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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
The Paradox of Freedom is an exploration of the life and work of Orlando Patterson, probing the relationship between the circumstances of his life from their beginnings in rural Jamaica to the present and the complex development of his intellectual work. A novelist and historical sociologist with an orientation toward public engagement, Patterson exemplifies one way of being a Jamaican and Black Atlantic intellectual. At the generative center of Patterson's work has been a fundamental inquiry into the internal dynamics of slavery as a mode of social and existential domination. What is most provocatively significant in his work on slavery is the way it yields a paradoxical insight into the problem of freedom - namely, that freedom was born existentially and historically from the degradation and parasitic inhumanity of slavery and was as much the creation of the enslaved as of their enslavers. The Paradox of Freedom elucidates the pathways by which Patterson has both uncovered the relationship between domination and freedom and engaged intellectually and publicly with the struggles for equality and decolonization among descendants of the enslaved. It will be of great interest to students and scholars throughout the humanities and social sciences and to anyone interested in the work of one of the most important public intellectuals of our time.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION: ORLANDO PATTERSON AND THE PARADOX OF FREEDOM’S BIRTH FROM SLAVERY
The Paradox of Slavery and Freedom
The Existential Birth of Freedom from Slavery
The Historical Birth of Freedom from Slavery
Dialogical Generations, Intellectual Traditions, and Problem-Spaces
Notes
THE PARADOX OF FREEDOM
A Mother’s Project
Years of Decolonization
Kingston College
University College of the West Indies
The Repairer of the Breach
The Rise of the Social Sciences
The London School of Economics
West Indian Fiction
The Children of Sisyphus
The Sociology of Slavery
The Caribbean Artists Movement
An Absence of Ruins
Returning Home
Not Much of a Joiner
Die the Long Day
Arrival at Harvard
Engaging Black America
Making Public Policy in Socialist Jamaica
Slavery and Social Death
The Paradox of Freedom
The Ordeal of Integration
Rituals of Blood
The Confounding Island
The Perspective of an Historical Sociologist
Notes
INDEX
Plates
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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The Paradox of Freedom
A Biographical Dialogue
David Scott
Orlando Patterson
polity
Copyright Page
Pages 23–213 were originally published as “The Paradox of Freedom: An Interview with Orlando Patterson,” in Small Axe, 17/1 (40), pp. 92–242. © 2013, Small Axe, Inc. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyright holder, and the present publisher, Duke University Press, www.dukeupress.edu
Pages 1–22 and 214–241 © David Scott and Orlando Patterson 2023
The right of David Scott and Orlando Patterson to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2023 by Polity Press
About the cover image: This series was commissioned by Small Axe for a project entitled “The Visual Life of Catastrophic History” with funding provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The prints were published in Small Axe 40, March 2013.
Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5116-3
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5117-0 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022945713
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The original interview on which this book is based was conducted over a number of sessions between June 2010 and December 2011 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was first published in Small Axe, no. 40 (March 2013): 96–242. For the Polity publication, the interview was expanded and, where necessary, re-edited, between late January and May 2022. As ever, I am grateful to Orlando Patterson for his generosity and patience through the several sessions that constituted our long conversation and his willingness to respond to the additional questions I put to him for the republication. What I have learned through this process is beyond measure. I once more thank Catherine Barnett for her careful transcription of the original interview, Liberty Martin for her work on the revised and updated version, and Juliet Ali for help with the images.
David Scott
INTRODUCTION: ORLANDO PATTERSON AND THE PARADOX OF FREEDOM’S BIRTH FROM SLAVERYDavid Scott
The Paradox of Slavery and Freedom
What is the relationship between domination and freedom? This is undoubtedly an old and tenacious question that haunts at least the archive of Western culture, where freedom is presumed to be a sacred value. More specifically, though, what is the relationship between enslavement, arguably the most extreme form of domination, and freedom? I mean here not only freedom thought of as a civic and political value but moral and existential freedom as well. What is the relationship between slavery and the individual experience of personal freedom? What is it to aspire to freedom as a value from a condition in which it is non-existent, in which freedom is violently withheld? Or, to put this a little differently, in order to highlight the sheer novelty of freedom as a positive value: What does it mean to live in anticipation or hope of, or longing for, a value of non-enslavement? Might there be a relevant sense in which the experience of freedom as a novel and incomparable and inextinguishable value depends precisely upon the background experience of its radical deprivation and suppression, and especially its deprivation and suppression in the experience of heritable enslavement? Are freedom and slavery perhaps more closely (if you like, dialectically) connected than has typically been thought? The historical story of freedom in Western culture is often told as though this anointed value grew out of the heads of Western intellectuals, especially from the liberal Enlightenment onwards, as though it was the achievement of an act of consummate White European intelligence. But it might well be wondered whether this isn’t really no more than a familiar self-serving story – that is, the celebrated autobiography of White liberal freedom. Is it worth considering whether slavery and freedom are not simply contingently and randomly connected but integrally and internally fastened to each other such that their traces and their shadows intermingle? And, if it is true that freedom is deeply and fundamentally intertwined with slavery, what are the moral and political implications for how we think of this most revered and sanctified of values, both for the past and for the present, both for the ruled and for those who rule?
In my view, though he might not have posed them in quite this way, these are the sorts of questions that have motivated and animated a significant dimension of Orlando Patterson’s thinking for more than five decades. They are the sorts of questions that not only constitute a recognizable thematic in the subject matter of his work but register also, at a deeper level, I believe, a broadly recurring pattern or motif of preoccupation. I want to suggest that in a certain respect they point to a pre-critical intuition concerning the paradoxical relation between freedom and slavery. Part of what Patterson came to understand, I believe, perhaps only dimly and incompletely at first, but gradually and with sharpening illumination and a broadening archive, is that, coming as he does from a certain form of life, an historical society that has been shaped – fundamentally, and maybe even persistently, chronically – by the powers of colonial plantation slavery, namely Jamaica, he could discern, almost as a form of implicit, embodied knowing, the ways in which these momentous universal questions about freedom’s origins and standing had a humble and poignant and also immutable particularity. (Indeed, we will see that, across the length and breadth of his work, the problem of the relationship between the “general” and the “particular” has necessarily been a recursive issue in Patterson’s thinking.) Already in the archive of the Jamaican slave experience, he had formed an awareness of the need to defamiliarize our assumptions about freedom’s self-evidence. For Patterson, Jamaica has always been distinctive in the history of New World slavery (not only distinctive in its barbarity, but distinctive also for being long devoid of elementary social cohesion), and, as wide or as global as his scholarly lens has become, it remains a comparative point of reference – and return.1 In his hermeneutic itinerary, Jamaica is simultaneously the concrete ground of historical particularity and an instance of moral universality.
Patterson makes the point about the densely paradoxical relationship between slavery and freedom with subtle insight and personal allusion in the preface to Freedom in the Making of WesternCulture, to my mind his conceptually most ambitious book. He writes:
Originally, the problem I had set out to explore was the sociohistorical significance of that taken-for-granted tradition of slavery in the West. Armed with the weapons of an historical sociologist, I had gone in search of a man-killing wolf called slavery; to my dismay I kept finding the tracks of a lamb called freedom. A lamb that stared back at me, on our first furtive encounters in the foothills of the Western past, with strange, uninnocent eyes. Was I to believe that slavery was a lamb in wolf’s clothing? Not with my past. And so I changed my quarry. Finding the sociohistorical roots of freedom, understanding its nature in time and context, became my goal, and remained so for these past eight years.2
I think, in a sense, that something about the very ethos – and, even, cast of mind – of Patterson’s life’s work is evoked in this complex passage. Uncannily, in the relentless scholarly attempt to grasp the nature and meaning of slavery as a mode of domination, in the historical specificity of Jamaica as well as in world-comparative perspective, Patterson has the disconcerting experience of persistently finding himself in the presence of freedom. How odd is that? How puzzling? But this freedom that stands there in the path, mocking his understanding of slavery, is not a pure and innocent virtue, a wholly untainted value. Rather, it has about it the ambiguous odor of an unwholesome and degraded origin. It is not, Patterson suspects, that slavery was other than he thought it was all along, a power of absolute bondage; it is not that slavery was masquerading in borrowed clothing, playing at what it plainly is not. Certainly, the lamb and the wolf are not identical. But they are not unfamiliar with each other either. What Patterson recognizes is that freedom is both more and less than it has been presumed to be in Western history; freedom has a more intimate and therefore more complex relation to slavery than has usually been taken to be the case in the idealized and teleological histories that characterize the West’s autobiography. Patterson recognizes that freedom is a paradoxical and tragic value: the good of freedom is inextricably tied to the evil of slavery.
It is a very curious but also very well-known (if not very well-advertised) fact that historically, at least in those worlds written into the authorized story of Western culture, it is precisely in the great slave-owning societies that freedom emerged as a deep and profound and cherished value – among slave-owners and their backers and ideologues, that is. Think of Cicero, the Stoic statesman and philosopher of virtue, duty, and libertas in ancient Rome whose freed slave, Marcus Tullius Tiro, would publish his former master’s speeches and letters. But, closer in time and influence, think of the Englishman John Locke, in the seventeenth century, and the American Thomas Jefferson, in the eighteenth. The modern value of liberty that Locke and Jefferson proclaimed, and that we have inherited, depended on an asymmetrical structure in which White slave-owning men enjoyed its possession while their enslaved Blacks suffered its radical dispossession.3 But is there, perhaps, another story of freedom, not so hegemonic as this one, in which the value of freedom emerges not simply from the powerful but from the powerless, not from the enslaver’s abstracted experience but from the “social death” of the enslaved? This would be a counter-story in which the great idea of freedom comes to us not from the rarefied minds of free intellectuals but from the social suffering of the enslaved and the lowly militancy of antislavery struggles. This is the story Patterson aims to tell.
In this introductory essay, I have a relatively limited aim. I do not offer a comprehensive introduction to Orlando Patterson’s life and work. That is largely the purpose of the text that follows, the biographical interview. My hope, of course, is that the interview will help to complicate our sense of the trajectory of Patterson’s life and work, invite us to better discern the continuities and discontinuities that mark its still unfolding path, the provocations and motivations that drive its concerns, the sensibilities and sensitivities that animate its preoccupations – and perhaps, in so doing, help to minimize the simplifications and superficialities that too often characterize engagements with his work, whether those engagements are dismissive or embracing.4 My more modest aim in this introduction is to suggest only an orientation to the paradox of slavery and freedom I believe is at the center of Patterson’s work, and indeed has been in a foundational way. And, in order to do this, what I offer in the next two sections is a provisional map of an itinerary in his work that traces passages from an account of the existential birth of freedom from enslavement to the reconstruction of the historical birth of freedom from slavery in Western culture. In the last section I seek briefly to situate the text of the interview that follows within the project from which it emerges and the kind of understanding I believe the interview form encourages. I shall suggest that the content and the form of the interview are connected – that it is partly the interview’s dialogical reconstruction of the successive problem-spaces that mark out Patterson’s intellectual formation that enable us to discern the contours of the relationship between the existential and the historical birth of freedom from slavery.5
The Existential Birth of Freedom from Slavery
There cannot be many contemporary scholars, of any geopolitical provenance or literary and philosophic sensibility, who have appreciated Albert Camus more thoughtfully or more provocatively than Orlando Patterson. Indeed, the influence runs long and deep. Patterson’s 1964 novel, The Children of Sisyphus, is a meditation on the absurd and suicide in relation to the abject social-racial conditions of the Black poor in early post-independence Jamaica.6 Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus is clearly one of its influences. Patterson’s novel is a reflection on the fundamental moral question that Camus invites us to ponder, namely: How should we judge whether, in the face of its mute exigences and impenetrable opacities, life is worth living?7 The feeling of absurdity, Camus wrote, a mundane and not a philosophic awareness, arises out of the simple, irreducible fact that our lives and our worlds do not seamlessly correspond. The question is, does the ineradicable fact of the absurd dictate suicide or hope – or, again, neither, a way of living, like Sisyphus, with deliberate and stoic resignation? This is the question Patterson explores through his memorable characters Dinah and Brother Solomon and the absurd predicaments they earnestly navigate. Dinah is a prostitute trying desperately to escape the dead ends of her intractable circumstances, and Brother Solomon is a Rastafarian intellectual complicit in forging a false hope of deliverance among his followers. Neither, in the end, can evade the Sisyphean claim on them: Dinah, violently attacked on the very eve of her final, triumphant, escape, returns defeated to the neighborhood of her origins to die; and Solomon, having exhausted the means of sustaining the deception he has perpetuated on his expectant disciples, chooses suicide rather than face up to the implications of his actions.
Arguably, too, An Absence of Ruins, Patterson’s 1967 metaphysical novel of intellectual despair and postcolonial rootlessness and disorientation, is trying to get to grips with a chronic condition of anomie and alienation of a sort that shapes Camus’ The Stranger.8 Camus’ 1942 novella, remember, arid and monotone in mood, centers on the character Meursault, the strangely affectless French settler in colonial Algeria who, with seeming indifference, kills an Arab man and is eventually executed for his crime. He seems a man without the quality of conviction, merely going through the motions of life, a man unable even to deceive himself into conventionally grieving at his own mother’s funeral. Meursault, it appears, is a man whose life is a question he cannot answer, who intuits the absurd and senses he cannot escape its remorseless claim on him. Notably, in Patterson’s novel, similarly restlessly, unsparingly barren in mood, his protagonist, named, suitably, Alexander Blackman, does not commit murder – though, in a cynical critique of cynicism, a self-deceiving attempt to undermine his deceptions and self-deceptions, he does fabricate his own suicide. Blackman, an intellectual recently returned to newly independent Jamaica to teach at the university, feels chronically at odds with the mimicry and bad faith of his fellow intellectuals, radicals no less than conservatives, but also at odds with himself and his own cruel, squalid dishonesty. He refuses the choice imposed on him: either a progressivist believer, on the one hand, or a conformist Afro-Saxon, on the other. What the language of belonging and freedom and purpose should be he does not – yet – know, and he lives somewhat adrift, like a castaway, in futile search of an authentic ground that would make the absurdity of his condition habitable, until, acknowledging his failure, he flees, once more, to London, the solicitous city of salvation.
If, in these works of Patterson, it is the dynamics of the absurd in Camus’ early work that motivate the fiction, in other work it is Camus’ The Rebel that is the real generative influence.9 Readers of The Rebel will recall that this sometimes opaque philosophical essay bears a complicated, perhaps even impossibly embattled, relation to the earlier work on suicide and the meaning of life. Published in 1951, almost a decade after The Myth of Sisyphus (a work very much of the war years of the Nazi occupation of France), The Rebel intervenes in the post-war French debate concerning the legitimacy of violence, and political murder most especially. Patterson, it is true, is not necessarily uninterested in the question of the political justifications for violence – after all, the historiography of slave revolts, to which he has importantly contributed, brings this problem squarely into the historical picture.10 But what specifically arrests his attention is the way, in The Rebel, Camus frames the question of the moment of refusal in the interminable cycle of domination. What precipitates the moral crisis in which a subjugated individual no longer “agrees” to be dominated, in which they no longer accept what has for so long been endured? Here, at the ontological level of Being, is Patterson’s question. Still more crucial is the fact that at the figurative center of The Rebel is the image of the slave. It is through the condition of the enslaved that Camus, albeit in a metaphysical Hegelian idiom, figures the existential birth of freedom. “What is a rebel?” Camus asks, in the memorable opening sentences of his book. “A man who says no: but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is also a man who says yes as soon as he begins to think for himself. A slave who has taken orders all his life, suddenly decides that he cannot obey some new command. What does he mean by saying ‘no’?”11 In the dialectic of recognition the book portrays, the emergence of the slave’s consciousness of her slave condition is at the same time the emergence of her self-consciousness of the absurdity – and wrongness – of that condition. It is the beginning of the experience of universality.
In answering the question that he poses (the meaning of the slave’s “no”), Camus describes a borderline beyond which the slave is not prepared to go, a moral-psychological limit beyond which she or he is unwilling to continue enduring the existing wrong. Up until this point, Camus says, the slave has remained “quiet and, in despair, has accepted a condition to which he submits even though he considers it unjust.”12 Then, somehow, the moment arrives when all at once the slave refuses to suffer any longer in abject silence. With newfound voice, she or he says no – and, thus, rebels. That no, however, is not merely a nihilistic act of pure negation. It is also, simultaneously, a vindicating act of affirmation, an implicit declaration that there is something worthwhile in her or him that will no longer stand being ignored, violated. In rebellion, the slave also says yes. As Camus writes of this moment:
He rebels because he categorically refuses to submit to conditions that he considers intolerable and also because he is confusedly convinced that his position is justified, or rather, because in his own mind he thinks that he “has the right to …”. Rebellion cannot exist without the feeling that somewhere, in some way, you are justified. It is in this way that the rebel says yes and no at the same time. He affirms that there are limits and also that he suspects – and wishes to preserve – the existence of certain things beyond those limits. He stubbornly insists that there are certain things in him which “are worthwhile …” and which must be taken into consideration.13
The event of rebellion, then, is a profound moment of self-awareness, a moment of dramatic self-recognition in which, as Camus puts it, there is, all at once, a perception that there is something in humanity with which she or he can identify. In short, the rebel slave abandons the particularity that ties her or him to the imposed – slave – status and identifies with the universality of human being as such. For Camus it is the moment when “interest” gives way to “right.” This is why, in his view, the act of rebellion has always to be all or nothing – because what has been denied by enslavement, namely, respect, cannot be repaired piecemeal but only in its immediate totality.14 This feature of universality is also why, in rebellion, what the slave affirms is not a narrow individual self-interest but a value held in common with others, even with the perpetrators of the injustice of slavery.15
This is the sensibility that shapes Patterson’s first monograph, The Sociology of Slavery, published in 1967, and also his third novel, Die the Long Day, published in 1972, a sort of fictive companion to the work of historical sociology.16 For Patterson, too, the central animating figure in his moral sociology of the Black Americas is that of the slave, paradigmatically the Jamaican slave. Indeed, more specifically, Patterson, one might almost say, is haunted by the figure of the Jamaican creole slave. Born into the abjection of generations of perpetual enslavement (and so without the African slave’s first-hand experience of freedom), and governed by the singular institutionalized powers of anomie and systemic violence of the slave plantation (and so without the African slave’s prior context of social value), it is with the creole slave that revolt emerges analytically as a distinctive existential problem. As Patterson writes in The Sociology of Slavery, while most slave revolts in Jamaica through the late eighteenth century were organized by African-born slaves,
in the last days of slavery even the creole slaves, who had never known what it was to be free, began to organize revolts against their masters, and the last and most damaging of all the rebellions remains a living memory of their struggle for something they had never experienced but for which they felt a need sufficiently strong for which to die.17
What accounts for this? How are we to understand the nature of the decision the creole slave makes in such circumstances to no longer accept their slave status and to risk life and limb for a value they have never known? The answer to these questions, Patterson suggests, is not to be found in quotidian material determinations or indeed in ideological ones – however important these are as shaping conditions. Something else is required. And here, invoking Camus, Patterson offers the phenomenological picture of the creole slave arriving at an existential crossroads where the burden of injustice has become simply unbearable, not in its brute weight so much as in its moral incongruity, because something has now been traduced, denied, beyond what was hitherto endurable. And this violation triggers an event of self-recognition wherein the slave “discovers a universal value” that at once “justifies and stimulates” an act of rebellion, or at least an act of rebellious refusal.18 What matters to Patterson, therefore, is above all the moral autonomy of self-determination that, in the final instance, and born of that moment of simultaneous recognition and affirmation of universality, propels the slave into unprecedented and decisive and irreversible action.19 It is hard to miss here the strains – however embattled – of a Hegelian phenomenology.
Memorably, it is this whole preoccupation that finds a poignant fictive form in Patterson’s Die the Long Day. Having arrived at the limit of empirical sociological description, Patterson mobilizes the resources of realist literary fiction to explore the interiority of slave ontology, to think about the emergence of an existential threshold beyond which the enslaved will not allow themselves any longer to be shackled to subpersonhood, subhumanity. Notably, Patterson epitomizes this moment in the figure of Quasheba, an enslaved mulatto woman of striking character: strong-willed, defiant, self-possessed, sometimes bad-minded. It is in Quasheba, I would argue, that we see the first adumbrations of Patterson’s later idea of “social death,” the defining condition of the enslaved that comes to conceptual realization in Slavery and Social Death. Quasheba is the embodiment of natal alienation, of the precarity of personal and familial legitimacy and of parental authority, the vivid expression of a condition of impotence and dishonor. Her daughter, Polly, as headstrong as her mother, is the object of the sexual predation of the sickly slave master of a neighboring plantation. Quasheba, who has unsuccessfully pleaded her case to the overseer of her plantation, arrives at length at the drastic point at which she can see no option but to try to kill the offending slave master. She fails, as it happens, and her end is sealed. Now, significantly, Quasheba commits an act of attempted murder, not an act of participation in collective (political) rebellion. Quasheba is not Nanny of the Eastern Maroons. She has arrived, not at a social critique of the system of plantation slavery, but at the personal capacity to refuse the degradation, violation, and humiliation to which she has been subjected from the day she was born. Indeed, she has arrived not merely at the rejection of what she has been made into but at the positive reappraisal of her selfhood, and with this new perspective she cannot any longer continue as she was. Quasheba claims for her wounded personhood the priority of an ontological or ethical universality. She is, as Jamaicans say, smaddy, somebody. As she admonishes her faithful but apprehensive lover, the ironically named Cicero (ironic because the Roman Stoic was not only a slave-owner but also an avowed humanist), who is urging her to remember her status and beseeching her not to pursue her determined course of action: “True me is a Neager. But me is human too and is only one time they can kill me.”20 This, for Patterson, is a passional moment of freedom’s birth: out of the absolute bondage to which Quasheba has been subjected by plantation slavery, she has invented an idea of personal freedom; she has redescribed herself as the self-determining agent of her own actions. It is a momentous and revelatory occasion, even if, for Quasheba, a frighteningly fatal one as well. And the cost in her life she pays underlines how, for Patterson, freedom is a fragile and tragic value.
Still, there is another moment in Die the Long Day in which the problem of freedom emerges somewhat differently against the background of slavery. I am thinking here of the character Benjamin, the servile quadroon carpenter who, incongruously (or not), in the complex racial genealogies that characterized eighteenth-century Jamaica, is actually Quasheba’s cousin.21 Indeed, the contrast between the actions of these creole slaves couldn’t be more different, and yet they are equally relevant for the relationship between slavery and freedom. Benjamin is portrayed as slightly pathetic, cravenly obsequious, endlessly in need of his oppressor’s approval, but it is in the quality of his dishonored status and his corollary search for manumission – his legal release from bondage – that the whole predicament of the hope for, and anticipation of, freedom is vividly explored. (It is often forgotten that, for Patterson, manumission has always been understood as a crucial index of the character of any slave regime, and it plays an important role in the wider story of the birth of freedom.) The episode in Die the Long Day that interests me is the one in which Benjamin learns that he is to be allowed at last to purchase his freedom, and he has gone to the capital, Spanish Town, to celebrate the occasion with his friend, the rather philosophical and dissipated near-White free colored Jason, who lives above a tavern of ill repute run by his unnamed mulatto “wife.”22 Benjamin is understandably elated at his coming change of status. After all, freedom is a value he cannot not aspire to. But, even as he elaborately prepares to set out on what should be a joyous evening, he has a nagging worry that his happiness may be purely contrived, a cruel deception, and so he has to keep reminding himself, absurdly, of the certainty of his happiness: “He was happy. He had to be happy. How else does a man feel after being a slave all his life and suddenly discovering that he is free? How else but happy? How else …?”23 The question lingers. And Benjamin will soon enough find out the unwanted answer. He decides to share his news first with his White Methodist minister, but the visit badly misfires when he falls afoul of the prevailing racial-gendered etiquette, and he begins to find himself roughly “chastised by his new status.”24 But it is only when Benjamin shares the good news with Jason that the full implications of his new freedom are brought home to him.
Jason is not only drunk, he is brilliant and merciless, in a shocking but endearingly empathetic way. He feels for Benjamin’s predicament; it is a mirror of his own. Jason tells the soon deflated Benjamin that, in reality, he is about to lose – to sell – one of the most “beautiful, simple guiding principles” of his life, namely, “the hope of freedom … the wish, the dream of freedom.”25 Benjamin, an innocent soul, does not follow. He now has freedom, surely, he declares; he no longer has to dream, to hope, to live only the fantasy of freedom. Reluctant to completely shatter his illusions, Jason nevertheless drives home that this is precisely the paradoxical point he is making:
So now you’ve got it there’s nothing more to hope for. The dream is over. You’ve gone and sold the goose that laid the golden egg of hope. A slave waiting for freedom is like one of those devout early Christians who lived a little after your Christ died, waiting for his second coming. Now you’ve lost it. Now you’re simply another one of us, lad. And there’s the tragedy. That’s why I mourn your freedom. Your God has come.26
But Jason is not done. Over Benjamin’s weak protests, he lectures him on the uselessness of the freedom of the free coloreds, who have made, and can make, little or nothing of their vaunted status. The society has no use for them. In a plantation slave society, only the slaves and the masters have any practical purpose. The society accords free coloreds limited rights and protections and few advantages. Not only in its positive aspect but also in its negative dimension, Benjamin’s freedom is virtually worthless. And finally, in a moving concluding gesture, Jason tells him:
You are like a man buying a primed-up old mule. You are buying all the burdens of freedom and none of its privileges. You say you want to be responsible for yourself. Take my advice, friend, for God’s sake. There’s no point being responsible if there is nothing to be responsible for. So you go back home, Ben. Go back to your cozy cabin and your work-shed. Until you are free to be somebody and to be what you know you want to be, it’s better to be what you have to be. Go back and try to learn to dream again. Go back home and learn once more to hope for freedom. But this time, promise me, you’ll hope for the real thing.27
As one might imagine, Benjamin is irretrievably devastated, mortified by Jason’s speech. But something hard has registered about the absurdity of his social and moral conundrum, about the inescapable paradox of a free colored’s freedom in the viciously binary world of racial slavery. Indeed, Benjamin returns to the plantation and immediately rescinds his request to purchase his freedom, much to his master’s bafflement. The whole episode rings eloquently with the reverberating echo of Camus: the birth of the existential desire for, and anticipation of, freedom in a context where the experience of its realization is most poignantly and desperately devoid of actual possibility. To be sure, Benjamin is not the admirably defiant Quasheba whose claim to personhood is her claim to universality. But here too, for Patterson, in the structure of expectancy and longing Benjamin so poignantly embodies in the abject ambivalence of his bi-racial personality, is one of the birthplaces of the value of personal freedom.
The Historical Birth of Freedom from Slavery
While the existential story of freedom’s birth from slavery in the specific historical context of Jamaica is told in the monograph The Sociology of Slavery and the novel Die the Long Day, the general and comparative-historical story of the birth of the value of freedom from slavery is told in Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, published in 1991 as volume 1 of a projected two-volume study simply titled Freedom. The second volume has not materialized. Almost as soon as Slavery and Social Death was published (in 1982), Patterson had begun to plot the ideas that would be central to the later work. Slavery and Social Death and Freedom in the Making of Western Culture are, in fact, profoundly interconnected books, the one laying out a general account of the nature of slavery and the other laying out a general account of the nature of freedom – the latter depends on the former. Moreover, though it is perhaps not typically read in this way, I believe Freedom in the Making of Western Culture is a key to understanding Patterson’s body of work as a whole, a decisive moment in a single unfolding project driven by the dialectic of slavery and freedom. In a certain sense, this comparative-historical sociology of freedom from slavery closes the hermeneutic circle of Patterson’s great exploration of the entangled relationship of these formative institutions that was opened in The Sociology of Slavery. Where this early monograph provided the working out of an intuition in the specific historical instance of Jamaica, Slavery and Social Death followed, and deepened and widened, the theoretical frame for thinking about the nature of slavery as such, as a system of domination, offering a conceptual idiom for naming and describing what slavery perpetrates on the enslaved. However, in the process of scaffolding this general, comparative work, Patterson discerns that slavery not only deprived and degraded the enslaved, not only produced natal alienation and social death; it also inspired in the enslaved a new, hitherto unheard-of value, namely, freedom. And, thus, the whole project of the social dialectic of slavery and freedom is realized in the last of the trilogy (as one might, in retrospect, call the series), Freedom in the Making of Western Culture. Arguably, everything about Patterson’s consideration of freedom depends on how he came to the problem he explores; how it came to him. Needless to say, in what follows I am not going to rehearse the argument of this long book in any detail. I intend only to sketch enough to foreground the rationale for the historical dialectic of slavery and freedom it develops.
It is sometimes supposed that Freedom in the Making of Western Culture is little more than a Eurocentric paean to the West’s achievement.28 But this is mistaken. Michel Foucault may not be among Patterson’s interlocutors, but, properly read, Freedom in the Making of Western Culture is a genealogy aimed at displacing the West’s most cherished, normative assumptions about the sources and standing of freedom. What Patterson offers is a deeply perturbing redescription of the self-image of Western civilization in which its most vile and despised institution, slavery, is shown to be the fertile source and inspiration of its most honored and celebrated value, freedom. Far from being the pristine and heroic value it appears to be in its own autobiography, a value steadily improved and fine-tuned from the ancient Greeks and Romans to the philosophers of modern liberal democracy, freedom is really a tragic value forever haunted by the dark and violent shadow of its degraded origins. Indeed, the West’s history of freedom, Patterson suggests, is a largely self-serving history empowered by disavowal. But, taken for granted though it so smugly and effortlessly is, there is nothing self-evident in freedom’s generalized esteem. “For most of human history,” Patterson writes, “and for nearly all of the non-Western world prior to Western contact, freedom was, and for many still remains, anything but an obvious or desirable goal.”29 Other values have been venerated more, among them, valor, courage, belonging, piety, glory, honor, justice, and so on. In its “inverted parochialism,” Patterson holds, the West has assumed that there was something lacking – wrong, backward, impoverished – in those forms of life that did not – or do not – recognize freedom’s virtue. To the contrary, Patterson argues, “it is not the rest of the world that needs explaining for its lack of commitment to freedom …; rather it is the West that must be scrutinized and explained for its peculiar commitment to this value.”30
As Patterson makes clear, what he is after in Freedom in the Making of Western Culture is not an exercise in the history of ideas or one in moral and political philosophy – though both are certainly involved. The book is meant to be an “historical sociology of our most important cultural value” framed around the following questions: How and why was freedom initially constructed as a social value? And, once invented, how and why did it emerge as the supreme value, as a kind of meta-value? Why did this rise to cultural hegemony take place only in the West? And what forces maintained its status as the core value of Western civilization?31 Patterson’s basic argument, as he says, is that “freedom was generated from the experience of slavery. People came to value freedom, to construct it as a powerful shared vision of life, as a result of their experience of, and response to, slavery or its recombinant form, serfdom, in their roles as masters, slaves, and nonslaves.”32 The insight that slavery and freedom are connected, Patterson allows, is not itself entirely new. For the modern period, the insight is already embodied in the work of David Brion Davis and Edmund Morgan and, for the ancient world, in the work of Moses Finley, Max Pohlenz, and Kurt Raaflaub. What Patterson offers is a sustained argument for recognizing the paradoxical dialectic of slavery and freedom, and one that demonstrates the distinctive role of women in the rise and consolidation of freedom’s value.
In characteristic fashion, Patterson starts off by offering a preliminary schema for thinking about the value. Freedom, he holds, is a triadic concept-value comprised of personal, sovereignal, and civic dimensions. Together they form a “chordal triad.” In any given context, one or other of the elements or “notes” in the triad may strike more emphatically than the others. The chords developed separately, he maintains, but by the Age of Pericles in the fifth century bc they were identified as dimensions of a single, interconnected idea of freedom. Personal freedom refers to the sense, on the one hand, of not being constrained by another in pursuing one’s desires and, on the other, that one can do as one pleases within the limits of another’s desire to pursue their own objectives. Sovereignal freedom refers to the power to act as one pleases regardless of the wishes of others. And civic freedom refers to the capacity of adult members of a community to participate in its life and governance.
Part I of Freedom in the Making of Western Culture is concerned with the prehistory of freedom, the emergence of the idea, prior to the consolidation of the value, of freedom in the non-Western world. As Patterson argues, the existence of slaves in “primitive” social formations meant that, almost necessarily, an idea about freedom was bound to emerge. But, given the social and economic conditions, what could not develop was the institutionalization of this idea as a shared social value and common aspiration. “A value emerges, is socially constructed,” Patterson writes, “only when a critical mass of persons, or a powerful minority, shares it and, by persistently behaving in accordance with it, makes it normative. Slaves by themselves could never have their aspirations institutionalized, being despised nonmembers of their masters’ communities.”33 Freedom as a social value emerged only with the Greek city-states, and the account of this development is offered in Part II of the book. It is, of course, a long and complex story, and it maps a series of fundamental transformations in ancient Athens between the end of the seventh century and the early fourth century bc – transformations that include, inter alia, the creation of large-scale agricultural estates dominated by slave and ex-slave labor; the emergence of a large slave population that economically sustained the aristocracy; the invention of the democratic state; the discovery of rationality; and the social construction of freedom as a central value comprised of the chordal triad personal, sovereignal, and civic freedom. Of these transformations, Patterson argues, the development of large-scale slavery was the ground of all the others. He traces the distinctive role of women in securing the ideal of personal freedom and maps the emergence of freedom as an “outer” material value as well as an “inner” or intellectual and spiritual value. Part III focuses on the Roman Empire and what Patterson calls the universalization of the value of freedom. With Rome’s “triumph over the Mediterranean and northern Europe,” he writes, “the idea of freedom completed its conquest of the Western mind in both its secular and its spiritual aspects.”34 Part IV offers an account of the place of Christianity as it emerged on the margins of the Roman Empire. What makes Christianity unique, Patterson argues, is that, of all the religions of salvation, the teachings of Jesus made spiritual liberation the foundational plank of its doctrine of deliverance from the forces of darkness. Central here, of course, is the story of Paul the Apostle, whose letters index a theology of redemption focusing on the process by which a suffering soul is released from spiritual slavery into the light of freedom. And, finally, Part V tells the story of freedom in the Middle Ages. Here, Patterson disputes the view that freedom was a negligible value during this period. To the contrary, he argues, “in the serf’s yearning and frequent struggle for free status, and the lord’s identification of his free status with honor and virtue,” one can recognize the “valorization and idealization of freedom in medieval society.”35
In the Coda that closes the book, Patterson stands back from the details of the historical sociology of the value of freedom from the degradation of slavery just concluded and offers something of a meta-reflection on the paradoxical moral implications of the story as a whole. Significantly (but perhaps not surprisingly, given the discussions of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in Part II), it is an explicit idea of the tragic that shapes Patterson’s picture of the paradox of freedom’s emergence from slavery. He writes:
The history of freedom and its handmaiden, slavery, has bruited in the open what we cannot stand to hear, that inhering in the good which we defend with our lives is often the very evil we most abhor. In becoming the central value of its secular and religious life, freedom constituted the tragic, generative core of Western culture, the germ of its genius and all its grandeur, and the source of much of its perfidy and its crimes against humanity.36
All three strands in the chordal triad of freedom – personal, sovereignal, and civic – are marked by an internal and, in fact, ineradicable tension between its vile and degraded sources and its radiant aspirations. Patterson, notably, is suggestively informed here by Martha Nussbaum’s great book on the nature of the tragic in Athenian philosophy and literature, The Fragility of Goodness.37 Readers of this book will recall Nussbaum’s central argument that the excellence of the good person is always vulnerable to the vagaries of chance and fortune, like a fragile vine (in Pindar’s well-known metaphor) always exposed to the contingencies of the elements. For Nussbaum, memorably, if also controversially, it is precisely this vulnerability that helps to constitute and nourish the excellence of the good itself.38 Now, Patterson’s intervention is less to disagree in any fundamental way with this view of the tragic than to subtly shift the emphasis in such a way as to offer a different picture of the intractable relation between good and evil. For him, it is not so much that goodness is fragile, which it clearly is, not so much that the good is always vulnerable to evil – for these formulations suggest too much that good and evil are external to each other, that evil comes from an outside to corrupt and subvert the unadulterated good. Patterson offers what strikes me as a more radical view, namely, that what we have learned to appreciate from the story just told is something more paradoxical – the “tragic interdependence of good and evil.”39 The evil of slavery and the good of freedom stand to each other not in a contingent relationship but in a constitutive one.
Here, then, is the historical arc of Patterson’s book mapping the historical emergence of the value of freedom from slavery in Western civilization. It is a remarkable reconstruction any way you look at it, representing the digestion and organization (and indeed reorganization) of a vast archive of canonical literature over which a phalanx of professional experts seeks to exert interpretive control. The historical facts matter, of course, not least to an historical sociologist such as Patterson for whom the relevant data are bread and butter to his enterprise. And, as one would expect, there are those who remain unpersuaded by the book precisely as a work of historical reconstruction.40 But, to my mind, this direction of criticism misses something vital in Patterson’s undertaking. In my view, the framing genealogical doubt is as central as the historical reconstruction itself – if not more so. Whether or not, in the end, you agree with the complex details of the history Patterson recounts from the materials he assembles (of ancient Greece and Rome, of Christianity and the Middle Ages), it is the provocative critical force of his argument that is to me most important – the intuition that animates and motivates the critical revisionary ambition the work embodies. And, arguably, this ambition is to lift slavery, that degraded but pervasive social form, from its conceptual obscurity and to place it (with all the discomfort this entails) at the historiographical center of the making of the central value of Western culture – note, not simply at the historiographical center of the making of a Jamaican world, or even of a modern world, but at the center of the making of that vaster world of Western civilization itself. To think of freedom, as we are endlessly obliged to do, given its exemplary place in contemporary life – personal, sovereignal, and civic freedom – is to at least tacitly acknowledge, implicitly invoke, the world-historical place of slavery as an institution, and of the enslaved (foundationally, the women among them) whose struggles against their natal alienation and social death made that value possible – indeed, gave that value its moral life. Those Jamaican slaves with whom Patterson began his intellectual journey – not least his vivid fictional characters Quasheba and Benjamin – are not merely exotic actors within a merely local drama in some peripheral and now irrelevant part of the former British Empire, but universal actors in a world-historical story that birthed the value of freedom in Western culture. This is Orlando Patterson’s point.
Dialogical Generations, Intellectual Traditions, and Problem-Spaces
Thinking about Patterson’s work in this way is, to me, inseparable from the arc of the interview that is the subject matter of the body of this book. It is therefore important to say something about this, something less about its content than its form, or, rather, the content of its form. The original interview with Patterson was conducted in his office at Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, over a number of sittings between June 2010 and December 2011. It was then published in the journal of Caribbean studies I founded and edit, Small Axe, in March 2013.41 The interview forms part of a larger project of interviews with Caribbean intellectuals aimed at mapping dimensions of what I call an anglophone Caribbean intellectual tradition. I have written about this work in some detail elsewhere and therefore will not rehearse here the entire scope of my concerns or argument.42 Nevertheless, a number of features of the process and point are of some significance and bear repeating here, however briefly, in order to properly situate the interview that follows.
To begin with, all the major interviews I have conducted for this project have an expressly biographical form. They are, so to speak, intellectual biographies, albeit on a relatively small scale. What is the relationship, they ask, between the circumstances of a life and the itinerary of its work? This is the question that interests me – or, anyway, came to interest me as I gradually found my feet within this form of inquiry over the decade or so I labored at it. Specifically, the interviews aim both to follow the chronological arc of an individual life (as it is shaped by its familial, educational, social, cultural, economic, and political conditions) and to connect the course of that life with the emergence of a distinctive path of moral, intellectual, and political concerns. The effort, therefore, is clearly one of a certain kind of contextualization. But the contextualization offered here takes on a particular form and orientation, what I have previously referred to as the reconstruction of problem-spaces. In a shorthand, by a problem-space I mean the discursive conjuncture in which questions appear as questions demanding answers. Arguably, then, in a conventional way, I am aiming to simply build up a picture of, as I say, the relationship between the distinctive circumstances in which a life is formed and socialized and the intellectual paths it takes. However, the specific aim of the contextualization I have in mind is less to observe the realized directions of an intellectual itinerary than to explore the milieu of questions, conundrums, and predicaments to which this itinerary appeared as the best mode of response. What really interests me is how my interlocutors formulated the questions that came to preoccupy them, what the discursive and non-discursive sources were of the hermeneutic paths they pursued. And this interests me partly because the interviews are less contributions to an intellectual history (though there is that too) than an attempt to map the internal contours of an intellectual tradition – one to which, admittedly, I also belong. Indeed, the project of the interviews is to link a number of dimensions of temporal experience, including generations, memory, traditions, and criticism, in a conceptual whole. I think of each of my interlocutors as being situated within the temporal frame of a generation, connected in an overlapping way to earlier and later generations, whose experiences of presents, memories of pasts, and expectations of futures are in a constant dynamic tension with one another. The relationship among these generations is one of inheritance – an inheritance less of specific ideas and perspectives than of complexes of rival arguments over what is shared from a broadly common past.
Methodologically, the interviews obviously have a dialogical character. They naturally unfold in the back and forth of question and answer linked together in a steady and recursive hermeneutic rhythm. Obviously, too, the exchange with my interlocutors is not, properly speaking, a conversation. The attitude and tone of the exchange is more formal, more deliberate, more directed, than a casual conversation. And, as an interview, the vector of inquiry is rather more one way than the other. My interlocutors and I are not reciprocally probing the formations of each other’s intellectual paths. And rightly so. There is something I want to know about the way an earlier generation formulated their questions and pursued their concerns, because this will help me not only to understand how they came to do what they have done, and are doing, but also how I, in turn, have come to inherit the pasts I have inherited, and in the way that I have inherited them. Here again we are in the embrace of the idea of an intellectual tradition and the agonism of inheritance. Nevertheless, the dialogue allows for an engagement that is at once exploratory, provisional, and participatory. My interlocutor and I are not establishing propositional truths, making final statements; we are engaged in an exercise of question and answer that, while more or less staged and directed by me, is nevertheless relatively open-ended and therefore unpredictable and primed for novelty and surprise. And, even though the dialogue is not symmetrical, it is participatory and cooperative inasmuch as the questions and answers are codependent, feeding off each other in an ongoing process.
Finally, it should be clear that the exercise involved in the interviews is not one of critique. Indeed, the interviews I’ve conducted are precisely one way of evading critique – that is, at least of side-stepping an attitude that critique often cannot help but embody, namely, an attitude of hubris, of assuming a superior and omniscient reason, of knowing more and knowing better than one’s interlocutor. On the one hand, as I have said, my concern in the exchange is not the attempt to discover a real truth below or behind my interlocutor’s supposed self-serving discourse. I am not exercising an interrogative hermeneutic of suspicion. Certainly, I am not interested in finding fault with my interlocutor’s claims or accounts or propositions. Nor, on the other hand, do I take everything I am told at face value. The interviews do not aim at agreement or consensus. I am not seeking to validate or celebrate or confirm or endorse the direction of intellectual life my interlocutor embodies. My objective, rather, is to challenge myself to listen and learn – and not in a passive but in an active way, in a probing, searching, but nevertheless receptive way. The interviews aim to practice a mode of attunement and critical awareness. My attitude, one might say, is shaped by a desire for an informed inheritance. And, therefore, my objective is, above all, clarification and elaboration, what I think of as the ongoing attempt to widen and deepen and complicate the contexts of intelligibility by which the pasts in their plenitude are made available to the interpretive present.43
It is primarily in relation to this conceptual orientation toward life and work that I have sought to think about the intellectual trajectory
