Abstract
The neo-republican conception of freedom as non-domination has emerged as a powerful framework for conceptualizing the dynamic relationship between power, democracy, and constitutionalism in modernity. Despite this, I argue that adaptations of republican freedom to the problem of slavery displace attention to race and foreclose more productive ways of addressing how racial slavery constitutes a distinct form of oppression. To illuminate the limitations of neo-republicanism, I turn to the political thought of abolitionists David Walker and Ottobah Cugoano. Both utilize comparative histories of race and slavery to reveal the specificity of modern slavery as a form of oppression, which cannot be captured as an issue of domination in the technical sense of the term. They thus pose challenges to neo-republican theory for its failure to fully appreciate the historical differences between ancient and modern slavery. To do so would illuminate how neo-republican theory faces severe limitations in providing an adequate conceptualization of oppression in the case of racial slavery.
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Acknowledgements
For helpful comments and conversations, I thank Roberto Alejandro, Nick Bromell, Barbara Cruikshank, Jane Gordon, David Temin, and audience members at the 2019 annual meeting of the Caribbean Philosophical Association in Providence, RI. Karen Zivi and the anonymous reviewers at Contemporary Political Theory also provided invaluable feedback.
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Dahl, A. Oppression and racial slavery: Abolitionist challenges to neo-republicanism. Contemp Polit Theory 20, 272–295 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-020-00415-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-020-00415-3