Arbitrary rule : slavery, tyranny, and the power of life and death / Mary Nyquist.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Ancient Greek and Roman slaveries -- Political slavery and barbarism -- Tyranny, slavery, and the despots -- The tyrant as conqueror and antityranny -- Tyranny, despotical rule, and natural slavery in Aristotle's Politics -- Roman antityranny -- Appropriation and disavowal of slavery -- Sixteenth-century French and English resistance theory -- Servility and tyranny in Montaigne and La Boétie, Goodman and Ponet -- Spanish tyranny, English resistance -- Collective enslavement and freedom in Vindiciae -- Slavery in Smith's De republica anglorum and Bodin's République -- Resistance -- Human sacrifice, barbarism, and Buchanan's Jephtha -- Barbarism, sacrifice, and civic virtue -- Calvin, Cicero, and wrongful vows -- Does Jephtha hold the sword? -- Blood(less) sacrifice -- Antityranny, slavery, and revolution -- Genesis, dominion, and natural slavery -- Servility, tyranny, and asiatic monarchy in 1 Samuel 8 -- Genesis, dominion, and servitude in "Paradise lost" -- Ears bored with an awl in revolutionary England -- Revolution and liberty cap -- Freeborn sons or slaves? -- Debating analogically -- Freeborn citizens and contract -- Fathers and resistance -- Antislavery and Bodin's preemption of antityranny -- Parker's antityranny and antislavery -- The power of life and death -- Brutus and his sons: lawful punishment or paternal power? -- Debating the familial origins of the power of life and death -- Debating divine sanction for the power and life and death -- Power, no-power, and the English revolution -- Etymology as ideology: servire from servare, or enslaving as saving -- Nakedness, history, and bare life -- Nakedness -- Nationalization of natural slavery and original sin -- De Bry's Europeanized Adam and Eve -- Privative comparison in Paradise lost -- Hobbes's state of nature and "hard" privativism -- The golden-edenic privative age -- Cicero's savage age -- Savagery and the Euro-colonial privative age -- Ancestral liberties, inherited freedom -- Hobbes's state of nature and libertas -- Frontispieces -- Hobbes, slavery, and despotical rule -- Liberty, slavery, and tyranny discomfited -- Preservation of life, civility, and servitude -- Hobbes's female-free family -- Servants and slaves -- Locke's "On slavery," despotical power, and tyranny -- Antityranny, not antidespotism -- Hobbes, Locke, and the power of life and death -- Reading "Of slavery" -- Reading Locke rewriting power/no-power -- Hebrew and chattel slavery -- Slaves and tyrants.

Slavery appears as a figurative construct during the English revolution of the mid-seventeenth century, and again in the American and French revolutions, when radicals represent their treatment as a form of political slavery. What, if anything, does figurative, political slavery have to do with transatlantic slavery? In Arbitrary Rule, Mary Nyquist explores connections between political and chattel slavery by excavating the tradition of Western political thought that justifies actively opposing tyranny. She argues that as powerful rhetorical and conceptual constructs, Greco-Roman p.

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