Slaves to Individuals or Slaves of the Community: Republicanism and the Invisible Chains of Domination

When the American slaves were emancipated they were formally declared freemen. But as many realised all too painfully, in reality they had merely exchanged one form of bondage (slavery to individual masters) for another (slavery by the community). Long after their iron chains had been broken, Frederick Douglass observed, the invisible chains of slavery remained. Douglass is surely right. And the same can be said in other cases of emancipation. After women received the vote and the formal rights of citizenship, the oppressive force of patriarchy has in many cases stayed intact. Republicans and their critics have long noticed that it is not always easy to reconcile the formal account of non-domination, which is built around the image of the master and slave, with the undeniable freedom-thwarting effects of more diffuse background sources of power, including the lingering influence of racial and gendered prejudice on the one hand, as well as obstacles such as the long-term accumulated effects of asymmetrical access to the free market. Domination, republicans standardly argue, is a relationship between agents, the result of intentional actions rather than of impersonal forces or the remote result of unintended consequences, and should pick out identifiable agents as oppressors and victims. Faced with the challenge of expressing the dominating effects of background social systems and institutional structures in intentional and agential terms, republicans have several options. They may decide that there is more than one concept in play and that an interpersonal model of domination is insufficient on its own and must be supplemented by a conceptually distinct idea of systemic or structural domination. Alternatively, they may maintain that domination is nevertheless best understood in interpersonal terms (normally along the lines articulated most prominently by Philip Pettit). Or they may argue that domination is really structural and bilateral cases of personal domination are merely reflections of the background power asymmetries. My own position is that there is a single concept of non-domination that addresses both interpersonal and structural threats to freedom while remaining focused on intentional actions rather than impersonal effects. I derive this account from the work of Frederick Douglass (who provides my title) and Mary Wollstonecraft. In both their accounts, the domination that comes from powerful individuals, and the domination that comes from social structures and systems of norms are analysed in the same way, as subjection to arbitrary power. While the structural threats to freedom are the most serious and are often logically prior, nevertheless interpersonal forms of domination can still be understood without reference to structures.