Aristotle, Slavery and Us

Abstract

Modern readers of Aristotle’s Politics are understandably embarrassed by his defense of slavery. We often attempt to minimize the embarrassment by presenting his endorsement of slavery as a mere reflection of his time and place. I argue that this approach misrepresents Aristotle’s project and fails to grasp what we most have to learn from it. Careful attention to the text shows that Aristotle’s treatment of slavery is an innovative piece of philosophical work and a substantial revision of slavery as it existed in the ancient Greek world. I show how Aristotle develops his defense in close dialogue with certain radical critiques of slavery. Aristotle’s position turns out to have surprising points of affinity with these critiques, in particular in regarding as wholly insufficient standard defenses of slavery that ground slavery in legal conventions arising from warfare. Once we open ourselves up to engaging with Aristotle’s argument as serious philosophical work, the essential problem we encounter is to recognize that it is at one and the same time intellectually ingenious and morally abhorrent.