Aristotle rationalized slavery through a theory of congenital and heritable difference

Evidence

[F]rom the Homeric period onward the passionate adherence of the Greeks to the desire for political and personal liberty made it difficult for them to find a satisfactory explanation of their own slave organization… . Plato’s reaction took the form of a mild protest that Greeks should not enslave their fellow Greeks while, as a matter of fact, the Hellenes of his day were using their fellow Hellenes as slaves, and without much compunction about it. Aristotle’s explanation of the origin of slavery was rationally based upon the then accepted theory of congenital and heritable differences in human capacities, as displayed both individually and in national totalities His definition of a slave in the Politics is not so admirable …: a slave is a tool with a soul. Only in the most superficial and materialistic sense is this true. The slave, as a human being, is not a tool; and a tool has not a soul. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 509

Categorization

• DEFINE: Aristotle’s ‘a slave is a tool with a soul’ is the load-bearing classical definition that later justifies New World slavery.
• XREF: connects to: Aristotle’s gendered form-over-matter hierarchy legitimated male household rule — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 107