Much evidence – textual, material and documentary – points to slavery in the early and medieval Islamic Middle East (c. 600-1000 CE) as a social fact, persistent and multivalent. This is especially true for the urban landscape: the presence of enslaved and freed persons would have been impossible to miss. More difficult is the reconstruction of Middle Eastern agrarian slavery. This is a survey essay with particular reference to the early Abbasid Caliphate (c. 750-950) and select questions around which debate in modern scholarship has grown. One must comb medieval Arabic texts (literary and documentary) to reconstruct patterns of early Islamic-era enslavement; the organization and dynamics of slave commerce; the demands on slave and freed labor; and the (relative) social integration of the enslaved. The Arabic/Islamic library illuminates all manner of topics, religious and secular alike. Literary references to slavery and/or enslaved persons therein are plentiful and of a great variety. One has references in works of poetry and adab, an elastic term used for a variety of Arabic prose writings. Equally numerous are references in chronicles, biographical dictionaries, and works of geography and political thought. Medieval Arabic legal and religious writings provide a considerable number of references as well.

State punishment, understood as hard treatment or the restriction of the liberty of the individual, has been central to modern debates about the rule of law. As a form of “dramatically coercive and burdensome” state action against the individual, punishment raises distinctive issues about the relationship between a state and its citizens, and as such requires particular justification.1 These questions of justification are typically seen as questions of who may be punished, and for what, the identification of legitimate and illegitimate forms of punishment, and indeed of the processes that must consequently be respected by the state if it is to impose justified punishment.2 It can therefore be seen that these questions are important not only in terms of justifying actual inflictions of punishment on particular individuals, but also in terms of legitimizing the institution of punishment more broadly.

Hermeneutics, critical theory, and deconstruction designate three intellectual orientations that have dominated debates in continental philosophy. All three exhibit the “linguistic turn.” The debate between Habermas and Gadamer brought Gadamer to prominence. Important for both is the Aristotelian distinction between the practical and the technical. Gadamer is more negatively critical of the Enlightenment than is Habermas. Both are concerned with the instrumentalization of reason in modernity. Yet Gadamer sees Habermas as too utopian. Habermas sees Gadamer as insensitive to the way dialogue is distorted by social forces and political power. This chapter concludes with a consideration of Gadamer in relation to Derrida and deconstruction. Both were profoundly influenced by Heidegger. Yet Gadamer emphasizes continuity, while Derrida emphasizes rupture and break. Gadamer shows us the achievement of understanding, while Derrida is preoccupied with the ways we misunderstand. Derrida and Gadamer serve as correctives of the other, just as Habermas and Gadamer serve as correctives of the other.

The rule of law is a central theme of Montesquieu’s major work, The Spirit of the Laws (1748), and in many respects it forms the conceptual core of his political theory. For Montesquieu, the rule of law means that the use of political power is subject to the formal constraint of standing rules that are codified in the positive laws of the land. It means that no one is above the law and that the actions of the state must conform in a consistent way to publicly known standards. The rule of law is the single most important factor, as Montesquieu sees it, in establishing moderation in government and therefore in protecting political liberty.

A This chapter builds on recent scholarship to assert that the Greater Mediterranean region has been host to large-scale, multicultural, and multi-ethnic slave systems, without a break, from ancient times through the twentieth century. This chapter provides the contours of these systems for the medieval millennium, with a focus on the emergence of ‘Renaissance’ slavery in later medieval southern Europe. It then covers the major theoretical models which have been posited regarding medieval Mediterranean slavery, from Verlinden and Braudel, to Abu-Lughod, Horden and Purcell, Michael McCormick, and Alice Rio. Finally, the chapter addresses some insights which the study of a millennium of slavery in the Mediterranean can have for historians of the Atlantic Slave Trade and other more recent forms of slavery. For example, to what extent was race a determinant of enslaveability in the medieval period? How did religion inform enslaveability in the long run? Why did much of Western Europe prove resistant to slavery after the year 1100? And how did ‘Renaissance’ slavery set the stage for the creation of the Atlantic Slave System, a system already underway with the lucrative exploitation of the Canary Islands from the 1340s?

This chapter provides a biography of Gadamer and includes an overview of the philosophical work that Gadamer produced. It provides an account of his youth and education, his early career in Nazi Germany, and his career after World War II. He was named Rektor of Leipzig University in East Germany but gave up the position and came to West Germany, first to Frankfurt and then to Heidelberg. In 1960 he published Truth and Method, which slowly became recognized world-wide. He retired in 1968 and was very productive throughout his old age.

This chapter addresses whether Gadamerߣs hermeneutics should be considered a kind of relativism or a sort of realism. In this consideration Gadamerߣs treatment of the concept of truth is also presented. This chapter argues that Gadamerߣs hermeneutics is on one side of the hermeneutical fork–the side of realism, as opposed to relativism. Gadamerߣs hermeneutics is considered in relation to the work of John McDowell. For Gadamer, our freedom and our knowledge are always situated and limited, but that does not undo Gadamerߣs commitment to realism and truth.

We live in an age of measurement and quantification which has produced cross-national indicators of concepts like gender equality, war and peace, and gross national happiness, to name just a few.1 The rule of law (RoL) is no exception and recent years have seen a proliferation of indicators that are the subject of a nascent literature.2 The literature points out that indicators inherently reduce complex social phenomena to simple measures with a corresponding loss of information but an increase in tractability.

This chapter will analyse the discourse in France on the relatively new French expression État de droit.1 After an unsuccessful first rise in its use at the beginning of the twentieth century (1907–1930s), the term has since 1977 progressively informed the language of French constitutional law scholars and even penetrated the language of specialists of other legal disciplines, politicians, journalists, and, to some extent, of ordinary citizens.

theory of art in the conventional sense. He does not provide a systematic account of art, nor does he provide criteria for aesthetic judgment. He is concerned rather with the role art plays in forming our culture and its meaning in our individual and communal lives. This chapter situates Gadamer’s views in the context of the history of philosophy–the ancient Greek view of art and the modern views of art, especially the view of Kant. For Gadamer, art is an event of understanding. The concepts of play and the game are important to his account. This chapter considers the temporal, the dialogical, and the communal aspects of art for Gadamer. It considers arts claim to truth. And finally, it shows how Gadamer thinks that art has an important transformative potential.

We live at a time of sobering realism – indeed pessimism – regarding rule of law building after conflict. There are many reasons for this. The inherent difficulty of the endeavor itself is one fundamental factor. Although each country emerging from violent conflict is unique in its history, leadership, culture, and possibilities for progress, they often also face many common challenges. Governing institutions may be discredited, law enforcement and judiciaries may be distrusted, civilians may be recoiling from egregious injury, social divisions may run deep, infrastructure may be devastated, economic opportunities may be limited, and confidence in the very idea of the rule of law may be at an all-time low.

This chapter looks at the enslavement of children (below 16 years of age) from the 5th to the 15th centuries, focusing on the Mediterranean and the British Isles. It uses contemporary documents, such as personal narratives, laws, contracts, letters and ecclesiastical sources, to construct case studies illustrating the major ways that children could become slaves. These include capture in war or kidnapping and sale by pirates and unscrupulous slavers; abandonment as a newborn, rescue, and rearing as a slave; pledging into servitude by parents to pay a debt; and birth to an enslaved mother. Domestic slavery was the most usual fate for children, though a few boys were made into eunuchs destined for elite households in the Byzantine Empire and the Caliphate, and girls might become concubines or sex slaves. There was little official effort to prevent child enslavement, although the Byzantine emperor Justinian attempted to abolish the use of children as debt-pledges and the enslavement of abandoned newborns, and banned castration within the bounds of his Empire. In general, the enslavement of even very young children and their transport across long distances was common and uncontroversial.

Thomas Hobbes is the founder of the rule by law tradition in modern Western thought. It argues that there is no more to law than what the holder of supreme legislative power chooses to enact, whatever its content. Hobbes founds it in opposition to the conception of the rule of law exemplified in the writings of Sir Edward Coke according to which the common law, as interpreted by judges, contains fundamental legal and moral principles which condition the content of enacted or statute law. Coke and others in this rule by law tradition thus consider the rule of law to be a moral good.

Theorists often begin with the elements or features of the rule of law, frequently distinguishing formal and substantive versions.1 Instead, I explore two other senses. The first sense is that the rule of law exists in a society when government officials and the populace are generally bound by and abide law. Framing the analysis in terms of a society subject to law enables a more expansive view of functions of the rule of law. The second sense construes “the rule of law” as an ideal and as rhetoric, asking what functions are served when people invoke it.