Over six decades, Orlando Patterson has produced a body of work characterized by exceptional diversity, breadth, depth, scholarship, audacity, and impact: three widely acclaimed, and frequently reprinted, novels in the 1960s; more than sixty years of teaching in London, Kingston, and Boston; and above all, at the core of his oeuvre, a series of major books that establish Patterson as the foremost contemporary scholar of slavery. This research includes slavery in its specifically modern, capitalist form, as seen in the Americas, but goes far beyond that and encompasses the global, world-historical evolution of slavery, which appears in very different forms across time and geography but is consistently defined as a relationship of absolute power—a relationship that revolves around the terror and pleasure of exercising control over others. And this specific view allows Patterson not least to analyze in a new way the complex, contradictory, and profoundly unsettling ways in which slavery persists after its legal abolition and emancipation. Furthermore, these investigations are intrinsically tied, both in motivation and insight, over decades of intense political engagement. Patterson has served as both an advisor and active participant in Michael Manley’s government, which sought to establish a democratic socialism (or social democracy) in Jamaica during the 1970s. And Patterson continues this political activity as a perceptive observer and incisive commentator on contemporary social, economic, cultural, and institutional developments in the Caribbean and the United States.

Through all of this, Orlando Patterson offers us an infinite amount to learn. But the Hegel Prize honors him not just for what we can learn from him—as a scholar, sociologist, historian, political analyst, and activist—but for what he gives us to think. This, ultimately, is what connects Patterson with Hegel. It is not a textual connection, even though Patterson occasionally references Hegel directly. Instead, it is a connection in substance—a shared grappling with a problem, indeed a paradox: the paradox of the relationship between slavery and freedom.

This paradox, which Patterson has repeatedly and emphatically described as the central experience underlying his work and to which it perpetually returns, is the driving force behind his thinking. It is a paradox that cannot be resolved. As Patterson states, it consists of the profoundly “disturbing” thought that slavery and freedom are “intimately and necessarily related” both historically and conceptually. For just as freedom is sharply opposed to slavery, it is simultaneously inseparably dependent on it. Without the experience of slavery, there is no “progress in the consciousness of freedom” (Hegel). So, is freedom only possible through slavery—by and through it? And what does this “strange and perplexing puzzle,” as Patterson describes it at the end of Slavery as Social Death (1982), mean for the very idea of freedom? “[Are] we to esteem slavery for what it has wrought, or must we challenge our conception of freedom and the value we place upon it?”Footnote ¹ Is freedom irredeemably corrupted—beyond saving—by its emergence from the experience of slavery?

The fact that Patterson confronts the depths of this dialectic, in which the opposites are inseparably linked, like few others have, is the first way in which he connects with Hegel. However, the true challenge posed by Patterson’s work goes not just one but two critical steps further—two steps that, as I will indicate, bring us into the heart of Hegelian philosophy while simultaneously transforming our understanding of its central idea. These are two steps, moreover, that many admirers of Patterson’s work who have productively used it to analyze the devastations of slavery and its persistence after its abolition are reluctant to take. In fact, they often shy away from these steps, even though there is no doubt that Patterson considers them as unavoidable as they are profoundly unsettling.

The first step, through which Patterson’s thought deeply engages with Hegel, leads us to the dialectic of slavery and freedom—the unity of contradiction and unity, which simultaneously separates and connects them. But where and how does this dialectical intertwining occur? Who thinks it? How is it practiced? Patterson’s answer to these questions is unequivocal and clear—and precisely because of that, it is disconcerting and challenging.

The dialectic of slavery and freedom is the heartbeat of the spirit that Patterson, translating Max Weber’s okzidental, calls “Western.” It is only here, as Patterson asserts at the beginning of his monumental work Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (1991), that the experience of slavery has led to the conclusion of freedom. Thus, in this specific sense, freedom is not merely a but rather the Western value—the defining value of the West. Or more precisely, it is the idea or principle of the West: without it, the West does not exist.

But recognizing this insight requires taking yet another step forward—and again, as Hegel did. Hegel referred to the Western world, which arises by the consciousness of the progress of freedom, as the “Germanic” world, though he meant the opposite: the Christian world. This is also Patterson’s perspective, but he articulates it in an entirely new way. According to Patterson, Christianity, specifically St. Paul’s teachings, stands at the beginning and center of the Western world only because—and this means, only to the extent that—Christianity is nothing other than internalized and practiced dialectics. Christianity is the thought of the slavery–freedom dialectic. To “believe,” in the Pauline sense, means to think the process by which slavery leads to freedom and by thinking in this way, to live this process, to realize it in one’s life. Christian faith, as understood by Paul, is the practice of liberation. Although the Greeks, particularly their radical thinkers (whom Patterson finds in their tragedies rather than among their philosophers), grasped the birth of the idea of freedom from the experience of enslavement, it was only the followers of Paul—those instructed and converted by him, the Christians—who placed this insight at the center of their experience and purpose.

Let us pause for a moment to assess where this has brought us. I have recalled Patterson’s self-interpretation of his work, which he has repeatedly given, that decades of historical and sociological research have taught him three things: that without slavery, there is no emergence of freedom; that this is the experience and practice of Pauline Christianity; and that this dialectical experience and practice established the tradition of freedom in the West. No closer alignment with Hegel’s grand project—to comprehend the world, its history, and its order in a dialectical philosophy of freedom—is conceivable. Yet, at this very moment of greatest proximity, a rupture in the connection between Patterson and Hegel arises. At this turning point, it becomes impossible to understand Patterson further through, with, or even in relation to Hegel. On the contrary, we would misunderstand Patterson’s thinking and work entirely if we saw in it a mere repetition of the Western self-image, which Hegel’s philosophy elaborated like no other. This self-understanding portrays the West as the culture that distinguishes itself not primarily through its rationality, its technical, economic, or administrative efficiency, but through its unparalleled exposure to the brutal and cruel experience of slavery and servitude, from which it draws only one conclusion: the conclusion of freedom, the assertion that freedom is the truth of humanity. However, Patterson’s work demonstrates that it is exactly the other way around. To see in Patterson’s oeuvre a confirmation of Hegel’s articulation of the West’s self-image as the exemplary culture of freedom would not only be a complete misunderstanding but also a grave misuse of his work. Instead, we must learn to interpret Hegel—and thus the West—anew and differently through Patterson.

This is about what can be seen and understood from two different perspectives: from Stuttgart, Jena, Heidelberg, Berlin—Hegel’s locations—or from Kingston, Jamaica, the complex, heterogeneous, and conflict-ridden world in which the characters of Patterson’s novels live and to whose monstrous primal scene Patterson’s first major work on the sociology of slavery (The Sociology of Slavery: An Analysis of the Origins, Development, and Structure of Negro Slave Society in Jamaica, 1967) leads us back. This primal scene is the attempt by English colonists (after the complete extermination of the island’s indigenous population by the Spanish) to establish a society devoid of order, law, and justice—founded on nothing but the pursuit of power and profit—a society as non-society, a Hobbesian state of nature. Thus, when Hegel and Patterson, from these opposing places and times, read Paul, understand Christianity as the experience of the dialectic of slavery and freedom, and thereby define the West as the culture of freedom, they are not saying or doing the same thing. “Slavery” and “freedom,” the “dialectic” of their opposition, and “Christianity” as the experience and unfolding of this dialectic—all these terms hold different meanings depending on whether they are understood from Berlin or Kingston. Consequently, the meaning of thinking freedom as the value of the West and the West as the culture of freedom also differs.

This directly impacts the intertwining of slavery and freedom. From the perspective of the slave societies established by the West in its colonies, it becomes unmistakably clear that freedom is not merely connected to slavery because freedom is born from—and thus through—slavery. Instead, freedom, at the very moment of its birth, produces new forms of slavery: the enslavement and subjugation of others, the unfree, and in other forms. As Patterson demonstrates, this dynamic—the creation of new slavery—has defined the history of freedom ever since the Greeks first elevated it as their concept of struggle and identity. And this history did not end with the legal abolition of slavery. Not only does slavery persist in various forms, but the systems of freedom developed by the West have also themselves produced new forms of slavery. They continue to rely on its violence even where it has been legally abolished.

The decisive conclusion Patterson draws from his dual examination of slavery and freedom is as follows: the dialectic of slavery and freedom is doubled—freedom emerges from slavery, and slavery arises through freedom. This doubling does not resolve the dialectic between them but deepens and radicalizes it, sharpening it into a paradox. By showing this, Patterson positions himself between opposing camps; he contradicts both sides at once: those who wish to abandon the concept of freedom as a mere Western invention (as they call it) because it has led to new forms of slavery, and those who claim that the West, in its acknowledgment of this insight, once again demonstrates its superiority. Patterson’s conclusion, in contrast to both perspectives, insists that we rather must think of the creation of slavery through freedom and the birth of freedom from slavery together.

How can we do this? Only by returning to the beginning, by generating freedom once again—this time through the experience of the slavery into which freedom itself led us the first time. This would be a rebirth, a new or second birth of freedom, arising from the experience of its own enslavement. We see such a process described by Patterson in his first novel, The Children of Sisyphus (1965), which imagines how Christianity, at the colonial margins of the Western domination that it sought to expand across the globe, could once again become the practice of liberation it once was for the oppressed and exploited.

One could thus say that through and in Patterson’s work, the Western idea of freedom, which we owe to Christianity, is rescued. But to save freedom, so we learn from Patterson’s work, means to divide it, to split it, even to tear it apart. Or rather, not to tear it apart but to recognize that it is torn. And this can only be seen with full clarity from the margins of the colonial world, which was built upon the Western idea of freedom. Or more precisely, it is the insight that must be brought from the margins of this world into its centers—London, Boston—and must be elaborated with their intellectual tools, just as Patterson has done and continues to do. If the West is the culture of freedom, then, from the perspective of its margins and for the sake of freedom, it must be divided, turned against itself—torn apart.

This recognition—that the fragmentation of the Western, Christian idea of freedom is not its demise but its rebirth, not an argument against it but for it, not its destruction but its rescue—perhaps represents both the greatest proximity and the greatest distance between Patterson’s work and Hegel’s thought. Hegel once noted: “A mended stocking is better than a torn one; not so with self-consciousness.” For Hegel, self-consciousness is better—it is only true—when it is torn, not patched up. Patterson’s thinking teaches us that only a freedom that is torn—because it turns the emergence of freedom from slavery against itself, against the slavery that has arisen from freedom itself—that only such a self-divided, torn freedom can be true.

This is a consistent, indeed a radical Hegelianism. But it is a consequence that Hegel’s philosophy could never have reached on its own. It required, and still requires, the experience of the “Germanic,” Western, Christian world that Hegel conceptualized—from its margins. It requires the discipline, knowledge, and courage to bring this external experience into the core of understanding. It required, and continues to require, the work of Orlando Patterson.