ARISTOTLE AND SLAVERY IN ATHENS

Extract

The New York Daily Tribune for 20 December 1859 reported a pro-slavery meeting held the day before under the banner of ‘Justice for the South’ (the Civil War was less than eighteen months away). A lawyer named O'Connor spoke as follows:

Now, Gentlemen, to that condition of bondage the Negro is assigned by Nature…. He has strength, and he has the power to labour; but the Nature which created that power has denied him either the intellect to govern or the willingness to work. (Applause)…. And that Nature which denied him the will to labour gave him a master to coerce that will, and to make him a useful servant in the clime in which he was capable of living useful for himself and for the master who governs him…. I maintain that it is not injustice to leave the Negro in the condition in which Nature placed him, to give him a master to govern him…nor is it depriving him of any of his rights to compel him to labour in return, and afford to that master just compensation for the labour and talent employed in governing him and rendering him useful to himself and to the society.

That thoroughly Aristotelian defence of black slavery was identified as such by Karl Marx, reprinted in Kapital as a modern commentary on Aristotle's thinking on the role of the slave-owner.