3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

In The Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau states “man is born free but everywhere he is in chains.” In the 1848 Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx declares “workers you have nothing to lose but your chains.” Yet Rousseau and Marx, like many other foundational thinkers of the Western canon, fail to theorize the unfreedom of those who were actually made to exist in very real chains, such as slaves and colonized subjects who according to Martiniquan poet Aimé Césaire were “thingified” not only in material reality but also in political thought. Why and how could “things” want to be free? Whose freedom was being theorized and at whose expense?