Aristotle on Slavery and
Household Management
“Insofar as Normal criticism takes ‘literature’ or ‘art’ to
consist only of those creations...which reinforce...capacities
for repression, bad faith, or genteel violence, it must be
seen as complicit in the very processes of self-denial that
characterize...consumptive societies.”
Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse
Gottfried Benn (a Nazi sympathizer)
on Culture and Slavery
“[E]verything that has made the West famous, which has
marked out its development, which is at work within it
even today, was created--let us be perfectly clear about it-in slave-owning states…History is rich in examples of the
pharaonic exercise of power being linked with culture; and
the song of this revolves like the starry vault.”
~ “Der neue Staat und die Intellektuellen,” text as in R.
Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories,
and Political Significance (Cambridge, Mass., 1999) 524
Base and Superstructure:
Karl Marx on Ideology
“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the
ruling ideas: that is, the class which is the ruling material
force in society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual
force. The class which has the means of material
production at its disposal, has control at the same time
over the means of mental production, so that thereby,
generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means
of mental production are subject to it.”
~ The German Ideology (R.C. Tucker, ed., The MarxEngels Reader, 172)
Binary Oppositions Revisited
The Overdetermined Slave
 Greek/Barbarian; Adult/Child; Male/Female; Free/Slave
 Important Historical Catalysts
 Persian Wars (490-479 BCE) and the Inferiority of the
Barbarian (Slave)
 Rise of Macedonia (mid-fourth century BCE)
 Conquest of Persia (Isocrates)
Aristotle (384-322 BCE)
 Student of Plato; passed over as head of Academy
 Lyceum in Athens (Rejection of Forms; Empiricism)
 Wide-Ranging Research Interests (rhetoric, botany,
zoology, logic, metaphysics)
 Tutor of Alexander III (“the Great”), King of Macedonia
 Politics and Constitutions (Athenaion Politeia)
Free/Slave Antinomy
in Aristotelian Thought
Intellect is to Body as Free is to Slave:
“For he that can by his intelligence foresee things
needed is by nature ruler and master, while he whose
bodily strength enables him to perform them is by
nature a slave, one of those who are ruled. Thus there is
a common interest uniting master and slave.”
(Politics, 1.2)
Free/Slave Antinomy
in Aristotelian Thought
Barbarian = Slave:
“So as the poets say, "It is proper that [Greeks] should
rule over barbarians", meaning that barbarian and slave
are by nature identical.”
(Politics, 1.2)
Climatic/Geographical Determinism
Aristotle, Politics, 1327b23-33
“The races that live in cold regions and those of Europe are full of
courage and passion but somewhat lacking in skill and brain power; for
this reason, while remaining generally independent, they lack political
cohesion and the ability to rule over others. On the other hand the
Asiatic races have both brains and skill but are lacking in courage and
will power; so they remain enslaved and subject. The Greeks, occupying
a mid-position geographically, have a measure of both. They continue to
be free, to have the best political institutions, and to be capable of ruling
over all others.”
Aristotle’s “Natural Slave” (Pol. 1.8)
“We may...say that wherever there is the same wide discrepancy
between two sets of human beings as there is between mind and
body or between man and beast, then the inferior of the two sets,
those whose condition is such that their function is the use of their
bodies and nothing better can be expected of them, those, I say, are
slaves by nature. It is better for them...to be thus ruled and
subject.”
Aristotelian Teleology and Slavery
 Human Purpose is Happiness and Self-Sufficiency
(Eudaimonia, Autarkeia)
 Oikos > Polis. Oikos Management Presupposes Slaves (cf.
Politics, 1.7)
 Just Wars and the Acquisition of Slaves (Politics, 1.8)
“It is part of nature's plan that the art of war...should be
a way of acquiring property; and that it must be used
both against wild beasts and against such men as are by
nature intended to be ruled over but refuse; for that is
the kind of warfare that is by nature right.”
Politics, 1.8
Reliability as Historical Evidence?
 Anti-Banausicism
 Polis According to Aristotle
 Alexander and the Cosmopolis?
Culture and Oppression?
Adorno and the Frankfurt School
“The general concept which discursive logic has
developed has its foundation in the reality of
domination.”
M. Horkheimer and T.W. Adorno, The Dialectic of
Enlightenment
Aristotelian Binaries and
the Origins of Orientalism
Edward Said and the Challenge of Orientalism
“Taking the late eighteenth century as a very roughly defined
starting point Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as a
corporate institution for dealing with the Orient--dealing with
it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it,
describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short,
Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring,
and having authority over the Orient.”
~ E. Said, Orientalism
Mahmud Ahmad al-Sayyid
20th-century Arab nationalist and intellectual
“Yes, we slur Gustav Le Bon; we disdain Shakespeare; we are
contemptuous of Dante, despise Voltaire, and moreover, we
dissociate ourselves from their world….They are the enemies of
true humanity and the clerics of the horrendous school of
imperialism.”