Treating liberty as alienable property historically legitimated slavery and absolutism

Evidence

Medieval jurists talked about “property rights” in a state of nature, but they tended to do so in terms of claims, a notion that implied that every right entailed a reciprocal duty in accordance with objective (because divinely given) criteria. In the later Middle Ages, however, the idea was introduced that a property right was any right that could be held against all other men, and that could be freely transferred by its possessor. In the sixteenth century there developed a debate between those for whom liberty itself was property (something owned ), and therefore alienable in the same way and under the same terms as any other property; and those (like the Dominicans, for whom the welfare of humans rather than their essential liberty was what mattered) who held that liberty was not in that sense a property. In this way, a theory of rights sanctioned practices—such as slavery—that an antisubjectivist theory disallowed. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 629 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Hobbes redefined liberty as the absence of coercion rather than non-domination — Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and…, 200; Segregationist legislation was justified in the language of property rights and liberty — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1468; Blackstone’s absolutist view of private property shaped American law from its founding — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 940 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• Modern rights theory made liberty alienable property, sanctioning slavery #expands (0.95) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 629