Professional Documents
Culture Documents
C.J. Sentell
15 February 2011
In this dissertation I examine the relationships between freedom and slavery through the
intersections of food and agriculture. With aims both critical and reconstructive, that is, I
inquire into specific forms of slavery in the production, distribution, and consumption of
food and agricultural goods so as to analyze their consequences for those particular
experiences of freedom associated with the theory and practice of democratic politics.
The motivating hypothesis of this project is that there are important connections
between the potential experiences of agency in a given society, and the means and ends
around which its subsistence is organized. My thesis in particular is that the various
politics are inextricably linked to specific configurations of power operative within the
and agriculture are constitutive aspects of this realm; as a central place for the
contingently universal form. In this way, I situate the realm of human necessity as both
the one hand, my critical aim is to trace the historical relationships of slavery and
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the intersections of freedom and food to elaborate how the experiences of each inevitably
incorporate certain behavioral technologies that obscure the politics of eating in late
between the contingency of need and the education of desire – particularly the need to eat
and the desire to be free – I aim to elaborate how a particular confluence of institutions
and practices form the continuous basis of surplus extraction that is required for the
reconstruct the concept of sovereignty as ineliminable from subsistence, and argue that
anthropologies – that seek the essential what of human nature in universal space, the
method I employ throughout this project is what I term philosophical ecology, which
seeks instead the relational how of human experiences in particular times and specific
places. By shifting the methodological emphasis from anthropos to oikos, that is, I am
able to advance a theory of slavery that neither depends upon nor reinscribes traditional
the realm of human necessity, and freedom as an experience contingent upon the
possibilities organized through its various economies. From this perspective, freedom is
neither a thing nor a right nor even a capacity unique to human beings, but a substantive
experience the specific qualities of which are always already habituated as agency in the
course of undergoing the necessities and pleasures proper to different forms of life. In
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this way, the intersectional significance of freedom and food lays precisely in the how the
activities of everyday life comprise the ineliminable background against which the habits
diachronic, and ecological hermeneutic framed by the relational continuity of slavery and
By way of this project, then, I seek to provide a timely, consequential, and novel
contribution to the emerging transdisciplinary body of scholarship that traces the origins
and development of freedom in the West to its institutions and practices of slavery. With
several notable exceptions, Western philosophers and political theorists have occluded
the significance of slavery in the development of one of its most basic political values,
and elided the consequences of agriculture from its central theories of human nature and
politics. To be sure, while many writers in this tradition address these aspects in the
course of their overall analysis, they are often embedded tangentially within a type of
conjectural prehistory – or theoretical fiction – that aims to naturalize the authority of the
state through a developmental narrative concerning its origins in human nature. The
importance of such narratives for my thesis concerns in the way they legitimate a
civilizations from savages, and those by nature fit for citizenship from those by nature fit
for slavery.
Motivating my analysis is the general hypothesis that there are rapid and
the ends and means around which its subsistence is organized. The broad contours of this
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tacitly incorporated into the work of many other social scientists and historians more
generally – links the advent of civilization with the transition from nomadic bands of
civilization, agriculture provided the surpluses required for humans to live in greater
population densities, amid permanently inhabited territories, which in turn enabled the
growth of villages, towns, and cities, as well as long-distance trade and the relative
antedate that other civilizational sine qua non – the invention of writing – by tens of
thousands of years or more, and when such inscriptions do in fact begin to appear in the
Importantly, however, for each of the four classic Old World civilizations –
Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, the Indus Valley, and Northern China – as well as the six
contemporary methods – the Levant, sub-Sahara Africa, China, Eastern North America,
several other notable changes in human societies, including the marked increase in social
hunter-gatherers did indeed live in relatively egalitarian social formations where the
nonexistent. And so while the holding and trading of slaves in particular was no doubt
present in many of these early human social groups, it rarely seems to have been of
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significant economic consequence. Rather, within such societies slavery appears to have
been largely symbolic, and functioned primarily as a primitive form of alterity by which
the community identified itself through various rituals of segregation and solidarity.
functions and characters of their slaveries changed as well. Thus while vestigial aspects
of the symbolic roots of slavery no doubt persisted, the advent of agriculture does in fact
coincide with the advent of the wide-spread economic and extra-economic significance of
slavery. From supplementing household labor and fulfilling jobs of toil and drudgery, to
serving in military, financial, and administrative roles and satisfying the sexual desires of
masters, as societies gradually became dependent upon domesticated plants and animals
to satisfy the necessities of everyday life there is a striking correlative increase in the
direct, personal, and often violent domination of human beings in satisfying the direct
necessities of life. In this way, not only does the sheer number of slaves held by
agricultural societies differentiate them quantitatively from their hunting and gathering
In short, despite ongoing scholarly debate about the details, there is a certain
around the transition to agriculture. On the one hand, as I have already intimated, this
link is rather straightforward and agrees with many common sense understandings of the
urban-rural dialectic in the history of human cultures. On the other hand, however, from
a certain theoretical point of view it raises more questions than it answers. Not only are
there problems of definition and demarcation – there are, for example, leaf-cutting ants
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that have cultivated a fungus as subsistence for some 23 million years – but there are
issues of causality and chronology, as well as questions of metaphor and modality, which
concerns in this project, however, are those particular relations that intersect ostensibly
democratic forms of state apparatus and ideology, and the seemingly requisite
Throughout, that is, I interrogate precisely those relationships of power intersecting the
evolution of the democratic state, particular forms of agricultural production, and the
Of course, philosophers and political theorists have long both recognized and
relied upon certain features of this traditional narrative, deploying its scope and content in
various ways to circumscribe their respective theories of human nature. From Aristotle’s
account of the origin of the polis and its affiliations with farming and democracy, to
Hegel’s narrative of the birth of the state and its reliance upon agriculture and property,
problems of subsistence and production on the one hand, and questions of sovereignty
and power on the other, flow as a susurrus of necessity beneath the clamor of freedom so
task in this project involves interrogating the conceptual integrity of this developmental
narrative, analyzing its normative assumptions and implications, and reconstructing its
potential consequences for the theory and practice of democratic politics. Suggesting that
the reductive developmental link between civilization with agriculture belies the ways in
which violence, mastery, and domination are central to both, I question the efficacy of
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from an ecological point of view, and inquire into the ways in which capitalism is itself a
To structure my inquiry into these relations and intersections I orient each chapter
traditional narrative of Western freedom. From its ostensible origins in the ancient Greek
polis to its development in the Roman republic, from its alleged rebirth in the modern
European nation state to its migration to the New World, the compelling coherence of
this tradition turns in many ways on a historiography of freedom that figures its
development as the embodiment of progress, and its concept the West’s beneficent
philosophical gift to the world. Thus while my scholarly claims are modest and include
vast, though sufficiently discrete field of footnotes, which I sow for now in the
bibliography to this project – my critical aims are ambitious and include arguments
To support such aims and claims, I begin each chapter by outlining the social and
historical intersections of agriculture and slavery for each period. From this context, I
isolate two specific historical cases to illustrate and contrast particular aspects of my
argument. In this way, I organize each chapter into three principal sections,
introduction to the period, in the first two sections of each chapter I present detailed
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genealogies of slavery and agriculture at two important moments in the history and
theory of democratic freedom. By contrast, in the third section I withdraw from the
historiography, nor a history of ideas as such. I do not aim to trace what a particular
lineage of thinkers wrote or did not write on these topics. Importantly, such a project
would be one of transmission and recovery, which is precisely the dynamic I aim to
interrogate and interrupt. Through this study, rather, I pursue a certain history of
knowledge that seeks, by way of slavery and agriculture, the conditions of possibility
characteristic of Western freedoms. While many have noted the associations between
slavery, agriculture, and various forms of liberal and neo-liberal political theory, I take
In what follows I outline the narratives, concepts, and norms central to this
project, elaborating the structure and substance of the claims to come. As such, I am
substance to demonstrate the quality and consideration of my thesis. In this way, this
prospectus also presents in condensed form the basic content of my Introduction, where I
explicate in detail the keywords and waypoints central to this dissertation. While in the
first part of that chapter I examine the relationships of freedom and slavery relevant to the
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general scope of this project, in the second I situate the intersections of food and
Yet because there is no substitute for an example to clarify the abstract, I begin
Agricultural and Mechanical Association in Nashville, 1873. For Douglass and his
audience the meanings of freedom are immediately associated with the conditions of their
and domestication. That novel forms of agency are possible for these newly born
citizens, Douglass is certain to reassure the audience; but, he argues, to limit the potential
content of such freedoms to the political economic metaphors of free votes and free labor
is to ignore and obfuscate how their actualization turns on satisfying basic human needs.
In his address Douglass argues that while the formal, legal abolition of slavery
was no doubt necessary for securing those supposedly inalienable rights of life, liberty,
subsistence outside those orders organized to produce precisely such privation, Douglass
recalls how immediately following emancipation the prevailing attitude across the South
was “let the Negro starve!,” a sentiment predicated on “the theory that the Negroes – like
the Indians – will ultimately die out.” Even as emancipation freed the slaves legally and
politically, then, a constellation of sentiments and habits characteristic of the former order
continued to control the lives of these new citizens, effectively killing them by means of
privation. “‘Let the Negroes starve!’” he concludes forcefully, “thus executes itself.”
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But as Douglass spoke to those black farmers and mechanics that autumn day in
Nashville, there was a flurry of activity across town in the white community. Just months
before, “Commodore” Vanderbilt announced his first and only major philanthropic gift to
young Methodist bishop – also the cousin of his young second wife – Vanderbilt
envisioned an institution that would “contribute to strengthening the ties which should
exist between all sections of our common country.” Such ties, of course, were as literal
as they were metaphorical, for Vanderbilt accumulated his fortune in the shipping and rail
industries just then tying the eastern metropolitan centers to the burgeoning western
Just four generations prior to his amassing what remains one of the largest
fortunes in the nation’s history, however, Vanderbilt’s New World patriarch emigrated
from Holland as an indentured servant, or white slave, which was quite common
throughout the seventeenth century. In fact, between 1619 – four months before even the
first Africans arrived enslaved in America – and 1800 – roughly when the transatlantic
slave trade began in earnest – a full half to two-thirds of all European immigrants to the
British colonies in the Western hemisphere arrived by way of this form of personal
bondage. But unlike their African counterparts, the 300,000 to 400,000 people arriving
under varying conditions of white slavery were actually able to improve their collective
and individual circumstances over time. By way of contrast, then, the rise of Vanderbilt
in three generations from indentured servitude to one of the richest men in the world is
part and parcel of the American drama staged in Nashville that September day.
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concepts of freedom the essential tensions of which motivate my analysis throughout this
project. On the one hand, as a former slave, abolitionist, and public intellectual,
Douglass exemplifies the moral victory of the Civil War, and the advent of freedom for
some four million Africans brought to the land of liberty in chains; on the other hand, as
the descendant son of immigrants, the industrial capitalist and onetime philanthropist
the American conflation of capitalism and slavery with democracy and freedom. And so
while the moral victory of emancipation lay in the abolition of slavery as a political and
juridical category, the economic victory of Reconstruction lay in the effective integration
of its more efficient replacement – i.e., wage labor – whereby the free worker appears on
the free market to sell their labor freely to live as a free citizen.
But – and in a moment capturing the essential tensions of this project – following
his account of the ongoing oppression of his people by way of starvation, Douglass
immediately turns to “hail agriculture as a refuge for the oppressed” while recognizing its
central role in the history of that very oppression. By linking the practices of agriculture
to the politics of freedom, in other words, Douglass frames the conditions required for
certain experiences of agency through their association with those activities required for
the reproduction of daily human life. In making this argument, Douglass invokes a long
and varied tradition of theorizing the realm of freedom through its relation to the realm of
necessity. But Douglass there departs from most of these predecessors who, comforted
with and by their abstractions, find it unnecessary to address and redress the particular
habits, rituals, and institutions constituting the realm of necessity in fact. Precisely
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because the satisfaction of basic human needs – food, water, shelter, clothing, community
– forms a singular horizon for the actualization of any agency whatsoever, Douglass
suggests that the settled cultivation of the soil forms a natural nursery for culture and a
In this way, his argument for the political importance of agriculture is also framed
by that common developmental narrative concerning its role in the evolution of human
societies, the general arc of which traces how agriculture is a – if not the – constitutive
condition that enabled the general development of human civilizations. The function of
themselves – functioned to allow particular peoples to settle in particular places over the
span of generations. The importance of such activities lay in the powers associated with
control of the surpluses afforded by agriculture, which both enabled the survival of
communities over the course of winters and famines, and allowed some individuals
Douglass thus illustrates in brief how questions of food and agriculture are always
political. Not only do their intersections with freedom and slavery raise issues of
sufficiency and surplus relevant to any general theory of value, they simultaneously
invoke a range of questions concerning technology and behavior pertinent to any general
theory of power. When such questions are joined with those framed by the realm of
human necessity in general – and the human household in particular – the result is a
theoretical landscape that is both wide and diverse enough to accommodate a plurality of
economies of necessity, that is, Douglass is my point of departure for analyzing the
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structures and functions of such economies as they are sheltered – or not – by the walls of
the human household. As such, the food politics that Douglass advances in his address,
and which I elaborate in this project, is in an important sense already a feminist one as
across human generations by the sexual agencies of reproduction and the gendered
classical political theories for how they figure the household as an economy of necessity
on the one hand, and domestication as its requisite technology of power on the other.
From the agrarian origins of democracy to the pastoral economies of empire, I situate
subsistence production, both of which turned – in different ways and toward different
ends – on the large-scale slave labor. In the first section, “Horticulture as Violence,” I
begin with Hesiod, Xenephon’s Socrates, and Aristotle to frame the nature of necessity in
both agriculture and slavery as analogues to the conceptions of growth, education, and
between forms of extensive agriculture developed in the early centuries of Greek culture
and technologies of war, empire, and domination that were central to their political and
traditional trajectory of the West to Rome, analyzing the ways Cicero, Epictetus,
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Augustine, and others figure slavery within different metaphorical hierarchies of animal
husbandry and pastoral power. Central to my analysis in this section of the chapter is the
rise of the Roman latifundia complex and its relationship to the practices and institutions
of slavery that reached unrivaled articulations in the republican period. In the third and
final section of this chapter, “Domestication as Mastery,” I argue against the theoretical
physical or even physic violence. From this analysis, rather, I integrate insights from a
of sovereignty for how they locate the dynamics of subsistence production within a series
of developmental narratives that convert actual forms of violence and domination into
metaphors for juridical and economic tyranny. In the first two sections of this chapter, I
social and political developments to their respective configurations of legal and economic
power that worked to define land as private property, and the state as its formal
institution. Using Hobbes, Locke, and others in the first section, “Enclosure and
Coercion,” and Rousseau, Montesquieu, and others in the second, “Governance and
human nature, analyzing in particular the forms and functions of conjectural prehistory in
each. I argue that central to the modern concept of sovereignty is a theoretical fiction that
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narrative that depends upon various versions of the “state of nature” or a “primitive”
nature of humanity. In the third section, “Bare Life and Social Death,” I conclude my
analysis of early modern slavery, subsistence, and sovereignty with a discussion of the
theoretical work of Agamben and Patterson. Between the peasant, the serf, and the
life and death on the one hand, and the relationships of technology to nature and culture
on the other.
In Chapter Three, “Life, Labor, and Land,” I follow the migration of these
relations and intersections to the New World, exploring how rights to land and
independent food production worked both to perpetuate and undermine agrarian slavery
in the Americas. In the first two sections, “Topologies of Tenure” and “Ecologies of
Toil,” I contrast the destinies of New World slavery between the American and Haitian
Revolutions. Drawing on a wide range of sources – from Jefferson and Paine to early
American slaves and de Tocqueville in first, to Smith and Hegel as well as C.L.R. James
and Buck-Morss in the second – I explore in each how democratic freedoms in the
Americas are founded between the twin pillars of agriculture and slavery. In the third
section, “Economies of Life,” I use the work of Arendt and Foucault to frame the
material and ideological basis of American hegemony in terms of the surplus wrenched
from the bodies of African slaves by way of plantation capitalism. Identifying key
structural affinities between colonial agricultural and mercantile capitalism, I argue there
an important sense in which wealth derives from the surplus originating from the
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based to industrial forms of agriculture, framing its significance with respect to the
emergence of nineteenth century biopolitics. In the first two sections of this chapter –
“Production and Power” and “Consumption and Slavery” – I juxtapose the consequences
of this transition in the American context through the divergent cases of agricultural
development in the United States and Cuba. Between Marx, Malthus, and others in the
first section, and Du Bois, the Southern Agrarians, and others in the second, I interrogate
the relationships between state power, scientific agriculture, theories of race, and the rise
of global capitalism that followed the nineteenth century revolutions of each. From this
analysis, in the third section of this chapter – “Development as Force” – I use Nietzsche,
fact, I examine how the transition from agrarian slavery to agrarian capitalism was
necessary for the emergence of industrial capitalism, and how the material and
ideological dynamics of this period lay the groundwork for those modern developmental
norms that characterize the immediate political and economic background to the
twentieth century.
century to examine the rise of global corporate agriculture, the neo-liberal philosophical
anthropology of Homo economicus, and their intersections with modern day slavery and
global food insecurity. With the close of the second World War, agriculture and food
unprecedented in the history of the species. In particular, not only did the processes of
cultivation and harvest undergo dramatic mechanization, but the number of farms and
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Since then, however, international institutions have structured the global economy around
while orienting the periphery around comparative advantages specific to various lesser
developed countries. Thus in the first two sections of this chapter – “Organism as
outlined by U.S. and Latin American agricultures in the last century. While in the first
property rights that underpin contemporary American hegemony in the global agro-foods
market, in the second section I examine the agrarian politics of structural adjustments,
from the perspective of modern peasants in Guatemala. In the third section of this
chapter, “Gene as Environment,” I use the work of Dewey, Merleau-Ponty, Haraway and
others to reconstruct the theoretical relationships of nature to nurture, and argue that the
and Freedom,” I return to and reconstruct the theoretical perspective linking democracy
ecological conception of freedom developed throughout the project, I situate the concept
Examining these connections in detail, I outline two basic elements of democratic autarky
analyses of each in terms of contemporary global slavery and corporate industrial food
production. In this way, I conclude that the potential for particular experiences of
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linked to its respective distribution of productive property, how such organizations effect
the social ends of self-determination, as well as the means by which both communities
and individuals experience various kinds of freedom in the course of reproducing their
And so at the close of the twentieth century – a century so often celebrated for the
triumphs of freedom and democracy over totalitarianisms with various faces – it may be a
surprise that more human beings are estimated to be living as slaves than ever before in
human history. Such facts and figures, of course, are “merely” numerical, which is to say
they fail to accurately reflect the proportion of the global population held in slavery. But
such a statistical caveats, themselves, at once expose a rift as old and as ordinary as the
institution itself. As Orlando Patterson argues at the beginning of his global comparative
study of the institution, Slavery and Social Death, there is nothing particularly “peculiar”
It has existed before the dawn of human history right down to the twentieth
century, in the most primitive of human societies and in the most civilized. There
is no region on earth that has not at some time harbored the institution. Probably
there is no group of people whose ancestors were not at one time slaves or
slaveholders.
And yet. Somehow it remains nonetheless striking that the last time such a proportion of
humans worldwide lives as slaves was 1861. That year the citizens of the United States,
primarily in the South, held some 3.8 million slaves as chattel property, which –
numerically as well as proportionally – was more than the entire world combined. And
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while a century earlier, at the height of the Atlantic slave trade, that ongoing democratic
experiment founded on the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness
was importing the smallest percentage of the nearly 12 million Africans brought in chains
to the New World, by 1825 it possessed the largest proportion of slaves in the Western
hemisphere.
Yet, with Frederick Douglass as one of its representatives, this very same period
marks for many the beginning of the end to this iniquitous institution. Indeed, at least in
the United States – among the last colonial nations to abolish slavery – the half million
lives lost in the Civil War is often construed as the morally necessary and politically
sufficient sacrifice to the redress the injustices of its national institutionalization. But, in
the United States in particular, whose triumphant conflation of freedom and capitalism
has become a model for global democratic governance, there have been seven successful
federal anti-slavery prosecutions since 1997 alone. As I have intimated throughout this
prospectus, I hold it as no coincidence that these modern day slaves and masters were
thriving – and continue to thrive – in the balmy fields of Florida agriculture. Locally and
increasingly nationally, the organizing center of resistance for such laborers finds a
powerful voice in the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (C.I.W.), whose tireless efforts to
improve working conditions and pay for thousands of migrant workers in the region stand
and the experiences of freedom that motivates my developing throughout this project the
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hegemonies of late capitalism, I argue, requires a return to the household – and so to its
attendant economies of necessity and excess – as the contingently universal basis for
reconstructing the habits of freedom educated by everyday ways of life. Even amid soils
still burning with slavery, therefore, the cultivation of such experiences requires a
technologies of behavior whose intersections in the realm of human necessity form the
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