The Paradox of Freedom: A Biographical Dialogue is a riveting journey through Orlando Patterson’s intellectual development and prolific scholarly career. Expanding on an initial interview David Scott conducted with Orlando Patterson, which was first published in 2013 in the Small Axe journal of Caribbean Studies, The Paradox of Freedom now covers the entire arc of Patterson’s scholarship and includes a new introduction by Scott. The biographical dialogue provides a comprehensive picture of Patterson’s intellectual itinerary which makes clear the breadth of his preoccupations. Even those who feel they know Patterson’s work well will learn something fresh from this exchange. In addition to chronicling his wide-ranging scholarly output, the dialogue amplifies the recurring questions of equality, democracy and culture that have shaped his diverse body of work.

Above all, in my view, The Paradox of Freedom allows us to appreciate the extent to which Patterson is a West Indian intellectual, part of an intellectual tradition that includes key figures such as C.L.R. James and Eric Williams. For readers of Slavery and Social Death or Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, it might appear that Patterson is above all a global social theorist. Readers of works such as The Ordeal of Integration might understand him to be primarily a sociologist of Black America. Both are of course true, but without appreciating how Patterson’s work emerges from a specifically West Indian set of preoccupations and orientations, we are liable to misread those works and miss Patterson’s core concerns. As Patterson tells Scott near the end of the interview when discussing his 2019 book The Confounding Island, “I never really left [the Caribbean] intellectually” (216). Rather than a long-awaited return then, Patterson views his recent effort to take stock of Jamaica’s political and cultural development as part of a long-running conversation that begins with his first book The Sociology of Slavery. The questions posed in that early book—about the disintegration of societies and cultures in the wake of transatlantic slavery, the resources available for resistance, the reconstruction of social life in the wake of that disintegration, as well as the values and orientations generated from the experience of slavery—reappear as key touchstones of Patterson’s work throughout his long career.

In this review essay, I will explore what it means to read Patterson as a West Indian intellectual. However, I want to say at the outset that to relocate Patterson in these terms should not be understood as a parochializing move. Instead, I think we get another way of understanding why and how the Caribbean has been a place to think particularity and universality together. First, I will contextualize The Paradox of Freedom in the wider project of chronicling a West Indian intellectual tradition conducted by David Scott and the Small Axe journal. Second, I will describe the upshot of locating Patterson within this intellectual tradition in terms of how he understands his work. In particular, I will highlight the way in which his specific interventions in sociology and the social sciences emerge from a West Indian attempt to think the particular and the universal together.

When David Scott’s initial interview with Orlando Patterson was published in Small Axe, it was part of a series of conversations Scott had conducted with key West Indian intellectuals. These included figures such as the preeminent historian and archivist of the Garvey movement Robert Hill, the cultural theorist and philosopher Sylvia Wynter, the political economist Lloyd Best, and many others. While The Paradox of Freedom serves as an intellectual biography of Patterson when we resituate it within this series, we can appreciate the intellectual and political context from which Patterson emerged. In the diversity of the interviews and the range of intellectual and political positions represented through them, we return again and again to the centrality of the mid-century experience of decolonization and the unique role of the University of West Indies.

Patterson’s formative years coincided with the transition to national independence. As for many of his generation, this epochal period generated great expectations followed very quickly by a sense of disappointment. Patterson joined fellow classmates such as Walter Rodney as a critic of the middle-class nationalism that came to shape the trajectories of decolonization. The unifying nationalist promise of “out of many, one” struck him as a fiction, one that merely papered over rather than addressed the deep inequalities of Jamaican society. While Patterson’s own scepticism about the nationalist project did not follow the main lines of critique advanced in Marxist and Black nationalist idioms, he shared with this emerging cohort of West Indian intellectuals a general path of historicizing the predicaments faced by Jamaica at the moment of independence.

I will return to this historical imagination shortly, but it is worth noting that the formation of Patterson as a West Indian intellectual has a great deal to do with the institutional context of the University of the West Indies where Patterson studied as an undergraduate. The University of the West Indies was a federal institution that served the entire region even after the political experiment of regional political federation came to an end in 1962. Patterson describes the University as a formative intellectual and political context. His first political activity was campaigning for a “yes” vote on the federation referendum in 1961 (51). More importantly, the University shaped his scholarly identity. As he puts it to Scott, “One of the first things that happens when you went there was that you were resocialized out of your parochial nationalism into this federal concept… you were being socialized into being West Indian (52). The cosmopolitan space of the university facilitated young West Indians encountering one another and coming to understand themselves in regional terms.

To see Patterson as a West Indian intellectual is to understand the central dimensions of his work. For instance, according to Patterson, the discipline of sociology and the social sciences has more broadly moved towards methods modeled on the natural sciences. Nevertheless, Patterson’s work has continued to emphasize the centrality of history to theorizing the social present. While he rejects the historicism label, Patterson insists that social problems have historical sources that must be understood in order to grasp their configuration in the present (221). Patterson’s commitment to historicization situates him within a West Indian intellectual tradition that includes C.L.R. James and Eric Williams but also figures of his generational cohort like Walter Rodney. Writing on the cusp of colonial independence as James and Williams did or during the dramatic yet incomplete transformations unleashed by decolonization as with Patterson and Rodney, each of these figures returns to history and especially the history of slavery. These acts of historicization, Scott notes, are not principally about the past itself (225). They are primarily efforts to understand the sources and trajectories that produced a set of present conditions and predicaments. In Patterson’s case, in particular, the historical inquiry is a constitutive element of producing generalizable social theory.

Marrying social theory and history in this way, Patterson also participates in a wider experimentation with form and genre that is characteristic of several West Indian intellectuals. For the many who know Patterson through works like Slavery and Social Death, it will come as a surprise that, in addition to his prolific work in sociology, Patterson wrote not one but three novels! Here too he is in the company of James who published the novel Minty Alley and wrote short sorties before he turned to his canonical history of the Haitian Revolution, Black Jacobins, and Sylvia Wynter whose novel Hills of Hebron inaugurates her thinking on humanism. Each of these figures exhibits an openness to the ways in which different genres make possible alternative ways of rendering political questions or making visible certain social dynamics that might remain difficult to capture in another form. In Patterson’s case, there is an iterative interplay between his novels and the early sociological work. The consequences of the social disintegration theorized in The Sociology of Slavery are reflected in the marginalization and inequality explored in his first novel, The Children of Sisyphus. Patterson’s third novel Die the Long Day explores the sources of resistance, a question that is briefly addressed at the end of The Sociology of Slavery. Die the Long Day then anticipates the central role that Patterson allocated to enslaved women in inaugurating the value of freedom in his book, Freedom in the Making of Western Culture.

The facility demonstrated with various genres in Patterson’s work also suggests the significance of an imperial education with its emphasis on humanistic inquiry and an engagement with the classics. Attention to this educational backdrop might also help to elucidate how Patterson and others within the West Indian intellectual tradition demonstrate a very specific relationship to the West or Western civilization. Readers will notice that, in a book like Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, Patterson does not pose the problem of a paradoxical connection between freedom and slavery from outside “western culture” but instead as an inheritor of its values and tragedies. This self-conception as part of Western civilization positions him as an immanent critic rather than an external observer, and suggests a critical approach of problematization rather than transcending/overcoming the West. The emphasis on problematization is perhaps most clear in the elaboration of the paradox of freedom and slavery, but it also appears in his most recent book, The Confounding Island, where the violence of Jamaican society is viewed as an internal dynamic of its democratic and participatory ethos. In each of these contexts Patterson offers a deep sense of the contingency and internal fragility of the values that we hold dear.

My final point is that by understanding Patterson’s emergence from within this West Indian intellectual tradition, we can better appreciate the sources of his interventions in sociology and the social sciences. Patterson lodges two specific challenges to his field and also to wider social science: ahistoricism and parochialism. I have already discussed the importance of historicization but let me say something about parochialism to close. As Scott notes in the introduction, “in [Patterson’s] hermeneutic itinerary, Jamaica is simultaneously the concrete ground of historical particularity and an instance of moral universality” (2). The interplay between particularity and universality in Patterson’s work has been accomplished through two significant features of his work. The first is induction and the second is comparison. Beginning with concrete instances of a phenomenon, he searches out family resemblances to construct new concepts such as social death. For Patterson, this is an exercise in “grounded theory” (234). In Slavery and Social Death, the book that crystallizes this method, Patterson turns to an agricultural metaphor to capture his work. As he puts it, the generation of a concept like social death emerges from the work of “a heavy plow that must first clear the ground, turn the rough soil, and demarcate the boundaries”.Footnote ¹ Patterson’s salutary approach takes a fine balance of neither forgoing theoretical generalization nor absconding from the realm of empirical conditions.