The World Justice Project publishes a “Rule of Law” Index. For 2016 the nations with the highest scores were Denmark, Norway, and Finland. Germany outranked Singapore, which in turn outranked the United States. Russia and Ecuador were tied at the relatively low 45th position, but both were above Bolivia (104) and Venezuela, which came in dead last. The Index attempts to measure compliance with what its sponsors identify as “universal principles of the rule of law.” These are that “[t]he government and its officials and agents as well as individuals and private entities are accountable under the law,” that “laws are clear, publicized, stable, and just, are applied evenly, and protect fundamental rights, including the security of persons and property,” that “[t]he process by which the laws are enacted, administered, and enforced is accessible, fair, and efficient,” and that “[j]ustice is delivered by competent, ethical and independent representatives and neutrals who are of sufficient number, have adequate resources and reflect the makeup of the communities they serve.”1 Some of these universal principles replicate in other terms Lon Fuller’s famous list of elements of the rule of law; others go beyond Fuller’s minimum requirements.

That a concept in common use, such as the rule of law, may be called essentially contested is not a criticism of that concept. Quite the contrary: “essentially contested” is a theoretical designation that draws attention to the way in which arguments about the meaning of a given concept contribute to our understanding and evaluation of the systems, practices, and actions to which the concept is applied.

For readers of legal philosophy, the title of this entry is likely to generate an expectation of a discussion that runs something like this. In the mid-twentieth century, the idea of the rule of law began to figure prominently and problematically within the long-standing debate between legal positivists and natural lawyers about the connections between law and morality. The question that presented itself for answering was the following. Could the positivist “separability thesis” – the argument that there is no necessary connection between law and morality – be said to hold with respect to the connection (if any) between the concept of “law” and the concept of “the rule of law”?

The rule of law is a sane idea gone big. Ever since Albert Venn Dicey, in 1885, popularized the phrase to describe the English way of law, it has left an indelible mark on societies the world over, and not always in a beneficial way.4 Unmoored from the context in which – and for which – it was first formulated, the idea has turned into a doctrine, some even think of it as an ideology. With its ancient origins, medieval roots, and modern instantiations, the idea of the rule of law – known by most, contested by many – has informed local and global ways of life like few other figments of our imagination.

The central concept of Truth and Method is the understanding. It provides an account of how we understand things. We understand things interpretively. This chapter discusses understanding as ߢpractical know-howߣ and as agreement. Understanding has a cognitive, a practical, and a linguistic element. Understanding is contextual and circular. The hermeneutical circle is the heart of the Gadamerߣs notion of the understanding.

This Companion provides an introduction to the theory and history of the rule of law, and thus to one of the most frequently invoked – and least understood – ideas of legal and political thought. Not so long ago, the “rule of law” was regarded as a rather esoteric expression, one employed by common lawyers – alongside such expressions as the Rechtsstaat, État de droit, and Stato di diritto that their continental confrères invoked – to identify certain technical features of the legal systems in which they worked.

Gadamer’s hermeneutics is concerned with the experience of understanding that takes place in living language. Living language is a matter of conversation and dialogue. Conversation and dialogue always take place in a living language within the historical context of a tradition. Gadamer’s hermeneutics challenges philosophy’s usual focus on the logic of statements. This is a profoundly Socratic-Platonic idea. The world is presented in language as a communicative event which is dialogical. The dialectic of the word in hermeneutics has a speculative structure.

A wave of populism is now sweeping across the advanced democracies in the northern hemisphere, overturning the conventional sense that since the mid-twentieth century populism has been primarily a phenomenon of countries with personalized, presidential political systems and radical inequalities, with Latin American countries providing prominent examples. Populism evidently poses a major challenge to prevailing political systems, placing pressure in particular on established patterns of partisanship and hence on political parties. These factors, along with increasing reliance on “directly democratic” decision-making mechanisms such as referenda, raise questions about some very basic aspects of the rule of law and other features of modern constitutionalism.

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.

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.

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.