Abolition : Jochen Schmon
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Abolition : Jochen Schmon
The most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history is the transportation of ten million human beings out of the dark beauty of their mother continent into the new-found Eldorado of the West. They descended into Hell; and in the third century they arose from the dead, in the finest effort to achieve democracy for the working millions which this world had ever seen. It was a tragedy that beggared the Greek; it was an upheaval of humanity like the Reformation and the French Revolution. Yet we are blind and led by the blind. We discern in it no part of our labor movement; no part of our industrial triumph; no part of our religious experience.
As a political concept, the notion of “Abolition” emerged in the British and French metropolises as a declaration of solidarity with the uprisings of enslaved people in the Caribbean plantation colonies of the eighteenth century.1 Self-described “abolitionist” associations called on their governments to abolish the highly lucrative slave-economies on which the prosperity of Europe fundamentally depended. It is this coarticulation of insurrectionary and humanitarian struggles that initiated the end of slavery in the Western world, which throughout its entire recorded history provided changing but sustained moral, religious, and scientific discourses to justify the legalization of property claims in human beings.2 This is why the legal prohibition of slavery in the course of the nineteenth century must be seen as a most unprecedented development. In Seymour Drescher’s words, “freedom, not slavery, was the peculiar institution.”3 The struggles against slavery mark the beginning of one of the most powerful and longstanding emancipatory traditions of modernity. Abolitionist politics have been recognized as the founding moment for the quest of a world without racial qualifications to human equality by the African struggles for decolonization, the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, or the struggles against racial incarceration and policing that mobilize masses of people today.4 But without any reference to this genuinely abolitionist tradition of politics, dominant histories of universalist conceptions of emancipation have claimed the liberal-republican principles of the French Revolution as their birthplace, as the supposed long-term effect and political actualization of the moral principles of Christianity and the Enlightenment. Much scholarship has demonstrated the failures of such Eurocentric and revisionist accounts to confront the deep-seated structures of racial domination in the history of the modern West as well as what Saidiya Hartman has coined as their innumerous “afterlives.”5 However, neither Eurocentric revisionism nor its criticism would be possible without the actual discursive universalization of principles of freedom and equality that began to emerge toward the end of the eighteenth century. And it was remarkably around the question of slavery that such universalist claims were articulated at the time. Two years after the first abolitionist mobilizations took place in response to Tacky’s War, the 1760 slave rebellion in the British colony of Jamaica, Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously deplored that “men is born free, and everywhere he is in chains,” that “if there are slaves by nature, it is because there have been slaves against nature.”6 After more than a decade of abolitionist pamphleteering by the French philosophes, Immanuel Kant declared in 1785 the transcendental moral maxim to “act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.” 7 No human being must be treated as a mere instrument, as the very “living tool” that since Aristotle had been accepted as the just condition for those who deserve nothing but enslavement. In the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution, which constituted the first republic in world history on the inalienable principle of “freedom from slavery,” Benjamin Constant marked the difference between the “liberty of the ancients compared with that of the moderns” in the very imperative that a modern republic could “no longer have slaves,” that “free men must exercise all professions, provide for all the needs of society.”8 Hegel claimed that the modern West could no longer bear the enslavement of human beings, unlike its ancient predecessors, “whose whole life and the maintenance of their splendid liberty was implicated with the institution of slavery.”9 For the moderns would have attained “the consciousness that human beings, as human beings, are free,” turning the “history of the world into nothing but the progress of the consciousness of freedom.” And even the royalist Alexis de Tocqueville consternated, right after the British Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, that it would become impossible to “imagine men, equal in all other ways, forever unequal to each other on a single point; so in time they will become equal in all ways.”10 Even if neither of these paradigmatic philosophical articulations of the politics of their time mentioned the massive slave rebellions or their humanitarian supporters, the progressive liberation from slavery became understood as the unique normative aspiration of what came to be called “modernity”—a dramatic shift for a social context that rested for thousands of years on justifications for slavery.11 The question of “abolition” marked a radical transvaluation of the values of Western politics, as this lexicon entry will argue in Nietzschean terms, inaugurating the true quarrel between the ancients and the moderns. Abolitionist politics articulated the very break with ancient inheritances of political inequality that was praised as the beginning of modernity. And this struggle against slavery could not be contained by the demand to abolish what only thus came to be called its “chattel” form. After the founding of the first abolitionist associations at the end of the century, advocates for equal women’s rights such as Olympe de Gouges and Mary Wollstonecraft opposed the conditions of coverture as the “slavery of women and children.” And in the heavily embattled years leading to the 1848 Proclamation of the Abolition of Slavery in the French Colonies, critics of the miserable situation of the European working classes, from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, condemned their condition as being reduced to “slaves of property” and “wage slavery.”12 The struggle for abolition was both prelude and context of this enormous proliferation of movements that mobilized, as I will reconstruct, decidedly abolitionist claims in their shared opposition to forms of domination whose authority rests on the same juridical discourse that made it possible to legalize chattel slavery as well. For even the republican and liberal politics of the time legalized patriarchy, property, and wages as ‘private matters,’ and thus, as incontestable forms of power—the same foundational juridical differentiation that abolitionists began to radically destabilize.13 If there was a radical break between Western antiquity and modernity, it was the abolitionist movement that changed everything. 1. Abolitionist Quarrels with the Ancients and the Moderns: A Radical Transvaluation of Western Values of Politics From the polities of ancient Greece and Rome to the modern republics of Italy, the Americas, and France, slavery received a stable legal basis for what was defined as ‘economic’ or ‘private matters.’ As Aristotle conceptualized the use and abuse of slavery in ancient Greece, what designates the specifically “political” form of ruling was its contradistinction to the “household” (oikos) in which women, children, and men captured in war could be legitimately ruled with the very absolute claims of power that would be impermissible between citizen men.14 “Politicians” and “citizens,” as the Aristotelian subjects of politics, are neither masters nor slaves. Politicians cannot rule with absolute authority, as only “tyrants” do. Rulers are assigned the status of politicians only if they can be “ruled in turn” by the citizenry (isonomia). But the very social conditions designated as “economic,” as Aristotle explicitly argues, should be organized according to the same lawless and omnipotent aspirations of “despotic power” that were prohibited for “political” matters. Tyranny was legalized for the “household,” as the proper form of ruling those claimed as wives, children, and slaves.15 Similar to Aristotle, what the Romans called imperium, as the authority over the laws of the polity, was defended by republicans from antiquity to modernity as a “public matter” (res publica). In the words of Cicero, a polity in which the citizenry does not have any “share in the administration of justice and deliberation” would be “to some extent like slavery for a people.”16 Such absolute aspirations of power, establishing claims to dominium (ownership), were only reserved for citizens to exert in what was defined as the “private matters” (res privatae) of child education, the lives of women, and captives of war. And without much quarrel, the liberals and republicans of modernity agreed with their ancient predecessors on this foundational juridical differentiation of power. As John Locke would rearticulate the ancients’ principles for the modern age right after the English Revolution of 1688, “tyranny” is when a government behaves like “a father over his children, a master over his servant, a husband over his wife, and a lord over his slave.”17 Politics must not to be conflated with the rules of the “private,” which is where patriarchy, mastery, and lordship ought to legitimately rule. The founders of liberalism inherited from the republicans of antiquity the juridical distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’ forms of authority in order to discursively locate racialized, gendered, and propertied hierarchies of power outside the political itself—as nothing but the ‘private’ matters of individual households and their ‘economic’ activities, set under the exclusive disposition of white propertied men that could thus legally enslave and rule over women and children with absolute power.18 But as this genealogy of liberalism in Aristotelian and republican registers of power shows as well, the political use of the concept of slavery has continuously exceeded its confinement to ‘chattel’ slavery. For the concept of “tyranny” served as the highest polemical term in the political vocabulary of the West given to regimes accused of so-called “political enslavement,” which is when citizens themselves are subjected to the very absolute forms of rule that they can legitimately exercise on lives declared a private matter. Against such incontestable authorities, citizenries could only liberate themselves by the violent insurrections that were honored since antiquity as “tyrannicide.” As Locke proclaimed, while justifying such tyrannical powers for ‘private’ matters, whenever rulers reduce citizens “to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience.”19 Without the right to consent or dissent the decisions of their governments, as Locke reserved the central principle of liberal politics only for men granted citizenship, “people have no other remedy in this, as in all other cases where they have no judge on earth, but to appeal to heaven: for the rulers, in such attempts, exercising a power the people never put into their hands.” Despite its militant anti-tyranny tradition, what Xenophon conceived as the central function of the ancient polity remained thus true also for the constitution of modern states and their philosophical discourses: “[For] all men their polis is very precious, because citizens ward one another without pay from their slaves and from evildoers to the end that none of the citizens may perish a violent death.” However, Xenophon’s conception implicitly acknowledges that enslaved people contiuously resisted the absolute claims of power to which they were subjected.20 And from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards, this tradition of struggle amplified into a serious threat to the continuation of the European colonial project in the Caribbean. In response to Tacky’s Rebellion in Jamaica, the abolitionist movement emerged as the publicly most present civil opposition in the imperial metropolises of the West, as the first human rights and commodity boycott movement as we know it today.21 As Olaudah Equiano unambiguously pronounced it in his role as a founding member of the Sons of Africa, the first black abolitionist association formed in 1787, the “question of Abolition” emerged not so much from moral empathy as from the political danger generated by the persistent insurrections of enslaved people that made the plantation economy increasingly unmaintainable: “are ye not struck with shame and mortification, to see the partakers of your nature reduced so low? But, above all, are there no dangers attending this mode of treatment? Are you not hourly in dread of an insurrection?”22 The omnipresence of resistance created a colonial life in a permanent state of emergency, for when “you make men slaves you deprive them of half their virtue, you set them in your own conduct an example of fraud, rapine, and cruelty, and compel them to live with you in a state of war.” The political work of abolitionists consisted in an effort to translate into the imperial public spheres the specific normative demands articulated in the insurgent acts of the enslaved. What these rebelling but discursively muted subjects of enslavement communicated in their relentless resistance was that slavery cannot be maintained. Not only that slavery ‘must not’ be, but that the conditions of enslavement will no longer be accepted by those subjected to it. As Frederick Douglass would draw the lesson from the history of British Abolition before the outbreak of the American Civil War, slavery was only abolished through the “combined action” of slaves and activists, for “while one showed that slavery was wrong, the other showed that it was dangerous as well as wrong.”23 What abolitionists were “endeavoring to win from the British Senate by magic eloquence, the Slaves themselves were endeavoring to gain by outbreaks and violence . . . and [to] warn the British government of the danger of continuing slavery in the West Indies.” The plantation colonies constituted “a state of war” from their very inception, this is what Equiano and other abolitionists emphasized, generated through the persistent disobedience and resistance of the enslaved. The anxious and unhappy fate of the tyrant, which the ancients and the moderns only attributed to its public form, inevitably also afflicts the private tyrant of the colonial household, for “tyrants are never at peace with the people subject to their tyranny, and no truce can ever make a tyrant confident.”24 One of the earliest and politically most important acts of abolitionist translation was the pamphlet Two Dialogues on the Man Trade, published anonymously in 1760 under the name of “J. Philmore” to support the revolutionary uprising of Tacky in Jamaica:
Extending verbatim Locke’s famous polemic against tyrannical governments to chattel slavery, the pamphlet claimed the legitimacy for the slaves’ absolute disobedience on the grounds of their absolute domination. Philmore surely mobilized the central liberal principle of ‘consent to government.’ But in applying the terms of liberalism to chattel slavery, arguing that any claim to property in human beings would systematically violate such rights of consent, the pamphlet radically articulated liberal principles against the liberal tradition itself. Philmore conceptualized the conditions of enslaved people as being subject to the very tyrannical modalities of arbitrary and lawless rule that from Aristotle to Locke was identified only as the wrong of absolute forms of government—not as the wrong of slavery. As Hartman has emphasized in her study of the American plantation regime, such a theorization of slavery as “tyranny is not a rhetorical inflation but a designation of the absoluteness of power.”26 For the specific claim to power that the institution of slavery attempts to enact consist in a “wanton exploitation of the captive body tacitly sanctioned as a legitimate use of property, the disavowal of injury, and the absolute possession of the body.”27 Philmore’s Christian radicalism was the paradigmatic articulation of how the first abolitionist associations in England and France would cultivate a universalist understanding and condemnation of absolute authorities, from the tyrants in the public sphere to the tyrants of the economy: “God gave to man dominion over all the earth, and over every creeping thing, that creepeth upon the earth; but not to any one man over another. Nor can one man, on any supposition whatever, become the property, or part of the goods or estate of another man.”28 With their dismissal of tyrannical claims to ownership in human beings, abolitionist discourses challenged the absolute protection of property rights that characterized the republican and liberal traditions. In the words of Nicolas de Condorcet, founding member of the Société des Amis des Noirs formed in 1788, “reducing a man to slavery, buying him, selling him, keeping him in servitude: these are truly crimes, and crimes worse than theft,” for it takes “from the slave the right to dispose of his own person” and to “invoke a law to ensure his own protection.”29 By universalizing the concept of tyranny to any claims of absolute power in social relations, the authority to ownership, abolitionists transformed the ancient virtue of tyrannicide into a universal human right—that no human being must be ruled under absolute and uncontestable authorities of power, that no one must be granted ownership over another and dispose of them as their property, and therefore, that everyone who is enslaved has the right to rebel against such domination. As the Abbé Raynal would praise the continuous resistance of the Caribbean slaves with his massive collaboration project Histoire des deux Indies in 1778:
Abolitionists were surely some of the central “innovating ideologists” in the Western history of political thought, to use Quentin Skinner’s conceptual methodology, who cunningly “legitimate a new range of social actions which, in terms of the existing ways of applying the moral vocabulary prevailing in their society, are currently regarded as in some way untoward or illegitimate.”31 Indeed, the conception of tyranny, one of the foundational political concepts for demarcating the locus and threshold of a liberated form of life, was radically extended by abolitionist thinkers from designating a specific form of government to encompassing any social condition in which absolute authority is exercised over human beings. Abolitionist politics, therefore, did not simply ‘apply’ or ‘reactivate’ republican or liberal paradigms of emancipation; rather, they radically transformed them by extending their established critique of tyranny to conditions that liberalism, as well as the republicans of antiquity and modernity, had until then relegated to the domain of ‘private matters.’ Only within abolitionist discourses were the values of the liberal and republican traditions transvalued into the very universalist anti-slavery politics we recognize today—a normative achievement that is erased in contemporary liberal and neo-republican scholarship. Principles of “non-interference” or “non-domination” have never been applied to chattel slavery until their abolitionist reinvention.32 And the paradigmatic climax of this radical transvaluation of Western values of politics was the Haitian Revolution as the constitution of the first republican state that based itself on the principle of a universal prohibition of slavery. 2. The Haitian Revolution: The Inauguration of Modernity The beginning of modernity might have been variously identified with the rise of capitalism in the sixteenth century, the birth of the secular state in the seventeenth century, or with the age of industrialization in the second half of the eighteenth century. However, as the paradigmatic scholarship throughout the political spectrum agrees, the concept of modernity first emerged in the discourses of German Idealism, where it served to demarcate a socially distinct epoque and new beginning in the history of the West—one in which universalist claims to human emancipation became authoritative for all political action.33 But what brings together these established accounts is their shared omission that this specifically modern universalism was historically articulated, as outlined above, not only around the question of slavery but, most generally, in the context of the heavily intensifying struggles for Abolition. It was in this concerted action of rebelling slaves and humanitarian activists that universalist conceptions of freedom and equality, without any qualifications, began to be institutionalized in the legal systems of the Western world. If it is true that modernity marks the beginning of an age in which human equality and freedom came to be universalized as the indisputable normative imperative and horizon of all politics, the founding of the Republic of Haiti must be understood as its true inauguration. By turning the principle of “freedom from slavery” into constitutional law, the Haitian Revolution was the first political actualization of the radically egalitarian understanding that the discourse of modernity has given itself.34 The Haitian Revolutionary War (1791–1804) was nothing short of a loss of the most valuable French colony. However, this dramatic event was not at all surprising for the abolitionist movement, whose proponents had made it unmistakably clear for decades that enslaved people had always resisted and would continue to resist their captivity. In the words of Raynal:
European citizenries were well-informed—through abolitionist information campaigns, the press, and debates in their national parliaments—about the persistent bellicose struggles of enslaved people against colonial regimes, about liberated slave-communities formed by hundreds of thousands of fugitives from Brazil and Colombia to the Caribbean, and about their many failed revolutionary wars. Haitian Independence was only the pinnacle of a long history of slave resistance in the West Indies that is as old as Euro-Atlantic slavery itself. What was unprecedented about St. Domingue was only its success, as the first successful revolutionary overthrow of a colonial regime and its replacement by an independent constitutional state governed by the formerly enslaved.36 It was here that the challenges of abolitionists against private authorizations of absolute power were elevated for the first time into a legal-constitutional principle—not in the United States or France. It is certainly true that republicanism, as the most powerful discourse of insurgent and emancipatory movements in Western societies at the time, was the central normative vocabulary of the Haitian revolutionary leaders. But when Georges Biassou, Toussaint L’Ouverture, and Jean-François Papillon invoked the enslaved masses’ inalienable right of “resistance to oppression” in their declaration of war against the French government in 1792, they mobilized the anti-tyranny ethos of republicanism not against French ‘inconsistencies.’37 On the contrary, the highest civic virtue of tyrannicide was never applied by republicans of all times against slaveholders. It was truly a normative invention, a radical revaluation of tyrannicide, through which the Haitian revolutionaries confronted the traditional republicanism of the French Revolution, which, consistent with the ancients, continued to subject parts of its governed population to slavery. After two years of heavy warfare between the revolutionary slaves and French republicans, and in order to win them over against the Spanish and British occupational forces, the French National Convention passed in 1794 the first decree in European history to prohibit slavery.38 It was not so much a benevolent gesture of pity that moved the French parliamentarians. Enslaved people, with their resolute and uncompromising struggle, forced them to. Against the French reservations, oppositional or gradualist, the revolutionary leaders of St. Domingue radicalized the Enlightenment of Europe beyond its own racial limitations: “any authority which is not founded on virtue and humanity, must come to an end, and that end is yours.”39 Only with the Haitian Revolution were the essentially nationalist and racially-confined Enlightenment principles of liberty and equality transformed into universalized notions of emancipation as a human right. In the words of Toussaint’s proclamation in 1793, “equality cannot exist without liberty,” and vice versa, liberty cannot exist without equality.40 Republican politics had never considered such a universalist conception of equality—extending to each and every one who is governed by the laws of a polity—until its Haitian reinvention. In anticipation of Napoleon’s attempt to reinstate slavery in the French colonies, the revolutionaries of St. Domingue began to fight for an independent republic that declared in its Constitution of 1801, drafted by Toussaint, that “There cannot exist slaves on this territory, servitude is therein forever abolished.”41 Toussaint emphasized in his famous letter to the French Directory the relentless “patriotism” of the formerly enslaved to wage war against any such attempts, the “oath that we renew to bury ourselves beneath the ruins of a country revived by liberty rather than suffer the return of slavery.”42 If slavery was ever reestablished in St. Domingue, “I declare to you that this would be to attempt the impossible. We have known how to confront danger to obtain our liberty, and we will know how to confront death to preserve it.” Jürgen Habermas was, therefore, not wrong in claiming the beginning of “political modernity” as the implementation of universal and equal rights to emancipation into constitutional law. However, its true subjects were not the French revolutionaries, but their insurgent slaves in the Caribbean colonies, who, for the first time in world history, prescribed the principle of universal emancipation as a constitutional right.43 The new beginning of modernity, as Hannah Arendt characterized it, was certainly the invention of “the idea of equality,” that “every person is born as an equal by the very fact of being born and that equality is a birthright, was utterly unknown prior to the modern age.”44 But this radical transvaluation of Western politics, as Arendt would rather bemoan it, was not founded in the “abstract rights” of the French Revolution. If the normative promise of universal emancipation marks the beginning of modernity, then the Constitution of the Haitian Republic was its political inauguration by declaring the most ancient of all legacies of inequality in the history of the West to be abolished: Slavery, the claim to ownership in human beings. Haitian republicanism, which should be acknowledged as a normatively distinct transformation of the tradition, was the truly radical Enlightenment. In their mobilization of a radically political conception of human equality—as necessarily conditioned in the normative universality of law, instead of personal morality—the abolitionists of Haiti articulated what Massimiliano Tomba has called an “insurgent universality.”45 However, their radical normative insurgency cannot be properly understood as what Tomba would claim an “alternative legacy of modernity,” with somewhat “autonomous” and incommensurable normative discourses and political institutions. Way more so, abolitionists radically changed the West’s own foundational political principles when not only its dominant philosophical discourses but also its legal paradigms increasingly conceived of slavery as an indefensible wrong. This abolitionist rejection of justifications for domination rendered ‘private’ or ‘economic’ would become the most forceful conceptual resource for other radical movements that began to politicize the traditionally private legalization of patriarchy, property, and wage labor as different formations through which the absolute power of enslavement is institutionalized. 3. Abolitionist Afterlives: Against the Slaveries of Patriarchy, Property, and Wages The struggle for Abolition can be understood as among the radical genealogical ruptures that Michel Foucault conceptualized as not being founded on “a decision, a treaty, a reign, or a battle, but [on] the reversal of a relationship of forces, the usurpation of power, the appropriation of a vocabulary turned against those who had once used it.”46 The normative vocabulary that abolitionists inverted and turned against those who once used it to enslave others was the militant discourse against tyrannical formations of power, the justification of violent disobedience against absolute authorities. This discourse was not meant to condemn the political disenfranchisement of the property-owning male citizen in order to guarantee his free engagement in enslavement, but to denounce any social condition in which anyone is claimed to be ruled absolutely. As the normative legitimacy of slavery came under scrutiny, challenges grew stronger against other forms of domination that the liberal-republican grammars of power had relegated to the realm of mere “private matters.” Just one month after the outbreak of the Haitian Revolutionary War, and many years of her own abolitionist engagement, de Gouges published the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, in which she denounced the slave colonies as “where nature shudders with horror . . . . These inhuman colonists say: our blood flows in their veins, but we will shed it all if necessary to glut our greed and blind ambition.”47 De Gouges condemned the plantations as the most ravaging site of capitalist inhumanity that puts the personal interests of wealth and profit for a few over any ethical concern. This was precisely the same political rationality that she saw at work in patriarchal domination. Without legal equality within civil society and marriage, the right to own property and divorce, women would be subject to “perpetual male tyranny,” for they can do nothing without the authorization of their fathers or husbands. Under such patriarchal conditions, marriage would be reduced to commerce in women: “any other road to fortune is closed to the woman whom a man buys, like the slave on the African coasts.” De Gouges took the conditions of the transatlantic slave-system as the comparative extreme point of human degradation in order to understand the strategies and normative principles that would also inform the subjection of non-enslaved women—part of the same juridical formation of power that was declared from Aristotle to Locke and the commercial societies they represented as nothing but matters of ‘private’ disposition. As the discourse on Abolition resonates in de Gouges’ conception of patriarchal power, no human being should ever be owned by or sold to another, which would be the fate of everyone who is not guaranteed equal rights to everyone else. Formed in the abolitionist circles around the protestant Dissenter and republican priest Richard Price, Wollstonecraft echoed this comparative analysis in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman one year after de Gouges. What Wollstonecraft condemned on Christian grounds as a blasphemous idolatry of profit and property would intervene whenever “a question of humanity is agitated,” such as “the abominable traffic”—the very “traffic” that was already in 1792 commonly understood, without explicit naming, as the traffic in enslaved people.48 Similar to the slaves of the colonies, non-enslaved women and children were legally held under “abject tyranny and slavery,” as the personal property of fathers and husbands who “must, in some shape, act like a tyrant, and tyranny, in whatever part of society it rears its brazen front, will ever undermine morality.”49 As Wollstonecraft rejected the patriarchal misconception—carried from Aristotle to Rousseau—that a woman could be ruled by a man and still be his friend, she insisted that absolute authority allows for nothing but the hostility and lovelessness characteristic of any tyrannical relation. And this multiplication of the conception of slavery to what thus came to be conceived as patriarchal slavery, most paradigmatically crystallized in de Gouges and Wollstonecraft’s political writings, became the very analysis that was mobilized by the organized women’s rights struggles of the nineteenth century, which grew out and together with the abolitionist movement. To participate in abolitionist activities was a crucial occasion for non-enslaved women to form themselves as political subjects. For not only could they learn the technical skills of public struggle, as Angela Davis argued, but as “they petitioned against slavery,” they “were compelled simultaneously to champion their own right to engage in political work.”50 Even if it was not against their own oppression, at first, their participation in movements that demanded the change of laws radically transgressed what the juridically defined positionality of “womanhood” commanded at the time. Feminists politicized themselves against the prohibitions of a systematically patriarchal world which, even after the republican revolutions in America and France or the proclamation of individual rights, declared their lives a ‘private matter’ to be determined by fathers and husbands—relegated to the same legal authority that the Greeks called oikos and the Romans dominium, the power of ownership. But these abolitionist radicalisms could not be confined to the discourses of liberalism and republicanism that early struggles against slavery and patriarchy still tried to transform. Turning the vocabulary of Abolition against liberal and republican formations of power in themselves, the anarchist and communist movements emerged as the most radical sections of proletarian struggles for liberation. Seven years after the British Empire passed the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, Proudhon called on the French government in What is Property? Or, An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government to put “an end to privilege, the abolition of slavery, the equality of rights, and the rule of law.”51 As the intellectual founder of the anarchist movement, whose aim he proclaimed in abolitionist terms as the establishment of a society in the complete “absence of a master,” Proudhon opens his famous treatise as following:
Depriving someone of their freedom of thought, their will, and personality would be immediately understood as the wrong of slavery, as the theft of one’s entire life, transformed into the property of another. Proudhon, however, argued that all property relations would be constituted by theft. For every form of property would essentially be an “appropriation” that takes away from others what should be held “in association” with everyone else, if the French Revolution’s principles should still be authoritative for all politics: “If you want to enjoy political equality, abolish property.”52 It was only a comprehensive “abolition of the proprietary regime” itself, not only the ownership in human beings, that could overcome all conditions of “tyranny” of which slavery was only the most extreme form. By challenging the legitimacy of property claims in human beings, abolitionist politics certainly destabilized the liberal and republican inviolability of property rights. But Proudhon’s analysis politicized and turned into a public matter what abolitionists before him did not put into question, that is, the organization of the material conditions that determine if and how human beings can satisfy their needs. For the power to dispose of such matters was legally circumscribed by liberal as well as republican politics as a ‘private affair’ of individuals freed from any governmental interference. There is maybe no more striking example for the centrality of the charge of slavery in the formation of anarchist politics than Proudhon’s polemic that “communism is oppression and slavery.”53 Communist politics, specifically in its Marxist formation, have indeed aimed at a proletarian collectivization of property through the abolition of private property rights and wage labor, which Proudhon judged as nothing less than the collectivization of slavery. Similar to Proudhon, as well as de Gouges and Wollstonecraft in the case of patriarchy, Marx used the conditions of chattel slavery as the comparative extreme of domination to analyze the conditions of the proletarian worker. But Marx explicitly countered Proudhon’s demand of an enforced increase of wages as “nothing but better payment for the slave, that would not win either for the worker or for labour their human status and dignity.”54 The wage-system would continue conditions of “forced labor” since the wage is not paid for the “satisfaction of a need: it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it.” That is, according to Marx, the needs of capital subjecting workers to a form of labor that systematically impoverishes them for the sake of enriching the small class of those who have been granted the right to own society’s means of production as their private property. Similar to the worker enslaved as chattel, the wage laborer would in this way continue to be ruled “under the dominion, the coercion, and the yoke of another man . . . the capitalist or whatever one chooses to call the masters of labor.” And it was precisely this conceptualization of the normative status of wage labor, elaborated in the Parisian manuscripts of 1844, that would inform Marx and Engels’s Manifesto of the Communist Party four years later. The very “alienation” that Marx attested to labor under capitalist modes of production, by juridically separating workers from their means of production, was conceptualized along abolitionist registers as the effect of a tyrannical form of power that constitutes the proletariat as enslaved by capital’s absolute rule. For whoever works for wages has no legitimate authority over the determination of one’s economic conditions, no right to decide on what is produced, how it is produced, and distributed, kept under the absolute claims to power of those who can juridically own the means of production as ‘private property.’ It is precisely how the masses of wage workers, as the Manifesto claimed, become the “slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself.”55 As the discourse of abolition echoes in its famous final acclamation, the “proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains,” which they can only break if they collectively seize the means of production—when so-called ‘economic’ conditions are no longer controlled as the private property of a few and turned into the public control of those who make the factory work. Marx thus certainly conceptualized a political theory of the factory as a kind of modern “social hell,” as contemporary republican interpreters would have it, as a tyrannical space of multiple and intricate, concrete and abstract formations of power through which capital attempts to maximize the absolute subjection of the working body to a ruthless regime of extracting labor time—without any legitimate right to dissent such rule.56 But the modern ‘household,’ the modern oikos of the factory, was not so much imagined by Marx as the real inferno of Dante on earth but as the slave plantation of the metropolis. The discursive space of the communist movement allowed to conceive the conditions of wage labor as wage slavery, and Marx continued to develop this conception against the backdrop of the logics of power that organized chattel slavery even after his theoretical shift to the critique of political economy: “autonomous wealth as such can exist only either on the basis of direct forced labour, slavery, or indirect forced labour, wage labour.”57 Marx’s entire political-theoretical work could itself be conceived as an attempt to multiply the abolitionist conception of slavery. As he unmistakably referred to the actual colonial conditions of chattel slavery in the Americas in his 1867 preface to the first volume of Capital, “after the abolition of slavery [in the United States], a radical transformation in the existing relations of capital and landed property is on the agenda.”58 The universalization of the wage-system as the dominant form of labor exploitation would have brought about the most clear-cut antagonism between capital and labor, for “the veiled slavery of the wage labourers” could not maintain itself anymore on “the unqualified slavery of the New World as its pedestal.”59 And as he set the normative horizon of his project toward the end of the third volume of Capital: “From the standpoint of a higher socioeconomic formation, the private property of particular individuals in the earth will appear just as absurd as the private property of one man in other men.”60 But what made the institution of chattel slavery appear “absurd” in the first place was the achievement of the rebelling slaves of the American colonies and their humanitarian supporters, who radically changed the West’s established understanding of one of its most traditional formations of power—the right to “private property of one man in other men”—into an unqualified and indefensible political wrong. The historical emergence of the modern struggles against patriarchal subjection and the capitalist domination of proletarian workers must be located, as I have tried to show, in the context of abolitionist politics. And their radical extensions of the concept of slavery to the experience of being dominated by patriarchy, property, and wages cannot be understood as a merely ‘strategical’ or ‘metaphorical appropriation’ of the dominant emancipatory grammars of their time.61 Not only did these opponents of patriarchy and capitalism place themselves within this very abolitionist horizon by drawing explicit political connections to both the modes of domination and the coalitional solidarities of those enslaved in the colonies as chattel. Beyond this, it was the struggle against chattel slavery itself that enabled the extraordinary strength and achievements of feminist and proletarian contestations throughout the nineteenth century. As enslaved people and their abolitionist supporters challenged both the normative legitimacy as well as the disciplinary sustainability of the transatlantic slave economy, they unsettled the traditional normative division of ‘public’ and ‘private matters’ through which slavery had been justified from antiquity to modernity. But it was precisely the same juridical register that fathers and husbands, lords and capitalists used—even in democratic, republican, or liberal regimes—to legalize their absolute claims to power over women, children, and material means of production. Against this analysis of the concrete juridical discourses of power, it was politically most consistent for early feminists, anarchists, and communists to theorize patriarchal and proletarian forms of domination as similar and akin—though not identical—to the enslavement of human beings as chattel. What unities these forms of domination are the absolute authorizations of power that patriarchs, masters, and capitalists assert over those they reduce to their ‘private affair.’ The kinship between those subjected as chattel, by patriarchy, and wages lies in their shared subjection to a juridical discourse of power that, since antiquity, has sought to subsume them under the realm of ‘household’ and ‘economy.’ The subjection of women and children under patriarchal norms as well as the domination of proletarian workers by the values of capital could only be challenged so forcefully in the course of the nineteenth century, because these movements emerged in a historical context in which abolition won through militant and humanitarian struggles had become the highest value of all political action. 4. A Long Nineteenth Century of Abolition: The Ongoing Struggle Against Slavery The nineteenth century was marked by the hegemonic emergence of a multitude of movements that demanded, to invoke Audre Lorde’s famous phrase, a total dismantling of the master’s house which from antiquity to modernity, even in democratic and republican regimes, was founded on chattel slavery, patriarchy, property, and wage labor. The abolition of one, chattel slavery, made precarious the legitimacy and protection of all other forms of domination that mark the history of Western politics. Orlando Patterson was right, therefore, to argue that property-claims were certainly crucial to the institution of chattel slavery but not exclusive to it, since women, children, and wage-workers would to some degree also be owned by husbands, fathers, and capitalists—even if not in the same, extreme degree as people enslaved as chattel.62 Patterson also analyzed the ways in which the power of each of these fundamental social differentiations of domination depended on the power of all the others. Chattel slavery served an immense class-stabilizing function by granting even poor citizen without slaves with “a sense of honor.” Decades before Patterson, also W.E.B. Du Bois conceptualized a similar ideological mechanism of whiteness as a “sort of public and psychological wage” that the “white group of workers” receives “while they received a low [monetary] wage.”63 Even if exploited by the rich, white workers could deceptively feel themselves as being part of the “free,” the legally free people of the polity. But wherever the distinction between masters and slaves was the only existing social differentiation, slave-societies were impossible to maintain because of their lack of a poor class of citizens without slaves who could always be mobilized against the resistance of people enslaved as chattel. The protection of the institution of chattel slavery systematically depended on the institution of other forms of social subordination, which must themselves be super-ordinated to chattel slavery, such as wage-workers, non-enslaved women, and children who can perceive themselves as free while being dominated by the male, capitalist master-class. Every revolutionary movement, as Walter Benjamin famously meditated, rests on an “image” of liberations in the past that inspires its own forms of struggle.64 The leaders of the French Revolution were fueled by the image of a resurrected Roman Republic in which the modern bourgeoisie should occupy the seats of the patrician ruling class of antiquity. However, the “oppressed past” that mobilized the modern proletariat and the movement against patriarchy were not the plebeians of ancient Rome. The oppressed ancestors that were recognized by revolutionary feminists and socialists as their true political ancestry were the rebelling slaves of antiquity and modernity—those without rights, citizenship, property, or wages. Marx and Engels famously proclaimed that communism was “haunting Europe” like a “specter.”65 But, in fact, what Europe was haunted by was the specter of slavery whose radical dissidents articulated the universalism of freedom from which feminist, anarchist, and communist liberations could be born. This continuation of the abolitionist project beyond the abolition of chattel slavery must be understood as a rather different version of what Hartman conceptualized as the “afterlives of slavery.” It describes not only the continuation of anti-Black racism in differently institutionalized social structures, but also the formation of a radical tradition of struggle aiming at the universal abolition of slavery and all of its racialized, gendered, propertied, and waged afterlives. This is why the struggle for abolition is ongoing, unresolved, and continuously reactivated until today. *** Acknowledgements: I am deeply grateful for the numerous interlocutors that helped me with this project, especially Andreas Kalyvas, J.M. Bernstein, Sandipto Dasgupta, Nikita Dhawan, and Ann Stoler, who have accompanied this work at all of its stages. I would also like to thank Judith Butler, Daniel Loick, Robyn Marasco, Vanessa E. Thompson, the anonymous peer-reviewers and Managing Editor Agnese Di Riccio for their thorough feedback. I am indebted to the participants of several conferences where I presented versions of this paper, the 2022 Political Concepts Graduate Conference and the 2023 Philosophy Graduate Conference at the New School for Social Research, the 2023 London Graduate Conference in the History of Political Thought at Queen Mary University, and the 2025 Radical Critical Theory Circle on Nisyros. Published on September 19, 2025 * Jochen Schmon * 1. Rather than functioning as a formal concept distinguishing radicalism from reformism across different political causes, the notion of “Abolition” became synonymous with the cause of abolishing slavery in the second half of the eighteenth century, and hence only became a political concept through its historically concrete connection to that specific normative project (see Christopher L. Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006]; Marcel Dorigny, ed., The Abolitions of Slavery: From L.F. Sonothax to V. Schœlcher, 1793, 1794, 1848 [New York: Berghahn, 2003]). This is precisely why what today is called “abolitionism” names a distinct and ongoing tradition of struggle against the different forms of racial domination that have succeeded the colonial system of slavery, such as racial segregation, disenfranchisement, mass incarceration, or policing.↩ 2. Slavery was abolished neither as a necessary consequence of “falling profit rates” of the plantation colonies, as the historical materialist Eric Williams argued, nor through what humanitarian interpreters such as Seymour Drescher describe as a miraculous capacity of slave-holding societies to sacrifice economic prosperity for “moral progress.” As Robin Blackburn has paradigmatically argued against these approaches, the most fundamental factors were the persistent and innumerous forms of disobedience, fugitivity, and rebellions carried out by enslaved people themselves (see “The Role of Slave Resistance in Slave Emancipation,” in Who Abolished Slavery? Slave Revolts and Abolitionism: A Debate with João Pedro Marques, ed. Seymour Drescher and Pieter C. Emmer [New York: Berghahn, 2010], 169–179). The discursive paradigms that were used to justify slavery have certainly drastically changed over time, but the institution of slavery itself always had a stable legal basis until its abolition in the course of the nineteenth century (see David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966]).↩ 3. Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Anti-Slavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 17.↩ 4. See Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020) and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket, 2021).↩ 5. Saidiya V. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 26:6 (2008): 13; For some of the paradigmatic scholarship on the systematic role of racial domination in the historical emergence of European Enlightenment and liberalism’s discourses on rights, see Anthony Pagden, Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination: Studies in European and Spanish-American Social and Political Theory, 1513–1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); Uday S. Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); and Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993).↩ 6. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “On the Social Contract, Or Principles of Political Right (1762),” in The Basic Political Writings, trans. and ed. Donald A. Cress (London: Hackett, 2011), 156ff.↩ 7. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. and ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 38.↩ 8. Benjamin Constant, “The liberty of the ancients compared with that of the moderns (1819),” in Political Writings, trans. and ed. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 314.↩ 9. G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), 18f.↩ 10. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Gerald E. Bevan (London: Penguin, 2003), 223, 368ff.↩ 11. That neither of these paradigmatic authors can be claimed as “abolitionist” is expressed by more than their omission of popular struggles for abolition. Rousseau even proclaimed that “in their chains slaves lose everything, even the desire to escape” (“On the Social Contract,” 158). Kant argued for a decisive exception to his own categorical imperative for severe “crimes,” in the case of which one “may indeed be kept alive, but he will be made a mere tool of another person (either the state or another citizen).” in The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 139f. And Hegel misconceived Napoleon Bonaparte as one of the most profound “world-historical individuals” in the progressive struggle for human equality, instead of the world-historical collective of rebelling slaves and abolitionist activists. Still, none of the canonic pre-abolitionist philosophers of the Western tradition, from Plato to Montesquieu, ever articulated a universalist condemnation of slavery (on this point, see David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, vii–xi).↩ 12. All preceding quotes come from Olympe de Gouges, “Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen (1791),” in Women in Revolutionary Paris: 1789–1795, trans. and ed. Darline G. Levy, Harriet B. Applewhite, and Mary D. Johnson (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 89–96; Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Janet M. Todd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 276. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What Is Property?, trans. and ed. Donald R. Kelley and Bonnie G. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 13; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848),” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978), 479.↩ 13. In conceptualizing the distinction of ‘public’ and ‘private matters,’ ‘politics’ and ‘economy,’ as “juridical forms,” I follow Michel Foucault, who emphasized the historically contingent character of legal paradigms. In his view, these paradigms never refer to social realities ‘as they are’ but operate as discursive claims of state power that try to shape continuously contested social realities after their own norms (see “Truth and Juridical Forms (1975),” in Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. James D. Faubion, vol. 3 (New York: The New Press, 2001), 65–72.↩ 14. Aristotle, Politics, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1944), I.2. For social histories of ancient philosophy, and the paradigmatic status of Aristotle in particular, see Ellen Meiksins Wood and Neal Wood, Class Ideology and Ancient Political Theory: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle in Social Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); G.E.M. de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World: From the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 69–80.↩ 15. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1926), VIII.11–16. Leo Strauss has emphasized the distinguishing feature of Aristotle’s philosophy in its conception of politics as truly distinct from the form of rule that characterizes the “economic” sphere. Plato and Xenophon did not consider the “art of household management” as essentially different from the “art of managing the polity.” Both would depend on the application of the “royal art,” the wise rule of one citizen that, in turn, constitutes for Aristotle a tyrannical, even anti-political form of rule when applied to citizens, see On Tyranny, ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 32–42, 100–107.↩ 16. Cicero, On the Republic. On The Laws, trans. Clinton W. Keyes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1928), I.43. For a short conceptual genealogy of republican theorizations of freedom, its reactivation in early-modernity, and subsequent repression by liberalism, see Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). However, Skinner’s inquiry falls dramatically short in offering an account of the conceptually and socially systematic underside of republican liberties in the history of Western politics and its paradigmatic theoretical crystallizations, that is, the legalization of various forms of unfreedom and domination as ‘private matters.’↩ 17. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, ed. C.B. Macpherson (Cambridge: Hackett, 1980), 111. On the political significance of Locke’s writings for the making of colonial slavery and regimes of dispossession, see David Armitage, “John Locke, Carolina, and the ‘Two Treatises of Government,’” Political Theory 32:5 (2004): 602–627; Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018). On early liberalism’s shared and avowed commitment to slavery, see Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History (London: Verso, 2011); Louis Sala-Molins, Dark Side of the Light: Slavery and the French Enlightenment (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).↩ 18. On the decisive ways in which republican principles of power served as the normative staging ground of liberal modernity, complicating neo-republican claims to distinguish itself from liberal conceptions of emancipation, see Andreas Kalyvas and Ira Katznelson, Liberal Beginnings: Making a Republic for the Moderns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Ellen Meiksins Wood explains this continuity on the basis that certain social aspects have remained stable and central problems in Western politics, such as “the autonomy of private property, its relative independence from the state, and the relation between these foci of social power” (Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Antiquity to the Late Middle Ages [London: Verso, 2008], 21).↩ 19. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 87, 7. On the conception of tyrannical forms of government in Western political thought as “slavery” while justifying enslavement for non-citizens, see Mary Nyquist, Arbitrary Rule: Slavery, Tyranny, and the Power of Life and Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). On the ancient Greek “tyrannicide” legislation and its translation in Roman critiques of dictatorship, see Andreas Kalyvas, “The Tyranny of Dictatorship: When the Greek Tyrant Met the Roman Dictator,” Political Theory 35:4 (2007): 412–442.↩ 20. Xenophon, “Hiero,” in Scripta Minora, ed. E.C. Marchant (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1993), IV.3–5. Plato also pointed to this central function of the polis as a defense apparatus against slave-rebellions, which an isolated slave-owner could never achieve by himself, see Republic, trans. Emlyn-Jones-Pretty (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1935), IX.578. For the history of slavery and its resistance in ancient Greece and Rome, see Sara Forsdyke, Slaves and Slavery in Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021); Zvi Yavetz, Slaves and Slavery in Ancient Rome (New Brunswick: Transaction Press, 1988).↩ 21. On the radicalization of slave resistance in the British colonies, for which Tacky’s Rebellion was the first culmination point, see Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982). At the end of the eighteenth century, the issue of “Abolition” filed the most petitions to the British Parliament ever seen before and was approved by the House of Commons in 1792, only to be suspended by the House of Lords. Abolitionist associations were founded in every single major city, organizing public speakers and information sessions, printing and distributing abolitionist writings, illustrations, coins, and buttons. After heavy campaigning against the consumption of sugar, the most profitable and popular commodity produced by enslaved labor, over 300,000 Britons began to refuse buying the “sinful good” (see Seymour Drescher, “Whose Abolition? Popular Pressure and the Ending of the British Slave Trade,” Past and Present 143:1 (1994): 136–166; Jenny S. Martinez, The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Law [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012]).↩ 22. Olaudah Equiano, “The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789),” in The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin, 1995), 171, 111.↩ 23. Frederick Douglass, “The Significance of Emancipation in the West Indies (1857),” in The Portable Frederick Douglass, ed. John Stauffer and Henry L. Gates, Jr. (New York: Penguin, 2016), 291f. My approach of conceptualizing abolitionist activities as “acts of translation” owes much to Judith Butler’s theorization of popular assemblies as forms of political action that can communicate their normative demands without the use of speech, whose assembling bodies can be interpreted as articulating specific political claims without necessarily discursively demanding them (see Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015], 1–11).↩ 24. Xenophon, “Hiero,” Book II.5–11. Or, as Ann Laura Stoler would have it, a “colony is a ravaged home,” it “is rendered un-homely for those on whom it is imposed, as well as for those to whom it is offered as a stolen gift” (“Colony,” Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon 1 (2012), available at: https://www.politicalconcepts.org/colony-stoler/ [last accessed August 15, 2025]).↩ 25. Philmore, Two Dialogues on the Man Trade (London: J. Waugh, 1760), 54. David Brion Davis has described Philmore’s pamphlet as “the most radical antislavery doctrine . . . found in any publication that appeared before the French Revolution,” and it became one of the most frequently recited documents at the founding ceremonies of abolitionist associations (see “New Sidelights on Early Antislavery Radicalism,” The William and Mary Quarterly 28:4 [1971]: 590ff.). The 1760 slave rebellion in Jamaica, named after its leader Tacky, was the most forceful emancipatory war that the Western world experienced since the 1688 English Revolution. Even if the Imperial Army eventually crushed the rebelling slaves after one week, their actions left behind the most significant financial and moral devastation for the British Empire, a devastation only surpassed by the American Revolution (see Vincent Brown, Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of An Atlantic Slave War [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020] and Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004], 167–192).↩ 26. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 86.↩ 27. Ibid.↩ 28. J. Philmore, Two Dialogues on the Man Trade, 7f. The first of these radical associations was the British Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, founded in 1787. As Equiano, one of its most influential members, wrote in an open letter to the English Parliament: “The Subject of Slavery is now grown to be a serious one, when we consider the buying and selling of Negroes not as a clandestine or piratical business, but as an open public trade, encouraged and promoted by Acts of Parliament. Being contrary to Religion, it must be deemed a national sin” (“Open Letter to the Reverend Raymund Harris; Author of the book called ‘Scripture Researches on the Licitness of the Slave Trade,’ 28 April 1788,” in The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, 337).↩ 29. Nicolas de Condorcet, “Reflections on Black Slavery (1781),” in The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Boston: Bedford, 1996), 56f. For his founding document of the first French abolitionist society, see “On Slavery: Rules for the Société des Amis des Noirs (1788),” in Political Writings, ed. Steven Lukes and Nadia Urbinati (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 150.↩ 30. Abbé Raynal, Philosophical and Political History of the Settlement and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies, 3 vols. (Glasgow: D. McKenzie, 1812), vol. 2, 52f. The multivolume and continuously edited Histoire des deux Indes was largely written by Raynal, and popularly credited to him, but major parts were contributed by other philosophes, such as Denis Diderot, Alphonse Dubreuil, or Paul-Henry d’Holbach. Over thirty different editions were published between 1770 and 1787 in France and over fifty abroad, hailed by progressive political writers across the bord, from Thomas Paine to Hegel or Marx (see Michele Duchet, “Diderot collaborateur de Raynal: à propos des «fragments imprimés» du Fonds Vandeul” Revue d’histoire litteraire de la France 60 (1960): 531–56.↩ 31. Quentin Skinner, “Some Problems in the Analysis of Political Thought and Action,” Political Theory 2:3 (1974): 294–297.↩ 32. Dehistoricized accounts of liberalism as supposedly based on the universality of “equal individual rights,” and thus oppositional to colonial dispossession and slavery, became paradigmatic after World War II, from Isaiah Berlin’s seminal Two Concepts of Liberty (1958) to John Rawls’ late reaffirming defense in Justice as Fairness (2001). On this point, see Charles W. Mills, “Racial Liberalism,” PMLA 123:5 (2008): 1380–1397. Regardless of how convincing their attempts to normatively distinguish themselves from liberal frameworks might be, contemporary proponents of republicanism also claim its principle of “non-domination” to include “freedom from slavery” without historicizing their own abolitionist transformation (Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, 36–41, 85–91; Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997]).↩ 33. See Reinhart Koselleck, “The Eighteenth Century as the Beginning of Modernity (1982),” in The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 154–169. Even if they rather bemoan this transformation, Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss agree with Jürgen Habermas on this point (see “Modernity: An Unfinished Project (1980),” in Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, ed. M.P. d’Entreves and Seyla Benhabib [Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996], 38–58; Hannah Arendt, “Tradition and the Modern Age (1954),” in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought [New York: Penguin, 2006], 17–40; and Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 120–164). And even the most radical critics on the left, from Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno to Foucault or Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in their outrage over persistent conditions of human inequality and unfreedom only seem to confirm that the modern age irresistibly established normative expectations for universal emancipation (see Nikita Dhawan, Rescuing the Enlightenment from Europe: Critical Theories of Decolonization [Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming 2026]).↩ 34. For a radically political conception of social normativities in their necessary foundation in law, instead of morality, see J.M. Bernstein, “Rule of Law,” Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon 3 (2018); available at: https://www.politicalconcepts.org/rule-of-law-jay-bernstein/ (last accessed August 15, 2025). This is precisely why the beginning of a politically-defined modernity can only be marked by the beginning of the specific struggles that fought to change the political normativity of the Western world, that is, to change the existing legal registers that have been legislated for governments to enforce what Max Weber has called collectively-binding decisions for their governed populations.↩ 35. Abbé Raynal, History of the Settlement and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies, 2:316f. On the immense public awareness in the imperial metropolises for the Caribbean slave insurrections, not least generated by abolitionist organizing, see Carl L. Lokke, France and the Colonial Question: A Study of Contemporary French Opinion, 1763–1801 (New York: AMS Press, 1968); Lucy Mayblin, “Never Look Back: Political Thought and the Abolition of Slavery,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 26:1 (2013): 93–110.↩ 36. See Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 1–29; Sybille Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).↩ 37. Georges Biassou, Toussaint L’Ouverture, and Jean-François Papillon, “Letter to the General Assembly, July 1792,” in Toussaint L’Ouverture: The Haitian Revolution, ed. Jean-Bertrand Aristide and Nick Nesbitt (London: Verso, 2008), 6.↩ 38. On the imperial rivalry over St. Domingue, sparked by the uprising of enslaved people, that strategically forced the French government to abolish slavery as the last resort to keep the colony (see David P. Geggus, Slavery, War, and Revolution: The British Occupation of Saint Domingue, 1793–1798 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1982]).↩ 39. Georges Biassou, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Jean-François Papillon, “Letter to the General Assembly,” 5. On the particularistic limitations of republicans and European Enlightenment thinkers as well as the merely gradualist approaches of French abolitionists, from Diderot and Raynal to the Amis des Noirs leaders Brissot and Condorcet, see Nick Nesbitt, Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 129–152; William B. Cohen, The French Encounter with the Africans: White Response to Blacks 1530–1880 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 60–99.↩ 40. Toussaint L’Ouverture, “Proclamation, 29 August 1793,” in Jean-Bertrand Aristide and Nick Nesbitt, eds., Toussaint L’Ouverture, 1f.↩ 41. Toussaint L’Ouverture, “Haitian Constitution of 1801,” in Jean-Bertrand Aristide and Nick Nesbitt, eds., Toussaint L’Ouverture, 46f. On Napoleon’s attempt to reintroduce slavery, see Jean-Marcel Champion, “30 Floréal Year X: The Restoration of Slavery by Bonaparte,” in The Abolitions of Slavery, ed. Marcel Dorigny, 229–237.↩ 42. Toussaint L’Ouverture, “Letter to the French Directory, July 1797,” in Jean-Bertrand Aristide and Nick Nesbitt, Toussaint L’Ouverture, eds., 22–25. C.L.R. James enlisted this declaration of war by Toussaint under “the great documents of the time” and Western civilization as a whole, comparable to “Pericles on Democracy, Paine on the Rights of Man, the Declaration of Independence, or the Communist Manifesto,” for it perfectly “incarnated the determination of his people never, never to be slaves again,” in The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1962), 197f.↩ 43. For similar critiques of Habermas and the problematic thesis of a French inauguration of political modernity more generally, see Nick Nesbitt, Universal Emancipation, 41–80; Susan Buck-Morss, “Universal History (2009),” in Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), 79–151. What distinguishes my approach from Nesbitt and Buck-Morss is that I neither understand Haiti as the expression of a “radical alternative legacy” of modernity nor as its “radical underside.” The Haitian Revolution is the inauguration of modernity, for it was only then that the principle of universal emancipation was implemented into constitutional law.↩ 44. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 2006), 40f. ↩ 45. Massimiliano Tomba, Insurgent Universality: An Alternative Legacy of Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 26–29.↩ 46. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History (1971),” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 2, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 2001), 378–381.↩ 47. Olympe de Gouges, “Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen,” 91–96. On her deep engagement in abolitionist discourses, also with her 1789 theater play L’Esclavage des nègres, ou l’heureux naufrage, see Christopher L. Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 109–141.↩ 48. Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 221–225, 62–67. On her formation in one of the centers of English abolitionism, see Moira Ferguson, “Mary Wollstonecraft and the Problematic of Slavery,” in Feminist Interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Maria J. Falco (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1996), 125–151; Janet M. Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).↩ 49. Ibid., 8f.↩ 50. See Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage, 1983), 40–43; on the coevalness and collaboration of the feminist and abolitionist movement, see Kathryn K. Sklar and James B. Stewart, ed., Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).↩ 51. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property?, 13ff, 209. On the influence of the abolitionist movement on Proudhon and early anarchists most generally, see Lewis Wayne Perry, Radical Abolitionism: Anarchy and the Government of God in Antislavery Thought (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1973).↩ 52. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property?, 32, 187f.↩ 53. Ibid., 197.↩ 54. Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” in Marx & Engels Collected Works, vol. 3 (New York: Lawrence and Wishart, 2010), 275–280.↩ 55. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” 479, 500.↩ 56. On the conception of the factory as a modern “social hell,” see William Clare Roberts, Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). For other republican interpretations of proletarian subjection, see Alex Gourevitch, “Labor and Republican Liberty,” Constellations 18:2 (2011): 431–454; Bruno Leipold, Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024).↩ 57. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin, 1973), 325.↩ 58. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990), 92ff. Especially in the antebellum period, Marx and Engels published many critiques of the slave economy of the Americas in which they articulated an unqualified and necessary solidarity between workers dominated as chattel as well as by the wage system (see Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Civil War in the United States, ed. Andrew Zimmerman [New York: International Publishers, 2016]). Robin Blackburn has emphasized this American influence on Marx’s theory of capital as well, specifically through a reading of his letter exchange with Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, see An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln (London: Verso, 2011).↩ 59. Karl Marx, Capital, 925–929.↩ 60. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 3, trans. David Fernbach (London: Penguin, 1991), 911. I thank J.M. Bernstein for referring me to this decisive abolitionist passage.↩ 61. For some of the paradigmatic problematizations of the usage of the concept of slavery for patriarchal oppression in early feminist discourses, attesting a decisive obfuscation of the differences between white patriarchy and colonial slavery as well as its extreme intensification of patriarchal conditions over enslaved women, see Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834 (New York: Routledge, 1992); Doris Y. Kadish and Françoise Massardier-Kennedy, eds., Translating Slavery: Gender & Race in French Women’s Writing, 1783–1823 (Kent: The Kent State University Press, 1994). For recent exemplary rejections of the concept of slavery for the theorization of proletarian subjection, specifically in Marx’s use of “wage slavery,” see Frank B. Wilderson, “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal,” Social Justice 30:2 (92) (2003): 18–27 and Denise Ferreira Da Silva, Unpayable Debt (London: Sternberg Press, 2022).↩ 62. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018), 21–25 and 92–100.↩ 63. W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935), 700f. C.L.R. James was aware of this as well when he described how the disproportionately small number of a non-enslaved middle class, which could be mobilized against slave rebellions, was one of the decisive reasons for the success of the Haitian Revolution, see The Black Jacobins, 30–41.↩ 64. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History (1940),” in Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 395ff.↩ 65. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” 473.↩ |
Jamal Cyrus