The so-called master-slave dialectic first appears in The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. In the original German phrase, Herrschaft und Knechschaft, he is actually considering the dialectic between lordship and bondage. He confronts two self-conscious beings that recognize each other’s self-consciousness. This relationship takes the form of struggle to the death, in which one attempts to master the other. In the end, neither can achieve their objectives. The antithesis of subject and object cannot be resolved, for one cannot survive without the other. Therefore, the subjective and objective end up by transcending each other. In the original German, this is rendered as Aufhebung. In contemporary terminology, the relationship can be understood as that between a principal and an agent. The principal hires the agent to perform a specific task for the principal, but their relationship is fraught from the onset. The two self-conscious beings, one independent and the other dependent, face self-consciousness of each other. In Hegel’s terms, they can resolve the conflict only by transcending it, whereby the distinction between a principal and an agent is itself blurred in the performance of the task. The principal-agent dialectic follows the same logic as that of any other independent and dependent self-consciousness investigated two centuries ago by Hegel.

Addendum (February 3, 2019)

One of my favorite books of old is The Pancatantra: The Book of India’s Folk Wisdom.[1] I have browsed through it innumerable times, and I have copied many stories from it into my magnum opus, a commonplace book of sorts. Thus I was quite surprised when I opened the book at random and chanced across the following verses, which are purportedly of greater vintage:

A king loves only the man close at hand,
Even if he’s a stranger or a fool, or a man of low birth;
Kings, women, and vines do, for the most part,
Cling to whatever they find close at hand.

Servants, when they get to remain close by,
Observe what angers or pleases the king;
And little by little they surmount him,
In spite of his attempts to shake them loose.[2]

I thought of Hegel at once, it goes without saying. And I searched for this particular piece a moment later. Amazingly, scholars place The Pancatantra around year 300 of our era.[3] To wit, the principal-agent dialectic must have been pinned down soon after kings appeared on the face of the earth. And in writing. Strangely enough, I felt kind of sorry for Hegel as soon as I stumbled upon these verses. Repeating the obvious?

Footnotes

1. Translated by Patrick Olivelle, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

2. Op. cit., p. 11.

3. Op. cit., p. xii.