"Devine, James" wrote: > > you don't understand Locke. He didn't think of his servant as a human being, so that > the servant's labor didn't produce property for her (according to Locke's labor > theory of property). Instead, she was like Locke's horse.
This is misleading. Until the millenia-old sense of human society as naturally hierarchical began to dissolve in the late 18th century it was not necessary (nor even desirable) to see the "lower orders" as non-human or less than human. They were fully human, and in the sight of God even fully equal, but god or nature had created a world in which subordination was the principle of unity and order. This is clear enough in Shakespeare; many (most / all) of his characters from the lower orders are seen as quite richly human and worthwhile, but this does not interfere in the least with an assumption that they filled their appropriate rungs of the great chain of being. It was the crumbling of this hierarchical sense of divine ordained order that generated the ideological necessity for scientific racism and scientific male supremacy in the early 19th century. Discussion of this change can be found in Stephanie Coontz, _The Social Origins of Private Life_, in Thomas Laqueur, _Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud_, Volume I of Martin Bernal's _Black Athena_, Stephen J. Gould's review of Laqueur in the NYRB, and Barbara Fields, "Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America." Stephanie Coontz quotes from a letter from a 17th c. gentleman to his daughter, in which he says that were it not for the natural subordination of women, she would be a better writer than he. In the same spirit it would have been quite possible (whether it ever happened or not I do not know, but it would not have been a contradiction) for Locke to see that servant as a better human being than Locke himself, and yet without a quiver exploit the hell out of that servant. It was only with the Declaration of Independence and its assertion of human equality that there developed a serious need to justify such subordination by asserting biological inferiority. Carrol
