I have always admired Orlando Patterson’s writing, but this book was genuinely awe-inspiring. Patterson’s life passes through Walter Rodney and Perry Anderson, CLR James and Talcott Parsons, Michael Manley and, because life is stranger than fiction, Gerald Ford. Patterson is a novelist and historical sociologist who somehow also found time to develop Jamaican housing and educational policy. By the end of this book, I said to myself “I want to be like Patterson when I grow up.” Perhaps in another lifetime.

One thing that has always been compelling about Patterson’s work, which comes across with special intensity in the interview with David Scott that forms the core of The Paradox of Freedom, is a determined willingness to face reality. Not just reality in its generic, contradictory messiness, but in its tragic and morally unsettling objectivity. Patterson’s fortitude comes out in everything from his discussion of Cudjoe and the Maroon betrayal of the slaves, to his discussion of the effect of slavery on gender relations and family structure, to his criticism of the way people try to make a usable-past out of the violence and horror of history. In each case, Patterson insists on drawing attention to just those features of the past and present that are the most difficult to accept. For instance, that Afro-Jamaicans might have defeated themselves when the Maroons cooperated in suppressing slave rebellions; that despite the awful legacy of slavery, each descendant remains responsible for overcoming their circumstances; that understanding the evil of slavery is not the same as presenting oneself as superior for knowing that evil.

There is something deeply humanistic in Patterson’s approach. There is a kind of “nothing human is alien to me” stance in the way Patterson writes and discusses his material that is very difficult to capture. It is not exactly a method but a disposition, a way of bringing oneself to the material, that we could all learn from. This humanistic disposition is all the more impressive given that one of his central objects of study has been the most horrific, long-lasting, and absolute of human evils: slavery. It is difficult to capture this quality of Patterson’s writing but the interview format of this book draws it out with special force.

The interview also prompted an immense range of questions for me, only three of which I can raise here: one about slavery, one about freedom, and one about self-emancipation. My first question is about slavery. Specifically, what does Patterson think about terms like wage-slavery or domestic slavery? One of Patterson’s signature contributions is to theorize the specificity of slavery as a condition of social death. There is nothing essentially racial about slavery, nor is it best understood as the reduction of persons to property. Rather, slavery is a condition in which, although the person continues his physical or natural existence, he has no independent, legitimate existence as a will or as a source of value. He can make no claims, and has no rights or standing in relation to those who can make claims. This social condition destroys kinship and family, not because slaves do not have families, but because they have no recognized and enforceable claims on their kin. That is social death.

If Patterson is right, and there is no denying the force of the argument, his view imposes a strict discipline on what we may validly call slavery. Which raises questions about how people have struggled against and thought about other forms of domination that do not involve social death. For instance, among the many struggles that overlapped with or emerged after abolition, were the well-known arguments against wage-slavery, as well as those of women against what they called the domestic slavery of the patriarchal household. Naming their domination slavery seemed to be an important part of the critique of that condition. What are we to make of these uses of the term? To be clear, I am not talking about examples of hysterical conceptual inflation, where people talk about minor injustices or micro-aggressions as if they were slavery. I have in mind contexts of systematic and severe social oppression, such as when workers contest their domination and exploitation by capitalists, or when women contest a broad rightlessness that is nevertheless not social death. On Patterson’s terms, it is clearly inaccurate to describe these other conditions as slavery. And I imagine Patterson is inclined to say we need to be disciplined in our use of terms. Slavery is, and only is, a condition of social death. There are other concepts for making sense of other forms of unfreedom: domination, subjection, exploitation, alienation, and so on. Aside from scientific inaccuracy, however, does Patterson think there is something wrong with the application of the term slavery to contexts that are not, technically speaking, slavery? Or, alternatively, can anything be said in favor of this extension of the term, as has been the case historically? And, aside from these normative and methodological judgments, how are we to understand the persistent attraction of using the term slavery to apply to non-slave conditions?

My second question is really about the other side of the first: about freedom, not slavery. There are various movements today that use the language of abolition to name the aspiration to freedom. We might see this ongoing use of the term abolition as proof that Patterson was right, in his book Freedom in the Making of Western Culture. Namely, that our basic way of thinking about freedom is born out of the ancient rejection of slavery and remains inseparable from that experience. The core meaning of freedom is something we inherit from the past, in its fully-developed, multi-dimensional richness. Hence we can talk about the freedom that those seeking escape from police brutality, mass incarceration, or wage-labor, in the same terms: as abolition or the negation of slavery.

But, by the same token, I wonder if there might be something insufficient or misplaced when talking about freedom in a modern society in this way. There might be something further to understand about freedom in post-slavery societies that is not reducible or derivable from the negation of slavery. After all, a signature feature of many modern struggles is that the formal freedom of the non-slave is incomplete. I can enjoy social personality, I can be an independent, recognized member of a political community that has abolished slavery, and yet be profoundly unfree. More importantly, the formal freedom of the socially living might even be constitutive of their unfreedom. To take one version of this idea, Marx famously thought that wage-laborers were dominated through the labor contracts that they are free to make because of the way they are masterless, or not bound to anyone in particular. They have socially enforceable claims, to their own formal independence, to not being anyone’s master, and to their kin, which they can only alter or abandon through their own will. Yet that same formally free personality is the one enlisted in the labor contract, which cements their subjection to capital via the will of a particular capitalist with whom they contract. Political emancipation, as the early Marx put it, is undoubtedly progress but it is not human emancipation. We find this kind of thought repeated throughout various modern struggles, not just by the labor movement and socialists, but also in post-colonial struggles that claimed formal political independence produced neo-colonial economic subjugation. Having a seat at the UN does not help much with the need for foreign investment, IMF structural adjustment conditionalities, and competition with other low-wage post-colonies. The right of poor states to take on debt is a freedom they have as recognized, claims-making members of the international legal community. But, in practice, it is a freedom to be incorporated into a highly exploitative, geopolitically dominating sovereign debt regime, with dubious prospects for economic development.

So the new modern thought about freedom is that we can be free and unfree at the same time. Freedom is not just the opposite of slavery; freedom, somehow, can become the opposite of itself. That is a thought not available until we live in societies that formally commit themselves, institutionally, to the universal freedom of all their members. In these societies there is some persistent, fundamental failure of reciprocity, which does not take the form of the absolute negation of human personality. In response to that failure of reciprocity, large numbers or people demand their full freedom. That is a demand for freedom that is poorly expressed in the conventional terms of “abolition.” In some ways we might even think that one of the challenges of modern life is to find a language for freedom that overcomes the inherited, dualistic and absolute way of thinking originating from the relation to slavery. If that is the case, though, it seems that we cannot quite say, as Patterson sometimes seems to, that all the essential features of freedom are born in response to and out of the negation of the condition of slavery.

Finally, I want to circle back to the problem of self-emancipation for Patterson. One of the most vivid parts of the interviews in this book for me was the way Patterson continuously returned to the theme of the wounds of oppression. Oppression is the systematic, institutionalized deprivation of freedom. It is easy to see that this is wrong, but harder to attend to the way that it is damaging. Attention to damage means speaking about the oppressed as damaged, not just as those who have been wronged, which is a much more fraught, if no less real, human problem. I was interested to learn from the interviews that Patterson feels he owes a debt to an earlier brand of cultural sociology that was concerned with these “wounds of oppression”. When I read that, it crystallized for me just how much of Patterson’s work is about the socially and psychologically damaging features of slavery and other extreme forms of subordination. The holocaust of slavery, for instance, is not just the murder of millions. It is the destruction of social life for the living and the long-lasting psychological and cultural effects on everything from their sense of freedom to their family and gender relations.

I would like to hear more from Patterson about how his concern with these issues relates to his clear concern with self-emancipation, or the capacity of and process by which the unfree overcome their oppression. The question of self-emancipation is normally referred to as a problem of collective action – how do the oppressed come together and exercise social power to change oppressive institutions? But I take it that, for Patterson, the prior or equally fundamental problem is how to overcome the inherited and socially reproduced burdens of oppression itself. The oppressed must exercise some kind of culturally transformative power over themselves, not just wider society. For instance, he uses the phrase “inward-directed social movements” to describe the kinds of emancipatory movements he is thinking about. Overcoming oppression is inseparable from overcoming what oppression has done to the self; that requires a kind of cultural self-transformation, available only to the self who must change.

I ask this question of Patterson because he is one of the few people I can think of who talks about the problem of the wounds of oppression so directly, forthrightly and, it must be said, with so much criticism of others who are unwilling to admit this dimension of the problem. This is one of those areas where his humanistic realism really comes to the fore. If we fail to recognize the damage and ask how it might be overcome, we fail to treat the oppressed as agents. We fail to treat them as responsive to reason and values, and therefore fail to see them as responsible in important respects for their choices, actions, behavior.

I also ask this question because it seems to me there is now a widespread set of sociological and political arguments that really dial up the claims about the wounds of oppression. For instance, I am thinking about the discussion of intergenerational trauma. Intergenerational trauma is one way of saying that there are inherited psycho-cultural structures in which groups are trapped. The implication of that literature, which is never really spelled out, is that we cannot treat the oppressed as moral agents responsible for their behavior, because to do so would be to blame the victim. This line of thinking has even become one way of grounding what Patterson elsewhere calls ethnic chauvinism. There are different historical traumas that organize groups and preserve group identity. Members of those groups are thereby trapped in their identities. I suspect that when Patterson first took up these issues, intergenerational trauma and neighboring ideas were much less common or widely applied. But it is just one case where we see the difficulty of emphasizing, on the one hand, deep historical legacies while also remaining committed to the responsibility of agents for their own actions. So I wonder now how he thinks about this problem of self-emancipation, or just how to recognize and acknowledge the damage of oppression while sustaining a thought that it is somehow up to the oppressed to emancipate themselves.

And, if I may modify this third question with a final twist, I wonder where collective self-emancipation figures in his view. It is clearer to me that Patterson wants to preserve a sense of individual responsibility in the face of historic injustice. The legacies of the past do not deny individuals the right to judge and be held responsible for their life choices, family commitments, personal decisions. But it is less clear to me how Patterson wants us to think about collective responsibility for and responsiveness to resisting inherited and present injustice. If it is important to preserve the moral agency of those who are subject to injustice by insisting that they are still responsible, how does that same thought work on the collective level? What kinds of collective responses are warranted, missing, and even obligatory for those who have accumulated all kinds of undeserved suffering and disadvantage? And, in the absence of any such collective, political resolution to enduring injustices, how are people supposed to sustain even their sense of individual moral agency?