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.

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 explores the historical relationship between Heidegger and Gadamer. It points out several surprises and disappointments that Gadamer experienced with Heidegger. More importantly, the chapter considers the phenomenological character of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. Gadamer rejects many of the basic characteristics of Husserl’s phenomenology, but he is also indebted deeply to other aspects of Husserl’s phenomenology. These aspects he also shares with Heidegger–the concepts of horizon and lifeworld, the account of temporality, and the rejection of a representational epistemology. The chapter points out the distinctiveness of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics in relation to Heidegger’s. Gadamer’s hermeneutics is more dialogical, embraces the antinomy of beginnings, and embraces Plato and Aristotle.

Democracy and the rule of law are both “essentially contested concepts” in common use; indeed both are hurrah terms to which virtually everyone these days seeks to lay claim. In this brief chapter, rather than survey contestants I opt for stipulation. My stipulations are intended to be fairly undemanding, indeed deliberately unoriginal. They might well exclude legitimate contenders and not be uncontroversial, but they are intended to reflect not only my own preferences but central themes in long traditions of thought about these matters.1