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.It is not at this level that we shall find the limitations of the right of slavery in Locke.They are detectable, on the one hand, in the idea that princes are also subject to the law of God and of nature, an idea common since the Middle Ages, which implies for Locke and many others that they must not be cruel.On the other hand, the chapter “Of Conquest” puts forward a set of conditions that circumscribe the right of slavery.Now, slavery appears as a juridical, individualized punishment, rather than a general right of the conqueror over a territory and its inhabitants.Locke argues that the conqueror has no kind of despotic power over the children of those conquered, or any permanent right of property over all the things in that country, and that the conquered people are not slaves.The despot finds himself before his subjects not in a political relation but in the state of nature, where everything is allowed and there is no common judge.47 For Locke, the state of nature is in fact preferable to the despotic relation, because the arbitrary will of the magistrate leaves men in “a far worse condition than in the state of nature,” a state of despotism where they live under the threat of a collective power to which they have given themselves up, only for it now “to make a prey of them when he pleases.”48Montesquieu discusses the right of slavery in the De l'esprit des lois in connection with the doctrines of Roman law and natural law.49 He demonstrates that slavery was legitimated by war, by the enslavement of insolvent debtors, or by the extreme need that impels a father who cannot feed his children to sell them as slaves.Montesquieu argues that these reasons put forward by the jurisconsultes are not at all rational.The right of war authorizes us only to place our enemy in a position in which he can no longer harm us.It is false to presuppose that we can enslave him because we have spared his life, because natural law does not authorize us to kill in cold blood subsequent to the heat of battle.Such an absolute right of life and death, Montesquieu argues, would be equivalent with that claimed by those cannibals who eat their prisoners.Rousseau also employs the argument of anthropophagy in The Social Contract to denounce the theory of slavery in Grotius and Hobbes.The first appearance of this critique is in the chapter “The First Societies,” which shows us that what Rousseau has in view is a critique of all the conceptions that place political domination on natural foundations rather than the consensus of those governed.Grotius and Hobbes, Rousseau argues, upheld that by virtue of a right of slavery the human kingdom has come under the rule of a limited number of men.Were this so, it would mean that the human race is “divided into herds of cattle, each with a master who preserves it only in order to devour its members.”50 This theory is said to have first been put forward by Aristotle and then Caligula.The implication of anthropophagy intervenes for a second time in the chapter “Slavery” in the Social Contract.Here, the argument concerns the more restricted question of the utility of absolute domination.One of the philosophers' arguments about absolutism is that which establishes its legitimacy from its supposed utility.Absolute power would be justified because it guarantees civil peace.In a passage where the influence of Locke is palpable, Rousseau argues that the price of such a peace is unacceptable: “It will be said that a despot gives his subjects the assurance of civil tranquility….What do the people gain if their very condition of civil tranquillity is one of their hardships? There is peace in dungeons, but is that enough to make dungeons desirable? The Greeks lived in peace in the cave of the Cyclops awaiting their turn to be devoured.”51What must be one of the last occurrences of this critique of extreme slavery is to be found in a letter that Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi wrote to Jean-François de La Harpe in 1790.Aristotle's theory of natural slavery and the idea according to which slavery is justified by the inequality of the rational faculties lead—according to Jacobi—to the absurd consequence whereby the intellectual superiority of a man justifies fattening and eating his intellectual inferior.52These critiques of the theory of slavery and of war in the state of nature possess at first sight an air of unreality in the eighteenth century, when colonial slavery finds ever fewer defenders among the philosophers and when those prepared to legitimate it usually put forward cultural, religious, and economic arguments rather than theses drawn from the jurists of natural law or Aristotle.53 From this perspective, the practical impact of such speculations inimical to despotic law was limited [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]