Orlando Patterson and David Scott. The Paradox of Freedom: A Biographical Dialogue

Orlando Patterson and David Scott’s The Paradox of Freedom: A Biographical Dialogue is at once a conversation and a theoretical thesis, an interview and an intervention into commonly held understandings of the natures of slavery and of freedom. In his introduction to the text, David Scott, founding editor of Small Axe and director of the Small Axe Project, describes the intention behind the book: to “[map] the dimensions of what I call an anglophone Caribbean intellectual tradition” (Paradox 18), a tradition to which both Scott and Orlando Patterson belong. The choice to trace this intellectual lineage via dialogue lends the text immediacy and life. Rather than a retrospective biography, the interview format offers Patterson the chance to comment on his past work in light of current scholarship—his own and others’—as Scott shapes a conversation that will inform Caribbean thought today. The interviews of which the text is composed, first published in Small Axe in 2013 and resulting ultimately in The Paradox of Freedom: A Biographical Dialogue, “aim both to follow the chronological arc of an individual life (as it is shaped by its familial, educational, social, cultural, economic, and political conditions) and to connect the course of that life with the emergence of a distinctive path of moral, intellectual, and political concerns” (Paradox 18–19). The concern Scott identifies as most central to Patterson’s work is the intersection of slavery and freedom. “What Patterson offers is a deeply perturbing redescription of the self-image of Western civilization in which its most vile and despised institution, slavery, is shown to be the fertile source and inspiration of its most honored and celebrated value, freedom,” Scott writes (Paradox 13). In his introduction, Scott traces the trajectory of Patterson’s career, from early scholarly texts such as The Sociology of Slavery (1967) and his first novel, The Children of Sisyphus (1968), to Patterson’s seminal Slavery and Social Death (1982), to his current research on the nature of freedom. Scott’s contextualization of Patterson’s writings and theories lays the groundwork for the interview of which The Paradox of Freedom: A Biographical Dialogue is composed.Scott, who, like Patterson, studied at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica before assuming a faculty position at a US university, has been instrumental in clearing space within Jamaican scholarship for reenvisioning what “Jamaican history” means. Arguing for a genealogical approach to understanding Jamaica’s present and past, Scott writes, “What we are still trying to discern (what we may always be trying to discern), as the genealogical self-consciousness of our intellectual tradition, are the normative conventions that have taught us how to think ourselves historically in the way that we do” (Scott, “On the Very Idea” 43–44). In “On the Very Idea of the Making of Modern Jamaica,” which appeared in Small Axe and served as Scott’s introduction to The Jamaican 1960s, an essay collection he co-edited with Donette Francis, Scott argues for an understanding of Jamaican history that is more contingent than linear, taking into account what could have been as well as what is. When Scott asks, “Why should the spontaneous uprising of the black poor, the descendants of the enslaved, have given birth to a movement for political independence that has only enhanced the elite classes? Might it not better have given birth to a demand for reparations, to a demand for the moral and material repair for the generations of enslavement?” (“On the Very Idea” 46), he suggests a reevaluation of traditional historical narratives that position Jamaica’s 1962 independence as the only logical outcome of the labor rebellion of 1938. “There is so much to do by way of reorienting our relationships to our pasts,” Scott writes in the preface to an issue of Small Axe (x). Scott’s interview with Patterson is a part of this reorientation, as Scott illuminates the complexity of Jamaican colonial and postcolonial history through the lens of Patterson’s legacy.The Paradox of Freedom is grounded in the genealogy of slavery Patterson traced in Slavery and Social Death and in his subsequent work, most notably Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, the first of a projected two volumes. In Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, Patterson establishes a premise key to his work: without slavery, we would not have freedom. “The first men and women to struggle for freedom, the first to think of themselves as free in the only meaningful sense of the term, were freedmen [former slaves]. And without slavery there would have been no freedmen” (Slavery and Social Death 342). We first knew freedom through its absence, and first valued it when it was denied us. Pursuing the implications of this thesis, Patterson describes the characteristics of slavery. Slavery is relational: “the slave was usually powerless in relation to another individual” (Slavery and Social Death 6). Slavery is “social death” or “a substitute for death,” a state people enter into as prisoners of war or as an alternative to suffering capital punishment for a crime. Slavery is natal alienation: slaves are sundered from their lineages and their descendants, “genealogical isolate. . . . Slaves differed from other human beings in that they were not allowed freely to integrate the experience of their ancestors into their lives” (Slavery and Social Death 5). Chapters of this volume explore the ways in which people became slaves, the functions and structures of slave societies, and relationships between slaves, freedmen (former slaves), and freemen (those who had never been enslaved). All this work serves as a key foundation on which Patterson builds his explorations of freedom.Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (1991) also centralizes slavery’s primacy in our ability to conceive of freedom at all. Freedom, Patterson states, “stands unchallenged as the supreme value of the Western world,” however varied the interpretations of “freedom” might be. “People may sin against freedom, but no one dares deny its virtue” (ix). As Patterson points out, however, freedom has not always been universally valued, and certain relational structures had to be in place in order for the concept of freedom to develop and gain value. For although freedom, as Patterson established in Slavery and Social Death, requires slavery as its oppositional structure, other alternatives to slavery prioritized belonging, kinship, and insider status, all “ideal nonslave condition[s]” that have nothing to do with individual freedom (Freedom 23). Throughout this text, Patterson explores specific confluences within the Western world that, through slavery, elevated freedom to its current exalted status. Patterson discusses the historical role of women in the development of the concept of individual freedom and the significance of Christianity to freedom’s spread. He acknowledges the interplay between different strands of freedom, the “personal,” “sovereignal,” and “civic” freedoms that make up a metaphorical “chordal triad”: “Within the context of the chord [read: freedom] we may want to emphasize one or another element of our expression. Further, the different elements also exist independently. People can, and do, play them separately” (Freedom 3). As this text shows, freedom is far from simple, far from singular; it manifests in many registers and in many different ways. Patterson analyzes the divergences and overlaps between freedoms at different convergences of time and space, never losing track of the dark underbelly, the “lamb in wolf’s clothing” (Freedom xiii)—slavery, the bedrock of freedom.With these texts, and with the body of his work, Patterson adds to and complicates a centuries-long discussion of freedom. John Locke, for example, attempted to define freedom in his 1689 Second Treatise of Government. Positing a hypothetical “State of Nature” in which “men” exist naturally in “a state of perfect freedom. . . . A state also of equality” (Locke II:4), Locke walks readers through a credible progression in which “men” of reason consent to surrender that natural freedom in exchange for the safety achieved through society and government. This alone staves off the State of War, in which a wronged party exacts revenge, only to have revenge exacted on him, ad infinitum. Locke’s State of Nature offers a logic for why “men” might choose to exchange freedom for government but never addresses the origin of freedom itself. Similarly, John Stuart Mill probes the boundaries and benefits of freedom, explaining the importance of free discourse and debate, claiming that if an opinion is correct but never debated, those who disagree “are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error” (19). Mill values individualism, describing an almost Darwinian model of natural selection through which diversity of thought and action produces opportunities for positive societal growth. Yet, again, the concept of freedom itself is not addressed. Mill, like Locke, assumes that freedom is a constant, atemporal human value. Neither asks how it is humans conceived of freedom in the first place.Patterson acknowledges that a great deal of work has already been done on the topic of freedom. Most historians, however, focus on one specific area and time period in their studies of freedom, and “either neglect the previous history of freedom, or, worse, they assume that the ancient, and especially the medieval, experience of freedom has little or nothing to do with its modern history” (Patterson, Freedom xii). For example, Patterson takes issue with Isiah Berlin’s claim “that personal liberty ‘is comparatively modern,’” springing into being in recent times divorced from any lineage “‘in the ancient world’” (Freedom xii). For Patterson, the only worthwhile exploration of freedom is a comprehensive one: freedom in all its iterations must be explored, and linkages across cultures and times cannot be ignored if we wish to understand, not only freedom, but how we talk about freedom; not only freedom’s roots, but the ways in which its growth might facilitate the spread of its opposite. This need to understand freedom fully—freedom and, with it, its partner slavery—drives Patterson’s work, and provides a launching point for Scott and Patterson’s collaboration, The Paradox of Freedom: A Biographical Dialogue.Scott’s first questions to Patterson, however, are not about freedom and slavery, but about his early life in Jamaica. Patterson describes himself as his mother’s “project,” and credits his success as a writer and academic to her commitment to his education (Paradox 24). The 1940s–1950s Jamaica of Patterson’s childhood, with its small towns, its limited scholastic opportunities, and its undercurrents of decolonization and cultural shifts, provides needed background for the discussion that follows. Much, however, remains unexplained. The text reads as a candid dialogue between colleagues. As such, Scott’s questions to Patterson fill gaps in Scott’s own knowledge but often fail to illuminate events and aspects of culture with which Scott and Paterson, as Jamaican intellectuals, are familiar but which may be new to many US readers. For example, Patterson, a supporter of the Jamaican People’s National Party when he was young, recounts the party’s highs and lows, his relationships with party members, and its eventual near-convergence with the Jamaica Labour Party his mother believed “were just interested in Black people remaining workers and having handouts” (Paradox 36). Details of the party’s political platforms and biographies of its leaders, however, are implied or glossed over. Similarly, references to maroon societies, the Reverend Claudius Henry, and Rastafarianism assume a certain literacy with Jamaican history that US readers may not possess. Far from detracting from the text, however, the resulting possibility of disorientation does important work, de-centering Euro-centric historical narratives and challenging uninformed readers to educate themselves, that they might better engage with scholarship that privileges non-Anglophone centers of knowledge production.After exploring Patterson’s early life and education, Scott moves to direct, mostly chronological engagement with Patterson’s texts. Here, again, Scott is directing a genuine conversation between himself and Patterson, rather than a staged interview with leading questions that might fill in for readers details Scott and Patterson already know. However, while some knowledge of Patterson’s work is presumed, the scholars’ discussion of Patterson’s methodologies and of the social and political contexts from which his texts were born is illuminating both for Patterson scholars and those new to his legacy. Patterson’s early work centered on slavery. His newer work turns toward freedom. For Patterson, though, these two areas of study are in fact one. “Freedom and slavery form a tragic pair,” Patterson says (Paradox 200). The deeper he dove into studies of slavery, the more he came to see slavery as a precondition for the concept of freedom. “You go looking for one thing and then you find what I call a ‘shadow concept,’” Patterson says, going on to describe his methodology as “a mode of intellectualizing in which you are open to surprises and always willing to see the unexpected in what you’re doing” (Paradox 160). Without this willingness to revise not only his own preconceptions, but even the subjects of his inquiry, Patterson might never have discovered the degree to which the human understanding of “freedom” depends on its opposite, the experience of freedom’s negation.Patterson explains “social death,” a concept he argues both slaveholders and slaves themselves uphold. He describes slaves as “living dead persons” who understood “that they did not belong and had no claims of birth in the society, . . . that they were utterly degraded, and that they were under the absolute power of the slaveholder who had the power of life and death over them—which amounted to a living death” (Paradox 234). Over the course of this interview, however, Scott’s questions and Patterson’s responses make clear that social death and the conditions of slavery are just one piece of the larger puzzle that also includes the oft-hallowed concept of freedom, a concept neither universal nor inevitable. Discussing Freedom in the Making of the Western World, Patterson says, “The story that unfolds in Freedom is, crucially, I think, not merely the story of the emergence of the idea of freedom but the story of its predominance as a personal and social value.” Patterson, again, sees contingency in that which many accept as a given, viewing freedom’s desirability as constructed rather than innate. “The crucial thing is not simply the emergence of freedom as an idea; the crucial thing is the institutionalization of freedom as a value, which is the story of the making of Western culture” (Paradox 197). Consistently, Patterson undermines historians’ assumptions about how and why the world works. Freedom thus becomes not an intrinsic concept but a shifting value, dominant now but not inevitably so.The Paradox of Freedom: A Biographical Dialogue reveals Patterson as an intellectual unafraid to break new ground, open to and curious about the political movements and shifts in discourse that background and frame his work. Unafraid to point out gaps and faults in the existing scholarship, Patterson is blunt in his assessments of his colleagues’ work, readily giving credit to those who guided him while, with equal readiness, defending his own positions and correcting the lapses he sees in the way history has been understood. Critics, for instance, have taken issue with Patterson’s claim that “a central component of the social, cultural holocaust of slavery was the destruction of the family and the poisoning of gender relations” (Paradox 211). To the accusations that this view endorses “a conservative or normative view of the family,” Patterson responds, “People don’t read carefully” (212), citing the lack of nuance most readers are able (or willing) to perceive in arguments about the structure of African-descent households. While Patterson—trained in economics, now a professor of sociology at Harvard—works across schools of thought in his attempts to understand human history and culture, he observes many of his peers failing to look beyond their own disciplines, a problem his texts seek to remedy. Describing his interest in “network-based neo-evolutionary theory,” Patterson writes, “sociology is too enamored with the inappropriate model of physics, with normal science, to change course anytime soon. It’s a dead end; but who is listening?” (Paradox 236).Perhaps the sociologists Patterson cites are, indeed, not listening. Patterson’s scholarship, however, has been influencing scholars for decades. While Patterson’s ongoing work on the relations between freedom and slavery, on the meaning of “social death” in slavery-dependent societies, and the elevation of freedom as a value in Western thought all shape modern understandings of these issues, Patterson’s methodology can also be used to shed light on other aspects of culture. Refusing to take for granted any historical “fact” narrated by dominant powers, Patterson’s meticulous tracing of the congruencies, divergences, and accidents that make up history allow us to see how concepts we take for granted have always been contingent, and how our interactions with what we think we know might shape us in the years to come.