Arbitrary Rule: Slavery, Tyranny, and the Power of Life and Death by Mary Nyquist (review)

Academics often study topics that seem irrelevant to current events. Perhaps exploring them creates a space of retreat from the disheartening occurrences chronicled in the daily news. A modern crisis, however, can throw the topics we treat with objective detachment into sudden relief. Mary Nyquist makes no overt attempt to connect the dots of her research on early modern debates over the nature and origins of sovereignty to the crises of 2013. And yet these fundamental political questions resonate loudly for a reader interested in the conflicts among Milton, Hobbes, and Locke who cannot also forget that these remain perennial questions. Nyquist’s Arbitrary Rule: Slavery, Tyranny, and the Power of Life and Death begins ambitiously with a broad survey of classical debates and culminates in careful close readings of Hobbes and Locke. Although the portions of her book that will be most explicitly pertinent to readers of Restoration occur especially in its final few chapters, the groundwork that Nyquist provides in her earlier chapters (many of which glance forward to Hobbes or Milton) will be important and fascinating to a wide variety of readers of literature, history, philosophy, and the arts.

The question that motivates Nyquist’s study will be one that scholars of late seventeenth-century political culture will find very familiar and similarly perplexing. How can the debates about events of the 1640s and 1680s so easily take up a discourse about “slavery” without seeming to acknowledge the existence of actual transatlantic slavery? In order to answer this question, Nyquist must weave several discursive threads together into a dense and complex survey of the political-tyrannical and the domestic-despotic, of the concept of natural slavery and the doctrine of war slavery, of the ambiguous differences between slaves and servants, and of the power of life and death. Nyquist begins with a fundamental but ambiguous divergence in the earliest discourses of political formation. For Aristotle--who accepted a nebulous category of “natural” slaves that seemed to reflect an artificial, political formation--one defining characteristic of a defective state was a tyrant’s effort to treat free citizens (who could, themselves, own slaves) as if they were enslaved to him. Such a comingling of domestic, despotic authority with the political operations of the state provides the impetus for much of the discourse of antityranny (Nyquist’s preferred term) through the early modern period. Curiously, Nyquist’s survey omits discussions of medieval discussions of these topics, but when she takes up the story again in treating the powerful language of antityranny circulating in the sixteenth century (with La Boétie and Bodin, among others) and a fascinating discussion of the figure of Jephtha’s daughter in Buchanan, Vondel, and Christopherson--a discussion that also illustrates the uneasy synchronization of scriptural and classical notions of slavery--Nyquist offers informative and penetrating analyses of the competing deployment of concepts of tyranny and sovereignty in the period. These early chapters should still prove fascinating to readers interested in the later seventeenth century.

Much of the second half of Nyquist’s study will more immediately catch the attention of this journal’s readers. Nyquist argues that the parliamentarian Henry Parker sets up the discursive limits for explorations of sovereignty and slavery in the 1640s that will later be revived in the conflict between Hobbes and Locke. In a discussion of the significance of the scriptural texts concerning dominion and slavery--texts that absolutists often find at odds with the Greco-Roman treatments of sovereignty--the antityrants highlighted divine injunctions against perpetual enslavement and the divine preference for natural equality (a preference highlighted in Milton’s treatment of Nimrod in Paradise Lost) as a rejoinder to the absolutists. As often occurs in Arbitrary Rule, Nyquist here and later circles back to the debates about the power of life and death that she had outlined earlier in the book. Theorists’ use of the examples of native Americans only further complicated their arguments...