Stone Inequality Book Talk: The Paradox of Freedom

To mark the publication of The Paradox of Freedom: A Biographical Dialogue by David Scott and Orlando Patterson, Harvard Kennedy School’s Stone Program in Wealth Distribution, Inequality, and Social Policy hosted a discussion of the life and work of Orlando Patterson, featuring panelists Adom Getachew, Alex Gourevitch, and Aziz Rana. The event featured an introduction by Deirdre Bloome and Christopher Muller, and a response to the panelists’ remarks from Orlando Patterson. Scroll down to view the recording.

Book Description: The Paradox of Freedom is an exploration of the life and work of Orlando Patterson, probing the relationship between the circumstances of his life from their beginnings in rural Jamaica to the present and the complex development of his intellectual work. A novelist and historical sociologist with an orientation toward public engagement, Patterson exemplifies one way of being a Jamaican and Black Atlantic intellectual. At the generative center of Patterson’s work has been a fundamental inquiry into the internal dynamics of slavery as a mode of social and existential domination. What is most provocatively significant in his work on slavery is the way it yields a paradoxical insight into the problem of freedom – namely, that freedom was born existentially and historically from the degradation and parasitic inhumanity of slavery and was as much the creation of the enslaved as of their enslavers. The Paradox of Freedom elucidates the pathways by which Patterson has both uncovered the relationship between domination and freedom and engaged intellectually and publicly with the struggles for equality and decolonization among descendants of the enslaved. It will be of great interest to students and scholars throughout the humanities and social sciences and to anyone interested in the work of one of the most important public intellectuals of our time.

Orlando Patterson is John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. He is the author of numerous books including Slavery and Social Death (1982) and Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (1991), which won the 1991 National Book Award for Non-Fiction.  His most recent publications include The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth and The Paradox of Freedom: A Biographical Dialogue (co-authored with David Scott).

Adom Getachew is Professor of Political Science and Race, Diaspora & Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. She is a political theorist with research interests in the history of political thought, theories of race and empire, and postcolonial political theory. Her work focuses on the intellectual and political histories of Africa and the Caribbean. She is the author of Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (2019) and co-editor, with Jennifer Pitts, of W. E. B. Du Bois: International Thought (2022). She is currently working on a second book on the intellectual origins and political practices of Garveyism—the black nationalist/pan-African movement, which had its height in the 1920s. Her public writing has appeared in Dissent, Foreign Affairs, the London Review of Books, the Nation, the New York Review of Books, and the New York Times. 

Alex Gourevitch is a professor of political science at Brown University. He is currently writing a book on strikes and another on freedom and submission in the history of political economy. His first book, From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth, showed how the nineteenth century critique of slavery developed into a critique of wage-labor and a defense of an economy based on producer cooperatives. 

Aziz Rana is the J. Donald Monan, S.J., University Professor of Law and Government at Boston College Law School. He joins Boston College from Cornell Law School, where he was the Richard and Lois Cole Professor of Law. His research and teaching center on American constitutional law and political development. In particular, Rana’s work focuses on how shifting notions of race, citizenship, and empire have shaped legal and political identity since the founding of the country. He is the author of The Two Faces of American Freedom (Harvard University Press) and most recently The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document that Fails Them (University of Chicago Press). Rana has written essays and op-eds for such venues as n+1, Dissent, The Boston Review, The Washington Post, The New York Times, New Labor Forum, Jacobin, The Guardian, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Nation, Jadaliyya, Salon, and The Law and Political Economy Blog. He has articles and chapter contributions published or forthcoming with Yale and Oxford University Presses, The University of Chicago Law Review, California Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Texas Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal Forum, among others. Rana is an editorial board member of Dissent, The Law and Political Economy Blog, and Just Security. He is also a Life Member of the Council of Foreign Relations and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. 

Deirdre Bloome is the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Sociology at Harvard University, where she serves as the Director of the Stone Program in Wealth Distribution, Inequality, and Social Policy and the Chair of the Ph.D. program in Social Policy. Her work focuses on socioeconomic mobility, racial inequality, family demography, and quantitative methods. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology and Social Policy and an A.M. in Statistics from Harvard University. Her research has been published in outlets including the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review, Demography, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; it has been supported by funders including the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Russell Sage Foundation; and it has been recognized by awards including the William Julius Wilson Early Career Award from the American Sociological Association's section on Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility.

Christopher Muller is Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. He studies the political economy of incarceration in the United States from Reconstruction to the present, with a particular focus on the relationship between incarceration and slavery, peonage, and broader shifts in the agricultural economy in the United States. His current work is focused on understanding long-run patterns in the Black and White incarceration rates since slavery, particularly why the Black incarceration rate was lower in the South than in the North for much of the 20th century, why it was lowest in the South’s cotton belt, and why it began to increase in the early 1970s.