“Neither Plato nor Aristotle had the radical intelligence to see through the injustice. They simply assumed that slavery was a natural, as opposed to a social, fabricated, institution, and they set about supplying a theory to back it up. From the start, the theorizing was intellectually shabby. Plato presented a crude invention, a myth dividing humanity into a hierarchy of superior and inferior races, the degree of superiority depending on admixtures of gold, silver, bronze and iron in the constitution of each race.” “Aristotle came later, but his contribution was cruder yet. There were, he asserted in circular fashion, people born to be slaves because they had the nature of slaves; there were others born to rule because they had the nature of rulers. If natural slaves resisted the authority of natural rulers, the latter had the right to compel then to subservience by waging war on them. The awful fact that European history is structured essentially around warfare is testimony to the tremendous cultural hold of this glorification of animal aggression in human affairs.” Ayi Kwei Armah “The Eloquence of the Scribes: a memoir on the sources and resources of African literature” Page 44
Posted on: Tue, 14 Oct 2014 07:33:14 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015