Arbitrary Rule by Nyquist Mary;

Author:Nyquist, Mary; [Nyquist, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2013-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

ETYMOLOGY AS IDEOLOGY: SERVIRE FROM SERVARE, OR ENSLAVING AS SAVING

In its preoccupation with juridical power, the power/no-power debate does not have recourse to the battlefield. Frequently, however, galvanized by threats to salus populi (welfare of the people), including the primacy of collectively instituted laws, antityrannicism represents the tyrant as a hostile would-be conqueror even if he does not threaten to engage his people in battle. The tyrant assumes this role whenever his actions are perceived to subvert his citizen-subjects’ status as his freeborn equals. Increasingly, the ruler who tyrannously oversteps the boundaries of his office is said to “invade” or to “encroach” on the citizenry’s rights. Such invasion is a displaced form of internal warfare against the ruler’s own people, the desired end of which will be their reduction to abject, powerless slaves—or so the ruler’s intentions are polemically represented. When the tyrant actually directs violence against his own people, as Charles I does in 1641 when entering Parliament to arrest five of its members or when he later takes up arms against them, he is perceived to morph from arrogant would-be slaveholder to rampant killer, destroying rather than preserving his citizen-subjects’ lives.

Death or enslavement are the options decreed by war slavery doctrine, for which military conflict is a prerequisite. Early moderns follow Greek and Roman authorities in assuming that the concentrated, supralegal power held by the individual slaveholder or interstate conqueror depends in some way on war slavery doctrine. Florentinus and later Gaius juxtapose the individual slaveholder’s power of life and death over the enslaved, which is contrary to nature but established by jus gentium, with the power of the military victor, who decides whether to kill or to enslave those who have been vanquished. In both juristic texts, the slaveholder’s power is presented before the victor’s. Slavery is first defined, with the slaveholder assigned the power of life and death, before the military victor’s power is explicated etymologically: the word servi (slaves), substantive form of servire (to serve) comes from servare (to save).

If, how, and why the two powers are related is not specified. Grotius defends chattel slavery using war slavery doctrine, which he explicates by means of this authoritative, seemingly timeless, etymological figure. Following Grotius, Hobbes and Locke, too, make use of it. Yet appeals to this etiology have long appeared in approving discussions of slavery. Most significantly, since he thereby brings it into the Christian fold, Saint Augustine assumes its validity in The City of God when with reference to the so-called just war he says, “[T]he latine word Servus, had the first derivation from hence: those that were taken in the warres, being in the hands of the conquerours to massacre or to preserve, if they saved them, then were they called Servi, of Servo.” Vives’s annotation adds that “Florentinus the Civilian” also says that servi are called Mancipia “of manu capti, to take with the hand, or, by force,” and directs the reader to “Institutes, lib. 4” and “Iustinians Pandects lib. 1.”50

But what exactly

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