The passions that incline men to peace are fear of death, desire of such thingsas are necessary to commodious living, and a hope by their industry to obtainthem. And reason suggesteth convenient articles of peace, upon which menmay be drawn to agreement. These articles are they which otherwise are calledthe Laws of Nature, whereof I shall speak more particularly in the two followingchapters.14© 1993–2020 Bartleby.com ·

Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time or war where every man isenemy to every man, the same is consequent to the time wherein men livewithout other security than what their own strength and their own invention shallfurnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because thefruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigationnor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodiousbuilding, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require muchforce, no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time, no arts, noletters, no society, and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violentdeath, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.9It may seem strange to some man that has not well weighed these things thatNature should thus dissociate and render men apt to invade and destroy oneanother; and he may therefore, not trusting to this inference made from thepassions, desire perhaps to have the same confirmed by experience. Let himtherefore consider with himself, when taking a journey, he arms himself andseeks to go well accompanied; when going to sleep, he locks his doors; wheneven in his house, he locks his chests; and this when he knows there be lawsand public officers armed to revenge all injuries shall be done him; what opinionhe has of his fellow-subjects when he rides armed; of his fellow-citizens, whenhe locks his doors; and of his children and servants, when he locks his chests.Does he not there as much accuse mankind by his actions as I do by mywords? But neither of us accuse man’s nature in it. The desires and otherpassions of man are in themselves no sin. No more are the actions that proceedfrom those passions, till they know a law that forbids them; which, till laws bemade, they cannot know, nor can any law be made till they have agreed uponthe person that shall make it

ue one another. And from hence it comes to passthat, where an invader hath no mor

hen we justly find fault with the present state of our civilization for so inadequately fulfilling ourdemands for a plan of life that shall make us happy; and for allowing the existence of so much suffering whichcould probably be avoided -when, with unsparing criticism, we try to uncover the roots of its imperfection,we are undoubtedly exercising a proper right and are not showing ourselves enemies of civilization. Wemay expect gradually to carry through such alterations in our civilization as will better satisfy our needsand will escape our criticisms. But perhaps we may also familiarize ourselves with the idea that there aredifficulties attaching to the nature of civilization which will not yield to any attempt at reform. Over andabove the tasks of restricting the instincts, which we are prepared for, there forces itself on our noticethe danger of a state of things which might be termed 'the psychological poverty of groups'. This dangeris most threatening where the bonds of a society are chiefly constituted by the identification of itsmembers with one another, while individuals of the leader type do not acquire the importance thatshould fall to them in the formation of a group. The present cultural state of America would give us agood opportunity for studying the damage to civilization which is thus to be feared. But I shall avoid thetemptation of entering upon a critique of American civilization; I do not wish to give an impression ofwanting myself to employ American methods.

If civilization imposes such great sacrifices not only on man's sexuality but on his aggressivity, we canunderstand better why it is hard for him to be happy in that civilization. In fact, primitive man was betteroff in knowing no restrictions of instinct. To counterbalance this, his prospects of enjoying this happinessfor any length of time were very slender. Civilized man has exchanged a portion of his possibilities ofhappiness for a portion of security. We must not forget, however, that in the primal family only the headof it enjoyed this instinctual freedom; the rest lived in slavish suppression. In that primal period ofcivilization, the contrast between a minority who enjoyed the advantages of civilization and a majoritywho were robbed of those advantages was, therefore, carried to extremes. As regards the primitivepeoples who exist to-day, careful researches have shown that their instinctual life is by no means to beenvied for its freedom. It is subject to restrictions of a different kind but perhaps of greater severity thanthose attaching to modern civilized man.When we justly find fault with the present state of our civilization for so inadequately fulfilling ourdemands for a plan of life that shall make us happy; and for allowing the existence of so much suffering whichcould probably be avoided -when, with unsparing criticism, we try to uncover the roots of its imperfection,we are undoubtedly exercising a proper right and are not showing ourselves enemies of civilization. Wemay expect gradually to carry through such alterations in our civilization as will better satisfy our needsand will escape our criticisms. But perhaps we may also familiarize ourselves with the idea that there aredifficulties attaching to the nature of civilization which will not yield to any attempt at reform. Over andabove the tasks of restricting the instincts, which we are prepared for, there forces itself on our noticethe danger of a state of things which might be termed 'the psychological poverty of groups'. This dangeris most threatening where the bonds of a society are chiefly constituted by the identification of itsmembers with one another, while individuals of the leader type do not acquire the importance thatshould fall to them in the formation of a group. The present cultural state of America would give us agood opportunity for studying the damage to civilization which is thus to be feared. But I shall avoid thetemptation of entering upon a critique of American civilization; I do not wish to give an impression ofwanting myself to employ American methods.

After primal man had discovered that it lay in his own hands, literally, to improve his lot on earth byworking, it cannot have been a matter of indifference to him whether another man worked with oragainst him. The other man acquired the value for him of a fellow-worker, with whom it was useful tolive together. Even earlier, in his ape-like prehistory, man had adopted the habit of forming families, andthe members of his family were probably his first helpers. One may suppose that the founding offamilies was connected with the fact that a moment came when the need for genital satisfaction nolonger made its appearance like a guest who drops in suddenly, and, after his departure, is heard of nomore for a long time, but instead took up its quarters as a permanent lodger. When this happened, themale acquired a motive for keeping the female, or, speaking more generally, his sexual objects, nearhim; while the female, who did not want to be separated from her helpless young, was obliged, in theirinterests, to remain with the stronger male. In this primitive family one essential feature of civilization isstill lacking. The arbitrary will of its head, the father, was unrestricted. In Totem and Taboo [1912-13] Ihave tried to show how the way led from this family to the succeeding stage of communal life in theform of bands of brothers. In overpowering their father, the sons had made the discovery that acombination can be stronger than a single individual. The totemic culture is based on the restrictionswhich the sons had to impose on one another in order to keep this new state of affairs m being. Thetaboo-observances were the first 'right' or 'law'. The communal life of human beings had, therefore, atwo-fold foundation: the compulsion to work, which was created by external necessity, and the power oflove, which made the man unwilling to be deprived of his sexual object -the woman -and made thewoman unwilling to be deprived of the part of herself which had been separated off from her -her child. Eros

All these assets he may lay claim toas his cultural acquisition. Long ago he formed an ideal conception of omnipotence and omniscience

his contention holds that what we call our civilization is largely responsible for ourmisery, and that we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions.

Assurhing an aggregate model of groups, some people think that socialgroups are invidious fictions, essentializing arbitrary attributes. From this p�intof view problems of prejudice, stereotyping, discr imination, and exclus10nexist because some people mistakenly believe that group identification makesa difference to the capacities, temperament, or v irtues of group members.This individualist conception of persons and their relation to one anothertends to identify oppression with group identification. Oppression, on thisview, is something that happens to people when they are classified in groups.Because othei"s identify them as a group, they are excluded and despised. Eliminating oppression thus requires eliminating groups. People should be treatedas individuals, not as members of groups, and allowed to form their lives freelywithout stereoty pes or group norms.This book takes issue with that position. W hile I agree that individualsshould be free to pursue life plans in their own way, it is foolish to den)'. thereality of groups. Despite the modern myth of a decline of parochial attachments and ascribed identities, in modern society group differentiation remains endemic. As both markets and social administration increase the web ofsocial interdependency on a world scale, and as more people encounter oneanother as strangers in cities and states, people retain and renew ethnic, locale,age, sex, and occupational group identifications, and form new ones in theptocesses of encounter (cf. Ross, 1980, p. 19; Rothschild, 1981, p. 130). Evenwhen they belong to oppressed groups, people's group identifications areoften important to them, and they often feel a special affinity for othersin their group. I believe that group differentiation is both an inevitable anda desirable aspect of modern social processes. Social justice, I shall arguein later chapters, requires not the melting away of differences, but institutionsthat promote reproduction of and respect for group •differences withoutoppression.Though some groups have come to be formed out of oppression, and relations of privilege and oppression structure the interactions between mahygroups; group differentiation is not in itself oppressive. Not all groups are oppressed. In the United States Roman Catholics are a specific social group,with distinct practices and affinities with one another, but they are no longer:in oppressed group. W hether a group is oppressed depends on whether it issubject to one or more of the five conditions I shall discuss below.The view that groups are fictions does carry an important antideterminist or antiessentialist intuition. Oppression has often been perpetrated by aconceptualization of group difference in terms of unalterable essential naturesthat determine what group members deserve or are capable of, and that exclude groups so entirely from one another that they have no similarities oroverlapping attributes. To assert that it is possible to have social group difference without oppression, it is necessary to conceptualize groups in a muchmore relational and fluid fashion.Five Faces of Oppression ■ 4SAlthoug� social processes of affinity and differentiation produce groups,they do not give groups a substantive essence. There is no common nature thatmembers o� a group share. As aspects of a process, moreover, groups are fluid;�hey come mto bemg and may fade away. Homosexual practices have existedm many societies and historical periods, for example. Gay men or lesbians have?een identi�ed as specific groups and so identified themselves, however, onlym the �ent1eth century (see Ferguson, 1989, chap. 9; Altman, 1981).Arismg from social relations and processes, finally, group differences usuall� cut acr�ss one another. Especially in a large, complex, and highly differentiated society, social groups are not themselves homogeneous, but mirror intheir �wn dif1:erentiations many of the other groups in the wider society. InA�erican society. toda_y, for examp;e, Blacks are not a simple, unified groupwith a common life. Like other racial and ethnic groups, they are differentia�ed by age, gender, class, sexuality, region, and nationality, any of which in agiven context may become a salient group identity.. Thi� v ie:" of group differentiation as multiple, cross-cutting, fluid, andshiftmg implies another critique of the model of the autonomous, unified self.In complex, highly differentiated societies like our own, all persons have multiple group _identifications. The culture, perspective, and relations of privilegea�d oppression of.these various groups, moreover, may not cohere. Thus individual perso�s, as constituted partly by their group affinities and relations,cannot be urufied, themselves are heterogeneous and not necessarily coherent.THE FACES OF OPPRESSIONExploitationThe central function of Marx's theory of exploitation is to explain how classst_ru_ctur.e can exist in the absence of legally and normatively sanctioned classd1stmct10�s. In prec�pitalist societies domination is overt and accomplishedt�rough directly ?ohtical means. In both slave society and feudal society theri�h_t to appropriate the product of the labor of others partly defines classprivilege, and these societies legitimate class distinctions with ideologies ofnatural supenority and inferiority.Capitalis� s?ciety, on the other hand, removes traditional juridically enforced class distmct10ns and promotes a belief in the legal freedom of persons.Workers freely contract with employers and receive a wage; no formal mechanisms of law or custom force them to work for that employer or any employer. Thus the mystery of capitalism arises: when everyone is formally free,how can there be class domination? W hy do class distinctions persist betweenthe wealthy, who own the means of production, and the mass of people, whowork for them? The theory of exploitation answers this question.�rofit, the basis of capitalist power and wealth, is a mystery if we assumethat m the market goods exchange at their values. The labor theory of value35

ExploitationThe central function of Marx's theory of exploitation is to explain how classst_ru_ctur.e can exist in the absence of legally and normatively sanctioned classd1stmct10�s. In prec�pitalist societies domination is overt and accomplishedt�rough directly ?ohtical means. In both slave society and feudal society theri�h_t to appropriate the product of the labor of others partly defines classprivilege, and these societies legitimate class distinctions with ideologies ofnatural supenority and inferiority.Capitalis� s?ciety, on the other hand, removes traditional juridically enforced class distmct10ns and promotes a belief in the legal freedom of persons.Workers freely contract with employers and receive a wage; no formal mechanisms of law or custom force them to work for that employer or any employer. Thus the mystery of capitalism arises: when everyone is formally free,how can there be class domination? W hy do class distinctions persist betweenthe wealthy, who own the means of production, and the mass of people, whowork for them? The theory of exploitation answers this question.�rofit, the basis of capitalist power and wealth, is a mystery if we assumethat m the market goods exchange at their values. The labor theory of value35

Oppression refers to structural phenomena that immobilize or diminish agroup. But what is a group? Our ordinary discourse differentiates people according to social groups such as women and men, age groups, racial and ·ethnicgroups, religious groups, and so on. Social groups of this sort are not simplycollections of people, for they are more fundamentally intertwined with theidentities of the people described as belonging to them. They are a specifickind of collectivity, with specific consequences for how people understandone .another and themselves. Yet neither social theory nor philosophy has aclear and developed concept of the social group (see Turner et al., 1987).A social group is a collective of persons differentiated from at least oneother group by cultural forms, practices, or way of li:fe. Members of a grouphave a specific affinity with one another because of their similar experienceor way of life, which prompts them to associate with one another more thanwith those not identified with the group, or in a different way. Groups are anexpression of social relations; a group exists only in relation to at least oneother group. Group identification arises, that is, in the encounter and interaction between social collectivities that experience some differences in theirFiv� Faces of Oppression ■ 41way of life and forms of association, even if they regard themselves as belonging to the same society.As long as they associated solely among themselves, for example, an American Indian group thought of themselves only as "the people." The encounterwith other American Indians created an awareness of difference; the otherswere named as a group, and the first group came to see themselves as a group.But social groups do not arise only from an encounter between different societies. Social processes also differentiate groups within a single society. Thesexual division of labor, for example, has created social groups of women andmen in all known societies. Members of each gender have a· certain affinitywith others in their group because of what they do or experience, and differentiate themselves from the other gender, even when members of each gender consider that they have much in common with members of the other,and consider that they belong to the same society.Political philosophy typically has no place for a specific concept of thesocial group. When philosophers and political theorists discuss groups, theytend to conceive them either on the model of aggregates or on the model ofassociations, both of which are methodologically individualist concepts. Toarrive at a specific concept of the social group it is thus useful to contrast social groups with both aggregates and associations.An aggregate is any classification of persons according to some attribute.Persons can be aggregated according to any number of attributes-eye color,the make of car they dr ive, the street they live on. Some people interpret thegroups that have emotional and social salience in our society as aggregates, asarbitrary classifications of persons according to such attributes as skin color,genitals, or age. George Sher, for example, treats social groups as aggregates,and uses the arbitrariness of aggregate classification as a reason not to givespecial attention to groups. "There are really as many groups as there are combinations of people and if we are going to ascribe claims to equal treatment toracial, sexual, and other groups with high visibility, it will be more favoritismnot to ascrrbe similar claims to these other groups as well" (Sher, 1987, p. 256).But "highly visible" social groups such as Blacks or women are differentfrom aggregates, or mere "combinations of people" (see French, 1975; Friedman and May, 1985; May, 1987, chap. 1). A social group is defined not primarily by a set of shared attributes, but by a sense of identity.What definesBlack Americans as a social group is not primarily their skin color; some persons whose skin coior is fairly light, for example, identify themselves as Black.Though sometimes objective attributes are a necessary condition for classifying oneself or others as belonging to a certain social group, it is identificationwith a certain social status, the common histor y that social status produces,and self-identification that define the group as a group

Rape is a temble caricature of love from which consent is absent. After rape, oppression is the second horror of human existence. It is a temble caricature of obedience.-SIMONE WEI