Collective Singulars

A Reinterpretation
NIKOLAY KOPOSOV
Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki

ABSTRACT

The article proposes a semantic theory of collective singulars, or singular collective names, designating basic historical concepts, which came into being in the period of the Enlightenment. Their logical structure seems to be internally contradictory, for they refer at the same time to universal values and ideas and to concrete historical occurrences. They also entail two different principles of category-formationthe logic of general names and that of proper names. The two logics are equally rooted in our cognitive makeup; however, different cultures favor either one or the other. The article examines the transformation of the balance of the two logics in European thought from the Middle Ages to the present. The formation of the idea of universal history has brought about an equilibrium of the two logics, while the contemporary crisis of the future is accompanied by the rise of the logic of proper names.
KEYWORDS

categorization, cognitive, collective singulars, ideal types, proper names, prototype, Sattelzeit in reverse, William Whewell

The notion of collective singulars, or singular collective names, is one of the central concepts of Begriffsgeschichte (the history of concepts). Though the expression collective singulars is not equivalent to Reinhart Kosellecks basic historical concepts (geschichtliche Grundbegriffe),1 basic historical concepts are often characterized as collective singulars. Thus, according to Koselleck, our modern concept of history emerged in the eighteenth century, when History with capital H (or more exactly Geschichte with capital G) became a collective name for all the stories that had ever happened to humankind. Much in the same way, the state came to be seen, around 1800, as a moral person and the collective name for a broad spectrum of public institutions.2
1. Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, eds. (Stuttgart: E. Klett and J. G. Cotta, 197293), hereafter cited as GG. 2. Reinhart Koselleck, Historie/Geschichte, GG 2: 64953; Koselleck, Conze, et al., Staat und Souvernitt, GG 6: 2.

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ISSN 1807-9326 (Print), ISSN 1874-656X (Online)

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However, to the best of my knowledge, the theory of collective singulars has not been developed in any detail. The term is most often understood within the context of the theory of basic historical terms as formulated by Koselleck.3 According to him, the conceptual revolution of the Sattelzeit (the saddle time, the period of transition to Modernity) and the emergence of the contemporary system of social and political concepts were determined by the changing perception of historical time, which came to be dominated by the idea of progress. Instead of describing the domain of experience, the newly emerging concepts became oriented towards a horizon of expectations. They became necessarily less descriptive, and more general and abstract than the old notions. It seems that collective singulars are usually thought of as an instrument of generalizing about history, by bringing under the same label a variety of phenomena that before the eighteenth century had not been viewed as parts of a single whole. Some historians believe that nowadays we are living through a kind of Sattelzeit in reverse, because the collapse of future-oriented thinking has brought about a sort of present-mindedness, or prsentisme, as Franois Hartog calls it.4 Hartogs analysis of contemporary time-consciousness is fundamental for the hypothesis of Sattelzeit in reverse. The theory of presentism has emerged at the confluence of two intellectual traditions: the history of memory of Pierre Nora and the history of concepts of Reinhart Koselleck. Hartogs main tool for the analysis of contemporary historical consciousness is his notion of rgime dhistoricit, by which he means a particular form of understanding the relationship between past, present, and future that is typical for a given culture. According to him, the conceptual revolution of the Enlightenment was also the birthplace of the modern rgime dhistoricit characterized by the domination of the future over the present and the past. This rgime has now come to its end and is being replaced by a new perception of historical time, where a kind of eternal present defines an extremely narrow horizon of expectations
3. Reinhart Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten [Future past: On the semantics of historical times] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979). On Kosellecks theory of basic historical terms, see Melvin Richter, The History of Political and Social Concepts: A Critical Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Kari Palonen, An Application of Conceptual History to Itself: From Method to Theory in Reinhart Kosellecks Begriffsgeschichte, Redescriptions: Yearbook of Political Thought and Conceptual History 1 (1997): 3969; Hans Erich Bdeker, Concept Meaning Discourse: Begriffsgeschichte Reconsidered, in History of Concepts: Comparative Perspectives, Iain Hampsher-Monk, Karin Tilmans, and Frank Van Vree, eds. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998), 5164. 4. Franois Hartog, Rgimes dhistoricit: Prsentisme et expriences du temps (Paris: Seuil, 2003). For a similar interpretation of the contemporary sense of the past, see Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, In 1926. Living on the Edge of Time (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997). On the growing importance of the domain of experience, see Pierre-Andr Taguieff, Leffacement de lavenir (Paris: Galile, 2000), 474.

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and shapes the past, which by the same token is transformed into an incoherent body of memories. I am largely sympathetic with this argument, though we need perhaps a more detailed picture of our current time-consciousness. In Russia, the theory of Sattelzeit in reverse has been developed by Dina Khapaeva, who has studied the impact of current changes in historical temporality on the conceptual apparatus of the social sciences.5 My focus in this article is more technical: what are the particular features of the semantic structures of collective singulars, and what transformations (if any) are these structures undergoing today? Other scholars have also suggested that there may be a link between the semantic structures of collective singulars and the current rgime dhistoricit. Thus, Javier Fernndez Sebastin and Juan Francisco Fuentes have proposed this hypothesis in their interview with Reinhart Koselleck shortly before his death. According to them, the balance between experience and expectation has been disturbed in recent years, because it has become progressively harder to see the future as an extension of the present. As a result of the current fragmentation of history, they say, basic historical concepts are no longer singular collective names and are returning to their pre-Sattelzeit origin.6 In other words, basic historical concepts are losing their generalizing potential due to the decomposition of the great narratives. Thus, even though we recognize progressive changes in various segments of contemporary life, we are now less confident than before in placing them under the collective name of progress. Again, I tend to agree with this argument, though with some reservations, to which I will return later. But in order to understand what is happening now with collective singulars, it is worth developing a little further the theory of their semantic structures. Let us start with some elementary facts about collective singulars, having John Stuart Mill, a classic in the field, as our guide (though I am not going to follow him on several important points). 7 As the term suggests, collective singulars are collective names that can be attributed to groups of individual occurrences taken together, but not to each of these occurrences taken separately. Taken separately, these occurrences can be also subsumed under a single name, but this will be a common or general name. Thus the word nobles is a general or common name, while nobility is a collective name for the same
5. Dina Khapaeva, : [The dukes of the republic in the age of translation: Humanities and the conceptual revolution], (Moscow: New Literary Observer, 2005), 21417. 6. Javier Fernndez Sebastin and Juan Francisco Fuentes, Conceptual History, Memory, and Identity: An Interview with Reinhart Koselleck, Contributions to the History of Concepts 1, no. 2 (2006): 11920. Interestingly, Koselleck in the interview seems skeptical about this idea. 7. John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic (London: J. W. Parker, 1843), 1: 3334.

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group of individuals, though this word can also refer to the state of being noble and to the quality of nobles. In the latter case, it is an abstract name (according to Mill, abstract names are the names of attributes, while concrete names are those of objects). Now let us consider the adjective singular. Only some collective names are singular. There also exist general (or common) collective names. Take the word regiment. It is certainly a collective name, for it refers to many individuals taken together. But there are many regiments, and insofar as it refers to many collective individuals that can be subsumed under the same concept of regiment, the word regiment is a general collective name. However, if we make our concept of regiment more precise by adding, say, a number, we will transform this concept into a collective singular. Take for example, the 76th regiment of foot. It is a singular collective name. But in our everyday speech we often use abridged formulas instead of long ones, so that we can imagine myriads of situations when speaking about the 76th regiment of foot, one could simply say, the regiment. In all such cases, the general collective name regiment was used as a singular collective name. Now let us consider a more complex case. Take, for example, the concept of nobility, considered as a concrete name. How do we decide whether it is a singular or a common collective name? Is there a unique historical phenomenon that we identify by attributing this name to it, or are there many different nobilities that we can compare to each other? There are some languages that prevent us from putting this word into plural, but there are also some that allow for that. But whether we can use the word in the plural or not, the problem persists, for in any case we can think of different kinds of nobility, groups of nobility, types of nobility, and so on. So is nobility a general or a singular name? I think that it can be both, and what it is depends on the context. To use it as a singular name, we do not even have to advance the risky hypothesis of a spiritual entity that emerged in immemorial times and has embraced every single noble on the earth. We can simply suppose that in a given place at a given time there existed only one social group corresponding to the name nobility, and limit our investigation to this framework. However, it would be a totally artificial situation, because our decision to use this word consistently as a singular name cannot prevent others from using it as a common name, so that the meaning of the term for most of the languages users (including ourselves) will always be quite ambivalent. This sort of transitivity characterizes our actual use of language, when one and the same word can mean logically different things. We can take it one step further. A concept can be used as a singular or as a general name depending on the context. If we use it as a singular name, does this mean that all the elements of a common name are completely absent from the message we convey? Or alternatively, when we use it as a general name,
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does it completely erase all traces of a singular name in our message? I think that it does not, so that we can expect to find some elements of a singular name in a general one, and some aspects of a general name in a singular one (though it can also happen that a word is used as a purely common or a purely proper name). In other words, what matters is not only the grammatical type of name, but also the way a name is used in a given context. However, the main ways of using a concept, taken together, form its meaning. This meaning does not have to beand most often is notevoked in all of its aspects every time we use the concept. Usually, to understand a sentence, only some aspects of the meaning of the terms used in it are relevant. But other aspects of the meaning are neverthelessto some extentalso present in the mind, though not actualized by a concrete context. If different ways of using one and the same notion are logically incompatible with each other, the semantic structure of the concept can be considered as internally contradictory. Being internally contradictory is not uncommon for many concepts we use, in both our everyday and our scholarly communication. It seems, though, that it is less typical for the natural sciences, whose terminology tends to be more abstract and formalized, than for social and human sciences that are more dependent on commonsense knowledge and ordinary language. Philosophers of history, especially of neo-Kantian vintage, have persistently emphasized this particularity of the social sciences vocabulary. Thus, building upon Heinrich Rickerts distinction between generalizing concepts used by natural sciences and individualizing historical concepts, Max Weber proposed the theory of ideal types. Most often Webers commentators consider ideal types as research utopias which do not exist in reality, but allow for understanding it. But this is true of any kind of concept. However, according to a recent interpretation, Weber saw ideal types as logically different from the natural sciences concepts: having abstract general meanings, they also contain references to concrete historical phenomena. The French sociologist Jean-Claude Passeron has convincingly argued that some names which by their grammatical type are general often function as semi-proper names (semi-noms propres) in the discourse of social sciences.8 I do not think that this is an exclusive property of terminology in the social and human sciences. Rather, it is typical of our everyday use of language, and insofar as some natural sciences (like botany or zoology) use terms from ordinary language they cannot altogether
8. See Max Weber, Die Objektivitt sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer Erkenntnis, in Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufstze zur Wissenschaftslehre (Tbingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1968), 190191; Jean-Claude Passeron, Le raisonnement sociologique: Lespace nonpopperien du raisonnement naturel (Paris: Nathan, 1991), 6061. For more details, see Nikolay Koposov, De limagination historique (Paris: ditions de lcole des Hautes tudes en Sciences Sociales, 2009), 183184.

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escape this ambiguity either. But it is likely that this ambiguity is more usual for the vocabulary of the social and human sciences. Take, for example, the concept of absolutism. We can define absolutism as unlimited monarchy, so that any kind of state with the strong power of a monarch could be called absolutist. But this concept so obviously refers to early modern Europe that we normally avoid using it, say, for the Roman or Byzantine empires, not to speak of the state of the Great Mongols or the Ottoman Empire, which were traditionally seen by early modern European political theorists as cases of oriental despotism, as opposed to the absolute monarchies. The applicability of the term absolutism even to Ivan the Terribles government has often been called into question, the Byzantine word autocracy being usually perceived as a more appropriate name for the unlimited monarchy in Russia, at least for the period before Peter the Great, whose reforms made Western terms more usable in the Russian context. The term absolutism, then, can potentially have a universal meaning. But it also refers to a concrete historical phenomenon. The same is true for many other historical concepts, for example Renaissance or Enlightenment. We can speak of a renaissance in medieval Japan, but most of us would feel that this would be rather in a metaphorical sense. To sum up: there is no absolute boundary between singular and general collective names. This allows for a kind of transitivity in the use of concepts that can in some contexts appear as general and in some contexts as singular names. This conceptual structure is particularly typical for the vocabulary of social and human sciences. Historical concepts may have universal meaning and refer to individual historical phenomena, limited in space and time. Even when designated by general names, these concepts often function as semiproper names. So far we have been discussing common and singular names. What about proper names? Do they have meaning? This would contradict Mills theory. To be sure, he distinguishes two kinds of singular names. Some of them consist of multiple general names combined in such a way as to describe a unique individual (the first emperor of Rome). These names do have meaning, while names like John, London, or England (proper names stricto sensu) do not. Meaning, according to Mill, is the sum of the connotations referring to the attributes of the objects denoted by a word. But proper names are attached to the objects themselves,9 and do not immediately affirm any of the properties of the objects they denote. Facts known about an individual designated by a proper name can turn out to be untrue of him, and consequently are not necessary to his identity. In other words, general names have both meaning

9. Mill, System of Logic, 1: 40.

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and reference (or connotation and denotation, in Mills terms), while proper names have only reference. However, other philosophers (beginning with Gottlob Frege10) believe that everything which is known about an individual can be considered the meaning of his name. I would tend to agree with them. It is extremely difficult to distinguish between what is affirmed by a name and what is simply associated with it. This is true for general names as well. Is there anything in the word noble that would make it affirm, say, the idea of landed property, which is an important aspect of our notion of nobility? What this word (derived from the Latin adjective nobilis) literally means is that a person to whom it is applied is widely known and nothing more. And for someone whose Latin is not so good it does not mean even this. Everything else that might be considered the words meaning is associated with it thanks to our knowledge of the world. Thus in fifteenth-century France, being noble meant living from ones own lands without doing anything (vivre de ses terres sans rien faire).11 There are numerous ways in which purely linguistic mechanisms (lexical connections, grammar, etc.) contribute to the formation of the words meaning. However, a partI would say the most essential partof the meaning comes from our knowledge of the world, not from within the language. It goes without saying that the facts known about, say, social groups can turn out to be false, and hence not necessary to the meaning of their names. Does it follow that general names have no meaning either? If it does not, why should we consider the facts known about individuals as having nothing to do with the meaning of their names? To conclude, we can say that proper names can have meaning. I am not suggesting that they always have it. John may certainly mean nothing, as well as Alexander (the favorite example of philosophers since Frege). But Alexanders full name was Alexandros tou Philippou tn Makedonn, and this meant a lot. The difference between singular names and proper names which was important for Mill does not look so fundamental, for both kinds of words can have meaning. Proper names denote different kinds of individuals, including the collective ones which interest us here. We can safely conclude that proper names of collective individuals may have meaning as well. Such concepts form a part of the category of collective singulars (proper names in Mills scheme are a kind of singular name). Thus, contrary to what Mill thought, England does not have to be an empty sign serving only to fix a reference. It can be a concept, a collec10. Gottlob Frege, ber Sinn und Bedeutung, Zeitschrift fr Philosophie und philosophische Kritik 100 (1892): 2550. For more details about this debate, see Koposov, De limagination historique. 11. Jacques Mourier, Nobilitas, quid est? Un procs Tain-lHermitage en 1408, Bibliothque de lcole des Chartes 142, no. 2 (1984): 25569.

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tive singular whose logical status is not altogether different from that of bourgeoisie, though the grammatical status of the two names is not equivalent. To be clear, the grammatical type of a name is important for its meaning, and collective singulars designated by general names tend to be more general than those designated by proper names. But the degree to which the meaning of a concept is general also depends on the tradition of its use, and first of all on the strength of its association with other general concepts. Take, for example, Mills compatriot and friend Henry Thomas Buckle.12 For him, England was by no means an empty sign (or a rigid designator, to use Saul Kripkes term13), but one of the most important concepts on which his understanding of history heavily depended. This was due to the intimate connection between the proper name of England and the idea of civilization. The concept of civilization contained a reference to England, which was considered the clearest case of humankinds development toward freedom and prosperity. But the concept of civilization, in its turn, was a part of Buckles idea of England. As a result, England could stand for civilization, in the same way as for Franois Guizot France stood for it.14 The countries proper names, then, acquired general meaning and became historical concepts. In the previous section, my emphasis was on the fact that general names can become semi-proper names. Now, let me underline that, in their turn, proper names can function as semi-general names, to revert to Passerons formula. Equating England or France with civilization was not an extravagant idea that came only to Buckle or Guizot. It was widely shared by their readers and numerous imitatorsand even opponents. The idea of civilization became strongly associated with England and France in other countries as well. Thus many German or Russian thinkers of the mid-nineteenth century used it to conceptualize the historical destinies of their respective countries in terms of a Sonderweg, that is, as alternatives to the model set up by the leaders of the worlds developmentEngland and France, a model that was often referred to as civilization. The capacity of proper names to express universal ideas (without ceasing to refer to concrete historical individuals) becomes even more obvious if we consider the names of the larger cultural units like Europe, Eastern Europe, the West, or the East. Excellent studies have documented how the concepts of Eastern Europe or the East had been forged in the Enlightenment Mind (exactly in the same period as other geschichtliche Grundbegriffe) to express
12. Henry Thomas Buckle, History of Civilization in England (London: J. W. Parker & Son, 185761), 12. 13. Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), 48. 14. Franois Guizot, Histoire de la civilisation en France (Paris: Pichon et Didier, 1828 32), 16.

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the conception of universal history seen as the progression from barbarism to civilization.15 More recently, in the Cold War period, the concept of the West (which had existed long before it) became central to the renewed version of the liberal master narrative. To be sure, both Europe and the West are, grammatically speaking, proper names, just like England and France. But logically they often function as semi-general names, though perhaps of somewhat different degree of generality, the West being more general than Europe, and Europe more general than France or England. Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe should perhaps be complemented by another volume dealing with notions like England, France, Europe, Eastern Europe, the West, or the Orient. It would not be an easy task to identify those concepts designated by proper names which belong to the category of basic historical concepts, but it was not an easy task with respect to the concepts designated by general names either. If the main criterion is whether a concept relates to our idea of history (or more exactly to the conception of world history as it was formed in the Sattelzeit and has been further developed since then), then clearly the proper names just quoted deserve to be included in the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. We can hardly imagine a master narrative that would not use the names of at least some nations, countries, or regions whichfrom the narratives vantage pointhave played a crucial role in history. To sum up, every name has a meaning and a reference (or intention and extension, or else connotation and denotation). Meaning is a concept that the word connotes. Reference is a thing or a group of things in the world that it denotes. Meaning is essentially general, for it consists of attributes of a potentially unlimited number of occurrences that we can subsume under the concept. To be sure, the meaning of singular names can be structured in such a way as to capture the individuality of the corresponding phenomena by combining general names. Partly for this reason, the meaning of singular names can include universal aspects. But even proper names can to some extent acquire universal meaning, if they become closely associated with this or that general concept. While meaning is potentially universal, reference, on the contrary, is more concrete, for it consists of concrete objects, and the uniqueness of some of these objects can matter for us. When we use a term, we most often refer both to the corresponding concept and the category of things in the world. But this can imply an internal logical contradiction, for we refer at the same time to something abstract and universal and something concrete and historical.

15. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1977); Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).

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To be sure, most of the concepts we use (at least most of the ordinarylanguage notions as well as terms from the social and human sciences) share this property of internal contradiction. But they share it to a different degree. Both the word nobles and the word nobility refer to an abstract and potentially universal idea of nobility. But nobles can also be used in the same sense as nobility, understood as a collective name. In fact, by saying Russian nobles of the eighteenth century and Russian nobility of the eighteenth century we refer to one and the same group of physical individuals. However, the word nobles by its grammatical form does not suggest the idea of collective individuality which is so strongly present in the concept of nobility (used as a collective name). That is why collective names are the preferred linguistic device of thinking in terms of collective individuals (though we can designate collective concepts by general and proper names as well). So far I have been discussing mostly social terms, or the names of social categories, because these terms are the most obvious example of the idea of the collective individual. However, many other basic historical terms have also an aspect of collective name. Thus, according to Jean Starobinski, the word civilization in the eighteenth century became a collective name for many singular developments like the improvement of mores, the progress of science, or the development of the arts.16 Or, if one would follow the analysis of Raymond Williams, the words industry and art, which before the mid-eighteenth century had meant qualities of industrious or artistic people, became collective names for the corresponding sets of practices, objects, and institutions.17 It is important to underline that collective names can refer to various assortments of concrete phenomena, both static and dynamic, not only to multitudes of things but also to multitudes of processes. In the eighteenth century, the world seen in terms of multitudes and processes came to replace the Aristotelian cosmos of static, perennial essences (we shall return to this later). The rise of collective names of multitudes and processes was one of the most characteristic aspects of the intellectual revolution of the Sattelzeit.18 To be sure, they were not invented in the Sattelzeit period. The capacity to form collective concepts and to consider collectivities as individuals is a property of our minds. However, the mind has a history, and some of its capacities seem to have been more developed than others in some epochs. The capacity to form collective singulars seems to have grown in importance in the decades around the French Revolution.
16. Jean Starobinski, Le mot civilization, in idem, Le remde dans le mal (Paris: Gallimard, 1989). 17. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 17801950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). xiii, xv. 18. See Koposov, Imagination historique, 13536; and idem, The Logic of Democracy, Le Banquet 27 (2010), 10121.

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There is one more thing that has to be said about the connection between multitudes and processes. It is important to realize that processes were seen as multitudes, and were designated by collective names referring to assortments of singular developments. But even more important is the fact that the idea of process was the only way to make multitudes intelligible. This is the connection I shall explore in the rest of the article. However, before doing this we have to consider still another aspect of the semantic structure of concepts. A concept can entail, simultaneously, mutually exclusive hypotheses about the structure of the group of objects to which it refers. This is particularly important for collective (or group) concepts that are fundamentally classificatory notions, allowing for ordering multitudes of individual occurrences. Recent research in linguistics and psychology suggests that humans form categories according to several kinds of logic at the same time: in particular the logic of necessary and sufficient conditions, as well as the logic of prototypes (when members of a given category possess no single common property but are grouped around the prototypes or good examples on the basis of a vague family resemblance).19 The latter logic draws essentially on the experience of empirical ordering of synthetically perceived objects in a mental space, while Aristotelian logic relies first and foremost on an analytical intuition rooted in the experience of interpreting the meaning of words. The logic of necessary and sufficient conditions is essentially deductive, while the logic of prototype essentially inductive. Empirical classification operates with unnamed objects that precede the categories of language, and produces groups of objects that need not coincide with those for which language has names. That is why we often do not have general names for empirical categories. Empirical ordering of proper names produces categories that are to be designated by collective proper names. Although both logics are equally rooted in our cognitive makeup, the proportion in which they mix to produce different world views changes from one culture to another. And the change in their respective roles in thinking paral-

19. Eleanor Rosch, Human Categorization, in Studies in Cross-Cultural Psychology, Neil Warren, ed. (London: Academic Press, 1977), 149; eadem, Principles of Categorization, in Cognition and Caregorization, Eleanor Rosch and Barbara B. Lloyd, eds. (Hillsdale, N.J.: L. Erlbaum, 1978), 2848; George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987); Eric Margolis and Stephen Laurence, eds., Concepts: Core Readings (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999); Gregory L. Murphy, The Big Book of Concepts (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004). See also Rodney Needham, Polithetic Classification: Convergence and Consequences, Man, 10, no. 3 (1975): 34969; Luc Boltanski, Laurent Thvenot, Finding Ones Way in Social Space: A Study Based on Games, Social Science Information, 22, no. 45 (1983): 63179

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leled the formation of the contemporary vocabulary of social terms and the rise of the collective singulars. We can now consider in more detail some of the historical transformations that occurred in the semantic structures of collective singulars and their role in Western thought. The medieval world view is sometimes described as an Aristotelian cosmos of static essences.20 Within this world view, things were held in order because they were seen to some extent as the manifestation of essences which were considered logically anterior to them. Essentialism was typical of the medieval style of thinking. Categories were seen as forming a coherent, logical structure, so that each of them could be defined in terms of genus proximus, differentia specifica. However, in spite of its predilection for deductive reasoning (or rather because of it), the medieval mind was not sufficiently trained to form complex, abstract concepts for entities. The medieval system of grammatical categories, substantially different from our own, reveals this intellectual difficulty. It was a verb-dominated system, adapted to describing the actions of concrete subjects.21 The vocabulary of abstract categories remained rudimentary, and those terms that did exist were understood in such a way that their abstract meaning and their reference to concrete phenomena almost fused. This corresponds to the tendency of medieval logic not to distinguish clearly between sense and reference, for both meanings of meaning were equally covered by the word significare. And to the extent that the logicians distinguished between them, sense (understood as essence) was perceived as the primary and direct meaning (significatum primarium) of common names, while reference was the secondary and indirect meaning (significatum secundarium or suppositum).22 In particular, the medieval vocabulary of collective historical concepts reflects a style of thinking that was at once more deductive and more concrete than our own. Medieval terms for human collectivitiesimperium (Romanum), communitas (christiana, ecclesiae, or regni), regnum (Francorum), etc.functioned as quasi-proper names referring to concrete historical individuals, so that their meaning, which in principle covered the attributes of all empires, communities, and so on, was necessarily less general than that of a normal common name. In particular, the ontological status of these entities was very loosely specified, if at all, by their names. Rather, they were appre20. Alexandre Koyr, Du monde clos lunivers infini, trans. Raissa Tarr (Paris: Gallimard, 1973). See also Ernst Cassirer, Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff: Untersuchungen ber die Grundfragen der Erkenntniskritik (1910), (Darmstadt, 1994). 21. Lucien Febvre, Le problme de lincroyance au XVIe sicle: La religion de Rabelais (Paris: A. Michel, 1962), 331. 22. E. J. Ashworth, Language and Logic in the Post-Medieval Period (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1974), 47, 72.

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hended in a syncretic way, in accordance with what can be called the model of politeia that goes back to the ancient Greek concept of polis. The latter concept, paradigmatic for premodern political thought, is untranslatable in the modern languages, for it referred simultaneously to what we now distinguish as state and society (not to mention its economic, legal, moral, and religious connotations).23 No wonder then that ecclesia, for example, was a normal term for what we now call society, and clearly referred not to society in general, but to the concrete community of Christians who inhabited medieval Europe. Apparently, in contradistinction to our own mental habits, medieval thinkers did not see this syncretic and concrete understanding of entities as incompatible with the idea of essence (and hence with deductive reasoning), partly because sense was not clearly distinguished from reference, and partly because essences themselves were often represented syncretically. Thus, according to a widespread formula going back to the end of the tenth century, medieval society consisted of three orders (ordines) of people: priests, warriors, and laborers (oratores, bellatores or pugnatores, and laboratores), or even, as it was stated by Adalberon, Bishop of Laon, of those who preach, who make war, and who labor (orant, pugnant, and laborant). The centrality of verbs is evident in this terminology. Taken together, the three orders form the House of God (domus Dei) or the highest entity.24 According to Otto Brunner, these categories were invented by theologians exclusively for the needs of moral philosophy and had nothing to do with the way medieval people actually thought about society (which they did in terms of concrete orders).25 However, O. G. Oexle has convincingly demonstrated that this model was meant, first and foremost, to describe a changing medieval society.26 In compliance with a tradition going back to St. Augustine, these orders were thought of not so much as groups of people but as syncretic metaphysical substances, within whose framework the ideas of social function and corresponding moral value could hardly be separated. In the same way, the Latin word militia could be understood both as a group of milites and as their service (servitium) or nature.27 The essentialist vision of society is thus manifest in medieval social vocabulary. In the same way, the word nobility (nobilitas, noblesse, Adel) was understood primarily as an abstract name designating the
23. Manfred Riedel, Gesellschaft, brgerliche, GG 2: 719800. 24. Georges Duby, Les trois orders ou limaginaire du fodalisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1978); Otto Gerhard Oexle, Die funktionale Dreiteilung der Gesellschaft bei Adalbero von Laon. Deutungsschemata der sozialen Wirklichkeit im frheren Mittelalter, Frhmittelalterliche Studien 12 (1978): 154. 25. Otto Brunner, Land und Herrschaft: Grundfragen der territorialen Verfassungsgeschichte Sdostdeutschlands im Mittelalter, third ed. (Brunn: R. M. Rohrer, 1943), 456, 460. 26. Oexle, Funktionale Dreiteilung. 27. Ibid.

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quality, or essence, of a social category, not as its collective name;28 and the word bourgeoisie referred not so much to the class of bourgeois, but first and foremost to their rights and privileges. Correspondingly, the status of a person was perceived as nothing else but his essence, given that individuals were not yet clearly emancipated from the social groups they belonged to.29 In other words, individuals were thought of as logically posterior in relation to orders. Despite the nominalistic uprising of the late Middle Ages, which emphasized that individual things alone had real existence, and despite the anti-Aristotelian mood of some sixteenth-century logicians (above all Peter Ramus), early modern logic was dominated by the Aristotelian school at least up to the mid-seventeenth century, if not later.30 It was not until the second half of the century that empiricist, inductive logic (foreshadowed, though by no means created, by Francis Bacon, whose thought had been too dependent on the Aristotelian framework) started to emerge,31 reflecting the formation of a new, atomistic world view in which things came to be seen as logically anterior to categories. By the same token, categories became much more problematic, for they could no longer be viewed as an emanation of divine reason. As late as the beginning of the seventeenth century, the medieval, hierarchical vision of society still largely dominated social thought.32 On the contrary, the eighteenth century saw the emergence of the theory of the society of classes. The first signs of this transition became manifest in the midseventeenth century. At first glance, the theory of classes and that of orders look similar. In both cases, society is divided into a limited number of social groups, defined on the basis of their social functions. However, the similarity is misleading. The transition from the theory of orders to that of classes entailed a profound logical change. Recent research on the genesis of the concept of class has revealed important differences in the logical status of orders and classes. It has been shown that in the course of the seventeenth century the word class came to be understood
28. Werner Conze, Adel, Aristokratie, GG 1: 6. 29. Aaron Gurevich, [Categories of medieval culture] (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1972). 30. On the importance of the nominalistic turn in William of Occams philosophy, seen as a premise of the modern style of thinking (including modern theories of society), see Otto Gerhard Oexle, Deutungsschemata der sozialen Wirklichkeit im frhen und hohen Mittelalter: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Wissens, in Mentalitten im Mittelalter: Methodische und inhaltliche Probleme, Frantisek Graus, ed. (Sigmaringen, 1987), 65117. 31. William Kneale and Martha Kneale, The Development of Logic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 30910, 318; see also Robert Blanch and Jacques Dubucs, La logique et son histoire (Paris: A. Colin, 1996), 173; Wilbur S. Howell, Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 259437. 32. See Koposov, Imagination historique, 11821.

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as (a) a general term for a category, and (b) a term for the social groups seen as a result of inductive classification; while estates were considered as (a) essences and (b) elements of a preestablished social order.33 The theory of the society of orders corresponded to the Aristotelian kosmos, or the image of the closed world, seen as a hierarchy of ideal essences with an all-inclusive genus (ta panta) at its summit. In such a universe, knowledge was thought of as existing before the knowing subject, and disclosing itself through syllogistic, deductive reasoning. In contrast, the theory of the society of classes corresponded to the model of the infinite universe, or the atomistic and nominalistic world view. In such a world, knowledge has to result essentially from inductive inference. In the closed world, estates were seen as logically anterior to individuals. In the infinite universe, individuals have appeared as anterior to classes. If the notion of essence was the key idea of medieval thought, the notion of the individual has become that of the modern age. This change, brought about by the formation of the modern scientific outlook, was in turn prepared by the invention of perspective and the revolution in spatial perception that had originated in Renaissance Italy and reached its highest point in seventeenth-century Dutch painting.34 A multitude of objects, liberated from the power of essences, had now to be arranged in the rational, three-dimensional mental space that had become the preferred system of logical reference. Qualitatively heterogeneous, symbolically meaningful, and hierarchically structured medieval space35 corresponded to the concept of the society of orders seen as a hierarchy of essences; the empty space of the infinite universe required a totally different logic of empirical ordering, which in the long run has brought about a new understanding of category structures. It was not before the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that the contemporary system of grammatical categories came into being, ensuring the transition from verb-dominated to noun-dominated thinking. The birth of basic historical concepts was a part of this transformation. Two aspects of the new system of grammatical categories should be emphasized here: the special role played by the adverbs, referring in particular to what came to be distinguished as different ontological levels (social, political, religious, etc.); and the
33. Dallas L. Clouatre, The Concept of Class in French Culture Prior to the Revolution, Journal of the History of Ideas 45, no. 2 (1984): 21944; Marie-France Piguet, Classe: Histoire du mot et gense du concept des Physiocrates aux Historiens de la Restauration (Lyon: Presses de lUniversit de Lyon, 1996); Otto Gerhard Oexle, Werner Conze, and Rudolf Walther, Stand, Klasse, GG 6: 155284. 34. Erwin Panofsky, La perspective comme forme symbolique (Paris: Minuit, 1975); Hubert Damisch, Lorigine de la perspective (Paris: Flammarion, 1987); Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Painting in the Seventeenth Century (London/New York: Penguin Books, 1989). 35. On the medieval concept of space, see Gurevich, Categories of Medieval Culture.

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emergence of new types of nouns: alongside common names referring to categories of objects (for example, nobles) and abstract names referring to their qualities (nobility used as an abstract name), names for processes (for example, civilization), multitudes (nobility used as a collective name), and systems of relations (feudalism), which either had not existed at all or had played only a marginal role in the medieval languages, became central to the new conceptual system, including the vocabulary of social and political categories. Thus nobility, whose primary meaning in the medieval period had been that of essence, came to be seen first and foremost as a collective name for a group of individuals. And the new concept of working class, or proletariat, that in the nineteenth century became one of the central notions of social thought, was a pure collective singular and not an abstract name of essence at all. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there also emerged a new object-oriented logic, laying emphasis on the empirical approaches to the problem of categories. The distinction between sense and reference that had been clearly established by the Logic of Port Royal (1662) contributed to the liberation of things from the power of essences. Things formed multitudes to be ordered empirically, be it nature (a multitude of atoms) or society (a multitude of individuals). The idea of multitude was a logically inevitable consequence of the idea of the individual. With the decay of the Aristotelian cosmos, essences lost the power to put things in order. In infinite empty space, individual bodies could be empirically grouped together in clusters whose origins could be accounted for only by the history of their individual processes of formation. The idea of the individual also entailed that of process. Collective singulars referring to historically formed entities, which consisted of individuals, became the preferred linguistic expression of this new style of thinking. The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed a real boom in the domain of the theory of classification. The science of this period was essentially about classification, or empirical ordering of things liberated from the realm of essences. The new theory of classification was largely rooted in the intellectual experience of what came to be known as classificatory sciencesbotany, zoology, mineralogy, and so on.36 Elements of this theory can be detected in the work of natural scientists like Buffon, who questioned the validity of the principle of hard and fast dividing lines between classes. The idea that classes are strictly separate from each other is indeed fundamental for Aristotelian logic. According to the principle of necessary and sufficient conditions, an object can either belong to a category or not belong to it, and all objects that a category includes have equal rights to be its members. Challenging this view, Buffon wrote:
36. William Whewell, History of the Inductive Sciences, third ed. (New York: D. Appleton, 1859), 12.

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Nature passes from one species to another, and often even from one genus to another, by invisible shadings; so that there exists a great number of intermediary species and divided objects that we do not know where to place.37

In other words, a category is best represented by its better examples, but can also include marginal ones. This clearly anticipates the prototypical theory of classification. At the same time, eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century philosophers, largely under John Lockes influence, came to be interested in language, and in particular in the variety of linguistic mechanisms that come into play in human categorization. The philosophical analysis of common language proposed by Thomas Reed was crucial for further shaping this interest. The idea that words are not names of essences, that genera and species are merely arbitrary creations which the human mind forms,38 and that the meaning of words was formed historically in the process of the development of language was fundamental for this new approach. This led to the theory of the transitive use of words, according to which the meaning of a concept often cannot be defined in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions because historically a name could come to signify various groups of things, and there could be no single property common to all of them.39 In both cases, the idea of history was vital to the new approaches to classification. They presupposed historical development of both natural kinds and categories of language. As Dugald Stewart put it, discussing the meaning of the word beauty:
Instead of searching for the common idea or essence which the word Beauty denotes, when applied to colors, to forms, to sounds, to compositions in verse and prose, to mathematical theorems, and to moral qualities, our atten37. La nature passe dune espce une autre espce, et souvent dun genre un autre genre, par des nuances imperceptibles; de sorte quil se trouve un grand nombre despces moyennes et dobjets mi-partis quon ne sait o placer. (G. L. Buffon, De la manire dtudier et de traiter lhistoire naturelle, uvres compltes [Paris: Pourrat, 1835], 1: 44 [my translation]). 38. Dugald Stewart, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, sixth ed. (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1818), 1: 216. 39. The theory of the transitive use of words was first developed by dAlambert and Richard Payne Knight. See J.-B. dAlambert, Essai sur les lments de philosophie, ou sur les principes des connaissances humaines, avec les claircissements, uvres (Paris: A. Belin, Bossange, 182122), 1: 238 ; Richard Payne Knight, An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste, 2nd ed. (London: T. Payne and J. White, 1805), 11, 233. Dugald Stewart developed this idea with respect to the theory of classification; see Dugald Stewart, Philosophical Essays, 3rd ed. (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, 1818), 262.

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tion is directed to the natural history of the Human Mind, and to its natural progress in the employment of speech.40

The world came to be seen not as a preestablished system of categories but as a universal process of becoming, an assortment of historically developed living things that our minds reflected in historically formed concepts. In 1840, already at the end of the Sattelzeit period, the new theory of classification based on the achievements of the classificatory sciences and the philosophy of language found its systematic elaboration in the works of William Whewell. He wrote:
Though in a natural group of objects a definition can no longer be of any use as a regulative principle, classes are not, therefore, left quite loose, without any certain standard or guide. The class is steadily fixed, though not precisely limited; it is given, though not circumscribed; it is determined, not by a boundary line without, but by a central point within; not by what it strictly excludes, but by what it eminently includes; by an example, not by a precept; in short, instead of Definition, we have a Type for our director.41

This is an eloquent statement of the theory of prototype. What Whewell had in mind was a historical development that was bringing about loosely cohesive classes springing out of common ancestors. Whewells approach to the philosophy of science was, in many respects, a continuation of the historicist revolution. It was strongly influenced by German thought and largely similar to the discoveries of the German historical school.42 Historically formed categories do not have to care about necessary and sufficient conditions and other artificial devices of schoolmen. Half a century later, Nietzsche formulated this
40. Stewart, Philosophical Essays, 34243. 41. William Whewell, The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (London, 1847), 1: 494. Laura J. Snyder has recently claimed that according to Whewell, kinds have rigorous definitions, even though we do not know what they are, because he believed that God knows the essences of kinds. See Laura J. Snyder, Reforming Philosophy: A Victorian Debate on Science and Society (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 16061. However, the fact that kinds in themselves might have essences cannot prevent human categorization from being prototypical. Cf. Michael Ruse, The Scientific Methodology of William Whewell, Centaurus 20, no. 3 (1976): 15657. 42. On Whewells philosophy see Yehuda Elkana, Editors Introduction, in William Whewell, Selected Writings on the History of Science, Yehuda Elkana, ed. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984); William Whewell: A Composite Portrait, Menachem Fisch and Simon Scheffer, eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); Menachem Fisch, William Whewell: Philosopher of Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); Richard Yeo, Defining Science: William Whewell, Natural Knowledge and Public Debate in Early Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Snyder, Reforming Philosophy.

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in his usual aphoristic way: What has history, escapes definition.43 Whether it be minerals, plants, languages, or nations, all classes of things are but historical occurrences. The whole of lifeboth natural and culturalcame to be seen as a process of historical development. It is not by chance that classificatory sciences were then called natural history. The idea of history as an almighty powerful force that carries within it the reason of its own development was invented in the eighteenth century, largely to explain the empirical clustering of things into categories. History is the way the world is, be it nature or society such was the most profound claim of the historicist intellectual revolution.44 To complete the picture, one has to return to one of the main ideas of Friedrich Meinecke, one of those historians who have fully appreciated the importance of historicism as the birthplace of modernity. Meinecke wrote:
The ways of thinking laying emphasis on the ideas of development and individuality are closely tied together. To manifest itself only in development belongs to the essence of individuality, whether it be that of a separate man or of an ideal or real collectivity.45

If we now return to collective singulars, we shall better understand the problem: the historicist intellectual revolution favored not only the idea of historically formed entities, but also that of the unique character of these entities. In a way, collective singulars can be seen as the key device of eighteenthcentury thought. It would be helpful to compare this analysis with Hannah Arendts understanding of the genesis of the modern idea of history. According to her, the modern concept of process pervading history and nature alike separates the modern age from the past more profoundly than any other single idea. And she continues:
What the concept of process implies is that the concrete and the general, the single thing or event and the universal meaning have parted company. The
43. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), transl. by Douglas Smith (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996), 60 the exact quotation is only that which is without history can be defined). 44. Robert J. Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002). 45. Entwickelnde und individualisierende Denkweise gehren unmittelbar zusammen. In Wesen der Individualitt, der des Einzelmenschen wie der ideellen und realen Kollectivgebilde, liegt es, da sie sich nur durch Entwicklung offenbart (Friedrich Meinecke, Die Entstehung des Historismus [Munich: Oldenburg Verlag, 1965], 5 [my translation]). On the role of historicism as the constitutive moment of modernity see Otto Gerhard Oexle, Krise des HistorismusKrise der Wirklichkeit: Eine Problemgeschichte der Moderne, in Krise des HistorismusKrise der Wirklichkeit: Wissenschaft, Kunst und Literatur 18801932, Otto Gerhard Oexle, ed. (Gttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2007), 26.

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process, which alone makes meaningful whatever it happens to carry along, has thus acquired a monopoly of universality and significance. 46

Arendt considers the formation of the idea of history to have led directly to Hegels philosophy, which sought to overcome dialectically the opposition between the universal and the particular, seen as the aspects of the process of development. However, it was by no means the only problem that historicism could help to resolve. As I hope to have shown, the idea of history was born out of the spirit of empirical classification. Meinecke was certainly right in pointing out not only the German, but also the Italian, English, and French origins of the historicist revolution. In fact, too many conventional oppositions partly inherited from nineteenthcentury thought obscure for us the meaning of this profound intellectual change. The first of these is that between Sattelzeit and the period of the emergence of modern science in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It is a largely Germany-based chronology that separates the birth of the basic historical concepts from that of modern science. It prevents us from understanding the role of the atomistic world view that emerged in the seventeenth century in the formation of the idea of history, which I see as the logically unavoidable explanatory principle of the atomistic universe. The second opposition is that between German historicism and French Enlightenment, or in other terms between Enlightenment and Romanticism. Within this opposition, historicism tends to be seen as a profoundly German, Romantic, and anti-Enlightenment phenomenon. This was not exactly the case in the eighteenth century, when the idea of history was emerging within the framework of Enlightenment thought. The universal and the particular had not yet been separated by the unbridgeable gap that became so typical of late nineteenth-century intellectual culture. It is not by chance that Koselleck speaks of the universal meaning of collective singularspure nonsense from the point of view of the aforementioned opposition. However, as we have seen, general meaning and reference to particulars do not exclude each other in our actual thinking, so that to some extent collective singulars can have universal meaning. This was precisely the fact that characterized the mental universe of the Enlightenment. When the modern idea of history came into being, the historicist emphasis on individuality was not yet opposed to the universalistic tendencies of rationalism. Finally, the third inherited opposition is that between nature and society, seen as the two domains of experience having opposite logical structures. Nature is about universal laws, while history is about individual occurrences. In
46. Hannah Arendt, The Concept of History: Ancient and Modern in Between Past and Future, in Hannah Arendt, Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), 63, 64.

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reality, it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that nature started to be consistently seen as the residue of uniformity, and could thus be opposed to culture, considered as the refuge of individuality, as it was famously formulated by neo-Kantian philosophers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.47 To return to collective singulars, which I have characterized as the preferred intellectual tool of the historicist revolution of the Enlightenment, I would like to suggest that they express a kind of balance between the two equally fundamental principles of our thinkingabstract universal meaning and reference to particular occurrencesand hence between the logic of general names and that of proper names. To be sure, our intellect is so equipped that we always think both ways, and cannot separate the universal and the particular save analytically. And we most often think in terms of both logics at the same time. To sum up, collective singulars are one of the main devices of thought. There always have been collective singulars, and there always will be. However, the role they play in this or that concrete system of thought may vary considerably. Within the bipolar semantic structure of meaning and reference, the prevailing emphasis may be laid either on meaning or on reference, and hence on the logic of either general names or proper names. Thus, as we have seen, medieval thought was characterized by a peculiar combination of universalism and particularism. The gap between them was bridged by means of metaphorical thinking, which was facilitated by the fact that both essences and individual occurrences were seen syncretistically. Analytical and empirical classificatory procedures were not typical of this style of thinking. Medieval thought could make little use of collective singulars, though it was certainly not completely ignorant of them. To the contrary, with the birth of the atomistic universe collective singulars saw their day of glory, because they had an aspect of classificatory devices and were quite suitable both for expressing universal meaning and for emphasizing the uniqueness of historical phenomena. The new balance between the universal and the particular, however, was not so easy to sustain. The situation was quite ambiguous. On the one hand, the formation of the future-oriented style of thought contributed to the emphasis on the universal aspects of historical concepts. On the other hand, further development of the prototype theory of classification could produce an image of the world as an assortment of individual phenomena that escaped definition in universal terms. And this could present a real danger for the project of liberal democracy that was in the process of formation in the Sattelzeit and its aftermath.
47. See Heinrich Rickert, Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung (Freiburg: J. C. B. Mohr, 1902).

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The combination of individualism and empiricism with universalism and future-oriented thinking created a world view in which liberal democracy was the most logical solution to the problem of social organization. Liberalism was unthinkable without abstract individuals, and hence without an atomistic world view. But it was also not possible without universal values and general truths, and hence without a theory of classification that would not reduce collective concepts to proper names. Further atomization of the world view and the shift of the logical balance towards the logic of proper names could result in the destruction of universalism and the rise of particularism. Whewells thought is an interesting marginal case demonstrating this potential danger. He was a conservative who dared to draw radical logical conclusions from the experience of modern science in order to restore the religious world view. The idea of classes that escape definition was for him an argument in favor of the hypothesis that they had originated from the archetypes in the mind of God. The framework of Whewells reasoning was essentially atomistic. But the notion of types that he sought to make central for the natural sciences had an undeniable affinity with the organicist metaphor of the world. And the world of organic entities designated by proper names was certainly not the one in which liberal democracy would appear to be the most natural form of society. The conservative criticism of the Enlightenment was largely inspired by this vision of the world. The danger of the prototype theory of categorization avant la lettre consisted in the fact that it was exploring the organicist structures underlying the atomistic universe. Whewell pushed the theory of empirical classification to its limits, where it risked undermining the foundations of the project of liberal democracy. Nineteenth-century thought had thus to reestablish the value of general names, without abandoning the idea of the individual character of reality. John Stuart Mill was quite central to this new intellectual project. In his System of Logic, in 1843, he proposed a theory of classification that accounted for prototypical effects, but marginalized their role. Mills theory was heavily dependent on that of Whewell. But he reinterpreted Whewells prototype theory in such a way as to undermine its radical conservative implications. The fact that some categories are actually structured in terms of prototypes does not mean, for Mill, that feature analysis has nothing to do with empirical classification. An object can be apprehended as a whole, but also described as a list of properties. However, these properties are no longer seen as necessary, but only as likely for the members of the category.48 This is the position that in recent debates about human categorization has become known as probabilism. Thanks to Mills efforts, atomism had been safely complemented by a nominalism that allowed for universal truths about the atomistic universe. Interestingly, a kind
48. Mill, A System of Logic, II: 314. See also Koposov, Logic of Democracy.

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of conspiracy of silence caused the name and the theories of William Whewell to be largely forgotten almost until the end of the twentieth century.49 Todays proponents of the prototype theory are often unaware of their forerunner in the early Victorian period.50 Mills thought had a powerful stabilizing effect on the development of logical theories in the nineteenth century, and more broadly on the modern style of thinking. However, there was a price to be paid, namely the marginalization of experimenting with the logic of proper names. As a result, instead of being considered a moment of synthesis, and of a productive tension, particularistic thinking has become a stronghold of the anti-Enlightenment historicism of the second half of the nineteenth century, as well as of nationalist ideologies of the twentieth century. An emphasis on the singularity of collective singulars, often accompanied by an organicist reduction of their classificatory function, became typical for radical conservatives like Carl Schmitt and the founder of Begriffsgeschichte, Otto Brunner, whose notion of relatively universal type concepts (relativ allgemeine Typenbegriffe) was but a variation of the theory of collective singulars.51 Let me now return to current intellectual transformations. I do not think that social and political concepts can stop being collective singulars. Collective singulars are by no means an invention of the Sattelzeit, though they became central for Western thought as a result of the historicist intellectual revolution. What is likely to happen, however, is that their role can change, as well as their semantic structure, or in other words the balance between universalistic and particularistic tendencies in our thinking. My hypothesis is that with the collapse of the great narratives and the decline of future-oriented thinking, a historical turn is happening in contemporary culture. It is manifest in the changes in method and approache of the social and human sciences, as has been documented in particular by Terrence McDonald and his colleagues.52 It is even more visible in the rise of historical memory, the heritage industry, the politics of memory, and the memory wars that are so typical of the present-day political and intellectual climate.53 Traditional political ideologies
49. John Wettersten, Whewells Critics: Have They Prevented Him from Doing Good? (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005). 50. They usually trace this theory back to Ludwig Wittgenstein. See Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, 16. 51. Otto Brunner, Land und Herrschaft, 129. See also Gadi Algazi, Otto BrunnerKonkrete Ordnung und die Sprache der Zeit, in Geschichtsschreibung als Legitimationswissenschaft, 19181945, Peter Schttler, ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 166203. 52. Terrence J. McDonald, Introduction, The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences, Terrence J. McDonald, ed. (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1996), 1. 53. On the rise of historical memory, see Pierre Nora, ed. Lieux de mmoire (Paris: Gallimard, 198492), vols. 17. See also David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (London: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory:

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were largely based on this or that version of global history. Due to the current decay of ideologies and the crisis of master narratives, contemporary politics has become heavily dependent on the past, but on a new past, or the past whose structures are undergoing considerable change. What was at stake in the ideological battles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were first of all conceptions of history, be it world history or national history, because the latter was dependent on the understanding of the former. Certainly there were also conflicts between countries over concrete episodes of the past. Todays politics of history is mostly about such conflicts. With the end of the Cold War the battles of the master narratives seem to have come to an end. Mutual accusations of misdeeds committed by the nations against each other have taken the forefront of the scene. To be sure, there are attempts (especially in Eastern Europe, which is now living through a belated process of forming national states) to recreate national narratives. But writing a new roman national (Pierre Nora) at the turn of the twenty-first century is intellectually problematic, precisely because the classical national narratives of the nineteenth century presupposed a conception of universal history which they sought either to exemplify (as was the case in France or England) or to negate (as most often happened in Germany or Russia) by telling a national story. Todays past, which has been decomposed into fragments as a result of the crisis of the future, resists reshaping in terms of national narratives as well. Or more exactly, the past can exist now either as a labyrinth of lieux de mmoire or as a catalogue of national insults. That is why some scholars speak about history-less elites now governing Eastern European countries (including Russia).54 It would perhaps be more exact to say that these are elites without a vision of history, but trying hard to exploit the fragments of the past. Eastern Europe seems an extreme case of a broader transformation. In other words, what is happening now in contemporary thought is a historical turn after the end of global history. In these conflicts, entities designated by collective singulars are the main actors. However, the way in which collective singulars are used today seems to be undergoing changes. As we know, there are various types of collective singulars. Those of them that are linked to the class vision of society have beThe Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991); Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory (vol. 1): Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London: Verso, 1994); Michael S. Roth, The Ironists Cage: Memory, Trauma, and the Construction of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995); Kerwin L. Klein, On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse, Representations 69, no. 1 (2000): 12750 ; Gabrielle M. Spiegel, Memory and History: Liturgical Time and Historical Time, History and Theory 41, no. 2 (2002): 14962. 54. Shari J. Cohen, Politics Without a Past: The Absence of History in Postcommunist Nationalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 47.

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come less important now. Bourgeoisie and proletariat are no longer categories of actual political thought. To the contrary, the concepts of nations or ethnic and religious groups have become more important, even central. And notwithstanding the heroic efforts that sociologists and anthropologists have undertaken to deconstruct them, they are most often perceived as primordial entities, following the organicist metaphor of the world. But names of social groups are more general and less singular than names of countries or nations. Indeed, social groups are designated by common nouns, while nation-states have proper names. We know that the type of name is not the only factor determining its meaning. But it is not irrelevant either. The typical proportion in which elements of proper name and elements of general name combine to form the meaning of this or that collective singular is also gradually changing today. Take for example the concept of Europe, which expresses what can perhaps be seen as todays most ambitious project for the future. It is a proper name. Thirty years ago, main projects for the future (like communism or democracy) were designated by more general names. But the concept of Europe has a strong general component as well, because it can stand for civilization, in the same way as the concept of the West, the latter being a more general concept than Europe. What seems to be happening now is that the notion of the West is gradually splitting into the two more concrete concepts of Europe and the U.S.A., and that these concepts tend to be understood less with reference to the universal idea of civilization and more with reference to the individual processes of formation that have brought these entities into being. If even those collective singulars that stood for the main road of civilization are now becoming more proper names, it is no wonder that this is also true of other collective names. Putins Russia is an interesting case here.55 The concept of sovereign democracy, which for several years served as its official self-description, reflects the search for a more proper name than that of democracy, which alongside its universal meaning also contains a reference to a part of the world, the West. It was precisely in order to distinguish Russia from the West within the broadly understood category of democratic countries that the concept of sovereign democracy was coined. Compare this concept to the one that was widely used to refer to the U.S.S.R.the first country of socialism. Formally, the two expressions look similarthey subsume the country under a generic name and indicate its differentia specifica. But the logical status of the entities that they presuppose is quite different. Being the first country of socialism meant leading humankind on its common way to
55. For more details, see Nikolay Koposov, : [Strict security memory: History and politics in Russia], (Moscow: New Literary Observer, 2011).

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the happy future. The universal component of this concept was rather strong. Being a sovereign democracy means just being different, without even specifying the way in which it is different. This is, therefore, much more a proper name. It is often said that contemporary societies are far more complex than those of the past, which inevitably leads to their fragmentation, and hence to the impossibility of relying on general concepts for their understanding. This may be true, so that the fragmentation of our vocabulary and the rise of proper names can to some extent be seen as a result of the fragmentation of society. But it is also possible to turn this argument another way around. Nineteenth-century society, though perhaps less complex than our own, was far more complex than its image as reflected in basic historical terms. All historians know that their terminology simplifies reality, and that basic historical terms in particular are not very useful for the description of what actually happened. This is not what they were coined for. Their function was, first and foremost, to formulate projects for the future. Today they are losing their attractiveness because of the evaporation of these projects. The domain of experience starts to prevail over the horizon of expectations. In the light of this new experience, the complexity of the present is becoming more evident than ever. The world is being seen as more particularistic because of the fragmentation of our world view. However, I do not think that this is a return to premodern habits of thought. Rather, we are confronted with a new shift toward the atomization of our world view and the decline of thinking in terms of universal values. In the conditions of decline of universalistic future-oriented ideologies, the crisis of the master narratives, and the rise of memory, there is a tendency to shift the balance toward the logic of proper names. Collective singulars are losing their connection to the wider history that bestowed on them their universal meaning, and are becoming more singular than they have ever been since the Sattelzeit.

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contributions to the history of concepts