Abstract

Despite its recent revival, the Victorian practice of translating Knechtschaft as “slavery” is questionable. First, it fails to preserve Hegel’s own distinction between Knechtschaft and Sklaverei, the normal German noun for slavery. Second, the English word “slavery” carries strong associations that are absent from Knechtschaft, and the English word fails to communicate important meanings of Hegel’s term. In the latest Hegel-Studien, I examine different cultural associations of the words. Here I want to propose a solution and to suggest some larger interpretive issues posed by the reduction of Knechtschaft to slavery.