Manhunts

The genealogy runs back to Greece, and Chamayou returns repeatedly to Aristotle because the philosopher supplied the theory the practice needed. In the Politics, some human beings are described as natural slaves — people who possess enough reason to follow instructions but not enough to govern themselves, and who are therefore better off, on Aristotle's account, under a master. From this premise the hunting of men follows almost logically. If some people are meant by nature to be ruled and resist that station, then pursuing them is not violence against the natural order but the restoration of it.

What Chamayou draws out is how the argument works. It does not begin with a hunt and look for a justification afterward. It begins with a claim about what certain people are, and the permission to hunt them flows from that claim. The prey is defined into existence before it is ever pursued. This is the crucial inversion: the natural slave is not a person who has been captured, but a category of person who is understood, in advance, to be capturable. The hunt merely realizes a status the theory has already assigned.

The scenes Chamayou assembles from the modern world show the ancient grammar scaling up. In the Spanish conquest of the Americas, Indigenous people who fled forced labor were hunted with dogs bred and trained for the purpose — animals that became instruments of a colonial economy. The pursuit was not incidental to conquest; it was one of its working methods, a way of converting free human beings into a controllable labor supply. The theological debates of the period, over whether the natives had souls, were in part arguments about which side of the huntable line they fell on.

Atlantic slavery industrialized the form. A person held in bondage who escaped did not become, in the eyes of the system, a free person; they became a fugitive, which is to say prey. Chamayou details the machinery this produced: professional slave-catchers, patrols riding the countryside at night, rewards posted for the return of the living body, tracking dogs, and eventually laws that compelled even free territories to assist in the capture. The runaway was hunted not because they had committed a crime in the ordinary sense but because their flight was itself treated as an offense against the order of property.

Stepping back, Chamayou's argument turns on a single hinge that runs beneath every scene: the hunt cannot begin until a category has been drawn. This is why his book is a work of philosophy and not only of history. The decisive act is not the chase but the classification that precedes it — the moment a group is defined as the sort of thing that may be pursued. Change the definition and the hunt loses its footing. This is why struggles against manhunting have so often been struggles over words, over who counts as a person rather than a quarry.

The category is never neutral, and it is never quite stable. Chamayou notes that those marked as prey have always found ways to contest the mark, and that the most powerful contestation is collective. A single fugitive can be run down. A group that recognizes itself as a group — that turns the imposed category back into a shared identity and a common defense — changes the arithmetic of the hunt. The maroon communities of escaped slaves, the networks that hid and moved the pursued, the solidarities that formed around the undocumented: these are the moments when the object of the hunt refuses to remain an object.

Chamayou began with a line from Aristotle and ends far from the ancient world, but the shape of the thing has not changed. Across every scene — the conquered forest, the plantation road at night, the modern checkpoint — the same operation repeats. A group is named as lower, the naming is presented as truth, and the pursuit of its members is folded into the ordinary maintenance of order. The dogs and the bounties are the visible part. The category that authorizes them is the part that does the real work.