This helps to explain something really strange about our property law, which is derived from Roman law and has created terrible problems for jurists starting in the eleventh century. Our definition of property is that property is a relation between a person and a thing, whereby that person has absolute power over that thing. This definition doesn't make sense. For example, if you're on a desert island, you might have a deeply personal relationship with a tree on that island. You might well be talking to it every day. But do you `own' it? Well, it's kind of an irrelevant question unless someone else is there. In fact, property rights are relations, or arrangements, between people, about things. Our notion of freedom is similarly problematic. `Freedom' is the natural power, according to Roman law, to do absolutely anything you like - except for those things you can't do, either because of the law or because somebody's going to stop you. This is like saying that `the sun is square except insofar as it is round'. And people immediately pointed this out: by this definition, everyone is `free'. Slaves are `free' - after all, they can do anything they want except for those things they can't do. So why did they develop this absurd definition? The reason is that what Roman magistrates were imagining was in fact a relationship between two people of total power, which therefore renders one of them a `thing'. That's what slavery is all about. So you had this subtle shift in the meaning of freedom. Originally freedom meant `not being a slave', and so referred to people who had social relations. In fact the word `free' in English traces back to the same root as `friend' - free people are, as noted before, people who can make commitments and promises to others, which of course slaves cannot do. But then the definition shifts, so that it now refers to the power of the slave-owner. A `free' person becomes a person who has people they can do anything they want to, or who approaches the world as a set of properties in the same way - someone who has a personal private domain, within which they can do whatever they like. This definition has the advantage of not suggesting that freedom is unlimited except insofar as it is circumscribed. But it brings all these deeply perverse and contradictory notions into it: that freedom is not a product of social relations, but is in fact the negation of social relations. That has had a deeply insidious effect on how we look at the world.
Our notion of freedom is similarly problematic. `Freedom' is the natural power, according to Roman law, to do absolutely anything you like - except for those things you can't do, either because of the law or because somebody's going to stop you. This is like saying that `the sun is square except insofar as it is round'. And people immediately pointed this out: by this definition, everyone is `free'. Slaves are `free' - after all, they can do anything they want except for those things they can't do. So why did they develop this absurd definition?
The reason is that what Roman magistrates were imagining was in fact a relationship between two people of total power, which therefore renders one of them a `thing'. That's what slavery is all about. So you had this subtle shift in the meaning of freedom. Originally freedom meant `not being a slave', and so referred to people who had social relations. In fact the word `free' in English traces back to the same root as `friend' - free people are, as noted before, people who can make commitments and promises to others, which of course slaves cannot do. But then the definition shifts, so that it now refers to the power of the slave-owner. A `free' person becomes a person who has people they can do anything they want to, or who approaches the world as a set of properties in the same way - someone who has a personal private domain, within which they can do whatever they like. This definition has the advantage of not suggesting that freedom is unlimited except insofar as it is circumscribed. But it brings all these deeply perverse and contradictory notions into it: that freedom is not a product of social relations, but is in fact the negation of social relations. That has had a deeply insidious effect on how we look at the world.
But then the definition shifts, so that it now refers to the power of the slave-owner. A `free' person becomes a person who has people they can do anything they want to
That later definition is in Herodotus too. Free are those who take slaves, un-free are those that are taken as slaves. I suspect Graeber is wrong about the order here, there is no point of defining "free" as not-slave unless there are slaves about. A vote for PES is a vote for EPP! A vote for EPP is a vote for PES! Support the coalition, vote EPP-PES in 2009!
ZCommunications | Debt, Slavery and our Idea of Freedom (Part 1) by David Graeber | ZNet Article
That was something I had been vaguely aware of, but I hadn't realised, until I began researching, just how flagrant it was. In most human languages, the word for `freedom' means `the opposite of slavery'. Moses Finley pointed out a long time ago that it's not a coincidence that doctrines of political liberty tend to emerge from places where they have the most extreme forms of chattel slavery, whether it's ancient Athens or colonial Virginia, where Thomas Jefferson came from. But this is true on a much more profound level than I had ever imagined. In most societies a slave is essentially like the living dead: as a social person they've been killed. The idea is that they are someone who was captured in battle, their captive decided not to kill them (which he would have had every right to do), so essentially their previous life is gone and all they have left is a relation of total subordination to the person who was within his rights to kill them.
I suspect Graeber does not go far enough here, which is why he ends up with an "Originally freedom meant `not being a slave', and so referred to people who had social relations" and then "the definition shifts, so that it now refers to the power of the slave-owner". I suspect that free always meant being in the class that held slaves, in effect the winners side that got to take slaves. At least that is how I read Herodotos usage of word, and him writing in the 5th century BC he predated most of what we know of Roman history and culture.
Now I have to read the book to see if he backs that claim of an original meaning up and if so how. A vote for PES is a vote for EPP! A vote for EPP is a vote for PES! Support the coalition, vote EPP-PES in 2009!
