The Otto di Guardia was a powerful magistracy established in the late fourteenth century just after Florence's experiment with democratized government (1378). The new regime was much perturbed by fear of revolution and replication of the terrible events of the Ciompi uprising. Intelligent commentators such as Francesco Guicciardini were to argue a century and a half later that formation of the Otto had saved the Repub- lic from anarchy. Without the fear of this dread tribunal, seditious and factious Florentines would certainly have toppled the regime. Many modern interpreters of these events follow this grand generalization, but few have bothered to study the day-to-day activities of this court or in fact of any of its adjuncts.

Murder has both an attractive and a repellent quality. The tingling, fearfully pleasurable sensation of reading or hearing about murders makes them popular in literature and in the media. George Orwell perceptively sums up this human reaction when he says of one of his characters, “Mother preferred the News of the World which she considered had more murders in it.” The fascination with split heads, spilled brains and dismembered bodies was a dominant theme of medieval as well as of modern literature.

Politics became a revolutionary activity for the people of France in 1789. In a few months they learned how to formulate their interests, organize to demand changes, and mobilize to achieve their goals. This politicization was most intensive in the towns because it was there that people met most frequently to confront the constitutional and political issues posed by the bankruptcy of the crown. Many townspeople had been at least vaguely aware of the constitutional crisis since 1787, but their political education did not begin in earnest until the spring of 1789 when they participated in the many long and often agitated meetings to elect deputies and draft grievance lists for the meeting of the Estates General.

The Mexican ejido, the Soviet kolkhoz, the Chinese commune and the Tanzanian Ujamaa village have all been encouraged by governments as a means of reorganizing the countryside on a communal basis. Few policies have had so profound an effect on people's lives as have those associated with the collectivization of agriculture. It is the purpose of this paper to examine the degree of similarity in the collectivization experiences.

Freedom is the secret topic of this essay—a topic political theorists can scarce let alone. Hence the following exploration into African kingship and slavery should be understood as part of a dialectic of freedom, as seen through its opposites.

The passing references to Western thinkers are meant to put the African ideas in a perspective of general intellectual history, which is permissible if only because the great tradition of political philosophy, after it was eradicated in the West, was preserved by the Arabic and Jewish scholars of Africa, Asia Minor, and Andalusia. Subsequently some versions of this tradition were diffused throughout Africa with the spread of Islam and Christianity.

When the British arrived in Northern Nigeria in the early years of the century, one of their first acts was a Proclamation on Slavery (1901) which prohibited slave-raiding, abolished the legal status of slavery and declared that all those subsequently born of slave parents would be free, but which did not prohibit slaveholding as such. Faced with the existence of ancient and flourishing slavery systems, which probably involved several million men and women, it would have been altogether beyond the power of the British administration to have enforced any policy of immediate emancipation—and this quite apart from the sympathy that was felt for slave owners as a class.