How can one maintain that “[s]lavery is so vile and miserable an Estate [...] that ’tis hardly to be conceived, that […] a Gentleman, should plead for’t”, and at the same time be a supporter of the slave trade and the enslavement of Africans in America? This question has been left to us by John Locke, father of liberalism but also a key player in English colonial policies in the New World. The spontaneous answer is to suppose an “external” contradiction between theory and practice, the man and his ideas. But this paper will argue that we should rather speak of an “internal” constitutive duality in Locke’s philosophy. It takes its roots in the way he reduces the very concept of slavery (“so directly opposite to the generous Temper and Courage of our Nation”) to the situation of English subjects placed under the yoke of absolute monarchy, through a process of metaphorization and concealment of concrete-empirical slavery that would culminate in the Age of Enlightenment. At the beginning of the chapter on the “state of nature” of the Second Treatise of Government, Locke suggests that God, “lord and master” of all men, might have given some an “undoubted right to dominion and sovereignty” over others. This hypothesis, however, is immediately put on hold since it threatens the postulate of original equality on which the entire theory of the social contract is based. Moreover, contrary to what has sometimes been claimed, it is impossible to identify here the premises of the doctrine of racial difference that will later serve to justify transatlantic slavery. Turning to Locke’s epistemology, and to his critique of the idea of species in particular, we shall see that he shapes a different strategy of anthropological exclusion, one based on continuous “small differences” between individuals, to assert the right to absolute dominion of white (gentle)man over “idiots,” poor and vagrant people, white indentured servants, native Americans and black slaves. In conclusion, the paper will advance that, in Locke, a genuine topo-logic of differential functioning of concepts is at work, according to which the same notions, first and foremost that of work (hence servitude), do not have exactly the same meaning and valence on either side of the Atlantic divide.
 

Matthieu RENAULT is Professor in Critical history of philosophy at the Université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès (France), and a member of the Research Team on Philosophical Rationalities and Knowledge (ERRaPhiS). His research focuses on the relationships between philosophy and non-European societies, the (post)imperial history of knowledge and its minority rewritings (class-gender-race). He is the author of: Frantz Fanon. De l’anticolonialisme à la critique postcoloniale (Éditions Amsterdam, 2011), L’Amérique de John Locke. L’expansion coloniale de la philosophie européenne (Éditions Amsterdam, 2014), C.L.R. James. La vie révolutionnaire d’un “Platon noir” (La Découverte, 2016), L’empire de la révolution. Lénine et les musulmans de Russie (Syllepse, 2017), W.E.B. Du Bois. Double conscience et condition raciale, with Magali Bessone (Éditions Amsterdam, 2021), and, forthcoming, Maîtres et esclaves. Archives du Laboratoire d’analyse des Mythologiques de la modernité (Les Presses du réel, 2024), Kollontaï. Défaire la famille, refaire l’amour (La Fabrique, 2024), with Olga Bronnikova.