PLEASE NOTE LOCATION

Law & Literature Workshop series

presents

Mary Nyquist

University of Toronto, Department of English

 

 

Hobbes on Slavery, Gender and Despotical Rule

 

Thursday, February 28, 2008

12:30 – 2:00

FLAVELLE DINING ROOM

Faculty of Law, University of Toronto

78 Queen's Park

Only in recent years have the contributions of (so-called) international law to western European colonial and imperial discourses and ventures begun to receive attention.  My essay takes up what Grotius and other early modernists (following Roman practice) refer to as the “law of nations,” specifically as this “law” regards war-slavery. Because Hobbes’ state of nature has no place for international law, his reliance upon this highly venerable, juridico-military schema for his influential theorization of contractual absolutism has not been appreciated.  Although I argue that Hobbes’ use of this schema cannot be understood apart from contemporaneous rhetorical appeals to figurative “slavery,” which Hobbes seeks to counter, I propose that in Leviathan Hobbes articulates a difficult-to-decode defense of Atlantic slavery, a defense that is later adapted by Locke. Against Carol Pateman’s reading in The Sexual Contract, I also argue that given the central part played in Hobbes’ theory by the sovereign’s right to exercise the power of life and death, wives are in an anomalous, somewhat privileged, position vis a vis children and servants or slaves. 

Mary Nyquist teaches in the Department of English, the Literary Studies Program and the Institute of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto.  Her research and teaching interests include early modern colonialism and republicanism, the literature of revolution, feminist and post-colonial theory, and contemporary poetry. She has written on a number of early modern authors, including several influential essays on Milton, as well as on a variety of later writers and subjects, such as mass-produced romance; she has also published poetry in several Canadian journals. The present essay is part of a manuscript tentatively entitled Arbitrary Rule: Slavery, Tyranny and Resistance from Herodotus to the Haitian Revolution, which studies the interrelations between colonial slavery and political “slavery,” central to the democratic discourses that emerge with particular vitality during the mid-seventeenth century English revolution.

A light lunch will be served.