This chapter considers the criticisms of Gadamer’s hermeneutics that have recently been put forward by Michael Forster and Kristin Gjesdal. They find that Gadamer errs in rejecting the philosophy of interpretation that is put forward in the nineteenth century by Herder, Schleiermacher, and Dilthey. For these critics of Gadamer, the merit of these predecessors of Gadamer is their commitment to a methodical interpretive practice. Forster criticizes Gadamer for rejecting the attempt to recover distinct original meanings in the texts that one is considering. They find Gadamer’s hermeneutics to be relativistic. This chapter defends Gadamer against these charges.

Stemming from its primeval origins in ancient notions of punitive punishment, by medieval times, Chinese slavery had already long ago become culturally embedded enough to function effectively as an invisible institution, practiced endogenously as well as exogenously. Since earliest times, slave status in medieval China, which was a class-bound, inheritable, and thus only rarely escapable condition, tended to befall either the surviving dependents of executed elites who had contravened authority or else those oftentimes non-Chinese unfortunates—combatants or otherwise—who were captured alive in battle or simply taken by force. Additionally, at any time, exigency could compel the sale of children into slavery. Slaves themselves were divided into two broad categories according to ownership, being either official slaves or private slaves. A crucial development of the medieval age is that both types of slaves came to be accounted for in the dynastic legal codes, which was an especially important occurrence for private slaves because, for the first time, their treatment by their masters became regulated. Finally worth noting in the medieval Chinese case is the prominence of specialized functionaries who, although unfree by any measure, were not typically regarded societally as slaves. Included under this rubric were eunuchs and concubines.

This chapter explores the intersection of gender, sex, and slavery in the medieval dar al-islam (“the lands of Islam). A background survey is provided for sexual ethics, male social reproduction, and female sexual slavery in these societies that illustrates how Islamic sexual ethics, derived from the Quran, and the Islamic legal understanding of legitimacy were very different from those of Roman law, Christianity, late antique Judaism and seventh century Zoroastrianism. Two central questions of the chapter are how was the status of an enslaved woman defined and whether or not the child of an enslaved woman was born with slave-status. In classical Islamic law, the rule of umm al-walad (“mother of child”) meant that an enslaved woman who bore her Muslim owner a child gave birth to a free born person. The status of umm al-walad thus provided enslaved women with limited opportunities to assert their agency.

The view of international law as a profession committed to the spread of liberal ideas emerged in Europe and North America in the late nineteenth century.1 One of those ideas was the rule of law. Attempts to realize a global rule of law and attempts to constitute an international community have long been linked. For many international lawyers, this gave international law a sense of forward movement and a clear telos, with the caveat that the reality of unequal power relations meant that international law could never be measured directly against a model borrowed from domestic law and politics.

The Mongol Empire (1206-1368) had a tremendous impact on slavery across Eurasia. While slaves played a minor role in pre-Imperial Mongolia, the Mongols saw people as a resource, to be distributed among the imperial family and used for imperial needs, like material goods. This view created a whole spectrum of dependency running from free men to full slaves. More specifically, the huge conquests of the United Empire (1206-60) resulted in huge supply of war captives, many of whom eventually sold in the Eurasian slave markets. With the dissolution of the Empire and the halt of its expansion, the demand for slaves remained high, and other means were sought for supplying it. The chapter discusses slavery among the pre-imperial Mongols; the general context of slavery caused by Mongol mobilization and redistribution policies; the various ways of becoming a slave in the Mongol Empire; and the slaves’ dispersion, uses, conditions as well as manumission mechanisms and opportunities for social mobility. It highlights the different types of slavery (extrusive versus intrusive) in China and the Muslim and Christian worlds and argues that in Mongol Eurasia slavery was not always a social death.

Given the connection of “law and order” politics with conservatism, the idea of a conservative critique of the Rechtsstaat at first seems contradictory. After all, wasn’t John Adams’s insistence on defending the British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre used as evidence for his conservatism? Didn’t Burke’s criticism of the French Revolution revolve around the preservation of law as part of a concrete order? But law and order are not identical and it is in the tension between the rule of law and the well ordered society that the possibility for conservative critique of the Rechtsstaat lies. In a time of revolutionary upheaval, furthermore, when revolutionaries proclaim the law, the legal side of “law and order” can come under fire as well.

Mamluk Sultante, military slavery, domestic slavery, Egypt, Syria, manumission, slave trade, Islamic Law and slavery

To speak of “the rule of law” in many of the Muslim countries of the world at present may seem, not only to Westerners but to many citizens of the Islamic world, at best hypocritical and at worst a cruel joke. How, after all, can one speak of the rule of law when a woman may be killed for a marriage not approved by her father or brother, when a constitution can be changed at the whim of a ruler, or when corruption is so pervasive as to leave much of the citizenry feeling dirtied and disaffected? And yet the rule of law remains more than an ideal, more than a vague concept, and more than a useless analytic concept employed only by academic lawyers. For if we try to understand the rule of law not as a universal concept but for what it means in the context of any particular cultural tradition and its system of law, it may be possible to discern features that are not incompatible with the sense in which this phrase is commonly employed.

Herodotus’ Persian debate – a fictional conversation between three noble Persians on the relative merits of rule by one, rule by the few, and rule by all – ironically provides one of our clearest statements of Greek democratic theory.1 In the debate, Otanes, arguing for rule by all, highlights what are recognizable as the key features of Athenian democracy: isonomia (equality under the law); selection of magistrates by lot; accountability for officials; and decision-making in a deliberative popular Assembly.

Gadamer saw hermeneutics as heir to the tradition of Aristotelian practical philosophy. The exercise of phronesis, good practical judgment, helps sustain the solidarities upon which democracy depends. Phronesis is distinguished from techne, technical knowledge. Gadamer is critical of technocratic thinking. Phronesis is closely related to ethos. It has communal dimensions such that it invigorates the ethos of the society and makes possible solidarity. The basis for this is friendship. Friendship involves a life together of reciprocal co-perception.

The “rule of law” is a relatively recent addition to the development project.1 Only after the end of the 1980s, when the Cold War was over, history had ended,2 and three worlds had putatively become “one,” did it also become commonsensical for law, institutions and “governance” to be understood as integral to “development.”3 Since that time, not only have developmental institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and regional development banks explicitly taken up promotion of the rule of law as a core aspect of their mandates, but a significant marketplace of international, transnational, government, and domestic actors has emerged.4 The result is a multi-billion dollar industry that is centrally concerned with “the rule of law” as instrument, end, and indicator of “development,” positioned at the heart of state-making more broadly.

These words appear in a short eleven-page passage headed “The rule of law” in E. P. Thompson’s 300-page historical study of one British statute enacted in May 1723. Yet the passage, and particularly the quoted words, received enormous attention at the time and since, provoking widespread criticism as well as praise.2 Edward Palmer Thompson (1924–1993) was probably the best-known British historian of the second half of the twentieth century, acclaimed for The Making of the English Working Class.

Tucked away in a minor footnote to the final chapter of Between Facts and Norms, Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929), the Frankfurt School’s premier second-generation representative, offers a tantalizing remark about Franz L. Neumann (1900–1954), his predecessor at the Institute for Social Research and its most impressive first-generation legal thinker.

This chapter considers the third great turning point in the development of hermeneutics in Western culture. The first hermeneutics was a hermeneutics of consent. This was developed in early Christianity and by Augustine. The second turning point was in the modern Enlightenment with its classic expression by Spinoza. This is the hermeneutics of suspicion. The third turning point was inaugurated by Barth and Heidegger. Gadamer provides its fundamental book, Truth and Method. This hermeneutics may be called integral hermeneutics, which incorporates the first two turning points. This chapter considers the hermeneutics of Heidegger in its relation to Aristotle. This is followed by a consideration of Gadamer’s hermeneutics with a focus on the central role of phronesis, which shows the relevance of Aristotle. Conversation is also central to Gadamer’s hermeneutics. The chapter finally shows the relevance of Gadamer’s hermeneutics to Christian theology.

Slavery can exist without racism, which certainly appears and endures in societies without slavery. Slavery and racism become entangled in color symbolism and color prejudice across the planet, and no natural rules determine how hierarchies evolve privileging some people over others. Nevertheless, looking at attitudes toward blackness in medieval Europe shows how one region’s societies evolving attitudes about color and the human family preordained how Europeans treated people who appeared different.Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and pagan antiquity bequeathed to medieval Europe systems of slavery as well as ideas on a hierarchy of “races” privileging some groups and colors over others. The premodern science of physiognomy legitimized constructs of race and color symbolism, to which commentators on the Bible contributed. The apparently stark contrasts among black, brown, red, and white people became proxies for good and evil and other traits. In Europe blackness normally defined Satan, bad things like death and melancholy, and eventually a prevalent type of slave. Color (and gender) of slaves in the late medieval Mediterranean markets affected their prices and revealed buyers’ preferences. Fifteenth-century encounters with sub-Sahara Africa illuminate how Europeans imposed their values of color prejudice on peoples who did not share them.

The difference between the idea of the Rechtsstaat and that of the rule of law is more than a variation on a theme. Theorists and practitioners of law’s rule would do well not to equate – for analytical as well as practical reasons – the Anglo-American way of law with what Leonard Krieger called “the German idea of freedom.”2 And yet they have and will – to the detriment, I argue in this chapter, of understanding and prescription.