Abstract
Book I of Aristotle’s Politics seems to deliver two slightly different pictures of the slave: on one hand the slave is depicted as an exploited tool of production; on the other hand, he is conceived as a less-gifted member of the household. The paper attempts to show that Aristotle’s conception is not ambivalent since the two pictures in question are complementary.
Thus, Aristotle provides us with a complex account, which can neither be criticized for inconsistency and ideological bias, nor does it need to be defended from the communitarian- -like standpoint. The paper proceeds by discussing four contexts of Aristotle’s slavery: types of rule, technical use of the slaves, psychology of the slaves, justification of slavery.
The main stress is given to the technical context that brings Aristotle’s theory very close to the controversy between Heidegger and Lévinas about modern technology.