Download Orlando Patterson`s Theory on Western Freedom

Orlando Patterson on Western Freedom
An Insidious “Chordal Triad”
(Quotations from Freedom in the Making of Western
Culture, vol. 1)
“Chordal Triad” of Western Freedom
 Sovereignal
 Personal
 Civic
 Thucydides 5.89
(Athenians in Melian
Dialogue)
 Cf. Homer, Odyssey
17.323-4; Aristotle,
Rhetoric 1367a32-33
 Thucydides 2.34-46
(Pericles’ Funeral
Oration)
Slaves
Natally-Alienated, Non-Persons
“Slavery is the permanent, violent, and personal domination of
natally-alienated and generally dishonored persons. It is, first,
a form of personal domination. One individual is under the
direct power of another or his agent. In practice, this usually
entails the power of life and death over the slave. Second, the
slave is always an excommunicated person. He, more often she,
does not belong to the legitimate social or moral community; he
has no independent social existence; he exists only through, and
for, the master; he is, in other words, natally alienated.” (9-10)
Comparative Anthropological Material
Socially Dead and Group Solidarity
Among the Cherokee
“The Cherokee used the abnormal status of the slave as a
way of strengthening their system of classification….the
deviant and outsider condition of the slave helped to
establish Cherokee identity…The kinless, clanless,
socially-dead slave negatively defined all that it meant to
be socially alive and an active member of one’s clan. It is
most significant that this earliest role of the slave, and of
slavery, was a communal and social one. There is, as yet,
no hint of individual freedom.” (12)
Enemies Within and Without Among the
Brazilian Tupinamba
“The notion of vengeance also became a means of
appeasement of, and solidarity with, the ancestors,
especially those who had been killed in warfare, and the
mythical founders of the community. Warfare—both
external, in clashes with the enemy, and internal, in the
sacrifice of the slave—established solidarity with the
ancestors and the gods and reinforced communal
solidarity and strength.” (15)
Failure of Freedom in the Non-Western World
“No one in his or her right mind In Imbangala
society desired personal liberty, least of all the
mavala. What the freedman sought, instead, were
the prescriptive liberties of sovereignal freedom
and the enhancement of the patron’s, and
protector’s, sovereignal power or freedom over
his remaining slaves.” (28)
Unimportance of Freedom as a Concept among Near
Eastern Powers
“They did not want freedom, because there was no special
social space for the ambitious freedman, and it was not a
valued state; indeed, being free involved a loss of status
and power….to belong, to be bonded, was to be protected,
by one’s patrons and one’s gods. To be personally free was
to be deprived of this vital support.” (35-36)
Freedom’s Rise among the Non-Slave
“To contemplate the social death of the slave was to
conceive of one’s existence in a wholly new light, as the
cherished condition of not being socially dead, not being
kinless, not being bereft of one’s household and tribal
gods. Who in his, or her, right mind would ever have
thought of anything so crazy until the perverse reality of
slavery came into the world?” (42)