The dialectic of lordship and bondage, more commonly known as the “Master/Slave dialectic,” is a moment in a much longer and exceedingly difficult-to-read (much less understand!) text by G.W.F. Hegel entitled The Phenomenology of Spirit. It’s probably a passage that is referenced in a wide number of fields– psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, literary analysis, any number of “area studies,” and even economics– though very few of the scholars who reference it have slogged all the way through Hegel’s Phenomenology. Nevertheless, like Plato’s Allegory of the Cave from the Republic and Nietzsche’s story about the lambs and the birds of prey from Genealogy of Morals, both of which we’ve discussed before on this podcast, Hegel’s dialectic of Lordship and Bondage manages to capture, in a concise and powerful way, something both intuitively true and yet, at the same time, utterly mystifying.

This week we ask the question, why has this passage become the hit single off of the dense concept album that is the Phenomenology.

In this episode, we reference the following thinkers/ideas/texts/etc.:

• Anchor Steam Brewery
• My Impossible Mission to Find Tom Cruise
• G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit
• Alexandre Kojève
• Murry Head, “One Night in Bangkok”
• Hegel’s often quoted line (itself a quotation) “No man is a hero to his valet-de-chambre,but not because the former is no hero, but because the latter is a valet.”
• Frantz Fanon
• Ubuntu philosophy “I am because we are”
• Time Magazine Selected You as the Person of the Year in 2006
• Nancy Fraser on the Politics of Recognition

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