Translation and Comparison - History of Ideas

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Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2008 DOI: 10.1163/187465608X290798

Contributions to the History of Concepts 4 (2008) 27-56 www.brill.nl/chco

contributionsto the history

of concepts

Translation and Comparison II: A MethodologicalInquiry into Reception in the History of Ideas*

Lszl KontlerCentral European University, Budapest

Abstract

Tis article addresses the methodological issues involved in the study of inter-lingual translation as an avenue of reception in the history of ideas. In particular,it assesses the possible uses of linguistic contextualism and conceptual history(Begriffsgeschichte) in this endeavour. It argues that both of these approaches havebeen, or are capable of being, far more sensitive towards the phenomenon ofreception and, indeed, this is an area where cross-fertilization between them (oftencommended in general but rarely if ever in specific terms) is a practical possibility.Perspectives from Rezeptionsgeschichtemay provide useful tools for building bridgesbetween them. A few case studies in translation history are then critically exam-ined, and on the basis of the foregoing methodological reflections propositions aremade for further refining the approach taken in those case studies.

Keywords

translation studies, early-modern period, reception, Skinner, Pocock, Koselleck,Rezeptionsgeschichte

Tis article is a sequel to the one that appeared in Contributions, volume 3,number 1, on translation and comparison in the history of ideas. In thatarticle I suggested ways in which an approach to the subject could be

*) Tis article was written while the author held a Marie Curie Fellowship of the EuropeanCommission at the Department of History and Civilization of the European UniversityInstitute (Florence). I would like to thank Martin van Gelderen and Heinz Gerhard Haupt

for the opportunity to present a version of it in their comparative cultural and intellectualhistory seminar, and to Edward Hundert, Peter Jones, Nicholas Phillipson, Antonella Romano,Karin ilmans and Orsolya Vincze for comments on early drafts.
http://www.brill.nl/chcohttp://www.brill.nl/chco


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28 L. Kontler / Contributions to the History of Concepts 4 (2008) 27-56

developed on the basis of the properties of the source material itself, i.e.,the theory and practice of inter-lingual translation, chiefly in early-modern

European history. I now proceed to relate those thoughts to the method-ological directions in intellectual history that have arguably inspired thegreatest amount of work as well as debate over the past generation or so,namely linguistic contextualism and Begriffsgeschichte. Tis is a vast topic,and my perspective will be limited to the reciprocal relevance of theseapproaches and the interpretation of translated texts. Critiques of bothschools will also receive some attention.

As to the Cambridge view, for a concise statement of a highly complex

programme one might turn to Quentin Skinners preface to the collectionof his re-published and revised articles:

I argue that, if we are to write the history of ideas in a properly historical style,we need to situate the texts we study within such intellectual contexts andframeworks of discourse as enable us to recognise what their authors weredoingin writing them. o speak more fashionably, I emphasise the performa-tivity of texts and the need to treat them intertextually. My aspiration is . . . touse the ordinary techniques of historical enquiry to grasp their concepts, to

follow their distinctions, to recover their beliefs and, so far as possible, to seethings in their way.1

Similarly, one can pick out aprcisof methodological priorities within theimmense output of John Pocock in the field for instance:

[O]ur understanding of what [the author] was doing when he made hismove thus depends in a considerable measure on our understanding of the

practical situation he was in, of the case he desired to argue, the action ornorm he desired to legitimate, and so on [. . .] But the practical situation alsoincludes the linguistic situation: that arising from the constraints and oppor-tunities imposed on the author by the language or languages available for himto use [. . .] the historian looks for ways in which [the move] may have rear-ranged, or sought to rearrange, the possibilities of language open to the authorand his co-users of language.2

1) Quentin Skinner (2002), vii.2) J.G.A. Pocock (1985), 14-5. Several of Pococks early methodological writings appear inhis Politics, Language and ime: Essays on Political Tought and History (1973). See also

J.G.A. Pocock (1987a), 19-38.


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L. Kontler / Contributions to the History of Concepts 4 (2008) 27-56 29

exts are regarded by both scholars as key vehicle that enable articulate andliterate individuals to act socially, and language as the principal means to

bring such vehicles into motion. Tey both recognize that just as any othertype of means of production, of transport, and so forth language pro-vides such individuals with the opportunity to realize their intentions, andat the same time determines the orbit within which this is feasible; thoughat their most ingenious, they can also be seen as capable of stretching suchboundaries. Pocock and Skinner both conceive of texts as speech acts, inthe style of Austin and Searle (both drawing upon Wittgenstein), in whichthe expressive functions of language are used to realize intentions which

thereby are transformed into meanings. Both of them also readily attributeto language more specifically, to the vocabularies and discourses intowhich clusters of verbal expression consolidate through the accumulationof meanings intended by users the quality of a paradigm which, in thefashion of Tomas Kuhn, sets certain limits to what is doable by speechacts, i.e. the thinkable. Undoubtedly, Skinner has been more interestedin the former aspect of language, that is, authorial intention, and Pocock(whose orientation in linguistic theory also embraces Saussures distinction

of languefromparole) in the latter, but their overall methodological alle-giances are not dissimilar.I deliberately chose the above synoptic representations instead of more

sophisticated statements of Skinner and Pococks allegiances as they aremore fit to withstand the objections advanced by their latest and perhapsmost trenchant critic: Mark Bevir.3Bevir has labelled and challenged themas representatives of soft and hard linguistic contextualism,4and morerecently dubbed their approaches conventionalism and contextualism(without a qualifier),5respectively. aking advantage of some of the moreradical statements of Pocock and Skinner which are undoubtedly not

3) Te main thrust of earlier objections was that their approach reduces the study of thehistory of political thought to antiquarianism and divests it of contemporary relevance,and that their empirical work does not as radically surpass their predecessors as it is claimedin their methodological manifestos. For a few examples, see Charles D. arlton (1973),307-328; J.G.A. Pocock and John G. Gunnell (1981), 3-62; and James ully (1988).

As these are of less immediate concern to the present subject, I do not discuss them at

length.4) Mark Bevir (1992), 276-298.5) Mark Bevir (1999), especially Chapter 2.


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too difficult to find and select, especially in their earlier writings6, Bevirconstrues them as equally fallacious opponents of intentionalism, with

Skinner suggesting that authors must follow the ruling conventions sincethey want to be understood, and Pocock, even worse, restricting authorsto bit parts as the mouthpieces of the script-writing paradigms whichconstitute their conceptual frameworks.7On the basis of this caricature oftheir positions, they are more or less flatly thrown in the same camp withMichel Foucault to whom their relationship is rather ambivalent8 andother representatives of structural idealism, who supposedly reduce indi-vidual ideas to copies of a collective episteme or knowledge structure.9

Bevir presumes to redress such errors by making a distinction betweensemantic meanings, which are determined by language, and hermeneuticmeanings, which are not. Te latter, while intentional, are also the onlyones that concern historians, since they are the meanings that exist forspecifiable people and because they originate from the ideas the authorintended to express. In proposing that texts in general cannot signify any-thing without individuals intentions and that all meaning-giving activityin the world is intentional, this approach, which we can call Bevirs weak

intentionalism amounts to a diluted version of a more nuanced positionthat, in addition to agency, also takes into account the role of culture with-out necessarily subscribing to a model of inevitable cultural reproduction.10Bevirs contentions in no way seem to constitute a plausible challenge to anapproach that combines the exploration of speech acts, performed by indi-viduals with sovereign intentions but whose performance is nonethelessdependent on a stock of tools that they may or may not wish or be able tomodify.

6) But, for instance, in the preface to his re-edited methodological writings, among manyother changes, Skinner avows to have toned down the noisy polemics [he] used to enjoy.Quentin Skinner (2002), vi.

7) Quentin Skinner (2002), 34-5 and 41.8) See, for instance, Quentin Skinner (2002), 90-1 and 117-9.9) Mark Bevir (1999), 177-264.

10) Bevirs book evoked a torrent of critical response, almost and perhaps a bit undeservedly in the fashion of the exchanges between Pocock and Skinner and their critics in the 1980s.

Concerning this polemic, I have relied on the contributions of Mark Erickson, AustinHarrington and Andreas Reckwitz (2002), 99-133; Robert Stern, (2002), 1-12; MelissaLane (2002), 33-41; Brian Young (2002), 101-117; and Donald Kelley (2004), 81-95.


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However, Bevir makes a point that is no doubt, unintentionally help-ful in approximating the survey of translation theories and practices,

attempted in my previous article, to linguistic contextualism. We have toconceive of an intention not as the prior purpose of the author, but ratheras the meaning an utterance has for a particular individual, whether he beits author or reader [italics added].11Te proposition that it is legitimateto attribute to readers intentions that constitute meanings would not beunfamiliar or untenable to Pocock and Skinner. As the former argues,[t]he history of discourse is concerned with speech acts that becomeknown and evoke response, with illocutions that are modified as they

become perlocutions by the ways in which recipients respond to them . . .Te reader himself becomes an author[italics added], and the complex modeof Rezeptionsgeschichteis required of the historian.12Pocock invokes Stan-ley Fish and his argument that the text can be said to exert no authorityover those who interpret it, but rather becomes dissolved in the continuumof interpretation to which it once gave rise.13Skinner also refers to Fish,besides other theorists of interpretation working within the reader-response framework. Tese include Wolfgang Iser and his proposition

that one must take into account not only the actual text but also, and inequal measure, the actions involved in responding to that text.14Tey alsoinclude Paul Ricoeur and his suggestion that because of the polysemic andmetaphorical features of language, any text will acquire an autonomousspace of meaning which is no longer animated by the intentions of itsauthor, and therefore in the act of interpretation [w]hat the text says nowmatters more than what the author meant to say hence, interpretationshould assume the character of appropriation.15

Reflecting on these possibilities, Skinner clearly distinguishes betweenthree types of meaning: first, that of the words or sentences in a given text;second, what the text means to me, i.e. the reader; and third what awriter means by what is said in a given text. Tough not inattentive to

11) Mark Bevir (1999), 67.12) J.G.A. Pocock (1985), 18.13) J.G.A. Pocock (1985), 2; Stanley Fish (1980), 305.14) Wolfgang Iser (1972), 279.15) Paul Ricoeur (1981), 174 and 201. For Skinners references to Iser, Ricoeur, and Fish,see Quentin Skinner (2002), 92-3.


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meaning 2, he has always shown himself more interested in meaning 3 perhaps because of his greater concern with the pointillist study of sudden

conceptual shifts rather than conceptual change over the slower march oftime,16as he admits while comparing his own work to that of ReinhartKoselleck. On the other hand, Pococks classic explorations of the languageof the ancient constitution, or of the Atlantic republican tradition17can beplausibly interpreted as a reconstruction of a series of acts of reading18performed on the texts of these traditions by the protagonists, who arecompetent enough in using the extant vocabularies to turn them to newspeech acts and thereby pursue agendas specific to their own political,

social and cultural contexts. As in the period in focus the principal mediumof passing down a tradition is the printed text, and the ticket to member-ship of the community of speakers of a political language is the absorptionof such texts, these speakers authors are also readers who, in Skinnersterms, first construe meaning 2 and then, on the condition of having doneso, go on to construing meaning 3.

Insofar as these processes remain within the boundaries of a single dis-cursive tradition, like civic humanism or natural law, they would mainly

resemble intra-lingual translation, a notion introduced by Roman Jakob-son to describe the interpretation of verbal signs by other verbal signs ofthe same language.19In a certain sense, redescription, the use of synonymswhose effect, either as a result of a deliberately chosen rhetorical strategy orby way of unintended consequences, is conceptual change, is a case of intra-lingual translation.20 But as the history of political discourse has beenconvincingly shown to involve a great deal of interaction among variousavailable vocabularies, it is not very dissimilar from inter-lingual transla-tion, and on several occasions Pocock was tempted to describe it as such:

Te history of discourse now becomes visible as one of traditioin the senseof transmission and, still more, translation. exts composed of languesand

16) Quentin Skinner (2002), 180.17) J.G.A. Pocock (1987b) and (2003).18) Cf. one of the most influential studies in literary reception theory (to be considered insome detail below), Wolfgang Iser (1978).19) Roman Jakobson (1987), 428-35.20) Redescription is a crucial category in Skinners reinterpretation of Hobbes, see QuentinSkinner (1996).


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paroles, of stable language structures and the speech acts and innovations thatmodify them, are transmitted and reiterated, and their components are sever-

ally transmitted and reiterated, first by non-identical actors in shared histori-cal contexts, and then by actors in historically discrete contexts. Teir historyis, first, that of the constant adaptation, translation, and reperformance of thetext in a succession of contexts by a succession of agents [. . .].21

Elsewhere he urges that [w]e should pay more attention than we havedone to the phenomenon of translation [this time inter-lingual], and sug-gests that much depends upon Rezeptionand reader response; the readerand interpreter may have the resources of rhetoric at his disposal too. Many

an author has found himself a more radical innovator than he intended tobe or ever admitted he was.22Tus, inasmuch as Bevirs above-mentionedpoint which is not developed further by him is also a tacit criticism oflinguistic contextualism, it seems to be misplaced. Similarly, while preoc-cupied with intentions as they become manifest in speech acts, Skinnerand especially Pocock in no way imply that authors possess a sort of monop-oly over the meaning of the texts they produce,23and their approaches canincorporate reader response.

Martyn P. Tompson has in fact proposed a refinement of what he callsthe new history of political thought. He has examined the methods ofPocock and Skinner in comparison with the interpretation of historicalmeaning in literary Rezeptionsgeschichte. While Tompsons summary judg-ment that the reader has been largely neglected by the former is some-what exaggerated (and attenuated by Tompson himself later on),24 it iscertainly acceptable that the historical understanding of texts aimed bylinguistic contextualism would stand to gain in sophistication by incorpo-

rating some of the insights of reception theory, in which the reader ascreator of textual meanings occupies the central position. Launched as aprovocation25to both the marginalization of historical studies in litera-ture, and its canon-centred approach (in this sense sharing some of the

21) J.G.A. Pocock (1985), 20-1.22) J.G.A. Pocock (1987a), 20 and 34.23) Cf. the objection to Skinner by Dominick LaCapra (1980), 245-276. A revised version

can be found in Dominick LaCapra and Steven J. Kaplan (1982), 47-85; especially 57-60.24) Martyn P. Tompson (1993), 248-72; especially 248 and 271.25) As the very title of the book conveys. Hans Robert Jauss (1970).


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main concerns of linguistic contextualism), reception history dismissedsubstantialist text theory, which restricts any meaning a text might have to

what could have been intended by the author, and embraced pragmatictheory, which attributes to the text merely a potentiality for meaning.26Itis worth remembering that speech act theory, also a pragmatic approachto language, significantly inspired Rezeptionsgeschichtein conceptualizingreception as both a reproductive and creative activity.27On this view, theintended meaning of the author, even if recoverable, matters little in com-parison with the specific meanings (Konkretisationen) that arise in the actof reading and whose understanding depends on the reader according to

the context of reading time and place, historical and cultural circum-stances, and the resulting horizon of expectations (Erwartungshorizont).While it is not clear why it should be necessary, as Hans Robert Jaussclaims, that historians also ought to place themselves within a tradition ofinterpretations by adopting the role of the critic, the contention that his-torians should pay more attention to reconstructing the changing stockof experience, expectations and purposes with which readers approachedtexts and (re)constructed their meanings is very valid. While the text to a

considerable extent determines the range of meaningful questions to beasked by its readers, they are the ones who decide, in terms of their hori-zon of expectations, what exactly they will ask not to speak of the pos-sible answers. Te reader as co-author certainly harbours intentions whichcome into play when [t]he convergence of text and reader brings the liter-ary work into existence.28o recall Skinners categories, the meaning 2created by the reader inevitably reflects these intentions before, in case s/heis also an author in the more usual sense, they are moulded into intentionsand thereby turned into meaning 3. Tis is also a useful perspective onauthors preparing a revised edition of their own work when, in an actof re-reading, their intentions and horizon of expectations might havebecome different from what they were when the text was first conceived.

26) On the allegiance of Rezeptionsgescichteto pragmatic, rather than substantive text theory,see Hans Robert Jauss (1970), 154-67; Gnter Grimm (1977), 117-44.27) See, for instance, Wolfgang Iser (1978), 54. Other sources, again, similarly to linguistic

contextualism, included hermeneutics, associated with Gadamer, and the approach to thephilosophy of science represented by Kuhn. For a survey, see Robert C. Holub (1984).28) Wolfgang Iser (1972).


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As Tompson suggests then, the history of receptions is constantlyinvolved with as many attempts to elicit the recipients intended meanings

as there are pieces of textual evidence available.29 If it is desirable thata correlation exists between the character of the source material and themethodology whereby it is interpreted, Tompsons proposition thatRezeptionsgeschichteprovides useful strategies for intellectual history is bothreinforced by the survey of translation theories and practices from theRenaissance to early Romanticism presented earlier and ought to be takenseriously when dealing with the role of translation in this period. Oneneed only recall the humanists who, to a very considerable extent, set the

framework in which translation was conceptualized and pursued into theeighteenth century. Fausto da Longiano explicitly defined two levels ofthe translating act, the translator being a reader at the first and a writerat the second. Similarly, in tienne Dolets work, reading and analysis,aiming at the full comprehension of the authors sense and subject, areprocesses distinct from, and preceding those of composition and articula-tion, the conceptual distinctiveness of these phases also being reflected inthe character of rules and procedures to be followed by the translator

in them. In terms of the composition and articulation, criteria of a newautonomous art form are promoted, abandoning reference to its origins inthe translated text, which has forgotten its beginnings, not to mention itsstated purpose.30Te humanists did not raise the issue of Erwartungshori-zontbecause they were convinced that their enthusiasm for the ancientsguaranteed that their questions were the same as theirs. If this element isadded, however, translation may be regarded not as an act of readinginspired by a quest for the authors sense and subject, but in terms ofquestions asked by the translator, which may or may not coincide with theauthors own. Tis is then followed by a speech act, which consists of aconversion of meaning 2 resulting from the act of reading into meaning 3whose overlap with that of the author is even more contingent because thetranslator acts no longer only as an interrogator but as an author with atleast partially independent claims. It must be added that the partial char-acter of the independence of such claims, i.e. the boundaries within which

29) Martyn P. Tompson (1993).30) Glyn P. Norton (1984), 200-16.


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the translators intentions can be realized, arise not only from constraintsthat the original text (provided by both authorial intentions and the dis-

cursive traditions or language, in the Pocockian sense, manifest in it)might place on the translator the translators natural language to someextent also possesses and exerts the force of a paradigm.

Let us imagine the encounter between Abb Prvost, an habituof Pari-sian polite society, and Richardsons Pamela. Te Abb would certainly betaken by the effective representations of middle class sensibility and moral-ity and also taken aback by the manifestations of a rusticity still perceivedas characteristic of the English that would seem out of place in such

a literary work. He nevertheless recognizes in the novel a suitable vehiclefor the advancement of an agenda, partially shared with Richardson, anddecides to weed out remainders of the old and uncouth British ways thatto him seem restrictive. Furthermore, this would be done in full convictionthat this is also the most appropriate way of doing justice to the qualitiesinherent in the original. o all intents and purposes, in this case the hori-zon of expectations with which the translator performs the act of readingis the same as the range of intentions that can be detected in the original.

Also, the translators agenda, while shaped independently from and priorto the encounter with the original text, consists of intentions not verydifferent from those of the author only to the extent that they also includethe intention of improving the original performance for the sake of reach-ing shared objectives through an act of re-composition. Even in this case,while Prvosts meaning 2 is not substantially different from Richardsonsmeaning 3, the formers meaning 3 in the French translation is somewhatremoved from that of Richardson in the English Pamela.31 In a ratherdifferent case, Christian Garve was fully aware that Ciceros De Officiiswaswritten for persons of the higher classes who participated in the affairs ofthe state for whom moral prescription often transformed into politicalinstruction. Yet he recognized that the book, when translated into Ger-man and equipped with a proper philosophical commentary, might for-ward the cause of German popular philosophy, a philosophical theory of

31) o be sure, contemporary discussions of the issue fully warranted him to consider hisown reputation as well as that of his model to interfere with the original. Sir Samuel Garth(1720), 1 and George Steiner (1975).


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moral and aesthetic action educating the private citizen to virtuous life andsociability.32Here, Garves Erwartungshorizontvery substantially determines

the sense he makes of Cicero through reading De Officiis, and Cicerosmeaning 3 is hardly more important than the arising meaning 2 in devel-oping Garves own meaning 3 in the translation. We shall see that there aremore extreme cases too. For the time being these examples are alreadysufficient to argue that while it is certainly possible to propose that intranslating an author X, translator Y got him/her wrong, this also entailsan imposition of our current horizon of expectations vis--visother pasttranslations produced when such expectations did not exist. Such mis-

translations carried a value for their producers and intended consumers,and that should be the primary concern for the historian of translations.What is more, even when the plea for fidelity, and its counterpart, the casefor foreignizing translation appeared towards the end of the eighteenthcentury, translations were also conceived as instrumental, rather than anend in themselves, and their underlying domestic agendas are of as muchinterest and consequence as their philosophical underpinnings.

Valuable studies now exist on the history of reception through transla-

tion, and I shall present a few examples below. Before that, however, it willbe helpful to relate the methodological endeavours outlined above to theGerman study of the history of concepts as it has emerged since the 1960s.Begriffsgeschichtehas been usually, and certainly not without merit, associ-ated with the towering figure of Reinhart Koselleck and the emblematicundertaking of the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, the multi-volume lexiconof social and political language in Germany.33

Te initial methodological commitments of Begriffsgeschichte can beidentified in Kosellecks introduction to this project. Basic concepts areclusters of words which constitute a field of meaning and express goals andexpectations as to the nature of the organization of society and the polity,and thereby function as vehicles for the movement of history. As such, theydo not merely indicate and register social and political change, but alsoaffect it, because it is through concepts that a horizon of expectations isconceived, against which structural transformation is conceptualized andacted upon. Te character of being contested is essential for a concept to

32) Johan van der Zande (1998), 75.33) Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck (1972-1978).


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be basic: in times of social and political conflict, the clash of interests isaccompanied by a semantic struggle to define and control positions and

settle disagreements about usage and rules to ones advantage. Te meth-odological principles of Begriffsgeschichte that arise from these featurescomprise, besides the application of traditional historical criticism, his-torical semantics, i.e. the diachronic and synchronic analysis of languageusing both semasiology (the study of all meanings of a single term) andonomasiology (the study of all terms for the same concept), and the reli-ance on an unusually broad range of sources discrepant in origin andappeal: texts by classic thinkers, the press, government, administrative and

bureaucratic documents, reports of speeches, private papers, and contem-porary dictionaries. Some of these sources are distinct due to their uniqueand time-bound character, others by their greater amount of normativity.Such complexity is required by the fact that, similarly to social history,Begriffsgeschichteis concerned with iterative structures or the repeatabil-ity of phenomena, for it is from the juxtaposition of these to the histori-cally unique that the momentum of change can be demonstrated.34

Te editors of the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffealso posited a time period

and subject matter they regarded especially appropriate to the method-ological principles of the history of concepts: the so-called Sattelzeit, theperiod of the transformation of Alteuropa into modern Europe betweenc. 1750-1850, which is marked by accelerated conceptual shifts. Tehypotheses being tested included that of Verzeitlichung(the tendency touse notions of historical time for creating a horizon within which conceptsare to function the imposition of temporal patterns upon social andpolitical thought); Demokratisierung(the spread of the use of political andsocial vocabulary beyond the elite); Ideologisierbarkeit (the increasingincorporation of concepts into isms that record the tension betweenexperience and expectations); and Politisierung(the tendency of conceptsto be caught up in political mobilization). However, given that the studyof continuity and change in the semantic coverage of basic social and polit-ical concepts requires a concern with the time layers (Zeitschichten) man-ifest in them, i.e., leftovers of earlier meanings whose permanence varies,the majority of the 118 entries in the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffetake a

34) Reinhart Koselleck (1972), 116-31 and (1983), 7-21.


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longue dureapproach and reach back and forth in time according to thecharacter of the concept under scrutiny.

Just as the Cambridge school came into being as a critique of the historyof ideas hallmarked by the names of Lovejoy and Sabine, the programmeof Begriffsgeschichtearose from reservations towards traditional Geistesge-schichte. Both of them have long been recognized as parts of the generalmovement in the 1960s towards a heightened awareness of the significanceof language for historical analysis. Nevertheless, the approach taken in theGeschichtliche Grundbegriffehas been criticized not only because, suppos-edly, the previously established thesis of the Sattelzeit35more or less prede-

termined the findings of the projects contributors.36

And the method itselfhas been regarded with some suspicion not only by social historians, towhom it seems to represent an older, historicist and hermeneutical style ofhistoriography. After all, Koselleck himself has repeatedly emphasized thesocial and political function of the relationship between words and things,and has warned against the dilution of history in discourse: no speechact is itself the action which it helps prepare, trigger, and enact; or else-where: even though all speech is action, not all actions are speech acts.37

However, precisely this feature has seemed too narrow from the angle of aprogramme of social-historical semantics, inconceivable without the inspi-ration from the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, yet formulated at some criti-cal distance to it. Its initiator, Rolf Reichardt has suggested that the realitycontent (Wirklichkeitscharakter) which concepts possess is not inferior tothat of material relations, and therefore ought to be considered as indepen-dent socio-political factors in the construction of consciousness and the

35)Koselleck himself has acknowledged that the notion of Sattelzeithas obscured ratherthan advanced the project, though without any detrimental consequence to the method.Reinhart Koselleck (1996), 69. Again, I am not concerned here with an important line ofcriticism which attributes any shortcomings Begriffsgeschichtemight have inccured due toits inter-war radical conservative origins and to the intellectual disaffection experiencedin relation to modernity in general (and not merely to Germanmodernity), and identifiesthe notion of Sattelzeit as providing a framework for the practice of conceptual historyrather than being generated by the study of concepts itself. See for a concise statementDaniel Gordon (1999), 23-29.36) For criticism of the practice of Begriffsgeschichteeven when its approach was applauded,see Helmut Berding (1976), 98-110; James Sheehan (1978), 312-19.37) Reinhart Koselleck (1972), 94 and (1993), 84.


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motivation of conduct. He has proposed to abandon walks to the sum-mits of the history of ideas (i.e., the study of canonical texts still a widely

pursued path in the articles of the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe) altogether,and explore collective linguistic usages and ways of thinking strictly on thebasis of sources whose character is, appropriately, equally collective, butwhich also include visual material, collective symbols, and rituals.38 Atthe same time, linguists have warned that the theoretical eclecticism ofBegriffsgeschichtetended to undermine its methodological clarity.39

One of the reasons for the uneasiness with the Koselleckian brand ofconceptual history, also not entirely offset by Reichardts intervention, is

the allegation that it studies the history of language without speakers, andindeed this is the criticism that has repeatedly been made by scholars work-ing within the Anglo-Saxon tradition of intellectual history. Skinners ownattitude for a long time was summed up in the claim that there can be nohistories of concepts; there can only be histories of their uses in argument,while Pocock, though finding the idea (and reality) of a historical lexiconof principal terms and concepts a genuinely interesting possibility, healso queried to which history the terms collected in such a lexicon are

basic, and what morphology of life forms is uncovered in tracing theirhistory.40What is at issue is agency, without which, from the Cambridgeperspective, there can be no historicity. More recently, Skinner has claimedthat he is not unhappy with the suggestion that much of his own researchmight be regarded as a contribution to one aspect of the vastly more ambi-tious programme pursued by Reinhart Koselleck, which is nothing elsethan the entire process of conceptual change, while he himself is inter-ested in one of the techniques by which it takes place, adding that thetwo endeavours do not seem incompatible.41Yet, [h]ow far one can cap-ture the historicity of concepts by adopting Kosellecks approach remains aquestion to him, as to several other scholars.42

38) Rolf Reichardt (1985) and (1998), 7-28. For the research tendencies inspired byBegriffsgeschichtein the broader sense, see Gnter Scholtz (2000).39) See Dietrich Busse (1987).40) Quentin Skinner (1998), 283 and J.G.A. Pocock (1996), 50, 52, and 54.41) Quentin Skinner (2002), 186-7. For the distinction between Skinners and Kosellecks

approach to conceptual change, see Kari Palonen (1997), 61-80 and (1999), 41-59.42) Most particularly perhaps, James Schmidt (1999), 9-14, even claiming that especiallythe use of contemporary dictionaries and encyclopaedias as sources suggests that theGeschichtliche Grundbegriffeis concerned not so much with what individuals are doing to


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It can be argued that since basic concepts are, by definition, contested,Begriffsgeschichtecannot avoid a strong concern with interests, which can

only belong to specific groups of speakers, and hence the issue of agencycannot be circumvented. It can also be said that familiarity with the his-tory of the conceptual resources available to an author is a prerequisite foridentifying the uses to which they were put by him. Finally, while theimaginative use of the philosophical theory of speech acts, combined withthe identification of political languages, might be recommended as a meansto refresh Begriffsgeschichte, the perspective of the latter might be a wel-come corrective to the lack of interest, detected in Pocock and Skinner, in

the way groups, movements, or parties evaluate and perceive social changes.Based on such considerations, and many more, Melvin Richter has, overthe past twenty years or so, tirelessly called for a closer understandingbetween these two approaches.43Tere are also numerous other attemptsto examine them in a comparative perspective. Some share Richters goal,namely, methodological cross-fertilization, and some choose to stress thedifficulties involved.44It has also been suggested45that, if such an endeav-our is to yield results, it ought to rely not merely on the achievement of the

Geschichtliche Grundbegriffeitself, but rather on case studies that emergedfrom the same research context but resorted to social-historical discourseanalysis46 a line of inquiry which, besides the already mentioned Germaninitiatives, has also been emerging in France since the 1970s, inspired bythe linguistic theories of Michel Pcheux, and whose proposition to inter-pret each utterance as a concretised usage of concepts and arguments deriv-ing from the general themes and conventions of socio-political discourse47is highly relevant.

a concept, but rather with what a concept is doing, behind the backs and above the headsof individuals.43) Melvin Richter (1987), 247-63 and (1990), 38-70 also republished as Chapter 6 ofMelvin Richter (1995). See, also, Melvin Richter (1999), 131-37 and (2000), 135-43.44) Iain Hampsher-Monk (198) and erence Ball (1998) tend to take the latter approach,while the former is represented by Martin van Gelderen in Iain Hampsher-Monk, Karinilmans, and Frank van Vree (1998), 37-50, 75-86, and 227-238.45) Hans Erich Bdeker (2002), 7-28, and 73-122.46) For instance, Willibald Steinmetz (1993). For the methodological considerations see 30-44.47) See, among a huge number of studies, Rgine Robin (1973) and Rgine Robin, JacquesGuilhaumou, and Denise Maldidier (1986), 43-56 and (1994). Also, see Jacques Guil-haumou (2000), 15-38.


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A satisfactory account of the polemics around Begriffsgeschichtewouldrequire a more extensive and detailed analysis. Te reason why the present

account serves the purpose of this essay is that it aims at identifyinga significant lack in the criticism levelled at Begriffsgeschichteas well as inthe attempts to build bridges between this approach and the CambridgeSchool: the centrality of the phenomenon of reception. While neither thefact nor its value has been disputed, reception has not appeared as a pos-sible common platform between the two approaches. While this may haveto do with the apparent insensitivity of Pocock and Skinner to the issue ofreception, I hope to have demonstrated that this is not the case. Contrary

to the more general suggestions made by Richter, this is a specific area inwhich identifiable methodological pursuits in Begriffsgeschichtemay clearlyhave an impact on linguistic contextualism, and vice-versa, in a fashionsimilar to that of Rezeptionsgeschichte.

Scholars have called attention to the fact that both Jauss and Koselleckencountered the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer in Heidelberg andthis became a shared intellectual legacy which was put to highly creativeusage by them. In its own way, Begriffsgeschichteis a form of Rezeptionsge-

schichte, charting the course of the reception of concepts, and examiningthe experience that they both contain and make possible, writes theEnglish translator and editor of Kosellecks essays on historical theory.48Te term Erwartungshorizont, which Jauss appropriated from sociologicalliterature (notably Mannheim) for literary studies,49 and its counterpartErfahrungsraum, serve remarkably similar purposes in the two approaches,and in both of them were perhaps the keys to taking philosophical herme-neutics from its ontological and epistemological heights thus making itrelevant for the practice of history.50It is through them that the historicityof concepts evolves: the idea that texts, on the one hand, cease to operateas stable entities but become subject to transformation by the readings,re-readings, commentaries etc. which constitute the process of reception,while on the other hand they emerge as elements in the modification of theexperience of readers. Te idea of the existence of differentZeitschichten,

48) Keith ribe (2004), xviii. Cf. Melvin Richter (1995), 34-5.49) Hans Robert Jauss (1974), 36.50) An image used in Van Gelderen (1998), 229.


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time layers in any given concept, has the same effect by suggesting that,independently of their initial application, concepts are capable of acquir-

ing and accumulating a variety of meanings, some of which are sifted outrelatively soon but others survive long and converge or conflict with newones. o put it bluntly, concepts do not have histories, only their receptionhas a history, and it is only by recognizing this that it becomes possible tograsp conceptual change.51

Closely related to the framing of the history of concepts as the historyof reception is Kosellecks fascination with translation and his stress onthe importance of the comparative study of concepts in different languages,

explained by reference to the fact that semantics concerns not language ingeneral, but particular languages.52He briefly points to a few examplesthat open up an immense field for comparisons, such as the virtual un-translatability of Bildung, or the difficulty of Germanic and Slavic lan-guages in rendering terminology of Latin derivation. However, a moresystematic attempt to highlight the possibilities of the inter-lingual com-parison of concepts inherent in translation is made by Ulrich Ricken in anarticle following Kosellecks in the same collection. Ricken discusses the

discrepancy betweenAufklrungand lumires, immediately visible in thehopeless struggle of French translators with the German term for instance,Mendelssohns famous 1784 title Was heit aufklrenhas been rendered asQue signifie aufklren. Part of the difficulty stems from the fact that whilein French lumireswas one among several important terms to denote theconcept, Aufklrung had no rival. A fact that sprung, rather from thedifferent character of the phenomenon itself, from the greater capacity ofthe German language to organize the lexical field in a mono-centric fash-ion, thanks to the infinite possibility of crafting composite words from thesame root. Tus, Kants subtle distinction between in einem aufgeklrtenZeitalter and in einem Zeitalter der Aufklrung result and process can only be rendered in French by paraphrase. Next, and related, whileaufklrerandAufklrungwere neologisms, lumiresand clairbelonged tothe basic French vocabulary, frequently used in their concrete and complexsense, with the result that their application to the concept of enlightenment

51) For a concise statement, see Reinhart Koselleck (2002a).52) Reinhart Koselleck (2002a), 40.


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required (and still requires) additional contextual means.53o be sure, themere fact that Was ist Aufklrung?was chosen as a prize question demon-

strates that the field of meaning itself was unstable or, heavily contested even within one community of speakers, so it should be even less surprisingto discover barriers in the way of the relevant vocabulary when transposedinto a community of speakers with a different natural language. Butthe difference between each of the connecting terms of the field, andthe relationships of synonymity, antonymity and complementarity thatexist between them shows nothing less than the difference of those con-texts themselves, which is very nearly what comparative history is about.

Te recognition that historians of ideas should seriously reckon withtranslation as a path of reception in the history of ideas is certainly notnew. Nevertheless, the past fifteen years or so have witnessed an intensificationof this interest, and in several studies some of the methodological assump-tions outlined above have been explicitly or implicitly applied. Let usbriefly examine three such studies, very different in scope, in the chrono-logical order of their subject matter.

Te first one is a recent article by David Saunders on the translations of

the works of Samuel Pufendorf by the Huguenot migr Jean Barbeyrac,which established the latters reputation as a pre-eminent translator ofseventeenth-century Latin natural law texts into French.54Te title itselfleaves no doubt that translation is regarded as adjustment, a strategic art,a weapon for serious struggle, in which the goal for the Protestant refugeewas to reunite civil duties to religious morality and delimit state authorityin the face of individual conscience a rather far cry from Pufendorfsradical separation of natural law from moral theology and his consequentsecularization of civil authority for the sake of the protection of publicpeace. Saunders takes adjustment, explained by him with reference to theheterogeneous character of early-modern natural law, to be overwhelm-ingly a matter of the translators deliberate intervention, and illustrates thisin several ways. First, some lexical and syntactic choices are adopted, notprimarily in Barbeyracs own 1707 translation, but in the Englisheditionof Pufendorf in 1717, which relied for the revision of the 1691 English

53) See Ulrich Ricken in Hans Erich Bdeker (2002), 49-72. See also Rolf Reichardt(1997), 879-999.54) David Saunders (2003), 473-490.


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text on Barbeyracs French version. Second, we are presented with Bar-beyracs 1718 translation of and especially his response to Leibnizs critique

of Pufendorf, which show him to be ambivalent between the both con-tenders: while distancing himself from Leibniz, by allowing conscience topre-empt civil authority, these texts also jeopardize Pufendorfs strategy oflegitimating an absolutist state that would not subordinate civil authorityto confessional ends, and tend to re-insert natural law into moral theology.Tird and last, Saunders discusses Barbeyracs discourses on morality andcivil laws, published as appendices in the 1718 edition of PufendorfsLes devoirs de lhomme et du citoyen, to arrive at a similar conclusion.

Te article successfully undermines the view that Barbeyrac was a medi-ator, both in the sense of presenting Pufendorf in a medium different fromLatin, and in the sense of occupying a middle ground between thevoluntarism of Pufendorf and the rationalism of Leibniz. It alsoenhances our appreciation both of the variety of natural law in the earlyEnlightenment, and adds to our understanding of the nuances of rivalEnlightenments along the cleavage between civil and metaphysicalphilosophy.55What it does not do, of course, is analyse the function, the

process, the instrumentality of the very act of translation in all of this.ranslation indeed functions as an excuse here, most probably not forBarbeyrac but definitely so for Saunders, and could be safely deleted fromthe title of an article which treats Barbeyrac as an independent natural lawtheorist polemicizing both with the author he happens to have translatedand his chief opponent, a polemics presented as taking place largely out-side the translated text. It is not asked why and to what extent this exerciseof adjustment should seem to Barbeyrac himself as depending on hisvery substantial investment in the translation of Pufendorf, nor is it shownhow it is pursued bythe act of translation itself. Under such circumstancesthe question of the extent to which the linguistic and conceptual toolsavailable for the translator played a role, besides his well-documentedintentions, in determining the meaning of the translated text, cannot evenbe raised.56

55) Cf. im J. Hochstrasser (2000) and Ian Hunter (2001).56) It must be added that exactly this kind of historical semantics is carried out very

effectively in another article by Saunders, co-authored with Ian Hunter, focusing on thenotion and uses of state in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century Englishtranslations of Pufendorf. David Saunders and Ian Hunter (2003), 218-234.


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Such questions certainly occupy an important place in Fania Oz-Salzbergers ambitious book that traces the trajectories of Scottish civic

discourse in eighteenth-century Germany.57In many ways, this is a pioneer-ing work in Enlightenment studies, bringing together subjects such as theflourishing of eighteenth-century Scottish studies and the debate over theplurality of the Enlightenment in national contexts, with the aimto provide a comparative history that draws upon the evolution fromreception through translation. It explicitly relies on the Cambridge-styleanalysis of political languages (mainly its Pocockian version) withsome methodological borrowings from Begriffsgeschichte. Te substantive

achievement of the book is defined by Oz-Salzberger as having shown thatreligious language was capable of transforming a vocabulary of politicalaction into a spiritual and inward-looking discourse, as part of an inadver-tent shift of meaning in translated texts,58while she strongly rejects anyaffinity with the Sonderwegthesis: the story presented is one of the depo-liticization of political ideas, but it is not a story of a straightforward rejec-tion of liberal or radical political theory in favour of a conservative orreactionary status quo. . . . [it is] a transformation of a moderate statement

of republican activism into a language of spiritual perfectibilism.59

Indefining her unit of comparison, she shows that so many similaritiesbetween Scotland and Germany in the field of national and historical con-sciousness, problems of identity, traditions of learning, social profiles andintellectual character were affinities bordering on dissimilarities, whichcongealed especially in the different character of politicization in the twocountries, with the result that Germans lacked the contexts of a terminol-ogy that was new and controversial in Scotland too.

Tis observation gives Oz-Salzberger the occasion to introduce hermethodological principles. Te concept of political language is vital forstudying the German reception of Scottish texts, she argues, for transla-tion in this case involves problems of transmitting a vocabulary andindeed a blend of several vocabularies of interdependent terms denotingparticular traditions of thought.60Elsewhere, a vocabulary is defined as

57) Fania Oz-Salzberger (1995).58) Fania Oz-Salzberger (1995), 27.59) Fania Oz-Salzberger (1995), 84.60) Fania Oz-Salzberger (1995), 40.


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a group of terms which are frequently repeated together, mutually eluci-dating, often syntactically or rhetorically complementary, its effect being

that it gradually familiarizes the reader with a set of ideas which the authordevelops in the work and elicits verbal associations in which the mean-ing of the text is, in a way, encapsulated.61Oz-Salzbergers project to studytranslation focusing on the question of whether such vocabularies retainedtheir integrity and inner connections is proposed to go beyond earliermodels of reception or rather, misreception, which she assumes mostor all of the examined cases to have been. Indeed, she flatly rejects Rezep-tionsgeschichte(identified as a positivist account of circulation, reading or

reaction) as well as post-modernist reception theories because they renderthe concept of misreception meaningless. Misreception is approached byher in terms of the authors intended meaning and is understood as itssubversion or neglect by translators, arising not as a necessary corollaryof reading, nor linked to bad reading or bad translation, but quite likely anoutcome of multiple transmission, or the impossible, or limited, translat-ability, of certain key terms (while it is also acknowledged that variousaspects of the original texts can facilitate misunderstanding or even delib-

erate mishandling).62

Several models of misreception are then presented.Tese include Gadamers deterministic model of how socio-politicalbackwardness prevented Germans from grasping the moral meaning ofthe concept of common sense; Isaiah Berlins account of the ways in whichGerman anti-rationalists, portrayed as radically free agents who deliber-ately translated Humes notion of belief (conviction arising out of custom,tradition or intuition) as Glaube(religious faith), thus turning Hume as anally against himself; Rudolf Vierhaus more nuanced approach to theselective reading of Montesquieu in Germany, which was partly intentionaland partly conditioned by socio-political realities; and Peter Michelsensanalysis of the intensification of Lawrence Sternes sentimental languagethrough the German translators choice of words. Oz-Salzberger attemptsto absorb the last two approaches into her own, which is defined by thestudy of political language.

In putting this framework to motion, Oz-Salzberger is specifically con-cerned with three concepts crucial for Ferguson who wrote his works in a

61) Fania Oz-Salzberger (1995), 140.62) Fania Oz-Salzberger (1995), 77-8 and 84.


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linguistic context of which he was very conscious, and evidently expectedsimilar awareness from his readers. Te concepts of civil society, public /

national / political spirit, (active) pursuit, together with their corollaries(polished, polite, civil, civilized, etc.) constituted a terminological battlefieldin contemporary Scotland, with Ferguson trying to bring out (restore)their distinctly (originally) political meaning: civic language was utilizedby him to appropriate and redefine both jurisprudential terms (civil soci-ety, civil liberty) and Addisonian language (politeness, polished, civility,refinement).63Against this background the question in regard to the recep-tion concerns the extent to which a German reader in 1768 could follow

[such] linguistic transactions. Oz-Salzbergers answer is, first, that besidesmere carelessness, and the uncertainty and instability of terms, the use ofvaguely resembling alternatives disrupted the tight logic of connotationsand associations, resulting in a confusing multiplicity and a mollificationof thorny issues. Only because of these, much of Fergusons critique ofnon-civic vocabularies was lost in the German translations. In addition,words used from the recognizable German terminologies of Pietism, main-stream Protestantism and sentimentalism to render Fergusons key terms

that define civic activism further contributed to their depoliticization andto a shift towards spirituality: they introduced a new system of mutuallyelucidating terms which caused a gradual distancing from the authorsoriginal vocabulary. Tis was particularly the case with the terminologyaround Fergusons pursuit: the main factor responsible for the overallmisreception became the cumulative misunderstanding of Fergusonsidea that political life is a worthy object of pursuit for citizens exercisingtheir free will. Te translation helped

to detach pursuit [Streben] from politics, make the citizen into aMensch, hismind into a Seele, and his immediate goals into Endzwecke. Te insertion of aspiritual striving towards a distant perfection was an easy move within thesame vocabulary [. . .] the Scottish civic vocabulary was lost in the process ofGerman translation and reception [. . .] not only because several terms werevery difficult to translate into German [. . .] but also, and primarily, because itno longer formed a vocabulary.64

63) Fania Oz-Salzberger (1995), 150.64) Fania Oz-Salzberger (1995), 165-6.


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As my chief interest here is the proper method employed in the interpreta-tion of translated texts, I shall not be concerned with some of the aspects

of Oz-Salzbergers work that have been contested by other scholars.65As tothe interpretative tools, her analysis is distinguished by a hardly paralleledsensitivity among historians towards the subtleties of the linguistic resourcesof the vocabularies available for each community of speakers, and in thissense it is a fine example to follow. Tis sensitivity, however, does not gotogether with her rather surprising description of Rezeptionsgeschichte aspositivistic, and her strong views on misreception. Discrepancy canbe noticed between the notion of mis-reception and the accent on the

authors original intention on the one hand, and the subject matter of thebook, on the other hand, which cannot be disentangled from prevailingcontemporary conceptions of translation and the translators roles, not tomention the intentions on the recipient side, when the agents of receptionfirst take to the text. Why did they translate Ferguson? What did theyexpect to bring out of him? Oz-Salzberger, who takes due notice of thestandards of translation in the eighteenth century, also gives compellinganswers to these questions in the subsequent chapters of her book. Tese

answers do not seem to depend in any way on the notion of misreception,which, at the same time by the nature of its semantics tends to repre-sent the recipients as mistaken or wrong.

My third example is somewhat beyond the chronological scope of thisstudy, yet it is highly instructive in a variety of ways. In his article onranslation and the Colonial Imaginary,66Abdelmajid Hannoum aimsto show how a fragment of Ibn Khaldns Ibar, translated in the early 1850sby William de Slane as Histoire des berbres, was discovered by FrenchOrientalism in the context of the colonization of Algeria and convertedinto a text with colonial categories. More generally, Hannoum investigateshow colonialism introduced and established a specific imaginary by trans-forming local knowledge into colonial knowledge, which also assuredcolonial domination after the collapse of the colonial enterprise and shaped

65) Tese include her unqualified construing of Ferguson as a representative of republicancivic activism within his Scottish context, and the concomitant assumptions that if

Germany was to possess such a tradition it would depend on the import of Ferguson forit, and by failing at this it would be and remain bereft of it.66) Abdelmajid Hannoum (2003).


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postcolonial identities. Hannoum draws a great deal of inspiration fromtheories of language and translation Ricoeur, Whorf and Jakobson figure

prominently in his citations in arguing that the activity of translation isnot to be understood as the reproduction of a foreign text, nor as the trans-mission of a message, nor its betrayal, but as domestication: an interpreta-tion in which canons articulated by the recipient culture are applied. Assuch, it is not only an interpretation but also the production of a new text,the foreign text and the translated text being expressions of imaginarystructures that are products of different historical moments.

In the given case, Hannoum argues, colonial questions and answers are

regulated by a European epistemology specific to the nineteenth century,as distinct from that found in the foreign text translated. He shows how adiscourse aboutIbn Khaldn emerged to create this context, in which hewas distanced from his environment on account of his rationality andmodernity qualities attributed to him on the authority of Europeanstandards held superior by French scholars. Te intervention required forthis canonization was performed in De Slanes introduction, to whichHannoum pays considerable attention: the introduction, which reveals the

rectification and the correction of the author as an avowed aim of thetranslation, is represented as a discursive strategy to determine the readingof the text a cognitive manipulation to make the reader understand thetext as intended by the translator. De Slanes narrative in the introduction,stressing that before being subjugated to the Arabs, North-Africa had beenpart of the Roman Empire, and expressing the opposition between Occi-dent and Orient, seems to have become fundamental in French colonialhistoriography.

Hannoum, however, is not content with the translators explicit claimsput forth in the meta-discourse of the introduction. He also attempts toanalyse some of the implicit claims made through the use of specific key-words in the translated text itself. Tese include, in the first place, raceand domination, which are claimed to represent quite unambiguously alanguage of conflict and conquest, superiority and hierarchy which hall-marked the racial ideology of Gobineau overtones which are, however,missing from the original terminology of Ibn Khaldn, whose account waspolemical in his time precisely because of being inclusive and integrative in

representing the Arab conquest of North Africa as a reunion of two groupsof the same origin (the other being the Berbers). By contrast, the translato-


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rial strategy was to make the history of North Africa that of a strugglebetween the Arabs and the Berbers, with the latter being consistently rep-

resented by contemporary ethnographers as primitive Europeans who haveretained their racial specificity as well as numerical superiority. Ibn Khal-dn, as it were, is turned inside out in the translation.

On the whole, this conclusion is not unconvincing. Hannoums articlehas formidable strengths in the consistent and fruitful application of lan-guage and translation theories to his subject matter, and in the subtle anal-ysis of the translators introduction as a genre with features that can begeneralized. It stands on less firm ground when it comes to examining De

Slanes use of the central categories, especially race. It is simply taken forgranted that when using this term, the translator had in mind Gobineausidea of races as marked by inherent, hereditary and permanent qualities, aswell as inequality and antagonism vis--vis one another. Te potentialobjection that Gobineaus Essai sur lingalit des races humaines, first pub-lished in 1853, could hardly have been available for De Slane before hecompleted his translation, is offset by the claim that Gobineaus viewsbecame influential not so much because they were novel, but because they

were widely accepted even before he articulated them a claim supportedfrom an article by Hannah Arendt published in 1944, hardly a time whenthe notion of race could have been a subject of dispassionate academicinquiry. On these grounds, existing alternatives within the contemporaryEuropean discourse on race, potentially available for De Slane,67are neglected,and it is Gobineaus concept that is contrasted to the semantics of the Arabterms conveyed in the translation by race (mainlyjl, in Ibn Khaldn ahuman group defined in time and by culture) with predictable results.But definitions of race not too remote from those ofjlinherited from theeighteenth century could have been still available to De Slane, and beforethe above-mentioned conclusions are reached, it ought to be shown thathe decidednot to avail himself of these options. o be sure, in the lack of asketch of the Begriffsgeschichteof race in the early to mid-nineteenth cen-tury context, this is hardly possible to show.

A survey of three highly respectable pieces of scholarship on translationin the history of ideas reveals that the methods applied in the study of this

67) Robert Bernasconi (2000) and (2001).


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field can be further developed and refined, especially in regard to its suit-ability to the peculiar features of the field itself. Tus, in the closing lines

of this article, I present a brief proposal of an approach based on my sketchof translation theories in the early modern period that could be adopted bylinguistic contextualism, Begriffsgeschichte or Rezeptionsgeschichte. Inten-tionality must be taken seriously. However, this stance would compel us toregard translation as an act of reading which becomes an independentspeech act substantially conditioned by the translators historical circum-stances: it prioritizes the intentions of the translator over those of theauthor of the text in its interpretation. Tis may be common sense, but

there are important consequences. I suggest that even a decision on thepart of a translator to confine him/herself to the re-enactment of theauthors intention is, first of all, an exception rather than the rule and,second, must also be understood in terms of an agenda specific to thetranslators historical context. Even in such cases at best it is only partiallytrue that the original text sets a standard for the translator; therefore, anyinterpretation that explicitly or implicitly assesses translations in terms ofsuch a standard, seems to disregard an important reality. Whether a trans-

lation is faithful or represents a case of misreception a heavily loadedterm that carries value judgements and thus should be avoided , what oneshould be concerned with is the grounds on which texts arising from theauthors realm of experience (including his/her being embedded in discur-sive traditions and intentions to use, promote or challenge them) andshaped to answer questions and offer solutions belonging to his/her Erwar-tungshorizont, still seemed suitable for pursuing agendas peculiar to thetranslators time and place; and the extent to which the reasons for select-ing such texts as vehicles for different strategies have to do with propertiesinherent in the text, or with the translators agenda. It must be furtherconsidered that besides the conscious endeavour of translators to performthe act of translation in adjustment to their space of experience and theirhorizon of expectations, in many cases, the character of the vocabulary, theidiom and the grammatical structures of the naturallanguage which is thetarget language of the translation, would leave them at a loss in renderingthose structures which provide the discourseof the original with any degreeof coherence it might possess, and compel them to look for substitute solu-

tions. Tese substitutes, however, may well belong to discursive (ideo-logical) traditions different from those in which the original text wasconceived, resulting in its transposition through the subversion either of its


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consistency, or its purpose, or both. Te analysis of synonyms, antonyms,complementary terms, terminological correspondences and discrepancies

within and between fields of meaning or concepts, as they become objectsof reception, is a feasible way to trace such transpositions.68

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