I have taken my title from the Onomastikon or Word-Book of an Alexandrian Greek of the second century of our era named Julius Pollux. At the end of a longish section (3.73–83) listing, and sometimes exemplifying, the Greek words which meant “slave” or “enslave”, in certain contexts at least, Pollux noted that there were also men like the helots in Sparta or the penestae in Thessaly who stood “between the free men and the slaves”. It is no use pretending that this work is very penetrating or systematic, at least in the abridged form in which it has come down to us, but the foundation was laid in a much earlier work by a very learned scholar, Aristophanes of Byzantium, who flourished in the first half of the third century B.C. The interest in the brief passage I have cited is that it suggests in so pointed a way that social status could be viewed as a continuum or spectrum; that there were statuses which could only be defined, even if very crudely, as “between slavery and freedom”. Customarily Greek and Roman writers were not concerned with such nuances. To be sure, the Romans had a special word for a freedman, libertus, as distinguished from liber, a free man. When it came to political status, furthermore, distinctions of all kinds were made, necessarily so. But for social status (which I trust I may be permitted, at this stage, to distinguish from political status), and often for purposes of private law, they were satisfied with the simple antinomy, slave or free, even though they could hardly have been unaware of certain gradations.

The Hebrew Bible contains a thrice repeated prohibition against the taking of interest on loans. For many centuries, these injunctions exerted a profound influence on the life and thought of the Western World. However, they have never been significantly observed or consistently enforced in their original, categorical terms. From an absolute prohibition, which treated all interest (of any kind, in any amount) as usurious, we have developed, through economic revolutions and moral transvaluations, a quantitative morality which determines legality by the rate of taking, rather than by the fact of interest. Today, these laws lack force either as social legislation or as religious command. They are virtually ignored and forgotten by men of affairs of all stations, Jewish and Christians alike. Only the social and religious philosophers, historians and other scholars of the past are still excited by the moral implications of this prohibition.

This essay has to do mainly with the economics of Ibn Khaldūn (1332–1406), historian and statesman of prominent Arab descent and medieval Islam's greatest economist, who spent most of his stormy life in northwest Africa and Egypt, engaged either in scholarly undertakings or in judicial and other governmental activities. His economic opinions, apparently the most advanced of those expressed in medieval Islam, are to be found principally in The Muqaddimah, originally intended as an introduction to his history (Kitāb al-‘Ibar) of the Arab and Muslim world and its pre-Islamic antecedents, though finally transformed into an exposition of the sources of historical change at work in that world. The Muqaddimah, initially completed in 1377, continued to be corrected or added to until shortly before the author's death; though manuscript copies were numerous, it was not issued in printed form until in the 1850's.

The Norman and Swabian monarchy has a rich and valuable bibliography. Scholarly interest has been refreshed at intervals by conferences on it, by comparative notes and latterly by polemics. But these occasional papers do not explain by themselves the continuing interest of the subject, which arises from the extraordinary political precocity of this monarchy, and from the personalities of two kings who stand among the great statesmen of all time, Roger II and Frederick of Swabia.

Conceptions of the nature and process of secularization have ranged in scope of reference from those encompassing all aspects of social change to those limited to alterations in the religious order of human societies. General theories of social change in modern sociology remain schematic. Indeed, until recent years, concern with this once central problem has been peripheral to the main trend in sociological research and theory construction. Howard Becker, whose conception of the process of secularization was intended to encompass all aspects of social change, remained, until his death, one on the very few American sociologists devoted to this once classical problem.

Professor J.F.C. Harrison's recently-published book, Learning and Living, 1790–1960, underscores the sometimes neglected fact that strikes, agitation and political action are not the only ways to change a society, even though they are usually the most spectacular. For nearly two centuries multitudes of Englishmen put some of their faith in a number of less direct processes, all of which may be categorized as adult education. The men and women who devoted themselves to this work had different aims and used different methods, but all of them sought to educate grown men, particularly factory workers, and all of them believed their efforts would somehow make England a better place. This movement was not unique; in France, for example, something similar took place. Unfortunately, no one has studied the French movement as Professor Harrison has the English. Enough information on the history of worker education in France is available, however, to make possible a comparison of the movements in the two countries and thus help to confirm or bring into question some accepted propositions concerning differences in their political and religious attitudes and climates of opinion.