Slavery Throught The World - Research Paper Example

The history of human civilization is the most explicit document of the fact that corruptible capacity of power can be enhanced to such an elaborate extent that it finally gives birth to a situation of brutal aggression of one man or a community over another less powerful individual or community. Aristotle in Politics suggested quite prophetically that “… [the] greatest crimes are caused by excess and not by necessity. Men do not become tyrants in order that they may not suffer cold; and hence, great is the honor bestowed, not on him who kills a thief, but on him who kills a tyrant” (Aristotle, 1932, p. 33). Thesis Statement: Judging the factors that are responsible behind genesis of slavery and helping in to take different shapes according to the changing course of time, it can be said that man’s insatiable hunger to gain power, in terms of money and recognition, his natural desire to survive as the fittest being and finally his indomitable desire to enjoy all the rights that society has enshrined to him even at the cost of depriving others, are main reasons that introduced the evil of slavery on the ideological backdrop of an equal and humanitarian existence.

Most of the modern philosophers are of opinion that human interaction and development of human relations, both are dependent on respective person’s perception of power and how they are interpreting scope of such power. Max Weber defines power as an “… [opportunity] existing within a social relationship which permits one to carry out one’s will even against resistance and regardless of the basis on which this opportunity rests” (Weber; Cited in Patterson, 1982, p. 1). One of the greatest philosophers of recent times and famous post-structuralist, Michel Foucault, though has defined power in a much simple way, suggesting that “power is a relation between forces, or rather every relation between forces is a ‘power relation’” (Deleuze,and