Attempt a critique of Aristotle’s ideas on slavery. (2006)
Book I of the Politics defends slavery as natural and good for master and slave alike: from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule. The defence covers only the natural slave, yet it fails on its own premises, was contested in his lifetime and later served every hierarchy that claimed nature’s sanction.
The Doctrine in Brief
- The natural slave has no deliberative faculty at all: he can follow reason but not form a plan, and is a living possession, an animate instrument of the household.
- The arguments are the universal pattern of ruler and ruled (soul over body) and mutual advantage: leisure for the master’s civic life, direction for the slave. Slavery by capture he treats as doubtful, since the war may be unjust.
Internal Incoherence
- No usable criterion. Nature, he admits, would like to give free and servile bodies different shapes, but the opposite often happens. An unmarked status cannot be verified, and nearly all Greek slaves were captives, the class he leaves unjustified.
- Persuadable, therefore rational. He wants slaves admonished, not merely commanded, and advises that liberty should be always held out to them as the reward of their services (Book VII). A being who can be reasoned with and freed has the capacity the doctrine denies.
- Contradicted by his own data. He ties natural slavery to barbarians, yet calls Asians intelligent and inventive and praises Carthage’s constitution.
- Nature read off convention. Ernest Barker called the theory a justification of a necessity: Athenian leisure required servile labour.
Critics Across the Tradition
- In his own day. Book I reports thinkers for whom slavery exists by law only, and not by nature and is therefore unjust; the sophist Alcidamas reportedly declared that nature has made no man a slave.
- Stoic. Lucius Annaeus Seneca (Letter 47) answered “They are slaves” with Nay, rather they are men, asserting common humanity without demanding abolition.
- Rousseau. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (The Social Contract, 1762, I.2): Aristotle was right; but he took the effect for the cause, for force made the first slaves.
- Kant. Immanuel Kant‘s rule that persons are ends, never merely means, negates the idea of an “animate instrument”.
- Marx. In Capital (1867) Karl Marx argued that Aristotle missed the equal human labour behind exchange because Greek society was founded upon slavery. Aristotle half-concedes this: if the shuttle would weave by itself, masters would not need slaves.
- Afterlife. At Valladolid (1550–51) Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda turned the doctrine against the peoples of the Americas; Bartolomé de las Casas refuted him.
The Indian Parallel
Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (Annihilation of Caste, 1936) attacked the same reasoning: caste is not merely a division of labour. It is also a division of labourers, fixed by birth, not aptitude. Articles 17 and 23 of the Constitution abolish untouchability and forced labour.
Conclusion
The structure is separable from the prejudice: falsify the empirical claim and the category of natural slave is empty. The habit is not, since reading existing hierarchy as nature’s purpose recurs in his treatment of women and labourers. His own premise refutes him best: if all humans possess logos, all are political animals.