Beholden: From Freedom to Debt

Abstract

Beholden: From Freedom to Debt Kennan Ferguson I. Freedom’s End What does it mean to be free? Freedom: the goal sought by liberals and revolutionaries alike, its optimal form hotly debated within political philosophy, a guiding light orienting constitutions, laws, and property rights. But the value of freedom—its intrinsic desirability—is rarely called into question, even amongst conservatives who otherwise question license.1 Every right-thinking political goal, it is presumed, aims at an increase in freedom, whether for the person or the polis. In 1991, however, Orlando Patterson developed a new conceptualization of liberty. Rather than simply presuming freedom as a social good, or an implicit individual desiderata, Patterson asked a genealogical question about it: who, precisely, wanted freedom? When and why did it emerge?2 The location of freedom at the pinnacle of social and political values, he noted, had a particularly Western track, from Ancient Greece to Christianity to modern politics. His answers to this question “whence freedom?” were threefold, reaching progressively backwards through time. Most recently, it became universal within early Christianity, which managed to combine the ideal of personal salvation and freedom. This was preceded by a conceptualization of women as the site of personal freedom, especially in their natalism (the ability to generate new humans) and in their embodiment of inner freedom (in the works of Aeschylus and Sophocles, for example).3 Most importantly, however, was its source: an imagined opposition to the horror of slavery. Without the absolute antithesis of autonomy, namely hereditary bondage, one cannot truly aspire to freedom. That is why, Patterson argues, freedom does not emerge as such in what he calls the “non-western world.” He notes that, for example, people from the Americas to the “near east” to Asia had long fought for many things: honor, status, family, safety. These other things could be lost and gained, and as such were worth striving for and discussing. But not freedom.4 The conditions of matrilineal lifetime bondage never appeared in these societies, even though they experienced enemies in long-term captivity, or outlaws reduced to servitude. The condition of [End Page 574] trans-generational slavery, in other words, generates the question that drives Greek, Roman, and Christian political philosophy: how does one protect freedom? Patterson’s history of freedom illuminates many aspects of its development: emerging in times and places where the particularities of slavery meant that some people’s entire life—and, usually, the lives of their children—would be spent in bondage. Patterson thus cleverly redeploys Lord Acton’s quip that “the history of freedom was the history of the thing that was not” into a recognition that what “is not” can birth what is.5 Through the complex interplay of racialization, inheritance, and human ownership, freedom emerged as a reactive ideal, a conceptual goal embedded in the time of its opposite. Freedom has always been slavery’s shadow. Patterson’s reconceptualization illuminates critical aspects of freedom: its connection to the slave trade, to the degradation of women, to settler-colonialism, to racialized capitalism. And yet this rendition, powerful and convincing as it is, fails to account for one critical aspect of freedom: its contemporary power. For freedom’s potency—its status as a shining ideal, a beacon of for all peoples individual and collective—remains undiminished many generations after the defeat of matrilineal lifetime slavery as a state-sponsored institution. With slavery dead, why is freedom still with us, still evocative, still sublime? This essay asks this question twice over. First, why do we still love freedom so much; why do even those who are most harmed by the vagaries and predations of certain kinds of liberty (e.g., capitalism, prejudice, religious hatred) continue to promote it as the primary political ideal? Second, what does this love of freedom obscure? What gets lost, forgotten, or junked in the contemporary dedication to freedom? My conclusion is that freedom should not be unthinkingly valorized, but rather suspected, questioned, and possibly rejected. This essay investigates one possible alternative to freedom, one which is as denigrated as freedom is cherished: indebtedness. What if we think of the latter as a different kind of state, one which might even...