The societies of medieval Northern Europe were slave-holding societies that revered military prowess and expressed wealth and power through symbols of warrior-hood. They were intensely hierarchical and patriarchal societies in which control, guardianship and naked power over people equated with status. Despite the growth of governmental and religious institutions, they remained societies obsessed with notions of honor and shame, with lineage and kinship, identity and belonging. This chapter explores some problematic historiographical assumptions around the diminishing significance of slavery in these cultural contexts, arguing that only when we acknowledge and recognize the slave-holding nature of these societies are we are better able to understand them. Close analysis of the lifestyle, attitudes, and cultural conceptions of the slave-holder and the enslaver are therefore essential. Indeed slave-holding behaviours are evident in a wide range of medieval sources including sagas, poetry, myths, chronicles, legal texts, manorial records, wills and manumissions as well as penitentials, sermons and hagiography. These sources reveal that enslaved people were regarded as the weakest, most dishonorable and degraded of all individuals. Paradoxically, they highlight that the marginalisation of enslaved human beings was extremely important for these communities - underpinning broader power relations and defining and reinforcing the boundaries of community identity and belonging.

Two things are certain about the rule of law. First, it is not the rule of men.1 Second, it is important: it protects those living under governments that are guided by it from authoritarianism, totalitarianism, and, quite possibly, “anarchy and the Hobbesian war of all against all.”2 Beyond those two certainties, however, much confusion reigns. Indeed, the rule of law is an “essentially contestable concept,” and paradigmatically so.

Gadamer has made a tremendous contribution to twentieth century thought, for he has proposed a new and different model of understanding and understanding in the human sciences that carries us beyond the dilemma of ethnocentrism and relativism. This model is not that of a “science” that grasps an object but rather one of speech-partners who come to an understanding together. Three important features of understanding are (1) it is bilateral in character, (2) it is party dependent, and (3) it involves revising goals. It follows that there is an important difference between the human sciences and the natural sciences. Important to Gadamer’s model of the human sciences is the “fusion of horizons.” This chapter discusses the proximity of Davidson and Gadamer and their differences.

This chapter explores how Gadamer’s hermeneutics has influenced important strands of contemporary philosophy and has converged with other philosophical school of thought. Mostly importantly, this chapter considers the relation of Gadamer’s thought to the thought of Rorty and Davidson. Rorty is influenced by Gadamer. Davidson shows no direct influence but is a case of overlap and convergence. Rorty aims to show the internal exhaustion of the twentieth–century epistemological–psychological tradition. He uses criticisms from within that tradition, including Gadamer. Philosophy is seen by Rorty, much like Gadamer, to a matter of joining a conversation. Rorty’s importation of Gadamer’s hermeneutic model is not without is difficulties. Rorty embraces incommensurability and Gadamer rejects it. Gadamer attempts an ontology and Rorty rejects ontology. Rorty cites Gadamer. Davidson never does and shows no signs of being influenced by Gadamer. Yet there some remarkable convergences. Davidson’s principle of charity and the communality of understanding and interpreting align very well with Gadamer.

General readers still lack awareness of the prevalence of slavery between the classical period and the post-1420 wider Atlantic World. This phenomenon is not just temporal but geographic, in that Asia, the Indian Ocean World, Amerindian societies and Oceania still receive far less scholarly attention than their populations warrant. This situation exists despite the rapid growth of interest in the general subject of slavery in recent decades. The Islamic conquests and the Mongol expansions generated large numbers of captives, but in fact no society in the Medieval millennium was without enslaved people. While no consensus on the definition of slavery is possible – in this era it assumed a wide spectrum of dependencies - the existence of slave markets across the known world indicates that buyers and sellers shared enough of a common understanding of the practice to sustain a vibrant slave trade. Despite this traffic and major military disruptions, many enslaved people derived their status via birth even though the sources suggest that probably most slaves were female. They also exercised some agency. Prejudice against black people is apparent but the ebb and flow of empires ensured that any group could be a slave, just as any could be a slave owner.

This chapter explores what Gadamer might mean by giving hermeneutics the task of “overcoming the primacy of self-consciousness” and asks whether it is really Hegel in his sights as he attempts to do so. The chapter first attends to the conflicting strands of deep solidarity with Hegel, coupled with just as deep a rejection. Gadamer’s final answer is that Hegel’s philosophy, whatever Hegel may have intended, did not completely break free of “subjectivism.” Of fundamental importance for Gadamer is the idea of finitude. Gadamer embraces what Hegel calls “the bad infinite” when he claims that the “soul’s dialogue with itself” has no teleological end point and is inexhaustible. Gadamer points to the limits of reflection.

While the Indian Ocean slave trade is at least 4,000 years old, there are three historical periods when this trade expanded significantly: at the turn of the common era (ca. 1st c. CE), the tenth to thirteenth centuries, and the nineteenth century. This chapter analyzes the ebb and flow of the slave trade in the western Indian Ocean and Red Sea region during the medieval millenium, beginning with an evaluation of how the expansion of Muslim societies impacted slavery. The regions discussed include the west coast of India, East Africa, Yemen and Arabia, Ethiopia, Nubia, and Egypt. The roles of urban markets and island entrepôt in the slave trade are discussed as well as the roles played by smaller polities along imperial frontiers. Large-scale wholesale slave trading was uncommon in the medieval Indian Ocean world. Instead, merchants generally trafficked in small numbers of enslaved people as part of larger mixed cargoes of luxury goods and other commodities. Finally, the chapter assesses recent genetics research that is relevant to tracing the movements of people through the regions of the medieval Indian Ocean.

In his lectures on the history of political thought given at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), Michael Oakeshott, the most important English political philosopher of the twentieth century, emphasized the remarkable accomplishments of the Romans. While they may not have produced philosophers of such distinction as Plato and Aristotle, the Romans had shown “a genuine genius for government and politics.”1 The fruits of this political genius were evident in the establishment of “a political community, a civitas, a state, out of tribal societies,” in “creating the Roman people, the populus Romanus, out of a miscellany of different peoples,” and in generating the sense of a people united in a distinctive mode of association.

This chapter concerns itself with the fulfillment, or carrying out, of the work of art according to Gadamer. The chapter takes a cue from Gadamer and uses lyric poetry as the paradigm for such fulfillment. The experience of art is a hermeneutic experience that is a linguistic phenomenon with a speculative dimension. Poetic language is representative of language use in general, as it achieves a certain ideality. This chapter argues for the positive ontological stake of poetry. The essay considers the poetry of Rilke and Mallarme in relation to Hegel’s speculative thought and relates this to Gadamer’s hermeneutics. The concepts of contemporaneity and aesthetic nondifferentiation are explicated.

The period Korea experienced medieval times in terms of slavery differs from that of Western Europe. From a diachronic view of the development of Korean civilization, the period of medieval Europe corresponds to a time in Korea when slavery was not yet fully developed. With emphasis on the distinctive features of slavery in traditional Korea, this chapter sums up its long-term evolution to provide a panorama of Korean slavery, including its early stage to 1100s, proliferation in the 1200s-1400s, zenith in the 1500s-1700s, and slow decline in the 1700s-1800s, among others. Many a Korean slave can be characterized as bond-tenants, bond-debtors, and land/slave owners. As long as the payment was made in the form of either rent or ransom, the owner did not interfere in the slaves’ lives. For this reason, some slaves emerged from poverty and could even accumulate wealth enough to purchase land and slaves, while the great majority still lived in poverty. Slavery in steady decline in the 1700s was the product of the socioeconomic situation in which slaves began to fall in price because of a shortage of land relative to the population.

It is a liberal truism that to live as a citizen in a society governed by “the rule of law” means both to be ruled by law and to be the ruler of law, at least insofar as submission is the consequence of a quasi-contractual or reciprocal exchange of chaos for order. The architecture of the rule of law ideal is built upon foundations of democratic legitimacy and popular sovereignty and, while the task of its authorship and enforcement may be collectively delegated, the fundamental mandate remains – so the theory goes – within the gift of individual citizens. For decades, however, critical scholars have questioned the legitimacy of this account, highlighting delusions of empowerment and the presence of micro-politics that mediate the relationship between what is authored in the name of citizens and the partial interests this may serve.

The concepts of the rule of law and constitutionalism are clearly interrelated, even though they do not mean the same thing or refer to the same phenomena. Although the two ideas are often equated, according to Ten “constitutionalism usually refers to specific constitutional devices and procedures, such as the separation of powers between the legislature, the executive and the judiciary, the independence of the judiciary, due process of fair hearings for those charged with criminal offences, and respect for individual rights, which are partly constitutive of a liberal democratic system of government.” And the rule of law, by contrast, “embodies certain standards which define the characteristic virtues of a legal system as such.

This chapter describes the forms of enslavement that existed in the Americas prior to contact with the Old World. Scholars have long avoided the subject due to their concern that indigenous Americans are already too much associated with savagery. However, the time has come to gather together all that we know of the varied forms of coerced labor. The information only helps us to humanize and comprehend ancient Americans. In Mesoamerica and South America, agricultural states did demand contributions from communities of laboring people; but though these people were diempowered dependents, they were not slaves. The vast majority of those who really were enslaved were prisoners of war who were maintained as domestics, most of them women. We even have some sixteenth-century texts that reveal something of these women's lives. Meanwhile, among the semi-sedentary peoples of North America, slavery likewise existed, as an effect of perennial warfare, but not nearly to the same extent as in the agricultural states to the south.

This chapter looks at the varieties and trajectories of unfree status in the Carolingian empire. Rather than seeing it only as a point of transition from A (Roman slavery) to B (medieval serfdom), it aims to consider the practical logic of unfreedom as a category in the early medieval West, in a variety of different contexts: enslavement (the slave trade, self-sale, penal enslavement), household slavery, on great estates, and in law-making.