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This article deals with a flagrant though invisible antinomy of liberalism: the close historical and conceptual relation in which liberty and slavery have developped in political modernity. While colonial slavery is made invisible, a lasting tradition of metaphorisation makes of slavery a rhetorical figure of political subjection against which is defined the modern notion of liberty. In as much as colonial and other forms of modern slavery develop in societies with universalist modes of legitimation it is an embarrassing institution as Orlando Patterson has rightly called it. To adress this embarrassment, to inquire into its political effects and the repression of slavery in modern political theory of liberty, offers a privileged perspective into the ambiguities of the traditions of liberty we have inherited.