Abstract
The essay retraces the genealogy of the philosophical debate on slavery during the age of Enlightenment in order to show the peculiar empirical indeterminacy of the concept of slavery itself. Indeed, the term names distinct phenomena and historical institutions – in particular ancient slavery, medieval serfdom and colonial slavery – among which it is possible to pinpoint common features. Secondly, the essay focuses on the distinction between civil slavery, political slavery under despotic regimes and slavery as wage labor in capitalism, by highlighting once again the ambivalence of the established uses of the word «slavery», a word that the author conceives of as a key-word conceptually abundant of meanings precisely because of its constitutive equivocity.