Emancipation

Release from domination or subordination - and the question of what has actually changed when it is granted rather than taken.

Theme: Society, politics and power
Tradition: Modern
Term fixed: 1843

In plain terms

Emancipation is being released from a condition of subordination. The word carries a grammar worth noticing: someone is emancipated, usually by someone else, which means the power to release was held by the party doing the releasing.

That is why the interesting question about any emancipation is what was left in place. A legal status can be abolished while the property, the debts, the land and the hierarchy it produced remain exactly as they were - and the freed party then enters a market they own nothing in.

Marx's version of the point is that political emancipation - equal legal standing - is a real achievement and not the same as human emancipation. You can be a full citizen in a society whose basic arrangements leave you with nothing, and the equality is not thereby a fiction. It is just much less than it sounds.

As a philosopher would put it

Marx's On the Jewish Question draws the distinction that organises the subject: political emancipation confers equal legal and civic standing, and human emancipation would require dissolving the separation between the citizen in the state and the private individual in civil society. His argument is that the first is a genuine advance and structurally limited.

Critical theory takes emancipation as its defining aim. Horkheimer's distinction between traditional and critical theory turns on it: a critical theory is one oriented toward liberating people from the circumstances that enslave them, which makes emancipation a criterion for the theory rather than an application of it.

Freire's version is pedagogical - the oppressed must be agents of their own liberation, since a liberation handed down reproduces the relation it was meant to end. Rancière presses this hardest against the emancipators themselves, arguing that an explanation that begins by assuming the other's incapacity confirms it, whatever its intention.

Where you meet it

The Slavery Abolition Act 1833 freed roughly 800,000 people across the British Empire, and paid twenty million pounds in compensation.

The compensation went to the owners. It amounted to around forty per cent of the Treasury's annual budget, and the government borrowed to fund it. Research at University College London has traced the payments to some 46,000 claimants and mapped where the money went - into land, art collections, railways and banks. The loan was not fully repaid until 2015.

The freed people received nothing, and most were required to serve a further period as apprentices, unpaid, until 1838. Many had no land, no capital and no alternative employer, and continued working the same estates for wages set by the same owners.

The Act ended a legal status and is rightly regarded as a landmark. It is also the clearest documented case of an emancipation in which the assets, the hierarchy and the balance of power survived the change intact, which is exactly the distinction Marx drew ten years later.

What is actually disputed

Whether emancipation can be granted.

One view is that it can: a legal status is abolished, and the change is real regardless of who conferred it. The other is that a freedom handed down by the party holding the power reproduces the relation, since the recipient's standing still depends on someone else's decision - which is Freire's argument and Rancière's.

The historical record supports both. Legal emancipations have changed lives enormously and have repeatedly left the underlying structure in place.

A second and unresolved question is what completion would look like. If emancipation is release from all domination, and domination is any arbitrary power over anyone, then it is not a state any society has reached or could specify. Treating it as a horizon rather than a goal is honest and removes the criterion by which progress could be judged.

Commonly confused with

rights being granted Legal standing is one component. Whether it amounts to emancipation depends on what else changes.

Defined against

Domination Emancipation is defined as its ending, which makes the pair the axis the whole field is arranged on

Philosophers

Karl Marx Political against human emancipation
Simone de Beauvoir Emancipation as a project rather than a grant
Achille Mbembe Decolonisation and what it leaves standing
Mary Wollstonecraft The argument for extending emancipation on grounds of consistency
Judith Butler Emancipation and the norms that constitute the subject

Works

The German Ideology The materialist frame
Pedagogy of the Oppressed Liberation as something the oppressed must carry out
Black Skin, White Masks The psychological aftermath of formal liberation
The Second Sex Emancipation as unfinished and structural
Discourse on Colonialism What independence did and did not change
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman The consistency argument

Schools

Classical Marxism Where the distinction is drawn
Frankfurt School (Critical Theory) Where emancipation defines what makes a theory critical
Philosophy of Liberation Where it is a pedagogical and political practice
Modernity-Coloniality School Where formal independence is assessed against it
Negritude Philosophy Where cultural affirmation is part of it

Related concepts

Oppression 1990 · Liberty 1859 · Revolution 1789 · Praxis 1845 · Solidarity 1848

The Roman emancipatio is the release of a son from a father's legal power; the modern political sense develops through the abolition and Jewish emancipation debates of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.