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The ideological interpellation of individuals ascombatants: An encounter between Reinhart Koselleckand Michel FoucaultJason Edwards aa School of Politics and Sociology, Birkbeck College, University of London, London,UK

Online Publication Date: 01 February 2007

To cite this Article: Edwards, Jason (2007) 'The ideological interpellation ofindividuals as combatants: An encounter between Reinhart Koselleck and MichelFoucault', Journal of Political Ideologies, 12:1, 49 66

To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/13569310601095606URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13569310601095606

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The ideological interpellationof individuals as combatants:An encounter between ReinhartKoselleck and Michel FoucaultJASON EDWARDS

School of Politics and Sociology, Birkbeck College, University of London, Malet Street,

London WC1E 7HX, UK

ABSTRACT Ideology forms social and political actors. This claim isdisconcerting for those who believe it rules out the contribution of agency insocial, political and ideological change. In this article, I consider the work ofReinhart Koselleck and Michel Foucault in tandem to demonstrate that suchconcerns are misplaced. Together, Koselleck and Foucault can aid us inunderstanding how ideology interpellates individuals as combatants, or in otherwords how it equips social and political actors in modernity with the capacity tocontest. From this perspective, we can conceive of ideology forming social andpolitical actors while maintaining that the contests and struggles in which theyparticipate are key for understanding social, political and ideological change inthe modern world.

Louis Althusser famously claimed that ideology works through the interpellation ofindividuals as subjects.1 Subjects are constituted by ideology in so far as it calls toindividuals and provides them with a social identity. The main line of criticismagainst Althussers argument was that it effectively denies any role in social andpolitical transformation for agency. By agency, in this sense, is meant somethinglike the capacity of human beings to make and act on decisions that are in animportant respect derived independently of ideology in its subject-constitutingfunction, and from social determination more broadly understood. While I take thiscriticism of Althusser to be misplaced, I will not attempt to refute it in any detail. Iassume that ideology does indeed function to provide human beings with a sense ofsocial and political identity, and that all individual and collective efforts totransform social and political life are in a relevant sense ideological. Of course, this

Journal of Political Ideologies (February 2007),12(1), 4966

ISSN 1356-9317 print; ISSN 1469-9613 online/07/01004918 q 2007 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/13569310601095606

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does not mean to say that, appropriately conceived, non-ideological considerationsshould not enter into any explanation of social and political change. Nor does it haveany particular bearing on the interminable debate about the relationship betweensocial structure and agency. All that it means is that we cannot seriously considerany instance of the transformation of social and political language and practicewithout giving serious weight to the ideological grounds on which it takes place.

It is perfectly possible, and indeed I would argue entirely necessary, to rejectaccounts of social and political change that prioritize the causal autonomy of thesubject. Nonetheless, a perennial difficulty for theoretical anti-humanists is to squaretheir claim for the identity-constituting function of ideology with the considerationthat social and political change in the modern world often enjoins the contestation ofgiven identities and values through various forms of social and political conflict. Weneed to establish the sense in which ideology interpellates individuals as social andpolitical combatants: that is, the way in which it provides individuals with theconceptual, linguistic and practical resources to contest the character of social andpolitical life against others who are defined as enemies. The enemy is not a natural orobvious category, nor one that is simply given by ideology, but must be constructedwith the tools that ideology provides to individuals and which render them capable ofbeing social and political actors. If much (though not all) social and political change isprimarily a result of contestation, we must ask what role ideology has played informing this relationship and the ways in which it has come to constitute individualsas combatants in social and political life. It is possible to think of kinds of humansocieties where contestation remains hidden or is transferred onto ritual forms ofcollective self-affirmation. A striking feature of modernity is the diffusion anddemocratization of social and political contestation. If we wish to grasp the characterof this process and its effects on the present, then we must seek to better understand themanner in which ideologies equip individuals with the capacity to contest.

In this article, I will attempt to show that much light is thrown onto this problemby considering in tandem the work of two theorists who may at first sight seem likestrange bed-fellows: Reinhart Koselleck and Michel Foucault. A sustainedcomparison of their work is called for on the grounds alone that there are manythematic overlaps between their texts, despite them never having directly engaged.In the first part of this article, I will attempt to provide a brief sketch of these overlapsin their earlier works, suggesting that they supply much material that deservesgreater elaboration. But my main aim here is to outline how reading Koselleck andFoucault in concert helps us to capture, in a sense that is not immediately obviousfrom considering each in isolation, how individuals in modernity are provided theconceptual and practical means by which to contest established knowledges, valuesand practices, in other words how ideology provides the grounds on whichindividuals in modern societies are made into agents of social and political change.

Begriffsgeschichte and archaeology

Koselleck is best considered not as the founder of a distinctive Begriffsgeschichte(conceptual history) in German and European historiography, but rather as the

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figure who has done most to advance it as a research programme and provide itwith a sophisticated theoretical articulation.2 As the chief editor of theGeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, a massive lexicon charting the history of keysocial and political concepts in the German language, Koselleck was at theforefront of challenges to prevailing methods of historical inquiry in Germanyduring the 1960s and 1970s. The approach outlined by Koselleck in theGeschichtliche Grundbegriffe stood as a repudiation of both a historicistGeistesgeschichte, which saw social and political vocabulary as the manifestationof the essence of a cultural unity, and of the kind of Sozialgeschichte that soughtto reduce thought and language to underlying social structures.3 But even beforeKoselleck had come to an understanding of the concept as the proper object ofa history of modern social and political thought, the centrality of contestation inhis historical studies had already been outlined in what remains, at least in theEnglish-speaking world, his most famous monograph: Critique and CrisisEnlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society.4 This book, firstpublished in German in 1959, is often wrongly seen as a conservative tract thatcondemns the Enlightenment as a movement. In fact, a careful reading shows it tobe about the emergence of a kind of ethos or attitude towards the social and thepolitical (conceived of as distinct and antagonistic domains) characteristic ofmodernity. The motivation behind Critique and Crisis was to begin to demonstratehow this attitude informed the ideological stand-off of the Cold War, as both theWest and the East embraced utopian reverie and the theoretical justification ofglobal civil conflict. It was, in this respect, a contribution to the critique ofideology. More than this, it was a critique of ideologiesboth of liberal capitalismand Soviet communismpremised on an anti-political humanism, to all intentsand purposes secularized forms of Christian eschatology. In this respect, Critiqueand Crisis announces what is central to Kosellecks Begriffsgeschichte: not thedelineation of a formal method of textual interpretation, but rather, to borrow aFoucauldian phrase, the history of the present.

Unlike Habermas in his The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,another book that focuses on the character of the emergent public in the eighteenthand nineteenth centuries,5 Kosellecks aim in Critique and Crisis was not toestablish discursive openness as the differentia specifica and principal strength ofthe bourgeoisie in their struggle with the old regime. The political power of thebourgeois public lay as much in its ability to circumscribe and prohibit certainforms of knowledge and practice as in any distinctive voice found in the process ofdiscussion. The context that Koselleck has in mind, then, for the articulation of adistinctive Enlightenment ethos is not just the Republic of Letters, but thebourgeois secret societies and professional associations that policed forms ofspecialist knowledge and practice. Specific forms of knowledge of the arts andsciences became weapons in the bourgeoisies struggle with absolutism. Withrespect to political knowledge, however, there was an important ambivalence.Politics itself was a dirty word among the illuminati, an activity engaged in bythe officers of the absolutist state in their own interests. At the same time, however,the Enlightenment oversaw the flourishing of specialized political knowledges that

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sought to both explain how the inequities of the existing order had come into place,and how social institutions and practices might best be organized to meet the moralgoals to which politics should be subordinate.

Kosellecks earliest intellectual concern, then, was in documenting how aspecialized language and knowledge of the social and political domains becameestablished from the time of Hobbes to the French Revolution. This initial line ofresearch would develop into a Begriffsgeschichte of social and political thought inearly modern Germany, the impetus for a wider investigation into thetransformation of social and political concepts and language in the West in thisperiod. Such a concern with language and knowledge as the non-subject specificconditions for social and political experience is also clearly evident in Foucaultsmajor early works. In The Order of Things he traces the transformation in thecharacter of particular knowledges between the sixteenth and nineteenthcenturies.6 His main concern is with knowledge of natural history, language andeconomics in the Classical period, that is from the seventeenth to the earlynineteenth centuries, and more broadly speaking to try to understand what werethe conditions of possibility for the emergence of the human sciences in the post-Classical, or modern period. While Kosellecks Critique and Crisis focuses morereadily on the overtly political character of Enlightenment thought, it shares withThe Order of Things an emphasis on the terms and concepts that made possibleknowledge of man as the object of a new moral-cum-scientific discourse.

In his next book, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault starts out with aconsideration of a history of the longue duree, of the underlying, stable tectonicstructures that are covered with a thick layer of events, and its relation to ahistory of thought or knowledge that emphasizes contingencies, discontinuitiesand radical departures. But his aim is not to identify these two kinds of histories,at least as they appear in contemporary guises, as fundamentally divergentknowledges and practices. Rather, both address themselves to the same problem,namely the status of the document in historical research. Whereas history in itstraditional form sought to transform the monuments of the past into documents,that is to read into documents the trace of a history that lies beneath and governstheir content, in the present history strives to transform documents intomonuments. Here Foucault provides an indication of what he means by anarchaeology of knowledge: history becomes, or aspires to the intrinsicdescription of the monument.7 In this regard, there is an important point ofintersection between Kosellecks Begriffsgeschichte and the archaeologicalapproach. For Koselleck, the distinctiveness of Begriffsgeschichte lies in itsautonomy as an approach to the linguistic analysis of meaning expressed insystems of interdependent concepts. In other words, context does not of itselfprovide the key to understanding either the reference or the sense of utterancesemploying a certain social and political vocabulary. It might be said, then, thatBegriffsgeschichte, like Foucaults archaeology, is an approach primarilyconcerned not with recovering meaning, in the sense that it seeks to locate itsextra-linguistic or extra-discursive source, but with the description of particularconceptual structures and their relationship to other conceptual structures.

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Like Koselleck, one of Foucaults main concerns in writing The Archaeologyof Knowledge was to repudiate conventional histories of ideas. Recordedknowledge is not to be understood as the trace of that which lies in the exterior ofa discourse as its generative cause. It is not possible to establish general lawsthat govern the evolution of knowledge, demonstrable through the empiricalstudy of the history of thought, nor is it possible to reduce discourses to theauthority of the creative subject. An archaeology of knowledge is not a methodof interpretation, but rather provides the analytical tools necessary to studydiscourses as practices, obeying certain rules.8 It is this emphasis on theautonomy of discourse from what might be characterized as the non-discursivethat seems to place a Begriffsgeschichte and archaeology on similar grounds, atleast in terms of their formal analytical strategies. What both are concerned withare the rules that govern what can be thought and said at any given moment, andwith the transformation of those rules that takes place in the emergence of a newsemantic field or discourse.

Concepts and contestation in modernity

These similarities between Kosellecks Begriffsgeschichte and Foucaultsarchaeology require closer investigation. But it might be objected that there aresignificant differences between the work of the two that militate against furthercomparison, particularly when Foucaults turn away from archaeology togenealogy in the 1970s is considered.9 The Foucauldian practice of genealogyhighlights the specificity of discursive practices and the diversity of forms inwhich power relations are made manifest. Begriffsgeschichte, as a methodology,seems in contrast to be concerned primarily with a textual hermeneutics in whichthe meaning of concepts are derived from the context in which they are articulated.It is for this reason that a number of commentators have noted a symmetrybetween Begriffsgeschichte and the work of historians of the Cambridge School,most prominently Quentin Skinner.10 However, I would argue against the viewthat the main contribution of Kosellecks understanding of Begriffsgeschichte isthe delineation of a technique for the recovery of meaning by the placing ofconcepts in historical context. This is a misreading of Kosellecks main concerns,which from the time of Critique and Crisis and the clear influence of Carl Schmitt,have focussed on the manner in which social and political identities (and theidentity of enemies) are conceptually constructed through the operation of definiteforms of historical consciousness.

The understanding that modern social and political actors have of the present is thusstrongly shaped by a particular perspective on the past. The past is interpreted throughthe semantic field of the present, that is, the complex structure of interrelatedconcepts that provides for a shared picture of the social and political world andendows actors with a sense of place and identity. Koselleck wishes to move awayfrom the idea that this semantic field, the space of social and political ideologies, canbe read off from underlying social structures. In a key essay on Begriffsgeschichteand Social History,11 he attempts to state the relationship between a history whose


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primary object is recorded linguistic utterances, and one which focuses on that whichis unsaid yetfrom the point of view of much historical and sociological practiceisusually understood to be the cause of what is said. These non-utterances are the long-term structures and processes that are often taken to be constitutive of a social history:the organization and transformation of economic life, demographic stability andchange, legal and political institutions and practices, etc. In contrast to such a socialhistory, Begriffsgeschichte is primarily concerned with texts and words.12 Morespecifically, it is concerned with the terms and statements constitutive of social andpolitical concepts.

The proliferation of new concepts and neologisms in the German speakingworld from around 1770 onwards is, for Koselleck, indicative of a profoundtransformation of the entire political and social space of experience.13

At the same time, the concepts of social and political life in this period (whatKoselleck refers to as the Sattelzeit) do not, in contrast to what used to be thedominant view in much social history, simply represent structural change of thesocial and political at an extra-linguistic level. The constitution of this level andits fortunes are the outcome of a semantic struggle over the character of the socialand political world. For Koselleck, this conflict is a central feature of thedistinctive character of modernity:

Since the French Revolution, this struggle has become more acute and has undergone astructural shift; concepts no longer serve merely to define given states of affairs, but reachinto the future. Concepts of the future became increasingly new-minted; positions that wereto be secured first had to be formulated linguistically before it was possible to enter orpermanently occupy them . . . Actual, substantial experience and the space of expectationcoincide less and less. It is here that the coining of numerous isms belong, serving ascollective and motivating concepts capable of reordering and remobilizing anew the massesrobbed of their place in the old order of estates. The application of such expressions reached,as today, from slogan to scientifically defined concept.14

The isms, the ideologies characteristic of modernity, stand as the means by whichactors contest the nature of the social and political world, its relationship to the past,and the possible futures it permits. To properly understand the work done by theseideologies and the concepts that constitute them, we must of course be sensitive to theparticularities of context. But while at a technical level Koselleck is concerned todemonstrate the importance of synchronic analysis for a rigorous form ofBegriffsgeschichte, what motivates the approach as a whole is its emphasis on thediachronic: the rupture of conceptual meaning, the transformations that takes place inintention when a term is uttered in different contexts, and the different conceptualcontent of given terms across time. Accordingly, Begriffsgeschichte, as it attends tothe diachronic, is not primarily an attempt to explain the meaning of political texts interms of context, where that is understood as the extra- or pre-linguistic conditionsgoverning the production of the text. This is a central feature of the enterprise thatKoselleck wishes to pursue, one in which meaning is not reduced to contextunderstood in itself as its transcendental precondition. Indeed, in an importantsenseand as in Foucaults workthe whole question of meaning is bracketed off

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in this kind of Begriffsgeschichte. What determines the meaning of concepts isneither their correspondence with a social and political reality that obtains on theiroutside, nor the particular consciousnesses of historical actors. The ground ofintelligibility of social and political concepts is constituted by the system of conceptsavailable to the subjects who enunciate them. We can understand the synchronic orderaccording to the statements made employing the social and political concepts inquestion. At the same time, the understanding of change in a conceptual order is not tobe gleaned by going beyond the statements of social and political discourse to anexternal referent located either in the empirical order or in a transformed state ofhistorical consciousness.

Begriffsgeschichte, in this sense, is not occupied with the contextualisation ofconcepts. Rather, as a method it suspends context as a moment of the intelligibilityof social and political concepts. It seeks to understand transformations in meaningas these are registered in series of linguistic differences that are analysable in theirown terms.15

Hence, the diachronic principle constitutes Begriffsgeschichte as an autonomous domain ofresearch, which methodologically, in its reflection on concepts and their change, mustinitially disregard their extralinguistic contentthe specific sphere of social history.Persistence, change or novelty in the meaning of words must first be grasped before they canbe used as indices of this extralinguistic content, as indicators of social structures orsituations of political conflict.16

On the face of it, the claim for the autonomy of Begriffsgeschichte as a domain ofresearch concerned with the transformation of concepts and the semantic fields inwhich they are expressed, would seem to place it on the same kind of footing as thearchaeological method pursued by Foucault in his earlier work. The fact thatKoselleck does not seem to be interested either in the transcendental subject ofhistory of the neo-Kantian tradition in German historiography, perhaps bestrepresented by Ernst Cassirer, nor in the kind of philosophical anthropologyevident in the hermeneutics of Martin Heidegger in Being and Time and Hans-Georg Gadamer in Truth and Method,17 only serves to bolster this impression.In Foucaults archaeology, the transcendental subject is the product of ahistorically specific discourse, not the conscious and unifying agent of historicalunderstanding. At the same time, Foucault forcefully dismissed any understandingof hermeneutics as the attempt to establish, as does Gadamer and the earlyHeidegger, the truth that human beings are in essence constituted as historical andinterpretive beings.18 While Koselleck does not make any explicit philosophicalobjections to such a deep hermeneutics, the practice of Begriffsgeschichte wouldseem to be premised on its rejection. The social and political concepts we possessin the present are indeed the product of a certain understanding of these conceptsin the past, but Kosellecks particular concern is the way in which thisunderstanding has only come about in the space of recent historical time, and howit is woven into the social and political practices of the present.

Foucault was at one with Althusser in rejecting the historicist Hegelianismcommon to humanist Marxism and certain strains in phenomenological thinking.


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It is quite striking that Kosellecks understanding of Begriffsgeschichte involves asimilar, if less spectacularly announced, rejection of a Hegelian reading of thecharacter of historical consciousness. In this respect, Begriffsgeschichte is notsimply the study of Zeitgeistes or of the unified historical consciousness of anygiven context. In modernity, concepts of the social and political combine inmanifold and uneven forms in ordering the experience of actors. Experience isconceptually constituted in a complex fashion, and cannot be read off a generalregister. Social and political concepts in modernity always embody a plurality ofmeanings. They are ambiguous, even when they can be expressed clearly. Theconcept bundles up the variety of historical experience together with a collectionof theoretical and practical references into a relation that is given and can beexperienced only through the concept.19 While the function of the concept is,therefore, to order the experience of the subject, it does not follow that it does so ina routinely conservative fashion. Far from it: the concepts that give shape to socialand political life and identify the place of the subject in it are also responsible forprovoking challenges to normal experience of the order of the world. It is in thisway that Kosellecks Begriffsgeschichte points to the role of social and politicalconcepts as transformative tools, capable of changing relations in social andpolitical institutions and practices. This understanding of the transformativefunction of concepts, however, does not appear in Kosellecks work as a generaltheory of the role of conceptualization in the ordering of human experience; it isnot a philosophical anthropology. Rather what is key for a Begriffsgeschichte inthis sense is the charting of the way in which modern complexly constitutedconceptual formations, or what we might call ideologies, allow individuals tocontest and transform the character of social and political life.

As we have already seen, Koselleck argues that since the French Revolution thecontestation of social and political concepts has been of increasing importance notonly for the understanding of the world as it is experienced in the here and now, but forthe articulation of a perpetual critique of the present and the active anticipation of atransformed future. This concern can be seen most clearly in Kosellecks essays inFutures Past, where he seeks to demonstrate how this modern contestation of socialand political concepts emerged out of the Reformation and reached maturity in theeighteenth century when it appeared in the form of an acceleration of the experienceof historical time:

This self-accelerating temporality robs the present of the possibility of being experienced asthe present, and escapes into a future within which the currently unapprehendable present hasto be captured by historical philosophy. In other words, in the eighteenth century, theacceleration of time that had previously belonged to eschatology became obligatory forworldly invention, before technology completely opened up a space of experience adequateto this acceleration.20

The pace and flux of social and technological change that is experienced in thepresent (which is always experienced as a past future) is, in other words,anticipated by the secularized conception of history as a constant movementtowards the future. What is important about this conceptualization of history is that

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it emerges not just as an intellectual event, but, as is made clear in Kosellecks firstbook, Critique and Crisis, as a social and political struggle that crystallizes in theEnlightenment.

What lies at the heart of Kosellecks Begriffsgeschichte, then, is not a generalanalytic of interpretation. Kosellecks outstanding contribution, given the neo-Kantian and phenomenological milieu in which his ideas about a Begriffsgeschichtewere formed, was to radically historicize the meaning of social and political conceptsand by so doing to reveal the very conditions that make a Begriffsgeschichte itselfpossible. In other words, a conceptual history of the order Koselleck has in mind isonly possible when conceptual contestation is not confined to debates within theclassic texts. Rather the contestation of social and political concepts has itselfbecome definitive of political conflict since the late eighteenth century. A certainhistorico-philosophical consciousness has moulded politics around a permanentorientation towards the future, which requires a persistent labour of society as a wholeto overcome the limitations and dangers of the present. Concepts, in this regard, aretools for the organization of the social and political according to ultimate objectives,and as such become important objects of conflict between contending ideologicalvisions. Yet the profundity of this conceptual contestation is only partly revealed inthe notion of a clash of ideologies. While the great ideological contests of thenineteenth and twentieth centuries have been widely seen as the most obviousmanifestation of a new order of political conflict, what is at least at important is theway in which the contestation of political and social concepts has shaped thedefinition and conduct of subjects at ostensibly non-ideological levels of discourseand practice. It is here where Kosellecks account of a Begriffsgeschichte should bebrought into an encounter with the work of Foucault.

Discourse and contestation

The emphasis placed in Kosellecks work on the everyday, language and otherforms of symbolism, both as a reflection and determinant of the conceptualschemes through which we understand the world and imagine its future, is clear tosee. It is evident, for example, in his work on war memorials, where suchmonuments are seen as performing the dual function of providing a meaning forthe death of soldiers from earlier generations and at the same time reinforcingcurrent political beliefs and identities. The monument is a physical representationof various social and political conceptions of past, present and future, butsimultaneously it is also a site of contestation. War memorials and the kind ofsocial and political function they perform, Koselleck reminds us, are only madepossible in particular historical conditions:

It is not only the death of soldiers itself that serves political purposes, but the remembrance ofit is also put to political service. It shifts the memory of the death of soldiers into an inner-worldly functional context that aims only at the future of the survivors. The decline of aChristian interpretation of death thus creates a space for meaning to be purely established inpolitical and social terms.21


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Death in combat only begins to have a social and political meaning for us wherethe fragmentation and decline of a universal Christian identity has lead to itsreplacement by identification with the state and the nation, and where in modernityconflict both within and between states has been primarily organized around thecontestation of who we are, who the enemy is, and how he may be defeated inorder to realize our vision of the ideal world.

This kind of analysis represents Begriffsgeschichte at its best. It seeks to seehow concepts and ideologies are manifested in those specific practices and spacesin which social and political actors in modernity go about contesting andtransforming the world. Yet at the same time, it retains an emphasis on the distincthistorical conditions of possibility in which conceptual contestation takes place,not just on the pages of the classic texts, nor in the comfort of the philosophersstudy, but in the everyday acts that may stand for both an affirmation of and achallenge to currently constituted social and political order.

It remains the case, however, that Begriffsgeschichte more broadly understoodhas maintained its focus largely on the text in context. This is the case with theGeschichtliche Grundbegriffe and similar attempts to compile historical lexiconsof social and political concepts. But here we re-encounter the problem thatBegriffsgeschichte is rendered little more than a formal analytic of interpretation.Concepts and ideological formations come to be seen as systems that areautonomous and capable of being analysed in their own terms independently ofsocial history. The great danger here is that while it is of course possible tomaintain the analytical autonomy of conceptual history, and of social history, wesimply re-introduce an unhelpful distinction between the social and conceptual(or intellectual, or ideological), the material and ideal, context and text, and so on.To an extent, this was the problem faced by Foucault in his turn from anarchaeology of knowledge to a genealogy of practices.

We have seen that there are interesting grounds on which to compareBegriffsgeschichte and archaeology as interpretive strategies. This is not to say, ofcourse, that there are not significant differences between the two. While Kosellecktakes concepts as the object of Begriffsgeschichte, in The Archaeology ofKnowledge, Foucault presents statements as the elementary forms of any discourse.The statement, so conceived, is not identical to a proposition, a sentence, or aspeech act.22 The statement is not to be understood as a unit but rather as fulfillinga specific function within a discourse, that is the enunciative function. Thestatement functions to allow particular groups of signs to come into existence,relating them to a wider field of objects and the relations between them that aregiven by the rules of the discursive formation. Thus, for example, documents suchas maps and statistical tables can be thought of as statements, as can architecturalstructures, and social practices more broadly understood, including particularkinds of political practice. Concepts are formative of discourses in so far as theyorganize a field of statements according to specific rules governing: the order,succession or relations of dependence between statements; the grounds on whichcertain statements are included in or excluded from a discourse; and the proceduresof intervention, such as rewriting, transcription, translation, approximation, and so

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on, that involve a transformation of statements.23 In this respect, Foucault is notconcerned to demonstrate what concepts are, but rather to analyse them asfunctions. What function they fulfil within a discourse is dependent upon theparticular rules of their formation.

In this sense, then, archaeology already placed an emphasis on the notion thatthe statements constitutive of a discourse could be seen as practices, inscribed ina variety of media and spaces, and responsible for constituting subjects. While inThe Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge, the emphasis was placedon formal systems of knowledge within the human sciences, Foucault indicatesthat the archaeological method is not inappropriate for the analysis of politicalconcepts in so far as they inform practice, or what he elsewhere refers to aspolitical knowledge or political technology. In The Archaeology of Knowledge,he claims that:

One might also carry out an analysis of the same [archaeological] type on politicalknowledge. One would try to show whether the political behaviour of a society, a group, or aclass is not shot through with a particular, describable, discursive practice . . . it would definethe element in politics that can become an object of enunciation, the forms that thisenunciation may take, the concepts that are employed in it, and the strategic choices that aremade in it . . . If such a description were possible, there would be no need of course to passthrough the authority of an individual or a collective consciousness in order to grasp theplace of articulation of a political practice and theory . . . The question, for example, wouldnot be to determine from what moment a revolutionary consciousness appears, nor therespective roles of economic conditions and theoretical elucidations in the genesis of thisconsciousness; it would not attempt to retrace the general, and exemplary, biography ofrevolutionary man, or to find the origins of his project; but it would try to explain theformation of a discursive practice and a revolutionary body of knowledge that are expressedin behaviour and strategies, which give rise to a theory of society, and which operate theinterference and mutual transformation of that behaviour and those strategies.24

For Foucault, then, a history of political concepts would only be possible on theunderstanding of political knowledge as the outcome of a discursive practice ofpolitics, an ideology, that is, not in the sense of principles or beliefs that obtainindependently of a practice, but rather as the practices that allow subjects to saywhat politics is, who can say what it is, how it is ordered, and how it can betransformed.

Of course, in the 1970s Foucault came to see the notion of ideology asextremely problematic. Ideology, in its usual Marxian use, suggested that whatwas true could be opposed to it, that it was subordinate or relative to the social,economic or material infrastructure, and that it refers . . . to something of theorder of the subject.25 But if we reject this understanding of ideology and see itinstead, in broad terms, as political knowledge or technology, then there are nogrounds to reject it as an analytical concept. In this respect, then, Foucault suggeststhat there is no reason not to approach ideology in the same way that we shouldtreat more formal systems of knowledge, such as the kind of delineable andrelatively coherent body of knowledge that constitutes a scientific discursiveformation, such as modern biology, linguistics and economics. Political concepts


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have tended to be identified more readily with ideology, in the conventionalsense of a set of principles oriented towards the transformation of the world, thanwith science understood as the protocols and methods oriented towards theexplication and explanation of the world as it is given. Foucault, however, wishedto explode such a distinction. Knowledges and technologies are strategies formanaging and shaping the world and the subjects of social and political life;however neutral or objective they claim to be, the practice of such knowledgesand technologies rests on more or less concealed assumptions about what ways oflife are to be valued, which are to be opposed, and the kind of futures towardswhich we should be striving.

While Foucaults work of the 1970s does not involve an abandoning ofthe categories of discourse and archaeology in considering knowledges andtechnologies, it does recognize the limitations of an analysis that remains weddedto the notion of an entirely self-contained discourse, or an episteme, that is to beexplicated from its interior. The shortcomings of archaeology, in this regard, musthave been most apparent when considering the character of political knowledgesand technologies in modernity. The analysis of the effects of political ideology onpractices, and of practices on political ideology, were an obvious concern of thegenealogical approach that Foucault pursued in the later part of his life. This kind ofgenealogy rejects the metahistorical deployment of ideal significations andindefinite teleologies and opposes itself to the search for origins.26 What wefind instead is an attempt to trace the emergence of discursive practices in theinterplay of knowledge and power that takes place within specific kinds of socialrelations and institutions. To an extent, this had also been Foucaults aim in hisearlier work, namely Madness and Civilisation and The Birth of the Clinic.27

However, in the work that leads up to the publication of Discipline and Punish,28

the focus on the political character of the formation of discursive practices comes tothe fore. Thus, in Discipline and Punish itself, Foucault is concerned primarily withstrategies of power that work on individual bodies to ensure that individuals adhereto certain, often concealed, norms of action. A similar focus on biopower isevident in the first volume of the History of Sexuality, where Foucault chartsthe development of knowledges and technologies aimed at stipulating norms ofsexuality and modes of sexual prohibition in the nineteenth century.29

Foucaults relatively novel understanding of the productive character of poweris clearly evident in these earlier genealogies, but what is perhaps overlooked isthe way in which political knowledges and technologies can have destablising, aswell as normativising effects. The shaping of man as a political subject from theseventeenth century onwards involves manifold strategies of power concerningthe governance of the population as a whole, on the one hand, and the governanceof the individual on the other. These strategies have the effect of producingsubjects who possess the capacity to contest current forms of social and politicalknowledges and practices. This is something that Foucault recognizes more fullyin his development of a macrophysics of power, or, in other words, the tracing ofhow an economy of the entire state had developed from the sixteenth century,which means exercising towards its inhabitants, and the wealth and behaviour of

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each and all, a form of surveillance and control as attentive as that of the head of afamily over his household and his goods.30 While this governmental rationality,or governmentality, would seem to indicate the saturation of politics by a scienceand technology concerned with the disposition of men and things, it does notforeclose the possibility of political contestation, as is witnessed in the birth ofsecular ideological conflict around the same time as the development of theprincipal modern technology of population: political economy.31 In part, suchpolitical contestation is a consequence of the movement that emerges in theReformation and Counter-Reformation which raises the issue of how we must bespiritually ruled and lead on the earth in order to achieve eternal salvation.32 Wemight say that what we see in the Reformation is the birth of a dialectic ofenlightenment, in which politics is associated on the one hand with politicalknowledges that are oriented towards the control and compulsion of men andthings, and on the other hand with political knowledges (which we might describeas ideologies) that are concerned with a secularized soteriology, in other words,how emancipation can be achieved in the present by the reformation of social andpolitical institutions and practices.

In his essay on The Subject and Power, Foucault quite explicitly states thatmodern struggles against subjection, that is, against forms of subjectivity andsubmission, recapitulate the struggles of: All those movements that took place inthe fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which had the Reformation as their mainexpression and result [and which] should be analysed as a great crisis of the Westernexperience of subjectivity and a revolt against the kind of religious and moral powerthat gave form, during the Middle Ages, to this subjectivity. The need to take a directpart in spiritual life, in the work of salvation, in the truth that lies in the Bookallthat was a struggle for a new subjectivity.33 In the present day, the form of powerthat found its first expression in the early Christian religion and was resurgent in theProtestant Reformation, that is, pastoral power, has lost its ecclesiastical setting buthas nonetheless been integrated by the modern state as a technique of power. Thefocus of pastoral power is both on care for the community as a whole, and care forthe individual as the subject of salvation. This accounts for the tendency of themodern state both towards totalization, in the sense that people within giventerritories are provided with a sense of solidarity through symbols of nationalidentity, and individuation, in the sense that the liberty, well-being, dignity, rights,and so on, of the individual are given priority over the demands of the communityfor individual sacrifice. In this regard, the technology of pastoral power makes forthe great elective affinity between nationalism and liberalism. But more than this,the diffusion of pastoral power through a variety of social institutionsnot just thestate but welfare societies, the family, private associations and firmsmakes thisemphasis on the individual subversive. Again, it is not inappropriate to draw aparallel with the way in which the theological practice and doctrine of justificationsola fide in the Reformation had manifold political effects, from consolidatingsupport for sovereign territorial rulers in national reformed churches, to the rejectionof all existing spiritual and temporal authority by radicals like Thomas Muntzer andthe Anabaptists.


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While Foucault does not use the terminology as such, part of what he is doing inthese reflections on the character of pastoral power is to suggest that there is noway in which to clearly distinguish political knowledges and technologies,understood as the instrumental means by which social and political life areorganized, from political ideologies, understood in the conventional sense of aset of fairly coherent and consciously held values shared by like-minded andplaced people. Both political technologies and ideologies are instantiated in thepractices of government and politics broadly conceived. A similar point issuggested in Kosellecks account of the rise of Enlightenment critique and itsattitude towards the relationship between the arenas of the political and thesocial.34 In his essay, What is Enlightenment?, Foucault amplified the sense inwhich the Enlightenment marks the emergence of an attitude or ethos thatcharacterizes modernity, and in which practices concerned with how the subject isconstituted can be envisaged simultaneously as a technological type of rationalityand as strategic games of liberties.35 His delineation of this critical attitude orethos as a way of thinking and feeling as well as a way of acting and behavingthat at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as atask,36 is intended both as a characterization of modernity in general and as theonly point from which a critique of the present can be constructed. Foucaultsclaim, then, that modernity is the permanent reactivation of [this] attitude37

shares much in common with Kosellecks portrayal of a modernity marked by aperpetual critique of the present that emerges from a constant anticipation of thefuture. It is the case that for both Foucault and Koselleck, this perpetual critique ofthe present is one that is political in characterit is concerned with social andpolitical actors defining both the subjects and objects of politics in relation tospecific semantic fields or discourses.

In What is Enlightenment?, Foucault presents a typically complex definitionof that phenomenon:

We must never forget that the Enlightenment is an event, or a set of events and complexhistorical processes, that it is located at a certain point in the development of Europeansocieties. As such, it includes elements of social transformation, types of politicalinstitutions, forms of knowledge, projects of rationalisation of knowledge and practices,technological mutations that are very difficult to sum up in a word, even if many of thesephenomena remain important today. The one I have pointed out, which seems to me to havebeen at the basis of an entire form of philosophical reflection, concerns only the mode ofreflective relation to the present.38

This reflective relation to the present is to be understood, then, as only onemoment of the Enlightenment, but nevertheless a persistent one that acts as thecontinuing condition of possibility of the kind of genealogical approach andcritique that Foucault was concerned to pursue. It is here where genealogy canhelp to illuminate the purpose of any conceptual history of the present. In thisrespect genealogy will not deduce from the form of what we are what it isimpossible for us to do and to know; but it will separate out from the contingencythat has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking

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what we are, do, or think.39 Ian Hacking has referred to this kind of approach ashistorical ontology, which is not so much about the formation of character as aboutthe space of possibilities for character formation that surround a person, and createthe potentials for individual experience. As Hacking points out, such a historicalontology may at one level be about the formation of persons in clearly delineatedpractices, such as those today associated with child development, but it mightalso be concerned with larger organising concepts such as those that constitutepolitical ideologies.40

Conclusion

We can then envisage a Begriffsgeschichte and an historical ontology of social andpolitical actors, that is the way in which various concepts, technologies andideologies, function to provide individuals with an understanding of the social andpolitical world, their place in it, and the kind of future to which we should aspire.But what I have tried to show is that if we read Koselleck and Foucault in tandem,what we take out of their texts is not any kind of straightforward or one-way socialor ideological determination of social and political actors. What the work of bothKoselleck and Foucault strongly suggests is that in modernity individuals areequipped with the linguistic and social resources to contest, that this diffusion anddemocratization of contestation is something peculiar to modernity, and that it iswhat makes possible the very practice of a Begriffsgeschichte or an historicalontology of the social and political. If we think of this process in Althusserianterms, individuals in modernity are interpellated by ideology not so much assubjects (though employing a rather narrow understanding of the subject as thesubject of subjection, in a way that tends to overemphasize the negative andrepressive character of ideology), but as combatants. Ideologies in the modernworld call to individuals to take up arms in a struggle against a definite enemy:whether that be the corrupt order of absolutism or authoritarianism, the capitalistclass, ethnic or racial outsiders, global terrorists, and so on. It requires of them thedefence of a set of values and a vision of a future, however, not by force of armsalone but by the employment of reason, argument and evidence. The manifesto ofthe modern political party was not designed as an advertising tool, but as apedagogic weapon for the effective politicization of the masses.

A reading of Koselleck and Foucault in concert, then, provides a way intounderstanding how modern political actors are constituted, and the effects thatthose actors produce in terms of constituting political subjects and objects.Kosellecks Begriffsgeschichte is central in this respect, because it presents us withthe need to focus on the constitutive role of social and political concepts, not as areflection of social and political reality, nor as that which constitutes it in anystraightforward causal sense. Rather, what social and political concepts do is to actas the conditions of possibility for the experience of political actors, both in thesense that they describe and delimit the political while simultaneously providingthe resources for a transformation of political discourses and practices. Politicalconcepts do not so much construct the political as provide the grounds on which


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political actors construct the political. For example, contestation over what ismeant by democracy, what the practices of democratic governance should involve,and which spaces of social life are appropriate to democratic organization, havehad a profound bearing on drawing political dividing lines and shaping politicalidentities in modern times. What a Begriffsgeschichte, properly practised, shoulddo is not simply delineate the various linguistic applications the term democracyhas had in particular times and places, but how these various applications are tiedinto specific struggles over political practices and spaces. This kind of approacheffectively repudiates criticisms of Kosellecks Begriffsgeschichte for notsufficiently recognising the role of agency in the process of change.41 This isonly the case if we understand Kosellecks concern to remain at the level of theformal delineation of systems of concepts. Yet we have seen that while this is anindispensable feature of Begriffsgeschichte, it is a mode of analysis adopted as anecessary initial step for the understanding of the conditions of possibility for theexperience of social and political actors. Concepts, in this sense, do not lead a lifeof their own, but are rather manifested in the discourses and practices in whichsocial and political actors engage.42

Kosellecks Begriffsgeschichte, then, recognizes that social and politicalconcepts render possible the experience of modern political actors and that,moreover, the contestation of these concepts is a central feature of modernity.As we have seen, it is this characteristic of social and political life in the modernworld that Koselleck acknowledges to be the very condition of possibility ofany conceptual history. The contestation of the fields of the social and political iswhat constitutes the distinct identity of modernity as it emerges out of theEnlightenment; it is what gives rise to the great secular ideological contests ofthe past 200 years; and it provides a form of historical consciousness throughwhich a Begriffsgeschichte can focus both on the constitution of the present andthe possibilities for its transformation. But while Kosellecks claim that politicalexperience is both a product and limitation of the conceptual formation ofsocial and political agents is one that should be taken with utmost seriousness,the practice of Begriffsgeschichte to date has indeed largely remained within theparameters of formal linguistic analysis. What it fails to illuminate, then, arethe specific ways in which conceptual contestation works to produce politicalknowledges and agents within particular kinds of social and political practices. It isin this respect that the kind of genealogical approach pioneered by Foucault, inwhich power operates not necessarily as a form of oppression but as the mediumthrough which actors constitute political subjects and objects, proves an essentialtool for the analysis of political knowledge and actors.

This marriage of Begriffsgeschichte and genealogy can shed light on the ways inwhich political thought, language, and action operate in the present. It allows us tosee how social and political concepts are central for the formation of politicalactors, but also how the contestation of such concepts is a central feature ofmodern politics. This is not to say that contestation or antagonism in itself operatesas the limit condition of political identity, for as Koselleck has shown suchantagonism is definitive only of a certain kind of historical consciousness

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characteristic of social and political modernity. We cannot expect, then, that bydrawing on Koselleck and Foucault we can hope to explain political discourses orideologies in general. Their work cannot support a meta-theory of politics. Ratherit aids only in the more modest enterprise of demonstrating how we can conceiveof ideology as forming social and political actors while maintaining that thecontests and struggles in which those actors participate are key for understandingsocial, political and ideological transformations in the modern world.

Notes and References

1. L. Althusser, Ideology and ideological state apparatuses in Lenin and Philosophy (New York: MonthlyReview Press), pp. 127186.

2. M. Richter, The History of Social and Political Concepts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 34.3. Richter, Ibid; see also K. Tribe, The Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe Project: From history of ideas to

conceptual history. A review article, Comparative Studies in History and Society, 31, (1), January 1989,pp. 180184.

4. R. Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, MA:The MIT Press, 1988).

5. J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Polity, 1989).6. M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2002).7. M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 48.8. Foucault, Ibid, pp. 155, 156.9. Starting with Discipline and Punish, Foucaults work of the 1970s and 1980s is often understood as marking

an abandonment of his earlier concern with the archaeology of knowledge, where the focus was on theinternal structure of systems of thought, towards an investigation of the manifold way in which variousknowledges and techniques, embodied in social practices and institutions, have acted historically inconstituting subjects. But as Dreyfus and Rabinow have claimed, it is a mistake to characterize Foucaultswork as marking a straightforward turn from archaeology to genealogy. Rather, [f]rom his earliest daysFoucault has used variants of a strict analysis of discourse (archaeology) and paid a more general attention tothat which conditions, limits, and institutionalizes discursive formations (genealogy). There is no pre- andpost-archaeology or genealogy. However, the weighting and conception of these approaches has changedduring the development of his work. See H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: BeyondStructuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 104.

10. See Richter, op cit, Ref. 2.11. R. Koselleck, Futures Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), pp. 7592.12. Koselleck, Ibid, p. 75.13. Koselleck, Ibid, p. 79.14. Koselleck, Ibid, p. 80.15. Koselleck, Ibid, p. 82.16. Koselleck, Ibid, p. 83.17. M. Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962); H.-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method (London:

Continuum, 2004). It is, however, true that Heidegger and Gadamer had an important influence onKosellecks view of Begriffsgeschichte in so far as they stressed the primarily historical character of self-understanding.

18. See Dreyfus and Rabinow, op cit, Ref. 9, pp. xiixiii.19. Koselleck, op cit, Ref. 11, p. 85.20. Koselleck, Ibid, p. 22.21. R. Koselleck, War memorials: Identity formations of the survivors in The Practice of Conceptual History:

Timing History, Spacing Concepts (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), p. 291.22. Foucault, op cit, Ref. 7, pp. 9093.23. Ibid, pp. 6270.24. Ibid, pp. 214215.25. M. Foucault, Truth and Power in James D. Faubion (Ed.), Essential Works of Foucault, 195484, volume

3: Power (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 119.


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26. M. Foucault, Nietzsche, genealogy, history, in James D. Faubion (Ed.), Essential Works of Foucault,195484, volume 2: Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 370.

27. M. Foucault, Madness and Civilisation (London: Routledge, 2001); The Birth of the Clinic (London:Routledge, 2003).

28. M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish (London: Penguin, 1991).29. M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1981).30. M. Foucault. Governmentality, in James D. Faubion (Ed.), Essential Works of Foucault, 195484, volume

3: Power (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 207.31. Foucault, Ibid, p. 217.32. Foucault, Ibid, p. 202.33. M. Foucault, The subject and power, in James D. Faubion (Ed.), Essential Works of Foucault, 195484,

volume 3: Power (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 332.34. Koselleck, op cit, Ref. 4.35. M. Foucault, What is enlightenment?, in James D. Faubion (Ed.), Essential Works of Foucault, 195484,

volume 1:Ethics (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 319.36. Ibid, p. 309.37. Ibid, p. 312.38. Ibid, p. 313.39. Ibid, pp. 315316.40. I. Hacking, Historical Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 23.41. M. Bevir, Begriffsgeschichte, History and Theory, 39 (2), May 2000, pp. 273284. Quote on p. 280.42. Ibid

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