Daily Inspiration Quote by Alfred Marshall

Marshall is doing something more unsettling than pointing out that Aristotle defended slavery: he is sketching how oppression survives by recruiting its victims into the story that makes it feel inevitable. The line “ordinance of nature” is the key tell. It’s not just a historical claim about Greek philosophy; it’s a prototype for the economist’s most dangerous alibi: whatever exists must be “natural,” therefore it must be efficient, therefore questioning it is sentimental.

The barb lands in the second half: “and so probably was it by the slaves themselves.” Marshall’s “probably” is a careful hedge, but it’s also a rhetorical trap. He invites the reader to imagine domination so culturally saturated that the enslaved internalize the metaphysics of their own subordination. That’s not a defense of slavery; it’s a warning about how ideology works when it’s at its most effective: it doesn’t merely coerce, it teaches people to misrecognize coercion as common sense.

Context matters. Marshall is writing in an era when economics is trying to sound like physics: laws, equilibria, natural orders. Britain had abolished slavery in its empire, but racial hierarchies and industrial exploitation were alive and well. Invoking Aristotle lets Marshall keep the tone cool, even clinical, while smuggling in a critique of “naturalizing” arguments that justify contemporary inequalities. The sentence reads like an aside, but it’s a pressure point: if even slaves can be persuaded that slavery is “nature,” then the fact that people accept an arrangement is the weakest possible evidence that it is just.