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ABSTRACT
The article explores the object and the methodology of conceptual history,
by elaborating on Reinhart Kosellecks idea of key concepts, and proposes to
study them according to two different aspects of meaning: The representational aspect, which touches upon the relations between words and concepts
and studies words and concepts within semantic fields, and the referential
aspect, which brings in both the social history reflected in semantic changes
and the contexts in which the concepts serve as factors, and which make the
use of the concepts possible. The article concludes with a methodological
suggestion for the use of digitized textual databases for diachronic as well as
synchronic histories of concepts.
KEYWORDS
Conceptual history is about studying the history of basic concepts (Grundbegriffe), at least in its German variant, Begriffsgeschichte, whose leading proponent was the historian Reinhart Koselleck. He was the main editor of the
magnum opus of Begriffsgeschichte, the eight-volume lexicon on the history of
basic concepts, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe.1 In this article, I intend to show
how Kosellecks understanding of basic concepts oscillates between a linguistic
approach and a nonlinguistic, contextualist approach. Instead of accepting the
inevitable character of this oscillation, I propose a way of linking the two without necessarily sacrificing Begriffsgeschichtes main strength, which is precisely
that it goes beyond the mere study of semantic change. I begin with some
reflections on how concepts can be situated in language, and go on to discuss
the linkage between concepts and what they are used for in communication.
1. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, eds., Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur Politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland (Basic Concepts in
History: A Dictionary on Historical Principles of Political and Social Language in Germany)
(Stuttgart, 197290), hereafter cited as GG.
Jan Ifversen
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ers that can transmit their observations through categories and theories, that
is, basically through language.
Language
Social constructivism does not necessarily entail a claim on language as a privileged instrument of generating social reality. For Berger and Luckmann, the
authors of the most famous work on social constructivism, The Social Construction of Reality, the main tool for constructing social reality is what they
call the social institution, which includes language, symbols, rituals, habits,
and so on.5 Some proponents of social constructivism do, however, consider
language the prime entrance to social reality. I will follow along and take this
as my second basic claim. John Searle again states this very precisely:
In order that Bush can be president, people must be able to think that he is
president, but in order that they be able to think that he is president, they
have to have some means for thinking that, and that means has to be linguistic or symbolic.6
He underlines that thinking is not a mental operation that is independent of language. In order to think, we need categories, and they are stored
in language. So presidents only exist because we have linguistic categories or
concepts of presidents attached to words. Searle does not deny that we have
prelinguistic registers. We can, for instance, feel hunger or pain without language. But to communicate these feelings we normally rely on language. When
it comes to abstract thoughts about presidents and the like, we are totally dependent on language. As Searle makes clear, the reason language is the basic
social institution is its capacity to represent something through symbolic devices, such as words, that by convention mean or represent or symbolize something beyond themselves.7
I am aware that my two basic claims open a Pandoras box of highly complicated ontological and epistemological questions, which I have no pretensions to answering. The only point I want to make is that conceptual history,
in Kosellecks variant, can be viewed as embedded in a social-constructivist
paradigm. I am pretty sure Koselleck himself would not have liked the label,
but it is not hard to see that the two claims made above and Kosellecks own
statements on what concepts are and what they do go in the same direction:
5. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in
the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Doubleday, 1966).
6. Searle, Social Ontology, 10.
7. John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (London: Penguin, 1995), 60.
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Without common concepts there is no society, and above all, no political field
of action.8 Admittedly, Koselleck is not terribly precise here. But he does say
that societylet us say social realityonly exists because of common concepts. Combined with his statement on concepts as factors, quoted earlier, we
have a rather strong claim on what concepts do to us. For the moment, I will
leave it at this and not consider how Koselleck also makes strong claims in the
opposite direction, which lead towards a realist understanding of social reality
as nonlinguistic.
So far I have made some rather brutal claims bringing us to language. The
next step will be to define what I mean by language. If we claim that language
is the main instrument in constructing social reality, we need to specify how.
This is an epistemological question, which demands a language theory. Searle
emphasized the essential capacity of language to symbolize thought through
a code made up of signs. When we go further down the road of conceptual
history, we will have to be more specific, and locate the relation between language and concept. In Saussures famous theory of the signthe foundation
for many later versions of structuralismthe material and the conceptual dimensions of language were combined in the sign, which was made the basic
unit of any sign system.9 To describe the two dimensions of the sign, he distinguished between the signified, which was the concept or thought-image, and
the signifier, the material carrier of the concept. Combined in the signand in
the systemthey produce meaning, or what Saussure called signification. Saussure was mainly interested in explaining how language as a system produces
meaning. What language is used forsuch as talking about thingswas not
really part of his language theory. In 1923, the linguists Charles Ogden and I.
A. Richards broadened Saussures systemic approach to include what the signs
refer to.10 They introduced their famous linguistic triangle, in which one side
described the relation between symbol and thought (signifier and signified in
Saussurian terminology), and the other side described the relation between
thought and referent.11
Linguists would later speak of the two sets of relations in terms of signification and reference, the former being internal to the sign system and the
8. Koselleck, Begriffsgeschichte and Social History, 76.
9. Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique gnrale [A course in general linguistics]
(Paris: Payot, 1969 [1916]).
10. For Saussure the language system, la langue, operated independently of any reference
to the objects signified. The systematic differentiation between meaning and reference is
derived from Gottlob Frege, Ein Eigenname (Wort, Zeichen, Zeichenverbindung, Ausdruck) drckt aus seinen Sinn, bedeutet oder bezeichnet seine Bedeutung, Gottlob Frege,
Funktion, Begriff, Bedeutung (Gttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002), 28.
11. C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of
Language Upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1923).
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latter relating signs to something in the world. Reference is the activity within
language that makes it possible to communicate about particular things. The
linguist John Lyons defines reference as the relation that holds between linguistic expressions and what they stand for in the world.12 The referent is that
thing in the world which is being symbolized by the sign.
I have only taken this detour into basic semiotics because Koselleck quite
directly states his adherence to it in his programmatic article on conceptual
history. Koselleck makes few references to language theory, but the structural
semantics that developed in the wake of Saussure is certainly a source of inspiration for him.13 In the aforementioned programmatic article he gives his version
of a linguistic triangle, in which the three angles are termed word (Wortkrper), meaning or concept (Bedeutung or Begriff), and object (Sache).14
With this triangle we can find translations between structural semantics and
conceptual history. Kosellecks concept is thus identical to Saussures signified
and Ogden and Richardss thought. Since concepts are expressed in words, this
means that they are always tied to words.15 This statement might sound quite
banal. But I hold it to be very important, because it is what distances conceptual history from nonlinguistic approaches to the history of ideas. Finally, the
12. John Lyons, Language, Meaning, and Context (London: Fontana, 1981), 220.
13. Koselleck particularly mentions the German linguist Jost Trier and the Romanian
linguist Eugenio Coeriu, who developed a theory of semantic change. Koselleck, Sozialgeschichte und Begriffsgeschichte, Sozialgeschichte in Deutschland, W. Schieder and V. Sellin,
eds. (Gttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986), vol. 1, 91, 109.
14. Koselleck, Begriffsgeschichte and Social History, 84.
15. I leave aside the fact that modern semantics, rather than referring to words, would
use the term lexeme. See Marit Julien, Word, Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics
(Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2006), 61724.
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referent becomes the object, die Sache in Kosellecks terminology. This term
clearly emphasizes that the referent is that which language is used to say something about. As we shall see in a moment, the object plays a prominent role in
Kosellecks understanding of referentiality.
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different from the concept of a vehicle; others might answer that car, being a
subcategory, is a hyponym of vehicle, which indicates a larger category including, for example, horse-drawn carriages. More importantly, words appear in
relation to other words in larger meaningful entities (the phrase, the proposition, the paragraph). Koselleck is certainly aware of this structuralist doctrine.
That is why he used the term semantic field, which designates relations between concepts. He borrowed the idea of semantic fields from the German linguist Jost Trier, a first-generation follower of Saussure, who introduced word
fields and conceptual blocks in the 1930s.18 He spoke of conceptual relatives, which made up semantic subsystems. The idea was based on Saussures
holistic view of language, where the units only acquire their meaning from
their position in the system. Saussure chose to speak of this as the value of a
sign.19 Trier also took Saussures spatial image of language as operating in basically two spheres of relations, one based on a linear or horizontal connection
of words, and the other based on a selection of words related by association.
Saussure called the horizontal sphere in language syntagmatic, and chose to
talk about associative relations for the other sphere.20 In the first, words are
related in coherent sequences on the basis of syntax, in what linguists call syntagms. The word sequence the old man is a substantive syntagm in which man
is the determiner, that is, the superior entity. Saussures associative relations
were later renamed paradigmatic relations and given a vertical direction, to
match the horizontal direction of the sphere of syntagmatic relations. In the
paradigmatic axis, relations are determined by semantic proximity. If a word
meaningfully can replace another one in a syntagm then it is considered to belong to the same paradigm. Young can thus replace old, in our word sequence,
and woman can replace man. The point is that there must be a selection from
within a paradigm. This was emphasized by Roman Jakobson, who proposed
to speak of the two spheres as regulated by combination and selection respectively.21 A paradigm can be defined broadly as all the nouns or adjectives that
would fit the syntagm, but we can also limit it to a certain semantic category,
namely concepts for the human being. A limited paradigm could equal a
semantic field. To study semantic fields, we need to describe syntagmatic as
well as paradigmatic relations.
18. The link between Trier and Koselleck has been pointed out by Melvin Richter, The
History of Political and Social Concepts: A Critical Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1995), 4849. Trier distinguished between word field (Wortfeld), the material side
of the sign, and the conceptual block or area (Begriffsblock, Begriffsbezirk): Jost Trier, Der
deutsche Wortschatz im Sinnbezirk des Verstandes (Heidelberg: Winter [1931], 1973), 1.
19. Saussure, Cours, 115.
20. Ibid., 17071.
21. Roman Jakobson, Essais de linguistique gnrale (Paris: ditions de Minuit, 1970
[1963]), 48.
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Although Koselleck emphasized the need to study concepts in association with their semantic relations, including semantic fields, he never really
adhered to any strict semantic methodology (or theory for that matter). He
certainly underlined the representational aspect of meaning and constantly insisted on the link between concepts and words. There is no doubt that for Koselleck, doing conceptual history entailed a word history, or rather a historical
semantics, based on the study of the language in the sources (Quellensprache).
He reiterated that historians have access to past concepts only through the
words available in the sources. Kosellecks much older colleague, Otto Brunner, had already emphasized the need to study the language of the historical
actors carefully in order to avoid anachronisms. Brunner himself meticulously
demonstrated how medieval power in Europe was conceptually linked to
property, and not to a modern concept of state.22
The historian Rolf Reichardt has introduced a more rigorous approach
to the study of semantic relations in conceptual history, in collaboration with
Hans-Jrgen Lsebrink. They are also the editors of another lexicon project
in conceptual history, Handbuch politisch-sozialer Grundbegriffe in Frankreich
16801820.23 Inspired by linguistic studies of conceptual fields and word fields,
Reichardt has developed an approach that focuses on the semantic relations
within semantic networks.24 The purpose of his study is to describe the semantic centers of particular semantic nets. He does this by examining the
syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations of a particular concept in a selected
corpus of texts. Reichardt chose to understand paradigmatic relations in a
rather basic way, as terms that in a particular text define the concept studied.25
He furthermore gave special emphasis to the study of counter-concepts, or
antonyms, within the study of paradigmatic relations. In the same way, syntagmatic relations are dealt with as all those words that are linked to the concept
studied and give it special content.26 In practice, these were only nouns and
adjectives. To help determine the centrality of a concept, Reichardt adds frequency as a factor. I will come back to this in my reflections on methodology.
22. Otto Brunner, Land und Herrschaft: Grundfragen der territorialen Verfassungsgeschichte Sdostdeutschlands im Mittelalter (Vienna: Rohrer Verlag, 1943 [1939]).
23. Rolf Reichardt and Hans-Jrgen Lsebrink, eds., Handbuch politisch-sozialer Grundbegriffe in Frankreich 16801820 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 19851996).
24. Rolf Reichardt, Revolutionre Mentalitten und Netze politischer Grundbegriffe in
Frankreich 17891795, in Die Franzsische Revolution als Bruch des gesellschaftlichen Bewutseins, Reinhart Koselleck and Rolf Reichardt, eds. (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1988), 187.
25. Rolf Reichardt, Zur Geschichte politisch-sozialer Begriffe in Frankreich zwischen
Absolutismus und Restauration, Zeitschrift fr Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 12, no.
47 (1982): 58.
26. Ibid.
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Unlike linguists, especially lexicographers working with word fields, conceptual historians are not interested in drawing up objective maps of the semantic relations between the words in a given lexicon. They are only interested
in deciding how a particular concept under study acquires its meaning within
a semantic field as it appears in a selected text corpus. Following Reichardt,
we can also decide whether our concept appears as a semantic center in the
corpus. To determine whether the concept is also a key concept, however, we
must go beyond the description of relations in semantic fields. This leads us
toward the referential aspect of meaning.
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ings covered by words such as government, territory, bureaucracy, and population. Many words with abstract meanings belong to a broad semantic field, but
for Koselleck this process of condensation and concentration is something to
be described not only as a linguistic phenomenon. A word becomes a concept
precisely because it gets involved in action stemming from a certain situation
or context. It is made into a concept by speaking and writing actors.
The process of concentration and condensation is therefore two-dimensional. It can be described as a linguistic operation in which some words acquire a broader meaning,29 for instance when state moves from the realm of
estate to mean something more. It is also possible that new wordsneologismsare invented to create new concepts. Civilization was a new word in
the eighteenth century, which encompassed a new conceptualization of development. I would not go so far in a cognitivistic direction as to say that we can
detect concepts looking for words, but rather state that new conceptualizations
show themselves through linguistic turbulence and innovation. New concepts
find their form when words change meaning, or when new words are invented
(often derived from older forms, as is the case with civilization).
The other dimension pertains to factors outside language. In this dimension, concentration and condensation are related to an action of some kind in
a particular context. Actors perform an operation of concentration to reach a
specific goal. A word can thus be assigned a key role in and through this action. If the word remains importantfor instance, when used by other actors
involved in the particular situationit can acquire the status of inescapability.
For Koselleck, it is this status which defines basic concepts:
A basic concept is an inescapable, irreplaceable part of the political and
social vocabulary. Basic concepts combine manifold experiences and expectations in such a way that they become indispensable to any formulation
of the most urgent issues of a given time. Thus basic concepts are highly complex; they are always both controversial and contested.30
One might rightly object that Koselleck does not clearly differentiate between general and basic concepts. From a linguistic point of view, all words
are linked to concepts. His intention, however, is to emphasize those cases
in which particular words become important for political and social action
oriented towards change, in those specific situations where old meanings are
being challenged and new concepts are emerging. Particular words will then
assume the role of key instruments in this process of challenging the old and
29. In semantics, polysemy designates the multiplicity of meanings of a particular word:
Anu Koskela and M. Lynne Murphy, Polysemy and Homonymy, Encyclopedia of Language
and Linguistics, 742744.
30. Reinhart Koselleck, Response to Comments, in The Meaning of Historical Terms and
Concepts: New Studies on Begriffsgeschichte, Hartmut Lehmann and Melvin Richter, eds.
(Washington, D.C.: German Historical Institute, 1996), 64.
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inventing the new. Supporters of the old order will oppose the proponents of
change. Even among the proponents of change there might be disagreement
as to how to conceptualize the new, and with which words. That is why basic
concepts are contested and controversial.31 Although these concepts will experience situations of less controversy, according to Koselleck, they will never
become completely uncontested. The reason is that they have become emblematic of a political and social configuration. In a certain context or conjuncture,
no political or social action can be imagined without these basic concepts. This
is what Koselleck means by their inescapable nature. With the democratic configuration of politics and society that took shape in eighteenth-century Europe,
the concept of equality, for instance, became such an inescapable concept,
with several meanings. Socialists advocated a substantial concept of equality,
whereas liberals would tend to understand equality as formal opportunities.
Both of these meanings become included in the concept of equality. But it is
difficult to imagine that one of these meanings would eventually disappear.
On the other hand, we might observe that, at particular times, some meanings become more dominant than others. Whether or not this is the case, for
Koselleck it is an empirical question to be examined in the course of historical
analysis. Other approaches, such as discourse analysis, would certainly include
theoretical reflections on dominance in their reflections on the emergence of
concepts.32
Let me now try to rephrase Kosellecks approach to concepts. Some concepts become so important that they play a key role in situations characterized
by change and contestation. These are what I would call key concepts. The
conceptual analyst has to show with what words and in which semantic fields
these key concepts emerge. This can be done by detecting semantic nets and
centers in chosen texts, in the way Rolf Reichardt has proposed. The observation and description of semantic changes, which are at the core of a historical
semantics,33 operate through a careful study of changes in semantic relations.
31. This has nothing to do with W. B. Gallies idea of essentially contested concepts.
What defines essential contestability, for Gallie, is the abstract and evaluative feature of a
concept, not a particular action or context: William Brice Gallie, Essentially Contested
Concepts, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 56 (1956), 16798. In fact, the difference
between a universally grounded, philosophical approach and a historical approach to concepts is well demonstrated in the difference between Gallies essentially contested concepts
and Kosellecks basic concepts.
32. This is certainly the case within the post-Marxist version of discourse analysis offered
by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. In this version, hegemony always trumps more moderate notions about conventions and traditions. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985).
33. It is important to distinguish between a study of how language changes with history
and a study of the innate capacity of language to change constantly. Eugenio Coeriu, Synchronie, Diachronie und Geschichte (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1984). For a linguist like
Coeriu, the most interesting history of language is still the internal history; ibid., 240.
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Such changes can be detected at the level of words. Existing words can change
their meaning, and new words can appear. When democracy became a key
concept in the latter half of the eighteenth century, it entailed a change in the
meaning of the word democracy. Civilization, on the other hand, was an example of a new word used to signify a new conceptualization of development and
history. From a retrospective point of view we can then determine whether
these key concepts become an inescapable part of the social and political
vocabulary. Koselleck himself was mainly interested in locating when and how
the basic concepts made their way into twentieth-century political and social
vocabulary in Western Europe. He wanted to locate that period in time out of
which Western Europes political and social modernity grew. He called this
period the saddle time (Sattelzeit), to highlight the period of radical change
that straddled the brink of two different epochs in European history. Here Koselleck spoke as a historian who needed to decide which context to examine
for the study of conceptual changes that led to new key concepts that were
emerging. This is the question of when, how, and why some concepts became
key concepts in the societies under study.
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When Koselleck speaks of politicosocial systems, he adds a new perspective to the study of the world of objects. The objects conceptualized in language
also get their meaning from being embedded in these complex systems. This
perspective does not necessarily break with the social-constructivist paradigm,
at least not if we accept that these systems are larger framings which include
language, and thus concepts. To speak of systemsor institutions for that mat36. John Saeed defines reference as the relationship by which language hooks onto the
world, John Saeed, Semantics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997). Lyons defines it as that which
has to do with the relationship which holds between an expression and what the expression stands for on particular occasions of its utterance, John Lyons, Semantics (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1977), 174.
37. Within linguistic science, the study of the linguistic rules of communication is typically undertaken under the heading of pragmatics. Jacob L. Mey, Pragmatics: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).
38. Kosellek, Begriffsgeschichte and Social History, 76.
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my focus to the study of the context necessary to explain the emergence and
development of concepts.
Instead of thinking in terms of a duality between the conceptual and the
social, I prefer to speak of a relation between concept and context. Context is
a purely analytical term, which does not depend on an independent theory
of the world of objects. Context is what language is about, and what makes
it possible to communicate. Communication always takes place in a specific
context. If the referential aspect of meaning concerns the link between concepts and objects, we might be inclined to add a contextual aspect of meaning. The referential aspect deals with what the words are about, the contextual
aspect whereby it is possible to utter them. We can also say that context can
be understood in two ways. It is what orients the language user. He or she
considers the context when uttering. But it is also what limits communication,
as for instance in the form of specific, institutional positions and channels. To
be more specific, we will have to consider different contexts. Let me leave out
for the moment the linguistic context, that is the linguistic entities beyond the
wordthe sentence, the semantic field, the text or the discourseand concentrate on other contexts.
Words appear in what we could call a communicative action, or simply language use.43 Communicative action takes place in a particular settinga book,
a parliament, a lecture hall, a television broadcastand involves speakers (or
writers) and listeners (or readers) communicating something. The communicative situation is the narrowest context that determines what can be said to
whom about what. But situations are embedded in larger, institutional frames
that partake in determining language use. What can be said in a parliamentary
setting is different from what can be expressed in a meeting of a party committee. In this way the context can be widened, but at a price. The more the
context is widened, the more difficult it becomes to demonstrate links to a
particular utterance. In the end, it all depends on how macro-oriented ones
claims are intended to be. Like many others, Koselleck invented a term for a
complete context, a totality, the space of experience. True to his existentialist
background he preferred to speak of experienceinstead of culture or episteme, for instanceas the basic term for human understanding.
The referential dimension points towards the context. But Koselleck is not
interested in referentiality as such. He is interested in studying the possibilities and the constraints on language use that stem from the context. His approach to concepts is definitely contextualist. Much as Quentin Skinner, he
underlines the necessity of reconstructing different contexts in order to un43. We find a host of different terms for language in use, from Saussures parole to speech
act, discourse, performance, and utterance. Koselleck speaks concurrently of Rede (as opposed to Sprache) and Pragmatik (as opposed to Semantik).
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derstand the meanings of concepts.44 For Skinner, the most important context
is the communicative action in which the concept is used.45 Koselleck is more
ambivalent when it comes to choosing contexts. Sometimes he advocates the
pairing of conceptual history with a social history, the purpose of which is
to reconstruct very broad contexts. At other times, he is almost Skinnerian
in his endorsement of elevating language to the status of a privileged gateway into the study of concepts: The record of how [the concepts] uses were
subsequently maintained, altered, or transformed may properly be called the
history of concepts.46 Koselleck speaks in broad terms about the pragmatics of language, referring to the approach within linguistics that particularly
looks at how meaning is generated in language use. From the point of view of
pragmatic linguistics, there is a difference between the potentiality of meaning
available in the language system and the actual meaning realized in language
use. The use of language involves a choice, which depends on the intention of
the speaker in the situation in which he or she speaks to someone. This is the
difference, for instance, between the meaning of a political society in general
and a specific one, our political society, which is not just any one. You can
only understand what our political society is if you are in the communicative
situation, or you are able to reconstruct the we I am referring to. Koselleck
gives a historical example when he claims that the semantics of the two main
opponents in the French Revolution of 1789the Jacobins and the Girondinswere identical, and that they only differed in terms of pragmatics.47
In referring to pragmatics, he directly acknowledges Skinners point that the
differences in what political actors mean by the words they use are best studied
in their specific use in political argumentation. Focusing solely on the lexicon
44. For Skinner, context is often equivalent to existing conventions: The context mistakenly gets treated as the determinant of what is said. It needs rather to be treated as an
ultimate framework for helping to decide what conventionally recognizable meanings, in a
society of that kind, it might in principle have been possible for someone to have intended
to communicate; Quentin Skinner, Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,
in Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics, James Tully ed. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988) 2967.
45. To be more specific, he speaks of this context as argumentation: I wanted to treat the
understanding of concepts as always, in part, a matter of understanding what can be done
with them in argument. Quentin Skinner, Rhetoric and Conceptual Change, in Finnish
Yearbook of Political Thought 3 (1999), 63.
46. Reinhart Koselleck, A Response to Comments on the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe,
in The Meaning of Historical Terms and Concepts, Hartmut Lehmann and Melvin Richter,
eds. (Washington: German Historical Institute, 1996), 93.
47. Reinhart Koselleck, Zeit, Zeitlichkeit und Geschichtesperrige Reflexionen: Reinhart Koselleck im Gesprch mit Wolf-Dieter Narr und Kari Palonen, in Zeit, Geschichte
und Politik: Zum achtzigsten Geburtsatg von Reinhart Koselleck, Jussi Kurunmki und Kari
Palonen, eds. (Jyvskyl: University of Jyvskyl, 2003), 14.
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will not bring out the variations in meaning that the words get when used as
ammunition in a debate. Koselleck sometimes emphasizes the difference between the lexicon, which he terms semantics, and language use as one between
structure and event.48
So far I have distinguished between three aspects of meaning. First, the
representational aspect of meaning deals with the relation between words
and concepts. It refers to what words mean, and how concepts are expressed
in words. To determine the emergence of key concepts, we rely on relations
within semantic fields as developed by structural semantics. With the second
aspect of meaning, the referential, we become interested in what the words (or
more correctly the signs) are about, which is what linguists call the referent.
The referent can be of very diverse nature. We can refer to concrete objects or
to abstract, even imaginary entities like dragons or dreams. Conceptual historians are interested in the referential aspect of meaning because it shows what
the words are used for. Only lexicographers would be interested in the internal explanation, that is the shifting relations between words and concepts.
Historians would look for the external explanations where social changes
[are] taken to be reflected in the respective semantic change.49 To do that they
will have to include the third aspect, which I have called the contextual aspect of meaning. In this case, the referent points to external conditions that
make using words possible. What we use the word for points to a larger context, which determines the use. Which context should be taken into account
is an analytical question. There is no fixed, monolithic context. Furthermore,
the move from the text to the context, or from language to communication,
demands a set of independent tools needed for reconstructing the context.
Koselleck proposed social history for this purpose. I think this proposal opens
up theoretical questions about the ontological status of the social that are too
complicated. That is why I prefer the strictly analytical term context, although
I will still have to rely on extratextual knowledge to reconstruct it. The only
way to escape this condition is to look only for intertextual links, that is traces
of other texts in your sources. This, however, leaves the historian with a rather
poor context. Being a conceptual historianor any kind of historian for that
matterthus entails being a contextualist, orto use Kosellecks own words
endorsing a reflexive historicism.50
48. See, for instance, Koselleck, Sozialgeschichte und Begriffsgeschichte, 100105. In
the same way, Ricoeur speaks of any utterance as a singular event: see Paul Ricoeur,The
Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text, Social Research 38, no. 3 (Autumn 1971), 529-562.
49. Gerd Fritz, Theories of meaning changean overview, http://www.festschrift-gerdfritz.de/files/publ_hp/fritz_2008_semantics_handbook_meaning_change_2.pdf, 89.
50. Reinhart Koselleck, Begriffsgeschichte, Sozialgeschichte, begriffene Geschichte: Reinhart Koselleck im Gesprch mit Christof Dipper, Neue Politische Literatur 43 (1998), 188.
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use words for certain purposes. They have rhetorical strategies for their use of
particular concepts. Intentionality is one element in a communicative action.
Another is the effect produced by the speaker in action. Conceptual history
will tend to prioritize those actions that had long-lasting, conceptual effects.
A typical case is the concept of democracy, which was emphatically debated at
the end of the eighteenth century and during the nineteenth century. Within
conceptual history, the synchronic approach is most often applied to concepts
in communicative situations where contestation is expected.
Whether approached diachronically or synchronically, the main focus for
conceptual history remains the concept. Conceptual history is basically interested in how concepts change. This question can be answered by concentrating on either the representational or the contextual aspect of meaning, and
accordingly has two parts. We can ask how a concept emerges and changes
within a lexicon, or we can ask how a concept changes a situation, an institution, or something even larger. It was the latter that Koselleck had in mind
when he talked about the concept as a factor.54
The first part of the question is concerned primarily with semantic change.
The second part involves changing or new referents. A word might enter the
language to denote something new, which indicates that we might have phenomena in need of conceptualization.55 Such a situation is actually quite common, for instance when we encounter phenomena we do not know how to
describe. Semantic innovation is often about naming new things in order to describe and classify them in our lexicon. But we must also be aware that concepts
themselves create new referents. It is in this sense that they are true factors.
Methodological Reflections
In this final section I will propose some methodological guidelines for both
the diachronic and the synchronic approach, and give some examples of how
to proceed. I will begin with the diachronic approach, with its focus on the
representational aspect of meaning. If we want to study the long history of a
particular concept, we must begin with the word history. For this, we need to
take a retrospective perspective on a chosen connection between a word and a
concept. We can thereby formulate a hypothesis, for example that the concept
of sovereignty is expressed in the word sovereignty, and then look for the first
emergence of this word in one or more natural languages. We next have to find
54. Reinhart Koselleck, Begriffsgeschichte and Social History, 86.
55. Koselleck developed an interesting, but theoretically unsatisfying, reflection on the
differing historical rhythms between language and reality. The idea behind this is that
concepts may change regardless of reality, and vice versa; see Koselleck, Sozialgeschichte
und Begriffsgeschichte.
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out when and how the word became a key concept. This involves describing
what meanings become condensed in particular words. Finally we must ask
whether a particular concept changed over time or remained stable. The obvious place to begin looking for the first appearance of a word is a dictionary. In
most languages we find general dictionaries like the Oxford English Dictionary
(OED), the Trsor de la langue franaise (TLF), or the Deutsches Wrterbuch
some of them dating back to the seventeenth centuryas well as a host of specialized dictionaries.56 Dictionaries are of limited use, however. Due to their
nature, they provide only short and conventionalized definitions, which mean
that words only enter them after having been authorized. I would like to advocate a far better source, namely digitalized databases comprising huge number
of texts.57 For French texts, there is the Frantext database.58 Frantext includes
around 4,000 mainly book-length texts from the eighteenth to the twentieth
century, and covers a wide range of genres. Frantext is furthermore equipped
with advanced search tools. For texts in English there are several databases:
Early English Books Online (EBBO) contains almost every work published in
the Anglophone world from 1473 to 1700, which adds up to around 100,000
titles.59 The English Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) claims
to cover almost every work published in Britain in the eighteenth century,
including pamphlets, journals, and legal texts.60 The databases can be used to
examine the first appearance of words, as civilization, for instance. According
to Frantext, the French word civilization first appeared in 1721, in a famous
text by Montesquieu, Considrations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains
et de leur dcadence. The TLF gives the same date, but refers to a different text
and a different meaning. A search for the English word civilization yields no
results in the EBBO, while the ECCO lists its first appearance in 1736, and provides a specialized legal definition of the word (in fact, the same as mentioned
by the TLF). The OED search yields the same meaning of the word dating back
to 1710.
It is far more demanding to decide when a word becomes a key concept,
or we could say this task at least requires more interpretation. We can, how56. Most dictionaries are now accessible electronically either for free or through subscription.
57. For a good overview of Anglo-American digital databases of interest to conceptual
historians, see Martin Burke, Conceptual History in the U.S.: A Missing National Project,
in Contributions to the History of Concepts 1 (2005): 2, 12744.
58. The Frantext database is constructed and managed by the French research center Analyse et Traitement Informatique de la Langue franaise, see http://www.frantext.fr/. A version
made in cooperation with the University of Chicago is called ARTFL Frantext; see http://
www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/databases/TLF/. Both versions require subscription.
59. http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home/
60. http://www.gale.cengage.com/DigitalCollections/products/ecco/index.htm
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Let me end this short illustration of a diachronic approach primarily interested in the representational aspect of meaning by referring to Kosellecks
study of the history of the concept of crisisone of a few entries in the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe to have been translated into English.62 True to his
distinction between word and concept, he looks at the word crisis before it
becomes a key concept, that is, when is has neither been validated nor sufficiently enriched to be elevated into a basic concept.63 The word thus exists
before it becomes a key concept, but it does not have the force of a key concept. Only as a concept does it accumulate meaning. Koselleck demonstrates
how this accumulation happens as the word moves from one semantic field
to another. In one such case, he gives Rousseau credit for moving the word
crisis from a religious field, where it is linked to eschatology, into the field of
human history, with the purpose of conceptualizing historical direction. This
is a move that marks the end of the lineanalyzed by Koselleck in his article
on crisisat which point the word crisis has moved from theology, where it
was tied to the meaning of the last judgment, and also from medicine, where
it related to the diagnosis of bodily malfunctions, into the fields of politics,
economy, and history. Kosellecks intriguing point here is that the word retains
some of its old meaning when transferred to new areas.
Let me very briefly say something about the synchronic or micro-diachronic approach, with its focus in the contextual aspect of meaning. Here we
shift from semantic fields to the contexts in which new concepts emerge and
old concepts change. Our main interest is not the long history of words, but the
communicative situations in which the words are used and how they become
new concepts by being used. In addition to reconstructing the communicative
situation with its intentional speakers and listeners, the investigation must determine the balance between intention and contextual constraints. This is the
balance between what is said and what can be said. The most important question, however, relates to the effect the action had on the meaning of the concept. It could be that actors were able to introduce a new concept by inventing
new words or by changing the meaning of existing words. Sometimes new
concepts can even serve as weapons in a political and semantic controversy. In
his article on crisis, Koselleck points out that important figures such as Thomas
Paine and Edmund Burke used the concept in an ideological controversy concerning desirable futures, and thereby transformed it into a concept designed
for combat.64 What Koselleck argues is that the concept of crisis can be used to
underline the necessity, and thus the legitimacy, of a political act. Seen from a
current perspective, we can easily recognize this function of crisis.
62. Reinhart Koselleck, Crisis, transl. Michaela W. Richter, Journal of the History of
Ideas 67, no. 2 (2006), 357400.
63. Ibid., 369.
64. Ibid., 376.
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Concluding Remarks
One way of practicing conceptual history is through the study of key concepts.
Koselleck chose to write the history of key concepts, although he preferred the
term basic concepts (Grundbegriffe), possibly to emphasize their basic function
in particular discourses on the political and the social. Their basic nature stems
from the fact that they can be viewed as semantic centers for different discourses. They concentrate and condense what is needed or inescapable when
a particular topic or problem is raised. An example might be the concept of
human rights, which seems inescapable when matters of justice are discussed.
I have chosen a slightly different metaphor and speak of key concepts. The
term has much the same meaning as basic. Key concepts are those you need
in order to access a particular field. Without the key you will either not understand or misunderstand what goes on. Key concepts are like key words in the
sense that they point to the semantic building blocks in a text or a discourse.
Key concepts cannot be studied in isolation. They are embedded in semantic fields within which they acquire meaning. They make up the conceptual architecture of larger discursive and institutional frames, and they become
forceful tools in speech acts and argumentative activities. As conceptual historians we must choose our targets. We can limit our investigation to the developments taking place between words and concepts. In this endeavour we
are in the company of lexicographers and semanticists interested in history. As
historians, however, we would tend to go further and look at the context that
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65. Concepta, The International Research School in Conceptual History, organized its
second advanced research training seminar in 2008, under the heading Beyond Classical
Key Concepts; see http://www.concepta-net.org/beyond_classical_key_concepts.
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