Persons and Things

Abstract

In Roman law the person was someone entitled to hold property: the person was the antithesis of a slave, who could own nothing. A residue of this distinction is found in the slave law of the American South, where slaves were neither personate nor propertied except when accused of a serious crime, whereupon they were invested in a temporary personhood that would last the length of their trial. A parallel metamorphosis was achieved by pain in ancient Rome, where slaves were required by law to be tortured before they gave evidence. In civil society the person—as opposed to the fool, madman, child, slave, bondservant, idol or thing—has a definite function as a representative of authority, one whose testimony may be relied on and whose goods are to be defended from misappropriation. Pufendorf divided this figure into the political person and the moral person:The political person, like the ‘Actor’ defined by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan, is the individual who joins the vast web of representations that constitutes the commonwealth, becoming in effect one of the many persons of the person of the king. The moral person is constituted like the person defined by John Locke in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding as one fit to own a personal history and to take responsibility for it. Locke’s moral person arises from the union of self and consciousness, just as the political person arises from the union of the sovereign and the multitude; but each is endowed with property and has a claim on justice that ensures every person keeps their own.