Montesquieu said in The Third Part of On the Spirit of the Law: "Slavery is precisely the fact that one person completely owns another person, and the life and property of the latter belong to the former completely. "This is the definition of slavery.
<h1>We cannot benefit from slavery</h1>
The most notable feature of slavery was personal dependency. This system was not a good one, and it was not only harmful to slaves, but also to the slave owners. Slavery deprived slave owners of their political virtues, inadvertently arrogant, violent, vicious, absurd, and cruel, unaware that freedom was the inevitability of being known, and enslaved by their own desires. In human society, most of the most heinous evils occur in slave societies.
Every day, people say, "I wish I could have slaves," but if you had to decide who would be a slave and who would be a slave owner by lottery, no one would want to do that. It is obvious that we cannot benefit from slavery.
Similarly, slavery was not needed in either the state or the city-state. The emergence of slavery represented the collapse of clan public ownership and the transformation of social organization into a force of oppression.
It was thought that the proliferation of democracy was responsible for the decline of the Athenian city-state, which had been transformed into a mob stage. They exiled Mistlee, executed Socrates, and punished Pericles. Prosperity and strength prompted Athens to pursue a colonial path of external expansion, and eventually suffered a crushing defeat in the Peloponnes War.
However, the root cause of Athens' decline was not democracy, but slavery, and Athens' outward expansion was the result of the development of slavery. The rising level of productivity gave rise to the demand for labor in Athens, but the bankrupt freedmen could not be reduced to slaves to supplement the labor force due to the constraints of slavery, which led to Athens's ambitions to expand abroad, plunder slaves, and enslave other countries, and slavery led to the decline of the Athenian city-state.
So how did slavery come about? Where exactly did it originate? Political theorists have mixed views on this.
The slave trade in ancient Greece
<h1>Aristotle believed that some people were born into slavery</h1>
Aristotle's Politics is another masterpiece of political science after Plato's Republic and The Law. Aristotle believed that there was a natural slavery in the city-state and in the family, that the family was the basic unit of the city-state, and that a complete family consisted of slaves and free men, and that "due to the connection between male and female hostess slaves, the family was first formed", and the family was formed to meet the needs of people's daily lives, and their relationship was master and servant, husband and wife, father and son.
Families unite to become villages, and villages unite to form city-states. In the city-state, the talented and visionary became the ruler and the master, while the physically capable laborer became the ruled and the slave. Slaves shared the same common interests as their masters, and they were subordinated to their masters' rule and led by their masters on the path of prosperity and strength.
Aristotle said, "As a property, slaves belong entirely to their masters." "Slaves have an innate nature and function that do not belong to themselves but to others." So why are some people born to belong to others? Aristotle said that this was first and foremost a "must" and that "the benefits outweighed the disadvantages." Rulers are always excellent, with great personalities and qualities, people are born unequal, some people are smarter, some people are stupid. The physically strong are suitable for manual labor, and the wise and intelligent are suitable for mental labor, the former is slavery, the latter is dominant.
For slaves, obedience to slave owners was as natural as the obedience of the body to the brain, and this obedience was advantageous, not only to enrich the family, but also to make the city-state rich and strong. For slaves, patriotism is the love of one's own slave status. Thus, Aristotle concluded: "Obviously, some people are born free, and some people are born slaves, and for the latter, slavery is more beneficial and natural." ”
Aristotle believed that slavery originated from the natural development of society, was in accord with nature, and some people should be born into slavery. In such a city-state, the dominant position is authority rather than law, and the city-state is like a family, practicing a patriarchal system, the master's business is to govern the country, and the slave's duty is to produce labor.
For Aristotle's theory, Rousseau's sharp rebuttal in the Social Contract theory is: "Aristotle's view is correct, but he puts the cart before the horse and reverses the causal relationship." It is quite certain that every person born into slavery was born into slavery. "It is only under the rule of slavery that people are born into slavery; it is not people who are born to be slaves who create slavery.
Aristotle (384–322 BC)
<h1>Roman jurists believed that slavery stemmed from human compassion</h1>
Justinian's Compilation of Theories argues that slavery stems from the inherent compassion of man, first, by agreeing to treat prisoners of war as slaves in order to avoid them being killed; second, by allowing debtors to be sold into slavery in order to avoid being mistreated by creditors; and third, when the fathers are unable to raise their children, the children should follow the fathers as slaves of their masters in order to earn a living.
Both Montesquieu and Rousseau refuted these claims:
First, the killing of captives is "spurned by the nations of the world", and when the enemy lays down his arms and becomes a prisoner, the victor only has the right to look after the captives, so that they can no longer be a scourge, not have the power to kill them. Grotius had argued that the right to enslavement came from war and violence, and that the victor could have the power to kill the conquered, and that the latter could redeem his life at the expense of his own freedom. Rousseau argued that this view did not make legal sense, because war was a relationship between states, not between individuals, and people became enemies only as soldiers. The purpose of war is to destroy the enemy country, not to kill the enemy country in the abstract. When the enemy lays down his arms and surrenders, he is no longer an enemy or an instrument of the enemy, but a person with basic human rights. Grotius based the right of servitude on the power of life and death, but the right of slavery contained the power of life and death, and the master could kill his own slaves at will, so that the source of power became himself, creating a vicious circle. "Slavery" is the opposite of "right", and "slavery" is not a right.
Second, it is equally untenable to say that debtors can sell themselves into slavery in order to avoid abuse. The sale was a transaction, and the slave sold himself to the slave owner, but he himself was the property of the slave owner, so he did not actually get anything, and the buyer did not pay him anything. Rousseau said: "To give up freedom is to give up being a person, to surrender human rights and even the responsibility of human beings." "Slaves gave all their rights to slave owners—including the right not to be mistreated.
Third, it is a delusion to think that children should be slaves with their fathers for a living. "People don't even have the right to sell themselves, so how can they have the right to sell their children' rights?" This is completely beyond the boundaries of patriarchy.
Rousseau (1712-1778)
<h1>The true source of slavery</h1>
Montesquieu believed that slavery was divided into two types, one was "to tie slaves to the land ... They do not work in the master's house, they only need to hand over a certain amount of grain, livestock, and textiles to the master", this kind of slavery is called "material slavery", the self-cultivating peasants in ancient China, the serfs of the European Middle Ages belong to this, they are political slaves; in addition, there is a kind of slavery, that is, as the property of the master, living in the master's family, and establishing a personal attachment relationship with the master, this kind of slavery is called "human slavery", which belongs to civil slavery.
Civil slavery appeared in slave societies, while political slavery appeared in authoritarian states.
On the Spirit of the Law examines and analyzes the sources of the right of slavery that arose in the feudal society of Europe at that time, the most direct of which was despotism. Civil liberties are destroyed by autocracy, and under such regimes, freedom has no value at all. And in such a state, the people are more tolerant of civil slavery, because they are already political slaves themselves. Since the subjects no longer have civil liberties and political freedoms, how can they care about personal dependency? Since they were all slaves of the Emperor, they must also feel justified in enslaving those who were weaker than themselves, admiring the strong and wielding their swords at the weaker.
Thus, Montesquieu said, "In those nations, the freedmen, too weak to stand up to the government, found ways to become slaves to those who carried out tyranny." Of course, such people are not real slaves, but what Lu Xun called slaves.
In a state with a constitutional monarchy, there can be no slaves, because such a state values humanity, honor, and governs by law rather than authority; there is no slavery in a republic, where democracies recognize equal political status and the same rights; in aristocratic governments, the law allows the whole population to achieve the greatest possible equality within the limits permitted by the nature of the polity.
Montesquieu (1689–1755)
<h1>Other sources of slavery</h1>
The form of government is the direct source of the right to slavery, and in addition, the development of social production and the increase of surplus products are the root causes of the emergence of the right to slavery. The development of production changed the way clans were distributed. The initial strength lies in economic superiority, the possession of land, means of production and food, so that armed forces can be formed, plundered externally, and defended internally.
In some places, the right to enslavement derives from customs, some peoples are hostile to other peoples because of differences in customs, people out of prejudice, they abandon reason and jurisprudence, and brutally enslave others, such as the slavery established by the Spaniards in South America.
In some places, slavery came from religion, and Montesquieu said that religious ideas inspired the colonists to commit various crimes in the Americas, and that "these robbers were very devout believers", and for the convenience of proselytizing, they actually stipulated that missionaries had the right to enslave non-believers.
There are also places where the right to enslavement comes from the corruption of reason, Rousseau said: "The force created the first slaves, and their cowardice perpetuated this situation." "The oppressed slaves not only lost everything, but even the idea of rebellion not to be slaves." They loved their state of slavery, just as Ulysses' companions loved their state of savagery. "If there are born slaves, then such people are.