men; whereas the other stil promoteth the greatest theeves and villaines, whom he may use as spunges, to sucke up the wealth of his subjects.29

This cannibalistic drinking of blood, gnawing of bones, and sucking of protein-rich juices hidden in bone marrow viscerally convey the tyrant’s exploitative abuse of the people he is meant to nourish and protect. Locke appeals to such representations of the parasitical, subhuman tyrant in the passage cited earlier satirizing subjects’ apparent willingness to be “devoured by Lions” (my emphasis) and again in the sustained defense of political resistance in “Dissolution of Government.” Insisting that the right to oppose the “unlawful violence of those, who were their Magistrates, when they invade their Properties contrary to the trust put in them” is no different from the right to oppose robbers or other oppressors, Locke mocks those who would counsel nonresistance: Who would not think it an admirable Peace betwixt the Might and the Mean, when the Lamb, without resistance, yielded his Throat to be torn by the imperious Wolf? Polyphemus’s Den gives us a perfect Pattern of such a Peace, and such a Government, wherein Ulysses and his Companions had nothing to do, but quietly to suffer themselves to be devour’d. And no doubt Ulysses, who was a prudent Man, preach’d up Passive Obedience, and exhorted them to a quiet Submission, by representing to them of what concernment Peace was to Mankind; and by shewing the inconveniencies might happen, if they should offer to resist Polyphemus, who had now the power over them. (2.19.228)

Locke’s tone expresses the contempt for voluntary servility that is antityrannicism’s special métier. Masochistically yielding one’s throat to be torn or cut is one of the most tried and true of the tropes vilifying servility, which is

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how Locke’s antityrannicism translates the contemporary doctrine of passive obedience or nonresistance. By introducing Polyphemus’s den, Locke places his readers in a life-threatening scenario every bit as imaginatively engaging as Hobbes’s. Standard representatives of pre- or acivil society’s lawlessness in classical Greek philosophy, the Cyclops are, interestingly, not mentioned in Locke’s narrative. In his allegorical role as devouring tyrant, only Polyphemus appears, the “Den” alluding directly to Homer’s epic narrative where the entrapped Ulysses and his men (minus those devoured) narrowly escape being eaten alive. Because he eats human flesh, Polyphemus is an effective figure for the cannibalistic tyrant. A quotation from Livy that appears on the title page of the fourth and fifth editions (1713, 1728) characterizes tyrants as driven by raging, insatiable greed that can be satisfied only if “we yield them our blood to drink and our flesh to rend.” In the First Treatise, when rebutting Filmer’s absolutist exegesis of the Genesis grant of “dominion,” Locke toes radicalism’s line by arguing that the divine grant permits only human dominion over animals. “[I]t is past all doubt,” Locke states, “that Man cannot be comprehended in this Grant, nor any Dominion over those of his own Species be convey’d to Adam” (1.4.27). But in a satirical conflation of slavery and bestiality, Locke adds that by giving Adam dominion “over every living thing that moveth on the earth, Chap. 1.28,” Filmer makes all humankind “slaves” to the royal Adam and his heirs. So why did Filmer not go the whole hog, he taunts, to say “that Princes might eat their Subjects too, since God gave as full Power to Noah and his Heirs, Chap. 9.2. to eat every Living thing that moveth, as he did to Adam to have Dominion over them” (1.4.27). As this suggests, Locke even gets patriarchal absolutism’s fathers to practice cannibalism. In his critique of Filmer’s thesis that fathers naturally hold the power of life and death, Locke eloquently lays out the variety of child-preservative acts routinely performed by nonhuman creatures before arguing that even if fathers have in the past exercised the power of life and death over their children, this does not prove it to be legitimate. (Locke here turns the argument Bodin uses regarding slavery’s universality against patriarchalism.) If real-life instances are what count, Filmer should have “shewed us in Peru, People that begot Children on purpose to Fatten and Eat them.” Locke is so impressed by his source for this ethnography, a French translation of Commentarios Reales by Garcilaso de la Vega (1633), that he cites an entire passage on the Peruvians’ custom of eating captive mistresses and the children they produce with them; the passage explains this and related behavior with the claim that “they were so liquorish after



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Mans Flesh” (1.6.57). While Locke is aware that the tyrant’s bloodthirsty hankering after his subjects is a traditional trope, he seems persuaded that the Peruvians do beget and (as his own translation has it) “choisly nourish” their children for the sake of sating their lust for human flesh. Under rhetorical pressure, the cannibalism associated with tyranny can make the tyrant into an enemy either of the state or of humankind. Tyrannicide is defended in this way by Cicero, and in Two Treatises it is subtly defended by Locke, as well. We have seen that in “State of Nature” and “State of War” Locke presents the offender’s monstrosity in highly general terms. The same generic language appears again in the section of chapter 15 on “Despotical Power.” Locke repeats that the aggressor who puts himself into a state of war with another formally forfeits his own life (using the juridical language found in “Of Slavery”), explaining: For having quitted Reason, which God hath given to be the Rule betwixt Man and Man, and the common bond whereby humane kind is united into one fellowship and societie; and having renounced the way of peace, which that teaches, and made use of the Force of War to compasse his unjust ends upon an other, where he has no right, and so revolting from his own kind to that of Beasts by making Force which is theirs, to be his rule of right, he renders himself liable to be destroied by the injur’d person and the rest of mankind, that will joyn with him in the execution of Justice, as any other wild beast, or noxious brute with whom Mankind can have neither Society nor Security. And thus Captives, taken in a just and lawful War, and such only, are subject to a Despotical Power, which as it arises not from Compact, so neither is it capable of any, but is the state of War continued. (2.15.172)

By associating the subhuman, animalistic resort to “Force” with the “Force of War,” Locke makes this characterization of the offender compatible with slavery as the lawful consequence of the aggressor’s instigation of a state of war. Yet “force” as threatening, invasive intrusion into the lives of his people also typically initiates the tyrant’s metamorphosis into an enemy or monster. By using abstract, general language, Locke makes it possible to identify the barbarous perpetrator as either the wild, precivil indigene or the willful tyrant. But does this really make sense? Wouldn’t this make the tyrant a potential slave? Inaugurating both the formal forfeiture of his life and the state of war, a perpetrator who so grossly offends against human society can be brought to justice only when the force he initiates is turned back against

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him and he falls under the victor’s despotical power. In this encoded narrative, Locke presents a justification for armed resistance against an absolutist ruler who has become an enemy of his people. Set out in terms of a confrontation between individuals, on this occasion resistance potentially involves a community (“and the rest of mankind, that will joyn with him in the execution of Justice”). That Locke is making a case for tyrannicide as well as for interstate aggression and slavery may be suggested by this phrase, together with the concluding specification of the captor’s formal power over the captive, now a slave. Significantly, Milton uses the term despotism in this way at the time of the Model Army’s power over the captive Charles I, who thereby becomes a political slave: “[B]y thir holding him in prison, vanquishd and yielded into thir absolute and despotic power,” the king was brought “to the lowest degradement and incapacity.”30 Does this mean that Locke is not rationalizing slavery here? Locke’s language, deliberately abstract and generic, is in my view capable of conjuring up both the tyrant and the slave. Yet it does so as the theoretical equivalent of the perceptual puzzle presented by the rabbit/duck, which the human mind is able to view successively but not simultaneously. Nothing in this passage conflicts with Locke’s defense of slavery in “Of Slavery,” which anticipates virtually every logical and rhetorical move as well as individual phrases of “Despoticall Power.” Extra-European heathens are habitually charged with monstrous crimes of the sort Locke attributes to the Peruvians and to tyrants. Such violations are believed to occur outside civil society, whether prior to it in the case of Europe’s contemporary ancestors or in self-authored exile from humanity for tyrants. As contemporary ancestors, Amerindigenes and Africans are more or less expected to enter readily into Locke’s state of war, since in “hard” versions of the privative age they are basically already there. Yet the absolute monarch just as easily ends up transgressing law, becoming a tyrant who threatens his own people with destruction. In so ingeniously getting the tyrant to act as a double for the slave in this passage, Locke hopes to find fit readers who can perceive one and not the other if need be. By the time Two Treatises appears in print (1689), Thomas Tryon had published his antislavery tracts in Friendly Advice to the Gentlemen-Planters of the East and West Indies (1684). Earlier, in A Christian Directory (1673), Richard Baxter had directly attacked the slave trade and the Caribbean planters who participated in it for violating Christian ethical standards. Turning colonialist rhetoric back against the colonizers, Baxter calls the traders “common enemies of mankind,” and compares the cruel planters with tigers and cannibals.31 Readers attuned to debates about



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colonial slavery would not have had to read too far into the Second Treatise to learn where Locke stood. Neither would fellow radicals. Chattel slavery, like political slavery, is incompatible with consent. As individuals, Eurocolonial citizens can, though, legitimately safeguard their political liberty against the tyrant and defer the penalty of death for those who deserve to be enslaved against their wills.

epilogue

C

oncerning the early modern political theorists and writers selected for this study, two fairly uncontentious (though for me initially unexpected) conclusions may be drawn. First, an individual author’s stance on the (il)legitimacy of political resistance has no predictable correlation with the position he adopts on the (il)legitimacy of institutional slavery. Bodin, absolutism’s first major theorist, advocates the abolition of slavery, as does Parker, a central theorist of popular, representative government. Hobbes employs Roman jurisprudence so as to make the slaveholder’s relation to his servi a model for the sovereign representative’s absolutist relation to political subjects, leaving the legal slave outside civil society’s protective covenant, while Locke endorses antityranny ideology in repudiating political slavery at the same time that he defends slaveholders’ legitimate power over their slaves. Such diversity is testimony to antityrannicism’s plasticity. This very plasticity, however, leads to the second conclusion: for writers concerned with systematization, attitudes toward contemporaneous, transatlantic slavery are thoroughly imbricated with theorization of specifically political rights. In the Euro-colonialist arena, antityrannicism’s plasticity appears in relations among colonizers, the colonized, and the home government—relations that can be configured variously. In Destruction of the Indies, for example, Bartolomé de Las Casas portrays the conquistadors as avaricious tyrants who brutally reduce Amerindigenes to slaves. Las Casas repeatedly highlights the colonists’ violation of the Spanish crown’s proclamations that the Amerindigenes are free subjects whose enslavement is legally impermissible. Despite its extremely novel application, Las Casas’s antityrannicism has ties with Greco-Roman and early modern traditions in the emphasis it places on the rule of law as underwritten by the polarity free/slave. In Tears of the Indians (1656), an English edition of Las Casas’s text prepared 362



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by Milton’s nephew John Phillips, Las Casas’s antityrannicism is replaced by a slapdash sentimentalization of Spanish cruelty and an antipapist construction of tyranny. As Phillips portrays him, the Spanish monarch, who formerly tried to “enslave” the English, is a bloody tyrant hell-bent on preventing other European nations from entering the West Indies. Thankfully, under Cromwell this tyrannous behavior is providentially leading England to “be interested in the Quarrel of those Innocent Nations.”1 In all too familiar fashion, Tears of the Indians recruits Las Casas’s protest against social injustice for immediate commercial, colonialist ends. Within European nation-states, antityranny discourse is similarly mobile yet productive in very different ways. Toward the end of the English revolution, it was taken up by counterrevolutionary writers and critics of the Commonwealth to denounce the “tyranny” of the new regime. In the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, English and French women writers began to employ antityrannicism to characterize their situation as one of “slavery”—appropriation of political discourse that has new rhetorical potentialities as well as strong affiliations with Euro-colonialism. Settlers in the Caribbean who felt marginalized or persecuted used it of the colonial or home governments that tyrannized over them, while by the mid-eighteenth century, New England was using discursive weapons forged from antityranny ideology to wage a war of independence against England’s arbitrary, tyrannous rule. In a historical irony Franz Fanon and other theorists of Euro-colonialism have disclosed, neoclassical adulation of freedom, mainstay of Euro-colonialist triumphalism, became the favored discursive medium for both abolition and decolonization movements. Yet antityrannicism’s numerous discursive progeny need not eclipse a historical development glimpses of which have appeared throughout this study. Earlier humanists’ rapturous exaltation of collective, political liberty as an ideal to be defended at the cost of life itself gives way to an emphasis on self-preservation or commercial interest. Hobbes’s central ur-drama assumes that a rational being subject to a victor’s right to kill will elect preservation of life with attendant servitude. Why choose death, slavery’s time-honored alternative, in exchange for the delusive abstraction, “liberty”? For different reasons, the freedom Locke theorizes in Second Treatise is also a wan, wily cousin of the ancient, glorious ideal La Boétie extols in Discours de la servitude volontaire, where at one point readers are asked to perform the following thought experiment: Place on one side fifty thousand armed men, and on the other the same number; let them join in battle, one side fighting to retain its liberty, the

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other to take it away; to which would you, at a guess, promise victory? Which men do you think would march more gallantly to combat—those who anticipate as a reward for their suffering the maintenance of their freedom, or those who cannot expect any other prize for the blows exchanged than the enslavement of others? One side will have before its eyes the blessings of the past and the hope of similar joy in the future; their thoughts will dwell less on the comparatively brief pain of battle than on what they may have to endure forever, they, their children, and all their posterity. The other side has nothing to inspire it with courage except the weak urge of greed [qu’une petite pointe de convoitise], which fades before danger and which can never be so keen, it seems to me, that it will not be dismayed by the least drop of blood from wounds.2

Like La Boétie in this passage, Locke uses war slavery doctrine in the Second Treatise to mobilize intersecting polarities between freedom and slavery, life and death, victory and defeat. Like La Boétie, he also rhetorically constructs hostile encounters so as to invite identification with one side of a dyadic pair—like La Boétie, the winning side, which is committed to preserving its liberty. Having no doubt but that the enslavement of war captives is motivated by greed, however, La Boétie is confident that such an ignoble passion, disparaged along conventional antimercantilist lines, cannot begin to compete with a collective love of liberty. For Grotius, by contrast, the benefits that accrue from the slaveholder’s power motivate the rational, civilized victor to save and enslave rather than improvidently to kill those vanquished in war. Locke does not openly endorse such motivation but instead appropriates Hobbes’s war slavery ideo­ logeme in order to legitimize the liberal subject’s power over the enslaved. Locke’s defense of slavery, unlike Hobbes’s, however, grounds itself on the liberal subject’s juridical innocence and right to preserve the self-as-property (occasionally extended to the preservation of human society). For Locke, freedom is a “fence” for other goods, including propriety in the self and in the power of life and death the liberal subject holds over the enslaved, whose “service” is legitimately appropriated. As a back-formation from the slaveholder’s power of life and death, “life” takes precedence over “liberty” (and in the American Declaration of Independence, also over “the pursuit of happiness”). Thanks to Euro-colonialism’s triumph and the decline of an aristocratic, military ethos, for European citizens the shame of providing the victorious opponent with servile labor is a thing of the past. The question of intentionality has been approached rather indirectly in this study. Would movement between or among slavery’s different discur-



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sive registers have been conscious on the part of early modern authors and readers? Would the decision to privilege “life” over “liberty,” or, say, to elect the father rather than the slaveholder as bearer of the power of life and death, be undertaken deliberately and with awareness of its implications? Though much depends on how consciousness is understood, my view is that more systematic theorists or writers reflected upon and analytically structured slavery’s varied discursive interrelations, and that engaged, experienced readers, skilled in decoding different registers of “slavery” and “tyranny,” would have responded to nuanced transpositions. Yet it is equally clear that the transpersonal, cultural conventions by which they did so are the product of historically specific institutions and circumstances, and that like any such deeply embedded conventions their significance may be lost over time. It would require a separate study to begin to understand how various factors—the prevalence of abolitionist sentiments, the dominance of liberal individualism, a predominately Anglo-European academy’s unwillingness to acknowledge Euro-colonialism’s legacies—have interacted to obscure the meanings and operations reconstructed here. One hoped-for consequence of my attempt to analyze the interdependency of political and Euro-colonialist discourses is that “hypocrisy” will no longer seem adequately to explain the contradictory aims of, say, Locke’s Second Treatise. Hypocrisy suggests either a semiconscious attempt to mislead by exploiting appearances or self-deception as a habitual practice of ethical bad faith. Antityrannicism, however, is a complex of conceptual and rhetorical principles that operates ideologically to consolidate communal political identity and claims. Interestingly, invective against hypocrisy is a staple feature of not only antislavery but also antirepublican discourse. In recent historical novels such as Lawrence Hill’s Book of Negroes and the Octavian Nothing series by M. T. Anderson, both set during the Age of Revolution, characters often bitterly satirize the hypocrisy of slaveholders. Historically, hypocrisy is most memorably targeted in Dr. Johnson’s rhetorically compact “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?” A Tory strongly opposing New England’s assertion of independence from the Crown, Johnson turns the language of servility back against the colonists whose undignified “yelps” are animalized to underscore the inhumanity of slave drivers—drivers itself being a term highlighting the brutal animalization of the enslaved. Not coincidentally, the text in which Johnson satirizes the incongruity of yelping for liberty and driving slaves is entitled Taxation No Tyranny (1775). Antityranny ideology’s roots in socioeconomic structures, educational institutions, and cultural histories and practices extend far below individual

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consciousness. In the context of transatlantic slavery, antityrannicism becomes an important conductor of racialization, one that severs or weakens the “free” citizen’s affective ties with enslaved Africans. An interesting instance of this racialization occurs in the following passage by George Washington, written to a fellow opponent of British tyranny in a letter on the topic of taxation without representation (1774): “The crisis is arrived when we must assert our rights or submit to every imposition that can be heaped on us till custom and use shall make us as tame and abject slaves as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway.”3 In this passage, arbitrary sway—conventionally used of the figurative, collective slavery suffered by citizens of the polity—gets transposed from the polity to the household, where its arbitrariness is literalized. Given Washington’s shifting, conflicted views on slavery, he may here obliquely concede the contradictory character of slaveholders’ privileges. Even so, he employs arbitrary sway in the neutral, descriptive manner Locke does when defining Despotical Power as “an Absolute, Arbitrary Power” (2.15.172). Despite or perhaps because of this historical moment’s unique tensions, Washington’s statement epitomizes Eurocolonial antityrannicism’s racialized construction of its two opposed collectivities: “free” political agents and the enslaved. Abjection resulting from graduated habituation to servility is the very process against which Greco-Roman and early modern political invective rails, and which La Boétie decries in Discours de la servitude volontaire. For “free” citizens as a collective, submission to political slavery is as voluntary as is its contrary, political resistance. A call to political resistance, Washington’s assertion has a conventional either/or rhetorical structure, in this case, either manly victory or ignominious defeat: “[W]e must assert our rights or submit.” Resistance takes the form of an assertion of “our rights,” the collective political rights that are the proper heritage of the British-diasporic citizens living in New England. Washington’s tacit racialization of these collective rights is furthered by the trope of affronted dignity that underwrites the entitlements exercised when citizen-masters rule their “blacks” (“the blacks we rule”). As in ancient Athenian antityrannicism, the likeness of the political tyrant to the household despot serves to strengthen bonds among members of the political community threatened with political “slavery” at the same time that it draws its rhetorical power from dissociation from those enslaved—in this instance, dissociation that is overtly racialized. If Washington and his cohorts were to neglect the exercise of their rights, they would, in effect, be degraded to the level of “blacks.” Though debates continue as to when, historically, race and racialization become stable features of Western European, Caribbean, and American

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social practices and discourses, several scholars have presented what I find to be compelling evidence that the racialization of transatlantic plantation slavery significantly precedes its unambiguous legislation.4 In probing the early modern practice of positing the “nation” (a synonym for “race”) as the site of collective identity, I hope to have broadened the historical framework and terms of this debate, central to critical race theory as well as to colonial studies. I have argued that in early Iberian and Western European colonialism, Aristotle’s natural slavery tends to be revisioned as a nation’s incapacity for self-rule. Advocates of just warfare suggest that entire nations have developed customs that violate natural law and may additionally signify the penal withdrawal of divine grace. Learned theologicojuridical rationalizations of conquest depend upon and in turn encourage the perpetuation of racialized stereotypes, images, and language, all of which participate in the construction of the powerful, protoevolutionary template that projects selected nations into a precivil, privative age anterior to present-day Christian Europe. This template facilitates and helps to rationalize the gradual institutionalization of chattel slavery in English and French colonies just as it had earlier (if very differently) for the Spanish and Portuguese. Often construed as a process affecting only extra-Europeans with darker skin, racialization can more productively be approached as a reflexive, relational process that generates heritable liberties along with heritable slavery, voluntary servitude along with slavery, juridical innocence alongside incapacity or criminality. Legitimate, political resistance, among the most significant of early modern Western European legacies, is a privilege that is tacitly racialized. Founded on disavowal of kinship with the enslaved, both ancient and early modern antityrannicism assume that specifically political resistance to the condition of actual enslavement is a priori impossible for slaves since they are neither legal persons nor citizens. The tensions that result appear in a poem by Phillis Wheatley, an enslaved African whose Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) was published in England when she was likely not yet twenty.5 Addressed to the Earl of Dartmouth, the poem in question—excerpted here—proclaims its support of Wheatley’s new nation’s desire for “Fair Freedom”:

No more, America, in mournful strain

Of wrongs, and grievance unredress’d complain, No longer shalt thou dread the iron chain, Which wanton Tyranny with lawless hand Had made, and with it meant t’enslave the land.

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Should you, my lord, while you peruse my song,

Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung Whence flow these wishes for the common good, By feeling hearts alone best understood, I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate Was snatch’d from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat: What pangs excruciating must molest, What sorrows labour in my parent’s breast? Steel’d was that soul and by no misery mov’d That from a father seiz’d his babe belov’d: Such, such my case. And can I then but pray Others may never feel tyrannic sway? (lines 15–31)

Of this section’s several extraordinary features, Wheatley’s representation of her abduction in the second of the two stanzas quoted here is noteworthy not for its language—at a time of rising antislavery sentiment, depictions by Anglo-Americans of children “snatch’d,” “seiz’d” or “torn” (not used here) from parental arms are increasingly common—but because she appropriates the dominant antislavery discourse, sentimentalizing as well as objectifying, as an enslaved African. Here as in other poems, Wheatley also subversively lays claim to identity as an American, a subject-position categorically proscribed. Most important, and radical, is Wheatley’s subtle annexation of her own antislavery protest to the antityranny discourse employed of America’s relations with England’s “wanton Tyranny.” So far as I am aware, this is the first instance, historically, where the injustice of interstate political slavery conveyed by antityrannicism is directly aligned with chattel slavery, which therefore appears similarly unjust (“And can I then but pray / Others may never feel tyrannic sway?”). Wheatley’s poignant autobiographical narrative appropriately focuses on intimate, familial relations: slavery, after all, is ostensibly a private, household matter. However, in a letter to Samson Occam on the topic of “natural Rights”—written in 1774, the same year as the letter by Washington just mentioned—Wheatley compares her people with Israelites enslaved by “our Modern Egyptians.”6 When antityrannicism becomes the site of collective, political identity, as it does in this letter, political resistance that simultaneously engages chattel and external, national slavery, has the historically unprecedented potential to become—if, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot so eloquently argues, wholly unthinkable in the terms set by dominant, political discourse—thinkable and, as the Haitian revolution proved, successful.

acknowledgments

L

ike the countless undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Toronto to whom I have dedicated this book, numerous writers—both early modern and contemporary, marginal and well known—have affected its development in ways I cannot possibly specify yet would anyway like to acknowledge. The same holds for the many people who engaged me in conversation after talks I gave at Dartmouth College, Duke University, Rutgers University, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Yale University, and in numerous venues at the University of Toronto. Over the lengthy period of writing and revision, I have benefitted from dialogues with many colleagues and friends. Especially generative have been discussions with Margaret Williamson, who responded with lively interest to an endless barrage of questions about ancient Greek and Roman literature, and rigorously critiqued earlier drafts of the first chapter of Arbitrary Rule. More recently, my understanding of Greek and Roman political philosophy was sharpened and deepened by conversations with Ryan Balot and Kurt Raaflaub, both of whom have also offered incisive comments on chapter 1, the flaws of which remain my responsibility. Johann Sommerville suggested important revisions to drafts of the chapters on Buchanan and Hobbes, and has since graciously drawn on his scholarly expertise whenever I have approached him with further questions. David Galbraith and Chris Warley helpfully reviewed chapters 2 and 5, respectively, and Simon Stern responded to a presentation for a Law and Literature Workshop in ways that significantly shaped my revisions to chapter 10, a chapter David McNally later kindly vetted. I am very grateful to Heather Murray for the editorial advice she offered on a draft of the entire manuscript at a critical stage in its development, and to Lorna Hutson and the two anonymous readers for the University 369

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of Chicago Press for their invaluable comments and the revisions they prompted. At an early stage of this project, which was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, I benefitted from the research assistance of Linda Ncube, and at a slightly later stage from that of Muhammad Sid-Ahmed and Jan Purnis. For assistance under pressure in readying the final manuscript, I am grateful to Seyward Goodhand. For her outstanding efficiency and cooperative spirit, I am hugely indebted to Erin Reynolds, who gracefully shouldered many burdens throughout the final stages of revision and production, including preparation of the index. For his courteous and ever-helpful engagement in a lengthy correspondence under circumstances that were often trying, I would like warmly to thank Randolph Petilos, the Press’s editor for Arbitrary Rule; for her exceptionally lucid and exact copyediting, I am deeply grateful to Susan Cohan; for carefully overseeing the production process, thanks to Mary Corrado, and for his thoughtful work on promotion, to Micah Fehrenbacher. For inspiration and timely advice when it was most needed, I am indebted to Linda Carty and Paul Stevens, and for ongoing, unstinting support, to Pramila Aggarwal, Sheila Crossey, Judith Hamilton, Sandra Lillevik, Jeanne Lockridge, and Carole Nyquist. A special thanks to Gerry White for his endlessly patient I.T. interventions and all-round generosity. Finally, for keeping me grounded, loving acknowledgment of Monika and Seth, who long ago perfected the art of delightful distraction. h Earlier versions of some materials in Arbitrary Rule appeared in “The Plight of Buchanan’s Jephtha: Sacrifice, Sovereignty and Paternal Power,” Comparative Literature 60, no. 4 (Fall 2008): 331–54; “Contemporary Ancestors of de Bry, Hobbes, and Milton,” in “Milton in America,” ed. Paul Stevens, special issue, University of Toronto Quarterly 77, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 837–75; “Slavery, Resistance and Nation in Milton and Locke,” in Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England, ed. David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens, 356–97 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008); and “Hobbes, Slavery and Despotical Rule,” Representations, no. 106 (Summer 2009), 1–33.

notes

introduction 1. See Kurt A. Raaflaub, The Discovery of Freedom in Ancient Greece, rev. and updated ed., trans. Renate Franciscono (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 107, 255; and Raaflaub, “Stick and Glue: The Function of Tyranny in Fifth-Century Athenian Democracy,” in Popular Tyranny: Sovereignty and Its Discontents in Ancient Greece, ed. Kathryn M. Morgan, 59–84 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003). Since the present study is interested in the reception and appropriation of ancient antityrannicism, it oversteps the boundaries of Raaflaub’s materially and historically grounded scholarship on the origins of Athenian democratic ideology together with differences between Athenian and Roman conceptions of freedom. Any distortions thereby introduced are the result of my desire to “zoom out,” and are my responsibility, as is the emphasis on antityrannicism’s systematic pairing of tyranny and servitude. 2. Raaflaub, Discovery, 264. 3. Geoffrey Robertson and Philip Baker, eds., The Levellers: The Putney Debates, Revolutions (London: Verso, 2007), viii. Paul Cartledge argues that academic neutrality regarding slavery is impossible in “Like a Worm i’ the Bud? A Heterology of Classical Greek Slavery,” Greece & Rome 40, no. 2 (1993): 163–80. See also Keith Bradley’s discussion of the realities and legacies of Roman slavery, “‘The Regular, Daily Traffic in Slaves’: Roman History and Contemporary History,” Classical Journal 87, no. 2 (1992): 125–38. 4. Orlando Patterson, Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, vol. 1 (New York: Basic Books, 1992). 5. Sylvia Wynter captures the momentousness of this transition and its legacies in “New Seville and the Conversion Experience of Bartolomé de Las Casas,” pt. 1, Jamaica Journal 17, no. 2 (1984): 25–32; pt. 2, Jamaica Journal 17, no. 3 (1984): 46–55. 6. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 75. See, too, Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), 21–39; Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (London: Verso, 1997), 18; Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal

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notes to introduction

of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975), 6; and David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966), 108–9. 7. Michael MacKeon explores the devolution of sovereignty from monarch to individual subject and resistance against private “tyranny” in seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury English literature in The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). 8. For ancient Greece, see Glenn Morrow, “The Murder of Slaves in Attic Law,” Classical Philology 32, no. 3 (July 1937): 210–27; and for Rome, see Alan Watson, “Roman Slave Law and Romanist Ideology,” Phoenix 37, no. 1 (1983): 53–65. 9. Raaflaub, Discovery, 129. Raaflaub suggests that the polyvalence of douleia (slavery) has led scholars to dismiss its usage as merely rhetorical or metaphorical. See also Page duBois, Slaves and Other Objects (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). DuBois analyzes the figurative slavery that supplies historians, philosophers, and tragedians of classical Greece with “an almost technical political language” for reflecting on relations of domination and subordination within the polis or between city-states (139). 10. On the exclusion of women from ancient Greek politics, see Giulia Sissa, “Gendered Politics, or the Self-Praise of ‘Andres Agathoi,’ ” in A Companion to Greek and Roman Political Thought, ed. Ryan K. Balot, Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World, 100–17 (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). For interrelations between Eurocolonialism and liberalism, see Uday Singh Mehta, “Liberal Strategies of Exclusion,” Poli­ tics and Society 18 (1990): 427–54; and Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). 11. On the critical importance of this term (not implying economic equality) in Athenian democratic ideology, see Gregory Vlastos, “Isonomia,” American Journal of Philology 74, no. 4 (1953): 337–66. See also Raaflaub, Discovery, 221–25. Both authors discuss its relations with ise¯goria, equality of speech. 12. Orlando Patterson stresses the indignity fundamental to slavery in Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). 13. Relevant is the graphe¯ hubreo¯s, a crime against the person in which the defendant is charged with dishonoring a citizen by treating him like a slave. Graphe¯ hubreo¯s is discussed by Paul Cartledge, who draws on N. R. E. Fisher’s transformative studies of hubris as violence that transgressively strikes a (free) individual’s honor. “Worm i’ the Bud,” 173–74. 14. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 241. Achille Mbembe observes that transatlantic slavery, an early instance of “biopolitical experimentation,” should feature in any history of “the rise of modern terror.” See Mbembe, “ ‘Necropolitics,’ ” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 20–23. The present study contributes to this history, which, arguably, begins with the decision taken by Spanish colonialists to supplement and then replace enslaved indigenous Americans with Africans, a decision often formulated in terms of physical suitability. 15. The Institutes of Gaius, and Rules of Ulpian, trans. James Muirhead, 1.52 (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1895), http://openlibrary.org/books/OL6104541M.



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16. “Introduction,” War and Peace in the Ancient World, ed. Kurt A. Raaflaub (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 10–11. 17. Alan Watson, Roman Slave Law (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 7–8; cited by Peter Garnsey, Ideas of Slavery from Aristotle to Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 48. 18. Theodor Mommsen and Paul Krueger, eds., The Digest of Justinian, vol. 1, trans. Alan Watson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970), bk. 1, chap. 5.4.1. 19. Ibid., bk. 1, chap. 5.4.2. 20. Ryan Balot, “Courage in the Democratic Polis,” Classical Quarterly 54, no. 2 (2004): 406–23. Balot explores courage’s relations with rationality and democratic ideology. 21. Thanks to Ryan Balot for drawing my attention to this little-known reality and to Peter Hunt’s Slaves, Warfare, and Ideology in the Greek Historians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 22. William Linn Westermann, “Between Slavery and Freedom,” American Histori­ cal Review 50, no. 2 (January 1945): 213–14; and Victoria Cuffel, “The Classical Greek Concept of Slavery,” Journal of the History of Ideas 27, no. 3 (September 1966): 323–42. 23. Brian Tierney shows how conceptions of both individual and communal natural rights interact throughout the medieval period and into the seventeenth century in The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law and Church Law (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997). Francis Oakley, too, emphasizes continuities among medieval, early modern, and modern conceptions of natural law and rights, which originate in the juristic and canonistic literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in Natural Law, Laws of Nature, Natural Rights: Continuity and Discontinuity in the History of Ideas (New York: Continuum, 2005). 24. This occasionally occurs in Anthony Pagden’s influential The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), to which the present study is indebted. Pagden discusses de las Casas’s critique of a unitary conception of the natural slave and the barbarian in chapter 6. 25. On the primacy of community, see Paul Cartledge and Matt Edge, “ ‘Rights,’ Individuals, and Communities in Ancient Greece,” in A Companion to Greek and Ro­ man Political Thought, ed. Ryan K. Balot, Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World, 149–77 (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). On the interplay of individual and communal rights in medieval conciliarism, see Tierney, Natural Rights, 208–17. 26. For an accessible, representative discussion, see Quentin Skinner, “States and the Freedom of Citizens,” in States and Citizens, ed. Quentin Skinner and Bo Stråth, 11–27 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 27. Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 84. 28. Ibid., 119. Paul A. Rahe draws attention to the Greek origins of “neo-Romanism” in “Quentin Skinner’s ‘Third Way,’ ” Review of Politics 62, no. 2 (2000): 395–98. John P. McCormick critiques Skinner and Philip Pettit for comparative neglect of social dominion and economic inequalities in “Machiavelli against Republicanism: On the Cambridge

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School’s ‘Guicciardinian Moments,’ ” Political Theory 31, no. 5 (2003): 615–43. Jonathan Scott challenges the dominance of classical republicanism in the historiography of En­ glish republicanism as well as the tendency to disassociate classical from religious forms of radicalism in, among other publications, “What Were Commonwealth Principles?,” Historical Journal 47, no. 3 (2004): 591–613. For a helpful discussion of twentieth-century views of early modernism’s relations with classical Greek and Roman political philosophy, see Eric Nelson, The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1–18. 29. Regarding England, it is thus compatible with Alan Cromartie’s thesis about the revolutionary implications of the 1628 Petition of Right, “The Constitutionalist Revolution: The Transformation of Political Culture in Early Stuart England,” Past and Present 163 (1999): 76–120; and with Nicholas Tyacke’s argument that the revolution’s origins can be found in the 1590s, “Introduction: Locating the ‘English Revolution,’ ” in The En­ glish Revolution, c. 1590–1720: Politics, Religion and Communities, ed. Nicholas Tyacke, 1–26 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2007). 30. Cartledge and Edge, “‘Rights,’ Individuals, and Communities.” The authors adopt Skinner’s emphasis on dependency to explain political “slavery.” 31. See especially Edith Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 32. Wynter, “New Seville,” pt. 2, 52; and Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). 33. David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–60 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and Victoria Khan, Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640–1674 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 34. On the desirability of subjecting historical documents to formalist analysis, see Richard Strier, “How Formalism Became a Dirty Word,” in Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements, ed. Mark David Rasmussen, 207–15 (New York: Palgrave, 2002). 35. Robert A. Williams Jr., The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 200. 36. Ibid., 203, citing The Records of the Virginia Company. 37. Williams, American Indian, 204. 38. On how Athenian democracy’s political identity meets freemen’s sociopsychological needs, see Raaflaub, Discovery, 275–76. 39. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed., ed. Margaret Canovan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 38. 40. Ibid. 41. Francis Bacon, Touching an Holy War, in Certaine Miscellany Works (1629; repr., Amsterdam: Da Capo Press, 1970), 120. Page citations are to the reprint edition. For Hobbes’s connection with Bacon, see Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Politi­ cal Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 126–27, 159–60. 42. See Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2005).



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43. See, for example, Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). For an important reconsideration of Grotius that neglects slavery, see Edward Keene, Beyond the Anarchi­ cal Society: Grotius, Colonialism and Order in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 44. Sara Forsdyke, “The Uses and Abuses of Tyranny,” in A Companion to Greek and Roman Political Thought, ed. Ryan K. Balot, Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World, 231–46 (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). 45. John Locke, Two Treatises, ed. Peter Laslett, student ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), bk. 1, chap. 1, para. 1. Subsequent parenthetical references to Locke’s Two Treatises (hereafter cited in text as TT) will be to this edition and indicate these locators. 46. Robin Blackburn, Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Mod­ ern, 1492–1800 (London: Verso, 1997), 270.

chapter one 1. For the absence of serious objections to slavery in classical and Christian antiquity, see Peter Garnsey, Ideas of Slavery from Aristotle to Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 2. On the variability and range of statuses brought under the category of slavery, see M. I. Finley, “The Servile Statuses of Ancient Greece,” Revue Internationale des Droits de l’Antiquité, 3rd ser., no. 7 (1960): 165–89. I am grateful to Ryan Balot and Margaret Williamson for assistance in clarifying these issues. 3. So Kurt Raaflaub argues when claiming that “political freedom was not a prime value for the elite.” Raaflaub, Discovery, 255. On the sociopsychological needs met by democracy’s provision of political identity, see 269–77. In “Democracy, Oligarchy, and the Concept of the ‘Free Citizen’ in Late Fifth-Century Athens,” Raaflaub contrasts the oligarchic emphasis on the social qualities and status of the individual with the democratic stress on “the collective concept of the freedom of the whole community . . . rooted primarily in the political sphere.” Political Theory 11, no. 4 (1983): 529. 4. For a discussion of central differences, see Craige B. Champion, “Imperial Ideologies, Citizenship Myths, and Legal Disputes in Classical Athens and Republican Rome,” in A Companion to Greek and Roman Political Thought, ed. Ryan Balot, Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World, 85–99 (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). 5. Glenn Morrow discusses the variety of meanings Plato gives δουλεία in “Plato and Greek Slavery,” Mind 48, no. 190 (April 1939): 186–201. 6. Euripides, Suppliant Women, in Orestes and Other Plays, ed. Edith Hall and James Morwood, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Parenthetical citations are to line numbers of this edition. 7. Aristotle, The Politics, ed. Stephen Everson, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 1.1259b5–6, 6.1317b2 (hereafter cited parenthetically in text). 8. Regarding equality, Gregory Vlastos brings out relations between equality before the law, which requires the rule of law, as well as the dialectically related meaning “that

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only the attainment of equality can secure the rule of law.” “Isonomia,” American Jour­ nal of Philology 74, no. 4 (1953): 365. 9. Raaflaub stresses the polemical character of antityranny discourse in Discovery, 134. For sharpening of distinctions between a “value-neutral and a negative-polemical terminology,” see 259. 10. Citation of Greek is to Aristotle, Politics, ed. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library 21 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932). 11. Taking issue with Orlando Patterson’s conception of “sovereignal freedom” in Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, Raaflaub argues that only after the Persian Wars was rule over others thought of as a form of freedom: “That a despote¯s was naturally free was so obvious that it did not need to be said. All that mattered was his status and the power he had over others.” Discovery, 260–61. Politicization of freedom within and of the polis precedes valorization of rule over others. 12. Peter Hunt observes, “On the ideological level, slaves were a group against which all Athenians could define themselves as a unity.” Slaves, Warfare, and Ideology in the Greek Historians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 3. 13. Permissible hunting of animals (as against humans) later illustrates the difference between slaves-by-nature and masters-by-nature (1324b36–41). 14. Peter Garnsey, Ideas of Slavery from Aristotle to Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 110–15. 15. Vincent J. Rosivach, “Enslaving Barbaroi and the Athenian Ideology of Slavery,” Historia 48, no. 2 (1999): 129–57. 16. For a thorough discussion, to which I am much indebted, see Edith Hall’s Invent­ ing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 17. Anna Missiou discusses the metaphorical slavery of Darius’s nobles in “ΔΟΥΛΟΣ ΤΟΥ ΒΑΣΙΛΕΩΣ: The Politics of Translation,” Classical Quarterly 43, no. 2 (1993): 377–91. 18. Herodotus, The History, trans. David Grene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Parenthetical citations are to book and section number of this edition. 19. On this passage, and on the verb κατέχειν as it relates to tyranny and Persian des­ potism, see Sara Forsdyke, “Athenian Democratic Ideology and Herodotus’ Histories,” American Journal of Philology 122, no. 3 (2001): 332–58. 20. See, e.g., Raaflaub, Discovery, 275. 21. Aeschylus, Persians, trans. and ed. Edith Hall (Warminster, UK: Aris & Phillips, 1996), lines 188–99. 22. See Hall’s commentary in Persians on “yoke of slavery,” 112n, and on prostration, 119–20n. 23. See, for example, Mario Turchetti, Tyrannie et tyrannicide de l’Antiquité à nos jours (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2001); Roger Boesche, Theories of Tyr­ anny from Plato to Arendt (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996); Ephraim Emerton, Humanism and Tyranny: Studies in the Italian Trecento (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1964); and Oscar Jászi and John D. Lewis, Against the Tyrant: The Tradition and Theory of Tyrannicide (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957). 24. Raaflaub, Discovery, 41.



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25. Ibid., 252. 26. Ibid., 54–55. Greg Anderson traces tyranny’s semantic shifts in “Before Turannoi Were Tyrants: Rethinking a Chapter of Early Greek History,” Classical Antiquity 24, no. 2 (October 2005): 211–12. 27. Raaflaub, Discovery, 54. François Hartog brings out the tragic likeness of tyrannous power to the power of the household despotés in The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History, trans. Janet Lloyd (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 322–39. 28. Vlastos captures the profundity of this analysis in his discussion of the Constitutional Debate, “Isonomia,” 357–62. In Ancient Greek Political Thought in Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), Paul Cartledge argues that this debate marks “the terminus ante quem for the emergence of Greek political theory” as a subbranch of historia (71). 29. Compare David Brion Davis’s comment in Slavery and Human Progress (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984) on the grandiosity encouraged by the enslaver’s experience of the enslaved as an extension of his own will: “Such a relationship, unmediated by family restrictions or by the normal stages of generational succession, gave masters the illusion of omnipotence, of escaping the bonds of kin” (17). 30. Hall frequently discusses incest and mutilation as signifiers of barbarism in Inventing the Barbarian. 31. Carolyn Dewald argues that Herodotus shows Greek tyranny becoming increas­ ingly caught up in the dynamics of Eastern despotism in “Form and Content: The Question of Tyranny in Herodotus,” in Popular Tyranny, ed. Kathryn A. Morgan, 36–40 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003). See also Arnaldo Momiglianno, “Persian Empire and Greek Freedom,” in The Idea of Freedom, ed. Alan Ryan, 139–51 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). 32. Raaflaub, personal communication. 33. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, ed. and trans. Steven Lattimore (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 301. 34. For further consideration, see Raaflaub’s discussion of archaic “expansion through integration” as against the “expansion through subjection” practiced by imperial Athens and Rome. “Born to Be Wolves? Origins of Roman Imperialism,” in Transitions to Em­ pire: Essays in Greco-Roman History, 360–146 B.C. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), 275, 288–89. 35. Ryan Balot, Greek Political Thought (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 142. 36. See Raaflaub, Discovery, 128–46, 173–93, 259–61. 37. Balot, Political Thought, 162–76. 38. Hall and Morwood, Suppliant Women, 212n. 39. Raaflaub, “Stick and Glue,” 83. 40. Ibid., 83. 41. Ibid., 66. 42. Ibid., 70–71. Detailing the variety of occasions on which antityrannicism was inculcated, Raaflaub comments, “All this reminded them regularly of their civic duty to fight would-be tyrants when and in whatever shape they might appear.”

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43. Josiah Ober, “Tyrant Killing as Therapeutic Stasis: A Political Debate in Images and Texts,” in Popular Tyranny: Sovereignty and Its Discontents in Ancient Greece, ed. Kathryn Morgan (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 225. 44. Cited by Sara Forsdyke, “Uses and Abuses of Tyranny,” in A Companion to Greek and Roman Political Thought, ed. Ryan Balot, Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 236. Plato uses this figure again in Republic 619c. Ryan Balot provided the instance from the Iliad in a personal communication. 45. Plato, Republic, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, trans. Paul Shorey (New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1963), 8.565–66b. 46. Raaflaub, “Stick and Glue,” 66. 47. Garnsey conjectures that these and other differences are related to Aristotle’s development of natural slavery theory in Politics, the later of the two texts. Ideas of Slavery, 116–27. 48. Malcolm Schofield discusses Aristotle’s disagreement with Plato and his interest in differentiating political rule from mastership in “Ideology and Philosophy in Aristotle’s Theory of Slavery,” in Aristoteles’ “Politik” (Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1990), 16–20. 49. Nicomachean Ethics 1160b24–32, quoted in Garnsey, Ideas of Slavery, 118. 50. By stressing Aristotle’s dynamic conception of nature, Jill Frank challenges the view that Aristotle propounds a theory of natural slavery. “Citizens, Slaves, and Foreigners: Aristotle on Human Nature,” American Political Science Review 98, no. 1 (February 2004): 91–104. 51. For a helpful account of the complexity of Aristotle’s views, see Andrew Lintott, “Aristotle and Democracy,” Classical Quarterly 42, no. 1 (1992): 114–28. 52. Garnsey queries Aristotle’s use of despote¯s, confusingly arguing that in Politics Aristotle rejects an analogy between slavery and tyranny that he earlier accepted. Ideas of Slavery, 116. 53. Mogens Herman Hansen, “Aristotle’s Two Complementary Views of the Greek ‘Polis,’” in Transitions to Empire: Essays in Greco-Roman History, 360–146 B.C., ed. Robert W. Wallace and Edward M. Harris, 196–203 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996). 54. Hansen adds, “And this Aristotelian doctrine still prevails among ancient historians.” Ibid., 203–4. 55. Schofield, for example, begins his inquiry into relations between ideology and philosophical critique with a discussion of Aristotle’s endoxic method, which “has an elective affinity for ideology.” “Ideology and Philosophy,” 6. 56. Hansen, “Complementary Views,” 202. 57. Ober, “Tyrant Killing,” 226–28. 58. Cicero, On Obligations (De Officiis), ed. P. G. Walsh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 95; see also 91. 59. Adrienne Mayor, “Pacesetter,” London Review of Books 32, no. 12 (2010): 30–31. 60. William Allen (i.e., Edward Sexby), Killing noe murder (London, 1657). 61. Cicero, On the Commonwealth and On the Laws, ed. James E. G. Zetzel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 2.47. For interrelations between Greek and



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Roman invective, see J. Roger Dunkle, “The Greek Tyrant and Roman Political Invective of the Late Republic,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological As­ sociation 98 (1967): 151–71. 62. Cicero, On the Commonwealth 3.42.43. 63. Cicero, Philippics, trans. Walter C. A. Ker, Loeb Classical Library 15 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926), 1.2.6, 3.14.35. 64. For a fascinating discussion, see Robert Kaster, “The Shame of the Romans,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 127 (1997): 1–19. 65. Cicero, Philippics 2.34.85–86. 66. Ibid., 3.14.36. 67. Ibid., 10.9.19. 68. Ibid., 10.10.20. 69. Hannah Arendt, Human Condition, 2nd ed., ed. Margaret Canovan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 36n30. 70. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 106. 71. Keith Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 108. In “On the Roman Slave Supply and Slavebreeding,” K. R. Bradley argues that in republican and imperial Rome, both slave trading and slave breeding were important means of acquiring slaves. Classical Slavery, ed. M. I. Finley (London: Fran Cass & Co., 1987), 42–64. Richard Saller discusses the widespread practice of infant exposure, assumed to result in enslavement, in “Slavery and the Roman Family,” ibid., 69–71. 72. Carlin A. Barton explains that surrender, deditio, left the defeated without any human rights and the victor with absolute power. “The Price of Peace in Ancient Rome,” in War and Peace in the Ancient World, ed. Kurt A. Raaflaub (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), 249. 73. Cicero, Phillipics 10.10.20. 74. On the indebtedness of Roman antimonarchic ideology to Greek antityrannicism, including representations of Tarquinius Superbus, see Andrew Erskine, “Hellenistic Monarchy and Roman Political Invective,” Classical Quarterly 41 (1991): 106–20. 75. Raaflaub, “Stick and Glue,” 66. 76. Cited by duBois, Slaves and Other Objects, 126. 77. Ibid., 6–31. 78. Ibid., 128. 79. Ibid., 133.

chapter two 1. David Wootton, ed., Divine Right and Democracy: An Anthology of Political Writ­ ing in Stuart England (London: Penguin Books, 1986), 40. 2. Annabel S. Brett, “The Development of the Idea of Citizens’ Rights,” in States and Citizens, ed. Quentin Skinner and Bo Strath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 98. 3. For a succinct overview of differences between ancient Greek democracy and modern rights-based liberalism, see Cartledge, Ancient Greek Political Thought, 57.

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4. Raaflaub, “Stick and Glue,” 72. 5. George Sabine, A History of Political Theory, 4th ed., ed. Thomas Landon Thorson (Chicago: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973), 365. For a discussion of absolutism emphasizing continuities between English and Continental formulations, see Johann P. Sommerville, “English and European Political Ideas in the Early Seventeenth Century: Revisionism and the Case of Absolutism,” Journal of British Studies 35 (1996): 168–94. 6. Sabine, History of Political Theory, 366. 7. Gordon J. Schochet, Patriarchalism and Political Thought: The Authoritarian Family and Political Speculation and Attitudes Especially in Seventeenth-Century En­ gland (New York: Basic Books, 1975). 8. Ibid., 56. 9. This feature of Schochet’s thesis becomes more prominent in the second edition, The Authoritarian Family and Political Attitudes in 17th Century England: Patriarchal­ ism in Political Thought (London: Transaction Books, 1988). Michael McKeon employs it along with Schochet’s emphasis on explicitation in The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). 10. See, for example, Wootton, Divine Right, 31–32. 11. Classics include A. S. P. Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1938); Christopher Hill’s Puritanism and Revolution (London: Panther Books, 1968); Michael Walzer’s The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (New York: Atheneum, 1969); and James Holston, Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution (London: Verso, 2000). 12. Michel de Montaigne, “Of Custome, and How a Received Law Should not Easily be Changed,” in The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne, 3 vols., trans. John Florio (London: Oxford University Press, 1904), 1:110. Originally published as Les Essais (1580). 13. On dating and Montaigne’s responses to publication, see Étienne de la Boétie, Discours de la servitude volontaire, ed. Simone Goyard-Fabre (Paris: Flammarion, 1983), 136 (hereafter cited in text as DSV). Also Étienne de la Boétie and Paul Bonnefon, “The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude,” in The Politics of Obedience and Étienne de la Boé­ tie, ed. Murray N. Rothbard, trans. Harry Kurz (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2007), 60–63, 68–72, 115. 14. Goyard-Fabre discusses La Boétie’s innovative contractualism. DSV, 102–6. 15. La Boétie and Bonnefon, “Discourse,” 115. Citations in English are from Kurz’s translation. 16. Ibid., 127. 17. Montaigne, “Of Friendship,” in Essayes, 3:215. 18. La Boétie and Bonnefon, “Discourse,” 118. 19. Ibid., 121. 20. John Ponet, A Short Treatise of Politique Power; And of the true Obedience which Subjects owe to Kings, and other civill Governours (1556), 50. 21. Grotius cites Cicero’s Oratio Pro T. Milone in The Rights of War and Peace, vols. 1–3, ed. Richard Tuck, trans. Jean Barbeyrac and John Morrice (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), 1.2.3. Originally published as De jure belli ac pacis (1625). Subsequent par-



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enthetical references in the text are to the 2005 edition and indicate the volume, chapter, section, and paragraph(s). 22. On the elitist and anarchist implications of Discours, see Nannerl O. Keohane, “The Radical Humanism of Étienne De La Boétie,” Journal of the History of Ideas 38, no. 1 (1977): 119–30. 23. Christopher Goodman, How Superior Powers Oght To Be Obeyd Of Their sub­ jects: and wherein they may lawfully by Gods Worde be disobeyed and resisted (Geneva: John Crispin, 1558), 30–31. 24. Ibid., 148–49. 25. Ibid., 67. 26. Ponet, Politique Power, 36. 27. Herodotus, The History, trans. David Grene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 1.119, p. 89. 28. Ponet, Politique Power, 43–44. 29. Ibid. 30. On this, see Quentin Skinner’s influential discussion, The Foundations of Mod­ ern Political Thought, vol. 2, The Age of Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). 31. See Julian H. Franklin, ed. and trans., Constitutionalism and Resistance in the Sixteenth Century: Three Treatises by Hotman, Beza, and Mornay (New York: Pegasus, 1969), 11–45. 32. Ponet, Politique Power, 50. 33. Theodor Mommsen and Paul Krueger, eds., The Digest of Justinian, vol. 1, trans. Alan Warson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970), bk. 1, chap. 5.4. 34. See George Garnett, introduction to Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos: or, concerning the legitimate power of a prince over the people, and of the people over a prince, trans. George Garnett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), xx–xxii. On the reception of Vindiciae and other Huguenot tracts in England, see Susan Doran, “The Politics of Renaissance Europe,” in Shakespeare and Renaissance Europe, ed. Andrew Hadfield and Paul Hammond, The Arden Critical Companions, 21–52 (London: Thomson Learning, 2004). 35. Garnett, Vindiciae, lxi. 36. Ibid., lxxxiii. 37. Ibid., 3n2. 38. Parenthetical references are to Garnett’s edition. 39. For the view that such constructivism appears only in the mid-seventeenth century, see Richard Tuck, “Power and Authority in Seventeenth Century England,” Historical Journal 17, no. 1 (1974): 50. 40. La Boétie and Bonnefon, “Discourse,” 118–19. This colorfully constructivist view of monarchy is an aspect of what Alan Cromartie points to when showing how English constitutionalism later makes the king “just an instrument, a means to, not a part of, the nation’s collective well-being.” “The Constitutionalist Revolution: The Transformation of Political Culture in Early Stuart England,” Past and Present 163 (1999): 100. 41. George Buchanan, A dialogue on the law of kingship among the Scots: a critical edition and translation of George Buchanan’s “De jure regni apud Scotos dialogus,” ed.

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Roger A. Mason and Martin S. Smith (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2004), 87 (hereafter cited in text as Dialogue). Though published in 1579, Buchanan began the treatise in 1567, and it started circulating in 1569–70 (xxvii). 42. Goodman, Superior Powers, 187–88. 43. John Milton, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, in Political Writings, ed. Mar­ tin Dzelzainis, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 27–28. 44. See Buchanan, Dialogue, 188n151. 45. Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum, ed. Mary Dewar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), bk. 1, chap. 5, p. 52. Subsequent references indicate the locaters cited here. Dewar speculates on “earlier unknown Latin editions,” which raises the possibility that Bodin may have come into contact with Smith’s text (34). 46. Ibid., 1.10.57. 47. Ellen Meiksins Wood and Neal Wood, A Trumpet of Sedition: Political Theory and the Rise of Capitalism, 1509–1688 (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 48. 48. Smith, De Republica, 1.10.57. 49. Smith distinguishes various forms of feudal servitude from slavery as practiced by gentiles in 3.8.135–42. 50. On tyranny’s connections with the Ottoman Empire in early modern orientalism, see Lucette Valensi, The Birth of the Despot: Venice and the Sublime Porte, trans. Arthur Denner (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987). 51. Smith, De Republica, 1.10.58. 52. Here I am indebted to R. Koebner’s discussion, “Despot and Despotism: Vicissitudes of a Political Term,” though my interpretations of the linguistic and semantic changes he investigates differ from his. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 14, nos. 3–4 (1951): 275–302. For a discussion of Bodin’s “la monarchie seigneuriale,” see 284–87. Drawing on Koebner, Valensi discusses Bodin’s attitude toward Turkish autocratic rule in Birth of the Despot, 61–65. 53. Jean Bodin, The Six Bookes of A Commonweale: A Facsimile reprint of the English translation of 1606, Corrected and supplemented in the light of a new compari­ son with the French [République] and Latin texts, ed. Kenneth Douglas McRae, trans. Richard Knolles (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), bk. 2, chap. 2, p. 200. Subsequent parenthetical references are to this edition and indicate the locators cited here. 54. Robert Filmer, “The Anarchy of a Limited Monarchy,” in Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 159–60. 55. Smith, De Republica, 1.8.55. 56. Ibid., 1.7.54. 57. Ibid., 1.24.76. 58. Ibid., 1.12.60. 59. Ibid., 1.7.53. 60. John Christopherson, An exhortation to all menne to take hede and beware of rebellion (1554), C.v–D.ii. 61. Ibid., T.i, T.ii.



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62. Cicero, De Officiis, 115. 63. Theodore Beza, “Du Droit des Magistrats sur leurs Subjets,” in Constitutionalism and Resistance, 125–26. On the edict to which Beza likely refers and the consistent regard such restrictions had for slaveholders’ property interests, see Allan Watson, “Roman Slave Law and Romanist Ideology,” Phoenix 37 (1983): 59–65. 64. André Thevet, The new found worlde, or Antarctike (1558; London, 1568), ii. 65. William Cunningham, The Cosmographical Glasse, conteinyng the pleasant Principles of Cosmographie, Geographie, Hydrographie, or Navigation (London, 1559), Aii, Qiii, Riiii. 66. Michel de Montaigne, “Of the caniballes,” in Essayes, 1:254. 67. Ibid., 254–55. Edwin M. Duval helpfully discusses the shifting criteria Montaigne uses to evaluate barbarism and civility in Edwin M. Duval, “Lessons of the New World: Design and Meaning in Montaigne’s ‘Des Cannibales’ (I.31) and ‘Des coches’ (III.6),” Yale French Studies 64 (1983): 95–112. 68. Montaigne, Essayes, 3:159. French citations are from Essais de Michel de Mon­ taigne, ed. André Tournon (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1998), 199. 69. Cannibalism’s relations with Greco-Roman conventions of war slavery have not been studied, though they would have been apparent to early moderns. Frank Lestrigant classifies the cannibalism of which Montaigne writes as “cannibalisme de vengeance” without comparing it to enslavement. “Catholiques et cannibales,” in Pratiques et Dis­ cours Alimentaires a la Renaissance, ed. Jean-Claude Margolin and Robert Sauzet (Paris: G. P. Maisonneuve et Larose, 1982), 233. For comparison of Thevet’s and Jean de Léry’s more polarizing, judgmental attitudes with Montaigne’s, see Claude Rawson, “‘Indians’ and Irish: Montaigne, Swift, and the Cannibal Question,” Modern Language Quarterly 53, no. 3 (1992): 313–18.

chapter three 1. Grotius, Rights of War and Peace, l:11.2.186. 2. This and all future citations are from the King James Bible. 3. “Jephtha, who by argument, / Not worse than by his shield and spear / Defended Israel from the Ammonite.” John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis: Odyssey Press, 1957), lines 283–85. 4. Locke, Two Treatises, 1.4.32. 5. Ibid., 2.3.21. 6. Ibid., e.g., 2.29.241. 7. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 2.21.109. Subsequent references are from this edition and indicate the part, chapter, and section. 8. From Aristotle, Politics. 9. Parenthetical line citations taken from Euripides, Iphigenia at Aulis, in Bacchae and Other Plays, trans. and ed. James Morwood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 10. On the history of “cannibals” in relation to “Caribs,” see Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Methuen, 1986), 13–43.

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11. J. Rives shows how negative evaluations of human sacrifice have been used in classical and early Christian cultures to distinguish civilization—where blood sacrifice, if it occurs, involves only animals—from barbarism. “Human Sacrifice among Pagans and Christians,” Journal of Roman Studies 85 (1995): 65–85. When condemning the Amerindigenes’ practice of human sacrifice, Francisco de Vitoria, following Aquinas, discusses Jephtha’s foolish vow and his impiety in fulfilling it. “On Dietary Laws, or Self-Restraint,” in Francisco de Vitoria: Political Writings, ed. Anthony Pagden and Jeremy Lawrance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 217. 12. Wilbur Owen Sypherd surveys this legacy in Jephthah and His Daughter (Newark: University of Delaware, 1948). 13. Bartolomé de Las Casas, In Defense of the Indians, trans. and ed. Stafford Poole (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1992), 240–43; and Vitoria, “On Dietary Laws,” in Political Writings, 212–19. 14. According to I. D. McFarlane, Iephthes “comes to enjoy an immense reputation in Protestant countries; indeed its popularity is little short of phenomenal.” Buchanan (London: Duckworth and Co., 1981), 201–5. Debra Kuller Shuger points out that “[e]igh­ teen . . . Latin editions followed in the sixteenth century, and twenty-eight in the seven­ teenth. The play was translated into French seven times before 1614 (not counting multiple editions of individual translations), as well as into Italian, German, Hungarian, and Polish.” The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 135. 15. Steven Berkowitz argues against attempts to politicize Baptistes, which he des­cribes as “an Erasmian, humanist, pedagogic document,” not a “revolutionary manual.” A Critical Edition of George Buchanan’s “Baptistes” and of Its Anonymous SeventeenthCentury Translation “Tyrannical-Government Anatomized” (New York: Garland, 1992), 125. However, if one accepts James H. McGregor’s argument that in translating Eurip­ ides’s texts, Buchanan acquired a knowledge of Greek tragedy that had not yet been theoretically formulated, it is possible that Buchanan may likewise have developed in the medium of drama political insights that only later assumed polemical discursive form. “The Sense of Tragedy in George Buchanan’s Jephthes,” Pers Leuven 31 (1983): 127. On the importance to Buchanan of civic humanism, public life, and a nascent historicism, see the introduction to George Buchanan: The Political Poetry, ed. and trans. Paul J. McGinnis and Arthur H. Williamson (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1995). 16. Introduction, George Buchanan Tragedies, ed. P. Sharratt and P. G. Walsh (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1983), 14. 17. An interest in distinguishing political from domestic (or “economic”) rule is a hallmark of resistance theory, which rejects the identification of paternal and monarchical forms of rule characteristic of royal absolutism. On the vitality of classical humanist and republican political traditions in pre–Civil Wars England, see Markku Peltonen, Clas­ sical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 18. Jonathan Wright, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), s.v. “Christopherson, John (d. 1558).”



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19. For fascinating, detailed discussion of these issues, see Jon Douglas Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). 20. Buchanan Tragedies, 248n. 21. Helene Foley, “Marriage and Sacrifice in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis,” Arethusa 15, nos. 1–2 (1982): 176. 22. Josephus, The Jewish Antiquities, vol. 2, trans. H. St. J. Thackeray and Ralph Marcus, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 263–64. Also see Cheryl Anne Brown, No Longer Be Silent: First Century Jewish Portraits of Bib­ lical Women (Louisville: Westminster Press, 1992), 93–139. 23. Joost van den Vondel, Jephtha of Offerbelofte, in Volledige Dichtwerken en Oorspronkelijk Proza, Verz. Albert Verwey (Amsterdam: H. J. W. Becht, 1937), 407. Also see Jephthah, trans. Peter King, Dutch Crossing 26 (2002): 248–302. Neither Verwey’s nor King’s edition of Vondel’s Jephthah has line numbers. 24. Parenthetical line citations taken from Iephthes, in Buchanan Tragedies. 25. In “Of Three Good Wives,” Montaigne, a pupil of Buchanan’s, illustrates female virtue through accounts of wives who willingly end their lives for the sake of their husbands. Citing Montaigne’s essay, Christine Fauré comments that such female heroism remains “within the framework of an attitude in the domain of private life which, through intransigence, attains to glory in the public arena.” “Rights or Virtues: Women and the Republic,” in Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, ed. Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 130. Although this formulation certainly applies to all the daughters represented here, the sacrifice of Buchanan’s Iphis in my view also has a more independently civic character. 26. Peter Sharratt, “Euripides latinus: Buchanan’s Use of His Sources,” in Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Bonoviensis, ed. R. J. Schoeck (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995), 616–17. 27. Ibid., 615. 28. In Euripides’s drama, Iphigenia responds to Agamemnon by formally offering up her body for the sake of Greece and insisting that no physical force be used: she will offer her neck voluntarily, without protest (lines 1546–61). (As happens even more clearly with Euripides’s Polyxena, the belief that a sacrificial animal should signal consent to its own slaughter here gets transposed to a distinctively human plane by opposing the slave, for whom force is appropriate, to the freeborn child, who offers her body of her own volition.) 29. In their edition of Buchanan’s tragedies, Sharratt and Walsh draw readers’ atten­ tion to Andromache’s dream in Seneca’s Troades as a possible source, 248–49n. McFarlane, following Carl Fries, mentions Buchanan’s imitation of the dream portent in Hecuba, as well as the mother’s desire to die with her daughter. Buchanan, 195–96. Shuger offers a related reading of this dream, although she argues that “Storge’s picture of the father as wolfish alien misrepresents Buchanan’s Jephtha.” Renaissance Bible, 144–45. 30. When trying to prevent Heracles from murdering his children, Heracles’s father cries, “What kind of insanity is this? Has the blood of the men you recently killed driven

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you out of your wits?” Euripides, Heracles, in “Heracles” and Other Plays, ed. James Morwood, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), lines 965–67. 31. Noting that mactatu (slaying) appears in classical Latin only in this very passage by Lucretius, Sharratt argues that this allusion, which would readily have been recognized by contemporaries, reveals Buchanan’s actual views in a coded, displaced manner. “Euripides latinus,” 617–18. See also the note to line 803 of Iephthes in Buchanan Tragedies, 258. 32. Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, 2:266. 33. Anna Linton, “Sacrificed or Spared? The Fate of Jephthah’s Daughter in Early Modern Theological and Literary Texts,” German Life and Letters 57, no. 3 (2004): 240–45. 34. Bodin, Six Bookes, bk. 1, chap. 5, p. 35. 35. Linton, “Sacrificed or Spared?,” 242. 36. Jean Calvin, The Institution of Christian Religion (London: Reinolde Wolfe and Richard Harison, 1561), fol. 83, 4.13.1. 37. Ibid., fol. 84, 4.13.3. Cited by Carl Fries, “Quellenstudien zu George Buchanan,” in Neue Jahrbücher für das Klassische Altertum Geschichte und Deutsche Litterature, Her. Johannes Ilberg (Leipzig: Druck und Verlag von B. G. Teubner, 1900), 251. 38. Fries, ibid., 252. Compare McFarlane, Buchanan, 196. 39. Jean Calvin, Certayn Sermons, or homelies, appointed by the kynges Majestie, to bee declared and redde, by all persones, vicares, or curates, every Sondaye in their Churches where they have cure (London, 1547), Miii. See also Faye L. Kelly, “Oaths in Shakespeare’s Henry VI Plays,” Shakespeare Quarterly 24 (1973): 371n18; and Richard Greaves, “Traditionalism and the Seeds of Revolution in the Social Principles of the Geneva Bible,” Sixteenth Century Journal 7, no. 2 (October 1976): 96–97. 40. Cicero, De Officiis, 3.95.116. Cicero’s pronouncement is mentioned in Morwood’s note to lines 20–21 of Iphigenia, p. 163. See also Cicero, De Officiis, xliv–xlv. Erasmus, too, condemns Agamemnon’s behavior in the Adagia, but Berkowitz downplays its relevance to Iephthes in Critical Edition, 172. 41. For this view, see editors’ annotations on the dialogue, pp. 259–62. 42. Buchanan’s Baptistes depicts yet another tyrant who makes and keeps an equally rash promise: Herod, who honors his promise to reward his daughter Salome with whatever she wishes—which, of course, is John the Baptist’s head. This similarity between Baptistes and Iephthes is, I think, more significant than commentators have suggested, since in both dramas the tyrant’s promise turns out to require realization in an act of unjustifiable homicide. Sharratt and Walsh, for example, mention Cicero’s condemnation of Agamemnon’s vow in relation to Baptistes but do not bring it up with reference to Jephthes. Buchanan Tragedies, 292. Both Jephtha and Herod are mentioned in other early modern Protestant contexts, a fact that suggests this pairing has an interesting, unexplored history (see below). Although Buchanan’s Jephtha does not succumb to bad counsel (as Herod does) but instead stubbornly refuses to listen to good advice, from the perspective offered by Dialogue (and early modern literature on tyranny in general), the difference is not significant. A ruler who can be persuaded to transgress the law or justifies doing so while rejecting good advice behaves tyrannously.



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43. For the offer of scepter and crown, see lines 452–55 of Fobes’s dual-language edition, Jephthah by John Christopherson, trans. Francis Howard Fobes, ed. W. O. Sypherd (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1928) (parenthetical references are to the line numbers in this edition). By dramatizing Jephtha’s victimization at the hands of his legitimate brothers in the opening scenes (an episode that would appeal to supporters of the Princess Mary, legally illegitimate at this time), Christopherson establishes Jephtha’s noble, long-suffering character well before the crown is offered, after which Jephtha is called “prince.” The 1544 act of Parliament restoring Mary and Elizabeth to the line of succession (though without altering their illegitimacy) is possibly relevant to the dating of Christopherson’s drama, which would likely have been able to address illegitimacy with more confidence after passage of the act. James K. McConica briefly discusses Christopherson’s affiliations with other conservative humanists and his residency in Louvain during Edward’s reign in English Humanists and Reformation Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 269–71. 44. Sharratt, “Euripides latinus,” 614. 45. See Carol Clover, “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,” Representa­ tions 20 (1987): 187–228. 46. Vondel, Jephtha of Offerbelofte, 411. 47. Christopherson, An Exhortation to all menne to take hede and beware of rebel­ lion (1554), Svi. 48. Ibid., Jvii. 49. Ibid., Lviii. 50. Ibid., Eevi. 51. Iphis’s heroism is stressed by the Protestant humanist Johannes Sturm in his preface to the Strasbourg edition of Buchanan’s play (1567): “Iphis ejus ita ad mortem ac­ cedit ut Iphigeniam graecam animi magnitudine superset.” (“By her manner of meeting death, Iphis exceeds the Greek Iphigenia in magnanimity of mind.”) Cited and translated by Martin Mueller, Children of Oedipus and Other Essays on the Imitation of Greek Tragedy, 1550–1800 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 162. 52. In having Jephtha slay his daughter himself (lines 923–28), Christopherson follows Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, perhaps to associate Jephtha more closely with Abraham. With Vondel, on the other hand, Jephtha’s physical agency underlines the barbarity of sacrifice, which is strongly opposed by Court Steward, Lawyer, and Priest, and which his Jephtha later recognizes as infanticide (p. 412). In act 5, Vondel dramatizes Jephtha’s guilt and remorse so as to purge his rule of lawlessness in preparation for his return. 53. Nicole Loraux distinguishes suicide from the virgin’s voluntary sacrifice, which resembles the male citizen’s noble death: “For the noble death is not sought after, but accepted. Just as the Athenians or Spartans bow before a demand laid upon them by their city, so the virgins accept a destiny that they reclaim as their own.” Tragic Ways of Kill­ ing a Woman, trans. Anthony Forster (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 46. In another allusion to Hecuba, Buchanan has Storge urge Iphis to prostrate herself before her father’s feet (lines 1212–14) just as Hecuba begs Polyxena to assume the posture of suppliant before Odysseus (lines 339–42). Neither daughter complies. 54. Shuger, Renaissance Bible, 158.

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55. Cf. Euripides, Iphigenia, line 1574: “the undefiled blood from a virgin’s beautiful neck.” For this reading of Polyxena’s death, see discussion of the throat as site of female vulnerability by Loraux, who sees Seneca as a good reader of Euripides in stressing Polyxena’s manliness (audax virago). Tragic Ways, 56–61. In the reading I propose, Buchanan’s treatment of sacrifice prepares the way for Léry and Montaigne, who privilege speech over body, blood, and ingestion when writing of anthropophagy. See Frank Lestringant, Cannibals: The Discovery and Representation of the Cannibal from Columbus to Jules Verne, trans. Rosemary Morris (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), 68–80, 102–11. On Protestant views of freedom as annulment of slavery, see Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 70–76. 56. On Buchanan’s critique of imperialism, see the introduction to Buchanan: Politi­ cal Poetry, 11–27. 57. Las Casas, Defense, 242–43.

chapter four 1. Hobbes, Leviathan, 2.29.171. 2. Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law Natural and Politic, 2nd ed., ed. Ferdinand Tönnies (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1969), pt. 2, chap. 3, sec. 3. Subsequent parenthetical references are from this edition and indicate the locator information cited here. 3. Robert Filmer, “Patriarcha,” in Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 13. 4. Filmer, “Anarchy,” 132–33, 147–48. Later Filmer makes “slavery” even more anomalous, not appearing in Greek or Roman texts. “Observations upon Aristotles Politiques,” in Patriarcha and Other Writings, 237, 262. 5. Bodin, Six Bookes, 1.5.33. 6. For Bodin’s critique of Aristotle, see chapter 2 of this book; for Hobbes’s, see chapter 9; for Filmer’s, see especially “Patriarcha,” 17, 65, and “Observations,” 252–54. 7. In-text citations are to Henry Parker, Jus Populi (London, 1644). 8. R. Koebner, “Despot and Despotism: Vicissitudes of a Political Term,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 14, nos. 3–4 (1951): 285. 9. For discussion of these issues in late medieval contexts, see J. H. Burns, The Idea of Monarchy, 1400–1525 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); and Annabel S. Brett, Liberty, Right and Nature: Individual Rights in Later Scholastic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 10. Walter Raleigh, The History of the World (London, 1614), 384–85. 11. Filmer’s clearest statement is found in “Patriarcha,” 5–23. Fathers and kings are interchangeable for Filmer, the difference between them being “only in the latitude or extent” of the populations ruled (12). 12. Translation and interpretation of this critical passage in Politics is discussed (without reference to Nimrod) by Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 65–67.



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13. Filmer, “Patriarcha,” 8. 14. The Life and Reigne of King Charls; or, The pseudo-martyr discovered (London, 1651), 96. 15. Raleigh, History, 187. 16. John Cooke, Monarchy No creature of Gods making, & . . . (London, 1651), 30. 17. Light shining in Buckinghamshire (1648), 1–2. 18. Ibid. Christopher Hill discusses this tract in connection with the revolution’s social and economical (as against merely constitutional) radicalism in “Levellers and True Levellers,” in The World Turned Upside Down (1972; repr., London: Penguin Books, 1991), 107–50. Page citations are to the reprint edition. 19. Cimelgus Bonde, Salmasius his Buckler; or, a Royal Apology for King Charles the Martyr (London, 1662), 102. 20. Johann Sommerville, “English and European Political Ideas in the Early Seventeenth Century: Revisionism and the Case of Absolutism,” Journal of British Studies 35, no. 2 (1996): 176–90. For additional discussion of this passage, see Buchanan, Dialogue, 198–99n200. The editors mention that Erasmus uses Deuteronomy 17:18–20 to contrast the ideal with the bad ruler of 1 Samuel 8, 199n203. Eric Nelson explores contributions made by the “Hebrew revival” in the seventeenth century to debates on this and related scriptural texts in The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of Euro­ pean Political Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 21. Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, trans. and ed. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 2.11.6. Originally published as De Cive (1642). Subsequent citations are to this edition and indicate the book, chapter, and section. 22. Lloyd E. Berry, ed., The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). 23. DSV, 144. 24. John Diodati, Pious Annotations upon the Holy Bible (London, 1643), annotation on verse 5, 167. 25. Ibid., verses 7, 9. 26. King James VI and I, The Trew Law of Free Monarchies, in Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 66–71. Bishop Overall’s Convocation Book (1606; London, 1690) is equally cagey. Conceding that the Israelites did “grievously sin in being weary of Gods immediate Election and appointment of their chief Governors,” their “preposterous hast” must nevertheless not be said to “prejudice the Dignity and Authority” of monarchical power. Nor can it be claimed that the people “had in themselves any Authority to set up a King over them” (20–23). 27. Buchanan, Dialogue, 110–11. 28. Monarchy, 29. 29. Ibid., 35. 30. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Barbara K. Lewalski (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007). All subsequent quotations from Paradise Lost are cited in parentheses by book and line number(s) from this edition. 31. Nicholas von Maltzahn demonstrates that a contemporary reader, John Beale, read these passages as testimony of an unrepentant republicanism. “Laureate, Republi-

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can, Calvinist: An Early Response to Milton and Paradise Lost (1667),” Milton Studies 29 (1993): 189. See also von Maltzahn, “The First Reception of Paradise Lost (1667),” Review of English Studies 27, no. 188 (1996): 496–99. 32. Milton, Eikonoklastes, 2nd ed. (London, 1650). In-text citations are to this edition. 33. John Lilburne, The Free-Mans Freedome Vindicated (London, 1646). 34. John Milton, Defence of the People of England, in Political Writings, ed. Martin Dzelzainis, trans. Claire Cruzelier, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). In-text citations are to this edition. 35. In an important study, Steven Jablonski comments on the contrast established here, and on Milton’s reassignment of Noah’s words, which he perceptively associates with antiabsolutist critique. Jablonski, however, mistakenly believes Milton to be defending the naturalness of human bondage, claiming that Milton conceives “a whole spectrum of degrees of natural slavery which authorize progressively more severe responses.” “Ham’s Vicious Race: Slavery and John Milton,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 37 (1997): 173–89. Maureen Quilligan discusses the Hamitic curse in the context of emergent mercantile capitalism and colonial slavery in “Freedom, Service, and the Trade in Slaves: The Problem of Labor in Paradise Lost,” in Paradise Lost: Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. William Zunder, New Casebooks Series, 170–94 (1996; repr., London: Macmillan Press, 1999). Page citations are to the reprint edition. Anne-Julia Zwierlein rejects Quilligan’s view that Paradise Lost registers a shift in the means of acquiring slaves, arguing that racialized, commercialized readings of the curse are “imported” into Milton’s text by eighteenth-century commentators. Majestic Milton: British Imperial Ex­ pansion and Transformations of Paradise Lost, 1667–1837 (Münster: LIT, 2001), 355–68, 369. 36. Jablonski points out the absence of both proper names. “Ham’s Vicious Race,” 181. 37. William McKee Evans, “From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the ‘Sons of Ham,’ ” American Historical Review 85, no. 1 (1980): 16–22. 38. Ibid., 22, 33; and Benjamin Braude, “The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods,” William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 1 (1997): 110, 133. 39. In different ways, Evans and Braude relate the Hamitic curse’s fixed association with Africans to European exploration of western Africa and the subsequent transatlantic slave trade. Braude demonstrates that its ethnic and geographic associations were extraordinarily variable prior to this period. Robin Blackburn argues that the Hamitic curse was especially important during 1550–1750, since it “added vital reinforcement to the argument from heathenism.” Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (London: Verso, 1997), 73. For an informative review of the extensive literature on the “sons of Ham,” see 88–89. 40. Antony Ascham, Of the Confusions and Revolutions of Governments (London, 1649), 80–81. 41. A Declaration of the Commons of England in Parliament Assembled (London, 1647).



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42. Life and Reigne, 97. 43. John Wildman, Putney Project (1647). Cited by Samuel Dennis Glover, “The Putney Debates: Popular versus Elitist Republicanism,” Past and Present 164 (1999): 44. 44. Richard Nelson stresses the text’s address to debt-slaveholders, who are obligated to manumit and exhorted to be generous. Deuteronomy: A Commentary (London: Westminster Press, 2002), 196–200. Victor Hurowitz investigates the piercing as a sign of ownership in “Marking Slaves in the Bible in Light of Akkadian Sources,” American Academy for Jewish Research 58 (1992): 47–77. For a study of the translation of Hebrew terms into Greek in the LXX, Josephus, Philo, and others, see Benjamin G. Wright, “ ‘Ebed/Doulos’: Terms and Social Status in the Meeting of Hebrew Biblical and Hellenistic Roman Culture,” “Slavery in Text and Interpretation,” ed. Allen D. Callahan, Richard A. Horsley, and Abraham Smith, special issue, Semeia 83–84 (1998): 83–131. 45. Alan Watson discusses forms of manumission and legislation governing relations between patron (former master) and freedwomen and freedmen in Roman Slave Law (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 23–34, 35–45. 46. Orlando Patterson considers many forms of manumission from a variety of interpretative angles in Slavery and Social Death, 209–39. 47. Ibid., 236. 48. For this ritual, see George Long, “Manumissio,” in A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, ed. William Smith (London: John Murray, 1875), 730–31, http:// penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/secondary/SMIGRA/home.html. 49. Andreas Alciatus, The Latin Emblems: Indexes and Lists, ed. Peter M. Daly with Virginia W. Callahan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), emblem 151. This emblem, which first appeared in 1546, is taken from a 1621 edition. 50. Cesare Ripa, Iconologie, trans. and moralized by Jean Baudouin (Paris, 1644; repr., New York: Garland Publishing, 1976), 99–101. Page citations are to the reprint edition. 51. Texts Concerning the Revolt of the Netherlands, ed. E. H. Kossman and A. F. Mellink (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 216–17. For the Dutch original, see From Revolution to Reconstruction . . . and What Happened Afterwards, “Plakkaat van Verlatinghe 26 juli 1581,” http://www.let.rug.nl/~usa/D/1501-1600/plakkaat /plakkaat.htm. 52. Revolt of the Netherlands, 218. 53. Slave trading and slavery were established in the Dutch East Indies and Brazil before the West Indies. See Ernst van den Boogaart and Pieter C. Emmer, “The Dutch Participation in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1596–1650,” in The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, ed. Henry A. Gemery and Jan S. Hogendorn, 353–75 (New York: Academic Press, 1979). 54. Many thanks to Anat Gilboa for locating this image, for identifying the Michelangelo prototype, and for our many discussions about the liberty cap. 55. J. David Harden examines connections between pole and liberty tree in “Liberty Caps and Liberty Trees,” where he suggests the pole with liberty cap first appears in Appian’s account of Julius Caesar’s assassination. Past and Present, no. 146 (1995): 90–91. 56. For discussion of this process, see Diana Paton, “Punishment, Crime, and the Bodies of Slaves in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica,” Journal of Social History 34, no. 4

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(2001): 927–40. Natalie Z. Davis examines criminalization in Surinam from the late seventeenth through the early nineteenth centuries in “Judges, Masters, Diviners: Slaves’ Experience of Criminal Justice in Colonial Surinam,” Law and History Review 29, no. 4 (2011): 925–84. 57. Richard Ligon, A True & Exact History of the Island of Barbados, vol. 1 (London, 1657), 51.

chapter five 1. The tendency to view Hobbes and Locke as moderns dovetails neatly with Michel Foucault’s thesis in Les mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimond, 1966). For a defense of analogy’s advantages over other modes of argumentation, see Cass R. Sunstein, “On Analogical Reasoning,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 3 (1993): 741–91. 2. Classic studies include M. A. Butler, “Early Liberal Roots of Feminism: John Locke and the Attack on Patriarchy,” American Political Science Review 72, no. 1 (1978): 135–50; M. L. Shanley, “Marriage Contract and Social Contract in Seventeenth-Century English Political Thought,” Western Political Quarterly 32, no. 1 (1979): 79–91; Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988); and Vic­ toria Khan, Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640– 1674 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 174–77. See also my discussion in “ ‘Profuse, Proud Cleopatra’: ‘Barbarism’ and Female Rule in Early Modern English Republicanism,” Women’s Studies 24 (1994): 93–95. For a view of the interchangeability of marital and political rule that differs significantly from that developed in the present study, see Constance Jordan, “The Household and the State: Transformations in the Rep­ resentation of an Analogy from Aristotle to James I,” Modern Language Quarterly 54, no. 3 (1993): 307–26. 3. Samuel Rutherford, Lex, Rex: The Law and the Prince. A Dispute for the Just Prerogative of King and People (London, 1644), 111. 4. In-text citations are to John Goodwin, The Obstructors of Justice; or, A Defence of the Honourable Sentence passed upon the late King, by the High Court of Justice (London, 1649). 5. Milton, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, vol. 2, ed. Ernest Sirluck (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959), 229. 6. In-text citations are to Henry Parker, Observations upon some of his Majesties late Answers and Expresses (London, 1642). 7. Milton, Tenure, 11. 8. Richard Field, Of the Church, Five Bookes, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1628), 614. 9. Aristotles Politiques, or Discourses of Government. Translated out of Greeke into French, with Expositions taken out of the best Authors, trans. Loys Le Roy and translated from French to English (London, 1598). 10. Johann Gerhard, The Marrow of Divinitie; or, A Golden Chaine of Divine Sen­ tences, trans. Ralph Winterton (London, 1632), 324. 11. Terence in English (Cantabrigiae, 1598), act 1, scene 1.



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12. Richard Overton, An Arrow against All Tyrants and Tyrany, Shot from the Prison of New-gate into the Prerogative Bowels of the Arbitrary House of Lords, and all other Usurpers and Tyrants Whatsoever (London, 1646), 4. 13. Ponet, Politique Power, 43. 14. Milton, Tenure, 32–33. 15. Overton, Arrow, 4–5. 16. The Serpent Salve; or, A Remedie for the Biting of an Aspe: Wherein the Obser­ vators Grounds are . . . discovered to be unsound, Seditious, nor warranted (1643), 18. 17. Peter de la Primaudaye, The French Academie, Wherin is discoursed the institu­ tion of maners, trans. T.B. (London, 1586), 579. 18. Ponet, Politique Power, 11. 19. Bodin, Six Bookes, 2.5.225. 20. King James VI and I, Trew Law, 77. 21. Milton, Defence, 68. For Filmer’s objection to this passage, see “Observations,” 203–4. 22. William Bridge, The Truth of the Times Vindicated: Whereby the lawfulnesse of Parliamentary procedings in taking up of Arms, is justified (London, 1643), 11. 23. Thomas Rainborough, “Extracts from ‘The Putney Debates,’ ” in The Levellers: The Putney Debates, Revolutions, ed. Geoffrey Robertson and Philip Baker (London: Verso, 2007), 77. 24. Henry Heller associates Bodin’s critique with a widespread fear that personal servitude could be revived within France. He also situates Bodin’s ambivalence toward “free” wage labor in the context of the transfer of land from peasantry to bourgeoisie occurring in sixteenth-century France and the consequent growth in impoverished people seeking waged work. “Bodin on Slavery and Primitive Accumulation,” Sixteenth Century Journal 25, no. 1 (1994): 53–65. 25. Herbert S. Klein, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 15–17. 26. Heller discusses these contradictions from a different perspective. “Bodin,” 64. 27. Blackburn, New World Slavery, 239–40. 28. Parker’s interesting use of reason-of-state theory is analyzed by Kahn, Wayward, 95–104. 29. This passage is discussed in my “Slavery, Resistance, and Nation in Milton and Locke,” Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England, ed. David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 372–73. 30. Ligon, History, 46.

chapter six 1. Eutactus Philodemius, The Original and End of Civil Power (London, 1649), 18. Dedicatory epistle dated April 1649. 2. Richard Saller discusses Gaius’s assertion and the absence in the classical era of clear evidence for paternal vitae necisque potestas in Patriarchy, Property and Death in the Roman Family (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 114–23.

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3. Bodin, Six Bookes, 1.4.22. 4. Saller discusses Bodin’s views in Patriarchy, 104–5, and differential treatment of children and slaves, 133–53. 5. Brent D. Shaw, “Raising and Killing Children: Two Roman Myths,” Mnemosyne 54 (2001): 60–61. 6. Ibid., 75–77. 7. Ibid., 67. 8. Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 1.2.49–50. 9. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 5. 10. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 89. Shaw discusses Yan Thomas’s essay, on which Agamben relies, in “Raising and Killing,” 72n104. 11. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 87–89. 12. Livy, History of Rome, trans. B. O. Foster, Loeb Classical Library, vol. 1 (1919; repr., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 2.3.3–4. 13. Ibid., 2.5.8–9. 14. The parallelism is Livy’s, History, 2.5.5–6. 15. Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. and ed. Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 3.1, p. 250. 16. Buchanan, Dialogue, 155. 17. Machiavelli, Discourses, 252. 18. Ibid. 19. Stephanus Junius Brutus, the Celt, Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos; or, Concerning the legitimate power of a prince over the people, and of the people over a prince, trans. George Garnett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). In-text citations are to page numbers of this edition. 20. See, e.g., Filmer, “Patriarcha,” 18. As Sommerville notes, The Necessity of the Absolute Power of all Kings consists entirely of passages from Knolles’s translation of Bodin’s République, 172. 21. Filmer, “Observations,” 237. 22. For the view that Hobbes’s fundamental principles do not undergo serious changes (a view with which I agree), see Johann Sommerville, Thomas Hobbes: Political Ideas in Historical Context (London: Macmillan Press, 1992). 23. Hobbes, De Cive, 2.8.9. See also Elements, 2.3.130–31. 24. Grotius, Rights of War and Peace, vol. 2, chap. 20, sec. 9, para. 1–6. 25. Milton, Paradise Lost. 26. Locke, Two Treatises, 1.4.39. 27. Ponet, Politique Power, 5. 28. Henry Ainsworth, Annotations upon the Five Bookes of Moses, the Book of the Psalmes, and the Song of Songs (London, 1627), 40. 29. Bishop Overall’s Convocation Book (1606; London, 1690), can. 14, cap. 16. 30. Parker, Jus Populi, 34. 31. Ibid., 32–33. 32. Ibid., 10–11.



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33. Filmer, “Patriarcha,” 7. 34. See A Remonstrance of his Excellency Thomas Lord Fairfax, Lord Generall of the Parliaments Forces. And of the Generall Councell of Officers (London, November 16, 1648); and To the Right Honourable, the Lord Fairfax and His Councell of Warre: The Humble Addresse of Henry Hammond (London, 1649), dated in the text January 15, 1648. 35. Henry Hammond, A Vindication of Dr. Hammond’s Addresse, etc. From the Exceptions of Eutactus Philodemius (London, 1650). 36. E.P., An Answer to the Vindication of Doctor Hamond, against the Exceptions of Eutactus Philodemius (London, 1650). 37. Richard Tuck mentions this debate in Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 102, 123. Tuck queries Ascham’s authorship in Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 257–58. 38. Ascham, Confusions, 25. 39. Ibid., 21–22, 108. 40. C. B. MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 132–59; and Sommerville, Thomas Hobbes, 91. 41. For the suggestion the author is likely a “Parkerian,” I am grateful to personal communication with Michael Mendle, author of Henry Parker and the English Civil War: The Political Thought of the Public’s “Privado” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 42. Parker, Jus Populi, 16–17. 43 Ibid., 11. 44. Ibid., 61. On awareness of the elitism of classical republicanism as well as prejudice against participatory democracy, see Glover, “Putney Debates,” 47–80. 45. Henry Parker, The Contra-Replicant: His Complaint to His Majestie (London, 1642), 21. 46. Parker, Observations, 34. 47. Ibid., 8. 48. For other writers who take this line, see Sommerville, Thomas Hobbes, 66. 49. Parker, Jus Populi, 66. 50. Saint Augustine, Of the citie of God with the learned comments of Io. Lod. Vives, Englished by J.H. (1610), 772–73. 51. Alan Watson, Roman Slave Law (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 7–8. 52. Francis Bacon, “Post-Nati,” in Three Speeches of the Right Honorable (London, 1641), 7–8. 53. Ibid., 8. 54. Ibid., 5. 55. Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed. Jonathan Bate, Arden Shakespeare (1995; repr., London: Thomson Learning, 2000), 2.2.158–59. 56. Not unusually, Brian Tierney, for example, mentions only voluntary slavery and on the basis of the section discussed here claims that Grotius denies the slaveholder’s power of life and death over the slave. Natural Rights, 336–37n82.

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57. Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977). 58. Blackburn, New World Slavery, 193.

chapter seven 1. Citing Howard Patch’s phrase “the negative formula,” Harry Levin refers often to negation in The Myth of the Golden Age in the Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), which draws on Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity by Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas (1935; repr., New York: Octagon Books, 1964). Hayden White argues that “wildness” belongs to a general set of cultural self-affirming devices, which include “the technique of ostensive self-definition by negation.” “The Forms of Wildness,” in The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism, ed. Edward Dudley and Maximillian E. Novak (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972), 4–5. Reflecting on the application of the pejorative term primitive to indigenous American culture, James Axtell contrasts the absence of “wheels, ships, paper, guns, compasses or cathedrals” with the extraordinary “complexity and sophistication of their polytheist religions, kinship systems, ‘barter’ economies, suasive governments, arts of war and peace, and languages” and the generally high quality of life. After Columbus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 40–41. With reference to the later querelle d’Amérique, Mary Louise Pratt refers to “the attempt to bind the Americas to Europe in an essentialized relationship of negativity, the pivot of colonial semantics.” Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 140. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam discuss “the positing of lack” as a mechanism of colonial racism in Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London: Routledge, 1994), 23. On comparison, especially negative comparison, as an integral feature of early modern colonial discourse, see Peter Hulme’s “Tales of Distinction: European Ethnography and the Caribbean,” in Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era, ed. Stuart B. Schwartz, 157–97 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 2. Writing of this transposition, Levin contrasts the former “chronological” with the new “cultural” primitivism (Lovejoy’s terms) that occurs when early moderns are “brought face to face with genuine primitives.” Myth of the Golden Age, 59. The lexicon of the golden age, he states, “at best, provided a metaphor, which dignified the simplici­ ties of the tribe” (60). Later, he decides to leave to anthropologists the question of “whether the uncivilized races of today actually correspond to the ancestral generations of humanity” (79). Though Levin’s study appears only one year later than Service’s (see n. 4 of this chapter), it would be naïve to think such views are a thing of the past, even if “savages” or “primitives” no longer tend to appear. For an interesting discussion of how critiques of “primitivism” have often reproduced some of its presuppositions, see David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), 156–63. 3. Fabian argues that “naturalized-spatialized Time” is used as a distancing device in anthropology; its ultimate expression is the “denial of coevalness,” which he defines as “a persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a time



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other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse.” Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 25, 31. Throughout Darker Side of the Renaissance, Mignolo explores connections among written history, occidentalization, and the development of “a temporal scale that had its point of arrival in the present, sixteenth-century Christian European civilization” (328). 4. Elman R. Service, “War and Our Contemporary Ancestors,” in War: The Anthro­ pology of Armed Conflict and Aggression, ed. Martin Fried, Marvin Harris, and Robert Murphy (New York: Natural History Press, 1968), 160. 5. Fabian, Time and the Other, 3–11, 146. Siep Stuurman argues that in his Nouvelle Division de la Terre (1684), François Bernier is the first to use physico-biological criteria for his four-part classification of humanity. “François Bernier and the Invention of Racial Classification,” History Workshop Journal 50 (2000): 1–21. 6. Pagden, Fall of Natural Man, 146–200. 7. André Thevet, The New Found Worlde, or Antarctike (London, 1568), 45. 8. Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writing in the English Renais­ sance, 1545–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 121 and fig. 13. 9. Thomas Harriot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. The Complete 1590 edition with the 28 engravings by Theodor de Bry after the drawings of John White and other illustrations, ed. Paul Hulton (New York: Dover Publications, 1972), 75. 10. Margaret Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centu­ ries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964), 313. 11. Bodin, Six Bookes, 1.5.34–36. 12. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, El divino Narciso (The Divine Narcissus), in Poems, Protest, and a Dream, trans. Margaret S. Peden, intro. by Ilan Stavans, 194–239 (New York: Penguin Books, 1997). 13. See Charles W. Mills’s discussion of the racialization that underwrites the classic social contract in The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 12–14, 41–62. In addition, I am pursuing a provocative remark Fabian makes: “That a clear conception of allochronism is the prerequisite and frame for a critique of racism.” Time and the Other, 182n13. 14. C Bacon, Holy War, 130–31. 15. Jean de Léry, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, trans. and ed. Janet Whatley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Parenthetical citations are to this edition. 16. Samuel Clarke, ed., A True, and Faithful Account of the Four Chiefest Planta­ tions of the English in America (1670), 13. 17. Montaigne, “The Author to the Reader,” in Essayes. 18. Ligon, History, 46. 19. For a discussion of this entry, modeled on the Roman triumph, see Margaret M. McGowan, “Form and Themes in Henri II’s Entry into Rouen,” in Renaissance Drama, New Series 1, ed. S. Schoenbaum, 199–251 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968). For other information on the Brazilians, see 218–24. An excellent reproduction of the illumination can be found in Spectacle of Empire: Marc Lescarbot’s “Theatre of Nep­ tune in New France,” ed. Jerry Wasserman (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2006), 26–27.

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20. Gretchen Mullin discusses this view regarding Irishwomen in “Representations of Irish Women in Seventeenth Century Colonial and Counter-Colonial Discourses” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2001), 122. 21. Hodgen, discussing the association between savagery and degeneration, explains how it permitted integration of Indigenous Americans into Christian theology by intro­ ducing “degrees of corruption”: “All men were corrupt, but the Indians most of all.” Early Anthropology, 379. Whatley discusses the questions early modern Christians had to consider in History of a Voyage, xxiii, iv. See also Hugh Honour, The New Golden Land: European Images of America from the Discoveries to the Present Time (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975), 57–59. 22. See Alfred A. Cave for a succinct discussion of demonization, “Richard Hakluyt’s Savages: The Influence of 16th Century Travel Narratives on English Indian Policy in North America,” International Social Science Review 60, no. 1 (1985): 3–24. 23. Giorgio Agamben, Nudities, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 55–90. 24. For a phenomenological analysis of relations among fault, narrative, and speculation, see Paul Ricouer, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerso Buchanan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967). 25. Vitoria, “On Dietary Laws,” in Political Writings, 212–16. 26. “The coppie of the Gentle-mans letters,” in Ralph Hamor, A True Discourse of the Present Estate of Virginia (London, 1615), 6. Paul Stevens discusses Rolfe’s sense of body-polluting shame in “ ‘Leviticus Thinking,’ ” Criticism 35, no. 3 (1993): 453–54. See also Karen Robertson’s discussion of the encounters between Rolfe, John Smith, and Pocahontas in “Pocahontas at the Masque,” Signs 21, no. 3 (1996): 551–83. 27. Vitoria, “On the American Indians,” in Political Writings, 251. 28. Ibid., 278–83. 29. Ibid., 287–88. 30. Bacon, Holy War, 119. 31. On the exceptionalism England thereby develops, see Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c. 1500–c. 1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). 32. Bacon Holy War, 120. 33. Ibid., 122–23. 34. Ibid., 125. On the identification of European colonizers with Israel’s hostility against Canaanites, see Stevens, “Leviticus Thinking,” 451–58. 35. Ibid., 131. 36. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, ed. Thomas Keymer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 144. 37. Ibid., 146. 38. Ibid., 195–96. 39. Ibid., 114. 40. Harriot, Briefe and True Report, 41. 41. Ovid, Ovid’s Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologized, and Represented in Figures, trans. George Sandys, ed. Karl K. Hulley and Stanley T. Vandersall (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), bk. 15, line 100. In-text citations are to this edition.



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42. Ibid., bk. 1, lines 122–24. 43. Ibid. 44. Comments on this engraving have been misleading. Bernadette Bucher uses structuralist analysis to suggest the above allegorical reading, which starts from the assumption that the foregrounded Adam and Eve are unfallen and still live in prelapsarian harmony with the animals at their feet. Icon and Conquest: A Structural Analysis of the Illustrations of de Bry’s “Great Voyages” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 73, 105. Hadfield adopts Bucher’s reading, suggesting that de Bry’s engraving poses the question “[I]s the European discovery of the peoples of the New World a violation, a forced entry into an earthly paradise which will eventually lead to its destruction?” Colo­ nial Writing, 115–16. B. J. Sokol, arguing that de Bry’s engravings distort White’s drawings and Harriot’s text, claims the conditions of the fallen figures are so “much worse than those of the American peoples described by Harriot” that it suggests the Americans are “somehow pre- or extra-lapsarian.” “The Problem of Assessing Thomas Harriot’s A briefe and true report of His Discoveries in North America,” Annals of Science 51 (1994): 6–7. 45. André Thevet devotes a chapter to refuting “the opinion of those that thinke these wilde men to be all heary.” New Found Worlde, 47–49. 46. Harriot, Briefe and True Report, 24. 47. David Armitage, “John Milton: Poet against Empire,” in Milton and Republican­ ism, ed. David Armitage, Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 218. Armitage repeats this point in “Literature and Empire,” in The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century, vol. 1, ed. Nicholas Canny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 120. For a persuasive critique of the view that Milton is a poet against empire, see Paul Stevens, “Paradise Lost and the Colonial Imperative,” Milton Studies 34 (1996): 3–21. 48. On interpretative issues arising from this section of Paradise Lost, see my “Fallen Differences, Phallogocentric Discourses: Losing Paradise Lost to History,” in PostStructuralism and the Question of History, ed. Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington, and Robert Young, 212–43 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 49. Annotations on this passage in Paradise Lost by both Hughes and Carey-Fowler quote John Gerard’s description of “the arched Indian Fig tree” in The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes (London, 1597), The Poems of Milton, ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler (London and Harlow: Longmans, Green, 1968). 50. See Stevens on the compatibility of longing awakened by Milton’s aestheticization of civility with Eurocolonial imperatives. “Paradise Lost,” 17. 51. The dialectical relation between an original, though now unknowable, possession of innocence and present loss is central to Reformed epistemology. Calvin, for example, frequently suggests that an acute sense of the enormity of its loss provides the only reliable knowledge of an original spiritual integrity: “For what is our origin? It is that from which we have fallen. What is the end of our creation? It is that from which we have been completely estranged, so that sick of our miserable lot we groan, and in groaning we sigh for that lost worthiness.” Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. F. L. Battles, ed. John T. McNeill, Library of Christian Classics 21 (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 2.1.3, p. 244. 52. This is how Patrick Hume reads line 1117, which he annotates: “[N]ot only the wild and naked Americans, but the Gymnosophists, that had their name from Nakedness,

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who studied Philosophy, in the vast solitudes of India, veiled their Wastes, as do every where the most barbarous Nations, confessing tacitly themselves the Descendents of a sinful and ashamed Adam.” Annotations of Milton’s Paradise Lost (London, 1695). 53. Daniel Defoe, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719; repr., London: Constable and Company, 1925), 117. Page citation is to the reprint edition. 54. Hobbes, Leviathan, 4.46.367–68.

chapter eight 1. Levin, assuming that such acivil societies exist, continues, “[Hobbes’s] realism has prevailed, on the whole, and most of us would be reluctant to exchange our lot for the kind of society that comes under the investigations of anthropology.” Myth of the Golden Age, 31. 2. Robert E. Stillman, “Hobbes’s Leviathan: Monsters, Metaphors, and Magic,” En­ glish Literary History 62, no. 4 (1995): 805. 3. Hobbes, De Cive, 2.10.1. 4. Richard Ashcraft makes this point in “Leviathan Triumphant: Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Wild Men,” in The Wild Man Within, ed. Edward Dudley and Maximillian Novak, 148–54 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972). See also Richard Tuck’s remarks in Rights of War and Peace, 8. 5. Hodgen, Early Anthropology, 199–200. 6. This is not to say that all privatives are equal. Within a Christian ethos, the ab­ sence of weapons or monetary exchange, for example, is more praiseworthy than the absence of monogamous, patriarchal marriage. (Having granted women idleness, Shakespeare’s Gonzalo hurriedly adds “but innocent and pure.”) Absence of laws provokes especially polarized responses to civil privation, being a sign either of natural self-regulation (as in Ovid’s set piece) or, in disparaging appropriations, of savagery’s neglect of all order. Everything depends on the language employed and the rhetorical import of the topos in both immediate and embedded contexts. 7. Ovid’s Metamorphosis, bk. 15, lines 98, 99–111. 8. Levin refers to this passage as “the grandly rhetorical set-piece that would be imi­ tated, plagiarized, paraphrased, parodied, reinterpreted, controverted, distorted, and metamorphosed into so many shapes” by Renaissance writers, stressing the importance of the Latin nondum (“not yet”). Myth of the Golden Age, 15–16. 9. Johann Boemus, The Fardle of Façions (1555), Lviiv–Miir. Cited by Hodgen, Early Anthropology, 198. 10. See Paul Stevens on how “an idealized form of the familiar in the midst of the other” evokes “wonder” in colonial literature, and “powerfully animates early modern colonial settlement at its most idealistic.” “Colonial Imperative,” 12–13. 11. Pietro Martire Anghiera, The Decades of the newe worlde or west India, trans. Rycharde Eden (London, 1555), 8. Cited by Levin, Myth of the Golden Age, 61. 12. Bartolomé de Las Casas, An Account, Much Abbreviated, of the Destruction of the Indies, trans. Andrew Hurley, ed. Franklin W. Knight (1552; repr., Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), 4–8. Page citations are to the reprint edition.



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13. Montaigne, Essayes, 1:245. 14. Hodgen, Early Anthropology, 197. 15. Harriot, Briefe and True Report, 56. 16. Cicero, De Inventione, trans. H. M. Hubbell, Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann, 1949), 1.1.2, pp. 4–6 (cited by book, chapter, and section). 17. Tuck cites this passage in Natural Rights Theories, 33; Lovejoy, Boas, and Levin do not mention it. 18. Peter Rose, “Cicero and the Rhetoric of Imperialism: Putting the Politics Back into Political Rhetoric,” Rhetorica 13 (Autumn 1995): 359–99. 19. Ibid., 397. 20. Ibid., 396–97. 21. See Cicero, On the Commonwealth, 3.36. 22. Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 20–21. Richard Tuck discusses this passage by Cicero in connection Polybius and Gentili in Rights of War and Peace, 40. 23. Anthony Pagden discusses the importance of this doctrine to English colonial activities in the Americas in “The Struggle for Legitimacy and the Image of Empire in the Atlantic to c. 1700,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 1, The Origins of Empire, ed. Nicholas Canny, 41–50 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 24. Ascham, Confusions, 80–81. 25. James Muldoon, ed., The Expansion of Europe: The First Phase (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977), 54. Cited in Hulme, “Tales of Distinction,” 187. Hulme comments on how different ideologically this passage is from that of the golden age as deployed by Montaigne and Shakespeare in spite of “their shared use of the vocabulary of deprivation” (ibid.). 26. Cited by Linda E. Merians, Envisioning the Worst: Representations of “Hotten­ tots” in Early-Modern England (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001), 45. 27. Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, Demócrates Segundo, ed. J. Brufau Prats and A. Coro­ leu Lletget, Obras Completas, vol. 3 (Pozoblanco, Spain: Excmo. Ayuntamiento de Pozo­ blanco, 1997), 65–66. Winston Black’s assistance with this translation is gratefully acknowledged. Anthony Pagden mentions this passage in discussing Sepúlveda’s transgressively literary mode of presenting his theological assertions. Fall of Natural Man, 113. 28. It can also be used to aid and abet intra-European competitiveness. Mary Louise Pratt cites the English John Barrow, for example, employing the topos in Travels into the Interior of Southern Africa (1801) to heap scorn on the lazy, ineffectual Afrikaners. Impe­ rial Eyes, 57–58. 29. Bacon, Holy War, 104–5. 30. Smith, De Republica, 1.10.57. 31. This is what Sylvia Wynter means by the “natural law charter,” which, in displacing the papal donation and traditional just/unjust discourses, inaugurates a secular system of essentialized, global “modes of the human.” “New Seville,” pt. 2, 52. Robert A. Williams Jr. explores these issues in American Indian. 32. Vitoria, “On the American Indians,” in Political Writings, 283.

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33. Alberico Gentili, De Iure Belli, ed. C. Phillipson, trans. J. C. Rolfe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), 123–24. Cited by Tuck, who observes that Gentili is aware of his departure from Aristotle’s nationalization of barbarians’ slavery, which Aristotle attributes to a collectively servile disposition. Rights of War and Peace, 35. 34. Bacon, Holy War, 126. 35. Vitoria, “On the American Indians,” in Political Writings, 283. 36. See S. A. G. Taylor, The Western Design: An Account of Cromwell’s Expedition to the Caribbean (Kingston: Institute of Jamaica, 1965), 5, 6. 37. Thomas Gage, A New Survey of the West-Indias (London, 1648), 27–28. 38. Ibid., 28–29. 39. Buchanan, Dialogue, 111. 40. Bodin, Six Bookes, 202. 41. Milton, Tenure, 11. 42. For Cicero’s use of a remarkably similar locution, see Rose, “Rhetoric of Imperialism,” 395–96. 43. Peter Heylyn, Cosmographie in four books (London, 1652), 20. 44. Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government (London, 1698), 6. Steven Jablonski draws attention to this passage in “Ham’s Vicious Race,” 181. 45. Christopher Hill, “The Norman Yoke,” in Puritanism and Revolution, 58–125 (1958; repr., London: Panther Books, 1968). Page citations are to the reprint edition. 46. A Declaration from Sir Thomas Fairfax, and the Army under his Command (London, 1647), 9. 47. J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of En­ glish Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), 30–55. 48. A Remonstrance of the State of the Kingdom (1641), A2. 49. See Englands Slavery, or Barbados Merchandize Represented in a Petition to the High and Honourable Court of Parliament, by Marcellus Rivers and Oxenbridge Foyle Gentlemen (London, 1659), A2. 50. On the complex, shifting relations between indentured servitude and slavery, see Hilary McD. Beckles, White Servitude and Black Slavery in Barbados, 1627–1715 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989). Elsewhere Beckles notes that this debate takes place at a time that England was beginning actively to sponsor trade in African slaves. “The ‘Hub of Empire’: The Caribbean and Britain in the Seventeenth Century,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 1, ed. Nicholas Canny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 231–32. In his discussion of this debate, Robin Blackburn writes that the captive royalists were to be “sold as servants to the planters” (my emphasis). New World Slavery, 248. 51. Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments Respecting North America, vol. 1, 1542–1688, ed. Leo Francis Stock (Washington: Carnegie Institution, 1924), 253–57. 52. Ibid., 250. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., 251. 55. Hammond, Humble Addresse, 10.



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56. In Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 161–62, Quentin Skinner recurs to this paragraph (only partly cited here), stressing the outrageousness of Hobbes’s pronouncements. 57. Locke, Two Treatises, 2.5.49. 58. Richard Tuck, “Hobbes’s Moral Philosophy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes, ed. Tom Sorell, 175–207 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Tuck mentions Bacon’s approving citation of a passage from Plato’s Laws in which Clinias says, “[H]umanity is in a condition of public war of every man against every man.” The passage appears in Considerations Touching a War with Spain, a defense of preemptive war Tuck speculates Hobbes may even have had a hand in writing. Rights of War and Peace, 126–27. 59. Richard Ashcraft relates this change to the uprisings of the 1620s, 1640s, and 1670s, noting how convenient for “genocidal retaliation” it was “to have available a widely publicized theory which saw in the actions of the Indians the hostility of natural men rather than the scourge of an angry Deity.” “Leviathan Triumphant,” in Wild Man Within, 170n122. Alden T. Vaughan discusses the effects of the 1622 uprising on AngloAmerindian relations in “‘Expulsion of the Salvages’: English Policy and the Virginia Massacre of 1622,” in Roots of American Racism: Essays on the Colonial Experience, 105–27 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 60. MacPherson, Possessive Individualism. 61. For a discussion and reproduction of this engraving, see Robertson, “Pocahontas.” 62. Thomas Hobbes, De Cive: The Latin Version, ed. Howard Warrender (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), xiii. 63. Quentin Skinner discusses this frontispiece and its appropriation of a different image by de Bry, in Hobbes and Republican Liberty, 98–104. 64. This iconography is discussed in my “ ‘Profuse, Proud Cleopatra,’ ” 89–90. 65. M. M. Goldsmith, “Picturing Hobbes’s Politics? The Illustrations to Philosophical Rudiments,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 44 (1981): 232–37; and Cornelis W. Schoneveld, “Some Features of the Seventeenth-Century Editions of Hobbes’s De Cive Printed in Holland and Elsewhere,” in Thomas Hobbes: His View of Man, ed. J. G. van der Bend, 125–42 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1982). 66. Schoneveld, “Seventeenth-Century Editions,” 128. 67. Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” (1852), trans. by Saul Padover and Frederick Engels, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18thbrumaire/ch01.htm. Terry Eagleton uses Marx’s reflections on revolution as a springboard for his own in “The God That Failed,” in Re-membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions, ed. Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson, 342–49 (New York: Methuen, 1987).

chapter nine 1. Tuck, Rights of War and Peace, 130. 2. Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis, trans. Elsa M. Sinclair (1936; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 17–18. Page citations are to the reprint edition. See John P. McCormick, “Fear, Technology and the

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State: Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and the Revival of Hobbes in Weimar and National Socialist Germany,” Political Theory 22, no. 4 (1994): 619–52. 3. This doctrine misleadingly represents warfare as the sole or primary means of acquiring slaves. For an analysis of the set of apparatuses required for slavery’s economic organization, see Claude Meillassoux, The Anthropology of Slavery, trans. Alide Dasnois (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 67–96. Orlando Patterson discusses the various alternatives to enslavement that war captives have suffered and Roman law’s militarized representation of slavery in Slavery and Social Death, 40, 106–15. 4. J. P. Sommerville situates Hobbes’s political theories in a variety of contemporary contexts and traditions. Thomas Hobbes. 5. Tuck, Rights of War and Peace, 109–39. 6. Jonathan A. Bush relates the underdevelopment of English jurisprudence regarding colonial slavery to a tacit reliance upon the Crown’s discretionary imposition of commonlaw doctrines. Atlantic slave regimes, Bush argues, were able to develop at a remove from English common law, which does not permit slavery, owing both to the legal autonomy of the colonies and to the privatization of the master’s rule. “Free to Enslave: The Foundations of Colonial American Slave Law,” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 5 (1993): 457–65. 7. Quentin Skinner, “The Context of Hobbes’s Theory of Political Obligation” and “Conquest and Consent: Hobbes and the Engagement Controversy,” in Visions of Poli­ tics, vol. 3, Hobbes and Civil Science, 264–86, 287–307 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 8. See Tuck, Natural Rights Theories. 9. De Cive and Leviathan reflect a change in the direction of greater systemization, since Hobbes does mention “the father or mother, or both” in Elements, 2.4.10. 10. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 48–50. 11. For the tendency to consider patriarchalism independently of despotism, see Gordon J. Schochet’s classic study, “Thomas Hobbes on the Family and the State of Nature,” Political Science Quarterly 82 (1967): 427–45. 12. See Filmer, Patriarcha, 17. Filmer concludes “Observations” with the claim (among others) “[t]hat there is no such form of government as a tyranny.” Patriarcha, 281. 13. Norbrook observes that Hobbes overcame his reluctance to use “the language of representation but he did so merely to outflank its democratic potentialities and reclaim it for absolutism,” Writing the Revolution, 291. 14. Michael Silverthorne, responsible for the translation, comments on servus and dominus in De Cive, xlii, xliii. 15. See introduction to this book, p. 000. 16. Institutes of Gaius, 2.12–16. 17. On this distinction in Roman practice and law, see George Long, “Mancipium,” in A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, ed. William Smith (London: John Murray, 1875), 727–28, http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/secondary /SMIGRA/home.html. 18. This continuity is obscured when Quentin Skinner reads Hobbes’s tripartite classification in Elements 2.3.2.127–28 as a contrast between voluntary and coerced



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subjection. “Hobbes on the Proper Signification of Liberty,” in Visions of Politics, vol. 3, Hobbes and Civil Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 236. 19. R. Koebner discusses Hobbes’s usage in “Despot and Despotism,” 288–91. 20. An exception can be found in the nonsystematic A Dialogue between a Philoso­ pher and a Student, of the Common Laws of England (1666), where Hobbes says, “[T]he Father of the Family by the Law of nature was absolute Lord of his Wife and Children.” Writings on Common Law and Hereditary Right, ed. Alan Cromartie and Quentin Skinner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 135. 21. Noel Malcolm, “Hobbes, Sandys, and the Virginia Company,” Historical Journal 24, no. 2 (1981): 297–321. 22. See Virginia Bernhard, Slaves and Slaveholders in Bermuda, 1616–1782 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 49–52. Both indentured servitude and North African slavery were temporary. Indentures formally stipulate a date of termination, while ransom is the conventional terminus for enslavement on the Barbary Coast—a terminus utterly foreclosed for Africans transported across the Atlantic. Deborah Baumgold states that North African economies relied more on ransom funds than on unfree labor and trade, while “Turkish authorities encouraged European slaves to correspond with their families.” “Slavery Discourse before the Restoration: The Barbary Coast, Justinian’s Digest, and Hobbes’s Political Theory,” History of European Ideas 36 (2010): 412–18. See also Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600–1850 (New York: Anchor Books, 2004), 59–65. 23. Alden T. Vaughn surveys debates on these issues, the terms of which have not substantially changed, in Roots of American Racism, 136–74. 24. I am indebted to R. W. K. Hinton’s brief reading of this passage, “Husbands, Fathers and Conquerors II,” Political Studies 16, no. 1 (1968): 56–57, though he uses despotic in ways that are misleading here and in “Husbands, Fathers and Conquerors I,” Political Studies 15, no. 3 (1967): 297. 25. J. P. Sommerville, email communication, July 5, 2007. 26. Hobbes, Leviathan, “Review,” 390–91. Sommerville discusses Hobbes’s concern for royalists contending with the Rump in “Hobbes, Behemoth, Church-State Relations, and Political Obligation,” Filozofski vestnik 24, no. 2 (2003): 220–22. 27. By contrast with both Elements and De Cive, Leviathan’s chapter 20 opens with a comparison of the commonwealth by design and by acquisition, differences between which Hobbes minimizes. Throughout this chapter, though, as in these earlier works, the servitude originating in defeat is, implicitly, household servitude, of which the commonwealth by acquisition is simply a larger embodiment even if it does not grow out of it organically. 28. Interrelations between indenture and the “covenant merely personal” are examined by Warren M. Billings, who stresses the significant temporal priority of racialized practices to legislation. “The Law of Servants and Slaves in Seventeenth-Century Virginia,” in Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 99, no. 1 (1991): 45–62. For theoretical reflection on this issue, see Alan Watson, The Evolution of Western Private Law, expanded ed. (1985; repr., Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 194–201. Page citations are to the reprint edition. 29. Hobbes, Elements, 2.3.2; and Hobbes, Leviathan, “Review,” 391.

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30. Bernhard, Slaves and Slaveholders, 30, 92–93. 31. Ibid., 137, 87–88.

chapter ten 1. “On the level of abstract political philosophy, John Locke, a shareholder in the Royal African Company, was the last major thinker to seek justifications for enslaving foreign captives.” Davis, Slavery and Human Progress, 107–8. 2. David Wootton goes on to say, “It seems to me clear that the argument of the Second Treatise made chattel slavery as it existed in the New World illegitimate, and clear too that Locke, who played a role in shaping England’s policy towards the colonies, did nothing about it.” Introduction to John Locke: Political Writings (1993; repr., Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2003), 117. Page citation is to the reprint edition. Wootton’s view is similar to that of James Farr, who asserts that “Locke’s theory positively condemns seventeenth-century slave practices and any ongoing institution of slavery whatsoever.” “ ‘So Vile and Miserable an Estate’: The Problem of Slavery in Locke’s Political Thought,” Political Theory 14, no. 2 (1986): 264. For another inconclusive attempt to come to terms with the interplay of registers in Locke’s Two Treatises, see Wayne Glausser, “Three Approaches to Locke and the Slave Trade,” Journal of the History of Ideas 51, no. 2 (1990): 199–216. Commentators tend to either ignore or dismiss the cogent reading of Locke’s discussion of slavery given by David Brion Davis, Problem of Slavery, 118–21. It would seem that such ambiguity is fostered primarily within the academy. Commenting on the marginalization of issues relating to racism in Western liberal democracies, M. Nourbese Philip, for example, assumes the integrity of Locke’s views, asserting, “While John Locke argued for the freedom of man, he had no intellectual difficulty ac­ cepting that these freedoms could not and should not extend to African slaves.” Fron­ tiers: Essays and Writings on Racism and Culture (Stratford, ON: Mercury Press, 1992), 271. 3. For a comprehensive overview of Locke’s personal and administrative interest in the English colonies, see Pagden, “Struggle for Legitimacy,” 42. Like James Tully, Pagden is not especially interested in “Of Slavery” but rather in how Locke’s “Of Property” legitimates the expropriation of New World lands. Pagden focuses on Locke’s development of the res nullius doctrine, which makes it “possible for Europeans to disregard all aboriginal forms of government, and consequently to deny them any status as “nations” (44). In a process similar to that analyzed in the present chapter, Mark A. Michael shows how Locke incorporates components of earlier discussions of rightful acquisition of property into his own, systematic justification for colonizing ventures in America. “Locke’s Second Treatise and the Literature of Colonization,” Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy 25, no. 3 (1998): 407–26. 4. Locke, Two Treatises, 1.1.1. In a review of books on slavery and abolition, Howard Temperley illustrates European opposition to slavery by stating, “In 1689, John Locke dismissed slavery as too contemptible to be defended by an Englishman.” Times Literary Supplement, October 4, 2002, 3.



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5. See Barbara Arneil, John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); and James Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), chap. 5. 6. David Armitage, “John Locke, Carolina, and ‘Two Treatises,’ ” Political Theory 32, no. 5 (October 2004): 603. 7. Locke: Political Writings, 230. 8. Armitage, “John Locke,” 619. 9. With primary reference to the franchise, Ellen Meiksins Wood argues that Locke “both appropriates and, on critical issues, deliberately neutralizes the radical ‘discourses’ of his time,” in “Radicalism, Capitalism and Historical Contexts: Not Only a Reply to Richard Ashcraft on John Locke,” History of Political Thought 15, no. 3 (1994): 343. 10. David McNally, “Locke, Levellers and Liberty: Property and Democracy in the Thought of the First Whigs,” History of Political Thought 10, no. 1 (1989): 39. Jonathan Scott situates Locke’s endorsement of armed resistance in its immediate political context, including the contributions made by Algernon Sidney, in “The Law of War: Grotius, Sidney, Locke and the Political Theory of Rebellion,” History of Political Thought 13, no. 4 (1992): 565–85. 11. Mark Goldie plausibly suggests that “the composition of Locke’s little-regarded chapter on conquest in his Two Treatises belongs to 1689” and debate about William III’s right of conquest. “Edmund Bohun and Jus Gentium in the Revolution Debate, 1689– 1693,” Historical Journal 20, no. 3 (1977): 585. 12. Two Treatises, 380n169, 382n172. Quoting from Johnson’s Dictionary, J. H. Burns correctly notes that Locke’s arbitrary and absolute are not synonymous but then assumes that his despotical and tyrannous power are on a continuum. Absolutism: The History of an Idea, The Creighton Trust Lecture (University of London, 1986), 4, 5. Richard Ashcraft, too, conflates tyranny and despotism, as when he asserts with reference to the discussion of “Despotical Power” that the exercise of “despotical power” makes one an “aggressor” or a “wild beast, or noxious brute,” in Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s “Two Treatises” (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 402. See also Ashcraft, Locke’s “Two Treatises” (London: Allen and Unwin, 1987), 221. 13. Richard Tuck relates the centrality of this right in the Second Treatise to Locke’s defense of Grotius against Pufendorf’s critique. Rights of War and Peace, 166–81. 14. Parker, Jus Populi, 10. 15. As Laslett points out, Locke turns this divine command (which for Ponet constitutes political power) into a “law of nature,” 274n, lines 30–31. 16. Parker, Jus Populi, 10. 17. Pagden, “Struggle for Legitimacy,” 46n53. 18. Bacon, Holy War, 131. 19. Grotius, Rights of War and Peace, 2:20.40. 20. Tuck, Rights of War and Peace, 171. 21. Hinton regards the rebuttal of Filmer with which “Of Slavery” opens as a “literary device” or possibly “an actual interpolation” introduced to bolster a woefully weak argument. “Husbands, Fathers and Conquerors: II. Patriarchalism in Hobbes and Locke,” Political Studies 16, no. 1 (1968): 63.

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22. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 5. 23. E.P., Original and End, 6. 24. Ibid., 14. 25. None of the pamphlets appear in John Harrison and Peter Laslett, The Library of John Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965). 26. John Maxwell, The Sacred and Royall Prerogative of Christian Kings (Oxford, 1644), 52. 26. Lea Campos Boralevi explores early modern representations of ancient Israel as an ideal res publica, and argues that Dutch identification with God’s republic became central to the formation of its national identity. “Classical Foundational Myths of European Republicanism: The Jewish Commonwealth,” in Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, ed. Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner, 247–61 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 27. That this disjunction plays a particular rhetorical role in “Of Slavery”—that of encoding racialized national identities—is indicated by Locke’s willingness to treat ancient Hebrew slavery as indistinguishable from Caribbean in the First Treatise, where the patriarchal slaveholder’s “Dominion” over property he has himself purchased is at issue, not despotic power (1.11.130–31). 28. Bodin, Six Bookes, 2.4.212. 29. Milton, Tenure, 30. In Defence, Milton uses despotism as a synonym for tyranny (85). 31. Cited by Philippe Rosenberg in his excellent analysis of antislavery rhetoric in “Thomas Tryon and the Seventeenth-Century Dimensions of Antislavery,” William and Mary Quarterly 61, no. 4 (2004): 621–30.

epilogue 1. John Phillips, The Tears of the Indians (London, 1656), b5. 2. Politics of Obedience, 114, 115. 3. Cited from correspondence with Bryan Fairfax by Henry Wieneck, An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 157. Letters by Virginian burgesses to the king and Parliament claimed that taxation without representation makes them “slaves of Britons from whom they are descended” (157). 4. Rosenberg provides a helpful brief bibliography in “Thomas Tryon,” 626n39. Though exploration of cross-class, cross-racial, and transnational relations is of the greatest importance, racialization is sometimes ignored, undervalued, or projected forward historically in an effort to recruit English radicalism’s references to political slavery for progressive causes. See, for example, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The ManyHeaded Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolu­ tionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000); and John Donoghue, “‘Out of the Land of Bondage’: The English Revolution and the Atlantic Origins of Abolition,” American Historical Review 115, no. 4 (2010): 943–74. 5. Phillis Wheatley, Complete Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 2001). 6. Ibid., 153.

index

Note: Numbers in bold refer to the definition of terms. absolutism: and antityranny discourse, 59–60, 74–76, 84–85, 126, 176, 199–200, 210, 283, 298; contractual, 294–97, 303, 312, 355; versus contractualism, 74–77, 162; patriarchal, 59–60, 88, 99, 106–7, 162–64, 177–79, 204, 205–6, 213, 223, 301, 311, 358; and political slavery, 74–76, 80, 126, 188–89, 199–200, 213, 315, 355; royal, 59–60, 74, 126–27, 130, 132–33, 162–64, 176–78, 189, 203–4, 326, 329 Acosta, José de, Natural and moral history of the Indies (1588), 228 Acts, book of, 109, 279 Aeschylus, 47; The Persians, 29–30, 36, 38, 40, 74 Africans, 89, 275–76, 337; cannibals, depicted as, 242; enslavement of, 1, 146–47, 183– 85, 191, 226, 278–79, 315–16, 332, 350, 354, 366–68; Ham’s curse and, 146, 239– 40; naked, depicted as, 232–33, 236, 239, 246; privative age and, 271, 382–83; savage, depicted as, 257, 270 Agamben, Giorgio: Homo Sacer (1995), 7, 196– 97, 236; Nudities (2011), 238 Ainsworth, Henry, Annotations upon the Five Bookes of Moses (1627), 203 Alcaeus, 42 Alciatus, Andrea, Emblemata (1531), 154 Amazons, 42, 231, 252, 288, 297 American Revolution, 1, 2, 5, 152, 291 Amerindigenes: animals, depicted as, 270–71, 284, 322, 336–37; cannibals, depicted as,

90–91, 95, 238, 241–42, 274, 288, 336, 358; contemporary ancestors, depicted as, 89–90, 229, 236–37, 251–52, 256, 259, 264–65, 360; de Bry’s Adam and Eve as, 244–47; enslavement of, 15, 68, 147, 181, 226, 237, 240, 257, 315–16, 362–63; frontispiece to De Cive and, 284–92; Ham’s curse and, 147, 239–40; human sacrifice and, 90, 94–95, 99, 120–22, 182–83, 231, 272, 336; Milton on, 247, 249–56; naked, depicted as, 232–36, 243, 246–53, 285; Ponet’s treatment of, 68–70, 90; privative age and, 90, 263–64, 271–72, 281–84, 322; resistance of, 20, 86, 90; savage, depicted as, 89–90, 251, 257, 270, 283–86; servile, depicted as, 15–16, 89–90, 240, 281 analogy, 162–65, 169 Anderson, M. T., Octavian Nothing (2006), 365 animals, nonhuman: boundary between humans and, 25, 267; dominion over, 140–41, 201–2, 358; extra-Europeans as, 270–71, 284, 322, 337; killing of, 6, 25, 50, 138, 201–3, 343; relation to polis, 48, 80; sacrifice and, 106, 117; slaves as, 6, 25–26, 30, 53, 77, 80, 126, 138, 176, 303, 319, 322, 365; tyrants as, 41–42, 49–51, 79, 106–7, 164, 356–57 antislavery discourse, 1–2, 4, 185, 360, 365, 368 antityrannicism, 1–2; absolutism and, 59–60, 74–77, 84–85, 126, 176, 199–200, 210, 283,

409

410

index

antityrannicism (cont.) 298; chattel slavery and, 2, 4–7, 15, 19, 56, 58, 68–71, 170, 190–91, 347, 362–63, 366– 68; Christian, 130–31, 133–43; contractualism and, 61, 163–64, 167; Dutch, 13, 19, 156–57; early modern, 18, 56, 110; early modern, and relation to Greco-Roman, 11–14, 57–61, 123, 126, 342; English, 12– 13, 19, 78–79, 147–48; freedom in, 71–73, 279–81; Greco-Roman, 1, 21–23, 54–55, 88; Greek, 13–14, 37–42, 51–53, 63–65, 68; political slavery and, 1–7, 12–13, 19, 21–23, 37–39, 49–56, 60–61, 66, 76, 80– 83, 152–53, 181–82, 327, 362–63, 366; Roman, 49–54; synthesis of Christian and Greco-Roman, 60–61, 124–27, 160, 221. See also tyranny; tyrant arbitrary rule: despotism and, 32, 43, 49, 82, 330–31, 348, 353, 366; political slavery and, 4, 12–13, 18, 32–33, 151, 188, 190, 211–12, 279, 327, 340–41; power of life and death and, 77, 174, 196, 199, 323, 331, 342, 348, 353; tyranny and, 12–13, 18, 32–49 passim, 174, 211–12, 330–31, 340–41, 348, 355 Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (1958), 16–17, 52 Aristogeiton, 41–42, 53, 63, 125. See also Harmodius Aristotle: De Republica and, 268; on despotism, 31–34, 47–49, 80–83, 126, 169–70, 186, 190, 299, 309, 331; on good versus defective rule, 73, 80, 84–85, 175, 299; household as model for state, 34, 48–49, 86, 176, 199–200, 268, 332; Nicomachean Ethics, 25, 43–45, 86; Poetics, 100; Politics, 11, 22–28, 32, 34, 43–47, 69, 80, 86, 94, 123, 138, 169–70, 176, 256, 197, 240, 268, 271, 298–99; on power of life and death, 9; tripartite division of humanity, 28, 274–76; on tyranny, 31–34, 47–48, 80–81, 126–28, 184, 186, 190, 280, 298–99 Aristotle, on slavery: as barbarous, 23, 27–29, 43–45, 82, 94, 126–27, 268, 271; contrasted with freedom, 28–29, 123; house­ hold, 16–17, 23–26, 43–45, 49; natural, 11, 15, 23–26, 43–49, 126–29, 138–40, 181, 186–87, 202, 213, 222, 240, 268–69, 274– 75, 299, 367; political and chattel, rela­ tionship between, 11, 20–21, 23–29, 43–46, 49, 80–81, 183–86; war, 9, 25, 138, 269

Armitage, David: “John Locke, Carolina, and ‘Two Treatises,’ ” (2004), 327; “John Mil­ton: Poet Against Empire” (1995), 399n47; “Literature and Empire” (1998), 399n47 Arneil, Barbara, John Locke and America (1996), 327 Ascham, Anthony, Of the Confusions and Revolutions of Governments (1649), 146– 47, 207–8, 269–70 Ashcraft, Richard: “Leviathan Triumphant” (1972), 403n59; Revolutionary Politics (1986), 407n12 Asians, 256, 288; as barbarians, 82, 85, 130, 268, 280; contrasted with Greeks, 27; as effeminate, 28, 275–76; liberty cap and, 152; political slavery and, 11, 18, 23, 26– 29, 35, 43, 45, 81–84, 130, 134, 146, 183, 268, 274–76 Augustine of Hippo, City of God, 219–20, 239– 40, 268–69; Ham’s curse in, 239–40; nakedness in, 252; war slavery doctrine, 219–20, 239 Axtell, James, After Columbus (1988), 396n1 Babel, 130. See also Nimrod Bacon, Francis: on cannibalism, 336; on human sacrifice, 336; on natural slavery, 222–23, 240–42; on paternal authority, 221; “Post-Nati,” 221–22; on power of life and death, 221–22; on privative age, 17, 271–72, 281; Touching an Holy War, 17, 233, 240–42, 271–72, 296; on volun­ tary versus involuntary servitude, 221– 22; on war slavery doctrine, 221, 296 Balot, Ryan, 373n21, 375n2, 369; “Courage in the Democratic Polis” (2004), 373n20; Greek Political Thought (2006), 39 barbarism: Amerindigenes as barbaric, 15–16, 89–90, 243; cannibalism and, 90–91, 94; chattel slavery and, 11, 23, 43–46, 50, 147, 268–69; human sacrifice and, 94–95, 101, 104–5, 109, 112, 118, 121–22; natural slavery and, 11, 15, 23, 26–31, 43–50, 82, 89–90, 94, 126–27, 147, 261, 268–77; political slavery and, 1, 11, 18, 23, 26–31, 43–46, 50, 94, 116, 147, 268–71 Barton, Carlin, “The Price of Peace” (2007), 379n72 Baumgold, Deborah, “Slavery Discourse” (2010), 405n22



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Baxter, Richard, A Christian Directory (1673), 360 Beckles, Hilary McD.: “The Hub of Empire” (1998), 402n50; White Servitude (1989), 402n50 Berkowitz, Steven, Buchanan’s Baptistes (1992), 384n15 Bernhard, Virginia, Slaves and Slaveholders in Bermuda (1999), 405n22 Beza, Theodore, Du Droit Des Magistrates (1574), 87–88 Bible, Christian. See individual books Black, Winston, 401n27 Blackburn, Robin, Making of New World Slavery (1997), 19, 185, 240, 402n50 Boas, George, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (1935), 396n1, 231, 266 Bodin, Jean: on antislavery, 127, 148, 168–69, 181–88, 199–200, 220, 226, 302, 362; on barbarism, 82–84; on contemporary ancestors, 230; on household as model for state, 166–67, 184, 200; on human sacri­ fice, 95–96, 108–9, 182–83, 230; on Jephtha, 108–9; on monarchy, 81–85, 168–69, 188, 221, 275, 296, 329, 357; on Nimrod, 81– 82, 188, 221; on paternal authority, 7, 88, 163, 166, 176–81, 185, 193–200, 203–4, 213, 221–22, 299, 302, 310, 358; on political slavery, 81–84, 152, 184, 299; on power of life and death, 163, 166, 193–94, 197, 203–4, 221–22, 310, 358; République (Six Bookes) (1576), 81–85, 88, 95–96, 108–9, 127, 148, 163, 166–69, 176–88, 193–204, 213, 220–23, 226, 230, 273–75, 296, 299, 302, 310, 329, 357–58, 362; on war slavery, 83–84, 220–23, 273, 296 Boemus, Johann, The Fardle of Façions (1555), 263 Boétie, Étienne de la. See La Boétie, Étienne de Bossuet, Jacques, Discours sur l’histoire universalle (1681), 228 Brett, Annabel, “The Development of the Idea of Citizens’ Rights” (2003), 57 Bridge, William, The Truth of the Times Vindicated (1643), 179–80 Brutus, Lucius Junius, 53–54, 63, 73, 118, 196– 99, 207 Brutus, Marcus Junius, 50–51, 73, 154–55, 159, 292 Brutus, Stephanus Junius. See Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos (1579)

411

Bucer, Martin, 99 Buchanan, George: Alcestis, 94; Baptistes, 95– 96; on barbarism, 116, 274–75; Dialogue on the law of kingship (1579), 76, 78–79, 88–89, 94, 96, 106, 110, 136; on human sacrifice, 91, 95–96, 104–7, 113–17, 120– 22; Medea, 94; on slavery, 102, 116, 119– 21, 160; on tyranny, 78–79, 106–7, 111–12, 136–37, 198; on vows, 96, 102, 107, 109– 11, 114 Buchanan, George, Iephthes (1554), 13–14, 61,91–113, 116–22; Christopherson’s Je­phthah and, 96–101, 120; Euripides and, 13–14, 61, 94–106, 111–13, 116–19; Iphis in, 100–106, 116–22; Storge in, 104–8, 116, Vondel’s Jephtha and, 96–102, 119 Bucher, Bernadette, Icon and Conquest (1981), 399n44 Burns, J. H., Absolutism (1986), 407n12 Bush, Jonathan A., “Free to Enslave” (1993), 404n6 Caesar, Gaius Julius, 126, 131, 152, 155, 292 Cain (biblical figure), 204–5, 335, 351 Calvin, Jean: Certayne Sermons (1547), 109– 11; Institutes (1536), 109, 111, 399n51; on Jeptha, 109–11, on resistance, 133–34 Cambyses II, 35 cannibalism, 52, 122, 226, 271, 360; Africans and, 242; Amerindigenes and, 90–91, 95, 238, 241–42, 274, 288, 336, 358; Roman Catholicism and, 94, 121–22, 230; tyranny and, 51, 68, 78, 130, 240, 336–37, 356–59 capital punishment, 121, 196, 203–6, 335–37, 352 captives: enslavement of, 38–39, 52, 66, 83, 160, 185–87, 224–25, 304–7, 319, 338–41, 360, 364; killing of, 8, 90, 111, 225, 358; power of life and death and, 8, 160, 221, 272–73, 295, 303, 316–17; war, 8, 38, 52, 66, 83, 111, 160, 185–87, 224–25, 303–6, 316–17, 338–41, 364. See also war slavery doctrine Cartledge, Paul: “Like a Worm i’ the Bud” (1993), 371n3, 372n13; “Rights, Individuals, and Communities” (2009), 373n25, 374n30 Casas, Bartolomé de las. See Las Casas, Bartolomé de Catholicism. See Roman Catholicism

412

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Cervantes, Miquel de, Don Quixote (1605), 258 Charles I of England, 135, 141, 277, 360; Eikon Basilike (1649), 131, 151; trial and execution of, 3, 77, 123, 131, 137, 165, 178, 193, 206, 214; as tyrant, 148, 151, 219, 279, 290, 328 Charles V, Holy Roman emperor, 181 Christopherson, John: on absolutism, 115; on divorce, 87; An exhortation (1554), 86– 87, 114; on human sacrifice, 111, 113–14; on slavery, 114; on vows, 114 Christopherson, John, Jephthah (c. 1545), 96, 100, 111–17, 119–20; Buchanan’s Iephthes and, 96–101, 120; Euripides and, 96, 100, 111, 114–15 Cicero, Marcus Tullius: on conquest, 268–69; De Inventione, 188, 257, 266–70; De Officiis, 50, 87, 110–11; De Provinciis, 268; De Re Publica, 51–52; “On the Commonwealth,” 51; on paternal authority, 87, 103, 177; Philippics, 50–53; on privative age, 261, 266–69; on resistance, 65, 87; on slavery, 52–53, 80, 123, 128, 268–69; on tyranny, 50–52, 78–79, 123, 128, 336–37, 359; on vows, 103, 110–11 Civil Wars, English, 2–3, 12, 96, 127, 135, 147, 178. See also English Revolution conquest: of Amerindigenes, 68, 121, 161, 268; Cicero on, 268–69; colonial, 17–18, 43, 90, 119, 161, 221–22, 229–30; England’s, by Rome, 277; interstate, 106, 147, 157, 195, 241, 274, 283; slavery and, 30, 38–39, 70, 146–47, 157, 195, 221–22, 295–98, 309, 319; tyranny as, 37–43, 53–56, 70, 157–59, 218–22, 356 contemporary ancestors, 227, 228–30, 247, 258–59, 360. See also Amerindigenes; Genesis, book of; privative age contractualism, 57, 61–63, 73–77, 122, 136, 169; Hobbes on, 281, 296, 297, 303; resistance theory and, 59, 162, 281, 296 Cooke, John, 2, 131; Monarchy, no creature of Gods making (1652), 137 Cortés, Hernán, 273–74 Cromartie, Alan, “The Constitutionalist Revolution” (1999), 381n40 Cromwell, Oliver, 273, 278, 323, 363 Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la, “The Divine Narcissus” (c. 1688), 231

Cunningham, William, The Cosmographical Glass (1599), 89 Cyrus II of Persia, 35 D’Anghiera, Peter Martyr, The Decades of the New World (1555), 263 Davis, David B.: Problem of Slavery (1966), 406n2; Slavery and Human Progress (1984), 377n29, 326 Davis, Natalie Zemon, “Judges, Masters, Diviners,” 392n56 de Acosta, José. See Acosta, José de de Bry, Theodor, 230, 242–49, 252, 288 Declaration, A (anon.) (1647), 147 Defoe, Daniel: Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), 252; Robinson Crusoe (1719), 241–22 de la Cruz, Sor Juana Inés. See Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la de la Vega, Garcilaso. See Vega, Garcilaso de la deposition, 71, 74, 156, 171 de Sepulveda, Juan Gines de. See Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de despote¯s, figure of, 24; dominus and, 51, 128, 169–70, 309; as household master, 24, 31–37, 46–48, 51, 296; tyrant, relation to, 29, 31–37, 34–35, 37, 46–47, 51 despotism: arbitrary rule and, 32, 43, 49, 82, 330–31, 348, 353, 366; Aristotle on, 32– 34, 43–50, 73, 80–83, 127, 331; Hobbes on, 127, 213, 295–96, 299, 307–9, 315–25, 331, 354–55; Locke on, 329–33; Parker on, 185–91; paternal rule and, 213, 295– 302, 309–14, 333; power of life and death and, 331–33, 350–53; slavery and, 29, 31– 37, 43–50, 73, 141, 169–70, 186–87, 213, 331–33, 339–41, 350–55; tyranny, relation to, 31–38, 47–48, 82, 127–28, 189–90, 213, 299, 329–31, 355–61; war slavery and, 295– 96, 299, 315–25, 333, 339–41, 344–46. See also household, as model for state Deuteronomy, book of: child sacrifice in, 100, 203; fraternal rule in, 125, 133–34, 137, 171; voluntary servitude in, 148–49, 217 de Vitoria, Francisco. See Vitoria, Francisco de Diodati, John, Pious Annotations (1643), 134 Dionysius I of Syracuse, 51 dominion: Filmer on, 129–31, 164, 176, 203, 358; Genesis grant of, 125–32, 137–42, 164, 176, 202–4, 358; Hobbes on, 129, 201–2,



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207, 288–302 passim, 307–18, 325, 331; Locke on, 331–32, 340, 348; nonhuman animals and, 140–41, 201–2, 358; political, 125, 128–29, 131, 137–42; slavery and, 129, 139–42, 300–301 dominus, 51, 75–76, 128–29, 194, 309, 311 Duarte I of Portugal, 270 duBois, Page, Slaves and Other Objects (2003), 372n9, 55–56

413

Eagleton, Terry, “The God that Failed,” 403n67 Edge, Matt, “Rights, Individuals, and Communities” (2009), 373n25, 374n30 Edward VI of England, 109, 115 eleutheria, 5, 10. See also freedom Elizabeth I of England, 109 English Revolution, 1, 18, 61, 123–25, 149–50, 261, 279, 291, 363. See also Civil Wars, English Entreé de Henri II à Rouen le 1er Octobre 1550, L’, 236 E.P. See Philodemius, Eutactus Erasmus, Desiderius: Education of a Christian Prince (1516), 79; Iphigenia (trans.), 112 Eugenius IV (pope), 270 Euripides, 45, 47; Buchanan, influence on, 13–14, 61, 94–106, 111, 113, 116–17, 119; Christopherson, influence on, 96, 100, 111–14; Hecuba, 105, 106, 119; Heracles, 105; Iphigenia among the Taurians, 110; Iphigenia at Aulis, 14, 61, 94–96, 100–101, 109, 112–14, 119; Suppliant Women, 22, 35, 40; Vondel, influence on, 96, 100–101, 111 Exodus, book of, 148–49, 177, 217

213, 221–22, 302, 310–11, 359, 364; as ruler in household, 33–34, 44, 46, 59, 162–63, 169–70, 184, 297–300, 313–14; sons’ duties toward, 87–88, 176–81, 301; tyrants, rhetorically opposed to, 78, 86, 99, 134, 178 Fauré, Christine, “Rights or Virtues” (2002), 385n25 Ferne, Henry, 179 Filmer, Robert: “Anarchy of a Limited Mon­ archy,” 82, 124; on barbarians, 82; on dominion, 129–31, 164, 176, 203, 339, 358; “Observations,” 127; on paternal authority, 92–93, 124, 164, 169, 176, 200, 204, 310, 326, 359; Patriarcha, 124, 127, 129–30, 200, 205, 299; on power of life and death, 304, 358; on slavery, 124, 127, 299, 326–27 Florentinus, 8, 219 Foucault, Michel: Les mots et les choses, 392n1; Society Must Be Defended, 7, 9 Foyle, Oxenbridge, 278 freedom: natural, 23, 64–66, 71–73, 127, 139– 41, 190–91, 267, 279–80, 339–40; power of life and death and, 342–49; privative age and, 17, 147, 229 freedom, political: early modern constructions of, 25, 60–61, 274; as English ideal, 3–4, 19, 277–79; chattel slavery, relation to, 55, 60–61; Greco-Roman constructions of, 2–4, 9–15, 20–24, 28–31, 47–48, 54–55, 58, 71–72, 79, 301; versus political slavery, 2–5, 9–12, 20–23, 31–32, 85, 116, 139–41, 170–71, 298, 339–40 French Revolution, 1, 2, 152, 158, 291 Fries, Carl, “Quellenstudien zu George Buchanan” (1900), 109

Fabian, Johannes, Time and the Other (1983), 228–29, 397n13 Fagius, Paul, 99 Fairfax, Thomas (1612–1671), 277 Fall, the: contemporary ancestors and, 232, 236–38, 244, 249–55; slavery as product of, 127, 144–45, 239 Fanon Franz, 363 Farr, James, “ ‘So Vile and Miserable an Estate’ ” (1986), 406n2 fathers: kings, analogous to, 93, 162–64, 176– 81, 309–10; power of life and death and, 7, 108, 118, 163, 166, 176–77, 193–206,

Gage, Thomas: A New Survey of the West Indies, 273–74; “The Tyranny of Satan” (1642), 149–51 Gaius, Institutes, 7, 195, 219, 303 Garnett, George, Vindiciae (trans.) 72 Garnsey, Peter, Ideas of Slavery from Aristotle to Augustine (1996), 25, 43, 378n52 Genesis, book of, 168, 241, 244; contemporary ancestors and, 227, 232, 234–37, 247, 249, 253–54; dominion in, 125–32, 137–42, 164, 176, 202–4, 358; Ham’s curse in, 125, 139, 145, 239–40; power of life and death and, 203–5; tyranny in, 125, 130–31, 139

414

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Gentili, Alberico, De Jure Belli, 226, 272 Gilboa, Anat, 391n54 golden age: America as, 232, 256, 263–64; Eden and, 202, 227–28, 231, 245, 263; Ovid on, 244–45, 256–57, 262–63; privative age and, 17, 227, 231–32, 256–58, 261–67 Goldie, Mark, “Edmund Bohun” (1977), 407n11 Goodman, Christopher, How Superior Powers Oght to Be Obeyd of Their Subjects (1558), 66–67, 77 Goodwin, John: on marital and political, 165– 68, 173; Obstructors of Justice, 165–68, 172–73, 180, 206–7, 215–18, 348; on paternal rule, 180; on power of life and death, 207, 215–16, 218; on voluntary servitude, 348 Grotius, Hugo, De Jure Belli ac Pacis (Rights of War and Peace) (1625), 8, 12, 18, 65, 90–93, 148–49, 160, 187, 195–96, 202–3, 209–26 passim, 273, 295, 298, 305–7, 317–19, 325, 337, 346, 353–56, 364; on dominion, 202–3, 355; on Jephtha, 92–93, 356; on jus gentium, 18, 65, 187; on paternal authority, 195; on power of life and death, 18, 195–96, 222–26, 305–7, 346; on slavery, 12, 219, 226, 317, 319, 325; on voluntary servitude, 148–49, 212–13, 216–17, 223–25, 353; on war slavery doctrine, 8, 90, 160, 195, 219, 222–26, 273, 295, 298, 305–7, 319, 346, 364 Hackett, Thomas, dedicatory epistle to New Found Worlde (English trans. 1658), 89 Hadfield, Andrew, Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writing (1998), 229–30, 399n44 Haitian Revolution, 2, 4, 368 Hall, Edith: Inventing the Barbarian (1989), 374n31, 27, 377n30; Persians (ed.), 376n22; Suppliant Women (ed.), 377n38 Hammond, Henry: Humble Address, 206, 214–15, 279; on liberty, 279; on power of life and death, 222–26, 350; A Vindication of Dr. Hammond’s Address, 206, 215–17; on voluntary slavery, 207, 216–19, 223, 348, 351 Ham’s curse, 139–40, 144–47, 189, 239–40, 345, 354 Handel, George, Jephtha (1752), 95 Hansen, Morgens Herman, “Aristotle’s Two Complementary Views of the Greek ‘Polis,’ ” (1996), 48–49

Harmodius, 41–42, 53, 63, 125. See also Aristogeiton Harriot, Thomas, A Briefe and True Report (1588), 243–46, 252, 256, 265–66 Hebrews, Book of, 100, 114, 356 Hegel, Georg, 63 Heliodorus of Emesa, Ethiopika, 107, 111 Herod, King (biblical figure), 110 Herodotus, Histories, 29, 30–40, 47, 63–64, 68; despotism in, 29, 34–37, 47; slavery in, 29, 30–31, 36–37, 47; tyranny in, 29, 39–40, 63–64, 68 Hesiod, Works and Days, 227, 261 Heylyn, Peter, Cosmologie in Four Books (1652), 276 Hill, Christopher, “The Norman Yoke” (1958; repr. 1968), 276 Hill, Lawrence, Book of Negroes (2007), 365 Hinton, R. W. K., “Husbands, Fathers, and Conquerors” (1968), 405n24, 407n21 Hippocrates, 63 Hirschman, Albert, The Passions and the Interests (1977), 225 Hobbes, Thomas: on absolutism, 74, 82, 115, 133, 312; on Amerindigenes, 229–31, 256–59, 266, 382–84, 293, 297, 322; on chattel slavery, 12, 217, 315–22; De Cive (1642), 124, 160, 201–2, 258, 261, 284–93, 297–311, 316, 319, 322; on despotism, 60, 127, 213, 295–96, 299, 307–12, 315–25, 331, 354–55; on dominion, 129, 201–2, 207, 288–302 passim, 307–18, 325, 331; Elements of Law (1640), 124, 200–202, 206, 229, 259, 294–95, 299–303, 306–11, 316, 323; on fear, 293; on Jephtha, 93, 205–6; Leviathan (1651), 17, 93, 123–24, 201–2, 205, 217, 256–60, 280–81, 296–304, 310–16, 318–20, 354; on liberty, 12, 123– 24, 127, 160, 267, 279–92, 298, 303–5; on maternal authority, 108, 296–98, 311–15; on paternal authority, 60, 169, 200–202, 301–2, 310–12; on political slavery, 82, 165, 200–201, 298–305, 354–55; on power of life and death, 8, 196, 201–2, 205–6, 215, 294–98, 305–15, 319–24, 329–30, 346, 352; on privative age, 229–31, 258– 60, 271, 280–82, 354; on state of nature, 17, 229, 256–60, 280–84, 293–98, 308–9, 319, 321–25, 334, 337; on transatlantic slavery, 301, 315–16, 319, 324–25; on voluntary servitude, 217, 305–6, 318–20;



index

on war slavery doctrine, 8, 219, 226, 273, 291–98, 305–8, 311–15, 319–25, 346, 364 Hodgen, Margaret, Early Anthropology (1964), 230, 398n21, 261 Holinshed, Raphael, Chronicles (1577), 229–30 Holland. See Netherlands Homer: Iliad, 42; Ulysses, 64, 358 Hopkins, Keith, Conquerors and Slaves (1978), 52–53 Hotham, John, 179 household, as model for state, 33–37, 46–50, 169–75, 179–80, 366–68; Aristotle on, 34, 48–49, 86, 176, 199, 268; Bodin on, 166–67, 184, 199–200; Locke on, 162, 301, 333; Milton on, 166–68, 173, 177–80 Huguenots, 59, 61–62, 72 Hulme, Peter, “Tales of Distinction” (1994), 396n1, 401n25 human sacrifice: Amerindigenes and, 90, 94– 95, 99, 120–22, 182–83, 230, 272, 337; barbarism and, 94–95, 101, 104–5, 109, 112, 118, 121; Eucharist as, 94, 109, 121; Jephtha and, 91–96, 100–109, 113–19; tyranny and, 42, 101, 240 Hume, Patrick, Annotations of Milton’s Paradise Lost (1695), 399n52 Hunt, Peter, Slaves, Warfare and Ideology (1998), 376n12 hunting: acquisition of slaves as, 25–26, 130, 138–39, 202; tyranny and, 130, 138–39; warfare as, 25–26, 130, 138–39 isonomia, 5, 22, 29 ius gentium, 8; Bodin’s rejection of, 182–83, 226; Grotius on, 18, 187, 295, 305; power of life and death and, 8, 18, 195, 219, 272, 295, 305; war slavery and, 8–9, 84, 128, 183, 187, 219, 222, 226, 272–73, 295, 305 Jablonski, Steven, “Ham’s Vicious Race” (1997), 390nn35–36 James I of England, 134–36, 177–79 James II of England, 330 Jeptha (biblical figure), 14, 92–102, 108–14, 160, 355–56; Grotius on, 92–93, 356; Hobbes on, 93, 205–6; Locke on, 92–93, 355–56 Jeremiah, Book of, 100 Johnson, Samuel, Taxation No Tyranny (1775), 365

415

Josephus, Titus Flavius, 102, 108 Judah (biblical figure), 205 Judges, book of, 14, 90–102, 111–12, 120, 355– 56. See also Jeptha jus gentium. See ius gentium Justinian I: Digest, 8; Institutes, 7, 52, 71, 194, 220, 224, 303 Khan, Victoria, Wayward Contracts (2004), 14 killing: capital punishment and, 203–5; versus murder, 41, 50–51, 65, 236; of nonhuman animals, 6, 25, 50, 138, 201–3, 343; power of life and death and, 64, 108, 193–95, 201, 302; right of, 308–9, 313–14, 334–39, 343– 47, 350, 352; slavery as alternative to, 7–10, 25, 52–53, 66, 90–91, 138, 218–26, 305–6, 321, 346–47; of slaves, 5, 223; tyrannicide as lawful, 41, 50–51, 65, 177– 78; tyranny and, 37, 39, 42, 67–68, 77–79, 146. See also power of life and death; tyranny; war slavery doctrine Kings, book of, 100 Koebner, R., “Despot and Despotism” (1951), 382n52, 388n8 La Boétie, Étienne de, Discours de la servitude volontaire, 61–69, 71–74, 90, 99, 134, 342–44; law of nature in, 64–65, 66, 69; resistance in, 61–67, 69, 74, 90; voluntary servitude in, 62–66, 71, 90, 134; war slavery in, 66, 342–44 La Peyrère, Isaac. See Peyrère, Isaac La Las Casas, Bartolomé de: Destruction of the Indies, 69, 264, 362; on human sacrifice, 95, 121–22, 230–31; In Defense of the Indians, 95, 121–22; on privative age, 264, 270; on slavery, 69–70, 181, 226, 362–63; Tears of the Indians, 362–63 Laslett, Peter, Two Treatises (ed.) (1988), 326, 330 Lastman, Pieter, 159–60 Léry, Jean de, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, 233–34 Lestrigant, Frank, “Catholiques et cannibales” (1982), 383n69 Levin, Harry, The Myth of the Golden Age (1969), 396nn1–2, 400n1, 400n8 Leviticus, book of, 100, 121 liberalism, 5, 11–13, 17, 60–61, 327 Libertas (figure), 154–56, 160, 284–92 liberty: Amerindigenes and, 90, 229, 235,

416

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liberty (cont.) 263, 276–77; as English ideal, 148, 276– 80, 355; Hobbes on, 12, 123–24, 127, 160, 267, 279–92, 298, 303–5; Locke on, 340– 41, 347, 350, 355; Milton on, 142–46, 151, 256; versus servility, 88–90; voluntary ser­ vitude and, 216–18. See also liberty cap liberty, political: chattel slavery and, 3–4, 18– 19, 38–39, 354–55, 360–61; early modern conceptions of, 61–62, 217; Greco-Roman conceptions of, 10, 40, 52–53, 89–90, 110, 124, 298; political slavery and, 57–58, 63– 66, 280–81, 340–41. See also liberty cap liberty cap: in American iconography, 152, 158; in Dutch iconography, 126, 156–60; in French iconography, 152, 158; in Hobbes, 261, 288–92; in Roman icono­graphy, 126, 152–55 Light shining in Buckinghamshire (anon.) (1648), 131 Ligon, Richard, A True & Exact History of the Island of Barbados (1657), 161, 235 Lilburne, John, The Free-Mans Freedome Vindicated (1646), 141–42 Linton, Anna, “Sacrificed or Spared?” (2004), 386n33, 386n35 Livy (Titus Livius Patavinus), History of Rome, 53–54, 196–98, 358 Locke, John: on America, 277, 327–28, 336– 37; on antityrannicism, 272, 276, 328, 337, 342, 347, 350–55, 358; on cannibalism, 51, 358–59; on despotical power, 170, 185, 315, 329–33, 344–46, 352–55, 359– 61, 366; on dominion, 141, 203, 330–31, 340, 348, 358; Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), 327; First Treatise (1689), 92, 203; on household as model for state, 162, 301, 333; on Jephtha, 92– 93, 355–56; “Of Conquest,” 326, 330, 333, 345, 356; “Of Despotism,” 231–32; “Of Property,” 327; “Of Slavery,” 18, 218, 315, 326–33, 338–54, 359; on paternal authority, 169, 301, 358; on power of life and death, 9, 196, 215, 222, 327–39, 342, 346– 53, 358, 364; on privative age, 16–17, 277, 328, 343, 354, 360; Second Treatise (1689), 17, 51, 79, 92–93, 163, 315, 326, 345, 353, 356, 363–65; on state of nature, 277, 334– 37, 343, 347, 351, 354–56; on state of war, 17, 334–38, 342–46, 356, 359–61; Two Treatises (1689), 18, 170, 206, 217,

326–33, 338, 342, 347, 354, 359–61; on tyranny, 329–30, 333, 337, 355 Locke, John, on slavery: chattel, 12, 169, 196, 217, 219, 332, 344–46, 353; defense of, 196, 326–29, 352, 360; political, 327, 329, 332, 339–41, 351, 354–55; resistance to, 330, 332, 358, 360; transatlantic, 18–19, 315, 326–28, 347, 350, 354, 360–61; voluntary, 206–7, 303, 339–40, 344, 348–53, 357; war slavery doctrine, 9, 219, 226, 273, 333, 337–39, 345–46, 363–64 Loraux, Nicole, Tragic Ways (1987), 387n53, 388n55 Lovejoy, Arthur O., Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (1935), 396n1, 231, 267 Lucretius, Titus, 106 Luther, Martin, 109, 114, 121 Machiavelli, Niccolo, Discourses on Livy (1531), 198–99 MacKeon, Michael, The Secret History of Domesticity (2005), 372n7 MacPherson, C. B., The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (1962), 208, 284 Malcolm, Noel, “Hobbes, Sandys, and the Virginia Company” (1981), 315 manumission, 72–74, 126, 152–59, 182, 217, 301 Marx, Karl, 292 Mary I of England, 114 Maxwell, John, The Sacred and Royall Prerogative of Christian Kings (1644), 351 Mbembe, Achille, “Necropolitics” (2003), 372n14 McFarlane, I. D., Buchanan (1981), 384n14 McGregor, James, “Sense of Tragedy” (1983), 384n15 McNally, David, “Locke, Levellers and Liberty” (1989), 328 Mehta, Uday, “Liberal Strategies of Exclusion” (1990), 327 Mendle, Michael, Henry Parker and the English Civil War (1995), 395n41 Michael, Mark A., “Locke’s Second Treatise” (1998), 406n3 Michelangelo, 159 Mignolo, Walter D., The Darker Side of the Renaissance (1995), 14, 397n3, 397n5 Milton, John: on Amerindigenes, 247, 249–56; on antityrannicism, 126, 137; Defense of the People of England (1651), 143, 178;



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despotism, use of term, 360; Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643), 167–68; on dominion, 137–41, 202–3; Eikonklastes (1649), 126, 141, 151, 171; on Ham’s curse, 139–40, 142, 144–47, 189, 239–40, 354; on household as model for state, 166– 68, 173, 178–80; on Jeptha, 92; on nakedness, 235, 247–56; on Nimrod, 137–44, 188; “Of Reformation,” 189; Paradise Lost (1667), 17, 118–19, 126, 137–47, 188– 89, 202–3, 234–35, 239–40, 247–56, 328, 344, 354; on paternal authority, 118, 178– 80; Samson Agonistes (1671), 92; on slavery, 138–47, 151, 172–73, 275, 343, 360; Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649), 168, 172–73, 179; on tyranny, 77, 138–39, 142–44 monstrosity: bestial imagery and, 41–42, 50– 51, 164, 356–57; extra-Europeans and, 89–90, 336–37, 360; murder and, 41–42, 50–51, 106–8, 335; tyranny and, 41–42, 50–51, 77–79, 106–7, 148, 164, 272, 335–36, 356–57, 359 Montaigne, Michel de: on Amerindigenes, 89– 90, 264; on cannibalism, 90–91, 122; on custom, 62–63, 66, 88–90; Essayes, 235; La Boétie, relationship with, 79, 99; on nakedness, 235; “Of the Cannibals,” 89– 91, 122, 258, 264–65; “Of Coaches,” 90; “Of Custom,” 62–63, 66, 88–90; on privative age, 258, 264–65; on tyranny, 62–63, 68, 79, 88 mothers: authority of, 117, 163, 180, 296–98; power of life and death and, 107–8, 203–4, 296–97, 311–13 murder: capital punishment and, 203–5, 335– 37; Jephtha’s sacrifice as, 105–9, 112–14, 119–20; killing versus, 41, 51, 152, 236; monstrosity and, 41–42, 50–51, 106–8, 335; power of life and death and, 178, 203–4, 305–6, 314–15; slavery and, 182, 256, 314–15; tyranny and, 64, 77, 131. See also power of life and death; tyranny nakedness: Africans and, 232–33, 236, 239, 246; Amerindigenes and, 232–36, 242, 246–53, 285; and privation, 232–35; and shame, 233–34, 247–50, 252–53; and simplicity, 232–35; as vulnerability, 235–36, 252–55 nationalism: ancient Israel as model for, 120,

417

148, 239, 264–65, 353–54; antityrannicism and, 12, 19, 126, 277; chattel slavery and, 4, 11, 16–19, 45, 145–47, 239–42, 269, 277–79, 354, 367; liberty and, 4, 15, 19, 126, 148, 161, 172–73, 260–61, 276–9, 282–84; political slavery and, 120, 146– 47, 240–42, 260–61, 276, 367; privative age and national identity, 227–32, 236– 44, 260–61, 264–65, 269, 367; tribes aggregated as nations, 16, 146 Nebuchadnezzar II, 143 negation: nakedness and, 233–34; privative age and, 228, 244, 258, 259–71 passim, 278–79, 284 Nero, emperor, 152 Netherlands: antityrannicism in, 58, 125, 148, 156–57, 290–91; slavery and, 4, 13, 58, 156–57 Nimrod (biblical figure), 81–82, 125, 130–32, 137–44, 188, 221 Norbook, David, Writing the English Republic (1999), 14, 404n13 Nourbese Philip, M., Frontiers (1992), 406n2 Nyquist, Mary: “Fallen Differences” (1987), 399n48; “ ‘Profuse, Proud Cleopatra’ ” (1994), 392n2, 403n64; “Slavery, Resistance, and Nation” (2008), 393n29 Oakley, Francis, Natural Law (2005), 373n23 Ober, Josiah, “Tyrant Killing as Therapeutic Stasis” (2003), 41 Occam, Samson, 368 Original Sin, doctrine of, 131, 238–40, 242, 269 Overton, Richard, An Arrow Against All Tyrants (1646), 148, 170, 173–74 Ovid: on golden age, 255–57, 262, Metamorphoses, 245, 255–57, 262 Pagden, Anthony: Fall of Natural Man (1982), 373n24, 401n27; Lords of All the World (1995), 268, 337; “Struggle for Legitimacy” (1998), 406n3 Paracelsus, 237 Parker, Henry: The Contra-Replicant (1643), 210; on despotism, 128, 185–90; on dominion, 127–30, 140–41, 202; Eutactus Philodemius as pseudonym for, 209–11; on household as model for state, 167–68, 174, 179, 189–90; Jus Populi (1644), 129– 30, 135, 167–68, 175–76, 185–89, 204–5, 209–14, 218, 350; Observations (1642),

418

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Parker, Henry (cont.) 167, 179, 184–85, 211–12; The Observator Defended (1642), 174; on paternal authority, 167–68, 179, 204; on power of life and death, 204–5, 211–14, 335–36, 351; on slavery, 27–28, 139, 168–69, 171, 185–92, 212–14, 217, 226, 350, 362; on tyranny, 135, 188, 167 Pateman, Carole, The Sexual Contract (1988), 298 Patterson, Orlando: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, 3; on manumission, 154; Slavery and Social Death (1982), 6, 52–53, 154, 186, 196, 404n3, 343; on social death, 6, 186, 343; on war slavery, 52–53, 196 Peloponnesian War, 38 Peyrère, Isaac La, 237 Persian Wars, 27, 29, 37, 39 Philip II of Spain, 114 Phillips, John, 363 Philodemius, Eutactus: An Answer, 206–8, 217; Ascham, wrongly identified as, 207–9; The Original and End of Civil Power, 206–11, 216–18, 349–51; Parker as, 209–11; on power of life and death, 193, 207–8, 214–16, 218, 350–51; on voluntary slavery, 207, 212–18, 348–51 pileus cap. See liberty cap Plato: Laws, 21; on paternal and royal rule, 176; Republic, 23, 42, 50; on tyranny, 23, 44–45, 50, 299 Plutarch, Parallel Lives, 54 Pocahontas, 239, 285 Pocock, J. G. A., The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (1957), 277 Polyxena, 55, 103, 105, 115, 119–20 Ponet, John: on absolutism, 133, 176, 203; on Amerindigenes, 68–71, 90; on antityrannicism, 65–71, 167, 171; on law of nature, 65–66, 69–71; on power of life and death, 203; A Short Treatise of Politique Power (1556), 65–71, 171, 176, 203; on slavery, 68–71; on tyranny, 73–74, 77, 130 power of life and death, 7; absolutism and, 76, 93, 108, 118, 174, 204; arbitrary rule and, 77, 174, 196, 199, 323, 331, 342, 348, 353; Aristotle on, 9; Bacon on, 221–22; Bodin on, 163, 166, 193–97, 203–4, 220–21, 310, 358; despotism and, 331–32, 350–53; Filmer on, 304, 358; Goodwin on, 207,

215–18; Grotius on, 18, 195–96, 222–26, 305–7, 346; Hammond on, 222–26, 350; Hobbes on, 8, 196, 201–2, 205–6, 215, 294– 98, 305–15, 319–24, 329–30, 346, 352; ius gentium and, 8, 18, 195, 219, 272, 295, 305; Locke on; 9, 196, 215, 222, 327–39, 342, 346–53, 358, 364; Parker on, 204–5, 211–14, 335, 351; paternal, 7, 108, 118, 163, 166, 177–78, 193–200, 203–5, 213, 220–21, 302, 310–12, 359, 364; suicide and, 214–16, 347–49; in Vindiciae, 199–200; war slavery doctrine and, 7–9, 195, 218– 26, 323–24. See also war slavery doctrine Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes (1992), 396n1, 401n28 Primaudaye, Peter de la, The French Academie (1586), 175 privative age, 16; Africans and, 271, 282; Amerindigenes and, 90, 263–64, 271–72, 281–84, 322; Bacon on, 17, 271–72, 281; Cicero on, 261, 266–67; golden age and, 17, 227, 231–32, 256–58, 261–67; Hobbes on, 229–31, 258–60, 271, 280–82, 354–55; Las Casas on, 264, 270; Locke on, 16–17, 277, 328, 343, 354–55, 360; Montaigne on, 258, 264–65; nakedness and, 228, 244, 258, 259–71 passim, 278–79, 284; Shakespeare on, 265. See also contemporary ancestors, golden age Protestantism: antityrannicism in, 125, 235; Eucharist in, 94; primitive in, 229–30; verbal privileged in, 104, vows in, 109 Putney Debates, 2, 180 Raaflaub, Kurt A., 377n32, 369; “Born to Be Wolves?” (1996), 377n34; “Democracy, Oligarchy” (1983), 375n3; The Discovery of Freedom in Ancient Greece (2004), 1, 372n9, 374n38, 375n3, 376n11, 31–32, 37, 50; “Stick and Glue” (2003), 1, 40–42, 58; War and Peace (2007), 373n16 racialization: chattel slavery and, 4, 162, 239–40, 278, 316, 324, 332, 354, 366–37; hierarchies of race, 14, 146, 239, 272–75; political slavery and, 19, 274–75, 366–38; privative age and, 227, 239, 257; “race” as nation, 146, 240, 354, 366–67. See also Africans; Amerindigenes; Asians; Ham’s curse; slavery: natural Rainborough, Thomas, 180 Raleigh, Walter, History of the World, 129–31



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republicanism: Dutch, 92, 353; English, 92, 353– 54; Roman, 2, 12, 46–47, 49, 51, 92, 128 resistance: Amerindigenes and, 20, 86, 89; Cicero on, 65, 87; contractualism and, 59, 162, 281, 296; La Boétie on, 61–69, 74, 90; Locke on, 330, 332, 358, 360; right of, 59, 71–72, 133, 139, 145, 178–81, 189, 223, 316, 320–25, 328–32 Reville-Martin des François, Le (1574), 72 Ripa, Cesare, Iconologie, 155–56 Rivers, Marcellus, 278 Rives, J., “Human Sacrifice” (1995), 384n11 Robertson, Geoffrey: The Levellers, 2–3; The Tyrannicide Brief, 3 Rolfe, John, 239 Roman Catholicism, Eucharist in, 94, 121–22, 230 Romulus, 194 Rose, Peter, “Cicero and the Rhetoric of Imperialism” (1995), 268 Rosivach, Vincent, “Enslaving Barbaroi and the Athenian Ideology of Slavery” (1999), 26 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 188, 254, 257; Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité, 257 Rutherford, Samuel, Lex, Rex (1644), 164 Sabine, George, A History of Political Thought (1973), 59 Saller, Richard: Patriarchy, Property and Death in the Roman Family (1994), 194; “Slavery and the Roman Family” (1987), 379n71 Salmasius, 143 Samuel, book of, 125–26, 130, 132–37, 188, 274–75 Sandys, George, Ovid’s Metamorphosis (trans.), 262 Schochet, Gordon, Patriarchalism and Political Thought (1975), 59–60 Seneca, 223; Troades, 119 Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de, Demócrates Segundo, 121, 270–71 Service, Elman, “War and Our Contemporary Ancestors” (1968), 228 Shakespeare, William: Hamlet, 95; on privative age, 265; Sonnet 130, 258; Tempest, 195–96, 265; Titus Andronicus, 222 Sharrat, Peter: “Euripides latinus” (1995), 385n26, 386n31, 387n44; George Buchanan Tragedies (1983), 100, 106–7 Shaw, Brent, “Raising and Killing Children” (2001), 195

419

Shohat, Ella, Unthinking Eurocentricism (1994), 396n1 Shuger, Debra Kuller, Renaissance Bible (1994), 384n14, 387n54 Sidney, Algernon, Discourses Concerning Government (1698), 276 Skinner, Quentin, 2, 12–14; “Conquest and Consent” (2002), 404n7; “The Context of Hobbes’s Theory of Political Obligation” (2002), 404n7; Foundations of Modern Political Thought (1978), 381n30; Hobbes and Republican Liberty (2008), 403n56, n63; “Hobbes on the Proper Signification of Liberty” (2002), 405n18; Liberty before Liberalism (1998), 12–14; “States and the Freedom of Citizens” (2003) 373n26 slavery —chattel: antityrannicism and, 2–7, 15, 19, 56, 58, 68–71, 170, 190–91, 347, 362–63, 366–68; barbarism and, 11, 23, 43–45, 50, 147, 268–69; conquest and, 30, 38–39, 70, 146–47, 157, 195, 221–22, 295–98, 309, 319; Greco-Roman, 20–21, 23–26, 57–58; Hobbes on, 12, 217, 315–22; Locke on, 12, 169, 196, 217, 219, 332, 344–46, 353; nationalism and, 4, 11, 16–19, 45, 145– 47, 239–42, 269, 277–79, 354, 367; versus political, 1–7, 10–12, 20–29, 43–46, 49, 80–83, 183–84, 256, 278–79; racialization and, 4, 162, 239–40, 278, 316, 324, 332, 354, 366–37; violence and, 20, 195–96 —household: privative age and, 16–17; state, relation to, 24–26, 41–49, 82, 169–75, 186, 191–92, 301–5, 309–15 —natural: Aristotle on, 11, 15, 23–26, 43–45, 126–29, 138–40, 181, 186–87, 213, 222, 240, 268–69, 274–75, 299, 366–67; Bacon on, 221–22, 240–41; barbarism and, 11, 15, 23, 26–31, 43–50, 82, 89–90, 94, 126–27, 147, 261, 268–71, 274–77; privative age and, 17, 89–90, 239–43, 271–74 —political: absolutism and, 74–76, 80, 126, 188–89, 199–200, 213, 315, 355; antityrannicism and, 1–7, 12–13, 19, 22–23, 37–39, 49–56, 60–61, 66, 76, 80–83, 152– 53, 181–82, 327, 362, 363, 366; arbitrary rule and, 4, 12–13, 18, 32–33, 151, 188, 190, 211–12, 279, 327, 340–41; barbarism and, 1, 11, 18, 23, 26–31, 43–45, 50, 94, 116, 147, 268–69, 271; versus chattel, 1–7, 10–12, 20–29, 43–46, 49, 81–83, 183–84,

420

index

slavery (cont.) —political (cont.) 256, 278–79; Greco-Roman, 20–23, 31–43, 53–56; nationalism and, 120, 146–47, 240–42, 260–61, 276, 367; racialization and, 19, 274–75, 366–38; tyranny and, 4–7, 12–13, 31–37, 39–42, 61–68, 130–45, 299–300, 353–61; violence and, 20, 31, 37–38, 277 —transatlantic, 1–2, 15, 18–19, 37, 181–85, 278–79; Hobbes on, 301, 315–16, 319, 324–25; Locke on, 18, 315, 326–28, 347, 350, 354, 360–61; Ponet on, 68–71 —voluntary: in English Revolutionary dis­ course, 15, 126, 148–51, 206–18; Hammond on, 207, 216–18, 223, 348, 351; Hobbes on, 217, 305–6, 318–20; La Boétie on, 62–66; Locke on, 206, 303, 339–40, 344, 348–53, 357; Philodemius on, 207, 212–18, 348–51; Roman conception of, 51–53; war slavery doctrine and, 218–24, 305–8, 318–25, 339 —See also despotism; dominion; slaves; war slavery doctrine slaves: acquisition of, by capture, 38–39, 52, 66, 83, 160, 185–87, 224–25, 304–7, 319, 338–41, 360, 364; acquisition of, as hunting, 25–26, 130, 138–39, 202; killing of, 5, 223; manumission of, 72–74, 126, 152–59, 182, 217, 301; nonhuman animals, epicted as, 6, 25–26, 30, 53, 77, 80, 126, 138, 176, 303, 319, 322, 365; violence toward, 20, 195. See also captives, slavery; war slavery doctrine Smith, Thomas (1513–1577), De Republica Anglorum, 79–81, 85–86, 271 Sommerville, Johann, 20, 208, 369, 405n25; “English and European Political Ideas in the Early Seventeenth Century” (1996), 133, 208, 380n5; on Filmer’s Absolute Power of all Kings, 394n20; “Hobbes, Behemoth” (2003), 405n26; Thomas Hobbes (1992), 395n48, 404n4 Sokol, B. J., “The Problem of Assessing Thomas Harriot’s A briefe and true report” (1994), 399n44 Sophocles, 47 Spartacus, 332 Stam, Robert, Unthinking Eurocentricism (1994), 396n1 Standish, Ralph, 270

Stern, Simon, 369 Stevens, Paul, 370; “Leviticus Thinking” (1993), 239; “Paradise Lost and the Colonial Imperative” (1996), 399n47, 399n50, 400n10 Strauss, Leo, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (1963), 293 suicide, honor and, 122; Locke on, 347–52; power of life and death and, 214–16, 347–52; as resistance, 161, 352 Superbus, Tarquinius, 53 Temperley, Howard, 406n4 Tengnagel, Jan, Allegorie auf die Herrschaft des Prinzen Moritz (c. 1623), 157 Terence, Adelphi, 170 Theseus, 23 Thevet, André, The new found worlde (English, 1567), 89, 229, 233 Tierney, Brian, Idea of Natural Rights (1997), 373n23 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, Silencing the Past (1995), 4, 368 Tryon, Thomas, Friendly Advice to the Gentlemen-Planters, 360 Tuck, Richard: Natural Rights Theories (1979), 207, 267; Rights of War and Peace, 293, 295–96, 337 Tully, James, An Approach to Political Philosophy (1993), 327 turannos. See tyrant tyrannicide, 41–42, 50–54, 63–66; Hobbes on, 123, 298; liberty cap and, 152–55, 159–60, 292; Locke on, 359–60; Milton on, 143 tyranny, 2–6; arbitrary rule and, 12–13, 18, 32– 49 passim, 174, 211–12, 330–31, 340–41, 348, 355; Aristotle on, 31–34, 47–48, 80– 81, 126–28, 184, 256, 190, 280, 298–300; Buchanan on, 78–79, 106–7, 111–12, 136– 37, 198; cannibalism and, 51, 68, 78, 130, 240, 336–37, 356–59; Cicero on, 50–52, 78, 128, 336–37, 359; despotism, relation to, 31–38, 47–48, 82, 127–28, 189–90, 213, 299, 329–31, 355–61; in Genesis, 125, 130–31, 139; Herodotus on, 29, 39–40, 63–64, 68; human sacrifice and, 42, 101, 240; Locke on, 329–30, 333, 337, 355; Milton on, 77, 138–39, 142–44; Montaigne on, 62–63, 68, 79, 88; Parker on, 135, 188, 167; Plato on, 42–45, 50, 299; Ponet on, 77, 130. See also tyrant



index

tyrant, figure of: arbitrary rule and, 32–36; as bestial, 41–42, 49–51, 79, 106–7, 164, 356–57; as cannibalistic, 51, 78, 356–59; as conqueror, 37–43, 53–56, 70, 157–59, 218–19, 356; despot, relation to, 29, 31– 37, 46–47, 51; as hunter, 130, 138–39; as monstrous, 41–42, 50–51, 77–79, 106–7, 147–48, 164, 272, 335–36, 356–59. See also tyranny Vane, Henry, 279 Vega, Garcilaso de la, Commentarios Reales, 358 Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos (1579): contractualism in, 73–77, 167; natural freedom in, 71–73; paternal authority in, 88; power of life and death in, 77, 199–200; tyranny in, 77–78, 132 violence: arbitrary rule and, 77–78; chattel slavery and, 20, 195; political slavery and, 20, 31, 37–38, 277; state of nature and, 258–59, 281–84, 293, 299, 314–15, 334; tyranny and, 36–38, 78–79, 131, 157, 218–19, 356–57 Vitoria, Francisco de, 226, 283; “On Dietary Laws,” 95, 239–42; “On the American Indians,” 272; Relectio de Indiis, 240–41 Vlastos, Gregory, “Isonomia” (1953), 375n8, 377n28 Vondel, Joost van den, Jephtha of Offerbelofte (1659), 95–102, 111–13, 119; Buchanan’s Iephthes and, 96–102, 119; Euripides and, 96, 100–101, 111; human sacrifice in, 113 Walsh, P. G., George Buchanan Tragedies (1983), 100 Warrender, Howard, De Cive (ed.) (1983), 286 war slavery doctrine: Aristotle on, 25; Augustine on, 219–20, 239; Bacon on, 221, 296; Bodin on, 83–84, 220–23, 273, 296;

421

despotism and, 298–96, 299, 315–25, 332– 33, 339–41, 344–46; Grotius on, 8, 90, 160, 195, 219, 222–26, 273, 295, 298, 305–8, 319, 346, 364; Hobbes on, 8, 219, 226, 273, 294–98, 305–8, 311–15, 319–25, 346, 364; ius gentium and, 8–9, 84, 128, 182– 83, 187–88, 219, 222, 226, 272–73, 295, 305; La Boétie on, 66, 363–64; Locke on, 9, 219, 226, 273, 334, 337–39, 345–46, 363–64; Patterson on, 52–53, 196; power of life and death and, 7–9, 195, 218–26, 323–24. See also power of life and death Washington, George, 366 Watson, Alan, Roman Slave Law (1987), 8, 219 Wheatley, Phillis, Poems on Various Subjects (1773), 367–68 White, Hayden, “Forms of Wildness” (1972), 396n1 White, John, 243, 246, 252 Wildman, John, Putney Project (1647), 149 William of Orange, 110 Williams, Robert, Jr., The American Indian in Western Legal Thought (1990), 15, 401n31 Williamson, Margaret, 375n2, 369, 375 Wood, Ellen Meiksins: “Radicalism, Capitalism” (1994), 407n9; A Trumpet of Sedition (1997), 80 Wood, Neal, A Trumpet of Sedition (1997), 80 Wootton, David: Divine Right and Democracy (1986), 57, 380n10; John Locke: Political Writings (1993), 326 Wyatt, Thomas, 114 Wynter, Sylvia, “New Seville and the Conversion Experience of Bartolomé de Las Casas” (1984), 14, 371n5, 401n31 Xerxes of Armenia, 36–37