Social Exclusion and the Right to Justification: The Case of Slavery

The concept of social exclusion has usually been conceived of as referring to the horizontal axis of social structuration, juxtaposed to the established vertical categorizations of social inequality. Opposing such a dichotomous conceptualization of (horizontal) inclusion/exclusion and (vertical) stratification, this paper examines the linkages between both axes: In which ways might the excluded not be ‘superfluous’, but rather functional to the reproduction of social structure. This question is explored by investigating the “peculiar institution” of slavery from the perspective of the right to justification.