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This text’s purpose is the critical analysis of the works of Francisco Suárez (1548–1617). These works deal with the themes of slavery and freedom, especially in the context of free and slave labour. Slavery and its legitimacy were much discussed by peninsular authors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, during the Second Scholasticism. These analyses gained momentum when military forces and Spanish settlers began enslaving the “Indians” of the American continent. In the seventeenth century, Suárez would validate the conceptions of earlier authors. However, the theme appears in his work mostly accidentally and at another level of remove, through the enunciation of abstract propositions or, at most, with reference to hypothetical situations. Like most authors of the time, Suárez also deemed slavery to be permissible. He considered that freedom was a natural right belonging to all men; however, he did not consider it inalienable: it could be sold or delivered by its own proprietor. Without questioning the obedience or submission the slave was believed to owe the master, Suárez held that the dominus’ power was not an absolute power but rather a “quasi-dominance,” one that excluded the possibility of killing or mistreating the slave. It is also important to analyse how, conceptually, slave and free labour were characterized and distinguished. Even in the seventeenth century, distinctions in terms of the time of attachment were still common. A rigorous distinction, founded on the kinds of obedience that can be demanded, can be found in Suárez’s work. Although he affirmed that servants, like slaves, were obliged to obey their masters, the former were only to be obedient insofar as they were bound by their office. Suárez’s text clearly distinguished free workers’ duty of obedience and limited it to certain functions. This last limitation, which may seem natural to us today, was unusual in the seventeenth century, so much so that it drew attention because it seems to presuppose a limit for subordination and, on the other hand, a dilation of the sphere of freedom in which that domain could not be exercised.
