Out of Bondage

Freedom, Vol 1: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, by Orlando Patterson, New York: Basic Books, 496 pages, $24.95

In the ongoing hero-or-villain quarrel over Columbus, Newsweek was recently taken to task by an irate reader for suggesting that without the European colonization of the Americas, the world today might have been composed of democracies in Europe and totalitarian, human-sacrificing empires across the Atlantic. Since the Europe of Columbus's day was anything but democratic, was it not flagrantly ethnocentric to presume that the Aztecs or the Incas would not have progressed toward freedom as well if left to themselves?

We shall never know how the high civilizations of the Americas might have turned out on their own. But if there is a conclusion to be drawn from Freedom, the seminal new work by Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson, it is that even a sophisticated civilization cannot be expected as a matter of course to become a free society (take China). "For most of human history, and for nearly all of the non-Western world prior to Western contact," writes Patterson, "freedom was…anything but an obvious or desirable goal." Indeed, "most human languages did not even possess a word for the concept before contact with the West." On the other hand, although the European monarchies of 1492 were hardly hospitable to freedom as we know it, Patterson maintains—disputing the widespread notion of a 2,000-year hiatus in the history of freedom in the West—that "freedom has been the core value of Western culture throughout its history."

Today, as more and more of the non-Western world embraces this value, it has become common to speak of the yearning for freedom as a "natural" or "basic" human instinct. But can something that was alien to most of humanity most of the time be taken for granted as an intrinsic part of human nature? Patterson says no: Since freedom is far rarer than unfreedom, it is the emergence of freedom that requires an explanation.

Patterson's criticism of the West's "inverted parochialism" in assuming that freedom is a universal ideal may sound jarring to some (particularly since the remarkable appeal of freedom to so many of the non-Western peoples who have been exposed to it suggests some universality, as Patterson himself acknowledges at the end of the book). Nonetheless, his quest for the origins of liberty and its development into the Middle Ages yields richly rewarding results.

Patterson's provocative basic thesis is that the notion of freedom first arose in human societies as a result of the institution 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…in their roles as masters, slaves, and nonslaves." (While, by his own admission, this is not a wholly original insight, Patterson is the first scholar to make it central to his conception of freedom.) In primitive societies, individuals had no existence apart from the tribe. With persons in their midst who were stripped of their full humanity through a "social death," members of the community began to define themselves as the opposite of the slave, gaining their "first experience of freedom as a socially valued good." Freedom was also a positive value in the yearnings of the enslaved.

And yet freedom failed to take root in many societies that practiced slavery—not only primitive tribes but such sophisticated ancient civilizations as Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China. In part, argues Patterson, this was because slavery always remained socially marginal in these cultures, as did, to an even greater extent, the manumission (release) of slaves. Moreover, distinctions between the slaves and the nonslave poor were not as sharp as they were to be in classical Greece and Rome: "Relations of personal dependence…affected all areas of society." What slaves lacked was a network of kinship ties to protect them; thus, paradoxically, the opposite of slavery was not freedom but belonging, and the slave's best hope was acceptance as a full-fledged member of society.

Here, it seems to me, Patterson's theory suffers from a logical flaw. He admits that in order for slaves to desire freedom, freedom had to be a viable social alternative, something that nonslaves possessed. But that means some form of freedom had to exist before it was "constructed" by slaves. Why did it exist in some societies and not in others? Climate, national character, accident of history? That is likely to remain a mystery. I hasten to add that this in no way detracts from the bulk of Patterson's sociohistorical analysis. In any event, he leaves no doubt that the articulation of freedom as an ideal, and the valuation of its importance, were informed in a major way by the experience of slavery.

Patterson offers a view of freedom as a "tripartite value," a "chordal triad" whose three "notes" are personal freedom (freedom from constraint and interference by others or the state), civic freedom (political participation), and "sovereignal" freedom (freedom to exercise power over others). While the last may strike us is a contradiction in terms, Paterson shows that it has played a crucial and often positive role in he development of the West: "Men with unrestrained freedom of power" were able to "create and transform their worlds," freeing those in their power from "the inertial weight of tradition."

Patterson traces the evolution of freedom in ancient Greece from an elitist ideal of a warrior caste to a much more democratic and human vision. He argues that the oligarchies' willingness to extend political rights to all freeborn males stemmed in part from the need to have them as allies in the event of a slave revolt; he also links the increasing appreciation of freedom—uniting, for the first time, all the elements of the triad—to the danger of enslavement in foreign wars. Patterson challenges the widespread view that the Greeks saw liberty only in civic, not personal, terms. Analyzing Pericles' funeral oration in the Second Peloponnesian War (441 B.C.), he finds that the Athenian statesman articulated a very modern, not to say American, vision of freedom: "We do not get into a state with our next-door neighbor if he enjoys himself in his own way.…Each single one of our citizens, in all the manifold aspects of life, is able to show himself the rightful lord and owner of his own person."Other Greek thinkers, such as Aristotle, were deeply suspicious of individualism and excessive democracy—but their very criticism of such notions suggests that they were commonly held.

Turning to ancient Rome, Patterson has little time for the civic-minded Roman elite, whose notion of liberty, he argues, implied the preservation of its own legal privileges and restricted the competition for power to members of the ruling class. This conception of libertas "fully accepted the right and power of the state to interfere [with the individual] as long as it did so in a constitutional manner." Patterson undertakes a spirited defense of Rome's much-maligned masses. If they cared little for civic liberty, he says, it was because to them it meant the elite's freedom to exploit them. But this same urban plebs— composed mostly of freed slaves or descendants of such, and therefore especially attuned to the value of "the right to do as one pleased without constraint from others or from the state"—passionately cherished personal freedom.

Ironically, the best guarantee of such freedom was seen to be a strong imperial power capable of reining in the rapacious oligarchy. Thus, the sovereignal freedom of the emperor became a source of personal freedom for the average citizen. At the same time, new philosophical and religious trends evidenced a turn toward inner freedom as mastery over one's passions and appetites, freedom as spiritual redemption—culminating, of course, in Christianity. One of Patterson's most illuminating insights has to do with how the Christian sense of freedom as a gift from, and submission to, an omnipotent God mirrored the Roman relationship between the master and the freed slave and between the emperor and the citizen.

Refashioned in their image by Roman ex-slaves, Christianity became "the first, and only, world religion that placed freedom…at the very center of its theology." It also affirmed the equal worth of every person, regardless of social status, in the eyes of God. Once again taking on a common preconception—that freedom was irrelevant in the Middle Ages—Patterson demonstrates that the feudal lords and kings clung zealously to their "sovereignal freedom," and townsmen to the free status that distinguished them from serfs. A peculiarity of the medieval vision was the "divisibility of liberties"—specific rights and immunities conferred on individuals or groups, and subject to buying and selling. Despite overtones of a crude protection racket, "these bartered liberties did constitute the transfer of genuine rights or freedoms." The "note" of personal freedom, while muted, was also kept alive by serf revolts and heresies.

Thirty years ago, it would have been possible to write a book such as this with hardly any mention of women and their experience of freedom. That this is no longer possible is, I think, altogether a good thing. But Freedom exemplifies the dangers of moving too far in the direction of a "gendered" approach. Patterson's contention is that women were no less than "the creators of Western freedom because it was they who first socially constructed personal freedom as a value."

The basis for this conclusion (which is likely to overshadow everything else in the book) is that in early Greece, slavery was a woman's fear: In wars of conquest, men were usually killed and women taken as captives. Most of the references to freedom in the Iliad, Patterson finds, have to do with fear of the enslavement of the city's women. But can this value have existed in the consciousness of women only when, in the passages cited, the fear is voiced by men?

Even more dubious is the assertion that women in classical Greece and in medieval Europe, excluded from power, "construct[ed] a compassionate, womanly version of personal freedom." The word womanly seems to imply that this compassionate freedom is inherently female. The evidence comes from female characters in Greek tragedies created by male writers—and very selectively interpreted at that. In discussing Antigone, Patterson posits a dichotomy between male freedom-as-power embodied by Creon, and female freedom-as-love embodied by Antigone; yet the chorus of male city elders takes Antigone's side, as does Creon's son. Patterson never mentions Medea, in which a woman murderously asserts her freedom.

Even more telling is Patterson's obvious discomfort with the fact that the more emancipated women of late Roman antiquity proved as power-hungry as their men: "What does it mean that women, once given the chance, could have so horribly sublated their personal freedom into monsters of sovereignal power…?" Perhaps it means that women are human. But Patterson feels compelled to express the hope that "they were not typical of their class of women"—and continues to identify the corruption of freedom into power with masculinity.

The book, which is to be followed by a second volume exploring the modern history of freedom, ends on a strangely ambivalent note of warning that freedom should not be seen as an unqualified good. When Patterson says that "at its worst, no value has been more evil and socially corrosive…inducing selfishness, alienation, the celebration of greed, and the dehumanizing disregard for the 'losers,'" it sounds distressingly close to a politically correct diatribe. And he unaccountably neglects to acknowledge that the evils which tainted the birth of freedom in the West—slavery and the oppression of women—were no less prevalent in other, unfree cultures.

Yet Patterson's ambivalence has very little to do with the fashionable multicultural credo; rather, it is a sobering reminder that "the tragic interdependence of good and evil" is part of the human condition. He does not hesitate to affirm the unique though flawed greatness of the West, to say that "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" worldwide. This is a statement to raise the blood pressure of campus radicals—particularly coming as it does from a descendant of slaves and a man of non-Western ancestry who speaks of Western culture as his own.

A monumental work by an original and courageous thinker, Freedom can be, by turns, eye-opening and infuriating, but never boring and always informative. And, though Patterson claims in the preface that the book offers no value judgments and is only "a historical sociology of our most important cultural value," it is also a stunningly passionate work. Starting with the dedication, "To the unfree of the world," Patterson makes no secret of his sympathies and his antipathies. Whether one shares them or not, the passion is refreshing. So is the clear, graceful style uncluttered by jargon, while the sheer scope of Patterson's vision is something all too rare among scholars today.

Contributing Editor Cathy Young is a writer in Middletown, New Jersey.