Chart of immigration of unfree labor into the American colonies: click here
Of Slavery
21 Here Locke describes "natural liberty," freedom in the state of nature, under the laws of nature. It is:
freedom from all superior power that is not "established by consent."Freedom is not:
"A liberty for every one to do what he lists [i.e. wants], to live as he pleases, and not to be tied by any laws" (Filmer);but:
to have a standing rule, common to every one, made by the legislative power erected in itThese are key terms, worth remembering. Laws are made by a legislative body that we create; they apply to each of us equally; where they do not apply, we are absolutely free. We’ll explore the implications of this definition further as we move along. For the moment, notice the key word "consent." To understand how novel this is, recall that kingship was more or less universal, and that Locke’s great predecessor Hobbes had said precisely the opposite: that human nature was so destructive as to require an absolute monarch to control us.liberty to follow my own will where that rule prescribes not, not to be subject to the arbitrary will of another man
Locke lived in an era when slavery was fairly universal—indeed, the first recorded statement anywhere, by any organized Christian group opposing the institution had been written only two years earlier (1688), by members of Germantown Friends Meeting in Philadelphia; it was the 18th century that brought widespread anti-slavery agitation, emanating in part from Philadelphia. He refers back to the classic texts on slavery, which themselves are full of irony: Exodus 21, in the middle of a book about liberation. And here, ironically, in a classic work about human liberation, he accepts some forms of slavery—as the continuation of a "just war": "the state of war continued between a lawful conqueror and a captive." It is very easy, and justified, to criticize this position: but it would be equally easy to criticize ourselves for accepting homelessness and poverty in American life.
Locke’s is one of the classic justifications of slavery; there are others, and they all rest on positions that seem horrible today. This is a fascinating topic, worth studying in depth. For the purposes of this course, I think the key thing to say is that once Locke and others let the cat (human liberty) out of the bag, it moves in directions (anti-slavery agitation, feminism) that Locke himself did not predict. We’ll study these in the coming week.
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