ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the practice of invoking slavery in polemical literature to engage a larger dialogue taking place in revisionist scholarship. The practice of invoking slavery to disparage political opponents appears in a range of polemical and dramatic works dating from the Exclusion Crisis of the early 1680s. An integral part of divine right ideology, passive obedience required dissenting subjects to keep their objections to the status quo largely to themselves, expressed through measures no stronger than 'prayers and tears', on the belief that armed resistance was a damnable offense. Critics of the Stuart monarchy argue that passive obedience served as a form of coercion, making Restoration society a closed system with no possibility of exit. As technology and patterns of immigration intensify the encounter with liberalism's 'others', Western democracies finds themselves faced with a number of ethical practices that challenge the autonomy on which the liberal, or consent-based, mode of obedience to authority is based.
