The Paradox of Freedom is a wonderful dialogue between David Scott and Orlando Patterson on Patterson’s life and work. The book embodies a quality that I have always admired in Patterson’s scholarship: he has a remarkable capacity to locate concepts within the lived details of social experience and, in the process, to tease out what is at stake in struggles over ideas. Scott and Patterson’s exchanges do exactly this, but now with the lens firmly directed toward Patterson’s thought itself. We see his concepts emerge and evolve over time in the context of shifting political dynamics in the United States, Jamaica, and the Third World more generally. All of this brings home the scholarly and political implications of the ideas themselves, and does so with remarkable power. It is a stirring work, embodying a profound intellectual biography of Patterson as a person and of the collective experience of the anti-colonial and postcolonial eras.

Indeed, I found reading The Paradox of Freedom to invite personal reflection about one’s own journey with Patterson’s ideas. It pushed me to examine what I’ve gained from engaging with his work over many years. The very first time that I read anything by Patterson was when I was in graduate school. I was struggling to figure out exactly how to shape my dissertation topic. I was studying political theory and I knew I wanted to write about the idea of freedom in the United States. Intuitively, I felt that this necessarily meant grappling with its negation: the big structural realities of slavery, settler colonialism, empire, racial capitalism. All these realities seemed to constrain emancipatory horizons and to serve as the backdrop against which any freedom movement operated.

I was very conscious of wanting to avoid two traps. The first trap entailed an easy affirmation of American narratives of inherent liberty and promise that ignored the structural conditions of collective life. The second trap entailed a similarly easy rejection of the very potential for genuine change—along with the rejection of the heroic achievements of past activists and thinkers. I wanted my writing to avoid both self-congratulation and radical rejectionism. Reading Patterson, particularly Freedom in the Making of Western Culture and Slavery and Social Death, felt like a guide out of the fog.

One problem I faced had to do with method. If I was committed to intellectual production in the academy, how could I translate my intuitions about freedom and subordination into something that was actually cognizable as scholarship—in the early 2000s, when the environment in these disciplines was very different? This is not that long ago, but when I look back 20 years, at that time the things that I cared most about understanding—labor and capitalism, empire and colonialism—were not topics that were commonly pursued in political theory graduate study.

Second, how could I develop a synthesis of the liberating and the oppressive in the American experience that avoided those two traps—self-congratulation and rejectionism? Finally, how, in writing about these features, could I maintain an ethic of humanity that treated those that I discussed, even those I disagreed with intensely, with sympathetic understanding and in a way that did justice to the complexities of social experience?

So let me say something about how reading Patterson helped me make my way through these issues. And then I’ll end with a question—not exactly a challenge, but something that I struggle with and am curious about how Patterson approaches. To begin with, on method: at that time, in political theory, the way that you typically studied a topic like freedom was through a focus on ideas, oftentimes either drawn from canonical thinkers or fully abstracted through a set of analytical philosophical tools. That’s basically how I started, by reading the canonical figures that were presented to me. But I quickly found this specific approach unsatisfying because I wanted to know how the ideas of those thinkers actually played out in terms of their politics on the ground. It was very hard in the abstract for me to assess the substantive meaning of their claims without locating them in concrete political disputes and struggles.

For instance, I spent a lot of time, initially, reading John Locke and Alexis de Tocqueville—the latter, I should add, is still a central interlocutor for me. Yet I had this thought, which was: wait a second, what were their actual politics like and how did the ideas intersect with those politics? That led me to explore Locke’s involvement with colonialism in the construction of the constitution for Carolina and his views about workhouses for children, as well as Tocqueville’s connections to French empire. I wanted to read these philosophers politically so as to better understand the implications of their philosophy.

At the same time, I wasn’t as interested in just turning to a conventional historical methodology. Twenty years ago, the most familiar style of historical research in the American academy was very suspicious of transhistorical and structural analysis. It tended to emphasize the particularities of historical moments. In my view, this emphasis on the particular and wariness of structure made it hard to see how an idea like freedom might emerge, persist, and change across time—along with its underlying institutions and practices.

By contrast with typical approaches in political theory and academic history, Patterson’s method of historical sociology linked the concept of freedom to an historical record in a way that allowed you to see structure as well as the ongoing spaces for ideological contestation. In Patterson’s language, his framework emphasized how ideas translated into enduring values precisely through the institutionalization of those ideas. In effect, his approach to the study of freedom treated the topic as a lived set of ideas and institutions that created durable regime types, whose structures could be delineated. It therefore allowed one to see how the invocation of freedom by either empowered elites or oppressed groups on the ground could have very different meanings and effects.

This was, in large part, due to the richness of his empirical research and findings. It seemed as if he had read everything, from across the ages. Patterson was doing theory and history at the highest level. And this combination allowed the reader to understand how specific structural backdrops made it possible for competing actors to employ the language of freedom for very different ends. All of this helped me make sense of the question I’d often grapple with when it came to Locke or Tocqueville: when were arguments by thinkers or political actors liberating or actually subordinating in political practice? Following Patterson, one had to first clarify the structural dynamics. Then, one could appreciate how claims—even under the guise of liberating language—actually entrenched forms of domination. Similarly, this historically grounded interplay between structure and agency meant one could also appreciate how those who were oppressed used a variety of discursive strategies to pursue transformation or to contest the institutionalization of destructive ideas.

Thus, Patterson’s approach offered a means of avoiding only seeing structural continuity across time: the pitfalls of such a viewpoint were one reason why academic history had pushed away from metanarratives and monocausal explanations of social experience. How do you study how ideas become institutionalized as values—how they shape background structural conditions—without embracing too intense a brand of determinism, Marxist or otherwise? How do you maintain space for change and for the recognition of social variety, while at the same time appreciating the durability of oppressive conditions?

Patterson’s approach to slavery, in particular, seemed to hold both intellectual objectives at the same time: making sense of change and making sense of continuity. And for that reason, it also appeared more resistant to a politics either of self-congratulation or of rejectionism. His analysis made apparent the historical and conceptual weakness of both tendencies. The first of those, self-congratulation, seemed to contend that slavery and freedom were separate currents flowing into the well of American ideas, but that over time, one would win out; thus, the American liberal experience was the steady winning out of freedom over slavery. His historical sociology made patently absurd claims that slavery in the United States, really the Western world, was purely aberrational. You could not read his work and conclude that the primary trajectory of American life was the ineluctable overcoming of slavery and subordination.

At the same time, the competing side, that of rejectionism, contended that the persistence of various forms of servitude spoke to the fact that there had never been anything liberating about the underlying ideas of freedom. History was primarily an exercise in preservation through transformation. But for Patterson, this of course proceeded through a flattening of political experience that also didn’t account for realities of change. Even when aspirational projects failed or succeeded only partially in the past, they generated alternatives and shifted institutions in ways that were both important to acknowledge and necessary for understanding social order—its rise, its endurance, and its collapse.

Above all, reading Patterson offered a toolkit. His approach was comparative, grounded in exploring how ideas and institutions fit together, and was able to think across historical eras. It also illustrated how change often proceeded through coalitional arrangements that brought communities together despite difference and on the grounds of shared experience. For Patterson, for instance, US segregation could be understood as a way, through separation, of making shared experiences and solidarity across the racial divide far harder to appreciate. Thus, it is not a surprise that the resurgence of the American far right has gone hand in hand with the effort to effectively—by rolling back racial inclusion—resegregate American life, to limit the types of cross-racial educational and workplace settings that are less fertile ground for the promotion of ethno-nationalism.

Patterson’s careful historical sociology had the capacity to locate sites of agency in ways that underscored both the successes and failures of interracial coalition building and of class-based organizing on behalf of racial justice. It also underscored how freedom and subordination operated dialectically, and how this meant that meaningful change often generated its own new forms of subordination. None of this, however, entailed rejecting that change as lacking in value, or assuming that the coalition building was therefore unproductive. This linkage of structure and agency instead highlighted the importance of embracing an understanding of history in which no change could fully unshackle society from oppression. And as a result, one had to appreciate the unavoidable continuity both of durable regimes of power and of the efforts—always made by those most oppressed—to break free from those regimes.

So, I’ll end with a puzzle that I’ve found in Patterson’s work, and that honestly I’m struggling with in my own. The very avoidance of this either/or binary of self-congratulation or rejectionism, which I view as an essential contribution, nonetheless produces its own tendencies when it comes to Patterson’s prescriptions about political strategy today. One tendency is a strong desire for oppressed communities to reclaim their own agency and communal self-worth—often by asserting profound alternatives to the structures shaping basic institutions, whether the family, economy, or politics. But at the same time, Patterson repeatedly makes us aware of the massive structures constraining our agency, and thus cautions against the type of ruptural romantic politics that imagines that you can just break free of these structures. He is a critic—albeit a sympathetic one—of certain strands of Third World and socialist revolutionary thinking.

This is how I read aspects of Patterson’s suspicions of the left, whether in Jamaica or in the United States. He tells left activists: We are thrown into these enduring conditions. They have knitted together good things and bad things. They can be shifted and moved, but if we go too far down the path of thinking that they should be revised wholesale, we can, in a sense, fall into another trap. This is a trap of imagining one can wish away the world as it is. That romantic embrace of rupture can at worst embody a meanness toward the lived experiences that people have, and the very real—if partial—benefits that the oppressed derive from our existing systems.

In fact, there’s an interesting moment in The Paradox of Freedom when Patterson defends the US constitution, or at least the rule of law, as an alternative mechanism—however flawed—for producing social cohesion and for providing people with various kinds of rights and benefits. As someone who is publicly quite critical of the US constitution, it made me pause to think through the safeguards —however compromised—that existing frameworks provide for those most marginalized.

But by the same token, sometimes the way to be most committed to our shared and essential humanity is precisely by arguing for radical changes to the structures that define our world, even if those radical changes cannot be fully realized within the terms of our existing political lives. I would like to hear more from Patterson about how he holds these competing truths together. A genuinely humanist politics seems to require both a utopian aspiration for a future that is truly different and a recognition of the need to be responsible to the types of security and meaning that oppressed groups gain even from flawed arrangements. What are the circumstances in which we might want to call for dramatic changes to the world we inhabit, and what are the circumstances in which we might want to tread lightly on disrupting the practices people have come to rely on?

I would just like to note that this is a difficult question. Sometimes refraining from offering a utopian horizon is not an expression of political responsibility. It is rather a failure to live up to the needs of others, or a too-hasty willingness to accept domination as, in practice, immovable.