After examining the unfreedom imposed by the circumstances of humanity's most distant past, we now turn to the specific institutions that grew from those circumstances: slavery, serfdom, and political subjection. We will see how these forms of non-liberty, once rooted in the facts of their time, gradually yielded to new facts and new circumstances.

Slavery was born in specific circumstances and developed universally, because it was intimately linked to the conditions of the epoch. First, the production and acquisition of wealth were accomplished almost exclusively through force: hunting, combat, and conquest. Men trained in violence and domination of others, in the domination of animals and in violent conquest, were naturally inclined toward the enslavement of their fellow men.

The characteristics of individual production in the past deserve our attention. The results were mediocre: one labored enormously, employing great physical force, but the outcomes were extremely small and deeply uncertain. The weakness of markets compounded this difficulty. Even if one had produced abundantly, how could one transport perishable goods? Today, of course, the market is open; even fruits and vegetables can be shipped across the world. In the earliest epochs, transfer between two villages or two tribes was already immensely difficult, especially when human groups lived at great distances from one another. There was almost no preservation apart from dried meats and similar methods. Commerce was extremely limited, and consequently wealth was hard to obtain amid numerous and powerful hazards.

In this precarious existence, slavery served as a form of insurance against existential risks. It permitted workers to contribute to production without having to risk their lives each day in the most dangerous activities. Slavery persisted in these societies because two elements sustained it: the daily violence and insecurity, and the mediocrity of productive results that required labor to be organized by force.

Aristotle himself provided a retrospective justification. Slavery existed, he explained, because there were no machines. If production could have been mechanized, if tools could have performed the work of human muscles, slaves would have been dispensable. But production remained extremely limited and uncertain, and so the balance of advantages and disadvantages of this brutal insurance tilted in favor of the institution of slavery, in all ancient societies, as a consequence of those particular historical circumstances.

Yet slavery, however firmly anchored in the historical circumstances of humanity's earliest ages, began to transform as production itself transformed. When economic activity became more intellectual, requiring creativity and innovation, slavery proved profoundly inadequate. A slave responds to the whip and the rod, but he cannot invent. When a society needs invention, when it needs to employ mental vigor productively, slavery becomes inoperable. At the same time, as circumstances became less dangerous, individuals found within themselves the capacity to govern their own conduct and the willingness to assume the risks of an autonomous existence.

These transformative forces drove the gradual abolition and mutation of slavery, first into serfdom, then into other, less restrictive forms of political or social domination. Century after century, as circumstances changed, individual liberty became more and more possible. This evolution was especially visible in societies most affected by technical and technological progress, where new circumstances provided concrete support for the expansion of freedom.

The maintenance of slavery in America in the 18th and 19th centuries presented a major historical paradox. French liberal thinkers recognized that slavery may have had a certain justification in the most ancient societies, in antiquity and in the earliest ages of colonial exploration. But the slavery of Black people in the modern era had no justification whatsoever; it was an anti-productive system maintained artificially by political authority.

Gustave de Beaumont (1802-1866), who undertook his famous voyage to the United States in 1831 alongside Alexis de Tocqueville, chose upon his return to focus his own work on the reality of the massacre of Native Americans and the condition of Black people in American society, both enslaved and nominally free, while Tocqueville devoted himself to writing Democracy in America.

Charles Comte (1782-1837) and other liberal authors identified two principal effects of slavery that led them to condemn the system in the strongest terms. First, the brutalizing effect on the slave himself. Under the new conditions of production, even as early as the 18th century, there was a growing need for intellectual effort, for the application of intelligence and even morality to productive work. Slavery did nothing but brutalize the person; it could not call upon his intellectual capacities, depriving him of any possibility of development. Second, and equally devastating, was the brutalization of the slave owners themselves. They developed a profoundly negative view of work and employed nothing but force. The habit of dominating others transformed their ideas and their character. It was no accident, these authors observed, that the great slave-owning families of Virginia produced so many politicians and presidents: the practice of domination over others engendered conceptions that were profoundly illiberal, incompatible with the principles of equality that ought to underpin modern societies.

Political subjection, too, had its roots in the same circumstances as slavery. In the most ancient societies, the imperative need for security demanded leadership. One could not go hunting without direction, for one unproductive hunt, two unproductive hunts, meant famine and death. In combat, when one tribe attacked another, there was a need for resolution, for rapid and decisive choices. This need for chiefs and political domination imposed itself, and we see in these societies an extensive power of leaders and, above all, of regulations covering nearly every aspect of life.

The risk of war, combined with the extreme weakness of security, demanded national-scale political protection. The narrowness of markets and the nullity of communications further reinforced this dependence: one could not emancipate oneself from one's group, could not seek out competition or new ideas, because communications were too feeble. One was therefore subjected to the political power that governed, a power that may have had greater justification in the past, precisely because those circumstances were so much more dangerous and decisive than they have since become.

With this examination of the historical raisons d'être of unfreedom, we can already sense the transformation. In the following lesson, we will trace the technical and intellectual progress that, by changing the conditions of human existence, has made freedom not merely possible but increasingly inevitable.