Adam Waggoner

My aim is to better understand how the ideas found in Aristotle’s account of natural slavery shaped and were shaped by practices of enslavement. I focus on three core aspects of Aristotle’s views on slavery: the animalization of enslaved people, the denial of rationality to natural slaves, and the purported shared interests between natural slaves and natural masters. I argue that, both in practice and in Aristotle’s own remarks, this account of natural slavery is highly insulated from evidence that enslaved people were not, in fact, natural slaves. I then show how this put enslaved people in double binds: in many situations, effectively whatever an enslaved person chose to do would have been interpreted as evidence confirming that they were a natural slave. I close by reflecting on how enslaved people in ancient Greece resisted the identity of natural slave that philosophers and enslavers attributed to them.