(iPoster) “Enemies of Humanity” and Founders of Concrete Utopias: On the Pirate Experience

• In Event: Poster Sessions: Foundations of Political Theory III & Comparative Political Economy
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Foundations of Political Theory III

Abstract

Political and legal philosophers from Cicero in ancient Rome to Alberico Gentili, Hugo Grotius and William Blackstone in the modern world have labeled pirates as the “common enemies of all.” Such accounts founded the way Western States have conceived and dealt with pirates, which became the quintessential hostes humani generis (“enemies of humanity”). In effect, throughout Western history, pirates became the symbol of a particular type of enemy for State authorities: the unlawful, illegal and universal adversary, to whom no rights can be recognized and with whom no agreement can be reached. Dehumanized and often bestialized, the pirate was to be exterminated.

I argue that pirates have thus historically belonged to a state of nature vis-à-vis the State, which cast them outside the human realm. Yet, focusing on piracy during its “Golden Age” in the Caribbeans (circa 1690-1730), I uncover that the pirates’ practice on their ships can substantially contribute to democratic and social contract theory. In effect, based on detailed historical accounts of piracy during this period, I argue that pirate ships constituted a revolutionary space beyond the State and State law, as pirates transformed their ships into autonomous societies organized around self-given laws. I maintain that the political organization instituted on these ships reveal pirates as concrete social contractors, birthing a new ‘society.’ This social contract dimension comes into view most prominently through the pirates’ “Articles of Agreement,” i.e. the collectively crafted rules that governed their ships. Through this practice, pirates come forth as a democratic figure, giving laws to themselves. What’s more, the form of social organization prevailing on these ships even anticipated modern practices such as checks and balances, most notably with the office of the Quartermaster, designed to countervail the captain’s authority on pirate ships. Overall, I contend that the pirate experience was revolutionary because through the practice of social contracting pirates created radically new forms of social organization aboard their ships, organized around democratic and egalitarian lines. This paper thereby reveals that, paradoxically, social contract theory can learn from the practice of those who have always been purposively excluded from it by its theoreticians.

Additionally, I maintain that the freedom pirates instituted on their ships was of a republican kind, i.e. non-subjection to arbitrary power. Crucially, this institution of a republican freedom was grounded in concrete material conditions, and more specifically in the pirates’ collective ownership of the ship and the abolition of wage-labor. In that sense, I suggest that pirates did not simply exhibit a republican conception of freedom; rather, their practice aligned with radical republican insights on the relation between wage-labor and freedom.

Ultimately, I suggest that the pirate experience can therefore contribute to contemporary utopian scholarship, which is predominantly oriented around concrete, communal, small-scale experimentations rather than wholesale projects of social change. In that respect, I maintain that pirate ships during the “Golden Age of Piracy” constitute an historical example of a ‘concrete’ utopia because it resoundingly showed that in the maritime world another form of social organization was possible along radical democratic egalitarian dimensions. Pirates thus turned their social world upside down as they radically questioned the dominant forms of social organization, profoundly authoritarian and inegalitarian, which prevailed in that era both on the sea and on shore. In that sense, engaging with pirates as a real and historical figure can provide important theoretical insights to envisage an emancipatory space beyond lawlessness and State Law. In particular, the pirate experience can speak to contemporary forms of self-organization outside and against the State, exemplified in recent years by phenomena such as the Zone to Defend (Zone à défendre or ZAD) movement in France since the early 2010s or in the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) established in Seattle in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. More generally, in an era where social movements reject both verticality, in search of horizontal forms of organization, and absorbance from the State, endeavoring to create spaces of political expression beyond it, the “pirate utopia” can constitute a useful point of departure and, possibly, source of inspiration.

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