Remains of the Day: Unfreedom in Ancient Greece

This paper takes an historicizing approach to the question of the figure of the slave in the European philosophical tradition. It focuses specifically on the concrete and ideological consequences of the dominant mode by which surplus labour in Greek antiquity was appropriated and coerced. Inherited Greek conceptions of the human and society at large are strongly determined by the precarious and violent conditions of life in the Ancient Mediterranean. Taking its cue from Marx's familiarity with the historical ancient city as the necessary intellectual precondition for historicizing the capitalist social formation, this article presents the ancient Greek backdrop against which a very different – our modern – understanding of the human must be juxtaposed.