journal of the history of ideas volume 48 issue 2 1987 [doi 10.2307%2f2709557] richter, melvin --...

Begriffsgeschichte and the History of IdeasAuthor(s): Melvin RichterSource: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 48, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1987), pp. 247-263Published by: University of Pennsylvania PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2709557 .Accessed: 17/06/2014 02:52

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BEGRIFFSGESCHICHTE AND THE HISTORY OF IDEAS

BY MELVIN RICHTER

I. More than twenty years ago, in a still indispensable paper, Maurice Mandelbaum distinguished the history of ideas as practiced by A. O. Lovejoy and his school from both intellectual history and the history of philosophy. In an aside Professor Mandelbaum noted that running par- allel to American "history of ideas" had been a German movement originating with Dilthey. This was being revived in post-war Germany by Erich Rothacker in collaboration with Hans-Georg Gadamer and Joachim Ritter in the pages of their Archiv fur Begriffsgeschichte. But it was not Professor Mandelbaum's purpose either to deal with this German movement or to explain the title of its journal. Thereafter American historians of ideas have heard little about Begriffsgeschichte. This paper will survey developments within this German genre during the past two decades.

In 1967 two far-reaching projects were announced in the Archivfur Begriffsgeschichte. After twenty years, these extraordinary reference works, although still in progress, have been creating a new genre. Both lexicons merit the attention of scholars writing in English on the history of ideas and intellectual history. Recently a third German work along analogous lines has begun to appear. It promises to be no less significant than its two predecessors.

Begriffsgeschichte (the history of concepts or conceptual history), although bearing upon the history of ideas, of philosophy, and of political and social thought, nevertheless has its own distinctive problems, matter, and methods. The three major German works applying this mode of inquiry are the Historisches Wirterbuch der Philosophie (A Dictionary of Philosophy on Historical Principles), hereafter cited as HWP; the Ge- schichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur Politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland (Basic Concepts in History. A Dictionary on His- torical Principles of Political and Social Language in Germany), hereafter cited as GG; the Handbuch politisch-sozialer Grundbegriffe in Frankreich,

* Research for this paper was made possible by support from the Earhart Foundation, the Herzog-August-Bibliothek, Wolfenbiittel; the Institute for Advanced Study, and the PSC-CUNY Research Award Program of the City University of New York. The author wished to acknowledge-with thanks-their indispensable aid as well as that of Professors Reinhart Koselleck, Christian Meier, Thomas Nipperdey, Manfred Riedel, Rudolf Vier- haus, and Drs. Horst Giinther and Rolf Reichardt.

1 Maurice Mandelbaum, "The History of Ideas, Intellectual History, and the History of Philosophy," History and Theory, Beiheft 5 (1965), 33-66.

247

Copyright 1987 by JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS, INC.


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1680-1820 (A Handbook of Basic Political and Social Concepts in France, 1680-1820), hereafter cited as the Handbook.2

Begriffsgeschichte has developed out of older German traditions of philology, the history of philosophy, hermeneutics, legal history, and historiography. Its immediate predecessors are the German specialties of Geistesgeschichte and Ideengeschichte. Yet the GG and the Handbook break new ground in their efforts to connect conceptual to social history. Both attempt contextual analyses of concepts and their history; both seek to relate conceptualized thought to structural changes in government, society, and economy. Another innovation is their effort to determine which concepts were used or contested by determinate groups, strata, orders, and classes, both before and during periods of crisis, conflict, and revolution.

Ostensibly works of reference, recording rather than adding to knowledge, these publications are in many regards strikingly original. Although the GG and HWP are meant to be limited to the use of concepts in German-speaking Europe, and the Handbook to France, these lexicons deliver rather more than they promise. They provide new information about the meanings and uses of words and concepts in classical, medieval, and modem languages. These three applications of Begriffsgeschichte have already set standards of excellence for the historical study of the concepts and semantic fields that constitute vocabularies: philosophical, political, social, legal, and economic. Thus their findings deserve attention not only from historians of ideas, but from philosophers of language, as well as those concerned with language, discourses, and historiography. Indeed Begriffsgeschichte has much to contribute to our current concerns with the implications of language and discourses for the writing of intellectual history and the history of ideas.

Despite differences in their matter and method, these three German lexicons bear a distinct family resemblance. Both their programs and actual practices diverge significantly from the history of ideas or intellectual history as written by Anglophone scholars. Yet Begriffsgeschichte, at least in the GG and Handbook, also marks a deliberate break with earlier German styles of analysis. These include the Geistesgeschichte exemplified by Dilthey and Rothacker, who wrote cultural and intellectual history in terms of those unique views of the world (Weltanschauun- gen) said to animate and unify spiritual aspects of societies or epochs. Another target of the GG and HWP is the work of Meinecke and his school, that is, an Ideengeschichte (history of ideas) that allegedly fails

2 Historisches Worterbuch der Philosophie, eds. Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Griinder (6 vols.; Basel, 1971-). Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur Politisch- Sozialer Sprache in Deutschland, eds. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, Reinhart Koselleck (5 vols.; Stuttgart, 1972-). Handbuch politisch-sozialer Grundbegriffe in Frankreich 1680- 1820, eds. Rolf Reichardt and Eberhard Schmitt, in collaboration with Gerd van den Heuvel and Anette Hofer (2 vols., Heft 1/2 and 3/4; Miinchen, 1985-).


LOVEJOY AND THE GREAT CHAIN 249

to relate its subject to specific groups or to those political, social, and economic structures within which they function. Another important move is to distinguish the method of Begriffsgeschichte from earlier philological analyses relying upon the history of individual words (Wortergeschichte) or ontological arguments based on their alleged etymology. Of the three, only the HWP concerns itself with the history of what its professional practitioners, that is, philosophers, consider to be its persisting theoretical problems (Problemgeschichte) and the history of its technical terms (Ter- minologiegeschichte).

I shall sketch the characteristics of Begriffsgeschichte as a genre and point out some of the differences in theory and practice among its German practitioners. Finally, I shall attempt a summary comparison of their work to that of A. O. Lovejoy and the school represented in this Journal since its initial publication fifty years ago.3

II. In what follows, the reader should remember that what is being discussed are not programmatic statements. Of these three projects, the GG is virtually completed; the HWP, more than half-finished; the Hand- book, just beginning to appear. The GG and HWP were announced in 1967, the Handbook in 1982.4

Although their primary focus is German-speaking Europe, the GG is the most intensive history of political and social concepts yet attempted, while the HWP contains perhaps the most extensive treatment of philosophical terms and problems available anywhere. In its treatment of French political and social concepts between 1680 and 1820, the Hand- book covers much of the GG's repertoire but differs from its predecessor's method. Despite variations among these three lexicons, they share a common emphasis on concepts as their unit of analysis. None of them contains articles on individual thinkers as does the Encyclopedia of Phi- losophy. While the GG and Handbook deal exclusively with the history of political and social concepts, the focus of the HWP is not so precisely defined. Dealing with philosophy in general, it contains many articles on the history of concepts. But many subjects such as logic are not treated in this way.

Despite its editors' original decision to restrict its scope to philosophy written in German, the HWP includes the terminology and concepts of most philosophical schools today, including many outside Europe. Its definition of philosophy is ecumenical, its coverage, vast in scope. The

3 A more detailed account of the theories and methods applied in the HWP and GG is given in my "Conceptual History (Begriffsgeschichte) and Political Theory," in Political Theory 14 (1986), 604-37. 4 Rolf Reichardt, "Pour une histoire des mots-themes socio-politiques en France (1680-1820)," Mots, 5 (1982), 189-202, and "Zur Geschichte politisch-sozialer Begriffe in Frankreich zwischen Absolutismus und Restauration," Zeitschrift fir Literaturwis- senschaft und Linguistik, 47 (1982), 49-74.


250 MELVIN RICHTER

total number of pages in print already exceeds 6,700; in six volumes, it has reached the letter "M." Eight volumes were planned; the final figure may reach twelve. The longest article, on Gott, runs to almost 100 pages with 890 footnotes; it was executed by a team of scholars, as have been many entries in the GG.

Begriffsgeschichte as practiced in the HWP remains close to the history of philosophy as treated by German scholars since the eighteenth century.5 The HWP was indeed first conceived in the 1920s by Rothacker in terms of that part of Diltheyan Geistesgeschichte which dealt with the history of philosophical concepts. Although this method was abandoned by the HWP's first editor, Joachim Ritter, traces of Rothacker's project are discernible in many articles that treat Begriffsgeschichte as a com- bination of the histories of philosophical terminology and of persisting philosophical problems. In the HWP, the history of concepts is written as part of the internal history of philosophy and related disciplines, and thus excludes social history. In the Federal Republic Begriffsgeschichte in this mode is considered by philosophers to constitute a specialized sub-discipline of their subject.

The heritage of Geistesgeschichte is also evident in the HWP's lack of interest in the political and social membership of either thinkers or their audience. The emphasis of the HWP falls principally upon the use of concepts of philosophers, theologians, political, social, and legal theorists; and such scientists as have affected philosophy. Seldom do contributors to the HWP attempt to relate conceptual changes either to the social position of philosophers and other thinkers or to structural changes in state, society, or economy. It was in part because of such omissions that German historians in the 1950s and 60s launched systematic criticisms of Geistesgeschichte and the related form of Ideengeschichte as written by Dilthey, Meinecke, and their followers.6

Begriffsgeschichte in the form specific to the GG had another origin, and this was in a specialized branch of historical study.7 Since the end of the nineteenth century, German medievalist historians had engaged in philological criticism of their textual sources.8 Their purpose was to recover those meanings of medieval concepts subsequently lost or altered.

This line of inquiry was later carried forward by one of the original editors of the GG, Otto Brunner. Attacking earlier work as anachronistic, Brunner investigated such concepts as "land" or "territory" (terra, Land) and "rule," "dominion," or "lordship" (dominium, Herrschaft)

5 H. G. Meier, "Begriffsgeschichte," HWP, I, 791-92. 6 J6m Riisen, "Theory of History in the Development of West German Historical

Studies," Germanic Studies Review (1984), 11-25. 7 Gerd van den Heuvel, "Begriffsgeschichte, Historische Semantik," in Handbuch

der Geschichtsdidatik, eds. Werner Boldt and F. Baumgart (Diisseldorf, 1985), 194. 8 H. K. Schulze, "Medidvistik und Begriffsgeschichte" in R. Koselleck, ed., Historische

Semantik und Begriffsgeschichte (Stuttgart, 1979), 242-61.



as used in medieval and early modem documents. In Brunner's view, previous studies of land tenure and authority relationships had been distorted by the use of categories that conformed neither to linguistic usage in the past nor to those actual practices registered by the concepts then in use. Thus the social reality of the past could be accurately described only after historians had retrieved the meanings of concepts actually employed during the period under investigation. Brunner held that the interposition of such modern terms as "feudalism," "society," and the "state" had distorted both the problems historians set themselves and their empirical findings.

Brunner had his own reasons for condemning Geistesgeschichte and Ideengeschichte because of their failure to connect ideas and concepts to their political and social settings. In some regards Brunner's notion of social history resembled that of the Annales school; in others, his mode of combining conceptual with social history resembled the Wissensso- ziologie developed by Karl Mannheim from the Marxist theory of ide- ology. But because these several modes of writing history originated in very different political and intellectual orientations, the practitioners of each viewed the other with suspicion.9

Although Brunner had done much to prepare the way for the GG, because of illness and age, he played a relatively small role in its actual development and execution. The group that translated the GG into reality originated in a workshop for modem social history organized at Hei- delberg by another of the GG's editors, Werner Conze.10 In an early statement (1966), Conze characterized the lexicon's objectives as a "se- rious version of historicism."11 By this he meant a method that would integrate social history into its treatment of concepts. These aspirations were again stated in the 1967 programmatic article by Reinhart Koselleck, the GG's third editor and its most brilliant theorist and practitioner.12

The history of concepts, long among the subjects of Geistesgeschichte, now was to be linked in the GG to changes in the political, social, and economic structures of Europe. To maintain such a balance between

9 This tendency persists among German social historians. See Hans-Ulrich Wehler, "Historiography in Germany Today," in Observations on "The Spiritual Situation of the Age," ed. Jiirgen Habermas (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 235, n. 26, where he lists a number of social historians who share his own negative estimate of Begriffsgeschichte.

0 W. Conze, "Zur Griindung des Arbeitskreis fur moderne Sozialgeschichte," in Hambirger Jahrbuch fuir Wirtschafts- und Gesellschaftspolitik, 24 (1979), 23-32. 11

"Histoire des notions dans le domaine socio-politique," in Roland Mousnier (ed.), Problemes de la stratification sociale (Paris, 1968), 34.

12 "Richtlinienen fur das Lexikon politisch-sozialer Begriffe der Neuzeit," in Archiv fur Begriffsgeschichte 11 (1967), 91. Koselleck's work in Begriffsgeschichte is best represented in his own contributions to the GG, some of which are among the longest and best contained in it: "Revolution," "Geschichte, Historie," "Krise." His collection of essays, Vergangene Zukunft (Frankfurt, 1979) has been translated by Keith Tribe as Futures Past (Cambridge, Mass., 1985).


252 MELVIN RICHTER

concept and structure required that the two younger editors become genuine converts to each other's original concern: Conze to Begriffsge- schichte, Koselleck to social history. They did so. Another indispensable member of the working group was Christian Meier, among the few classicists to specialize in political thought. He coedited the fourth volume and has made distinguished contributions to many of the GG's articles dealing with concepts of ancient Greek or Roman provenience.

The GG charts the careers of political and social concepts in German- speaking Europe with particular attention to the century from approxi- mately 1750-1850. It was in that period that distinctively moder political and social concepts were shaped in forms which both registered and shaped the rapid but persisting transformations of governmental, social, and economic structures. As one contributor has remarked, the GG is among the few reference works since the l'Encyclopedie to have been written with a specific set of theoretical concerns. The Handbook has an equally detailed but dissimilar theoretical program.

What is the GG's project? It is to test the hypothesis that the basic concepts used in the political and social language of German-speaking "old Europe" (Alt Europa) were transformed during the period Koselleck calls the Sattelzeit, between 1750 and 1850. Begriffsgeschichte is used to track the advent, perception, and effects of modernity in German-speaking Europe, where it took on a distinctive form. The GG treats the accelerated speed (Beschleunigung) of conceptual shifts in meaning during this period as both effect and cause. Concepts both registered and affected the transformations of governmental, social, and economic structures.

The method of the GG is meant to combine the study of the language used to discuss state, society, and economy with identifications of the groups, strata, orders, and classes that used or contested this language. This program requires contributors (occasionally individuals, more often teams) to look back as far as classical antiquity and forward to the usages of our own time. The GG's objective is to identify three types of political and social concepts, each defined in terms of German usage at the present day: traditional concepts such as "democracy," the meaning of which may still be retrieved and understood; concepts such as "civil society" and "state," whose earlier meanings have been so effaced from usage since the Sattelzeit that they can now be understood only after scholarly reconstruction of their earlier meanings; and neologisms such as "Cae- sarism," "fascism," or "Marxism," coined in the course of revolutionary transformations they helped shape or interpret.

What is specifically moder in such concepts? High on the agenda of the GG are a number of hypotheses about conceptual developments during the Sattelzeit: 1) Verzeitlichung, the disposition to insert moder political and social concepts into one or another philosophy of history set out teleologically in terms of periods, phases, or stages of development. 2) Demokratisierung (democratization) of political and social vocabu-



lares, which prior to this period had been specialized and relatively restricted to elite strata. During the eighteenth century profound changes occurred in the manner of reading, what was read, the political messages delivered, and the size of the audiences to which they were directed. 3) Ideologiesierbarkeit, the ease with which concepts could be incorporated into ideologies. Under the systems of estates and orders characteristic of Europe during the ancien regime, political and social concepts tended to be specific and particularistic, referring in the singular to well-defined social gradations, such as the liberties of the Burger of a city; but beginning in the eighteenth century, those older terms remaining in use began to become more general in their social reference, more abstract in meaning and hence, in the form of "isms" or singular nouns like "liberty," easily fitted into open-ended formulae that could be defined variously by com- peting movements and groups that sought large-scale adherence. 4) Pol- itisierung (politicization) of concepts. As old regime social groupings, regional units, and constitutional identifications were broken down by revolution, war, and economic change, political and social concepts became more susceptible to use as weapons among antagonistic classes, strata, and movements.

How were such wide-ranging generalizations to be tested? In its man- ifestos the editors of the GG insist upon three methodological principles. 1) The resources of Begriffsgeschichte and social history must be used conjointly. There is a dynamic interaction between conceptual and social changes; only by using both types of history can continuities, modifi- cations, and innovations be detected. 2) Because language is both an agent and an indicator of structural changes, research into the history of concepts must adapt to its own purposes a battery of methods derived from philology, historical semantics, and structural linguistics. When identifying and tracing concepts, Begriffsgeschichte regularly uses both diachronic and synchronic analyses of language, relies upon both semasiology and onomasiology, and analyses the semantic fields of political and social language.13 3) Conceptual usage and change are to be established by analyzing materials unusually broad in range, discrepant in origin and appeal, and covering as many social formations as possible.

These sources include major thinkers in German philosophy, political, social, and economic theory, jurisprudence, theology, and less often, literature. Information about usage of political and social terms by both elite and other groups, strata, and classes is to be gathered from news- papers, journals, pamphlets, reports and speeches in assemblies; in documents originating in governmental, administrative, and legal bu- reaucracies; and in memoirs, correspondence, and diaries. Finally, it is requisite to survey systematically dictionaries (German, bilingual, and

13 These terms are explained in my "Conceptual History and Political Theory," op. cit., 621-27.


254 MELVIN RICHTER

multilingual) in each period treated comparatively, as well as apposite entries in encyclopedias, handbooks, and thesauri. No previous work has so successfully made systematic use of such materials as sources for establishing past political and social vocabularies.

Of the GG's six projected substantive volumes, five are in print. They total more than 5,000 pages. The publication of the sixth volume is in sight, and this unprecedented project will be completed by a seventh volume devoted to a comprehensive computerized index. About 120 concepts make up the GG's repertoire. Thus far articles average 50 pages; they occasionally exceed 100. The longest to date, and among the most brilliant, is on Revolution, which runs to 135 pages and 778 footnotes.

In the view of this reader, the GG is full of extraordinarily rich and novel scholarly discoveries and insights. For anyone genuinely interested in political and social theories and their context, this work is indispensable. Because its unique theoretical program provides an unifying frame- work and because of the quality of its contributors' scholarship, the GG must be ranked among the great reference works. It scarcely need be said that articles vary considerably both in quality and in their authors' adherence to the GG's program; and no doubt, like any other type of scholarship, the GG's work will be criticized and revised. Yet its inter- disciplinary value is already apparent. Although the GG is a collaborative work by teams of specialists, individual scholars have already begun to use its methods and adapt them to their own interests.14

The Handbook is the newest of the lexicons. Published in volumes of about 200 pages, it first appeared in 1985. Its emphasis is on concepts used prior to, during, and after the French Revolution; on social history; on popular mentalities as conceived by historians of the Annales school, rather than on major thinkers; on French lexicometry and discourse analysis; and on the sociology of knowledge as formulated by Berger and Luckmann, that is, treating language as primarily social and creating operative definitions of reality.15 A common set of carefully chosen sources are prescribed for use by all contributors. With a repertoire of 150 political and social concepts, many of which also figure in the GG, the Handbook's length has been projected as about 3,000 pages. The first subject treated was Philosophe, Philosophie, (76 pages, 268 footnotes); the second, Terreur, Terroriste, Terrorisme (44 pages, 175 footnotes).16

"4 See the path-breaking study by Kurt Raaflaub, Die Entdeckung der Freiheit. Zur historisches Semantik und Gesellschaftsgeschichte eines politischen Grundbegriffs der Griechen (Munich, 1985). Arnold J. Heidenheimer has made perceptive use of the GG in "Politics and Linguistics," Review of Politics, 48 (1986), 3-30. Valuable books, in- corporating contributions to the GG, have also begun to appear; e.g., Horst Giinther, Freiheit, Herrschaft und Semantik (Frankfurt, 1979).

15 Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (N.Y., 1966).

16 The first article is by one of the principal editors, Rolf Reichardt, and Hans Ulrich



The Handbook begins with a highly informative, lucid, and well- argued introduction of 110 pages that is both methodological and substantive. Rolf Reichardt, speaking for the editors, sets out the Handbook's primary goals and techniques for attaining them. The Handbook is presented as a historical semantics designed for use in.the social history of the French ancien regime beginning with 1680 and continuing that social history through the Revolution, and Restoration (up to 1820). Its editors perceive the Handbook as situated between French Lexicometrie and German Begriffsgeschichte, that is, between the quantitative, computer- aided methods developed at Saint-Cloud for studying political vocabularies, and the less precise but more theoretical, qualitative, and inter- pretative approach of the GG.

Begriffsgeschichte in the GG, as Reichardt sees it, has not been al- together successful in its efforts to show how German-speaking Europe conceptualized the great series of structural changes connected with the advent of modernity. The GG uses a method that combines the history of concepts with social history. Koselleck admits that there is a tension between Begriffs- and Sozialgeschichte; yet in his view the tension is not only fruitful but indispensable to both subjects, for the editors of the GG refuse to treat concepts as nothing more than indicators of change. Con- cepts also affect political and social change because it is through concepts that a horizon is constituted against which structural changes are per- ceived, evaluated, and acted upon.

Reichardt reaffirms much of this, stating that the Handbook's greater emphasis upon social history and the social character of language derives neither from treating concepts as superstructure, as do orthodox Marxists, nor from assuming that thought is unimportant, compared to long-term social and economic structures, as do many historians.17 Reichardt gen- erously concedes that the Handbook would have been inconceivable without the GG's theoretical formulations, without its exciting hypotheses about the accelerated pace, patterns, and significance of conceptual changes. Reichardt, once Koselleck's student, gives full credit to his mentor for his hypotheses about the patterns followed by political and social concepts during the Sattelzeit: historicization, the creation of ideologies, democratization, and politicization.

Where, then, did the GG go wrong? And how should its defects be repaired? Reichardt-and his colleagues have been convinced by certain criticisms of the GG made by social historians, some linguists, and literary critics.18 Such criticisms center on the use of sources in the GG. The editorial team of the Handbook regard the GG as excessively biased in

Gumbrecht, who helped devise the Handbook's method; the second is by an associate editor, Gerd van den Heuvel.

7 Handbuch, Einleitung, Heft 1/2, 26. 18 These are listed in the Handbuch, Heft 1/2, 26, n.26.


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the direction of elite culture, particularly in its inclusion of the greatest thinkers and writers.19

To write the history of concepts in terms of major authors is for the Handbook's editors unacceptable as an empirical description of what different strata were in fact thinking. The actual practice of the GG is described in the Handbook as Gipfelwanderungen, proceeding from peak to peak. Too many contributors to the GG are said to have engaged in a discredited type of Geistesgeschichte, which assumes rather than proves the unity of thought in a complex society undergoing conflict and crisis. Nor, in this view, were the editors of the GG able to enforce their injunctions to contributors to consult a prescribed corpus of sources that went beyond major theorists. Such alleged errors in the theory and practice of the GG have produced distortions unacceptable to historians, particularly those concerned with the mentalities of the classes, orders, and strata that were to play important parts in the French Revolution.

Another criticism stems from the broad range over time in the GG's treatment of concepts. Because its purpose was to identify shifts from classical and medieval meanings of concepts to those they took on in early modern and moder German thought, the GG's teams devoted considerable attention to older forms of these concepts. Those social historians who criticize the GG also do so because, in their view, it is too difficult to trace a series of shifts in the meaning of concepts from classical antiquity to moder times, and at the same time to specify precisely how these concepts were used by all relevant social formations in each period.

Yet for the historian of political and social theory, or for the historian of philosophy, or intellectual historian, the GG's procedure offers great rewards. Although major thinkers do not comprise a sufficient basis for generalizations about conceptual persistence and change, any analysis that omits them would itself be unsatisfactory. The GG attempts to combine a number of sources and on the whole provides more satisfactory results than had been previously attained. Certainly many problems about the use of discrepant types of sources have not been resolved in the GG, but the analysis of major thinkers sometimes is crucial to the understanding of conceptual changes, for the diachronic charting of major shifts in the meaning of concepts, as is done in the GG, makes it possible to perceive just how moder concepts diverge from those that preceded them. Such understandings are not easy to come by. Their attainment may be judged by many historians of thought to equal in importance

19 Curiously enough, Lovejoy, the least sociological of intellectual historians, also argued against writing the history of ideas in terms of major authors. He used the same mountaineering metaphors of peaks and valleys (as did Reichardt). More recently an analogous point about the ahistorical quality of a story based upon a canon of the great thinkers has been made with great force by Pocock and Skinner.



what social historians have to tell us about the mentalities of less educated classes.

Of course there is no reason why scholars should not be interested in both types of evidence. As yet, little has been definitively established about the effects of highly educated thinkers upon other strata or the extent to which the mentalities of non-intellectuals affect intellectuals. The criticisms of the GG made by the social historians seem narrow and unappreciative of the fact that a major reference work centering on concepts will have readers who may be interested in fundamental shifts in meaning in the works of major thinkers and in other social formations that held, contested, or were unaware of what was being said by those intellectually most prominent.

Some of the most extraordinary achievements in the GG occur in contributions that detail how, in a later age, the meaning of a classical or medieval concept becomes transformed. Surely such outlooks as Ar- istotelianism and anti-Aristotelianism cannot be omitted from any account of the intellectual categories in which men thought during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is questionable whether the editors of the Handbook have improved their work by omitting consider- ation of how the French reception of classical and medieval thought figured in the conceptual shifts occurring between 1680 and 1820.

Obviously any work, even as compendious as these German produc- tions, cannot include everything. Should a comprehensive history of social and political concepts be tailored exclusively to the agenda of social historians? The critiques made by them of the GG and accepted by the Handbook's managing team simply brush aside the case for the value of political and social thought as autonomous enterprises and the importance to historians of knowing how, on varying levels of theory, change was being conceptualized and understood, for action even in revolutions cannot be understood in isolation from the available definitions of the situation. In deciding upon which sources ought to be included in historical treatments of concepts, no single branch of historical inquiry ought to have overriding priority. Abstract thought in the highest reaches of a society should not be dismissed a priori as insignificant for its history.20 Such issues cannot be satisfactorily resolved by dismissing as "old-fash- ioned intellectual history" all contributions to the history of concepts other than those made by social historians of mentalities.21

Despite such criticisms, it must be said that within their chosen range, its editors have been remarkably successful in adapting both French lexicology and German Begriffsgeschichte to their program. They have

20 For a subtle discussion of "Why the History of Thought," see Benjamin I. Schwartz, The World of Thought in Ancient China (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 1-7.

21 Such comments mar an otherwise most useful article by Gerd van den Heuvel, Begriffsgeschichte, Historische Semantik, op. cit., 126.


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worked out detailed procedures for applying their conception of language as the social creation of reality; they have discovered previously unknown or unexploited sources and devised procedures for analyzing them. The list of works contributors must use is itself a major piece of research. In short, the materials and articles thus far presented are remarkably re- warding and novel.

Two examples will have to suffice. Reichardt begins his introduction by summarizing a striking controversy, in the ancien regime and the Revolution, about the nature of language. On one side revolutionaries accused the old regime of having used language as an instrument of domination and oppression; on the other, liberals and reactionaries alike charged the Jacobins and the terror with a cynical and deadly inversion of the ordinary, established meanings of words. Another considerable contribution comes in an exploration by Brigette Schlieben-Lange of a previously little-known genre, the new, deliberately revolutionary dictionaries that appeared between 1789 and 1804, the period of greatest lexicographical activity. In a brilliant and highly differentiated analysis, Professor Schlieben-Lange demonstrates the variety and scope of this corpus. Her essay rivals some of the best lexicographical work that consistently informs the GG.

Yet some of the methodological decisions taken in the Handbook have their drawbacks. In his striking treatment of French eighteenth- century controversies about the political uses of language, Reichardt seems to imply that such ideological analyses were unprecedented. He does not refer to the long tradition beginning with the Greeks, in which writers use the rhetorical topic of how the meanings of words become transformed during revolutions.22 Yet Reichardt makes an important contribution to our understanding of language in politics, for after reading his introduction, we realize that there was a powerful revolutionary case for treating the language of the old regime as a political weapon. In short, we now know that contemporaries were making powerful rejoinders to Burke's argument that the French revolutionaries were irresponsibly reversing the plain meanings of words and terms of political discourse.

III. Implied in what has gone before is a contrast between the history of concepts, a German speciality, and "the history of ideas" and "intellectual history. "23 These appear so American to German scholars that the HWP breaks with its usual practice and uses English for its entries on these subjects. Although it is impossible here to present a detailed

22 See James Boyd White, When Words Lose Their Meaning (Chicago, 1984). 23 In a favorable review of the Handbook that is to appear in the Journal of Modern

History, Lynn Hunt notes the Begriffsgeschichte of the GG and Handbook and attributes to it some of the most valuable West German contributions to the historiography of the old regime and Revolutionary France.



comparison of these German and American genres, a few of the more salient resemblances and differences between them merit notice.

How does Begriffsgeschichte differ from the history of ideas? There is little point in attempting to distinguish between "concept" and "idea" by stipulative definition. In both English and German philosophical discourse the two terms are often synonyms. The meanings of "concept" and "idea" can be determined only within the context of a theory; they cannot be satisfactorily determined in isolation.24 Should we infer that the German emphasis upon concepts is due to differences in philosophical traditions?

Hegel seems to have been the first to use the term Begriffsgeschichte,25 and Gadamer, with whom Koselleck studied, has suggested some of the central problems treated by the GG. Gadamer's assumption is that our relationship to the world is determined by language, our experience mediated by concepts.26 Yet the GG itself specifically abjures any ontological conclusions drawn from Begriffsgeschichte and is based on a historical method probably insufficiently hermeneutic and too positivistic for Gadamer.

Both Begriffsgeschichte and the "history of ideas" are best understood as sets of procedures used by scholars to study past thinkers and their thought. These procedures are to be reconstructed both from the programs of their founders and from actual performances by them and their disciples. The "history of ideas" will be identified here with the movement in the United States begun by A. O. Lovejoy; with the work published in the Journal of the History of Ideas over the past half-century; and with the entries in the Dictionary of the History of Ideas, whose principal editor, Philip P. Wiener, long directed this Journal.

Begriffsgeschichte has been used here as a generic term to designate the practice of using concepts and their history for analyzing thought in the past rather than alternative units of analysis (individual authors, texts, schools, traditions, persisting problems, forms of argument, styles of thought, discourses). As has been seen, significant differences both in their programs and actual practices distinguish the three lexicons discussed above from one another. Each prefers its own form of Begriffs- geschichte. Nevertheless a pronounced emphasis upon concepts and their history is common to all three projects, and they stand in conspicuous contrast to the hetereogeneous subjects treated in The Journal of the History of Ideas and The Dictionary of the History of Ideas.

24 P. L. Heath, in Encyclopedia of Philosophy, II, 178. 25 See the definitive account of H. G. Meier, "Begriffsgeschichte," HWP, I, 788-808. 26 Koselleck cites Otto Brunner and Walter Schlesinger in history, Erich Rothacker

in philosophy, Carl Schmitt in law, and Jost Trier in linguistics as preparing the way for Begriffsgeschichte. "Sozialgeschichte und Begriffsgeschichte," in Sozialgeschichte in Deutschland, op. cit., 91. See also Hans-Georg Gadamer, Die Begriffsgeschichte und die Sprache der Philosophie (Opladen, 1971).


260 MELVIN RICHTER

What was Lovejoy's view of the history of ideas? Why did it lead to such a marked fragmentation of interests? Which problems attracted his attention? Can he be said to have had an explanatory theory? How does the history of ideas compare to Begriffsgeschichte?

Lovejoy's program for writing the history of ideas centers on tracing "unit-ideas." These he described as unchanging constants comparable to the elements of analytical chemistry. In his view, there are but a relatively few such unit-ideas, just as there are a finite number of basic jokes. His own masterpiece, The Great Chain of Being, is a study of such a unit- idea: "a single specific proposition ... together with some further prop- ositions ... supposed to be its corollary."27

How does the treatment of concepts in the German works compare to Lovejoy's use of unit-ideas? Probably the German genre closest to Lovejoy was Ideengeschichte, itself a set of practices usually identified with Friedrich Meinecke and his school.28 Both the GG and Handbook have attacked Ideengeschichte in terms that apply almost equally well to Lovejoy's use of unit-ideas. Practitioners of Begriffsgeschichte understand themselves to be engaged in historical rather than philosophical semantics. They do not believe that the same unit-idea can, without changing its meaning, be articulated at different times in what Lovejoy calls idea- complexes. To follow Lovejoy's procedure would seem to make it impossible to provide an accurate account of what concepts have meant to those who have used them for determinate purposes in discrepant historical settings.

Thus the GG alternates between synchronic and diachronic analysis of concepts. Synchronic analysis addresses such questions as: what could the writer have intended to do by writing as he did in a given situation to a given audience? What was the vocabulary used? What did it mean at that time? What was its illocutionary force?

Diachronic analysis constructs a series of successive meanings carried by a single concept over time. The fact that the same word was used tells us nothing about its meanings. Only by diachronic analysis can we learn when and how dislocations occurred among older and newer meanings of a concept.29 The notion of an unchanging unit-idea thus cannot be adapted to strictly historical semantics.30

Another issue separating the history of ideas from the history of concepts is their treatment of words and concepts. Although Lovejoy

27 Arthur 0. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, Mass., 1948), 14. 28 See Felix Gilbert, History and Theory, 13 (1974), 59-64; Isaiah Berlin and Carl

Hinrichs in Meinecke's Historism, tr. J. E. Anderson (London, 1972), ix-liii. 29 Some examples and a more extended analysis of method are given in my "Conceptual

History and Political Theory," 621-23. 30 Quentin Skinner makes a similar case against Lovejoy's use of unit-ideas in his

"Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas," History and Theory, 8 (1969), 37-39.



recognized that the two are far from identical, that the same concept may be given a number of names, he never developed a method for treating this problem.3' By contrast, Begriffsgeschichte, especially in the GG, has adapted linguistic techniques to its purpose of charting both continuities and discontinuities in the use of concepts. Concerned to identify persisting meanings in concepts transmitted from the classical or medieval thought, it also studies decisive shifts of meaning in concepts that continue to be designated by the same word. Finally, it seeks to identify neologisms. Contributors are meant to use two methods: assem- bling all the meanings of a given term (semasiology), and seeking all the terms or names given to the concept at a given time (onomasiology).32

Both philosophical systems and ideologies were viewed by Lovejoy as unstable compounds, complexes made up of unit-ideas for the most part logically incompatible. Lovejoy did not find such compounds worth studying: "the doctrines or tendencies ... designated by familiar names ending in -ism or -ity ... usually are not units of the sort the historian of ideas seeks to discriminate. .. "33 This position derives from Lovejoy's "passion for drawing distinctions in order to gain analytical clarity."34 He first took up the history of ideas because of his interest in detecting intellectual fallacies. By identifying the unit ideas combined illogically in idea complexes such as political ideologies or philosophical systems, he would reveal their inherent confusions.

Again there is an important distinction to be drawn. Since the GG and Handbook concentrate on political and social language, the development of ideologies is central to their analysis. Almost a quarter of the concepts treated in the GG and Handbook are "isms" of the sort Lovejoy declared out of bounds to the historian of ideas. Whereas he regarded ideologies only as containing philosophical fallacies to be discredited, the German historians are concerned to chart the development of ideologies, identify the audiences for them, and provide a causal explanation for their proliferation since the eighteenth century. Lovejoy, it has been noted, was not interested in questions of explanation, even in indicating why unit-ideas were taken up or abandoned.35 Perhaps the greatest effort he made in this direction was his application of what he called philosophical semantics:

a study of the sacred words and phrases of a period or movement, with a view to clearing up of their ambiguities, a listing of their shades of meaning, and an

31 Arthur 0. Lovejoy, Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore, 1948), xv. 32 Richter, "Conceptual History and Political Theory," 623-25. 33 Ibid., 5. 34 Mandelbaum, op. cit., 41. 31 Mandelbaum, op. cit., 37.


262 MELVIN RICHTER

examination of the way in which confused associations of ideas arising from these ambiguities have influenced the development of doctrines ... 36

Thus for Lovejoy the history of ideas is meant to unmask ambiguities, as well as to reveal confusions. In both cases, his theory of causation is weak: ambiguities "influence" the development of ideologies and systems. "Influence," originally an astrological concept, unfortunately became perhaps the principal theoretical issue in American history of ideas.

Lovejoy and his school were open to many of the accusations made against German Geistes- and Ideengeschichte. Yet he knew what Wis- senssoziologie was (although he could not bring himself to translate it as "the sociology of knowledge. ") He even wrote that it could be combined with the history of ideas, though he never attempted to practice it himself. 37 Perhaps he came closest to doing so when he came out without equivocation against an intellectual history centered on only the most eminent thinkers and writers. The history of ideas, he wrote, should be:

especially concerned with the manifestation of specific unit-ideas in the collective thought of large numbers of persons, not merely in the doctrines of or opinions of a small number of profound thinkers or eminent writers.... It is, in short, most interested in ideas which attain a wide diffusion, which become a part of the stock of many minds.38

Yet neither he nor many of the scholars closely associated with him ever attempted to relate ideas to the structures of governments, societies, or economies. Nor was he interested in identifying the groups, strata, or classes that adopted or rejected ideas.

To trace ideas as masterfully as Lovejoy did, and not only in The Great Chain of Being, required great learning, intellectual curiosity, tire- less research, unusual philosophical acuity, and a delicate sense of what a text meant to its author, its contemporary audience, and later readers. For them we should be grateful, especially those who first were attracted to the history of ideas by Lovejoy. Anyone rereading his work will go some way towards welcoming the resounding defense of it by Francis Oakley.39

Yet much of the excitement seems to have gone out of Lovejoy's program. In the research for an alternative way of proceeding, Begriffs- geschichte has much to offer. It is a recognizably historical mode of investigation; it addresses questions which in Germany have attracted

36 Lovejoy, Great Chain of Being, 14. 7 Arthur O. Lovejoy, Essays in the History of Ideas, 2. 38 Lovejoy, Great Chain of Being, 19. 39Francis Oakley, Omnipotence, Covenant, & Order (Ithaca, 1984), Chapter I,

"Against the Stream: In Praise of Lovejoy"; and see above pp. 231-45



intellectual historians with broad interests, and may do so elsewhere as well.

There is work to be done. Both the GG and Handbook have dem- onstrated that the great lexicographical works of the last century, including the Oxford English Dictionary, are inadequate sources for certain parts of the vocabulary, including those dealing with politics, with political, social, and economic theory. Feminist ideas and investigations of racial attitudes offer other potential applications as yet virtually unexplored in German work. Begriffsgeschichte, when adapted to the needs of special fields of historical inquiry, may provide a more solid way of investigating language than many other theories now in vogue. And since there are solid studies applying the history of concepts to Germany and France, there is an increasingly attractive case for doing the same in Anglophone societies. For those interested in comparative history, Be- griffsgeschichte offers prospects that have yet to be explored.

City University of New York


Article Contentsp. 247p. 248p. 249p. 250p. 251p. 252p. 253p. 254p. 255p. 256p. 257p. 258p. 259p. 260p. 261p. 262p. 263

Issue Table of ContentsJournal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 48, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1987), pp. 187-368Front Matter [pp. 246 - 360]Lovejoy's The Great Chain of Being after Fifty Years [pp. 187 - 206]A. O. Lovejoy and the "History of Ideas" [pp. 207 - 210]Lovejoy and the Hierarchy of Being [pp. 211 - 230]Lovejoy's Unexplored Option [pp. 231 - 245]Begriffsgeschichte and the History of Ideas [pp. 247 - 263]Mathematics and Philosophy: Wallis, Hobbes, Barrow, and Berkeley [pp. 265 - 286]From Shaftesbury to Kant: The Development of the Concept of Aesthetic Experience [pp. 287 - 305]Carl Becker Revisited: Irony and Progress in History [pp. 307 - 323]Between Gog and Magog: The Republican Thesis and the Ideologia Americana [pp. 325 - 346]Work on Blumenberg [pp. 347 - 354]Books Received [pp. 361 - 368]Back Matter

journal of the history of ideas volume 48 issue 2 1987 [doi 10.2307%2f2709557] richter, melvin --...

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