Arbitrary Rule: Slavery, Tyranny, and the Power of Life and DeathSlavery appears as a figurative construct during the English revolution of the mid-seventeenth century, and again in the American and French revolutions, when radicals represent their treatment as a form of political slavery. What, if anything, does figurative, political slavery have to do with transatlantic slavery? In Arbitrary Rule, Mary Nyquist explores connections between political and chattel slavery by excavating the tradition of Western political thought that justifies actively opposing tyranny. She argues that as powerful rhetorical and conceptual constructs, Greco-Roman political liberty and slavery reemerge at the time of early modern Eurocolonial expansion; they help to create racialized “free” national identities and their “unfree” counterparts in non-European nations represented as inhabiting an earlier, privative age. Arbitrary Rule is the first book to tackle political slavery’s discursive complexity, engaging Eurocolonialism, political philosophy, and literary studies, areas of study too often kept apart. Nyquist proceeds through analyses not only of texts that are canonical in political thought—by Aristotle, Cicero, Hobbes, and Locke—but also of literary works by Euripides, Buchanan, Vondel, Montaigne, and Milton, together with a variety of colonialist and political writings, with special emphasis on tracts written during the English revolution. She illustrates how “antityranny discourse,” which originated in democratic Athens, was adopted by republican Rome, and revived in early modern Western Europe, provided members of a “free” community with a means of protesting a threatened reduction of privileges or of consolidating a collective, political identity. Its semantic complexity, however, also enabled it to legitimize racialized enslavement and imperial expansion. Throughout, Nyquist demonstrates how principles relating to political slavery and tyranny are bound up with a Roman jurisprudential doctrine that sanctions the power of life and death held by the slaveholder over slaves and, by extension, the state, its representatives, or its laws over its citizenry. |
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
1 Ancient Greek and Roman Slaveries | 20 |
2 SixteenthCentury French and English Resistance Theory | 57 |
3 Human Sacrifice Barbarism and Buchanans Jephtha | 92 |
4 Antityranny Slavery and Revolution | 123 |
5 Freeborn Sons or Slaves? | 162 |
6 The Power of Life and Death | 193 |
7 Nakedness History and Bare Life | 227 |
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absolute Amerindigenes Ammonites analogy ancient ancient Greek antityranny discourse antityranny ideology appears arbitrary argues Aristotle Aristotle's associated barbarians barbarism Bodin Boétie Buchanan Cambridge chapter chattel slavery Christian Cicero cited citizens Cive civil society claims colonial context critique curse of Canaan death debates despotical power despotical rule discussion divine dominion early modern English enslaved Euripides Euro-colonial European father figure Filmer freeborn freedom Genesis Greco-Roman Grotius Hebrew History Hobbes Hobbes's household human Ibid individual institution Iphigenia Iphis Jephtha juridical kill king Leviathan liberty cap Locke Locke's Lord lordly master military Milton monarchy nakedness nations natural slave origins Paradise Lost Parker passage paternal patriarchal pileus polis political rule political slavery Ponet precivil privative age Quentin Skinner radical reference relations represented resistance rhetorical Richard Tuck ruler sacrifice servant servility servitude slave slaveholder slavery doctrine social sovereign sovereignty status subjects theory tion Treatises tyrannicide tyranny tyrant University Press voluntary