Freedom (Vol. 1)
by Orlando Patterson
Summary
Patterson sets out to explain where the Western idea of personal freedom came from, and arrives at an answer most readers find counterintuitive on first hearing: it came from slavery.
His argument is that freedom is not a natural or universal human value that societies gradually recognize. Most societies in history have not organized themselves around it and have not especially prized it. It became central to the West, Patterson contends, because the ancient Mediterranean world contained mass slavery on a scale that made its opposite thinkable. People who could see enslavement in front of them every day developed an idea of what it meant not to be enslaved, and that idea was then elaborated, contested and inherited.
This first volume traces three distinct forms of freedom, personal, sovereignal and civic, from antiquity through the Middle Ages, and much of the intellectual pleasure lies in watching Patterson keep them apart. The freedom to do as you like, the freedom to make others do as you like, and the freedom to participate in collective self rule are not the same thing, and a great deal of confusion in ordinary political talk comes from treating them as one.
It is a work of historical sociology and it reads like one. The argument is patient and heavily evidenced rather than brisk, and Patterson builds slowly through Greece, Rome and the early Christian centuries before the shape of the whole becomes visible. Readers who want a thesis delivered in the opening chapter will find it withholding.
Give it the attention it asks for and it will permanently change how you hear the word freedom used, particularly by people who assume it has always meant what they mean by it.
Historical Context & Significance
Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, the first volume of a projected larger work, was published by Basic Books in 1991 and won the National Book Award for Nonfiction that year.
Patterson, a Jamaican born sociologist at Harvard, had already established himself with Slavery and Social Death, a comparative study which argued that slavery is best understood as a condition of total powerlessness and dishonor rather than as a form of property. Freedom is the sequel to that insight, following the idea outward from the institution he had already anatomized.
The book has had a long life outside its own discipline, and the distinction it draws between personal, sovereignal and civic freedom is now regularly borrowed by political theorists and historians who arrived at it through Patterson.