Mary Nyquist. Arbitrary Rule: Slavery, Tyranny, and the Power of Life and Death.

Abstract

In this immensely learned, lucid, and challenging study, Mary Nyquist analyzes an early modern phenomenon that she tags “antityrannicism” (p. 1): a form of literature that glorified the ideal of political liberty while denouncing the tyrant who would snuff it out, all the while saying little about (when not actually serving to rationalize) the emerging world of transatlantic slavery. Her compelling project directs us to experience this literature anew, not as protagonists of the Western tradition of liberal democracy, but as skeptics attuned to its ambiguities and its ability to produce rival forms of argument, most notably with respect to the legitimacy of chattel slavery itself. Arbitrary Rule: Slavery, Tyranny, and the Power of Life and Death traces the complex history of this phenomenon from its initial manifestations in ancient Greek and Roman taxonomies of tyranny and slavery through early modern political theories of sovereignty and the state. Part of the challenge of reading this book stems from its ambitious scope: Nyquist purports to take on an entire tradition of Western thought that assumes the interdependence of political liberty and slavery. But, as is often the case with studies positioned vis-à-vis such a broadly conceived tradition, the actual participants in the theoretical debates Nyquist so skillfully dissects hail from a relatively narrow, albeit deeply influential, set of geographical and chronological parameters. The book's early chapters move, somewhat abruptly, from ancient Greek and Roman commentaries on the free/slave polarity to the rise of sixteenth-century theories embracing resistance to tyranny. These latter include literary accounts of the biblical story of Jephtha, one of ancient Israel's judges, whose vow to sacrifice his daughter provides the foil for several English commentaries about the need to limit both the patriarch's authority over his children and the magistrate's rule over his people. There is intermittent treatment of early modern Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch antityrannicism (Grotius's account of the law of nations figures in some revealing pages). Nyquist devotes considerably more attention to French writers like the jurist Étienne de La Boétie and (especially) Jean Bodin, whose ability to combine a classically informed defense of absolutism with a robust critique of household slavery Nyquist memorably captures.