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Review: The Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe Project: From History of Ideas to ConceptualHistory. A Review ArticleAuthor(s): Keith TribeSource: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Jan., 1989), pp. 180-184Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/178800 .Accessed: 05/08/2011 16:01

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The Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe Project: From History of Ideas to Conceptual History A Review Article KEITH TRIBE

University of Keele

Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, edited by 0. Brunner, W. Conze, and R. Koselleck (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1972-1989).

In the later 1950s, Reinhart Koselleck, then an Assistent to Professor Werner Conze in the Group for the Study of Moder Social History at the University of Heidelberg, proposed to Conze that the group consider publication of a dictionary of historical concepts, providing in one volume a survey reaching from Antiquity to the present. Conze accepted the idea but argued that the scope should be cut both in time and coverage: The dictionary should be restricted to the German language and focus on the years of early modernity, principally the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The project proved to be an undertaking that far exceeded initial anticipations of the amount of

scholarly effort required-the first five volumes take up well over a foot of shelf space. Contributions range in length from a few pages ("Radikalis- mus," pp. 113-36 of Volume 5) to that of a small book ("Geschichte, Historie," pp. 593-718 of Volume 2). The level of scholarship is high, the approach adopted surprisingly uniform considering the number of academics involved, and it is evident that much editorial work has gone into ensuring complementarity rather than duplication among the contributions. Clearly this is an enterprise which is of major significance for our understanding of the historical development of the concepts with which we seek to arrange and order the world-to take a few examples at random from Volume 2: "Hon- our," "Factory," "Fanaticism," "Peace," "Progress," "Law," and "Balance."

An undertaking of such length and detail would be hard to imagine in the theoretical and historical traditions of Britain and North America. Germany, on the other hand, has a long and relatively unbroken tradition of classical philology, and a training in law is not uncommon for historians and political scientists. German historians thus tend to have a greater interest in the lin- guistic base of their studies than that found among Anglo-Saxon social and economic historians. And, despite the intimidating formality of historical

0010-4175/89/1955-0900 $5.00 ? 1989 Society for Comparative Study of Society and History

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THE GESCHICHTLICHE GRUNDBEGRIFFE PROJECT 181

semantics, the project of charting the changing structure of the conceptual world is intended as a contribution to a deeper understanding of the social world in its historical formation. Koselleck has himself described GG (a convenient abbreviation for the dictionary) as an aspect of a struggle against the kind of Geistesgeschichte practised by Friedrich Meinecke-it is an at- tempt to historicise Geistesgeschichte and take sociopolitical experience as the point of departure. And, indeed, one of the most obvious features repeated through the diverse contributions is a record of the manner in which the conceptual world was transformed as the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth. In the contributions on "Revolution," "History," "Progress," "Police," "Politics"-but also in those on "Society," "Law," and "De- velopment"-we find the contours of a new conceptual topography which, when taken together, constitute "modernity." In their different ways, the concepts paraded in GG represent the coordinates of our conceptual world. The approach adopted allows us to see this world in process of formation, and also to appreciate the distance separating us from former worlds.

Koselleck casually nicknamed this period of change the Sattelzeit-the "saddle-period." Before this transition period, there lies a conceptual field whose topography is no longer immediately comprehensible for us without exegesis and interpretation; after it, there exists a conceptual world in which we, more or less with justification, feel at home. Accordingly, most contribu- tions follow a common pattern. First comes the Greek or Latin root. This is followed by medieval scholasticism, which rapidly gives way to the period of the Reformation and the political conflicts of the seventeenth century. From here, the detail usually becomes more intense, leading to the transformation of word and concept in the later eighteenth century and the diffusion of a modified understanding in the early nineteenth century. Depending on the individual term, there is then a decrease in detail, and a summary of any twentieth-century developments concludes the contribution. Some 150 con- cepts were originally envisaged for this treatment, but a strictly uniform treatment was never the intention. In the actual execution of the project, some leading terms apparently disappeared-"culture," for example, and "oecon- omy." In these cases, contributors entrusted with cognate areas took on the orphans; "culture" should now be dealt with under "civilisation."

It was also originally intended that the arrangement of the volumes should emphasise the structural aspects of semantic change, but in the end, resort had to be made to a purely alphabetical arrangement. As in the actual selection of concepts for treatment, there was a general pragmatism in the enforcement of the standards laid down during the later 1960s for contributions. It is certainly possible to criticise the organisation of the volumes and to question the criteria employed in the distribution of space. Ultimately, however, it is necessary to recognise that any such large-scale collaborative project will always rest on compromise and theoretical accommodation. As it is, GG is set to take its place among a number of German handbooks and dictionaries that have

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served as valuable supports to high-level scholarship since the nineteenth century. In this, GG continues a noble tradition.

What, then, is Begriffsgeschichte? More than a "history of concepts," it is "conceptual history" of a sort unfamiliar to the Anglo-American reader. Otto Brunner was one of the leading practitioners of this form of history, which is embodied in his most important single text, Land und Herrschaft, first pub- lished in 1939. The subtitle of this book runs: "Basic Questions on the History of Territorial Organisation in Medieval Austria." The form that the "questions" take involves a continual interrogation of the concepts associ- ated with "territorial organisation": peace and feuding; state, right, and constitution; Land and Landrecht; house and domination; Landesherrschaft and Landesgemeinde. These are in fact the headings of the chapters, and so the argument begins with the question: what is "politics"? By examining the

regulation of plunder and feuding, Brunner is able to demonstrate the manner in which such aspects of social organisation escape moder conceptions of political conflict. "Politics" would usually be assigned to an interstate sphere, while internal strife would then be described in terms of individual ambition or greed. Brunner shows that the late-medieval political order does not admit of a rigid distinction of "internal" from "external," and that a

proper understanding of the arrangement of structures of power and social order depends on a "substantive" appreciation of the language in which life was expressed. Indeed, Land und Herrschaft represents theoretical positions more familiar to an Anglo-American readership through the work of legal and economic substantivists working in social anthropology during the 1960s, the fruits of whose work have only recently begun to enter modern social history. Begriffsgeschichte is thus a very long way from Geistesgeschichte.

Brunner's main intellectual effort was over by the mid-1950s, but his work remained an inspiration to Koselleck and many other German historians. Conze was a social historian of a more conventional cast, although he contrib- uted, as has Koselleck, several articles to GG, as well as sharing the editorial burden. Conze became one of the leading "managers" of the German histor- ical profession during the expansion of the 1960s and early 1970s, and to a

great extent GG owes the broad spectrum of its contributors to the network of contact that Conze had established. The three editors are thus in large measure

complementary contributors to the conception and execution of the project, now solely in the hands of Koselleck following the deaths of his co-editors.

What shape, then, does the method of Begriffsgeschichte take in GG? First, key concepts are selected that articulate political, social, and economic

organisation. These can be of a most general order, like "politics," "move- ment," or "progress." They can also be more specific in their fields, like "conservative," "communism," "liberalism," or can focus on more ideo-

logical currents, like "race" or "reaction." Finally, there are names for

dominating social groups-"noble," "peasant," "worker," "middle stra- ta." Some critics have argued that the sole consistent definition of a central

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historical category is merely its inclusion in GG; there is some truth in this, but it would be difficult to establish any other, more consistent, principle of selection. An "historical concept" is therefore definable as a concept selected by the editors for inclusion in GG.

The "Introduction" which Koselleck provides in Volume 1 discusses some of these problems, and also gives a rubric for the project- "to investigate the dissolution of the old world and the emergence of the moder world through the history of its conceptual comprehension." The organising role of the Sattelzeit has already been noted, and there are a number of further ideas that lend this rubric substance. First, the moder world is implicitly conceived as "economic society," a central concept of Brunner's own work, but which derives principally from Lorenz von Stein, notably his study of the French Revolution, Geschichte der sozialen Bewegung in Frankreich von 1789 bis auf unsere Tage (1850). Von Stein emphasised the way that the French Revolution had altered the conceptions of time organising the sociopolitical world. Whereas before, "revolution" had carried the connotation of repeti- tion and return, the future had now become open and "constructible." This provided a space for the transformation of polity and economy and the devel- opment of "social movements" that sought to design and implement their visions of the future world. Within this framework, then, there is great scope for the consideration of the various levels and rhythms in and through which the conceptual structure of the social world could be reconstituted as "mod- ernity." In this process, history itself moved from being a set of accounts that provided lessons for action, to a real movement of events that could be controlled by the "agents of history." Quite evidently, both liberalism and socialism are parts of this process, as well as a conservatism that recognises the transformation of the world and seeks to stabilise the forces thereby unleashed. The world as described by von Stein was a world in motion; and in this world there was scope for the ideologisation of numerous categories and classifications, placing them at the service of groups that sought to contain, control, or accelerate the "movement of historical forces."

To many readers, this might seem to represent a kind of Marxist histo- riography. In the German intellectual context, however, it would be more accurately described as "social liberal"; and in fact the recourse to von Stein was in part motivated by a desire to present a coherent and theoretically robust alternative to Marxist historical writing. The potential of von Stein's approach is indeed great, and its apparent similarity to Marxism can be accounted for by the manner in which it comprehends major features of Marxist understanding of modernity while also being theoretically open and capable of descriptive elaboration.

Within this general approach, then, it is possible to identify leading terms and categories that lend themselves to description and analysis; while it is clear that no consistent formal criterion can be employed, a high degree of consensus can be developed around the issues involved and the various crite-

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ria of selection. The problem that then arises concerns the techniques of analysis. How does one develop a systematic historical semantics? By what means can descriptive statements establish a "truth value"? What is to count as a complete or finished analysis? Ideally, of course, each contribution should combine the qualitative range of historical research with the evaluative rigour of theoretical semantics; but such an ideal is one that could perhaps never be achieved, and is certainly unrealisable in collaborative research. As previously indicated, most contributions follow a set pattern; sources are marshalled that contain the use of the term in question, or which instance its cognates or counterconcepts. A wide range of sources is drawn upon, but attention remains strictly upon the term under study-no great deviation or elucidation is permitted. Out of this parading of evidence the important fea- ture that emerges is the structural changes of language and language-usage according to a perceivable pattern of meaning. At this level, the editors succeed in establishing the structure of linguistic transformation and em- pirically charting its progress. At the level of the individual contributions, the result is inevitably more mixed. For some reason Manfred Riedel provides two articles on society, the first "Society, Civil," the second "Society, Community." The first is of major interest and in eighty pages provides a convincing and succinct account of the development of this concept. The second contribution, however, covers much of the same ground in sixty pages, and it is not clear why this material was not placed in the first article. Some of the articles with a more institutional basis, such as those on social groups or social ideologies, occasionally lapse into simple historical descrip- tion, forgetting the emphasis on linguistic analysis. Some articles are, for whatever reason, disappointingly uninformative.

Any project of such length or involving so many collaborators cannot, however, be subjected to critical standards that demand absolute consistency or uniform success. A great deal of intellectual and editorial effort has gone into the production of these volumes, and the cumulative effect of the articles is stimulating and humbling in equal measure. English-speaking scholars can judge the merits of the approach from two translated articles: Franz-Ludwig Knemeyer on "Polizei," and Rudolph Walther on "Economic Liberalism" (Economy and Society, 9 (1980), 172-96; 13 (1984), 178-207). A collection of essays composed during the period in which the project was being organised, and which illustrate aspects of the method of Begriffsgeschichte, was published in 1985 as Koselleck's Futures Past.

There are plans to produce a cheaper paperback version of the work that would be thematic in organisation, rather than alphabetic. It is to be hoped that translations will eventually appear in this guise, for Begriffsgeschichte has much to offer historical research in terms both of the results it has so far produced and of the methods that it has developed.