 Just as the shepherd is superior in kind to his sheep, so, too, the shepherds of men, or, in other words, their rulers, are superior in kind to their peoples. This, according to Philo, was the argument advanced by Caligula, the Emperor, who drew from the analogy the perfectly true conclusion that either Kings are Gods or their subjects brute beasts. The reasoning of Caligula, of Hobbes, and of Grotius is fundamentally the same. Far earlier, Aristotle, too, had maintained that men are not by nature equal, but that some are born to be slaves, others to be masters. Aristotle was right: but he mistook the effect for the cause. Nothing is more certain than that a man born into a condition of slavery is a slave by nature. A slave in fetters loses everything -- even the desire to be freed from them. He grows to love his slavery, as the companions of Ulyesses grew to love their state of brutish transformation. If some men are by nature slaves, the reason is that they have been made slaves against nature. Force made the first slaves: cowardice has perpetuated the species.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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