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 ·

So that in the nature of man we find three principal causes of quarrel. First,competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly, glory.6The first maketh man invade for gain; the second, for safety; and the third, forreputation. The first use violence, to make themselves masters of other men’spersons, wives, children, and cattle; the second, to defend them; the third, fortrifles, as a word, a smile, a different opinion, and any other sign of undervalue,either direct in their persons or by reflection in their kindred, their friends, theirnation, their profession, or their name.7Hereby it is manifest that, during the time men live without a common power tokeep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war, and such awar as is of every man against every man. For ‘war’ consisteth not in battle onlyor the act of fighting, but in a tract of time wherein the will to contend by battle issufficiently known, and therefore the notion of ‘time’ is to be considered in thenature of war, as it is in the nature of weather. For as the nature of foul weatherlieth not in a shower or two of rain but in an inclination thereto of many daystogether, so the nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting but in the knowndisposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. Allother time is ‘peace.’8

hath made men so equal in the faculties of the body and mind, asthat, though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body orof quicker mind than another, yet when all is reckoned together the differencebetween man and man is not so considerable as that one man can thereuponclaim to himself any benefit to which another may not pretend as well as he.For, as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill thestrongest, either by secret machination or by confederacy with others that are inthe same danger with himsel

should fall to them in the formation of a group. The present cultural state of America would give us a

When a love-relationship is at its height there is no room left for any interest in theenvironment; a pair of lovers are sufficient to themselves, and do not even need the child they have incommon to make them happy

he 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

us of that. As regards the third source, the social source of suffering, our attitude is adifferent one. We do not admit it at all; we cannot see why the regulations made by ourselves shouldnot, on the contrary, be a protection and a benefit for every one of us. And yet, when we consider howunsuccessful we have been in precisely this field of prevention of suffering, a suspicion dawns on us thathere, too, a piece of unconquerable nature may lie behind -this time a piece of our own psychicalconstitution.When we start considering this possibility, we come upon a contention which is so astonishing that wemust dwell upon it. This 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. I callthis contention astonishing because, in whatever way we may define the concept of civilization, it is acertain fact that all the things with which we seek to protect ourselves against the threats that emanatefrom the sources of suffering are part of that very civilization.How has it happened that so many people have come to take up this strange altitude of hostility tocivilization? I believe that the basis of it was a deep and long-standing dissatisfaction with the thenexisting state of civilization and that on that basis a condemnation of it was built up, occasioned bycertain specific historical events. I think I know what the last and the last but one of those occasionswere. I am not learned enough to trace the chain of them far back enough in the history of the humanspecies; but a factor of this land hostile to civilization must already have been at work in the victory ofChristendom over the heathen religions, for it was very closely related to the low estimation put uponearthly life by the Christian doctrine. The last but one of these occasions was when the progress of

ee it.When our will finds expression outside ourselves in actions performed by others,we do not waste our time and our power of attention in examining whether they haveconsented to this. This is true for all of us. Our attention, given entirely to the success ofthe undertaking, is not daimed by them as long as they are docile. . _ _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.-SIMO

d sexism, for example, to the effects of class domination or bourgeois ideology. Racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia, some social movements asserted,are distinct forms of oppression with their own dynamics apart from the dynamics of class, even though they may interact with class oppression. Fromoften heated discussions among socialists, feminists, and antiracism activists inthe last ten years a consensus is emerging that many different groups must besaid to be oppressed in our society, and that no single form of oppression canbe assigned causal or moral primacy (see Gottlieb, 1987). The same discussionhas also led to the recognition that group differences cut ,across individuallives in a multiplicity of ways that can entail privilege and oppression for thesame person in different respects. Only a plural explication of the concept ofoppression can adequately capture these insights.Accordingly, I offer below an explication of five faces of oppression as auseful set of categories and distinctions which I believe is comprehensive, inthe sense that it covers all the groups said by new left social movements to beoppressed and all the ways they are oppressed. I derive the five faces of oppression from reflection on the condition of these groups. Because differentfactors, or combinations of factors, constitute the oppression of diffe'�entgroups, making their oppression irreducible, I believe it is not possible to giveone essential definition of oppression. The five categories articulated in thischapter, however, are adequate to describe the oppression of any group, aswell as its similarities with and differences from the oppression of othergroups. But first we must ask what a group is.THE CONCEPT OF A SOCIAL GROUPOppression 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.Social groups are not entities that exist apart from individuals, but neither 20are they merely arbitrary classifications of individuals according to attributeswhich are external to or accidental to their identities. Admitting the reality of

Someone who does not see a pane of glass does not know that he does not see d.