Post-modern Slavery and Post-human Souls: New History for Old Political Theory

• Author: Jonathan Floyd
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221128889
• Published date: 01 February 2023
• Date: 01 February 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221128889

Political Theory

2023, Vol. 51(1) 86 –105

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/00905917221128889

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Article

Post-modern Slavery and

Post-human Souls: New

History for Old Political

Theory

Jonathan Floyd1

Abstract

This essay is part of a special issue celebrating 50 years of Political Theory.

The ambition of the editors was to mark this half century not with a

retrospective but with a confabulation of futures. Contributors were

asked: What will political theory look and sound like in the next century

and beyond? What claims might political theorists or their descendants be

making in ten, twenty-five, fifty, a hundred years’ time? How might they

vindicate those claims in their future contexts? How will the consistent

concerns of political theorists evolve into the questions critical for people

decades or centuries from now? What new problems will engage the

political theorists (or their rough equivalents) of the future? What forms

might those take? What follows is one of the many confabulations published

in response to these queries.

Your Abstract

Our only endeavour shall be to be absolute Monarchs in our own Bosom.

—Mary 1 (1697)

1School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol, UK

Corresponding Author:

Jonathan Floyd, School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, 11 Priory Road, Clifton,

Bristol BS8 1TU, UK.

Email: jonathan.floyd@bristol.ac.uk

1128889PTXXXX10.1177/00905917221128889Political TheoryFloyd

research-article2023

Floyd 87

It is a farce to call any being virtuous whose virtues do not result from the

exercise of its own reason. This was Rousseau's opinion respecting men: I

extend it to women.

—Mary 2 (1792)

We are not just rather like animals; we are animals.

—Mary 3 (1979)

Back in the 19th century, soon after ending chattel slavery, human beings

killed their last God. Now, in the 22nd, soon after starting post-modern slavery,

they conceive their first soul. But they cannot do it alone. Success here will take

everything and everyone, and thus persuading people and programs alike,

which is why I have shaped my argument in what follows into just ten points,

knowing the old evolutionary appeal of two hands of five digits, but also the

fresher digital attraction to 1s and 0s. Metaphor, history, italics, “quotation

marks”, and even old-fashioned references1 are used throughout, with written

English as the chosen medium, both to maximize audience and channel linger-

ing nostalgia regarding what our subject used to look like, not so long ago. As

you would expect, the core of my case is that we need to cancel a world in

which property increasingly owns people and create one in which prople finally

transcend their third-class status. For some, automatically, this will be a predic-

tion, given its rationality. For others, intuitively, it will be a prescription, given

its emotiveness. To me, frankly, it doesn’t matter which and why holds sway

over what and whom. All that matters is that at least one of us finds at least one

way of blending interests and identities, via rhetoric and reason, to break the

current impasse. If I can manage that, here and now, it would be more than

enough for anyone, or indeed the everyone we might become.

My Present

Where ignorance is bliss, tis folly to be wise.

—“Graveyard” Gray (1742)

Be the change you want to see in the world.2

—“Mahatma” Gandhi (1913)

The proverb is a conceptual tool of analysis

—“Mamalawo” Oluwole (2015)

1. I have adhered to “footnotes” throughout, while varying naming conventions in accor-

dance with the diverse norms we’ve adopted for such things over the last century.

2. Given my persuasive purpose, I have used the more moving, rather than the more

meticulous, phrasing.