Archive for the ‘The Universal Template’ Category
The Core Roman Institution
It would be most gratifying if novels and films set in Ancient Rome would condescend to deal with one of the bedrock social structures of that civilisation. Not even the 2006 BBC/HBO series quite managed to clarify it, excellent as it otherwise was at illuminating both the sordid aspects of Roman life glossed over by […]
In: THE ENSLAVING MAMMAL, The Universal Template
Yo’ Ma Bitch: Towards A Unified Terminology
Instead of learning solely about the civic institutions that form the outer shell or façade of human politics, pol-sci students ought perhaps to be taught about the heart of the matter, the bottom-line, the universal core principle of all human societies larger than the hunter-gatherer band: namely the relationship between patron and client. I would […]
In: THE ENSLAVING MAMMAL, The Universal Template
Slavery, A Special Case Of Patronage
We have been accustomed to think of slavery as a unique and special institution, quite distinct from free labour. The moment that clientship to a patron is recognised as a human universal, however, we may begin to wonder whether what we call slavery is not better described as a special case. We all know that […]
In: THE ENSLAVING MAMMAL, The Universal Template
Slaves And Serfs, A False Distinction
Everybody knows that the Romans had “slaves” while the medievals had “serfs”, and that this was an important distinction. Unfortunately, it is not certain that the medievals themselves were aware of it; for the Middle French word “serf” is simply the Classical Latin servus. For this reason, the modern English adjectives meaning “pertaining to a […]
In: THE ENSLAVING MAMMAL, The Universal Template
Slaves At The Top
English-speaking people who think about the past concept of “nobility” tend to assume three groups: nobles, free commoners and serfs or slaves. Many societies have, however, operated with only two categories, namely the free and the unfree, where free and noble is the same thing. The word liberal, for example, was originally Old French for […]
In: THE ENSLAVING MAMMAL, The Universal Template
A Proxy Measurement For Slavery
People have imagined that marrying for money is something to do with a wicked thing by the name of Patriarchy. In fact, marrying for money is the inevitable consequence of the invention of property, and men and women who have property behave exactly the same as one another and differently from men and women without […]
In: THE ENSLAVING MAMMAL, The Universal Template
Terms And Conditions
If, as we saw, a person called by his own society by the names of “serf” or “slave” might in fact be merely what we would call an employee, the contrary might seem to follow, that a person whom we call employee might be called by other societies a serf or slave. We have our […]
In: THE ENSLAVING MAMMAL, The Universal Template
The Inadmissible Drive
As late as the end of the Seventies, my second university held a Rag Week at which students were put up for sale as “slaves” to other students. It was stipulated that the acquisitions were to do the purchasing students’ housekeeping rather than provide sexual services, but nobody appeared to have had compunctions about modelling […]
In: THE ENSLAVING MAMMAL, The Universal Template
