Orlando Patterson's Freedom: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture
Elshtain, Jean Bethke
FREEDOM: FREEDOM IN THE MAKING OF WESTERN CULTURE, by Orlando Patterson. Basic Books, 1991. $29.95. 487 pp. No small projects for Orlando Patterson. Freedom is grand in scope, heartfelt, and...
...But the seeds were sown at the beginning...
...The "desire for personal freedom" he finds lurking even in preliterate "primitive beginnings," such as the Tupinamba peoples of pre-European South America who enslaved others and who eventually killed and ate those they enslaved...
...Finally, however, one can only urge this book on all fairminded readers...
...Men envied those above...
...Patterson takes seriously the early Christian claim that its savior came that they "might have life and might have it more abundantly...
...His dominant explanatory device is a master-slave dialectic whose dynamics Patterson discerns (no doubt with Hegel in mind) in classical antiquity...
...The West is different in that slavery, operating through a complex negative dialectic, served to generate its antinomy — freedom—but in a nuanced and differentiated way that permits no grand, cataclysmic synthesis...
...For example: one man's sovereignal freedom could spur another's yearning for personal freedom or lead intellectuals (Stoics, Sophists) to invent another category — inner or spiritual freedom—which would go on to become part of an "endless dialectic between social processes, social thought, and intellectual reflection...
...Second, how and why, after having been invented, did it emerge as the supreme value distinct from any number of other important values...
...Third, Patterson's cursory dismissal of Isaiah Berlin's classic work on liberty seems misplaced...
...This comes down to little documentation of a tangible sort, but is grounded, instead, on a series of "must have beens...
...Sovereignal freedom is the capacity to do as one pleases insofar as one can...
...But, in fact, his claims are so strong as to imply an urge that overflows the boundaries of social constructionism...
...If freedom is not a value (for example, in Tupinamba society where slavery never ripened into its opposite), how and why does the slave experience his or her condition as a fundamental violation...
...Paul is extolled for his great "emphasis on personal spiritual freedom as a universal value...
...Personal freedom means not being coerced by another...
...The three strong notes in the chord, for Patterson, are "personal, sovereignal, and civic freedom...
...By the end of the fifth and throughout the fourth century, freedom had become a universal value, but its three elements were rated differently depending upon whether one was a citizen, a slave, a male, or a female...
...The story of freedom, for Patterson, is the story of a persistent struggle through which freedom is defined in relation to a condition of unfreedomslavery and later forms of servitude...
...Where does this negative impulse come from...
...Most non-Western cultures thought little of the notion...
...I do, of course, have a list of concerns and caveats...
...At the same time, the Roman nobility enhanced and fleshed out the notion of civic freedom or libertas, an "elite conception of civic freedom...
...The slave, knowing the inevitability of the outcome, exhibited a "desperate yearning for escape and freedom...
...indeed, many had no word for it in the Western sense...
...Civic freedom is participation in the life of governance...
...The average woman of the sixth and fifth centuries, BCE, when viewing the slave, must have murmured, "There but for the gods and goddesses go I." We don't know this, but we can safely presume it, Patterson claims...
...Patterson introduces the concept of spiritual freedom as an inner realm or sphere, created in opposition to an external realm but different from the abstract intellectual freedom cherished by the likes of a Plato...
...Perhaps one can expect no tangible earthly rewards, but one can create a community based on agape, brotherly and sisterly love...
...Perhaps Patterson's most controversial move is to argue that men were the creators of civic freedom and women the preeminent bearers of the idea of personal freedom...
...First, Patterson's notion of sovereignal freedom includes little sense of freedom from imposition by an external force, the political and legal expression of which is nationalism...
...In other words, Patterson offers the story of a centuries-old and continuing struggle...
...God is softened—becoming "Abba" or "Daddy," thus undermining older terms of exclusion and hierarchy...
...So what is particular to the West that we made of freedom "our most important cultural value...
...But the same tripartite version of freedom persists, taking on its particular manifestations throughout the Roman world and culminating in the accession of personal freedom as "the supreme value of the vast majority of the city that ruled civilized Europe, including its working and elite women...
...Confinement, imprisonment, enchaining—these no human being seeks...
...He plays the whole chord in this book, and there is genuine power in the way he draws things to a close: Individually liberating, socially energizing, and culturally generative, freedom is undeniably the source of Western intellectual mastery, the engine of its extraordinary creativity, and the open secret of the triumph of Western culture, in one form or another, over the other cultures of mankind...
...Where Stoicism had failed its adherents through over-intellectualization divorced from "the method of faith," Christianity pushed the credo ut intelligam: one must believe in order to understand...
...And that "does not" is a big category —all non-Western societies...
...The facts that, today, almost all peoples embrace the ideal of personal freedom, whatever their actual practice, and that many have come to define the value as instinctively human in order to deny its essentially Western origins are telling testimony to its overpowering appeal and inherent goodness...
...Rome brings much of the irony of the ancient FALL • 1992 • 545 world full circle, universalizing freedom in part because it institutionalized a large-scale slave system...
...What makes human beings unique is that we can write books about it and build societies and constitutions on an edifice constructed out of our own most profound yearnings...
...One's evaluation of this question will be determined in part by the stance one takes toward Patterson's unpacking of the negative case—the "stillbirth of freedom in the nonWestern world...
...Patterson's case seems a bit thin here as he relies on what might be called "negative evidence...
...Patterson's thesis is robust: the West holds and has held the value of freedom as central...
...This is no doubt too tidy by far, and Patterson admits that the language of freedom in its tripartite personal, sovereignal, and civic meanings did not yet exist by the end of the sixth century BCE, yet freedom "as a social value" was already "well in existence...
...Many non-Western societies were slave societies...
...That is, when the value of freedom is upheld as a clearly constructed contrast to unfreedom, then and only then does the "master-slave dialectic" arise as slaves begin to yearn to negate their condition...
...I don't often review a book by offering a decocted précis, but that seemed the best tack to take with an effort as grand in design as Patterson's...
...In surrender to God, paradoxically, lies the mystery of freedom and the "good news" of a liberation from the social contract of late antiquity...
...This, in turn, paves the way for Christianity — humankind's "only universal religion of freedom...
...Analytic and moral 544 • DISSENTphilosophers might describe freedom as an essentially contested concept, one whose meaning will always be somewhat unsettled and around which political and social contests will rage...
...Are we really talking about the "same" phenomenon...
...Perhaps there is something peculiar to human beings that pushes us toward rattling, even seeking escape from the cage...
...Although Patterson's reading of Augustine is rather cursory and disappointing in contrast to the richness of his treatment of Paul, his willingness to try to situate the early Christians in their own time and to locate them as part of the great and terrible drama of freedom is admirable and, within the contemporary academy, iconoclastic...
...Patterson resists the trendy insistence that we can make no judgments as between cultures and ways of life, and he is prepared to offer a powerful exemplary tale of freedom as a drama of history played out in many contexts, many places, with many faces...
...Patterson asserts a longing so basic and fundamental as to acquire near ontological status...
...In other words, his argument proceeds in and through the proliferation of counterfactuals...
...This elemental freedom is freedom from enslavement to sin and freedom to be active in our own behalf, even to disobedience to earthly powers...
...Why does the slave not merely acquiesce...
...For slavery was, by then, a terrifying part of the human condition, and the Christians were unique in refusing to justify slavery: "Once you were a slave/Now you are fee...
...Full civic freedom requires what comes later in Western history—a politically centralized community...
...His overall thesis can be summed up in a few words: one finds slavery without freedom, but one never finds freedom without slavery as a precursor...
...The complexity for Patterson is that the existence of slavery cannot account for the Western devotion to freedom...
...Finally, having achieved preeminence, what forces maintained its status as the core value of Western civilization throughout the course of its history...
...Women came to value personal freedom because of their "empathy with the slave condition...
...By that I mean Patterson offers a "grand narrative" of the sort now under sustained attack in many quarters, and the very fact that it is so thoroughly compelling reminds us of what we have lost...
...Not wanting to court the ritual hue and cry against essentialist assumptions and argumentation, Patterson speaks of a socially constructed idea, not a "natural one...
...He seems to be arguing along these lines: slavery generates freedom except where it does not...
...Patterson defines his work by noting the four questions it will attempt to answer...
...thus, "incipient or proto-civic freedom, then, is found in the most primitive of social formations having freedom...
...The Greek male, on the other hand, including the male slave, was impressed by the "power and enhancement of the master...
...Not all would be masters if they could, he suggests, but all—every man and woman—would not be slaves...
...The fact that something is not mentioned or noted constitutes a form of evidence the historian and sociologist must interpret...
...How well has Patterson succeeded...
...I presume he will get to this vexation in the promised second volume...
...Patterson attempts to view freedom from the "bottom up," hence his protracted argument from the negative— slavery generates freedom...
...Hence, freedom was a value for slaves and women in ancient Greece for it was precisely what they lacked...
...Only when nonslaves value freedom, clearly, do slaves get a hankering for it, as it is the nonslave who is the first to experience freedom as a value...
...Freedom began its career as a social value in the desperate yearning of the slave to negate what, for him or her, and for nonslaves, was a peculiarly inhuman condition...
...Freedom is grand in scope, heartfelt, and refreshingly oldfashioned...
...Continuing to think against the grain, Patterson insists that it is a "gross misconception" to launch broadsides against the early church for failing, somehow, to stop slavery...
...These are: "First, how and why was freedom initially constructed as a social value...
...Personal freedom is nowhere actualized in the non-Western world...
...The Arab slave trade, for example, preceded that of the West and continued after slavery was abolished in the West...
...women empathized with those below...
...Third, why did this rise to cultural supremacy happen only in the Western world, and for so many centuries remain confined to this civilization...
...Patterson interprets the Christian insistence that all human freedom is bound to be conditional by exploring Paul's complex and highly original use of the Roman concept of "sovereignal freedom": no man can ever be an absolute master—that is idolatry, an attempt to usurp God's role...
...Patterson calls freedom a "chordal" concept with many tones and registers...
...I found Patterson's discussion both problematic and persuasive...
...Berlin, remember, was writing out of a recognition of the terrible price millions of ordinary men and women paid when a particular form of positive or utopian freedom gripped whole societies in its maw...
...That many societies are resistant to freedom as a complex "chordal" value does not stay Patterson's hand as he claims that "the promotion of freedom as a value was the natural thing to do for most human societies...
...Second, I wonder if one really can so readily separate the value of freedom from the concepts we use to capture that value...
...Here, too, I hope Patterson tends to the realization that absolute freedom yields its (only) apparent opposite, absolute terror...
Vol. 39 • September 1992 • No. 4
