The Fact
In De Officiis, written in the first century BCE, the Roman philosopher Cicero described hired manual labor as socially degrading and wrote that “the very wage they receive is a pledge of their slavery.” Roman law still distinguished free wage earners from enslaved people; Cicero was making a philosophical and social argument about dependence, not a legal claim that wage workers were literally slaves.
What This Means
The idea that dependence on wages can be compared to slavery is not a modern internet invention. It appears in ancient political thought. But the comparison used a broader idea of freedom—independence from another person’s will—rather than the legal ownership definition of slavery.
Sources
- Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Officiis, Book I, section 150.
- LacusCurtius / University of Chicago transcription and translation.
- Tom O’Shea, “Wage slavery: A neo-Roman account,” European Journal of Political Theory, first published online 2024.
- EDITORIAL NOTE — PHILOSOPHY / HISTORY OF IDEAS
- This sheet examines a historical philosophical use of the word slavery. It is not intended to equate wage employment with chattel slavery, racial slavery, forced labor, human trafficking, or any legal definition of slavery, nor to diminish the distinct harms of those institutions.