Chapter 7 (Part 5) Honor and Degradation, Debt The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber
Freedom ≠ Property Rights and vice versa. Graeber traces the legacy of Ancient Rome's Republican slave society to our current false narrative of freedom
Dear Reader,
I finished half of the Care of the Species book for my other book club, I realised that John Hartigan noticed that people were quoting or interpreting, The Origin of Species for people when in fact, Darwin was referring to our non-human compatriots - the animals and plants. Perhaps, it is best to actually quote him from The Descent of Man where he focused on our evolutionary origins.
Tada! I just opened my bookshop to support our club and at the same time drive purchases towards independent booksellers! Double win! These are affiliate links so you can check out our list here and hundreds of others. I am mesmerised by the beautiful covers and love browsing. Bookshop might have cracked addictive digital browsing.
It is looking more and more like summer now. Glorious.
Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats (First Stanza)
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,—
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
Happy browsing!
Melanie
Concluding honour- where do we stand?
Graeber closes this chapter with his most illuminating case study yet — about us. It is a fascinating dissection of one of the mainstays of Western values, the concept of freedom (but mostly, the right to own property and things).
All that is well and done. However, I wanted to flag this much earlier as you read this final section. Graeber does not answer any of the questions he started with in this chapter.
How did debt become synonymous with honour?
How did honour become entangled with female degradation?
What Graeber establishes in this final story is our troubled relationship with freedom. It is a long roundabout way of linking violence and slavery to pretty much how we think about ourselves today (and indirectly, to equality, indenturedness, and debt).
We have the Romans to thank for that.
Why our notion of property and freedom laws are screwed
Who knew that jurisprudence could be so fascinating? Graeber takes us to the origins of how we view people and our relationship with each other and to things. He tracks it down to ancient Rome’s jurisprudence.
Ancient Rome conquered the world three times: the first time through its armies, the second through its religion, the third through its laws.
Rudolf von Jhering
The Romans attempted to tackle several interrelated tricky questions:
What does it mean to have a relationship with things?
How does this change our relationship with others?
Graeber rightly points out that by formulating property laws, we are essentially remarking on how best to interact with people. But thinking through things is a much easier scale.
The concept of dominium is the absolute power granted to the person over a thing. The term appeared is not ancient and appeared in Latin after Rome eliminated their monarchy (509 BC), during the Late Republic era (200 - 27 BC). During this period, Roman jurists laid out the Twelve Tables as a written form of unwritten rules of justice for the public, specifically outlining the rights and obligations between the elites and ordinary citizens.
The slave origins of property rights
Unlike its racial undertones in the 18th century, slavery in Ancient Rome was about power and control.1 The legal assumptions on rights, liberties, and property were in contrast to the slave condition.
The term dominium comes from dominus or ‘master’ or ‘slave-owner,’ but also refers to the domus or the ‘house’ or ‘household.’ The reference to slave ownership came about around 111 BC when the term dominus first appeared. By the time the Republic ended in 27 BC, up to 40 percent of the Italian population consisted of slaves. Surprisingly, even the term familia, as Graeber explains, derives from famulus, meaning slave.
What we see here is that the term is less about kinship but a unit of power or authority. The category of ‘slave’ informs us much of the turning point that has occurred in human history — the violent transformation of a person into a thing. In the Twelve Tablets (dated 450 BC), slaves were still understood to be people except with a diminished valuation. Any injuries received by them only amounted to half a person (see Twelve Table VIII.3 for example). By the time the term dominus emerged in 111 BC, slaves would be legally redefined as things res, with the same injury valuation as farm animals.
The power of the head of the household is so great that it almost threatens the existential right of the state to control its citizen’s lives. Under the law, a family was under the absolute power of the paterfamilias, that is, he could do whatever he wanted with them, including enslaving members or punishing members for capital crimes. This would be quickly limited, whether by emperors (pre-Republic) or magistrates (Republic) since it interfered with the sovereign/state’s monopoly on power over life and death.
There is a direct impact of the slave system on debt in Roman society. Roman citizens were less likely to become debt slaves themselves since their function had been taken over by foreign slaves. This prohibition of debt bondage meant that
fathers retained their powers and protected themselves and their households from debt and extreme punishments such as death
kept households under familial language versus property-based relations
It is noteworthy that slavery in Rome is a temporal and not a moral state. Control can also be reversed or surrendered. For instance, it was common for educated Greeks to sell themselves to a wealthy Roman to become a secretary, buy themselves freedom with funds left with a relative, and become a Roman citizen. This loophole has been blocked to prevent non-Roman citizens from selling their relatives to later buy their freedom and become citizens.
Property rights are not freedom
Freedom, like other rights, becomes fungible. Rights become the thing unto itself. And as property, that means it is alienable from the person and can be bought, sold, or given away. At least from those who see these rights as natural. It was Jean Gerson, Rector of the University of Paris, in 1400 who would coin the concepts that would be later known as ‘natural rights theory.’
However, it takes another actor to create a two-way street. Graeber argues here that a man’s right is an outcome of another’s obligation to recognise and accede to those terms. This means one is infringing on another’s right to uphold your own.
Following this proposition, Graeber reasoned further
if freedom is natural, then all impediments to freedom are unnatural including slavery
not only that, impediments to freedom include society, social rules, and property rights
Like Graeber, these are the similar conclusions of Roman jurists. Property rights are not linked to freedom at all.
Property rights are political power
The paradox does not end there. Graeber continues down the rabbit hole and reviews the implications of this logic in the evolution of states.
if property rights are impediments to freedom, then the assumption is that all things were once held common property in the past
then war and the ‘law of nations’ including conquest and slavery resulted in unequal individual property rights
therefore, property rights and political power based on violence are interchangeable terms
These premises challenge how we understand freedom and our willingness to sell it to the state.
Redefining society and ourselves
It makes sense now for political philosophers like Thomas Hobbes, said Graeber, to call this situation a social contract. A nation-state is a social contract in which the citizens give up their liberties for life and liberty under an autocratic sovereign’s protection.
The result is a freedom that was re-interpreted by medieval jurists from Roman law. Here, freedom was inherited from the Roman concept of absolute power over a dominion. During the medieval period, dominium referred to both ‘lordship’ and ‘private property.’ The lord’s power to do whatever he wanted on his land included the right to execute people, a ‘liberty of the gallows.’
Graeber argues that this was the remnant of the Republic's slave-owning system except this time, a lord is surrounded by dependents and multiple slaves in his estate. Though chattel slavery was eliminated by the Barbarian invasions, two classes of people remained. One that had power and one who did not.
In our current neoliberal environment, we end up in a peculiar situation where the state has somewhat receded its protection and the most insidious legacy is that we have become properties ourselves.
Who owns whom?
In a continuous line that traces back to the legacy of Roman law, we become property ourselves. This is the crux of Graeber's advocacy. If we see ourselves as owning our bodies and ourselves, following the Roman property law tradition, we are both master and slave to ourselves. He then flies off to an interesting branch.
if we have a double self consisting of a master and a slave, then one must hold dominion over another
which parts of ourselves rule over another? Is it mind over body?
Graeber makes an unprecedented argument that without the fragmentation of ourselves, our conceptions of freedom, property rights, and law will collapse.
Round-Up
Graeber did not successfully connect property rights and freedom to debt and honour. What he does instead is underscore a common link across these concepts.
Violence underpins them all.
Honour at its highest valuation requires the degradation of others, particularly women.
In this section on property rights and freedom, Graeber traces the ancestry of two of our cherished Western values, namely property rights and freedom. By tracing our Western jurisprudence to Ancient Rome, he unearthed the slave relations in our definition of freedom and property. This case is not exceptional as we have seen the trajectory of people becoming defined as things and enshrined into law.
The peculiar thing that made this section such an eye-opening one is that freedom is a false project of property rights and vice versa. Several philosophical paradoxes arise from affirming freedom through property rights.
If freedom is the absolute will and power to do anything, then property rights limit it
Freedom and property rights occur because one party must submit to uphold the other
This means that all forms of social structure and institutions serve to squash freedom and property rights
Ironically, the endpoint of Graeber’s logic puzzle is the obliteration of what we recognise as human society. Hence, the framework of the social contract is the form under which governance and society operate.
Today, in the neoliberal environment, the concept of ourselves as alienable property works as we submit ourselves to wage labour (Graeber’s slavery) among other arrangements. The most insidious of all, according to him, is the fragmentation of our bodies into mind and body, the ultimate master and slave relation. Without which, none of our Western values survives.
Re-read the previous post
Slavery is less about race but about unfortunate conditions that one became one by war or capture as is common. Roman citizens could be captured by foreigners, pirates or kidnappers and become slaves. A slave might be smarter than their owners, working as tutors or who had come from an educated background with knowledge of high culture.