On November 20, 2024, the Stone Program in Wealth Distribution, Inequality, and Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School hosted a panel discussion on the life and work of Orlando Patterson. The event was introduced by Deirdre Bloome and organized by Matthew Lavallee. It centered on the recent publication of a biographical interview with Patterson conducted by Columbia University anthropologist David Scott.
Scott’s original interview with Patterson took place in 2010 and 2011 and was published in the journal Small Axe in 2013. I was a student of Patterson’s at the time, and I remember devouring it soon after it was published. Over the years, I have pressed the interview on many people, including my former Berkeley colleague, Loïc Wacquant. In 2020, on one of our Sunday walks in Berkeley, I insisted that Loïc read the interview, telling him he wouldn’t be able to put it down. I woke the next morning to find an email from Loïc, timestamped 1:45 AM, reading: “This should be the basis for a book.” Loïc got to work, Scott did another round of interviews, and the result is The Paradox of Freedom: A Biographical Dialogue, published by Polity in 2023.
The Paradox of Freedom follows Patterson from his childhood in Jamaica to his current post as John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. The book is full of incredible stories from Patterson’s extraordinary life. On just the third page, we learn that Patterson’s father, who worked on the Jamaican police force, was assigned to tail Marcus Garvey when Garvey was deported to Jamaica and that he was radicalized by Garvey’s speeches. In Patterson’s studies at the University College of the West Indies, he researched resident hall life with fellow student Walter Rodney, who became a renowned historian and political figure. Later, when Patterson and Rodney continued their studies in London, they were summoned to the flat of the towering historian, critic, and organizer C. L. R. James, to study Marx at the great man’s feet. When Patterson shared his first novel, The Children of Sisyphus, with James, James secretly found him a publisher, and after the book came out, wrote a glowing review in the New Left Review, whose editorial committee Patterson had just joined.
We follow Patterson back to his alma mater, and then to a sabbatical leave in Cambridge, Massachusetts, arranged by Talcott Parsons, which led to Patterson’s tenured position at Harvard. But Patterson never abandoned Jamaica, and over the years he has traveled regularly to the island, originally to serve as Special Advisor for Social Policy and Development to Michael Manley and most recently as the chair of the Jamaica Education Transformation Commission.
Most importantly, the book traces the evolution of Patterson’s thought over his incredible career, allowing us to see the through lines in his expansive body of work: his insistence on both the destructive consequences of slavery and the origin, in the minds and experiences of the enslaved, of the idea of freedom as the supreme human value; his rejection of essentialism and parochialism; his devotion to recovering the lived experience of the oppressed, in all its complexity; his commitment to the indispensability of history; and his dedication to going against the grain—“I hate conforming,” as he puts it at one point in the interview. Most clearly, we see the centrality of Jamaica to the thought of this universalist thinker. It is sometimes said that the research trajectory of political scientist James C. Scott can be summarized in the following way: “Peasants in Malaysia, peasants everywhere, everyone everywhere.” You could say something similar about Patterson’s career, running as it does from slavery in Jamaica to freedom across the globe. For these reasons, I believe The Paradox of Freedom is the best single-volume introduction to Patterson’s work currently in print.
To close, I will quote from Patterson himself, in response to a question about what he wants his work to do: “I want my work to enlighten some of the big issues of our time, such as freedom, democracy, and equality; I want to help my readers come to terms with the great evils of human history, such as genocide, slavery, colonialism, racism, classism, and colorism. I want people to be honest about how the past works in accounting for present outcomes, especially the tragic ways in which the historically oppressed become entrapped in their own oppression. In broader terms, I want people, especially in my discipline, and related ones like anthropology, to take history and culture seriously again. I am as puzzled by persistence as I am by change, and I strongly believe that we cannot come to terms with the latter, cannot bend change to our will, until we understand how the mechanisms of persistence prevent the change that we want… I want to promote understanding of development and to engage with change. And in regard to my own little part of the world, Jamaica, I want so badly to see the burden of its horrendous past lifted, to relieve the still shocking levels of poverty, to see a reduction of the ghastly scourge of violence, and to see the education system work, since it is the main path toward any kind of real progress.”
The Kennedy School panel featured remarks from political theorists Adom Getachew, Alex Gourevitch, and Aziz Rana. A few weeks later, on December 12, 2024, Patterson received the Hegel Prize in Stuttgart, Germany. At the ceremony, philosopher Christoph Menke delivered a laudation in honor of Patterson. We reproduce all four sets of remarks here, along with a response from Patterson.
