Contributions1 2

in this issue
Conceptual History in the United States:

a Missing “National Project”
Martin J. Burke
On the Notion of Historical (Dis)Continuity:
Reinhart Koselleck’s Construction of the Sattelzeit
Gabriel Motzkin
The Notion of Modernity in Nineteenth-Century
Spain: An Example of Conceptual History
Javier Fernández Sebastián and Gonzalo Capellán de Miguel
For a Critical Conceptual History of Brazil:
Receiving Begriffsgeschichte
João Feres Júnior
The Concept of Citizenship in Danish Public Discourse number 2, volume 1 :: october, 2005
Uffe Jakobsen
number 2, volume 1 :: october, 2005

Classical Modeling and the Circulation of Concepts
in Early Modern Britain
Patricia Springborg
http://contributions.iuperj.br
Sponsored by:
ISSN :: 1807-9326
volume 1, number 2 :: october, 2005
articles
127 Conceptual History in the United States:
a Missing “National Project”
Martin J. Burke
145 On the Notion of Historical (Dis)Continuity:
Reinhart Koselleck’s Construction of the Sattelzeit
Gabriel Motzkin
159 The Notion of Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Spain:
An Example of Conceptual History
Javier Fernández Sebastián and Gonzalo Capellán de Miguel
185 For a Critical Conceptual History of Brazil:
Receiving Begriffsgeschichte
João Feres Júnior
201 The Concept of Citizenship in Danish Public Discourse
Uffe Jakobsen
223 Classical Modeling and the Circulation of Concepts
in Early Modern Britain
Patricia Springborg
245 book review
Redescribing Political Concepts:
History of Concepts and Politics
Sandro Chignola
253 announcements
255 recent and upcoming publications
257 research projects and networks
contributions 1 (2) : 127 – 144
127
conceptual history in the united

states: a missing “national project”
Martin J. Burke
The City University of New York
In this essay I would first like to address the question of why there has been
no national project on the history of political and social concepts in the
United States analogous to those which have appeared in the Netherlands,
Finland, and Spain – or that are being considered in Brazil – in the wake of
the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, the Handbuch politisch-sozialer Grundbegriffe in
Frankreich, and the Historisches Wöterbuch der Philosophie.1 I will then turn to
consider a number of the ways that scholars can, nevertheless, develop his-
tories of central concepts in American public discourse thanks to recent ad-
vances in information technology. In conclusion, I will offer a few comments
about national and comparative projects in conceptual history.
The factors that have militated against the development of a na-
tional project, or projects, on the history of political and social concepts in
the United States have been professional and institutional. The organization
of academic life and the intellectual division of labor among historians, phi-
losophers, and political scientists have tended to discourage sustained, coop-
erative ventures that cross professional boundaries. Despite regular – some-
times ritualized – calls for and celebrations of “interdisciplinarity,” doing
work that is grounded in and directed toward the research agendas of more
than one discipline is quite difficult. So, too, is obtaining the necessary fund-
ing for collaborative projects from public or private sources. Although the
federally funded National Science Foundation does support multi-year stud-
ies in the social sciences, it has emphasized “rigorous,” that is to say, quan-
titative research. Hence, teams of political scientists engaged in collecting
and analyzing voting data are regularly given support, while grant propos-
als from scholars interested in interpreting political discourse would not be
encouraged. Such proposals could be funded by another publicly supported
agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities, but that body has far
fewer financial resources than does the nsf. In addition, the neh has pre-
128 ferred projects in American social and cultural history that have focused
on the experiences of marginalized or oppressed groups – women, African-
conceptual history in the united states: a missing “national project”
Americans, homossexuals – and has been reluctant to fund research on the

activities or ideas of members of literate elites. Nor have private organiza-
tions, such as the Rockefeller or Ford Foundations, recently underwritten
long-term historically oriented studies. The German Historical Institute in
Washington, d.c. has hosted and underwritten conferences and volumes on
Begriffsgeschichte and the history of concepts, but these have not concentrated
on concepts in specifically American contexts. 2
Thus, while academics in the United States have made significant
methodological and empirical contributions to the scholarly literature
– such as Terence Ball’s Transforming Political Discourse: Political Theory and
Critical Conceptual History; the Ball, Hanson and Farr volume on Political
Innovation and Conceptual Change; Melvin Richter’s seminal History of Political
and Social Concepts: a Critical Introduction; the essays on Conceptual Change
and the Constitution, edited by Ball and J.G.A. Pocock; and the Lehmann and
Richter collection on The Meaning of Historical Terms and Concepts – no larger
national project has followed in their wake. Nor, given the aforementioned
institutional and professional circumstances, do I expect that one will soon
be forthcoming. 3
In lieu of an equivalent to the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, or Dutch
style volumes on particular concepts, Americanists engaged in doing con-
ceptual history have had to rely on a number of less than satisfactory alterna-
tives. There is the Oxford English Dictionary, but as Melvin Richter has noted,
while the oed might be etymologically reliable, it is chronologically suspect,
and hardly, in any event, suited for the systematic study of political and so-
cial concepts. 4
The multi-volume Dictionary of the History of Ideas, edited by Philip
Wiener, reflects a philosophical and a methodological orientation that is not
compatible with either Begriffsgeschichte or the so-called “Cambridge school”
contextualist history of political thought. 5 A New Dictionary of the History
of Ideas, edited by Maryanne Horowitz, is under preparation and soon to
be published. Though the contributors to the ndhi no longer subscribe to
Arthur Lovejoy’s program for the study of unit ideas, I doubt that many of its
entries will be informed by work in the fields of conceptual history. 6 Daniel
Rodgers’ Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics since Independence, has
a title that is promising to conceptual historians. 7 But the text follows along
the lines of Raymond William’s Keywords, and suffers from similar prob- 129
lems in the range of sources examined, and the interpretive methods em-

ployed. 8 Simply put, there is little in the way of currently available English
language reference works or compilations that meet the rigorous standards
set by Reinhardt Koselleck and Rolf Reichardt, or recommended by John
Pocock and Quentin Skinner.9
What then are political scientists and historians interested in the
history of American concepts to do? Thanks to recent endeavors by research
libraries, universities and for-profit publishers, an extensive – and ever-grow-
ing – amount of printed materials is being made available online. These re-
sources can provide scholars with rapid, and relatively easy, access to a virtual
archive of digitized items that can be examined, assessed, and compared, de-
pending on the questions asked. Although I do not want to suggest that in-
formation technology can or should be a substitute for serious thought – an
assumption too commonly made by many of my American contemporaries
– access to online original sources can enhance the quality of historical re-
search. For scholars in and of the United States, these databases can provide
means to solve some of the problems posed by the lack of an American proj-
ect done in a Dutch, German or Spanish mode.
The digitization projects of particular importance to historians of
political and social concepts include publicly available sites on the World
Wide Web, as well as restricted access sites that are available to research schol-
ars and students at colleges and universities that pay the necessary licensing
fees. The latter are indicative of the growing “digital divide” in American
higher education, in which only those affiliated with well-financed institu-
tions can fully benefit from the dramatic expansion of online resources.10
Although these projects vary, often quite significantly, in organization and
operation, many do allow for author, title, keyword and subject searches. A
number of them also provide for searches by time period, e.g. 1770 to 1790, by
genre and by place of publication. Taken together, they can permit research-
ers to proceed along the lines recommended by Koselleck for the systematic
analysis of large amounts of materials, and they can provide far more in-
formation on the semantics and the pragmatics of terms and concepts than
could be gathered from working solely with sources in the original. 11
For scholars concerned with the earliest episodes of American his-
tory – from European expansion in the Atlantic basin to the establishment of
permanent colonies on the North American mainland and in the Caribbean
130 – Early English Books Online has made available to date over one hundred thou-
sand items published between 1475 and 1700. The project is based upon the
standard bibliographical tools for this period, the Short Title Catalogues, and
expands upon an earlier, successful microfilming project. It includes mate-
rials published in England, Scotland, Ireland, on the continent and in the
colonies, and presents them in a printable image format. 12 Along with books,
eebo has compiled almanacs, tracts, broadsides, statutes and proclamations.
Of particular significance to historians of concepts is the Thomason’s Tracts
collection of some twenty-two thousand items – primarily books, broadsides,
and periodicals – printed in Britain and overseas from 1640 to 1661 on the
subjects of politics and religion. This latter resource could serve as part of the
basis for in-depth, comparative studies of concepts in Europe in this era. 13
eebo is complemented and continued by Eighteenth-Century Collections
on Line, which includes some one hundred and fifty thousand titles printed
in England, Scotland, Ireland and North America from 1701 to 1800. 14 An
attractive feature of the eeco is a full text search option. This enables re-
searchers to locate words and phrases easily within the bodies of texts, as well
as in their titles or in subject indexes. For example, a full text search for the
term “civil and religious liberty” – one which Dissenters and Tories would
construe differently – for the years 1715 to 1745 results in some two hundred
and forty nine items. In each of these, the term is highlighted on the specific
page(s). Choosing from eight subject categories can further refine searches.
The advantages of such search options for locating sizeable bodies of relevant
sources, mapping out semantic fields, and tracking changes and continuities
in language use are clear. So, too, are the possibilities for close semantic and
conceptual analysis in small numbers of texts or contexts, e.g. the philosoph-
ical histories of the Scottish Enlightenment, or in the work of a single author,
such as Edmund Burke.
The most important online resource for Americanists working in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is Early American Imprints which
provides access to over thirty-six thousand items published in British North
America and the new United States from 1639 to 1800; a companion series
continues on until 1819.15 Like eebo, eai is derived from an established refer-
ence guide to publications from this era, the American Bibliography, and from
a widely used microform collection.16 Save for newspapers and periodicals, it
strives to make available almost every printed source from this period held
by libraries and archives across the United States. 17 Though the great major-
ity of these items are in English, materials in Algonquian, Dutch, French, 131
German, ancient Greek, Mohawk, Spanish, Swedish, and Welsh are also in-

cluded. Searches in eai can be done by genre, e.g. sermons or speeches de-
livered in legislatures, and by place of publication, e.g. the colony and state
of Virginia. Thus conceptions of liberty, freedom or slavery – to suggest but
a few examples – can be surveyed at local, regional, and intercolonial levels,
and can be studied either diachronically or synchronically.
For a more detailed example of how eai can enhance historical
research, I will refer to a part of my current work-in-progress on political
and cultural relations between Protestants and Roman Catholics in British
North America and – after 1776 – the United States. Among the things that I
have studied are conceptions of popery in colonial, revolutionary, and early
national contexts and in the arenas of learned, political, and popular dis-
course. By using the various search options, I have able to map out semantic
fields that include the terms “popery,” “popish,” “popedom,” papist(s),” “pa-
pistical,” “Romanist(s),” “Romanism,” “Catholic(s)” and “Catholick(s).” These
terms were ubiquitous in eighteenth-century American English: there are
some one thousand four hundred and fifty-five items that contain “popery,”
for instance. I have been able to locate these terms within specific texts, and
to situate them in larger institutional settings and cultural practices, e.g. ser-
mons, political addresses, or Pope’s Day (November 5th) celebrations. Since
results in eai indicate the page(s) on which words or phrases appear, it is
possible to distinguish between commonplace, uncontroversial uses of these
terms, and instances where conceptions of popery were being contested. The
database also makes possible searches for related concepts, such as popery
and tyranny, or counter-concepts, such as popery and religious liberty. Were
I to pursue these lines of research with the older microprint and microfiche
versions of eai, I would be limited to title and subject searches, and unable to
examine so many different sources in such a comprehensive manner. Work
that would have taken me months in libraries and archives I can now do in
weeks from my office or from home.
The online version of Early American Imprints might also be used to
clarify, if not to resolve, a number of debates about the contours of eighteenth-
century American political thought. For over thirty years, historians and po-
litical scientists have disagreed as to whether republicanism or liberalism
was the dominant ideology in the era of the American revolution.18 An all text
search in eai returned eighty printed items that included the term “republi-
132 canism” from the year 1774 onward. The first, appropriately, was a broadside
letter by “A Freeman” entitled “It is the Beginning of Republicanism.”19 The
word “liberalism,” by comparison, occurred in none of the database’s texts. 20

Nor does “liberalism” appear in either ecco or eebo. “Republicanism,” how-
ever, was employed in English language discourse(s) of politics since the
1660s. 21 Scholars who wish to argue for the salience of liberalism as an ide-
ology could use eai to demonstrate the widespread use of such characteris-
tic liberal terms as “natural rights” and “equality,” and could maintain that
the conceptions of liberalism did not depend on the presence of a particular
word, but on the employment of a cluster of propositions. The appearance of
neologisms, such as “republicanism” and “liberalism,” in the contexts of rev-
olutionary change is part of the historical process that Koselleck has referred
to as Ideologiesierbarkeit. 22 The eai series, in conjunction with eeco and eebo,
could be used to determine if and how this process was at work in Anglo-
American politics and society as well.
As useful as eai, ecco and eebo are, they are available to institu-
tions only by way of expensive licenses. Fortunately, there are also a num-
ber of open access online resources of significance to conceptual historians.
The Avalon Project at the Yale Law School has been digitizing major collec-
tions in the fields of law, diplomacy, economics and politics. 23 Although it
encompasses sources from the Code of Hammurabi to twenty-first cen-
tury European Union declarations, the Avalon Project’s most extensive vir-
tual holdings range from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries. Of spe-
cial interest to Americanists are: colonial charters; petitions and resolutions
from the era of the Revolution; James Madison’s “Notes on Debates in the
Federal Convention of 1787;” the Federalist Papers; arguments made before
the Supreme Court and the annual messages of the presidents. However,
the Project is less interactive than are eai and the other restricted sites: it
provides but a few options for searching in its collections. But by using the
find option on Microsoft Word or similar programs, all Avalon’s documents
and texts can be examined at lexical and conceptual levels. How “liberty” or
“slavery” was construed in the course of the secret deliberations of the 1787
Constitutional Convention could be compared to uses in the Federalist, for
example.
By far the most comprehensive of the open access sites is the
American Memory Project. 24 To date, American Memory has placed online more
than nine million items from the collections of the Library of Congress, and
from other research libraries, museums, archives, and historical societies 133
in the United States. These include books, pamphlets, manuscripts, photo-

graphs, prints, maps, motion pictures, sheet music, and sound recordings
which are gathered into over one hundred thematic collections. 25 Among
the many holdings that could be enlightening to historians of political and
social concepts are: broadsides relating to the Continental Congress and the
Constitutional Convention (1774-1789); documents and debates from Congress
(1774-1875); the African-American Pamphlet Collection (1822-1909); trial records
and case reports on “Slaves and the Courts” (1740-1860); and the papers of
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass and Abraham
Lincoln. 26 Partial online access to the papers of Hannah Arendt is also avail-
able. 27 The project features a far more sophisticated set of search options than
does Avalon. Its collections can be explored individually, or subjects can be
searched across American Memory as a whole. Researchers can browse by top-
ics, time period, e.g. 1700-1790, by genre, or by geographic region. Changes
in conceptions of “democracy” during the course of the nineteenth century
could be followed in the spheres of politics or popular culture, for example.
Or Thomas Jefferson’s papers could be studied to determine how he and
his correspondents understood and used such signifiers as “republican,” “re-
publicanism,” and “republican principles.”28 And since many of American
Memory’s collections include manuscript letters, notes and diaries, there are
ample opportunities for examining language use in private as well as in pub-
lic discourse.
While the respective divisions of the Library of Congress have done
the bulk of American Memory’s digitization, there have been joint efforts with
other institutions as well. The Nineteenth Century: The Making of America in
Books and Periodicals is a collaborative endeavour with the libraries of Cornell
University and the University of Michigan, and draws upon their Making of
America (MoA) primary source preservation and access programs. 29 The MoA
at Cornell is composed of one hundred and nine monographs and twenty-
two journals published between the years 1840 and 1900; Michigan’s contri-
bution to the MoA digital library includes some eight thousand five hundred
books and eleven journals from the period 1850 to 1877. 30 The MoA is partic-
ularly rich in primary source materials in history, sociology, psychology, reli-
gion, education and the sciences. Single words or phrases can be searched for
in books and/or journals; and periodicals can be browsed on a volume to vol-
ume basis. However, as impressive as is the MoA, the very size of these digi-
134 tization projects can create problems, as well as possibilities, for an historian
of concepts. A full text search for “liberty” in the Michigan MoA site pro-
duced seven thousand and sixty-six books and nine thousand five hundred
and seventy-one journal articles in which the term appeared; a similar search
for “democracy” yielded two thousand one hundred and twenty-eight books
and one thousand two hundred and thirty articles. The Cornell site does pro-
vide for more refined searches bounded by five-year periods: there “democ-
racy” appeared in five hundred and ninety-six books and journals published
between 1845 and 1850. Doing research with these online resources, then, can
prove to be a daunting task.
As a review of the MoA digital library indicates, journals and mag-
azines are very important resources for studying patterns of language use
and conceptual change, especially from the mid-nineteenth century onward,
when periodical literature came to replace pamphlets as the most common
medium of political discourse. A more efficient means for examining an
even larger body of that literature is the restricted access American Periodical
Series. This online version of the aps, adapted from a microform edition, en-
compasses some one thousand and one hundred periodicals that began pub-
lication between 1741 and 1900; the bulk of the collection is comprised of
nineteenth-century materials. 31 These periodicals can be searched in a va-
riety of ways: by author, subject, title of article, editor, publisher, place, and/
or date of publication. Uses of terms and phrases can be located within spe-
cific articles, in runs of particular publications, or in the entire collection.
“Republicanism,” for example, could be found in fifty-eight articles, essays,
and short entries printed before 1800, with the earliest instance in 1791. 32
“Liberalism,” in a political sense, first appeared in 1821, when it was used in
descriptions of conditions and changes in Europe. 33 In these and in subse-
quent texts, “republicanism” and “liberalism” seem to be synonymous, not
exclusive, categories.
The search options in the aps also allow for close analyses of con-
cepts in a variety of settings. How “democracy” was construed by supporters
of Andrew Jackson in partisan journals such as the United States Magazine
and Democratic Review (1837-1851) could be contrasted with the writings of
their Whig rivals in the American Review (1845-1850). Conceptions of “popery”
could be compared in denominational organs such as the American Baptist
Magazine (1817-1835), the Congregationalist (1816-1906), and the Methodist
Review (1818-1931). Or how provocative figures such as Thomas Paine and
William Cobbett employed conceptions of “liberty” and “aristocracy” in the 135
former’s Pennsylvania Magazine (1775-1776) or the latter’s Porcupine’s Political

Censor (1797-1797) and Political Register (1816-1818) could be explored.
As interesting – and potentially rewarding – as these databases, web-
sites and virtual libraries might be, they should not be construed as replace-
ments for multi-volume studies along German, Dutch or Spanish lines. For
historians and political scientists, these and other digital archives are a
means to an end, not ends in themselves. Yet they can serve as significant
aids for identifying and interpreting linguistic evidence: that is to say, for
the doing of conceptual history. If used in connection with the methods of
Begriffsgeschichte and Cambridge contextualism, these online resources can
enable an individual scholar, or group of scholars, to compose well-docu-
mented histories of a concept, or a cluster of concepts, depending on the
relevant scholarly interests. Thanks to them, the regrettable absence of an
ongoing national project need not be a major impediment to sustained and
systematic studies of political and social concepts in the United States.
In addition, research done in these virtual sources could make sig-
nificant contributions to the larger study of conceptions and conceptualiza-
tions in English, especially in the early modern era. Both Early English Books
Online and the Eighteenth Century Collections Online include materials printed
in the British Isles, the Caribbean, and on the North American mainland;
while Early American Imprints, Avalon and American Memory, and the American
Periodical Series contain many items that circulated throughout the Atlantic
world. Though Melvin Richter did recommend an English-language proj-
ect some ten years ago in the closing chapter of his “Critical Introduction,”
only a few historians have responded to his call. 34 But scholars now have
the opportunity to develop histories of concepts as they were discussed and
deployed by Anglophones in the British metropolitan and on the American,
Irish, Indian, South African and antipodean peripheries of empire.
Since the seaboard territories which would become the United
States were colonies for over one hundred and sixty years, any American proj-
ect should be a comparative one, at least until the founding of the new re-
public in 1776. Even after the Revolution, the United States was in many ways
a cultural province of Great Britain, and would remain so for decades. It
seems to me that similar arguments could be made for the relationships be-
tween Brazil and Portugal, and between Spain and the creole republics in
the Americas. Thus, any Brazilian, Mexican or Argentine national project
136 would have to include a significant comparative aspect. The trans-Atlantic
dialogues did not end with eighteenth or nineteenth-century declarations
of independence. Those declarations, in turn, with their appeals to “natural

rights” and their evocations of “liberty,” should remind us of the intra- and
intercontinental histories of these and related terms in the lexicons of liberal
politics. When, how and why certain concepts were introduced, adapted and
exchanged across the borders of states and languages here in the Americas
are questions that we may wish to discuss in the future.
notes 137
1
Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck (1972-1997); Rolf

Reichardt and Eberhard Schmitt (Reichardt and Schmitt, 1985); Joachim
Ritter and Karlfried Grüner (1971). The Dutch national project, Reeks
Nederlandse begripsgechidenis, includes: E.O.G. Haitsma Mulier and W.R.E.
Velema (1999); N.C.F. van Sas (1999); Pim den Boer (2001); Joost Kloek
and Karen Tilmans (2002). The ongoing Finnish project includes Ilkka
Lakaniemi, Anna Rotkirch and Henrik Stenius (1995). The Spanish project
includes Javier Fernández Sebastián and Juan Francisco Fuentes (2002).
2
Hartmut Lehmann and Melvin Richter (1996); Peter Baehr and Melvin
Richter (2004).
3
Terence Ball (1988); Terence Ball, James Farr and Russell Hanson (1989);
Melvin Richter (1995); Terence Ball and J.G.A. Pocock (1988); Lehmann and
Richter (1996).
4
J.S. Simpson and E.S.C. Weiner (1989). On the Oxford English Dictionary and
the history of concepts see Richter (1995), 144;147-57.
5
Philip Wiener (1973) . On the differences between the history of ideas and
the history of concepts see Melvin Richter (1987).
6
Maryanne Cline Horowitz (2005).
7
Daniel Rodgers (1987).
8
Raymond Williams (1976).
9
J.G.A. Pocock (1981), 959-80. Quentin Skinner (1969).
10
The term “digital divide” has been used to characterize these circumstanc-
es by my colleague, Professor Stephen Brier, associate provost for informa-
tion technology of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
11
Reinhart Koselleck (1989).
12
Early English Books Online (Ann Arbor: Bell and Howell Information and
Learning, 1999-). More information on eebo can be found at: http://eebo.
chadwyck.com . eebo is based on the compilations made by A.W. Pollard and
G.R. Redgrave (1969) and Donald Wing (1972).
138
13
British Museum Department of Printed Books compilated by George
Thomason (1908). Thomason was a London printer and bookseller.
14
Eighteenth Century Collections Online (Farmington Hills, MI: Bell and
Howell, 2003-). Additional information can be found at: http://www.gale.com/
EighteenthCentury.
15
Early American Imprints, Series I and II (2002). For online information see:
http://www.readex.com/scholarl/eai_digi.html .
16
Charles Evans (1903) . The second series is based on the continuation of
Evans, Ralph Shaw and Richard Shoemaker (1983). The Early American
Imprints series was first released on microcards, and then subsequently on
microfiche.
17
An online version of Early American Newspapers (1690-1876) is under prep-
aration by Readex as part of their web based Archive of Americana: http://www.
readex.com/.
18
The terms and positions in this debate are summarized in Joyce Appleby
(1992) .
19
Advice from Philadelphia, dated July 23, 1774. “The committee from the
several counties of this province, met in this city the 15th instant, and have
been very busy ever since in framing instructions to the Assembly…” (New
York, 1774).
20
Although an all text search for the term “liberalism” did yield one re-
sult, it appears to be an error. On page 171 of the Catalogue of the books be-
longing to the Loganian Library; to which is prefixed a short account of the insti-
tution, with the law for annexing the said library to that belonging to “the Library
Company of Philadelphia,” and the rules regulating the manner of conducting the
same (Philadelphia, 1795), the word “liberalium” appears in a book title.
21
In eebo, “republicanism” is used in the course of an exchange between
James Harrington and Henry Stubbe over the former’s Oceana: Henry
Stubbe (1660) and James Harrington (1660). In ecco, the first instance of the
term is to be found in Conyers Place, A sermon preached at Dorchester in the coun-
ty of Dorset, January 30, 1701/2 (London: J. Nutt, 1702).
22
On neologisms and Ideologiseierbarkeit see Richter (1995), 37-38.
23
For the Avalon Project, go to http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/avalon.htm. 139
24
The homepage for American Memory is http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html.

25
More information on the range and the resources of the collection can be
found at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/about/about.html .
26
These collections are located at the following sites:
Broadsides: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/bdsds/bdsdhome.html;
Congressional debates and documents: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/lawhome.html;
African-American pamphlets: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aapchtml/aapchome.html;
Slaves and the courts: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/sthtml/sthome.html;
Washington Papers: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/gwhtml/gwhome.html;
Jefferson Papers: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/jefferson_papers/;
Douglass Papers: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/doughtml/doughome.html;
Lincoln Papers: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/alhtml/malhome.html.
27
Partial access to the online Hannah Arendt Papers can be found at: http://
memory.loc.gov/ammem/arendthtml/arendthome.html.
28
In Jefferson’s correspondence from the years 1791 to 1825, the term
“republican” appears in 194 items; “republicanism” in 67; and “republican
principles” in 17. As a term denoting a body of political actors, the term
“liberals” appears but once. See http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/jefferson_papers/.
29
The Nineteenth Century in Print can be found at: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ndlp-
coop/moahtml/ncphome.html .
30
The Making of America online collection at Cornell University can be found
at http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/. The website for Michigan’s MoA is http://www.hti.
umich.edu/m/moagrp/. Both are accessible to scholars, students and the general
public. For more information go to http://www.hti.umich.edu/m/moagrp/about.html.
31
The American Periodical Series Online (Ann Arbor: Chadwyck-Healey, 2003-).
Additional information can be found at http://www.il.proquest.com/products/pt-product-
APSOnline.shtml .
32
See, for example, Benjamin Rush (1791).
33
See, for examples, “The ‘Holy Alliance’,” Niles Weekly Register 20, no. 20
(July, 1821): 313-18; Review of Geschichte der Democratie in den Vereinigten Staaten
von Nord America, by Johann Georg Hülsemann, North American Review 23
(October, 1826): 304-15.
140
34
Melvin Richter (1995) , 143-60. An important exception to this generaliza-
tion is to be found in the comparative work of Jörn Leonhard (2001). Although
he writes in German, the Oxford-based Leonhard is interested in how con-

cepts have been used in both English and American contexts. See as well
Martin J. Burke (2002).
bibliographical references 141
Appleby, Joyce Oldham. 1992. Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical

Imagination. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Baehr, P. R., Melvin Richter, and Conference for the Study of Political Thought.
2004. Dictatorship in History and Theory: Bonapartism, Caesarism, and
Totalitarianism, Publications of the German Historical Institute.
Washington, D.C., Cambridge, UK; New York: German Historical
Institute; Cambridge University Press.
Ball, Terence. 1988. Transforming Political Discourse: Political Theory and Critical
Conceptual History. Oxford; New York: Blackwell.
Ball, Terence, James Farr, and Russell L. Hanson, eds. 1989. Political
Innovation and Conceptual Change. Edited by W. Lepenies, R. Rorty,
J. B. Schneewind and Q. Skinner, Ideas in context. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Ball, Terence, and J. G. A. Pocock. 1988. Conceptual Change and the Constitution.
Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas.
Boer, Pim den. 2001. Beschaving: een Geschiedenis van de Begrippen Hoofsheid,
Heusheid, Beschaving en Cultuur, Reeks Nederlandse Begripsgeschiedenis;
3. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
British Museum. Deptartment of printed books. Thomason collection and
George Thomason. 1908. Catalogue of the pamphlets, books, newspapers,
and manuscripts relating to the civil war, the commonwealth, and restora-
tion. London: Printed by order of the Trustees.
Burke, Martin J. 2002. “Papistes ou Catholiques? Papisme ou Catholicité?
Terminologie Confessionnelle et Culture Colitique en Irlande et aux
Etats-Unis à la Fin du 18e et Début du 19e siècle.” Revue Dix-Huitième
Siècle (34): 419-33.
Evans, Charles. 1903. American bibliography; a chronological dictionary of all
books, pamphlets, and periodical publications printed in the United States of
America from the genesis of printing in 1639 down to and including the year
1820. With bibliographical and biographical notes. Chicago: Priv. print.
for the author by the Blakely Press.
142 Evans, Charles, Roger P. Bristol, American Antiquarian Society, and Readex
Microprint Corporation. Early American Imprints. Series I, Evans
(1639-1800) [Electronic text, images, and search engine.]. Readex.

American Antiquarian Society 2002. Available from http://infoweb.newsbank.com/
?db=EVAN . For subscribers only; follow link to resource.
Haitsma Mulier, E. O. G., and Wyger Velema. 1999. Vrijheid: een Geschiedenis
van de Vijftiende tot de Twintigste Eeuw, Reeks Nederlandse begripsge-
schiedenis; 2. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Harrington, James. 1660. A Letter unto Mr. Stubs in Answer to his Oceana
Weighed. London: printed for J.S.
Horowitz, Maryanne Cline. 2005. New Dictionary of the History of Ideas. 6 vols.
New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Kloek, J. J., and Karin Tilmans. 2002. Burger, Reeks Nederlandse begripsge-
schiedenis; 4. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Koselleck, Reinhart. 1989. “Linguistic Change and the History of Events.”
Journal of Modern History (61): 549-66.
Koselleck, Reinhart, Otto Brunner, and Werner Conze, eds. 1972-1997.
Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 9 vols. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta.
Lakaniemi, Ilkka K., Anna Rotkirch, Henrik Stenius, and Renvall-instituut-
ti. 1995. “Liberalism”: Seminars on Historical and Political Keywords in
Northern Europe. Helsinki: Renvall Institute, University of Helsinki.
Lehmann, Hartmut, and Melvin Richter, eds. 1996. The Meaning of Historical
Terms and Concepts: New Studies on Begriffgeschichte. Vol. 15, Occasional
Paper. Washington D.C.: German Historical Institute.
Leonhard, Jèorn. 2001. Liberalismus: zur Historischen Semantik eines Europèaischen
Deutungsmusters. Mèunchen: R. Oldenbourg.
Newton, Frances P., and Ralph R. Shaw. 1983. American Bibliography, a
Preliminary Checklist, 1801 to 1819: Ralph R. Shaw and Richard H.
Shoemaker: printers, publishers, and booksellers index, geographi-
cal index. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press.
Pocock, J.G.A. 1981. “The Reconstitution of Discourse: Toward the 143
Historiography of Political Thought.” Modern Language Notes

(96):959-80.
Pollard, Alfred W., and G. R. Redgrave. 1969. A short-title catalogue of books
printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland and of English books printed abroad
1475-1640. London: Bibliographical Society.
Reichardt, Rolf, and Eberhard Schmitt, eds. 1985. Handbuch politisch-sozial-
er Grundbegriffe in Frankreich, 1680-1820, 18 vol. to date. München:
Oldenbourg.
Richter, Melvin. 1987. “Begriffsgeschichte and the History of Ideas.” Journal
of the History of Ideas (48)247-263.
. 1995. The History of Political and Social Concepts: a Critical
Introduction. New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ritter, Joachim, Karlfried Grèunder, Gottfried Gabriel, and Rudolf Eisler.
1971. Historisches Wèorterbuch der Philosophie. Vèollig neubearbeitete
Ausg. des Wèorterbuchs der philosophischen Begriffe von Rudolf Eisler. ed.
Basel: Schwabe.
Rodgers, Daniel T. 1987. Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics Since
Independence. New York: Basic Books.
Rush, Benjamin. 1791. “A Defence of the Use of the Bible as a School-book.”
Massachusetts Magazine, June 1791, 337.
Sas, N. C. F. van. 1999. Vaderland: een Geschiedenis van de Vijftiende Eeuw tot
1940, Reeks Nederlandse begripsgeschiedenis; 1. Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press.
Sebastián, Javier Fernández, and Juan Francisco Fuentes, eds. 2002. Diccionario
Político y Social del Siglo XIX Español. Madrid: Alianza Editorial.
Simpson, J. A., E. S. C. Weiner, and Oxford University Press. 1989. The Oxford
English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 20 vols. Oxford; Oxford University Press:
Clarendon Press; New York.
Skinner, Quentin. 1969. “Meaning and Understanding in the History of
Ideas.” History and Theory 8 (1):3-53.
144 Stubbe, Henry. 1660. The common-wealth of Oceana put into the balance, and
found too light, or, An account of the republick of Sparta with occasional
animadversions upon Mr. James Harrington and the Oceanistical model.

London: Printed for Giles Calvert.
Wiener, Philip P. 1973. Dictionary of the History of Ideas; Studies of Selected
Pivotal Ideas. New York: Scribner.
Williams, Raymond. 1976. Keywords: a Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Wing, Donald Goddard, and Alfred W. Pollard. 1972. Short-title catalogue of
books printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America,
and of English books printed in other countries, 1641-1700. 2nd ed. New
York: Index Committee of the Modern Language Association of
America.
abstract
The author addresses the question of why there has been no national project
on the history of political and social concepts in the United States analo-
gous to those which have appeared in many countries in the wake of the
Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, the Handbuch politisch-sozialer Grundbegriffe in
Frankreich and, the Historisches Wöterbuch der Philosophie. Nevertheless, by list-
ing and explaining how to use a number of available internet resources, the
author suggests ways for scholars to develop histories of central concepts in
American public discourse.
keywords
History of concepts, history of ideas, online research resources, digitization
projects, public discourse.
145
on the notion of historical

(dis)continuity: reinhart
koselleck’s construction of
the sattelzeit
Gabriel Motzkin
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
The concept of a bridging period such as a Sattelzeit depends firstly on the

idea that there was a before and after, and, secondly, that there was a peri-
od of transition linking both. Assuming that such periods can be distin-
guished from each other, a period of transition should somehow be con-
tinuous with the previous and subsequent period and yet remain a distinct
period. However, one could also adopt a second hypothesis according to
which a period of transition is somehow heterogeneous or diFerent in both
directions – not just in one direction, for otherwise it is not a period of
transition. As we shall see, however, periods of transition are in practice
conceived more in terms of continuity with either the preceding period or
the subsequent period, rather than as something sui generis. Furthermore, a
period of transition is either conceived as continuous or discontinuous in
both directions, and if a period is discontinuous in both directions, it can-
not be a period of transition. Since there is no coherent conception of a pe-
riod of transition that also includes a thoroughgoing concept of discontinu-
ity, one has to assume that a period of transition must display overarching
historical continuity.
However, that is not at all the structure of the concept of the “de-
cisive period” as articulated either by Koselleck or by Foucault. For both of
them a period of transition, such as a Sattelzeit, marks a discontinuity and at
the same time remains part of the new era that is about to begin. Conversely,
we could think of the characterization of the years between 1905 and 1917 in
Russia as a period of transition still placed within the pre-revolutionary pe-
riod. In each of these cases, the period of transition is a coherent concept be-
cause it is not disconnected from both previous and subsequent periods, but
clearly belongs to one of them.
146 It is both a historiographical and an ideological question whether a
period of transition should be assigned to the preceding or succeeding pe-
reinhart koselleck’s construction of the sattelzeit
riod. This raises the question of how we assess our historical present. There
is then a substantive historical justification for assimilating the Sattelzeit to
the period that came after: I believe that the reason why both Koselleck and
Foucault make this move is that they wish to assimilate the period of transi-
tion to the modern period. We must then ask ourselves why. I want to exam-
ine the impulse to divide the traditional and the modern in this way, and the
reason for so much interest in locating this discontinuity at the beginning of
the nineteenth century or at the middle of the eighteenth century, etc. Indeed,
the origins of the modern can be placed sometime around the middle of the
eighteenth century and immediately thereafter as indicated by a shift in the
meaning of concepts. Yet there are many competing periodizations as, for in-
stance, Paul Hazard’s, which locates the discontinuity and the transition to
the modern at the beginning of the eighteenth century. 1 Regardless of how
dates are chosen, the assimilation of the period of transition to its succeeding
period makes one thing clear: as they look back, both Foucault and Koselleck
experience a sense of discontinuity with the past, one that in a certain way
makes them uneasy, and which they seek to explain. Moreover, assimilating
the period of transition to the succeeding period makes the break seem even
greater, although the counter-example of the Russian Revolution should en-
courage caution regarding this last hypothesis.
Yet before considering the reasons behind this desire to assimilate
the transition to the modern, one must inquire into both the kind of discon-
tinuity that is meant, and, more importantly, the notion of a sense of discon-
tinuity, which after all is a sense of discontinuity entertained by certain spe-
cific twentieth-century intellectuals. It is a matter of discerning whether the
discontinuity in question according to Koselleck, for example, is that of a dis-
continuity that continues to function as a living discontinuity in the present
or whether it is that of a more retrospective sense of discontinuity, according
to which history since that eighteenth century break has been continuous. A
retrospective sense of discontinuity is the only one in which it is possible for
a transition to belong to that which is on this side of the vanishing point of
retrospection, i.e. the age of transition is viewed continuously from the point
of view of the observer. Looking back, I now know I met my wife by walking
out onto a balcony in Berlin, but of course at the time I knew no such thing.
Still, there is a before and an after, and retrospectively, the period of transi-
tion, i.e. the period after I met my wife, seems more belonging to the period 147
after than to the period before. It is therefore natural to understand events

from a point of transition that attains its meaning long after the point of
transition itself. This point needs to be reinforced: in many ways the period
of transition belongs to the period before: after all we did not marry right
away, and in many ways my style of life continued to be what it had been, just
as the aristocratic style of life did not shift as fast as the sense of discontinuity
at the turn of the nineteenth century. However, retrospectively, the key point
is an epistemological point and not a social one, nor even one of awareness.
Socially, this period of transition belonged to the period before; yet in terms
of awareness, something had already shifted: perhaps one could define this
transitional awareness as an anticipatory awareness. Such an awareness is not
the epistemologically retrospective awareness that defines life since the tran-
sition, which is to say that my consciousness at the time and my consciousness
now, as I look back, have something to do with each other, but are nonetheless
distinct, since an anticipatory awareness has not yet been historically or bio-
graphically confirmed. It is only now that I am able to locate a retrospective
point of origin. The point about an anticipatory awareness is that it is not ret-
rospective – it evades the question of its origin and it is not a fully historical
awareness. Thus the concept of a Sattelzeit relies on the distinction between
contemporary awareness and retrospective consciousness. Consequently, the
primacy of epistemological determinations in mapping history does not im-
plicate in the protagonists’ complete self-conscious awareness.
But these relations between anticipatory awareness and retrospective
self-definition are not quite the same for every kind of transition: it depends
on whether the same relations between expectation and retrospection apply
to all types of transition or whether one can construct a typology of transi-
tion. Here I would like to inquire further into the possibility of being aware
during the transition itself. As mentioned earlier, this awarenness is impos-
sible to a certain extent, since any retrospection during a period of transi-
tion would be a fake retrospection, a perception and aGrmation of change
when perhaps none had occurred or was occurring. On the other hand, par-
tial awareness is possible. This partial awareness is not just anticipatory. Let
me specify: between the first and second world wars, many people knew that
they were living in an age of transition, and even thought that they could
identify and understand the prewar pre-transitional age, but no one during
the interwar period knew which political regime would emerge as the win-
148 ner. Thus they could not order epistemologically the period in which they
were living: they knew they had left one period behind, and they knew that
something new had begun, but whether they were living in an age of fas-
cism or an age of democracy was completely obscure. In turn, the incapac-
ity to epistemologically sort out the age in which one is living may not be a
constant, but may itself be a historically significant characteristic of certain
types of transition, one in which there is some awareness, albeit accompa-
nied by the uneasiness of being unable to impart coherent significance to the
age in which one is living. In turn, that means that such epochs should show
both a change in the meaning of key concepts and the lack of any settled con-
sensus about their meanings, since it could turn out that they mean diFerent
things. It could be inferred that intra-cultural communication is especially
diGcult during an age of transition, since diFerent people mean diFerent
things when using the same concepts. My point is that these diFerent mean-
ings revolve less around their inheritance and more around their anticipa-
tions of the outcome of their contemporary age of transition. Of course, that
would be more true for an age of transition with high awareness of transition
than one with low awareness.
Indeed, I have often wondered about the degree to which people liv-
ing in an age of discontinuity recognize that they in fact live in such a pe-
riod. After all, things continue to be the same so long as one is alive. In a
world not dominated by the media, one would know that some change has
occurred, but surely the end of an intimate relationship may seem to be
more of break in one’s life than say the creation of the State of Israel or the
day that World War II ended – and so forth. Moreover, is it because of my
perception of my own age or really because of something altogether diFe-
rent that I do not think that much change at all has occurred during my
lifetime? Feminism, automated tellers, the fall of Communism, the discov-
ery of dna, all seem somewhat undramatic from my own personal perspec-
tive. In comparison to personal experience, historical events that occured
before I was born – the First World War, Stalin, Hitler, World War II – seem
very dramatic indeed. Is that a true reading of history, or is it a function of
the sense of sameness and coherence perceived in one’s lifetime? Or is it, on
the contrary, the eFect of historical narrative, which may tend to maximize
the drama of an individually unexperienced history? Or, after all, is it due
to our perception of life as less dramatic than something that is told as a
story, such as the past?
Countering this idea are two experiences, which are also possible 149
illusions, that need to be articulated: the notion that things were somehow

very diFerent when one was growing up – I call this the illusion of Philippe
Ariès (in his memoir Un Historien de Dimanche), 2 and the idea that world his-
tory is divided into two periods, then and now. The illusion that things were
somehow very diFerent when one was growing up is in direct contradiction
to the sense of continuity in one’s lifetime. It may also be a function of age:
by the time one is old, most people that one has known, and certainly any-
one who was around during one’s childhood, is long dead. Thus the world
of one’s childhood moves from being a public or a social world to a private
world, in contrast to the adolescent, who emerges from his private world into
a social world, who is alienated from him or herself, whereas the elderly are
alienated from the world. Perhaps these transitions from private to public
and from public to private are sources of the sense of discontinuity, which
thus aGrms in time the chasm between the individual life and that of the
world around us. Perhaps the sense of historical discontinuity emerges from
the experience of biographical discontinuity, which, as noted, is itself an un-
stable and tenuous experience.
The fantasy of then and now is a much more universal, a stronger
and more enduring fantasy. It too has always existed in some form: it sug-
gests that things must have been diFerent in a period that we can only re-
member through books or other relics. Note that the sense of “thenness” that
Ariès deploys and the senses of “thenness” that Koselleck and Foucault de-
ploy are not quite the same. The sense of “thenness”, for Ariès, is that of a
world that one has known personally, thus placing the individual ego and its
continuity in question, much as seventeenth and eighteenth-century memo-
rialists such as Retz and Saint-Simon did. For Koselleck and Foucault, “then-
ness” has to do with the past before one’s birth: it does not call into question
personal coherence, but calls into question the sense of historical continuity,
the sense that our lives form part of an unbroken continuity with the past.
According to this point of view, an unspoken assumption is that my being
alive is only possible as a déchirure from the past. I am always readily negat-
ing or erasing the past.
“Then” is, for example, the pre-modern age, whenever that existed,
and “now” is what has happened since the break. Sometimes a third moment
is added so that the sequence then runs: then, yesterday, and now. In this case,
however, the real present for the author is “yesterday,” e.g. the modern, and
150 the postmodern is by definition therefore unknown. One develops a coher-
ent present by locating it in the recent past: one can know and apprehend a
past of the present that is coherent, unlike the remote past, and even more
unlike the current present, which is much more mysterious on this account
than the recent past. Here one can see that one problem with dichotomies of
this kind lies in the point of view one adopts: either the point of view of now,
which raises the question of which point of view of now should be adopted,
or the artificial point of view of then, or of yesterday. In contrast to a retro-
spective perspective, which is a perspective of now, historians often adopt the
point of view of then, and then reach out to the known but artificially un-
known future, the future of the past, which is also always in the past. That is
what could be called the novelistic perspective, since there is no such thing as
adopting the point of view of then, especially the point of view of then while
knowing the future.
In any case, we have three conceptions here: the experience of the
dramatic break, the radical diFerence between the past and the present in
one’s own life, and the radical diFerence between the past and the present
in history. It should be noted that each of these has its own tense structure.
Thus the dramatic break has its anticipation, its present, and its past as a
story that is told. One’s own life story is nourished by the most radical di-
chotomies one can invent. And the radical diFerence between the past and
the present in history depends on a perception of the contingency of present
and past that is much more accentuated when applied to history than to one’s
own life. It is that sense of contingency that stimulates us to devote attention
to locating historical discontinuity.
The concept of a period of transition is something invented by his-
torians because they feel uneasy with the idea of a sudden change, one that
occurs at a single moment, because they are aware that people live through
events. This, however, makes us question whether concepts used in the pe-
riod of transition were unique to the period of transition or whether they
somehow participated and survived in the actual transition from the first pe-
riod to the second period. Moreover, one can conceive of such concepts and
notions in two diFerent ways: the first way is to conceive concepts as inter-
mediary. The second notion is the idea that the transition is statistical: thus
in the period of transition one uses some concepts that are part of the later
world-view and some concepts that are part of the earlier world-view, and
thus the question is which concepts belong to which world-view, which con-
cepts are decisive, and what is the proportion between the two sets of con- 151
cepts, the first set and the second set. In this latter conception, we have a

mixture but not a compound, whereas in the first conception, history evolves
through blending.
The first question we must ask, however, is whether the underly-
ing sense of the evanescence of the past that informs a concept such as the
Sattelzeit is a constant in human experience. Obviously, it is. However, it has
been dealt with diFerently at diFerent times. From Plato through Hegel to
Freud, leading thinkers have been concerned with denying the evanescence
of the past, either with the idea that nothing changes, or that everything
changes, but something still remains the same. What has recently changed
can be termed the decline of the desire to claim that the past is preserved.
Thus in considering a concept such as the Sattelzeit one really has to take two
diFerent historical periods into account: the “modern,” which denied the
past and changed its meaning, but did not claim that the past has vanished,
and the “postmodern,” which also claims that the past has vanished. It is
this latter claim which locates the postmodern in an ambivalent relation to
modernity, one in which the postmodern first claims that the past vanishes,
but then asserts that the modern is preserved (in the postmodern) while ev-
erything else has vanished, thus searching for some line of demarcation be-
tween the pre-modern and the modern.
I am reminded of my experience with Holocaust survivors, who,
quite frequently, can choose one of two pasts along with their post-Holocaust
present, but experience diGculty in maintaining both pasts at the same time.
Thus some Holocaust survivors remember the Holocaust quite well, but ex-
perience great unease when they are asked to recall the pre-Holocaust world
in which they grew up, while other Holocaust survivors have sought to for-
get the Holocaust, and then can remember the pre-Holocaust past. Of course
the option of forgetting everything exists, which seems to be quite the sim-
plest course. In the same way, Germans are constantly tempted to get around
the Holocaust, for it is a barrier to the past that proves quite diGcult to get
around. Analogously, we are confronted by the question of whether we can
get around the modern and return to tradition, or whether indeed we have
lost both the modern and the pre-modern.
In this way, modernity is now the barrier between us and tradition:
there is a perception that suggests that we can either choose tradition or mo-
dernity, but not both. This was quite evident in Leo Strauss’s work, in which
152 the seeker of wisdom or power also makes a conscious historical choice be-
tween historical contexts. In a way so does Heidegger, although he tries to
get around it by positing a reverse continuity to Hegel: for Heidegger alles

ist immer schlimmer. What informs their work is the possibility that the past
vanishes, a conclusion that Strauss rejects, and that Heidegger keeps chang-
ing his mind about.
This was not at all the situation in modernity if the core period of
modernity is defined as the period between 1750 and 1850 (and certainly it
was not the situation before then as well). People were conscious of their
diFerence from the past, but their entire eFort concerned the preservation of
the past in the present. The desire to deny history or tradition, to claim that
the past is inherently evanescent, only surfaced towards the end of the nine-
teenth century.
It could be argued that the nineteenth-century mania for pres-
ervation and even for archeology was a consequence of the sense of a cul-
tural break and especially of a political revolution. However, it should also
be noted that the revolutionaries themselves, after an initial outburst of de-
struction, furthered the idea of museums, the notion of the neo-classical, the
return to antiquity, etc. 3 In fact, the sense of a change can be read out of the
great eFort to recover the past, the interest in archeology, the desire to deci-
pher dead languages, and so forth. 4 The moderns were not interested in de-
fining their diFerence from the past, but rather in reconstructing their past
so that it could suit their present.
Thus the marking of a boundary between the past and the present,
where the past is the pre-modern and the present is the modern, as if the past
has vanished, is a retrospective demarcation, a line drawn much later. But in
order to eFect what? Namely this: the simultaneity of modernity. The con-
sequence of the notion of a Sattelzeit is the notion of contemporaneity with a
past that is already almost two centuries distant, and thus provides stability
to a culture sorely in need of long-range temporal perspective.
There is another way to view this, and to opine that the notion of
a Sattelzeit stems from the desire to locate the breakthrough to modernity
at a privileged point, one which would privilege one’s particular choice of
what is modern. Thus it is logical for a German to think that the transi-
tion to modernity occurred in the middle of the eighteenth century since
the German language did not really come into widespread intellectual
use until then. In the same way so many Protestants have conceived of the
Reformation as the breakthrough to modernity. I was once convinced that 153
the choice of date for modernity was a consequence of one’s national his-

tory, but I no longer am: my argument is rather that the particular loca-
tion of a Sattelzeit has much more to do with one’s present than with one’s
choice of a past.
However, this argument should not be completely ignored. Let us
for a moment consider what other conception the location of the Sattelzeit at
the middle of the eighteenth century could be opposing. Namely, it could be
opposing the prominent nineteenth-century view of the Renaissance as the
transition to modernity, which is the notion I was taught in schoolbooks that
I read as a boy in America, and which stems from Michelet and Burckhardt.
The reinvention of the renaissance is probably the most successful notion of
the breakthrough to modernity in the last two hundred years, and we have to
ask why it is no longer relevant, or even well-understood.
This notion was primarily, as defined by Burckhardt, aesthetic. In
addition, it was anti-religious in a quite specific sense: namely it was anti-
Catholic, paradoxically locating emancipation from medieval Catholicism,
viewed as negative, at the center of the Catholic world itself, Italy, and es-
pecially Rome. The greatest secularists turned out to be some of the Popes,
and the Popes, through their sponsorship of renaissance art, contributed to
emancipation. Implicitly, the reason the Renaissance failed is the Protestant
Reformation, (here the story gets sticky) which scared the Catholics and con-
demned them to reaction (never mind that this is not completely true). The
story gets sticky because the terms of the merger between Renaissance and
Reformation are never completely clear, but this dual origin of secularism
and enlightened religion conformed very much to the needs of elites both in
Germany and the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century, for
they were both Protestant and secular at the same time.
Influenced diFerently by Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, both rene-
gade Catholics, Foucault and Koselleck will have none of this, which they im-
ply is both naïve and ideological. Foucault privileges the primacy of the polit-
ical, and his story is a story of counter-enlightenment meant to show that the
modern is in no way more emancipated than what preceded it. Koselleck’s
take is quite diFerent from Foucault’s, for he is less concerned with the di-
alectics of representation as a form of the performance of power, and more
concerned with the sense of time and “pastness” that he views as key quali-
fiers of modernity, whether via acceleration, simultaneity, or historical per-
154 spective as mappings in time rather than space. In his account, there is no
necessary primacy of the political.
However, sotto voce, this characterization is not completely accurate,

since it could be argued that Koselleck is reacting against the primacy of the
political. His story is not the story of a belated (and politicizing) moderniza-
tion of apolitical Germans, but rather a story in which Germans are at the
forefront of modernity, since the conceptualization of these problems of the
relations between enlightenment and history took place to a large degree in
German. In the end, what Koselleck oFers is a metaphysical account of so-
cial modernity, and in doing so his real dialogue is with Hegel, Marx, and
Habermas.
Why then is he a historian? Namely because of this: for Hegel the
break with the past is himself, for Marx the break with the past will be in the
future, and for Koselleck the break with the past is in the past.
That could lead to a nostalgic point of view, in that the great moment
is already over, our yearning for historical drama will not be satisfied in the
present or the future; indeed the transition itself took place stealthily and
without any drama. Yet this lack of drama contains an advantage: namely ev-
erything that has happened since the break becomes contemporary; there is
no further break with the past, and therefore events since the break cannot
be judged relatively, since they belong to the same world, and are subject to
the same categories of judgment as actions in the present. This only ceases
to be true if one believes that there is still another break with the past some
time later, e.g. 1945. But that is not at all what Koselleck believes, and he is
completely right on this one point: in contrast to seventeenth century divines,
we do not take the divine right of kings as a serious political alternative (not
even Carl Schmitt considered this), but our categories for judging political
actions are much the same as they were in 1900: atrocities are atrocities, we
seek to improve the human condition, etc. Now if Hitler had won that would
be diFerent; we would indeed be living in a diFerent civilization.
Thus there is no nostalgia here at all. Rather, the question should be:
what is gained and what is lost by this demarche? What is gained is the incom-
parable advantage of providing the contemporary world with a background,
which is vaguely analogous to the way that Karl Heinz Bohrer wishes to cir-
cumvent the Nazi past by seeking to derive relevance from German Idealism
and Romanticism. However, Bohrer is nostalgic because he seeks to provide
a therapy for the present by importing the past, whereas Koselleck seeks to
capture and to depict the present against the background of the past. 5 Two 155
things are effected here: first, one has to buy the modern world entier, and,

second, one is turned defenseless against a further change in episteme, since
he or she has to succeeded in situating and justifying the present historically,
and that without a paradigm that could explain future historical develop-
ment. The force of the old philosophy of history consisted in its predictive
power.
There is a further point, and it relates to discontinuity rather than
to continuity: namely both Foucault and Koselleck seem from my point of
view to have lived through one of the greatest discontinuities of all time. Now
they would perhaps not see it this way, since as stated they were not born af-
ter the Second World War, and so there is no literary-biographical motive for
them to dramatize their lived past. Nonetheless, this sense of discontinuity
informs their eForts to understand history as a succession of discontinui-
ties rather than continuities, one that is then balanced by the sense of the ex-
tended present. In order to gain coherence, one needs to extend the present.
However extending the present can render the notion of continuity incoher-
ent, because even a static present must end, as Husserl understood so well.
I have not given Koselleck his due, because although Foucault is bet-
ter known at the present time, I do not think that this will be true in the
future. Namely, while Foucault and Koselleck have a family resemblance in
that both seek to hold something constant, Foucault’s epistemes assume the
priority of space over time: if everything is constant, then Kant’s dictum of
space as the simultaneity of inner intuition and external experience takes
eFect. Koselleck rather seeks to uphold the primacy of time over space, and
therefore to show language not as a static reflection of embedded structures
of meaning, but rather as a refraction of changed points of view. The meta-
phors may be spatial, but concepts such as experience and expectation all em-
bed historical reality in an intuition of time rather than of space. Thus this
model is less beholden to a contemporary intuition of the relations between
time and space. Such a model is more appropriate to a sense of historical ex-
perience as unfolding in time.
Too little has been made of the notion of yesterday in historical ex-
perience, since it has often appeared in the century in which yesterday was
a site of odium. This rejection of an old regime did not begin with our re-
action to the Second World War: look at the invective that Ernst Jünger re-
served for the nineteenth century, of which he was so preeminently a product.
156 If we wish sometimes to escape the past, Jünger and others like him sought
actively to destroy it, much as French revolutionaries took pleasure in burn-
ing archives. Revolutions are often accompanied by burning archives, if only

to destroy the record of property ownership, and therewith the lien of the
meaning of the past.
Yet none of this appears in Koselleck’s work, which rather depicts
how the past could be neutralized by new conceptions of meaning, entailing
the superseding of the past, but not its destruction. For Koselleck it is a ques-
tion of whether the period since the eighteenth century is a “today” or a “yes-
terday.” But underlying this question is the problem of whether “yesterday” is
relevant for “today.”
Yesterday is so crucial because it is in the yesterday that the paths of
retrospective memory and narrative history intersect. The only way we can
make sense of a distant past is by narrating its development, but the only way
we can make sense of our memory is by retracing backwards and forwards
our development to and from our origin. Yesterday is so diGcult because it
is both memory and history, and therefore it is either continuous with us and
discontinuous with the past, or continuous with the past and discontinuous
with us, all at the same time. Yesterday is continuous with us at the cost of be-
ing historically discontinuous, and historically continuous if it is discontin-
uous with us. Thus the Sattelzeit is not really a purely historical concept, nor
is it an episteme. It rather probes this meaning of yesterday, which is both
historical and a post-historical replacement for the philosophy of history. By
extending continuity, it addresses the simultaneity of the discontinuous in
the present.
notes 157

1
Paul Hazard (1935).
2
Philippe Ariès, with the collaboration of Michel Winock (1980).
3
Stephen Bann (1984).
4
Peter Fritzsche (2004).
5
Karl-Heinz Bohrer (2001), 20.
158 bibliographical references
Ariès, Philippe, and Michel Winock (collaborator). 1980. Un Historien Du

Dimanche. Paris: Seuil.
Bann, Stephen. 1984. The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History
in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Bohrer, Karl-Heinz. 2001. “Erinnerungslosigkeit. Ein Defizit Der
Gesellschaftlichen Erinnerung.” Frankfurter Rundschau, June 16, 2001.
Fritzsche, Peter. 2004. Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy
of History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Hazard, Paul. 1935. La Crise De La Conscience Européene (1680-1715). Paris:
Boivin.
abstract
The author contends that a transition period is conceived in terms of its con-
tinuity with preceding or subsequent periods, rather than an entirely discon-
tinuous temporal unit. Thus, in order to conceive of a period of transition,
one must assume an overarching historical continuity. This contrasts with
Reinhart Koselleck’s and Michel Foucault’s conception of the period of tran-
sition to modernity which is at once a break and part of the modern period.
By analyzing how time is experienced in terms of contemporary awareness
and retrospective consciousness, the author maps out the epistemological
determinations that allow for the conception of a period of transition to mo-
dernity such as Sattelzeit.
keywords
Historical continuity, periods of transition, Sattelzeit, Reinhart Koselleck,
Michel Foucault.
159
the notion of modernity in

nineteenth-century spain
an example of conceptual history*
Javier Fernández Sebastián and
Gonzalo Capellán de Miguel
Universidad del País Vasco
The aim of this article is twofold. First, it attempts to give a brief account of
the semantic evolution of the terms modernidad (modernity) and modernismo
(modernism) in the Spanish context from the end of the eighteenth to the be-
ginning of the twentieth century. Secondly, we would also like this article to
illustrate our particular way of approaching the study of conceptual history.
In fact, in these pages, we reproduce with certain modifications the text for
the entry modernidad in a dictionary of the most significant political and so-
cial concepts in nineteenth-century Spain recently published in Madrid.1
This lexicon, which consists of just over a hundred essays arranged
in alphabetical order, is the result of the coordinated eForts of some thirty
Spanish university scholars over a period of more than six years. The ini-
tial idea was to study the changes in the key terms forming the hub around
which political speeches revolved in nineteenth-century Spain (libertad, igual-
dad, nación, civilización, progreso, clase media, constitución, democracia, etc.); we
also wanted to do this without losing sight of the intellectual context and the
underlying social, political and institutional processes, that is, the history of
events that runs parallel to changes in concepts, even though each of these
processes proceeds at its own pace. To this end, we decided to take advan-
tage of the analytical categories and methodological tools honed by the fol-
lowers of BegriFsgeschichte, starting with the best-known works of Reinhart
Koselleck, 2 and of the so-called Cambridge school (especially the studies and
reflections on methodology by John G. A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner). This
is not to forget the valuable contributions made in the last two decades by
the histoire des usages des notions socio-politiques, through Jacques Guilhaumou,
Raymonde Monnier and the Saint-Cloud group, which draw upon history,
political lexicology, and discourse analysis. Arising from markedly diFerent
160 academic traditions, these methodological currents have in the last few years
found a common ground for an understanding of their shared interests in
the notion of modernity in nineteenth-century spain
the study of the meaning of languages, concepts and discourses in relation to

time. This approach has been favored by the creation in 1998 of the History
of Political and Social Concepts Group (hpscg), a network of scholars from
diverse backgrounds, one of whose many projects is to establish the basis for
a future European Dictionary of Political and Social Concepts.
Our systematic study of the lexicon of Spanish politics, which will
continue in the near future with the publication of a similar volume on twen-
tieth-century Spain (Diccionario de Conceptos Políticos y Sociales del Siglo XX
Español), shares with the hpscg scholars the same theoretical basis and could
thus be included in this movement of transnational analysis of, and reflec-
tion on, political language, with special emphasis on the extraordinary im-
portance of linguistic and symbolic factors in the modern world.
Like the followers of BegriFsgeschichte, we believe that concepts not
only have a history, but that they contain history, due to the fact that they are
per se, in their complex and conflictive evolution, history in action, and actu-
ally make history. Indeed, the fundamental concepts of modern politics are
often a repository of experiences and, at the same time, a blueprint for the
future. And, since the battles waged over the meaning of some especially dis-
puted terms convert them into true concepts, these are capable of embodying
in a single word a wide range of divergent meanings. 3
However, like the members of the Cambridge school, we also believe
that thought and political action are inseparable, and that it is only from the
joint analysis of both levels and through the study of languages in relation
to time that satisfactory results can be achieved in the study of the history of
thought. Therefore, we agree with Melvin Richter that it would be highly de-
sirable to combine the two academic traditions in order to get a richer and
more complete view of social and political processes. 4 This is especially true
when it concerns a period of history like the nineteenth century in Europe,
when – as Max Weber pointed out nearly a hundred years ago – politics be-
came an activity increasingly aimed at the general public, a new activity at the
center of which is the spoken or the written word.
The text presented here is, as mentioned earlier, a sample of the way
in which we have attempted to combine intellectual history with social and
political history in dealing with a body of over a hundred concepts that make
up our Diccionario. Although originally written for a Spanish audience capa-
ble of deciphering the codes basic to the history of nineteenth-century Spain, 161
we trust that this version – with its notes on historical characters and cul-

tural references – will allow English-speaking readers to get an idea of the
debates that took place around the concept of modernity in our country two
centuries ago, and of the special diGculties that, owing to the comparative
backwardness of Spanish socio-economic structures in relation to the rest
of western Europe at that time, were involved in incorporating this concept
into the “mental frame” (imaginario) of the political and intellectual elites in
Spain. Moreover, it is well known that political and social notions do not oc-
cur in isolation but are part of “semantic clusters” or networks of concepts
that refer to one another; hence, at the end of the entry for the word modern-
idad – whose implications, political, social, economic and cultural, artistic
and religious, make this concept a focal point for many diFerent issues – in
the Diccionario Político y Social del Siglo XIX español, readers are advised to fur-
ther their knowledge on the topic by reading other related entries on the fol-
lowing: civilización, crisis, historia, progreso, revolución, 5 and romanticismo.
Before moving on to the subject matter of this article, one more
warning. It is clear that the development of the concept of modernity in any
country is necessarily related to the process of modernization in that soci-
ety. In the case that concerns us here, there is no doubt that our historiogra-
phy has for a long time been immersed in an “exceptionalist” view of Spain’s
past. Together with the German Sonderweg, the peculiarities of the English,
French singularité and American uniqueness, there has long existed a Spanish
historiographic paradigm bent on emphasizing Spanish singularity, which
is perceived as something radically anomalous within the context of the west-
ern world. It is a singularity that in the last two decades of the Franco dicta-
torship obsessively focused on the idea of failure (failure of industrialization;
defeat of liberalism; thwarted democratization). Only after the victory of de-
mocracy, over twenty-five years ago, were Spaniards ready to take a new, less
pessimistic look at their past. The “paradigm of failure” was quickly replaced
by a new view of history. On the basis of comparative studies, this view tends
to de-dramatize diFerences and, therefore, to interpret the Spanish way as
just another European path to modernity (which, to be more accurate, should
be placed in the context of southern Europe). 6
In this article, we shall present a summary of the concept of mo-
dernity in nineteenth-century Spain and try to reveal certain problems re-
lated to the sense of Spanish backwardness held by local elites at that time.
162 Nevertheless, this was no obstacle for the early appearances of reflections on
modernity and its consequences in the writings of a handful of Spanish jour-
nalists and intellectuals.

In one of his philosophical newspaper essays in the second decade of
the twentieth century, the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset refers
critically to the predominant mentality of the previous century, and in par-
ticular to that “primordial desire for progress” of a century that arrogantly
considered itself as “the century of modernity.” It was a century that not only
bequeathed a specific idea of modernity but also a special way of looking at
the past, since “strictly speaking… all other pasts only exist for us in the con-
text of the nineteenth century, as it saw them and through its peculiar ge-
nius.” This is because, as Ortega goes on to say, “one of the singularities of
this century was to forestall all attempts at improvement:” thus the Madrid
philosopher paradoxically accused the 1800s – “a century that had progress
as its ideal” – of, in fact, “hindering advance and renovation.”7
That most men of the nineteenth century regarded their era as “the
century of progress and modernity” can of course be supported by sound ar-
guments, and should be viewed in relation to the new perception of time that
had been developing throughout the eighteenth century and which reached
maturity with the French Revolution, when the whole of Europe rapidly be-
came aware that it was living in a new, faster and changing age character-
ized by its dynamism and frank openness to a future full of expectation and
promise (as well as fears and threats). It is true that the term modernity was
by no means current among eighteenth-century writers, who used the adjec-
tive modern on countless occasions, but only infrequently resorted to the re-
lated abstract nouns modernity or modernism to refer to certain typical qual-
ities of “all that is modern” (lo moderno). This term, of distant late Latin origin
(from modernus) and in use since the sixth century, is derived from modo (= re-
cently) and had systematically been contrasted with the things from the past,
the ancient or antiquated.
However, what is striking is how early certain lexical items belong-
ing to this semantic field made their appearance in Spanish. Thus, the word
modernismo, generally said to have been coined in Spanish by Rubén Darío
in 1890 (later passing into other languages), had been used sporadically
since the middle of the previous century, first by “father” Calatayud 8 and
later, in the 1780s, in the works of José Cadalso. In a passage from the Cartas
Marruecas (Moroccan Letters, carta lxxxii) Nuño speaks of certain “men in-
fatuated with fashion” who “by studying present-day customs and condemn- 163
ing old ones and in their desire to extract the quintessence of modernism

have lost their heads”9 (note that modernism here quite clearly refers to a sub-
tle peculiar quality pertaining to that which is modern and, therefore, comes
very close to the meaning later acquired by the term modernity – which had
actually been used by Jovellanos in a letter written in 1805).10 In fact, the ad-
jective modern had been employed in Spanish since the fifteenth century,11
but, when disputes between novatores (innovators) and escolásticos (scholastics)
became increasingly embittered at the beginning of the eighteenth century,
the term would often be invoked by both sides – with highly derogatory over-
tones in the mouths of the defenders of tradition (as a result of these disputes,
modern was still used as a political insult at the beginning of the liberal rev-
olution, at the time of the Cortes de Cádiz) 12 – together with other epithets
of similar meaning, such as neotérico (neoteric) or recencior (literally, more re-
cent), which later became obsolete. (It is also obvious that the content of the
word modern is diFerent at diFerent moments in history: although Feijoo
systematically uses the phrase “modern philosophers” to refer to the adver-
saries of the escolásticos, it is clear that the latter had also once been modern
in comparison with their predecessors; in the past, they too had defended
“modern ideas” and opposed their own “ancient” adversaries). The need for
some term to refer in abstracto to the condition or quality of modernness is
shown not only by the above references to modernismo, neoterismo and modern-
idad, but also by the use of other strange expressions such as modernía, appar-
ently used by Burriel in 1747 in his correspondence with the Mayans. 13
We have seen how Cadalso ridiculed – not only in his Cartas
Marruecas – certain contemporaries, the extravagant and pretentious young
people who, scorning all that was national and dazzled by the brilliance of
foreign novelties, sought the philosopher’s stone of modernity. This close
association between the search for the modern and the attraction of foreign
things, as opposed to the ancient, which was identified with things purely
and intrinsically Spanish, would become an enduring semantic feature of
the concept of modernity constructed by Spaniards during the nineteenth
century. A hundred years after the apologists’ polemic sparked by Masson’s
famous article in Panckoucke’s Encyclopédie, the Neo-Catholic idearium on
this point hardly seemed to have changed: “dominated by the modern spirit
originating in foreign lands,” we can read in a newspaper of ecclesiastical
leaning, “Spaniards are learning to scorn all that is their own and coming to
164 love what is foreign.”14 It is not surprising, therefore, that a most progressive
critic, like Manuel de la Revilla, said that the only thing one could learn from
the Catholic press was to declaim against liberalism and modern civilization.
Even a conservative Catholic such as Menéndez Pelayo criticized neoscholas-
tic philosophy for creating “confused anathemas” of everything that in its
eyes bore “the signum bestiae of the modern spirit.” And in the same work he
defended the compatibility of the modern with the Spanish, a good example
of this being Padre Feijoo. 15
Besides this link between foreign and modern as something nega-
tive as opposed to that between Spanish and traditional as something posi-
tive, the idea of modernity acquired a wide range of meanings within con-
servative Catholic thinking. For example, modernity was associated with the
diFusion of ideas since, according to Gonzalo Cedrún de la Pedraja, “mod-
ern civilization” had taken newspapers to the remotest corners of the coun-
try.16 Modernity was also believed to be related to positive science and free-
thinking. Hence the Neo-Catholic leader Candido Nocedal did not hesitate
in Parliament to identify modern liberties with anti-Catholic principles.17
In other words, the much vaunted modern civilization in the eyes of these
thinkers appeared as the unreconcilable enemy of Catholicism and its fun-
damental ideas (the most advanced Catholics such as Tomás Tapia identified
the modern spirit with a process of secularization that, for instance, included
civil cemeteries). Thus, the stage was set for the struggle between those who
wished to keep society firmly anchored in the past and those who wanted to
travel along the path of modernity, a shorthand for freedom, progress, and
equality. It was a battle that would rage for a long time, since even at the start
of the twentieth century complaints concerning modernism and its ultras
were still arriving from Rome.18
A second point that should be stressed in the quotation from Cadalso
is the link between two notions that, according to him, sustain a long-last-
ing and fertile relationship: customs and modernism (or, later, modernity).
This connection, which is particularly evident in the field of literature, can
be traced back to those works – one-act farces (sainetes), newspaper articles,
sketches portraying social customs (cuadros de costumbres) – in which, follow-
ing in the steps of Addison, Mercier or Jouy, authors like Ramón de la Cruz,
Mesonero Romanos and many others aspired to “copy what can be seen, to
portray men and to reflect their words, their actions and their customs,” thus
creating a true “history of our century” (the expression comes from the play-
wright Ramón de la Cruz and is dated 1786). 19 As José Escobar pointed out, 165
the very term costumbres acquired a new semantic content to refer to the new

literary genres whose aim was the modern mimesis of (changing) social cir-
cumstances; and its derivative costumbrismo, though created in Spain at the
end of the nineteenth century, should in no way be taken as an exclusively na-
tional cultural phenomenon. 20 Much of this literature reveals a nostalgia for
the old Spain that was gradually disappearing with the advance of new ways
of life. Although this attitude, which at times takes on elegiac tones, should
not necessarily be equated with pure misoneism (rather, as Escobar himself
suggested, it is “a modern negation of modernity”), it should be interpreted
in the light of the acute sense of change that pervaded the Spanish press in
the 1830s and 1840s. In addition, as Escobar also noticed, the conflict caused
by the ambiguous nature of modernity is a feature common to all European
romanticisms, which perhaps reached its maximum expression in Spain in
the works of Larra. Although, to our knowledge, Larra never used the word
modernity, he was clearly sensitive to the deeper meaning underlying the
concept, when, for instance, he wrote that “extreme civilization” – i.e. moder-
nity taken to its ultimate consequences, the modernity of the Europe beyond
the Pyrenees that Spain was soon to emulate – is in the end prosaic, “sterile
and not at all creative.”21 The idea was quickly picked up and repeated so often
that it became a cliché: the nineteenth century, as we can read for example in
the newspaper Semanario Pintoresco, is a “highly antipoetic,” positive, materi-
alistic century. 22
What was happening to the word modernidad in the meantime? We
have seen that Jovellanos used the Spanish term in 1805. He refers to the
“modernity of Asturias,” and since the term stands out in his text, the writer
apologizes to his reader for using it. However, the number of actual occur-
rences that we have found in the years that follow is small, and the word did
not appear in the Dicionary of the Spanish Royal Academy (drae) until 1936.
Apparently, the expression modernitas had occasionally been used in the
Latin of the late Middle Ages. 23 In English, modernity is documented in the
seventeenth century and there are some isolated references at the end of the
eighteenth century. In German, Heinrich Heine coined the word Modernität
in 1826, while in French Chateaubriand, long before Baudelaire, associated
modernité with certain undesirable consequences – the prosaic and the vulgar
– resulting from progress and technical rationalization. In his famous text, 24
however, he ends up consecrating and endowing modernity, in a surpris-
166 ing volte-face, with an eminently aesthetic aura, having it refer to the ephem-
eral and the new urban life. Nonetheless it would appear that in the early
part of the nineteenth century a certain sense of dissatisfaction with the con-
sequences of the century of steam and positivism spread through Europe.
Larra, who, as an enlightened liberal, at the same time valued the “great revo-
lution in thinking” responsible for leaving behind old prejudices and opened
way for a “progressive march” of Spanish society towards modernity, and ex-
pressed his disenchantment at the harshness and disillusionment of a “mod-
ern society” like the one in France, which he deep down felt was “wretched,
disgusting at times, and contemptible.”25
Another aspect that should be kept in mind concerning the emerg-
ing concept of modernity in nineteenth-century Spain is its use as a marker
to separate historical periods. The numerous allusions to historia moderna
or to época or era moderna indicate that, as in other parts of the world (which
alluded to the modern times, temps modernes, Neuzeit), nineteenth-cen-
tury Spanish historiography increasingly used this adjective as a marker for
the historical period that followed the Middle Ages (in this way the classi-
cal triad of ancient–medieval–modern slowly crystallized in a process initi-
ated in the eighteenth century). 26 Among journalists, however, there was lit-
tle agreement as to where exactly modernity started. For the liberal politician
Nicomedes–Pastor Díaz, at the end of the Middle Ages “Kings destroyed feu-
dalism, and modern Europe, modern civilization and modern freedom ap-
peared”; 27 in contrast, Balmes considered that it was when Charles III came to
the throne that “our modern era began”28 and Cánovas in 1888 called the rev-
olution of 1808 a “modern revolution.”29 This designation for the period was
still sometimes confused with that of historia contemporánea (contemporary
history), an expression that, according to data from the Spanish Diachronic
Corpus (corde), 30 showed a substantial increase from 1840 to 1850 and whose
meaning ranged from the predominant one referring to “one’s own time”
whichever this might be – and, in this context, contemporariness was sim-
ply understood as generational simultaneity, people living at the same time
or with the facts being studied – to the emerging idea of a still more recent
history, a nova aetas or even newer age; this was identified with the history of
the present time and gradually came to be clearly separated from a preced-
ing modern age and, therefore, implicitly or explicitly taken as finished. 31 In
this regard, it is significant that in the press at the end of the liberal Trienio
(1820–3) there were those who advocated giving priority to the teaching of
modern history rather than ancient history, arguing that “the events of our 167
era,” which are directly related to “present-day customs,” would not only be

of greater usefulness but would arouse greater interest in the young. 32 Years
later, in the middle of the century, the expression contemporary history
seemed to acquire at times – i.e. in A la Corte y a los Partidos (1846) and Los
Problemas del Socialismo (1848), by the above cited politician N. Pastor Díaz –
the idea of a distinct period. After the civil war and the triumph of the liberal
revolution, there was in the socio-political atmosphere of the country some-
thing qualitatively new that could not be captured by the adjective modern;
lo moderno would largely be replaced by lo contemporáneo: “The public does
not want any other history than contemporary history,” wrote Mesonero in
his Escenas Matritenses. Contemporary, in Antonio Pirala’s Historia contem-
poránea, for instance, meant current or present-day history, relating to the
live narration of the flow of time, the consequences of which were still com-
pletely valid both politically and emotionally. This led the historian Julio
Aróstegui some years ago to distinguish this type of work – which he desig-
nated annalistic – from general purpose histories. However, with the emer-
gence of new conceptions of historiography, the simple passing of the years
led to “contemporary history” being equated with nineteenth-century his-
tory, a process that can be considered to be symbolically complete in 1900,
when the discipline of “Modern and Contemporary History” was created in
the Faculties of Philosophy and Fine Arts. 33
This contemporary history of the present day had some links with
the literature of customs and with the writing of memoirs, and could be con-
fused in some respects with journalism. In the midst of so much change,
the press turned its eye to the future and realized the documentary value of
many of its publications: “There will come a day,” we can read in a mid-cen-
tury periodical:
…when some investigators will search the newspaper columns of our
time for the history of present-day society, and not for its political his-
tory but for its social history, the confusing development of our customs
and our present way of life; then the local newspaper will acquire an im-
portance, foreseeable even now, in relation to how it has come to mirror
day by day the life of the present generation. 34
168 In addition, many texts by the anonymous writer Curioso Parlante
and most of the articles in Los Españoles Pintados Por Sí Mismos gave the same
impression of a desire to oFer to posterity a series of sketches of an era that was

disappearing, of a traditional world vanishing forever before their own eyes.
That same perception of the individuality – the fleeting nature – of
the time in which one lives lies at the root of the new semantic load acquired
at this time by the word century. The century, or rather the change of cen-
tury, was understood both as a break and as a continuity. This was to a certain
extent a “creation” of the French Revolution and went with the “discovery of
the future” so characteristic of modernity. In nineteenth-century Spain there
was abundant evidence of this new concept of century, which now signified
not so much a simple chronological division as a significant unit of histori-
cal experience endowed with a characteristic “spirit” (it was not by chance
that use of the phrase spirit of the century proliferated, in particular, in the
middle decades of the century). From the sketches of the customs of society
of Antonio Flores (Ayer, Hoy y Mañana, 1853) to the essay by Martínez de la
Rosa entitled El Espíritu del Siglo (1851), by way of Fray Gerundio’s Teatro Social
del Siglo XIX (Modesto Lafuente, 1846), this feeling of the individuality of the
century is ubiquitous in the literature and in the journalism of the time. 35
From a diFerent point of view, “the century of steam and the railway”
(a cliché repeated thousands of times in the press in the nineteenth century),
“the century of progress and modernity” (Ortega dixit), gradually gave shape
to its attributes in the political field and in social morality. The predominant
discourse amongst the Spanish authors at that time in relation to their own
century maintained, as already suggested, a certain evaluative ambiguity. It
is clear that, between neophilia and misoneism, the “modern” or “recent” oc-
cupied for many people an outstanding place in the rising importance of
history. At the same time, it is no less true that the suspicion due to certain
undesirable consequences of modernity and industrialization pervaded the
works of many writers, politicians and journalists (not necessarily conser-
vatives): the clichés on the progress of civilization present in speeches and
newspaper articles, with the identification of some outstanding features of
modern society, on which fairly severe moral judgments were often passed.
Alongside eulogies, sincere or otherwise, of individualism, liberalism, free-
dom of thought, the legitimacy of private interests and what Weber years later
called “bureaucratic rationality,” we often find in documents of the time bit-
ter invectives against egoism and loss of morality, prosaic coldness and all
kinds of depravity and scourges of a society “with no soul.”36 This evaluative 169
ambiguity did not stop the prevailing view from gradually imposing the idea

that politically modern constitutions should be based on freedom, equality
and private property, that is, that “the modern system should unequivocally
be founded on liberal principles.”37 This modernity was, of course, carefully
qualified and manifested itself in diFerent forms in each individual coun-
try; at the same time, however, it seemed to unite Europeans and transcend
national borders, since, as Balmes pointed out in 1842, “there is not so great
a difference between one modern nation and another as between modern
and ancient nations.”38 Nevertheless, not everybody would agree that liber-
alism represented could serve as a byword for modernity. Thus, when the
Utopian Sixto Cámara repeatedly invoked the “modern spirit” as the inspir-
ing principle behind the political, social and cultural changes of his time,
he was basically thinking of equality and the solution to the social question
as marking the horizon of the future. 39 Many other observers – from the
“Progresista” Campuzano, who considered his time as a “century of equality
and economy”40 to the liberal-conservative politician Antonio Cánovas, for
whom “the equality of man is the greatest dogma of modern society” and the
true “epitome of the modern spirit”41 – agreed on the fundamental value of
equality (although by no means did all of them give this concept the same
meaning). 42 “Modernist” rhetoric of course admitted many other formula-
tions: the Republican Castelar waxed lyrical on freedom and, especially, on
progress – a term that held a clear advantage over its equivalents and com-
petitors civilization and modernity because of its inherent dynamism – and
after proclaiming his era as “the age of revolution,” he asserted that “modern
times are so great that it can rightly be said that they have created a new man
within mankind.”43
Rhetoric aside, the creation of a specifically modern timescale in
which novelty and incessant change became a kind of paradoxically alter-
native tradition seemed to initiate an endless pursuit of that fleeting ever-
renewed, “ever-contemporary” modernity. When the supply of adjectives
ran out, they were replaced by superlatives such as filosofía novísima (the lat-
est philosophy), an expression used by Sanz del Río in 1856, and much re-
peated by Krausists and Republicans. This school of thought emerges in
the 1840s and in the Spanish translation of Cours de Droit Naturel (written
by the German Krausist Heinrich Ahrens) Navarro Zamorano states that
Spain needed to enrich modern science and a wonderful way to do so was
170 by translating foreign authors into Spanish. 44 This idea reached the oGcial
institutions which prompted the Espartero government in 1843 to publish
a decree in La Gaceta de Madrid in which we read that:

The circumstances of the time and the special situation in which our
country (Patria) has remained for centuries, has been an obbacle pre-
venting budies from reaching to the heights as in other European coun-
tries and, hence, obliging them to remain as bationary within the great
picure of modern civilization. 45
In this way Spanish Krausism initiated an early “Europeanism,”
according to which “progressive Europe” (mainly England, France and
Germany) would be the representative of modernity; accordingly, if Spain
aims to be modern it must import science and culture from those countries.
The texts by Krausists are full of diFerent allusions to modernity, such as
“modern spirit,” “modern philosophy,” “modern epoch,” etc., always using
the “modern” as a highly positive adjective (as something opposed to the old
times and, in general, to thoughts, customs and things of a past regarded as
“old,” “withered” and definitively surpassed). Some authors such as Salmerón
or González Serrano well into the 1870s still thought that Spain should fol-
low the way of modern philosophy and for them this started with Kant. 46 As
a result, another significant Krausist, Giner de los Ríos, wrote as late as 1914
that Krausism allowed Spain to “awake from the old drowsiness to the mur-
mur of the modern European thought.”47
In the light of this and other evidence, this experience of modernity
– which was usually concealed beneath circumlocution and epithets – did not
consist merely in replacing one set of values and concepts by another stable al-
ternative set, but rather in creating an endless series of continuous changes, in
creating a door permanently open to an unknown and unforeseeable future.
Of course, the traditionalists and reactionaries did not cease to launch
their attacks on diFerent aspects, movements and dimensions of modern so-
ciety (liberalism, secularization, indiFerentism, democracy, etc.). The pages
of the Carlist, Neo-Catholic and Integrista press were full of such diatribes,
although the most enlightened would finally advocate adapting traditional
thinking to the new society “in order to be better equipped to combat the ills
of modernity.” The expression “modern civilization” referred to an amalgam
of technical advances and political and social innovations; these included the
use of steam (and later electricity) in industry, the development of transport
systems, and also new attitudes (such as a taste for material well-being and a 171
scorn for “spiritual values”), representative liberal institutions, etc. 48

Under the Restoration monarchy (that is to say, during the lib-
eral and oligarchical political regime set up by Cánovas at the end of the
so-called Sexenio Democrático, 1868–74), the adjectives modern and contem-
porary were often used – outside the historical settings mentioned above –
almost as synonyms. It is significant that two of the philosophical and lit-
erary publications that best characterized the last part of the century, the
Revista Contemporánea, of the neo-Kantian José del Perojo, and La España
Moderna, of Lázaro Galdiano, included these adjectives in their titles. The
latter, which was receptive to European literary and philosophical currents,
made no attempt to hide its goal of being a kind of “intellectual sum of the
contemporary period,” and in the parliamentary and journalistic rhetoric of
the Krausists, the invocation by Giner de los Ríos and by Salmerón of the
“contemporary spirit” or “the demands of contemporary life” were the order
of the day. 49
The final important episode in the portrayal of the concept we are
examining in the context of nineteenth-century Spain occurred at the turn
of the century. Around 1898 a conflux of several circumstances that together
served to highlight the idea of modernity both generally and in certain spe-
cific settings (literature, art, religion) took place. First, there was the appear-
ance of literary modernism, an essentially poetic movement founded by
Rubén Darío in the 1890s, which opened up the way to avant-garde litera-
ture and enjoyed undeniable prestige in the Spanish world. 50 In the preced-
ing years there had already been talk of modernity having its own aesthetics,
which was opposed to classicism and had its origins in particular in the liter-
ature and poetry of romanticism. Second, there was the boom of the modern
style, an internally diverse aesthetic movement, anti-academic in nature, and
not unrelated to the industrial revolution and its consequences. As is well
known, one of the outstanding features of this movement was Catalan mod-
ernisme (most famous for its architecture, but covering a wide range of artistic
manifestations), especially in Barcelona where modernism was supported by
a vigorous bourgeoisie. Lastly, in the religious domain, the term modernism
was applied to a set of open-minded doctrinal positions that were expressly
condemned by Pope Pius X in his encyclical Pascendi (1907). Those that in-
spired this attitude advocated the need to reconcile religious dogma with
the new interpretation of the Bible and advances in modern science. That
172 this revisionist movement should have had only a limited response in Spain
was, according to Leopoldo Alas Argüelles, due to the lack of authenticity in
Spanish Catholicism and to the excessive distance between clergy and laity:
the notable eForts of “Catholic modernists” in other countries to “come to
terms with contemporary civilization,” with regard to both renewing the old
scholastic theology and raising moral standards, unfortunately in the eyes of
this critic, met with too many obstacles in Spain. 51
The relationship between the intellectuals that emerged from the
1898 movement and modernity is complex and problematical (as, in fact, was
the very notion of modernity at this juncture). Certainly, this group of young
discontents, which included José Ortega and Ricardo Baroja just to name two
of them, was given the derogatory label of modernists, not in any proper aes-
thetic sense, but rather because of their attitude to life, their way of facing the
present and of looking to the future. 52 It is evident that for some of them the
unrenounceable goal was “to push the nation forward into the mainstream of
modern life,” including a decisive impulse towards the new industrial econ-
omy, shaking oF all kinds of inertia and purist hindrances; 53 if we leave aside
the problem of the suitability of the means proposed, the modernizing and
Europeanizing projects of Costa and the Regeneracionistas set similar objec-
tives, and three decades later, Manuel Azaña would recall that, at the begin-
ning of the twentieth century, “Madrid fought to make up lost time and to
adjust to the new century. The slogan was: modernity.”54 The obsessive invoca-
tion of innovation and youth, the parallel rejection of the antiquated and the
abuse of the adjectives modern and contemporary were ever-present themes
in a substantial part of the press of the time (the names of some magazines,
Vida Nueva, Gente Nueva, La Nueva Era, Nuebro Tiempo, are eloquent evidence
of this). In literature, the break between “young” and “old” writers, their to-
tal repudiation of a dying nineteenth century, now considered decrepit and
insubstantial (Azorín, Baroja, etc.), their rejection of existing literary tradi-
tions and conventions could be seen as a new revised and corrected version
of the age-old and recurrent dispute between ancient and modern (at the end
of the seventeenth century), escolásticos and novatores (in the eighteenth cen-
tury) and classicists and romantics (in the nineteenth century). The belliger-
ent reaction of the academic media to modernism – defined by the drae in
1899 as “excessive love of modern things, with scorn for old ones, especially
in art and literature” – leaves no room for doubt about the bitterness of this
intergenerational dispute.
It is paradoxical that these angry young men, derogatively labeled 173
modernists, were in many cases highly refractory to the values of moder-

nity. Although in diFerent fields – culture, economy, politics, and society –
there is a need for careful qualification for each case, it is clear, for instance,
that Ganivet showed hostility towards, rather than disillusionment with, in-
dustrialization and technical civilization, and in some respects the young
Unamuno was not far behind in this rejection. As reflected in the articles in
En Torno al Casticismo, although it is true that:
…at the end of the nineteenth century the term ‘modern Spaniard’…
meant a man open to the new currents in Europe and concerned for
Spain…this term…would be a contradiction because a Spaniard could
not be modern in the way that Europe understood the concept of the
modern. 55
Paradoxically, under the influence of the irrationalist currents in
fashion throughout Europe at that time and conditioned by the inadequate
development of their homeland, the same writers that created literary mod-
ernism in Spain revealed an ambiguous – if not totally opposed – position to-
wards modernity tout court. Hence their doubly critical attitude to tradition
and modernity that places them in a no-man’s-land between aestheticism
and a kind of existentialism avant la lettre. 56
In any case, there is no doubt that, at the end of the century, one cycle
had finished and another had commenced. Finally, Ortega’s assessment with
which we started this article suggests that from the vantage point of the new
century the old one is viewed with a certain superiority and condescension:
the 1800s, perceived now as a complete chronological and existential unit,
can retrospectively be labelled as contradictory, as a kind of “past moder-
nity,” or rather as a specific version of what is modern that had to be quickly
replaced. Despite the somewhat outrageous aim of nineteenth-century men
“to forestall all attempts at improvement,” which Ortega mentions, that same
modernity – that nineteenth-century modernity heated in its “prime zeal for
progress,” which Ortega did not hesitate to call pathologic – had inevitably
become outmoded: it would not be long before the literary critic Federico de
Onís, in 1934, would coin the term postmodernism.
Although it appears that the term modernidad was far from usual
among writers and intellectuals – the references currently included in the
corde indicate that it was only between 1910 and 1920 that the word began to
174 appear with increasing frequency in some of Unamuno and Ortega’s works57
– it is also true that the concept was perfectly defined long before the second
half of the twentieth century, when this notion – and its close relative, mod-
ernization – were massively employed in the philosophical, historical and so-
ciological literature as a fundamental category in the understanding of the
social and cultural world that surrounds us. Furthermore, it is not without
a certain irony that it should have been the Spanish language which, despite
the historical backwardness of Spain with regard to the most advanced and
modern European nations, played a pioneering role in the creation of two
terms – modernismo and posmodernismo – which became part of the linguistic
resources of those other countries much later. 58
notes 175

*
This article originally appeared in the European Journal of Political Theory 3
(4): 369-391 and is reprinted here with the permission of the authors and of
the journal’s editor.
1
Javier Fernández Sebastián and Juan Francisco Fuentes (2002).
2
Above all, we are thinking of the monumental work by Otto Brunner,
Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck (1972-1997). Particularly Koselleck’s
Introduction, which opens the first volume.
3
For a word to attain the status of concept, it has to be polyvalent and contro-
versial, and has to embody “the whole of a context of experience and sociopo-
litical meaning,” thereby constituting an unstable condensation of disputed
meanings that come into play in diFerent discourse contexts at the service
of a given rhetoric. It is in this sense that concepts are said to contain history
and are, in a way, “condensed history.” Reinhart (1992), 105–26, 117. The main
reason for our dissatisfaction with the German-style history of concepts re-
lates to what we see as this school’s rather restrictive use of historical sources,
which is often limited to important political texts. We have chosen to widen
the range of sources considerably to include newspapers, literary works, par-
liamentary speeches and even archival documents, as well as the significant
theoretical treatises. We believe that, depending on the concept under con-
sideration, this provides a broad spectrum of registers that allows us to ap-
proach the linguistic usage of a much wider range of speakers and users of
the language.
4
Melvin Richter (1995).
5
An English version of the entry for Revolución is available in Juan Francisco
Fuentes and Javier Fernández Sebastián (2002).
6
Juliá Santos (1996). Obviously, this is not the place for a historiographic dis-
cussion of the problems of the modernization of Spain over the last two cen-
turies. We would only like to point out that the revision of the idea of fail-
ure started in the field of economic history, where young researchers in the
mid-1980s (e.g. J.I. Jiménez Blanco, A. Carreras, L. Prados de la Escosura) be-
gan to perceive a slow but sustained growth in the nineteenth century. The
American economic historian David Ringrose entitled one of his books Spain,
176 Europe and the “Spanish Miracle,” 1700–1900 (1996). No less significant is the
Spanish translation of this work, which goes under the title of España, 1700–
1900: El Mito del Fracaso (1997). A book very much in harmony with this new
spirit is Juan Pablo Fusi and Jordi Palafox España: 1808–1996. El Desafío de la
Modernidad (1997). This, from its prologue, outrightly rejects the exceptional
nature of Spain and, while recognizing certain serious errors and “collective
failures,” asserts that Spain was a “normal country.” “Overall,” the authors
add, “the history of Spain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was a far
cry from a history of failure” (1997).
7
José Ortega y Gasset (1916), 1; 22-3.
8
Cited by Pedro Álvarez de Miranda (1992), 649.
9
Nuño is one of the fictitious correspondences of Cartas Marruecas, by the
writer and military José Cadalso (1741–82), an epistolary work critical of Spain
at that time, written in a similar way to Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes. Las
Cartas Marruecas, written in 1773–4, were published for the first time in 1789,
in the pages of Correo de Madrid. See the edition of this work by Lucien
Dupuis and Nigel Glendinning (1966).
10
Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos (1988). Politician, jurist, poet, playwright
and introducer of Adam Smith’s thought to Spain, Gaspar Melchor de
Jovellanos (1744–1811) is one of the most outstanding exponents of Spanish
Enlightenment.
11
José Antonio Maravall (1986), 241–2.
12
María Cruz Seoane (1968), 184–6.
13
Cited in Álvarez de Miranda (1992), 651.
14
La Ilustración Católica, 40 ( April 28, 1881). About the controversy caused by
the article on Spain published in the Encyclopédie Méthodique de Panckoucke by
the obscure French author Masson de Morvilliers, see François López (1976),
317–436. The article by Masson, which appeared in 1782 (vol. 1 dealing with
Géographie moderne), was of a scornful and oFensive nature to Spaniards. It
should be regarded as part of the persistent anti-Spanish “black legend” of
the modern age: see Ricardo García Cárcel (1992).
15
See M. Menéndez Pelayo , “Historia de las Ideas Estéticas en España” includ- 177
ed in his complete works (1947), vol. 3, 124, and vol. 4, 9. Marcelino Menéndez

Pelayo (1856–1912) was a fearsome polemicist, Catholic apologist and one of the
most influential learned persons in Spanish contemporary culture. Among
his far-reaching Historia de los Heterodoxos Españoles (1880–2) and his monu-
mental Historia de las Ideas Estéticas en España (1882–91) should be mentioned.
Benito Jerónimo Feijoo y Montenegro (1676–1764), Spanish Benedictine and
professor at the University of Oviedo, was one of the most popular and polem-
ic writers of his time. He published many volumes spreading modern ideas
in the scientific field among Spaniards. He also bravely fought against eve-
ry kind of prejudice and superstition. (1726-40) Teatro Crítico Universal, 9 vols.
and (1740–60) Cartas Eruditas y Curiosas, 5 vols. Both works of encyclopedic na-
ture were translated into the main European languages.
16
Letter to M. Menéndez Pelayo (February 1, 1881), in (1982).
17
Speech in Congress: see (1866) Discurso pronunciado por el Sr. D. Cándido
Nocedal en la legislatura de 1866, en defensa de la enmienda presentada por los
diputados católicos al proyeco de contestación al discurso de la Corona. Madrid:
Imprenta de la Regeneración.
18
Letter from Manuel Huetedo to Menéndez Pelayo on December 27, 1903
(1982).
19
Cited by José Escobar (1994), 202.
20
José Escobar (1994), 196.
21
Mariano José de Larra . In the journalistic works by Mariano José de Larra
(1809–37), one of the most splendid romantic writers of the period, we often
find deep analysis of customs of Spanish society at that time, usually in a bit-
ing and satirical tone
22
Semanario Pintoresco (1840), 311.
23
See Jacques Le GoF (1991), 152.
24
Chateaubriand, “La Modernité,” in Le peintre de la vie moderne (1859–60).
25
Larra (n. 21), vol. 2, 240.
26
Álvarez de Miranda (1992), 209–10.
178
27
Nicomedes-Pastor Díaz (1996), 86.
28
Jaime Balmes (1844), Jaime Balmes (1810–48), Spanish clergyman, philoso-
pher and writer, was especially sensitive to social problems related to mod-
ern industry and “steam-civilization,” due to the circumstances of Cataluña
at that time. See Josep M. Fradera (1996), 167–213.
29
Cánovas (1883) ,vol. 2, 131.
30
CORDE :
Corpus Diacrónico del Español (Spanish Diachronic Corpus). This is
an on-line database of literary texts made by the Spanish Royal Academy that
researchers can look up at www.rae.es.
31
For the German case, see Reinhart Koselleck (1985) and (2001).
32
See El Europeo December 6, 1824, 241–7.
33
Julio Aróstegui in the Introduction to Antonio Pirala (1984), ix–x and
xxxvii–xl. Antonio Pirala (1824–1903), liberal historian contemporary with
the facts he narrates, began his celebrated chronicles of the Carlist wars with
Anales de la guerra civil (1843), which he kept on enlarging. His second work
mentioned is (1893–5) Historia Contemporánea: Segunda Parte de la Guerra Civil.
Anales desde 1843 hasta el Fallecimiento de Alfonso XII. Madrid: Estab. tip. y Casa
Ed. de Felipe González Rojas; 1st edn (1875) Historia Contemporánea… Hasta
la Conclusión de la Actual Guerra Civil. Madrid.
34
Las Novedades, October 1853.
35
See Antonio Flores (1853). Also (1863–4) 7 vols. Madrid: Mellado (1968) La
sociedad de 1850. Madrid: Alianza Ed. Francisco Martínez de la Rosa (1835–
51) El espíritu del siglo, 10 vols. Madrid: Tomás Jordán. Reprinted in (1960)
Obras. Madrid: BAE . Modesto Lafuente (1846) (Fray Gerundio), Teatro Social
del siglo XIX, 2 volumes. Madrid: Mellado.
36
See, for example, the August 11, 1864 edition of El Correo (1841) or the arti-
cles by Ramón de la Sagra in Semanario Pintoresco.
37
El Vapor, March 30, 1836.
38
Jaime Balmes (1948-50), vol. 2, 1528.
39
(1848) La Organización del Trabajo (15 March), cited in Antonio Elorza (1970),
166–7.
40
Significado Propio de las Voces Constitucionales March 19, 1840, 22. 179
41
Diario de Sesiones de las Cortes April 25, 1861.

42
For Campuzano, see Significado Propio de las Voces Constitucionales March 19,
1840, 22; and for Cánovas del Castillo, see Diario de Sesiones de las Cortes April
25, 1861. Antonio Cánovas del Castillo (1828–97), possibly the most influen-
tial politician in nineteenth-century Spain, was the architect of the most sta-
ble political regime of the period (the political system known in Spain as La
Restauración – the Restoration – from 1874 up to 1923). Cánovas combined his
duties in the Parliament and as Prime Minister with his remarkable works as
historian and academic (in 1890–4 a huge edited collection, Historia General
de España, in 18 volumes was published under his direction).
43
Emilio Castelar (1858), ix. Emilio Castelar (1835–99), democratic politician
and one of the republican party leaders, was known for his outstanding ora-
tory. He was a parliamentary deputy, minister and, for a time, prime minister
during the Spanish First Republic (1873).
44
In the introduction to Heinrich Ahrens (1841). Julián Sanz del Río (1814–
69), university professor and philosopher, is best known for introducing
the pantheistic doctrines of Karl Christian Krause (1781–1832) in Spain by
the mid-century. His disciples became enormously influential amongst the
Spanish intellectuals of the left.
45
La Gaceta de Madrid, June 9, 1843, our emphasis.
46
In their Introduction to G. Tiberghien (1875) Ensayo Sobre la Generación de
los Conocimientos Humanos. Madrid: Frederico Escamez.
Boletín de la Institución Libre de Enseñanza 38, (1914), 231, our emphasis. Nicolás
47
Salmerón, González Serrano, Gumersindo de Azcárate and Francisco Giner

de los Ríos are the best representatives of Spanish Krausism.
48
Marta Bizcarrondo (1996), 303–313.
49
Words from J. López Morillas, cited by Manuel Suárez Cortina (1998), 470.
50
Rubén Darío (1867–1916), writer and poet from Nicaragua, was the driv-
ing force behind the modernist movement that took place mainly in Latin
America (and also on the other side of the Atlantic) during the last decades of
the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth.
180 (1910) “El modernismo católico,” Vida Socialista (17 April), cited in Manuel
51
Revuelta González (1999), 126–9.

52
Quoted by Carlos Serrano (1998), 341. The group of young nationalist in-
tellectuals of Spain at the end of the nineteenth century (Unamuno, Azorín,
Baroja, Ganivet, Maeztu, etc.) was for a long time known as “generación del 98,”
to note the emotional shock due to the disaster (the defeat in the war against
the United States that meant the loss to Spain of Cuba and the Phillipines).
About that group and about the later regeneracionista movement (related to
the necessary regeneration of Spain) there are plenty of works. We will just
cite only one of them as it may be more easy for an English-speaking public
to find: H. Ramsden, The 1898 Movement in Spain: Towards a Reinterpretation
with Special Reference to En torno al Casticismo and Idearium español (1974).
53
Ramiro Maeztu, Hacia otra España (1899), 173 (1997).
54
Manuel Azaña (1996), vol. 1, 629. Manuel Azaña (1880–1940), Spanish writ-
er and politician, was the leader of the Left Republican Party. He occupied
important posts during the Second Republic (1931–6), first as minister of war
and later on as president of the republic. In this post he had to fight against
the rising of a part of the Spanish Army led by General Francisco Franco.
55
Carlos Blanco Aguinaga (1954), 27. Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936), fa-
mous Spanish writer and philosopher, was author of numerous literary and
essay works. In many of his reflections -- and throughout his lengthy and
controversial intellectual career – he showed a clear taste for contradiction
and paradox that was extended right up to his own interior conflicts
56
Félix Ortega (2000), 43–58.
57
See, for instance, Del Sentimiento Trágico de la Vida (1913), by the first; and El
Especador (1916), by the second.
58
See Perry (2000; 1998), 9–10.

1841. El Correo Nacional, August 11.
Aguinaga, Carlos Blanco. 1954. Unamuno, Teórico del Lenguaje. Mexico City: El
Colegio de México.
Ahrens, Heinrich. 1841. Curso de Derecho Natural. Translated by N. Zamorano.
Madrid: Boix Editor.
Anderson, Perry. 1998. The Origins of Postmodernity. London; New York:
Verso.
. 2000. Los Orígenes de la Postmodernidad. Barcelona: Anagrama.
Azaña, Manuel. 1996. Obras Completas. 4 vols. Vol. 1. Mexico City: Ed. Oasis.
Balmes, Jaime. 1844. El Protestantismo Comparado con el Catolicismo, En Sus
Relaciones Con La Civilización Europea, § 384. Barcelona: Antonio
Brusi.
. 1948-50. Obras Completas. Madrid: BAC.
Bizcarrondo, Marta. 1996. “La Ilustración Católica: Los Inicios Del
Nacionalcatolicismo.” In La Prensa Ilustrada en España: Las
Ilustraciones, 1850-1920. Montpellier: Université Paul Valéry.
Cadalso, Jose, Lucien Dupuis, and Nigel Glendinning. 1966. Cartas Marruecas.
London: Támesis Books.
Cánovas. 1883. El Solitario Y Su Tiempo: Biografía de D. Serafín Estébanez
Calderón Y Crítica De Sus Obras. 2 vols. Madrid: Imprenta de A. Pérez
Dubrull.
Cárcel, Ricardo García. 1992. La Leyenda Negra: Historia Y Opinión. Madrid:
Alianza Editorial.
Castelar, Emilio. 1858. La Fórmula Del Progreso. Madrid: A. de San Martín y
A. Jubera.
Cortina, Manuel Suárez. 1998. “Krauso-Institucionismo, Democracia y
Republicanismo De Cátedra en la España de Fin de Siglo.” In Los 98
Ibéricos Y El Mar. Salamanca: Varona.
182 Díaz, Nicomedes-Pastor, and J.L. Prieto Benavent (ed. 1996. Obras Políticas.
Madrid and Barcelona: Anthropos-Caja de Madrid.
Elorza, Antonio. 1970. El Socialismo Utópico. Madrid: Alianza Ed.

Escobar, José. 1994. “Literatura de lo que Pasa entre Nosotros: La Modernidad
del Costumbrismo.” In Sin Fronteras: Homenaje a María Josefa
Canellada. Madrid: Editorial Complutense.
Flores, Antonio. 1853. Ayer, Hoy y Mañana, o la Fe, el Vapor y la Electricidad:
Cuadros Sociales De 1800, 1850 Y 1899. Madrid: Imprenta de José
María Alonso.
Fradera, Josep M. 1996. Jaume Balmes: Els Fonaments Racionals d’una Política
Catòlica. Vic: Eumo Editorial.
Fusi, Juan Pablo, and Jordi Palafox. 1997. España: 1808-1996. El Desafío de la
Modernidad. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe.
Gasset, José Ortega y. 1916. El Espectador. Madrid.
González, Manuel Revuelta. 1999. El Anticlericalismo Español en sus Documentos.
Madrid: Ariel.
Jovellanos, Gaspar de, José M. Caso González, and Javier González Santos.
1988. Obras Completas, Colección De Autores Españoles Del Siglo
XVIII, 22-. Oviedo: Centro de Estudios del Siglo XVIII ; [Gijâon]: Ilustre
Ayuntamiento de Gijón.
Koselleck, Reinhart. 1985. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time.
Cambridge and London: The MIT Press.
. 1992. Futuro Pasado. Barcelona: Paidós.
. 2001. Los Estratos del Tiempo: Estudios sobre la Historia. Barcelona:
Paidós.
Koselleck, Reinhart, Otto Brunner, and Werner Conze, eds. 1972-1997.
Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 9 Vols. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta.
Larra, Mariano José de. Obras. Vol. 2. Madrid: BAE .
Le Goff, Jacques. 1991. Pensar la Historia: Modernidad, Presente, Progreso.
Barcelona: Paidós.
López, François. 1976. Juan Pablo Fornere et la Crise de la Conscience Espagnole 183
au XVIIIE Siècle. Bordeaux: Bibliothèque de l’École des Hautes Études

Hispaniques.
Maeztu, Ramiro. 1899. Hacia Otra España. Madrid: ed. J. Varela.
. 1997. Hacia Otra España. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva.
Maravall, José Antonio. 1986. Estado Moderno y Mentalidad Social: Siglos XV y
XVII. Madrid: Alianza.
Miranda, Pedro Álvarez de. 1992. Palabras e Ideas: El Léxico De La Ilustración
Temprana En España (1680-1760). Madrid: Real Academia Española.
Ortega, Félix. 2000. “Intelectuales y Modernidad: En Torno al 98.” In
Intelectuales y Ciencias Sociales en la Crisis de Fin de Siglo, edited by J. A.
G. Alcantud and A. R. Egea. Barcelona: Anthropos.
Pelayo, M. Menéndez. 1947. Obras Completas. Madrid: CSIC.
Pelayo, Marcelino Menéndez, and Manuel Revuelta Sanudo. 1982. Epistolario
de Menéndez Pelayo, Publicaciones de la Fundación Universitaria
Española. Documentos Históricos; 12. Madrid: Fundación
Universitaria Española.
Pirala, Antonio. 1984. Historia de la Guerra Civil y de los Partidos Liberal y
Carlista. Madrid: Turner.
Ramsden, H. 1974. The 1898 Movement in Spain: Towards a Reinterpretation
with Special Reference to En Torno al Casticismo and Idearium
Español. Manchester [Eng.]Totowa, N.J.: Manchester University
Press;Rowman and Littlefield.
Richter, Melvin. 1995. The History of Political and Social Concepts: A Critical
Introduction. New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ringrose, David. 1996. Spain, Europe and the Spanish Miracle 1700-1900.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
. 1997. España, 1700-1900: El Mito del Fracaso. Madrid: Alianza
Editorial.
184 Santos, Juliá. 1996. Anomalía, Dolor y Fracaso de España. Claves de Razón
Práctica (66):10-22.
Sebastián, Javier Fernández, and Juan Francisco Fuentes, eds. 2002. Diccionario
Político y Social del Siglo XIX Español. Madrid: Alianza Editorial.
Seoane, María Cruz. 1968. El Primer Lenguaje Constitucional Español (Las Cortes
De Cádiz). Madrid: Moneda y Crédito.
Serrano, Carlos. 1998. “Les Intellectuels En 1900: Une Répétition Générale”.
In 1900 En Espagne (Essai D’Histoire Culturelle), edited by C. Serrano
and S. Salaün. Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux.
abstract
This article provides an account of the concepts of modernidad and modernis-
mo in the Spanish language, chiefly in Spain, from the end of the eighteenth
century to the beginning of the twentieth century. This account also reflects
the peculiarities of how conceptual history is being conducted in Spain,
which resulted in the recently published Diccionario de Conceptos Políticos y
Sociales del Siglo XIX Español. The authors conclude that an examination of
these two terms reveals that the emphasis upon Spanish singularity has been
exaggerated and that, despite the presumed historical backwardness of the
country, Spain played an outstanding role in the creation of the language of
modernity and postmodernity.
keywords
Nineteenth-century Spain, modernismo, modernidad, José Ortega y Gasset,
modernity.
185
for a critical conceptual

history of brazil: receiving
begriffsgeschichte
João Feres Júnior
Instituto Universitário de Pesquisas do Rio de Janeiro – IUPERJ
This article aims to be a contribution to, preliminary as it is, a project of con-

ceptual history of Brazil. As such, it can be considered an addition to the ever-
growing corpus of Begriffsgeschichte’s international reception. On the other
hand, it is not a piece of passive reception. That is, I do not intend to sim-
ply adapt the methodological prescriptions of German conceptual history to
an unexplored national case. On the contrary, I think that some theoretical
and methodological aspects of the history of concepts, the way it has been
practiced so far, must be reconsidered before delving into the specificities of
Brazil’s case.
The international reception of Begriffsgeschichte is an ongoing pro-
cess that includes an increasing number of national conceptual history proj-
ects, mostly in European countries such as Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, and
Finland, and also the interpretation and translation of foundational texts of
Begriffsgeschichte by authors outside the German academia. Although of a lim-
ited scope, the reassessment proposed here will also address part of the litera-
ture produced by this process of reception.
In the following paragraphs, I will argue that such project should
be based on a programmatic position different from that of the original
Begriffsgeschichte, which is more or less shared by most national projects. I
would like to call this “new” position Critical Conceptual History. Firstly,
the adjective “critical” indicates the adaptation of the Begriffsgeschichte to the
programmatic position of critical theory, which is that of a commitment to
the present aiming at its transformation. But that is not all. Making use of a
substantive theoretical contribution from an author identified with the criti-
cal theory tradition of the Frankfurt School, Axel Honneth, I will reexamine
the assumptions of Begriffsgeschichte regarding the relationship between con-
186 ceptualization and experience, or, in other words, between the history of con-
cepts and social history, in order to propose a research agenda more suited to
for a critical conceptual history of Brazil
the Brazilian case, if not to other national contexts.
First, I would like to point out a crucial issue present not only in Koselleck’s
writings on the theory and methodology of Begriffsgeschichte, but also in their
reception by authors outside Germany. It concerns the Begriffsgeschichte’s funda-
mental hermeneutic stance in relation to the present. I refer here to the conse-
quences that the reflexive character of the interpreter’s relationship with his or
her present time carries to the conception of the enterprise as a whole.
There are basically two dissimilar readings regarding this issue.
The first one, which could be termed weak hermeneutic stance, considers
Begriffsgeschichte only as a method of conducting the historical study of con-
cepts, and thus, applicable to any period and/or linguistic community. This
seems to be the position that Koselleck himself assumes in his response to
the comments made by J.G.A. Pocock, Donald R. Kelley, Gabriel Motzkin
and James Van Horn Melton at the symposium promoted by the German
Historical Institute in Washington in 1992. 1 Repeating the lesson of Otto
Brunner, Koselleck says: “we can best study a past period by first reconstruct-
ing the language used by its members to conceptualize their arrangements,
and then translating these past concepts into our terminology.” In this same
text, the author defines “the task of the Begriffsgeschichte” simply as the search
for continuity and change within the layers of the concept’s meanings.
This stance is made even clearer when Koselleck explains the notion
of Sattelzeit:
What has already been said partially answers queries about the Sattelzeit
(the period of transition between early modern and modern Germany, c.
1750 and 1850). Initially conceived as a catchword in a grant applica-
tion for funding the lexicon, this concept has come to obscure rather than
to advance the project. Perhaps Schwellenzeit (threshold period) would
have been a less ambiguous metaphor. In any case, hypotheses about
the existence of such a period play no part in the method used in the
Begriffsgeschichte. The Sattelzeit is neither an ontological notion nor
is it tied to a single national language. This periodization is but one
means of narrowing the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe’s focus and mak- 187
ing its goals more manageable. 2

The weak hermeneutic stance in relation to the present is also shared
by key authors in the reception of Koselleck’s writings in academic mi-
lieus outside Germany. Probably based on Koselleck’s “Introduction” to the
Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, Melvin Richter argues that, in addition to pro-
viding good analyses of the ways in which language and action interacted in
German history and disseminating quotations of important texts, the pur-
pose of the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe is:
[T]o sharpen our awareness at the present time of just how we use po-
litical and social language, and what alternatives to our present usages
have existed in the past. By understanding the history of the concepts
available to us, we may better perceive how they push us to think along
certain lines, thus enabling us to conceive of how to act on less constrain-
ing definitions of our situation. 3
In other words, the purpose of the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe is to provide
clarification for readers by giving them the tools which would allow them to
resist the ideologizing of concepts in the present. We should note that this
hermeneutic position in relation to the present is quite close to that adopted
by Quentin Skinner and James Tully in their defense of the Collingwoodian
approach (Cambridge School) against the accusations of antiquarianism
raised by authors inspired by Gadamer’s hermeneutics. 4
There is, however, in the reception of the Begriffsgeschichte project, a
strong hermeneutic stance in relation to the present. This can be found, for
example, in a recent article by Sandro Chignola published in the History of
Political Thought. 5 Chignola parallels the theoretical projects of Koselleck
and Max Weber and argues that the historian’s perspective, that is, his theo-
retical anticipation (Vorgriff ), is what gives history its meaning. This anticipa-
tion is necessarily anachronistic since it is made up of hypotheses and issues
pertaining to the present projected backwards to the past. The sources are,
therefore, “forced to speak to us,” given that, if the historiographical repre-
sentation has a meaning, it can only have a meaning to us, interpreters of the
present. Chignola writes:
Begriffsgeschichte has to start from a strong theoretical anticipation.
Only then can a determined interest in, and a strong sense of the pres-
188 ent be developed, and the porosity of the collective experience of time and
the lack of balance between the ‘space of experience’ and the ‘horizon of
expectation’ can be articulated. The historian is thus compelled to con-

ceptualize his consciousness of time through the elaboration of a cultural
‘construction’ of the present…. 6
According to Chignola, this strong commitment to the present
is Koselleck’s specific epistemological contribution to the Geschichtliche
Grundbegriffe. It is a contribution that modifies the initial project conceived
by Otto Brunner and Werner Conze.7
Yet an important problem remains unsolved: what set of questions
constitute the condition of being-in-the-present in the Koselleckian project?
According to Chignola, these questions are related to the genesis of moder-
nity, whose specificity consists in the structural presence of the break between
the space of experience and the horizon of expectation. Koselleck himself
buttresses this reading by defining, in “Begriffsgeschichte and Social History,”8
the history of political concepts as the subject that “comprises that zone of
convergence in which the past and its concepts penetrate the modern con-
cepts.”9 Therefore, the theoretical anticipation (Vorgriff ) of Begriffsgeschichte
necessarily involves the question of the transition to and the constitution of
modernity. In Chignola’s words:
To trace the history of concepts means to identify and to point out the
continuities and the transformations which, within the perspective of the
definitive emersion of the modern world, constitute the long-term axes
of Western political experience. 10
Chignola identifies similarities between Koselleck’s intellectual
project and Max Weber’s. If Weber’s work is guided by the effort to map
out the genesis of modern Western rationalism, Koselleck’s Vorgriff does the
same in relation to the genesis of modern Western historical consciousness.
In sum, Chignola, as well as other key figures in the international
reception of Begriffsgeschichte such as Giuseppe Duso and Kari Palonen, is an
advocate of the strong hermeneutic stance: a diagnosis of the present as mo-
dernity is the foundational point from which conceptual history inquires the
past, thus infusing it with meaning.
II 189

After this brief exposition on these two readings of Koselleck’s work, I should
now consider the consequences they bring to the elaboration of a project of
critical conceptual history.
The weak hermeneutic stance renders Begriffsgeschichte a pedagogical
enterprise whose purpose lies in de-ideologizing concepts used in the pres-
ent. Put to use, this version of historiography is, in itself, a great advance-
ment in comparison to historical endeavors still bound to idealistic or purely
present-minded notions. Moreover, it is conducive to the production of lexi-
cons and dictionaries of concepts of invaluable use to academic research on
history and the human sciences. However, given that it is not premised on
a strong commitment to the critical reading of the present, it does not fully
serve the purpose to which I aspire here.
The strong hermeneutic stance presents a different set of problems.
It asserts a commitment to the present, but yet this present is reduced histor-
ically and socially to its structural components, stripping away the its speci-
ficity in time and space. The “critical” consideration of this stance is limited
to defining modernity as a structural fracture in the relationship between
the space of experience and the horizon of expectation, and shies away from
clearly identifying the geographical spaces in which such rupture takes place
and the specific historical subjects who experience it. It is as if the position of
the present were transcendental. However, when one actually reads the works
produced by the Begriffsgeschichte approach, this subject appears here and
there, but never clearly enough. Sometimes it is the German-speaking com-
munity, sometimes the German nation itself, at times it seems to be Europe
and finally it appears also as the Western civilization.
This uncertainty in regard to the subject of Begriffsgeschichte has the
practical consequence of avoiding an overt national position. James Van Horn
Melton argues that, in order to de-Nazify the project of Begriffsgeschichte orig-
inally designed by Brunner, Koselleck replaced its political purpose with a
hermeneutic stance. Thus, the effort to remove nationalism from the surface
of discourse was crucial in distancing the German nation from its shame-
ful past, redefining it as a full-fledged actor in the development of Western
modernity. In practical terms, the emphasis on the genesis of modernity led
the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe to concentrate on nineteenth-century liberal-
ism and set aside twentieth-century nazi-fascism. 11 But one must ask if this
190 historical fracture, expressed by the consolidation of the Nazi regime, is re-
ally of secondary importance? In order to answer this question in the pres-
ent, a political viewpoint, which is not always made clear in Begriffsgeschichte

writings, is required. In a very similar fashion, other national projects also
identify their organizing questions with the advent of modernity, the incep-
tion of the modern state or of liberalism, sometimes leaving aside important
periods of those countries’ recent histories, during which these “facts” and
“institutions” were abolished or put in check.
Furthermore, a more basic question should be posed. After all, what
is modernity but one of the most challenged concepts of the present: would it
be the advent of capitalism or its last stage, the dissemination of the market
economy or of state intervention in the economy? The advent of the national
state, of the public sphere, of mass society, or the encroachment of politics by
the economic system, or even the emergence of the punctual self, and so on?
Not only is the meaning of “modernity” contested, but also its application:
are we in the modern age or have we reached post-modernity? As Elias Palti
has rightly observed, the famous thesis by Karl Löwith12 about the rupture
between experience and expectation, adopted by Koselleck, has been chal-
lenged even within the German academic milieu itself. 13
Therefore, the present has no obvious and simple structure that
could be summarized by such a controversial term: modernity. There is no
Archimedean point, no universal question which exists outside of a context,
no Zeitgeist able to define a theoretical anticipation which would be immune
to different worldviews and political points of view. And these points of view,
in turn, are often based on contradictory readings both of the present itself
and of the past, and exist only in context, within a political community and
in relation to a set of specific power relations. In other words, modernity
won’t do!
III
Not only is critical theory helpful in revising Begriffsgeschichte’s

epistemological position, it also has an important substantive contribution
to offer the history of concepts, which consists of a specific theoretical
insight. Once this is acknowledged within a conceptual history project,
it might have deep methodological consequences. This insight has been
formulated by the German philosopher Axel Honneth in his debate 191
with Nancy Fraser on the theory of recognition. 16 Fraser argues that

recognition should be considered a “folk concept,” defined according to
the actual meanings arising from the discourse of concrete contemporary
social movements. Her proposition, thus, is to abandon the psychological
matrix of Hegel’s philosophy and George Herbert Mead’s pragmatism,
which has been the basis of Honneth’s theory of recognition. Honneth
challenges Fraser by arguing that privileging the discourses articulated by
social movements leads to overlooking the most cruel and acute forms of
misrecognition: the ones experienced by people who cannot even articulate
their grievances in the form of organized social movements. It is often
the case that individuals and groups who experience misrecognition are
unable to transform their own suffering into issues on the public agenda
or even articulate it verbally as concepts or coherent ideologies.
Honneth’s argument can be read in a way that puts into question
the relationship between the history of concepts and social history, a sub-
ject Koselleck has discussed at length.14 Koselleck has repeatedly warned his
readers against the risks of reducing language to ideology or of treating it
as a mere epiphenomenon of “real” social facts and forces. At the same time,
he also rejects the simplistic notion that reality is entirely fashioned by lan-
guage or the more sophisticated claim that, given the linguistic nature of the
human condition, the object of historical inquiry (and of philosophy) is ex-
clusively linguistic – this point is made clear by the author in his debate with
Hans Georg Gadamer.15 Despite Koselleck’s warnings, however, his work and
that of most practitioners of conceptual history have been focused chiefly on
key-concepts, that is, concepts that reflect and express in a more or less tight
way social conflict, leaving aside the parcels of human experience that do
not make it to the public arena in the form of linguistic contestation. That is
why Honneth’s thesis is crucial to the present endeavor, for it highlights the
fact that an important part of social experience is not expressed in the pub-
lic use of language. Thus, if this argument is taken seriously, the importance
Koselleck attributes to the history of concepts in the general framework of
his historical theory should be reassessed.
I believe there is a possible solution that could restitute the impor-
tance of conceptual history, even if this means significantly modifying the
methodology of the initial project. Such a solution is derived from an anal-
ysis of the history of the semantic structure of asymmetrical countercon-
192 cepts. Let’s briefly examine the example the history of the concept of Latin
America in the United States – a subject that I have developed in more detail
elsewhere.17 For nearly two centuries, Latin America was systematically de-
fined as the opposite of an idealized collective self-image of America (usa).
Within the semantic field of the concept of Latin America, I have identified
three main semantic “regions”: cultural, temporal, and racial. In substantive
terms, Latin America has been historically defined as Catholic, authoritarian,
corporatist (cultural), underdeveloped, primitive, infantile (temporal), and
generally non-white, and mestizo (racial), vis-à-vis an America that imag-
ines itself as Protestant, democratic, pluralist, modern, developed, and white
Anglo-Saxon. The long-term history of the concept reveals that its seman-
tic field has not changed significantly. Such observation supports, though
in a negative way, Koselleck’s thesis concerning key-concepts (Grundbegriffe):
terms become key-concepts only when they become battlegrounds for con-
testation and political conflict, and consequently, their semantic field is en-
larged by definitions that are often conflicting and contradictory. In turn,
counterconcepts such as Latin America are not subjected to this contesta-
tion process since they are used to denominate human groups that are either
outside the limits of the nominating political community or are subalterns
within this community. In either case, theses groups do not have access to in-
stitutional political channels and thus to the public contestation of concepts.
Nonetheless, this does not mean that such concepts have no social or politi-
cal efficacy. Counterconcepts and other social concepts that are not contested
through public debate – and thus do not become key-concepts – are crucial
tools when it comes to sustaining the oppression and exclusion of human
groups. Therefore, such concepts, and not only Grundbegriffe, should be part
of any conceptual history project with a critical commitment towards the so-
ciety in which it is inserted.
In other words, the brand of conceptual history based on
Begriffsgeschichte overestimates the political as something defined by contes-
tation, and, consequently, also overestimates conceptual change. This leads
academic research away from the study of concepts that remain on the fringe
of public debate, but that are also highly effective in the social control of hu-
man groups.
There are still other consequences. The study of the concept of Latin
America in the us also shows that, even with no radical semantic breaks, the
history of a counterconcept is not free from change. This change takes place
through the reception, generation after generation, of such and other social 193
concepts, through discourses, theories and practices. In this process, the ho-

rizon of expectation projected by the concept is changed. In the case of Latin
America, the semantic content was not significantly modified, but the proj-
ects that incorporated the concept were numerous and diverse: territorial an-
nexation, colonization, tutelage, geopolitical control (modernization, author-
itarian repression), benign neglect, etc. This kind of reception constitutes
most of the history of Latin America as a counterconcept in the us: its seman-
tics allowed for the projection of different horizons of action. By intuition,
we can infer that the same is also true for other social concepts used within
national contexts.
Lastly, I would like to add another methodological insight. The se-
mantic history of Latin America in the us reveals a crucial difference be-
tween its use in everyday language and its appropriation by the specialized
discourses of the social sciences. While in everyday language temporal, cul-
tural and racial oppositions remained strong, in the technical discourse of
academia racial opposition nearly vanished. Why and how did racial asym-
metric opposition vanish from social scientific discourse? Does the lack of
racial asymmetric opposition in the social scientific discourses have conse-
quences to the way Latin America is perceived today in the us? Whatever the
answers to these questions might be, this example shows that the semantics
of concepts may vary when appropriated by technical modalities of discourse,
which have a great deal of power and social prestige in the present world.
This problem is particularly relevant when discourses have human beings
as their main object, such as the various social sciences, law, ecology, pub-
lic administration, medicine, etc. In other words, a conceptual history with
a critical commitment to the present cannot be limited to the examination
of texts produced by great political philosophers and well-known thinkers.
Therefore, the task of conceptual history, if that is to be saved from the threat
of Honneth’s insight about the human suffering that does not enter public
discourse, must also include the identification of politically effective discur-
sive modalities in each national context.
194 iv
How might everything that has been said up to now be applied to the study
of a critical conceptual history of Brazil? First, we should explicitly as-
sume that Brazil constitutes the unit of analysis. If this academic endeav-
or is to have political significance it must identify the context in which
such politics matter. In this case, the choice of the Brazilian society seems
obvious. However, the constitution of Brazil as a nation, a society or na-
tional state cannot represent in itself the organizing question of a criti-
cal conceptual history. I propose therefore to base this project on a triad
of fundamental questions that are posed to the Brazilian society of the
present. The first is of socioeconomic nature: Brazil’s economy had the sec-
ond largest growth rate in the world during the twentieth century, while
at the same time, the country has become the world champion of unequal
income and wealth distribution. The second question is of politico-insti-
tutional nature: this process of growth and exclusion was paralleled by the
consolidation, although with some setbacks and ups and downs, of lib-
eral democratic institutions. And lastly, there is a politico-cultural ques-
tion: despite the particularities that characterize Brazil’s national ideol-
ogy, most of its main advocates see Brazil as a Western nation, an heir to
European values, religion and culture. Ironically enough, Europeans and
North Americans see Brazil as a non-Western, exotic, non-white country
and people. Reformulating Groucho Marx’s saying, Brazil believes that it
belongs to a club that in fact does not accept it as a member.
Each one of these problems defines a proper conceptual region with
its own discursive modalities and privileged institutional spaces of linguistic
circulation, which are sketched below:
1) The adoption and institutional consolidation of the republican-democrat-
ic regime – we are dealing here with the history of the legal and political de-
bates that took place since the independence of the country (1882) and that
gained momentum in the decades that preceded the proclamation of the re-
publican regime in 1889.
Key concepts such as republic, common good, state, democracy,
monarchy, liberty, liberalism, rights, citizenship, political centralization,
federalism, etc, predominate in these debates. There is also a complex set
of translations of concepts from French, English, American and German
sources, in addition, of course, to conceptual adaptations from the vocabu- 195
lary of the Portuguese colonial period.

Discursive modalities: constitutional debate, political debate, media,
legal doctrine.
2) The construction of a Brazilian national identity – already starting dur-
ing the monarchical period, this process gained momentum throughout the
nineteenth century and hit its highest point after the revolution of 1930, with
the government of Getúlio Vargas. We have here a great number of key con-
cepts such as Brazil, Brazilian, nation, national interest, but also less contest-
ed concepts such Portuguese, American, Latin-American, European, etc.
In this case, we have also a large number of translations of foreign
terms, but, at the same time, a great need to create concepts or redefine them
as something genuinely local. For example: democracia racial, luso-tropicalismo,
antropofagia, morenidade, etc.
Discursive modalities: official discourses, literature and literary crit-
icism, social sciences, media, etc.
3) Economic and demographic evolution of Brazil in the twentieth century
– in addition to the vertiginous growth of the Brazilian economy, the coun-
try experienced radical demographic changes. At the time of the abolition
of slavery in 1888, the population was composed of a majority of blacks and
mestizos. As a result of the active policy of importing European immigrants
to work as salaried laborers in the growing coffee economy of the Southeast,
a process that started in the second half of the nineteenth century, nowa-
days the country’s population has a majority of self-declared whites. At the
same time, the old economic centers based on extractive agriculture, in the
Northeast, entered a period of decadence, while the Southeast became indus-
trialized and attracted a huge number of immigrants and migrants.
In this semantic region, social, spatial and economic concepts
seldom reach the status of key-concept. For example: negro, preto, mulato,
branco, caipira, paraíba, baiano, nordestino, indigente, malandro, favela, periferia,
subúrbio, etc.
Discursive modalities: public policies, popular culture, official dis-
courses, literature, social sciences, media.
The proposition I have advanced is highly schematic and requires

improvement. I hope that this critical reflection on theoretical and method-
196 ological issues concerning the history of concepts will contribute not only to
a project of conceptual history in Brazil, but also to reevaluate the practice of
conceptual history in other political contexts.

notes 197

1
Hartmut Lehmann and Melvin Richter (1996).
2
Hartmut Lehmann and Melvin Richter (1996). This same interpretation of
the relative importance of the notion of Sattelzeit is made by Keith Tribe in
his introduction to the English version of Futures Past (Koselleck 1985).
3
Melvin Richter (2003).
4
James Tully (1983) and (1988).
5
Sandro Chignola (2002).
6
Sandro Chignola (2002).
7
Chignola’s reading seems in part misguided, at least regarding Brunner’s
theoretical anticipation in the first edition of Land und Herrschaft, a book
written at the precise moment when National Socialism had overcome liber-
alism in Germany. Brunner undertook the task of dissipating the interpreta-
tive distortions introduced by German liberal historians in the study of me-
dieval Germany and redeeming the contextual meaning of those institutions
and customs. See Howard Kaminsky’s and James Van Horn Melton’s intro-
duction to the German translation of Land und Herrschaft (1992).
8
A chapter of Koselleck’s Futures Past (1985).
9
Chignola warns the reader that this theoretical assumption does not seem
to be shared by most authors that contributed to the Lexicon.
10
Sando Chignola (2002).
11
James Van Horn Melton (1996).
12
Karl Löwith (1949).
13
Hans Blumenberg (1974).
14
Reinhart Koselleck (1985, 1996, 2002).
15
Reinhart Koselleck and Hans-Georg Gadamer (1977).
16
Axel Honneth and Nancy Fraser (2001).
17
João Feres Júnior (2003; 2004; 2005a; 2005b).
Blumenberg, Hans. 1974. “On a Lineage of the Idea of Progress.” Social

Research 41:5-27.
Brunner, Otto. 1992. Land and Lordship: Structures of Governance in Medieval
Austria. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Chignola, Sandro. 2002. “History of Political Thought and the History
of Political Concepts: Koselleck’s Proposal and Italian Research.”
History of Political Thought XXIII (3):517-541.
Feres Júnior, João. 2003. “The History of Counterconcepts: ‘Latin America’ as
an Example.” History of Concepts Newsletter (6):14-19.
. 2004. “El Concepto de América Española en Estados Unidos: de la
Leyenda Negra a la Anexión Territorial.” Historia Contemporánea 1
(28):61-79.
. 2005a. A História do Conceito de Latin America nos EUA. Bauru, São
Paulo: EDUSC.
. 2005b. “The Semantics of Asymmetric Counterconcepts: the Case
of ‘Latin America’ in the US.” Anales of the Iberoamerikanska Institutet
(7/8):83-106.
Fraser, Nancy, and Axel Honneth. 2001. Redistribution or Recognition? a
Philosophical Exchange. London: Verso.
Honneth, Axel. 1992. “Integrity and Disrespect: Principles of a Conception
of Morality Based on the Theory of Recognition.” Political Theory 20
(2):187-202.
. 1995. The struggle for recognition: the moral grammar of social conflicts.
Cambridge, UK; Oxford; Cambridge, MA: Polity Press - Blackwell.
. 2001. “Invisibility: On The Epistemology Of ‘Recognition’.”
Aristotelian Society Supplementary 75 (1):111-126.
Koselleck, Reinhart. 1985. “Begriffsgeschichte and Social History.” In Futures
Past: on the Semantics of Historical Time. Cambridge and London: The
MIT Press.
. 1996. “A Response to Comments on the Geschichtliche 199
Grundbegriffe.” In The Meaning of Historical Terms and Concepts:

New Studies on Begriffgeschichte, edited by Hartmut Lehmann and
Melvin Richter. Washington D.C.: German Historical Institute. 59-
70.
. 2002. “Social History and Conceptual History.” In The Practice
of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Koselleck, Reinhart, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. 1977. Historia y Hermenéutica.
Barcelona: Paidós.
Lehmann, Hartmut, and Melvin Richter, eds. 1996. The Meaning of Historical
Terms and Concepts: New Studies on Begriffgeschichte. Vol. 15, Occasional
Paper. Washington D.C.: German Historical Institute.
Löwith, Karl. 1949. Meaning in History. Phoenix Books. Chicago and London:
The University of Chicago Press.
Melton, James Van Horn. 1996. “Otto Brunner and the Ideological Origins of
Begriffgeschichte.” In The Meaning of Historical Terms and Concepts:
New Studies on Begriffgeschichte, edited by Hartmut Lehmann and
Melvin Richter. Washington D.C.: German Historical Institute. 7-21.
Richter, Melvin. 2003. “Assigning Begriffsgeschichte (The History of
Concepts) its Proper Place in the Writing of the History of Political
Philosophy.” Paper read at V Conference of the History of Concepts,
at Bilbao, Spain.
Tully, James. 1983. “The Pen is a Mighty Sword: Quentin Skinner’s Analysis
of Politics.” British Journal of Political Science 13 (winter):489-509.
, ed. 1988. Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics.
Cambridge: Polity.
200 abstract
The author argues that the development of a critical history of concepts

should be based on a programmatic position different from that of origi-
nal Begriffsgeschichte, or of its main interpretations. By drawing upon the-
oretical insights of Axel Honneth, he reassesses the basic assumption of
Begriffsgeschichte regarding the relationship between the history of concepts
and social history, and calls attention to the problems that spring from fo-
cusing analysis almost exclusively on key concepts. According to Feres, spe-
cial attention should be paid to concepts that are socially and politically
effective, but, at the same time, do not become the subject of public contes-
tation. Based on this programmatic position, he ends the article proposing
a sketch for organizing the study of conceptual history in Brazil along three
semantic regions.
keywords
History of concepts, Axel Honneth, critical theory, Brazil, asymmetrical

counterconcepts.
201
the concept of citizenship in

danish public discourse
UFe Jakobsen
University of Copenhagen
The concept of citizenship is of great importance for any analysis of democra-

cy or democratization, since “democracy” basically means rule by the people
and “the people” (demos) consists of a number of individuals in their capac-
ity as citizens. As part of a greater investigation of the contemporary usages
of the concept of democracy in Denmark based on a Koselleckian perspective
on conceptual history, 1 this paper will analyse usages of “citizenship” in con-
temporary Danish public discourse on democracy. If, currently, democracy is
understood as “rule by the people,” a number of questions apply: Who are the
people or the citizenry? What are the characteristics of citizenship? Which
are the roles of citizens in a democracy? Being a contested concept, “citizen-
ship” is – not surprisingly – used in many contexts and meanings. Instead
of refinements practiced by normative theories as to the meaning of citizen-
ship according to diFerent strands of academic literature, this paper focuses
on politicians’ and laymen’s usages of the concept of citizenship in public
discourse in Denmark. Thus, the paper takes contemporary agents seriously,
using them as key to the analysis, without taking them literally or judging
them at “face value,” but rather analyzing the connection between the actors’
discursively constructed positions and their usages of the concept of citizen-
ship. The aims of the paper, then, are 1) to map diFerent usages of “citizen-
ship” and try to locate conceptual changes within them; 2) to relate usages
of the concept to diFerent actor types; and 3) to relate the usages of diFerent
conceptions of democracy. First, however, I shall make a brief remark con-
cerning method.
202
methodological considerations
the concept of citizenship in danish public discourse
Politics is not only about struggles between conflicting interests or rational

solutions to common problems, but also struggles about ideas and concepts.
Accordingly, policy proposals are not only to be understood as the techni-
cally best solutions or as the most eGcient means to obtain a common goal.
Hence, the focus here is on which political ideas and concepts are put for-
ward, when and in which contexts this is taking place, and by whom and for
what purposes the utterances are made public. What becomes crucial in the
study of politics, then, is the intensity and the ways in which a concept, an
idea or a certain position is disseminated with the purpose of gaining he-
gemony in political matters or of obtaining influence on decisions of the po-
litical agenda, by determining the contents of key political concepts. It is also
important to observe which types of actors speak about which ideas and con-
cepts in specific ways, and to interpret the underlying purposes of this kind
of intervention in public discourse. In this respect, the project is inspired by
this approach of conceptual history.
Conceptual history as an approach emphasizes the study of con-
ceptual change in a political culture as a means for understanding that cul-
ture and the changes in its political practices. What this paper specifically
wants to adopt from conceptual history is the fundamental hypothesis that
struggles over the contents of concepts are important being that they are
parts of political struggle in general, 2 and on this basis carry out an analy-
sis of the conceptions of citizenship that have been dominant among actors,
at certain times and situations. These questions – the what, when, where,
who, how and why – are posed by the methodological approach of “(critical)
conceptual history,” where the history of concepts becomes an important
point of entry to the analysis and understanding of contemporary politi-
cal struggle, on the assumption that changes in the meanings of concepts
are a condition for political changes. 3 The inspiration for this approach
to “conceptual history” is Koselleck’s idea of concepts as a relationship be-
tween Erfahrungsraum and Erwartungshorizont – in other words, that con-
cepts, on one hand, are an accumulation of experiences from the past and,
on the other hand, horizons or scenarios of expectations for the future, and
as such, contemporary vehicles of political change. 4 Acknowledging this, it
almost follows that basic concepts have many meanings. For example, the
word democracy is widely used, covers very diFerent meanings, and de- 203
notes very diFerent subject matters. Lamenting such circumstances would

be, however, to misinterpret the art of politics. The many meanings of key
concepts derive basically from the political function of language (among
others, of course) – language as a component of politics. This means that
politics is also language, not only events, objects, etc. Ball and Pocock have
put this very aptly by saying that “politics is a communicatively constituted
activity. Words are its coins, and speech its medium.”5
To study ideas and concepts, then, is to study texts of diFerent
kinds. Here the focus is on texts consisting of words forming political lan-
guages. Words are seen to signify concepts that again are seen to stand
in a complex relationship to diFerent kinds of entities. Epistemologically,
words are either producers of “objects”6 or the only way to access “objects.”
Words, concepts and “objects” in this way form a complex triangle of rela-
tions, known as “Ogden’s triangle,”7 which causes concepts to be change-
able and changing, and is exactly what constitutes the importance of study-
ing key concepts historically.
To study texts in order to understand the meanings of concepts in
them presupposes the availability of a manageable textual corpus. In order to
delimit a textual corpus to study the political usages of “citizenship” several
steps were taken and filters were applied:
1) The public sphere (Öffentlichkeit): The usages of citizenship will be delim-

ited to the public sphere or public aspects of private life. 8
2) Public opinions expressed in debates: A “discourse” consists of diFerent
statements that alter, oppose, clarify, and supplement each other, and not just
of statements standing alone.
3) Delimitation of “word archives” or textual corpuses: Although the object
of analysis is “the concept of citizenship in Danish discourse,” we are – pace
Foucault9 who claims that “one ought to read everything” – making a “short-
cut” to a manageable textual corpus consisting of Danish dictionaries and
corpora collected in connection with these dictionaries.
204 In 1989 a new dictionary of modern Danish, The Danish Dictionary
(Den danske Ordbog) was conceived to allay the fear presumably felt among a
“large minority of the Danish people… that Danish culture and language will
slowly but surely disappear in the new Europe” as a consequence of the plans
of developing the European Union into an economic and monetary union10
– not to mention a political union with a quasi constitution of “union citizen-
ship.” To make this project possible, a textual corpus in digital format was
collected from a diversity of sources dating from 1983 to 1992. The overall size
of the corpus is of approximately 40 million words. The first two volumes of
this six–volume dictionary are now published, and selections of the corpus
have been made accessible via the internet (www.dsl.dk). Another source for
the new dictionary has been was the card index collected through the years by
staF members of The Danish Society for Language and Literature (Det danske
Sprog– og Litteraturselskab) and the Danish Language Board (Dansk Sprognævn)
dating from 1950 onwards. The cards selected for the present analysis were
the ones containing the key word in question, the quotation from which the
key word is derived, and either the whole text or the reference to the text from
which the quotation is derived.
For the purpose of this analysis, the “public sphere” is restricted
to social settings in which politics is debated publicly, where “public dis-
course” takes place. As a result, the “textual corpus” consists of the follow-
ing types of texts:
1) Parliamentary debates at national (in casu the Danish parliament

Folketinget) and local levels (in casu the municipal council of Copenhagen).
This is solely the scene of elected politicians.
2) The press, national and local newspapers (dailies), weeklies, etc. This
is the scene for “professional politicians” (or Berufspolitiker to use a term
coined by Max Weber, i.e. vocational politicians) through the medium of
journalistic reports, editorials etc. The press, however, also contains in-
terviews, features articles and political commentaries by non–journalists,
both elected politicians and “experts” (or people acting – or construct-
ed – as experts) or “laymen.” Texts by experts made for or presented in
the public sphere (in the form of comments or feature articles or even in
book form) are, of course, also political, i.e. they function as utterances by
Gelegenheitspolitik, to use the Weberian term for the opposite of “vocational
politicians,” as do texts by (other) “laymen” or “ordinary people” through 205
the medium of letters to the editor etc.

3) News and political debate, among politicians, between politicians and citi-
zens, and among citizens, from radio and TV broadcasts, in the form of man-
uscripts or transcripts.
Following Weber, the analysis treats Berufspolitiker and Gelegenheitspolitiker as

different actor types. 11 In the former group we find not only elected politi-
cians, but also the (non–elected) staff of political and vocational organiza-
tions etc., and journalists of all sorts (including editors, “spin doctors” or
agencies promoting politicians or political standpoints, etc.) In the latter
group we find laymen, both ordinary people and experts acting politically by
coming forward and presenting their views in public.
My first practical step with this textual corpus, selected by the edi-
tors of The Danish Dictionary (the overall size of which is of approximately
40 million words) was to search for both the Danish contemporary words
for “democracy” (demokrati – democracy – and folkestyre – people’s rule) and
for words derived from “democracy” (“demokratisere” – democratize – and de-
mokratisering – democratization –, demokrat – democrat – and demokratisme
– democratism). Next, this part of the corpus was searched for Danish equiva-
lents for “citizenship” (medborgerskab and statsborgerskab) and “citizen” (borger,
medborger, samfundsborger, and statsborger). The unit of analysis, however, was
the text, or in case of very large texts, for example minutes of parliamentary
debates or book length contributions to the public debate, the parts of the
text in which the equivalents of either of the words appear. The word search
applied to the whole corpus, then, was only used in order to select texts that
will undergo analysis. Finally, these texts were read in order to grasp the spe-
cific contexts and meanings of citizenship contained in the text.
So the corpus used for the analysis here is fairly broad, consisting
of a great variety of sources capable of covering practically all kinds of us-
ages of the concept, although not made for that purpose. The corpus has not
been selected for an analysis of “citizenship,” but for the most complete rep-
resentation of the Danish language in actual use in diFerent contexts. This
is considered an advantage for it is precisely the opposite of what Reichardt
calls “verstreute Zufallsfunde”12 – meaning random, incidental findings – but
206
systematically collected material made by others and for other purposes. The
goal of the editors of the Danish Dictionary has been to effect the most com-
plete coverage of the language in all its aspects. This, of course, does not
amount to (statistical) representativeness, which is not required in this case.
However, the corpus contains diFerent uses of the same words in diFerent
contexts by diFerent agents and aptly produce a picture of a number of typi-
cal usages of the concept of citizenship.
mapping of the usages of the concept of citizenship
In the following part of the paper the selected empirical material described
above is analyzed to map the diFerent usages of the concept of citizenship
and to relate these usages to types of actors and conceptions of democracy.
1) citizenship as rights
The word medborgerskab (citizenship) only appears once in the corpus, and
even then merely en passant in connection with the project behind the book
Citizenship – Democracy and Political Participation (Medborgerskab – Demokrati
og politisk deltagelse) in a radio program called The Public Opinion (Den oFentlige
mening).13 The word medborger (fellow citizen) usually appears as a form of ad-
dress, stressing the fact that the author is posing herself as an equal to her
audience of readers/listeners.
In such cases, however, it is frequently used in reference to democ-
racy as the framework for this equality. This can be noticed in phrases like
“dear fellow citizens of the Danish democracy,” found in a newspaper opin-
ion piece seeking to establish a gulf between experts (here the economic pun-
dits) who try to convince people that the economy is controlled by “inexorable
forces of nature,” and laymen, who maintain that the whole expert discourse
consists of “man–made concepts and phenomena, which you and I and ev-
erybody else can change.”14 Here, an attempt is being made to mobilize ordi-
nary people to change society and defy the predictions of oGcial expertise,
placing the author on the side of the ordinary citizen by the use of “you and
I,” which becomes “we.”
Often, however, “fellow citizen” designates a concept that covers
something sociological rather than political, i.e. a group of people living in
the same area. An article in a local newspaper reports a motion submitted by 207
a councillor from the Socialist People’s Party to set up exchanges with twin

towns abroad by “quite ordinary citizens” under the auspices of the coun-
cil’s “non–partisan” international friendship society. 15 A newspaper report
discusses deadly arson and other “right–wing terror” attacks in Germany on
“fellow Turkish citizens.”16 A feature article otherwise dealing with outlining
fraternization between employers, labour and the state, describes one of the
groups ostracized from the labor market as “physically, mentally or socially
handicapped fellow citizens.”17 In a parliamentary debate after the EU refer-
endum of June 2, 1992 on the Maastricht Treaty, the MP from the so–called
Progressive Party (Fremskridtspartiet) sought to cast the party as the savior of
“our fellow elderly citizens” by describing a scenario of uncertainty for or-
dinary citizens – in this case the “individual Dane” – because the govern-
ment does not have a “grip on things.” Furthermore, the mp characterizes the
situation as “wavering haphazardly,” especially for the pensioners who have
been subjected to “asocial” attacks. 18 In general, the semantic field around the
word “fellow citizen” is made up of words like: “elderly,” “old,” “dear,” “our”
and the likes (ddo corpus).
“Fellow citizen” is not just used in the corpus as an expression for
a horizontal relationship between inhabitants in a (often) small or (some-
times) large area, but also for groups who are transformed into social cli-
ents or are seen as (passive) receivers of benefits or objects for policy. There
are also exceptions to this, i.e. a letter to the editor by a university profes-
sor arguing the fact that the majority of graduates are educated to suit the
needs of an elite. The professor encourages socially committed students to
retain the desire to be “ordinary citizens” and “commit themselves to fur-
ther Danish democracy.”19
In a number of texts about citizenship the phrase “fellow citizen”
is used on par with “citizen,” but also in opposition to it, i.e. as a conscious
but implicit choice of a diFerent term. Sometimes, this choice is explicitly
rationalized; however, in his memoirs, one of the authors looks back on the
Book on Citizenship (Medborgerbogen), which was used by the armed forces for
instruction in general subjects in the 1960s and explains the title by say-
ing that the subject medborgerkundskab” (information for (fellow) citizens)
was not the same as the subject civics (“samfundskundskab”): “The subject is
not based on institutions but on the people who live in a society. The sub-
ject was based on the educational principle that you progress from the fa-
208 miliar to the unknown, from the family community to the international
community.”20 These “fellow citizens” – usually conscripts straight out of
school – were deemed to be uninterested in politics and, first and foremost,

interested in matters close to their heart: “engagement, marriage, setting
up a home, training, and engaging on a trade” – i.e. social and economic is-
sues. But what does that mean for citizenship and democracy? If we com-
bine this representation with the later representation in the meaning of
both “the Scandinavian welfare model” and Danish democracy as being
special, the author makes citizenship and democracy meet through three
successive levels – from a perception of being a citizen going up to the so-
cial model and from there to a concept of democracy that covers more than
just political aspects:
1) The objective of the Scandinavian welfare model is “the well–being of the

individual citizen.”
2) Democracy emerged in Denmark as a “popular demand from below.”
3) “In Denmark we have a broader concept of democracy. Democracy is some-
thing determined by its content. It is a way of life. It is not just political de-
mocracy. It is just as much economic, cultural and social democracy.”
The word borger (citizen) on the other hand is often used in the cor-
pus with the meaning of a subject (statsborger, i.e. citizen of the state) or citizen
with – natural or acquired – rights of citizenship in Denmark, in the mean-
ing of a citizen in general possession of rights – “the right to have rights,”
to be a member of and participate in a political community, irrespective of
which rights and how extensive (civil, political, social, etc.) these rights might
be. Such “civil liberties” are understood throughout as individual protec-
tions. The individual can demand that his or her rights vis–à–vis other citi-
zens (of the state) and vis–à–vis the state itself be enforced by the state through
the legal system, etc., which means they are rights that provide real and not
just formal protection to the individual. In this perspective, citizenship is
membership of a political community, its core is the individual’s right to pro-
tection from authoritative courts, which enjoy general legitimacy in society.
The character of the relationship between the elements of the community is
typically vertical.
Democracy and citizenship are not entirely compatible in this per- 209
spective. It is, therefore, as expressed in an “expert” magazine article, a

matter of “striking a balance:” democracy implies equality but runs the
“risk of ending up in equalization (ligemageri) in the real sense of the word,”
which represents a threat to pluralism and, thus, to “the right to be diFe-
rent,” which is only natural if the individual is taken as the starting point. 21
When (state) citizenship in the sense of rights and suGcient guarantees for
real protection of the individual, which typically presupposes rule of law
and constitutionalism, has to be combined with democracy, “the balance”
requires less extensive democracy than the political, economic, social and
cultural democracy which was construed above as a pre–requisite for link-
ing democracy and citizenship.
The right to have rights is both a basic feature of every democracy
and constitutional relationship in general as well as the first step in a process
of democratization in authoritarian societies. The core of the transition from
absolutist forms of government is to a great extent the transition from the
status of subject to the status of citizen. This was the case in Denmark in the
period up to 1849. As a Conservative parliamentary candidate formulates it,
democracy and citizenship are in the first instance about “developing a form
of government that laid down the citizens’ rights vis–à–vis the king” at the
same time as “the political power of democracy is to have its limits vis–à–vis
the individual citizen.” The method found was to incorporate rules to the
Constitution concerning respect for private property rights, the sanctity of
the home, etc. 22 Here, too, the individual weighs most heavily in “the balance”
between democracy and citizenship.
The same tradition spawned the 1980s debate about Denmark’s
neighboring country, Sweden, dubbed “prohibition Sweden.” In a whole
book about The Case of Sweden (Tilfældet Sverige) the concept of citizenship is
seen as the state protecting citizens against “encroachments by the authori-
ties.” According to the book’s author, this should be done by an independent
ombudsman institution “controlling the bureaucrats” in “a democracy in
which the bureaucracy has such extended powers vis–à–vis both parliament
and government.” But that is not at all the way it works according to the au-
thor: “Nay! In case of doubt the executive always has the last word in Sweden.
Justice is little more than a branch of the administration.” The judges con-
sider themselves part of the state apparatus and do not see it as their task to
protect the citizen from the State but to protect the State from the citizens.”23
210 Irrespective of the accuracy of this depiction of the state of Sweden, it is clear
that the discussion remains centered around “protection” as the central as-
pect of the relation between citizen, state and rights. It is, therefore, far re-
moved from a concern with the question of what the citizen is supposed to
use his or her freedom for doing things.
In a background newspaper article about the changes in the Soviet
Union towards the end of the 1980s, “citizen” is also used as the description
for the right to be committed politically, to be politically active and to partic-
ipate in the political life of the country in order to be able to exert influence
on one’s “own life”: as a “culmination of five years with glasnost and perestroika,
millions of Soviet citizens have become involved in political work: environ-
mental issues, the struggle to preserve historical monuments, the struggle
for the right to form new political parties. In short: the struggle for the right
to determine your own life and take responsibility for it.”24 Thus, citizenship
is about the content of and relations between basic concepts such as “the peo-
ple” and “popular sovereignty” per se and about the relations between these
basics concepts and personal autonomy and political equality.
2) citizenship as identity
A textbook, in which the sovereignty of the people and political equality are
presented as the basic dimensions of the concept of democracy, maintains –
according to John Stuart Mill – that an eGcient democracy not only depends
on citizens possessing rights, but also on people feel a “sense of citizenship.”25
Thus, the concept of citizenship also has to do with a sense of community, a
feeling of belonging to a community or a sense of identity as a citizen.
In a radio lecture, citizenship was also held as something diFerent
from the actual community in its dealings with citizens and the right to have
rights. Not just a question of individuals striving for autonomy from the state
and society, “citizenship” is also a common search for recognition as a com-
munity and a search for identity. The question of democracy and citizenship
can, therefore, be formulated as the relationship between the demos and the
ethnos, where demos is the democratic/political community in which all who
participate in the community are considered and dealt with as equals regard-
less of origins, while ethnos is a community defined on the basis of common
origins. Thus, one of the ways, but not the only one, of forging a sense of
community is to build up a common national identity. The lecturer refers
here to the Danish writer N.F.S. Grundtvig’s nation state program: the so– 211
called Composite State, consisting of present–day Denmark and the present–

day German county of Schleswig–Holstein – in other words a multinational
state – was, according to this perception, only possible “as long as an absolute
monarch reigned over them all.” Following the same logic it can, therefore,
be claimed that it was a major benefit that Denmark became a proper nation
state in 1920: “a state in which more or less all Danes are gathered together
and in which there are, as it were, only Danes.”26 This does not preclude solv-
ing the question of national minorities by granting them special political
rights, however, because ethnos is also a matter of a sense of belonging to a
group, not just a question of kinship. The Grundtvigian nationality principle
is based on identity or the sense of belonging, or as Grundtvig puts it: “to a
people belong all those who consider themselves a part.”27
The interrelationship between citizenship, in the sense of national
identity, on the one hand, and democracy, on the other, is also brought into
play when dealing with more topical questions, i.e. the further development
of the eu integration. Under the heading “free nation or region” an anti–eu
activist uses the definition of citizenship as a sense of identity and of com-
munity as an argument against the transformation of the old eec from a
primarily economic cooperation agreement into a political union because
of the negative consequences for democracy. The possibility of a democratic
eu is rejected on the basis of the definition of citizenship as identification
with other citizens and on the basis of this sense of community necessarily
being manifest through ongoing public debate: “a democracy presupposes a
common identity or, if you will, a sense of nationhood, a national debate, the
same terms of reference. That does not exist in the eec.”28
3) citizenship as “civic virtues”

In an interview, Jiri Hajek – “the man behind the velvet revolution” in
Czechoslovakia in 1989 – stresses the sense of responsibility and other po-
litical “virtues” as important causes for the fall of the Soviet regime and
aspects of democracy and citizenship in general: “the resurrection of the
democratic mentality, civic political virtues and active civil courage is ...
the very basis for a good democratic society. Without the courage of the in-
dividual citizen not even formal democratic institutions would work well.”
The same perception of the central importance for a democratic society of
212 what might be dubbed civic virtues is also found in Danish public debate.
In the introduction to an edition of collected essays by the Danish writer
Elsa Gress, we learn that it is a duty to take part in politics, to think of and
act for the common good, not merely to observe those who hold the formal
responsibility but to have a personal sense of responsibility. 29 Much of the
honor for cultivating and maintaining this perception is attributed to the
Danish tradition of “folk high schools.”
Sometimes, this perspective on citizenship is stressed to such a de-
gree that formal institutions are overlooked in favor of the individual’s dis-
position and dynamism: “being a democracy is not just a matter of having a
democratic constitution. It stands or falls on whether a suGcient number of
citizens, who are capable of taking an initiative, have enough perspective to
make judgements, feel a sense of personal responsibility for what happens
in society and possess self–confidence.”30 These civic virtues are also seen as
creating the “pillars” supporting the Danish democracy. However, the unan-
swered question is how civic virtues are established to a suGcient degree to
constitute the foundation for democracy. In the intellectual showdown after
1945, a schism emerged between the demand for a radical individualization
of responsibility and the desire to train people for democracy.
On which side of this dividing line diFerent players place them-
selves depends on the actor’s situation and strategic objectives. One example
of this is a newspaper debate on the relationship between elected politicians
and the electorate. Responding to a claim attributing the responsibility for
the results of the political decision–making process to the politicians while
simply giving the voters the responsibility of casting a ballot, the author in-
terjects that “the electorate’s influence stretches – or could stretch – much
further. The voters could, in particular, participate more actively in politi-
cal life, join political organizations that nominate candidates for election, at-
tend political meetings, express themselves politically in various fora, etc.”31
Here, there are two possible positions in the political field: (elected) politi-
cians and voters. However, only parties make demands concerning the im-
provement of the political process. The reason for the recommended change
in the electorate’s (lack of ) behavior is limited to an appeal to the “good old
days”: “It is indeed a fact that the population in the old days was far more po-
litically active than it is in the present. Nowadays, interest and participation
in political life for the big, and oh so silent majority is limited to watching TV.”
With a message like that, i.e. that it is the electorate’s fault, the author would
hardly have a chance as an elected politician – as it would be a definite vote 213
loser at the next ballot – but must rather be a non–elected “professional poli-

tician” in Weber’s sense, who earns a living in the political system and has
an interest in maintaining the system, including the two main stakeholders
in representative democracy, politicians and voters: “perhaps the grassroots
movements, for better or for worse, are an expression of growing political ac-
tivity. Nonetheless, there are thousands and thousands of Danish voters who
ought to know that their potential to exert influence on social development
stretches much further than depositing the ballot.”32
This is almost a return to the accusation made by folk high school
director Hal Koch and other popular educators in 1945 of the attempt to “get
everybody to be a member of some kind of debating club or other organiza-
tion” in which they could be trained in democracy. The point – “that such
training is in itself the antithesis of any true democracy” – could very well be
applied to Secher in 1984, who completely overlooks the fact that being a poli-
tician also requires “the ability to listen and ask questions.”33
4) citizenship as political participation

In addition to political representation through the right to vote and run for
office, and political participation beyond voting at election time, the ques-
tion is whether citizenship can influence the decision–making processes
and their outcomes. This perception of citizenship is expressed, for exam-
ple, in a local radio broadcast with the title “Hospital Debate.” In this de-
bate, one of the participants introduces herself as chair of an association
that works to include citizens in the decision–making processes concern-
ing things that have a direct bearing on the citizens. Citizens should ex-
press themselves in between elections on issues that will be decided upon
in future elections. Conversely, politicians must be responsive to the points
of view and requests put forward by the citizens. In her view, however, “it
is as if representative democracy is the same as the power and right to ig-
nore the will of the same people that mandated the county councillors to
engage in representative democracy. I wouldn’t say all councillors because I
get the impression that perhaps only two–thirds of them don’t really want
to listen to what the citizens are saying.”34 In the very same radio broadcast,
the vice–chairman of the county hospital committee supplies what might
be called the typical politician’s answer, defending representative democ-
214 racy as a system of governance in which the politicians have the power and
the right, once they have been elected, to make decisions without “outside
interference”: “we cannot discuss all the details in local areas. It is simply
impossible,” although it is not “as if we are ignoring the hundreds of thou-
sands who have expressed themselves by signing a petition. I think we are
open to influence.”35 Not only is it impossible in the politician’s opinion, but
also undesirable to comply with points of view that are of a very local nature.
So even though the citizens have the right to – and would like to – express
themselves, the politicians do not have a duty to listen, nor is there any guar-
antee that they will do so.
In one letter to the editor, the author, who introduces himself as a
voter who wants politicians to listen, proposes an alternative to representa-
tive and competitive democracy consisting of “free and open public debate
before representatives decide on a given issue.”36 Here, the main emphasis in
the perception of the citizens’ function in a democracy is on deliberation and
influence between voters and elected politicians, not just on citizens exerting
influence by voting at election time.
A book about “revolt by the majority” bears witness to the fact that
citizens and politicians or voters and representatives are not just opposite
poles in a continuum nor are they mutually exclusive. The book criticizes
the widespread idea that “decisions shall be made as close as possible to
the citizens aFected.” This dictum is often repeated by politicians, some-
times expressed in the demand for more “close” or “small” democracy (nær-
demokrati), something that is supported verbally by both right–wing and left–
wing parties. However, this book challenges the widespread consensus by
listing both pros and cons of democracy in neighbourhood relations, public
institutions, etc.: on the positive side, “small democracy” can, of course, “be
used to increase participation in the democratic process – to train everybody
in the way democracy functions when it comes to local issues, so we all have
a better idea how it works when it comes to the big issues, too.” This corre-
sponds to John Stuart Mill’s argument for political participation in addi-
tion to participation in elections, an argument also espoused by advocates
of “participatory democracy” such as Carole Pateman37 and others. On the
negative side, “small” democracy proposals often “follow on the coat tails of
a ‘back–to–the–village’ sentiment,” an escape from the complexities of in-
dustrial society. “Small” democracy can be used to divert attention from the
crucial questions of the day, letting people use all their energy on that which
is closest at hand instead – where to put the stops for the school bus or the 215
new park bench – while the mighty, unhindered by participatory democracy,

deal with the big issues.”38
On this basis, the relationship between the “small” and the “big”
issues is formulated as an almost dialectical relationship: it does not re-
ally help to stress that all decisions should be taken as close as possible to
the citizens aFected. Without central supervision, the strong would over-
power the weak in local communities, abolishing parts of the social secu-
rity and human rights infrastructure that have been achieved by high–level
culture. This problem occurs only if you look at the contradiction between
“big” and “small” democracy and not at the unavoidable link between cen-
tral and decentralized decisions. It is not enough to hide behind the much–
loved idea of “small” and “close” democracy and make as many of the de-
cisions in these contexts as possible. It is both more important and more
diGcult to ensure that the central decisions are made democratically. And
the most important thing of all is to make the interaction between decen-
tralized and centralized democracy work – that interminable ping–pong
between the whole and its constituent parts – both of which are interde-
pendent. Local needs and desires must be summarized and form the basis
for central decisions, which in turn must form the basis for local actions,
the results and side eFects of which must again be summarized to form
the basis for new central guidelines.
5) citizenship as “free consumer choice”

Inspired by the revolt against the command economies in Eastern Europe
and the Soviet Union at the time, and the fact that in many parts of the pub-
lic sector in Denmark “command economy or monopoly–like conditions ex-
isted, in which certain groups and institutions had the exclusive right to re-
ceive public–sector funding earmarked for certain objectives,” the Minister
of Education at the time proposed that Denmark also “needed some of the
invigorating eFects of the perestroika which had pepped up Eastern Europe
in recent years”; specifically, he proposed to “send money from the state – by-
passing local councils – directly to the institutions, where it would be the re-
sponsibility of the boards to spend the money as well as possible. Later, we
can consider sending money directly to citizens, who will then be able to pay
by themselves and decide for themselves.”39
216 The Social Democrats also positioned themselves in line with this
discourse: in this context one becomes a citizen only after he or she receives
benefits from the public sector, and by doing so, the distinction between pri-
vate and public sectors would have to be reconsidered, as it becomes advanta-
geous to outsource work to private companies. Outsourcing and decentraliz-
ing public decisions are not issues pitting left against right: the government
and almost all of the Parliament wants, in the words of the Prime Minister,
to “arrange things so that decisions, to the greatest possible extent – there
is a limit somewhere of course – are made away from parliament, away from
the town halls and other public deliberative bodies but rather in the institu-
tions that people are a part of and, in many cases, all the way out to the in-
dividual citizen.”40
This, clearly and concisely put, is the consequence of (neo)liberal
thinking put into practice in the public sector: citizens no longer have a say
and all representative institutions have been taken out of the loop. If this
proposal were fully implemented, the citizen would simply be converted into
a consumer, which would not only make the public sector cease to be public
but do away with citizenship as political participation, as civic virtues, as po-
litical identity, and as “the right to have rights.”
conclusions
The aim of this paper has been to map diFerent usages of “citizenship” in
Danish public discourse and to locate significant conceptual change, to re-
late usages of the concept to diFerent actor types, and to examine the usages
to diFerent conceptions of democracy.
Several diFerent meanings of citizenship in contemporary Danish
public discourse have been analyzed. As shown in this article, citizenship
is used with the following meanings: rights, political identity, civic virtue,
political participation, and social welfare consumption. While some of the
meanings make sense together – community, identity, civic virtue, and po-
litical participation – citizenship as “free consumer choice” is an example of
conceptual change. It is certainly both a long way from civic virtue and po-
litical community, and also from any kind of democracy as a form of gov-
ernance, since common decisions ideally should be taken by individuals for
individuals – not for the common good.
This idea of reducing citizenship to free and individual consumer 217
choice concerning public welfare services is only espoused by elected politi-

cians, 41 while the position of citizenship as political participation is held by
ordinary people and expert laymen, 42 and explicitly contested in one case by
an elected politician. 43 In contrast to this, only expert laymen hold the po-
sition of citizenship as civic virtue. 44 The position of citizenship as identity
is promoted primarily by expert laymen, 45 and in only one case also by an
elected politician. 46 Finally, conceptions of citizenship as rights can be found
among all actor types.
Finally, the diFerent meanings of citizenship have implications for
the concept of democracy. Again, the conception of citizenship as “free con-
sumer choice” – and of the citizen as a consumer – cannot be categorized as
a conception of democracy at all, since it is too far away from the basic idea
of democracy as popular sovereignty or decision–making by an autonomous
political community. Furthermore, while the conception of citizenship as
state citizenship in the sense of rights and suGcient guarantees for real pro-
tection of the individual often tends to emphasize the element of negative lib-
erty, not the right or duty to actively participate in politics, the conception of
citizenship as active participation in politics by the citizenry promotes a con-
ception of democracy as responsive rule and public deliberation and the duty
to listen to points of view and requests put forward by citizens in a free and
open debate in the public sphere of society. However, the conception of citi-
zenship as something wider than the political community asks for an even
broader conception of democracy as a form of society, not just a political de-
mocracy but also an economic, cultural and social democracy – a democratic
“way of life.”47
218 notes
1
UFe Jakobsen, forthcoming.
2
Reinhart Koselleck (1972) and (1979); Terence Ball (1988); Melvin Richter
(1995).
3
James (1989), 24–49.
4
5
Terence Ball and J.G.A. Pocock (1988), 1.
6
Michel Foucault (1986).
7
C.K Ogden and I. A. Richards (1972), 11.
8
Jürgen Habermas (1962).
9
Michel Foucault (1986).
10
Ole Norling–Christensen and Jørg Asnussen (1998), 224.
11
Mogens Herman Hansen (1992).
12
Rolf Reichardt (1985).
13
Johannnes Andersen (1992).
14
I.C. Lauritsen (1992).
15
Anonymous (1990).
16
Vivian Jordansen (1992).
17
Bertel Torne (1992).
18
Pia Kjærsgaard (1992).
19
Erik Christensen (1991).
20
Jørgen Bøgh (1991).
21
Bjørn Elmquist (1984).
22
Christian Krogh (1986).
23
Mogens Behrendt (1983).
24
Flemming Rose (1990).
219
25
Palle Svensson and Lise Togeby (1986).

26
Hans Fink (1985).
27
Hans Fink (1985).
28
Ib Christensen (1990).
29
Else Brundbjerg (1990).
30
K.E. Løgstrup (1961) quoted in Henning Fonsmark (1990).
31
Knud Secher (1984).
32
Knud Secher (1984).
33
Vilhelm Krarup (1945) quoted in Løgstrup (1961).
34
Grethe Holgersen (1983).
35
36
Torben Haugstrup Jensen (1984).
37
Carole Pateman (1970).
38
Philip Arctander (1985).
39
Bertel Haarder (1990).
40
Poul Schlüter (1992).
41
Bertel Haarder (1990) and Poul Schlüter (1992).
42
Grethe Holgersen (1983); Philip Arctander (1985); Torben Haugstrup Jensen
(1984).
43
Else Brundbjerg (1990); Løgstrup (1961); Knud Secher (1984); Vilhelm
44
Krarup (1945).
45
Palle Svensson and Lise Togeby (1986); Hans Fink (1985).
46
Ib Christensen (1990).
47
Jørgen Bøgh (1991).
Andersen, Johannes. 1992. Den OFentlige Mening.

Anonymous. 1990. “Fortiden Må Aldrig Mere Blive Fremtid.” Gladsaxe
Bladet.
Arctander, Philip. 1985. Oprør Fra Flertallet. En Bog Om Socialisme. København:
Gyldendal.
Ball, Terence. 1988. Transforming Political Discourse. Political Theory and Critical
Conceptual History. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Ball, Terence, and J. G. A. Pocock. 1988. Conceptual Change and the Constitution.
Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas.
Behrendt, Mogens. 1983. Tilfældet Sverige. København: Erichsen.
Bøgh, Jørgen. 1991. Alle Mine Kæphebe. København: Gyldendal.
Brundbjerg, Else. 1990. “Den Ukuelige Fighter.” In Nærværende. En Bog Om
Elsa Gress. København: Gyldendal.
Christensen, Erik. 1991. “Universitetet Slår Revner.” Weekendavisen, 25/10.
Christensen, Ib. 1990. “Fri Nation Eller Delstat.” Berlingske Tidende, 01/12.
Elmquist, Bjørn. 1984. “Retten Til at Være Forskellig.” Niche.
Farr, James. 1989. “Understanding Conceptual Change Politically.” In
Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, edited by T. Ball, J. Farr
and R. L. Hanson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fink, Hans. 1985. “Frem Og Tilbage over Grænsen.” In Danmarks Radio.
Fonsmark, Henning. 1990. Hiborien Om Den Danske Utopi. København:
Gyldendal.
Foucault, Michel. 1986. The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Tavistock.
Haarder, Bertel. 1990. Grænser for Politik. København: Gyldendal.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1962. Strukturwandel Des Bürgerlichen ÖFenlichkeit:
Untersuchungen Zu Einer Kategorie Der Bürgerlichen Gesellschaft.
Neuwied: Luchterhand.
Hansen, Mogens Herman. 1983. “Sygehusdebat.” In Radio Næbved. 221
. 1992. Hvad Er En Politiker Og Hvem Er Politiker. København:

Munksgaard.
Holgersen, Grethe. 1983. “Sygehusdebat.” In Radio Næbved.
Jensen, Torben Haugstrup. 1984. “Åbent Brev Til H. Hansen.” In Lokal-avis-
en Fredensborg-Humlebæk.
Jordansen, Vivian. 1992. “Strammere Kurs Mod Højreterror.” Information, 25/11.
Kjærsgaard, Pia. 1992. Folketingbidende Folketingets Præsidium København.
Koselleck, Reinhart. 1972. “Einleitung.” In Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe.
Historiches Lexikon Zur Politisch-Sozialen Sprache in Deutchland.
Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta.
. 1979. Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik Geschichtlicher Zeiten.
Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Krarup, Vilhelm. 1945. Opgørets Nødvendighed.
Krogh, Christian. 1986. “Folkebevægelserne Spiller Hasard Med Vores
Frihed.” Amtsavisen Randers, 06/06.
Lauritsen, I.C. 1992. “Blufærdighed À La Danoise.” Information, 15/04.
Løgstrup, K.E. 1961. “Højskolens Nye Fronter.” In Højskolen Til Debat, edited
by J. Rosendahl. København.
Norling-Christensen, Ole, and Jørg Asnussen. 1998. The Corpus of the Danish
Dicionary. Lexikos (8):223-242.
Ogden, C. K., and I.A. Richards. 1972. The Meaning of Meanings: A Study of
the Influence of Language Upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism
(1923). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Pateman, Carole. 1970. Participation and Democratic Theory. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Reichardt, Rolf. 1985. “Einleitung.” In Handbuch Politisch-Socialer GrundbegriFe
in Frankreich 1680-1820, edited by R. e. a. Reichardt. München:
Oldenburg.
222 Richter, Melvin. 1995. The History of Political and Social Concepts: A Critical
Introducion. New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rose, Flemming. 1990. “En Nation Fødes.” Berlingske Tidende, 14/07.

Schlüter, Poul. 1992. Speech in Parliament. Folketingstidende.
Secher, Knud. 1984. In Flydelse Og Ansvar. Fyns Stiftstidende, 04/12.
Svensson, Palle, and Lise Togeby. 1986. Politisk Opbrud: De Nye Mellemlags
Græsrodsdeltagelse - Årsager Og Konsekvenser Belyst Ved En
Ungdomsundersøgelse. Århus: Politica.
Torne, Bertel. 1992. “Region Dannebrog.” Information, 25/11.
abstract
This article traces the uses of the concept of citizenship in Danish public dis-
course in light of the theoretical framework of conceptual history. The author
draws upon parliamentary debates, media articles, and debates on political
subjects that are part of the textual corpus that served to create The Danish
Dictionary in order not only to identify the different usages and conceptual
changes of “citizenship” but also to identify the actors using the concept. In
addition to mapping the use of “citizenship” in its traditional meanings, such
as the entitlement to rights, political identity, civic virtue, and political par-
ticipation, the Jakobsen encounters a new meaning, namely, citizenship as
“free consumer choice.” This conceptual change, however, is only espoused
by elected politicians, while ordinary people tend to preserve the traditional
meanings of citizenship.
keywords
Citizenship, democracy, Danish public discourse, conceptual history, media.

223
classical modeling and the

circulation of concepts in early
modern britain
Patricia Springborg
University of Sydney
cosmopolitanism and empire

If global identity may be seen to represent the cosmopolitanism of large ag-
gregates or of empire, it also represents the class from which particularity is
drawn. For empire lurked in the wings of the nation state from its very incep-
tion. As those small spaces carved out of the great garment of Christendom,
the early modern European nation states not only emulated empires rather
than city-states (hence Rome and not Greece), but they quickly went on to
found empires. Cosmopolitan localism was a strategy for nationalism but
the cosmopolitan element was by no means trivial. Nationalism, whether we
like it or not, seems to reach for empire readily.
It is noteworthy that the quintessential theorists of the early modern
state, Hobbes and Locke, made no systematic reference to empire or to the
colonies of the New World in their canonical works, which may explain why
imperialism was regarded as antithetical to nationalism in the beginning
of the modern era. Hobbes’s failure to discuss empire as the horizon of the
absolute state, or to discuss technological developments in transportation,
communications and warfare that made colonization feasible, is all the more
remarkable due to the fact that he was himself a regular participant at meet-
ings of the Virginia Company. 1 In the some thirty-seven meetings of the
Company, Hobbes is recorded as having attended with his patron, William
Cavendish, earl of Devonshire, justifications for settlement were actually dis-
cussed. Rationales canvassed included: the natural-rights arguments of Sir
Edwin Sandys, playwright brother of the great translator of Ovid, George
Sandys; rights of conquest, oGcially endorsed by James I; and the conversion
of Indians, as preached by John Donne at a meeting attended by Hobbes and
Cavendish in November 1622. 2 Very probably Leviathan, intended as the bible
224 of the nation state, avoided the question, treating the colonies as private busi-
ness or as business too controversial for the reading public at whom this par-
classical modeling and the circulation of concepts in early modern Britain
ticular work was directed. Hobbes may even have dismissed the New World
colonies as merely the work of bootleggers and carpet-baggers of the likes of
Walter Ralegh, Sir Francis Drake, and Co., who founded them, men expected
to leave no permanent mark on history. Or he may have viewed them as he-
retical Puritan communities which should not be dignified by recognition.
When we come to Locke, more active even than Hobbes in the new
colonies, reference to the Americas in the Two Treatises of Government is
frequent, but anecdotal. Once again, Locke, like Hobbes discusses con-
quest, albeit the conquest of England and, probably for prudential rea-
sons, refrains from discussing colonization. Although, holding the post
of Secretary for Transportation in the Colonies, Locke never discusses the
specifics of economics and infrastructure required to sustain an empire
well under way by his time. The purposes for which the Two Treatises were
written were not conducive to such meanderings. It was suGcient to try
and reconcile a public with a long history of binding oaths to the Stuarts in
order to switch allegiance to a Dutch impostor. To suggest that the British
were imperialists like the Dutch would have been definitely hazardous. But
the significant absence of empire from these early treatises on the modern
nation state should not mislead us into thinking that the reality of empire
went unremarked. The most formative text of new nation states (and for
Hobbes as well), Machiavelli’s The Prince, empire appeared only negatively,
in the final chapter, an “Exhortation to Liberate Italy from the Barbarian
Yoke.” Nonetheless, it makes an appearance.
print culture and the rise of the nation state

Modernity, in its early phase, is associated with two mutually dependent phe-
nomena: the rise of print culture and the rise of the nation state. Michel
Foucault and Koselleck have postulated two watersheds in the rise of moder-
nity: the transition from the Renaissance to the neo-classical era, 1625-50; and
the transition from the neo-classical to the modern 1775-1825. Koselleck’s no-
tion of the Sattelzeit and his concepts of temporalization more generally point
to the interfaces between print culture and the rise of the nation state. For
print culture made time itself a resource, reproducing and recirculating clas-
sical texts updated for present purposes. 3 Print culture changed dimensions 225
of time and space in a dramatic way, deepening and broadening the “timeless”

universality of modern collective identity, local yet cosmopolitan. Changing
conceptions of time challenged the ancient caution, to which Hobbes in fact
subscribed, that “the future does not exist.” The Renaissance saw a transition
from polis to politicking, from politics as city-state management to strategies
of power-seeking that were deliberately future-oriented. Changes in the con-
ceptualization of space involved the fabrication of “the West” and Western
civilization of which particular states were the privileged bearer.
The change of vision opened up by print culture was profound. Life
was no longer confined to lived-in institutions. Great vistas of diFerent lives,
lived in diFerent and exotic structures, stretched before the Renaissance hu-
manist, captured in ancient books. Generally speaking, however, these were
vistas for the elite, to whose safe-keeping the texts could safely be entrusted.
As guardians of antiquity, oGcers of church and state and counsellors to
kings, Renaissance humanists were keepers of arcana imperii, the secret and
the hidden. The texts they kept complicated any straightforward conceptions
of space/time, anticipating the revolutions their new guardians were to bring
about. Not only were many of them deliberately archaizing works but they
also syncretized oriental and occidental sources, problematizing the concept
of “the West” that they were marshalled to defend. If fabrication of a col-
lective identity both cosmopolitan yet local required manipulation of time/
space dimensions, and being that these distortions were already present in
the texts Renaissance humanist resurrected, it was precisely the reason that
they served to bring about new collective identities by sleight of hand.
It is not by accident that court poets of the Tudor and Stuart period
turned to the imperial poets of Rome, Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Theocritus,
Tibullus and Catulllus as their models, poets who themselves turned
to the vast repository of ancient writings belonging to an oral tradition,
whose provenance and processes of transcription are still incompletely
known. The works of Homer and Hesiod, imitated by Virgil, and with an
archaizing analogue in the carmina of Horace, enjoyed special status as
relics of ancient memory from which counsels of state might be drawn.
Their very archaism oFered, at the same time, an evocation of immemo-
rial tradition eFectively applied to the imperial cult and the works of the
Roman senatorial class. These imperial poets marshalled the primal lan-
guage of seasonal chant and primordial sentiments of hearth and home
226 to lend legitimacy to Emperors, many of them upstarts, as well as to cele-
brate the country estates of nouveaux riche Roman senators, to render their
palatial piles more acceptable and familiar to common folk. Pastoral, a

genre so celebrated by early modern court poets, also oFered an alterna-
tive immemorial religious pagan tradition, durable enough to challenge
the Catholic Church on its chosen ground: enjoying the marks of time,
tradition and universality. Not without reason was Homer presented as
the poet of kings. 4 Celebrated early modern debates over the relative mer-
its of Homer and Virgil, in which Hobbes himself and his interlocutor,
William Davenant, participated, usually concluded in favor of the former
on the grounds of antiquity alone, because Virgil was then cast as an imita-
tor. But Roman archaizing practices were themselves a lesson in the power
of tradition. For Rome’s conventional reputation as imitator of the Greeks
hid an accomplishment that early modern humanists hoped to emulate: a
cultural syncretism in which the most primitive expressions of human ar-
tifice were assimilated, the songs of the poets of remote antiquity and the
song lines of genealogy and kingship that they sung. By resurrecting a lit-
erary tradition specifically designed to empower kings, early modern mir-
rorists were able to juxtapose the powers of an ancient church with syn-
cretic roots in the same cultural wellsprings, the countervailing power of
pagan texts.
Among the most favoured transmitters of this “ancient wisdom” were
the Alexandrine poets, servants of the Ptolemies, who grafted onto Pharaonic
Egypt the tradition of the Greeks and retransported it to Greece and Rome.
Roman Alexandrians, imitators of Callimachus and Apollonius of Rhodes,
had turned away from the Greek classics to Hellenistic poets of first and sec-
ond century B.C. Alexandria, who, schooled in old forms, adapted them to a
new empire. Breaking ground with innovations like the small scale epyllion,
if compared with the classical epic, the Roman Alexandrians were mocked
by Cicero as neoterici: “the Moderns.”5 Their vitality was epitomized in the
epigrams of Porcius Licinus, Valeriius Aedituus, and Lutatius Catullus and
the “bizarre erotic poems” of Laevius. Poets of Cisalpine Gaul, of whom only
Catullus survives, included Valerius Cato, Cinna, Calvus, Cornelius Nepos,
Ticidas and Furius Bibaculus. Ovid and Propertius, among the archaizing
moderns represent them best. 6
Five or more English translations of Ovid were completed between
1590 and 1632, which include those of playwrights such as Arthur Golding,
Christopher Marlowe, John Dryden, and George Sandys, Hobbes’s colleague 227
at the Virginia Company meetings, whose translation outdoes all the others

in the elaborateness of its textual apparatus, the commentary on some books
exceeding even the length of Publius Ovidius Naso’s original text. Why were
these pioneers of the English theatre and fabricators of the nation engaged
in the translation of Ovid? Because Ovid was foremost representative of the
Alexandrian school among the Roman “moderns,” with authorial legitimacy
as the transmitter of ancient songs (carmina) about the elemental, an alterna-
tive repository of knowledge to the traditions of the old Church or the Bible
as the text of the new churches. In tropes of mutability and metamorphosis,
he posed the problems of cosmic generation, genealogy and identity, epis-
temic and categorial questions that lay at the heart of new national identi-
ties under construction. The “new science” of the moderns is this old science
passed through the filter of a new theory of language, but for the same old
purposes: to create legitimacy for states or to empower kings.
The diFerence in disposition between Ovidius Publius Naso,
Virgil and Horace as imperial poets was analogous to their early modern
Renaissance imitators. There were those who deplored the costs of empire,
hardship and war, and those who believed that only war was a palliative to
human inertia and the softness of sedentary society. Moreover, the moderns
self-consciously debated and reflected upon these diFerences. A peculiar lit-
erary genre, the country house poem, which emerged with the spate of aris-
tocratic palace-building on which it commented, was the peculiar vehicle of
classical reflection upon national expansion, political involvement and in-
dividual retreat which engaged servants of the Roman Empire as well as the
courtiers of early modern nation states.7
english courtier clients and the fabrication of

great britain
The Union of England and Scotland engineered by James I, to whose circle
Hobbes belonged as a courtier’s client, was much in the spirit of Machiavelli,
as were eForts to pacify the countryside with good arms and good laws and to
create in the Church of England a civic religion. English Renaissance human-
ists and courtiers vigorously debated the relative merits of classical aesthet-
ic forms versus a “Gothic” vernacular immemorial tradition that included
Druids, fairies and a rough native tongue. These debates and quaint discus-
228 sions of the nature of “fayrie-land” in the reigns of Elizabeth and James I, for
instance, reflected a larger and less openly discussable concern over the rela-
tive merits of empire and localism. Spain, as England’s primary competitor

in the New World represented Empire. The Spanish Inquisition and the en-
gagement of Spanish Jesuits in English dynastic politics were seen as imperi-
al interventions. Catholicism was the religion of cosmopolis and empire. For
if civilization is the ethos of empire, civilization itself does no work, it has no
structures or institutions of its own. It is superstructural rather than struc-
tural, an emanation of empire that may extend well beyond the boundaries of
eFective control that constraints of organizational competence, technology
and communications impose.
Renaissance Englishmen, debating the relative merits of em-
pire and nationhood under the surrogates of republicanism or monarchy,
Catholicism or a national church, imperial metre or native rime, demon-
strated this understanding. They referred to themselves as cosmopolitan im-
perialists or transmontani, using the language of the Romans for Cisalpine
and Transalpine Gaul to make it clear that their aGliation was with Gallican
France and Northern Europe across the Alps, and not with that “ghost of the
Roman Empire”, Catholic and Latin Europe. National and tribal incursions
on the imperial heartland had demonstrated a capacity to bring about the
collapse of the centre from time immemorial. When Gibbon reflected on the
success of the Barbarians in bringing about the fall of Rome he laid it to the
door of two factors: crusading religion and the primordial vigour of tribal
society, the explanation of Tacitus in his much emulated Germanica, belong-
ing to a subset of theories about the mutually interactive principles of tribal-
ism and cosmopolitanism that has classical and early modern examples.
“Great Britain,” as the product of the union of England and Scotland,
celebrated by Michael Drayton as Poly-olbion, chronicled and mapped by
Camden and Speed, was fabricated with all the trappings that heroic poets
of antiquity and their archaizing counterparts of modernity could bestow.
This is a perfect case of cosmopolitan localism: the resources of antiquity and
modernity jointly plundered to fabricate a particular identity out of a global
class. In some of the more deliberate eForts to accomplish collective identity
formation through persuasion, eloquence and the power of image, the na-
tion in an imperial mould was explicitly evoked. Sir William Davenant, poet
laureate and playwright, celebrated national heroes and colonizers like Sir
Francis Drake in support of “Cromwell’s ‘imperial western design’” 8 in his
plays written in the 1650’s. Davenant was also author of the long and tedious 229
heroic poem, Gondibert, to which was appended a preface on poetics dedi-

cated to Hobbes, from whom its theories of sensationalist psychology were
drawn, and to which Hobbes further appended a lengthy Answer.9 Davenant
hoped that his poem might be read aloud at civic festivals like Homer. In
epitome to his Proposition for the Advancement of Moralitie, Davenant outlined
a “new way of Entertainment of the People” which would accomplish crowd
control through multi-media diversions: 10
In which shall be presented severall ingenious Arts, as Motion and trans-
position of Lights; to make a more naturall resemblance of the great and
vertuous actions of such as are eminent in story; and chiefly of those fa-
mous Battails at Land and Sea by which this Nation is renown’d; rep-
resenting the Generalls and other meritorious Leaders, in their Dangers
Successes and Triumphs; and our Enemies in such acts of Cruelty (like
that at Amboyna) as shall breed in the Spectators courage and animos-
ity against them; diverting the people from Vices and Michiefe; and in-
structing them (as in a Schoole of Morality) to Vertu, and to a quiet and
cheereful behaviour towards the present Government.
The vitality of the English Renaissance, which came later than the
Italian and French, and extended well into the Stuart age, derives from pro-
found philosophical debate in dramatic and poetical dress. Aesthetic disguise
worked well enough that formalistic analysis has dominated literary criti-
cism to this very day and the political or prudential content of these works of
the “autonomous aesthetic moment” has been largely ignored.
Of the myriad of aesthetic forms under which the courtiers of the
English Renaissance wrote, one of the most symptomatic is the country house
poem. Imitative of the great poems addressed by Roman clients to their pa-
trons, Horace to Maecenas, Virgil to Augustus, etc., English courtiers ad-
dressed to patrons in the great age of palace building on confiscated monastic
lands, profound reflections on the ups and downs of politics. Aware, as we tend
to be forgetful, of the precariousness of new families enriched at the expense
of the church, the writers of country house poems were mindful of their own
contribution to the stability of the house in the form of intangibles, reputation
and honour. As a quid pro quo they extracted the right to remind their patrons
of the enduring hazards of political life and the ethical alternative – Stoic with-
drawal and enjoyment of pastoral and rural life in the present.
230 Horace, the great exemplar of the Roman country house poem, most
beautifully presented the moral dilemma of the courtier as client in relation
to the illuminati and Emperor as clients. While advising them on how to ex-
ercise their power better, he must constantly remind them that it is best not
to exercise it at all. Pastoral withdrawal, the enjoyment of the present, and
the delights of nature and “home” as one’s favored spots are all appeals to the
patron to be mindful not only of the hazards of Fortune, which take man far
from his roots, but also that reason enjoins one to enjoy the present, refusing
to sacrifice it to a future that does not exist.
The long diatribe against rhetoricians in Ben Jonson, his clumsy and
rather crude veneration for local “fairy” traditions of Robin Hood, nymphs of
the solstice, Puck and Maid Marion, represent a form of English pastoralism,
as well as an attack on Machiavellians at court who would use their erudition
for political enrichment. At the same time, Jonson held in contempt play-
wrights and poets who could not demonstrate suGcient classical erudition
to know where danger lay – in imitation of French and Italian models that
might give entrée to European powers on English soil. The threads of a de-
bate picked up here and there between the relative merits of nascent “Gothic,”
Northern European, and therefore barbarian, traditions, against imperial,
Francophone or Italianate incursions represent forms that the reception
of Machiavelli took. “Old Nick” was himself too notorious to mention, but
Machiavellian themes are everywhere to be found, in discussions of the mer-
its of war as a purgative, and the anti-war themes of Horace and Virgil; in
discussions of the merits of pagan civic religion against the claims of the
Roman Church; in assessment of the role of the people and whether to enrich
them economically or pacify them politically as strategies. Specific debates
over Elizabeth’s marriage suitors, the dynastic struggles between Elizabeth
and Mary Queen of Scots, and discussions about the shape of the Stuart pol-
ity, revealed deeper underlying concerns about the viability of an island na-
tion, however well cultivated its garden, set in an imperial sea.
Mindful since Machiavelli of the lessons of The Prince in the purga-
tive eFects of war and primordial violence, courtiers of the Tudor and Stuart
state set about to create a quasi-tribalism in the notion of nation as a ge-
nealogical and racial construct that might mobilize the intense powers of
localism indigenous to any homogeneous community and particularly pro-
nounced in insular cultures. “Nation,” from natus, emerged simultaneously
with “race,” for which it was synonymous. It was a self-conscious eFort in
primordial prefabrication. Courtiers crafted for genealogies in England that 231
went back to imperial founding fathers, Aeneas and Brut, placing England

on the fringes of an ancient diaspora. They fabricated for the royal house ge-
nealogies worthy of Homer and Ovid, whom they translated and then mim-
icked. Genealogy and patriarchy as titles to rule (Filmer) gave rise to genetic
historiography of which the theory of progress from primitives to polis to na-
tion state is a product. Spurning classical republicanism they focused rather
on undivided sovereignty, arcana imperii, and royal absolutism as appropriate
to the new nationalism. The congruence of race, genealogy, nationalism and
hereditary monarchy was persuasive.
None of this was aFected without debate, and the fertility of
Renaissance aesthetic forms represent both the subterfuges under which
subversive philosophical and religious principles were explored and the gen-
uine doubt with which courtiers in the brave new world of nation and em-
pire were faced. Emulation of French literary forms was recognition that the
French had been there before them. Gallican religion and the promotion of
royal absolutism based on theories of undivided sovereignty, both directly
challenged the diFusion of Empire registered in classical republican the-
ory, and the reality of Catholic and Spanish imperial hegemony. The choice
of the Gallic Hercules, Lucian’s “cave man” or Gallic primitive with the sil-
ver tongue, who rules by rhetoric and not by arms, symptomized a nation-
alist project with both a folk and an intellectual dimension. From Oberon,
Puck, the Fairy Queen and Robin Hood, folk characters representative of
local popular culture, were juxtaposed with the genealogies, chorographies,
and myths of origin the antiquarians could provide. Both were important as
two wings of a single project: music and masques for the masses, heroic po-
etry, history and philosophy for the elite.
hobbes and the caudian forks

Hobbes’s country house poem, De Mirabilibus Pecci Carmen was produced
around 1626-7 and presented as a New Year’s gift for his patron, the Earl of
Devonshire. The subject of the poem, while ostensibly a celebration of the
Cavendish dynasty and Chatsworth, the family seat, is in fact an allegory
about dynastic fragility. The poem is an extraordinary synthesis of classical
and Renaissance material centering on marriage quests, the trials of suitors,
232 women and their impossible powers, the intrinsic capacity for anarchy in the
human reproductive system, the country house as an institution facilitating
dynastic stability, and the corrosive waters that lie beneath its foundations.
It is prompted, one might guess, by the marriage negotiations for Prince
Charles, and seems to rehearse arguments raised by courtiers who had lived
through the rough times of marriage negotiations undertaken on behalf of
Elizabeth I.
The ignominious defeat of the Roman army, deceived by deliber-
ately propagated rumours of superior Samnite strength, which led them into
ambush in a narrow defile between two mountains, is evoked by the topo-
graphical description in Hobbes’s heroic poem, De Mirabilibus Pecci Carmen.
Overwhelmed at the implications of their own success, the Samnites sought
advice from a respected elder, who advised them first to treat peace on terms
which would humiliate the Romans so much that they cease to be a threat. If
it that failed, advice was to kill one of the opponents, which although a less
moral solution, would achieve the same result. The treaty that was eventually
negotiated, Livy tells us in Book 9 of his History of Rome, so violated the reli-
gious foundations of the Roman state that it could only be concluded under
a special judicial formula, as a compact between the senate and the Roman
people, which went unratified by the priests and which eventually remained
to be revenged.
The early lines of Hobbes’ poem, describing Chatsworth and its wa-
ter works, water seeping through a thousand little channels around and un-
der the house, represent pollution. It is the language we are familiar with,
from Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, and a range of Elizabethan poetic and dra-
matic works which could be read as reflecting on the growth of London and
its vulnerability to the plague spread through the city’s water supply. Given
the intensity of dynastic preoccupations, the focus on marriage negotiations
between Elizabeth and the long line of potential foreign suitors, the persis-
tent trope of water born pollution might well suggest dynastic defilement
through foreign marriage. Later in Hobbes’s poem, once the protagonists
have undertaken their quest through the narrow defile that marks the path of
a river through mountains and the declivity between the buttocks of a wom-
an’s body, more Roman language takes over: the language of national hu-
miliation represented in Livy’s account of the ambush at the Caudian Forks.
Frequent reference to “the crack” or defile in question, evokes John Stubbes’s
seditious work, The Gaping Gap, deemed obscene, and for which an honour-
able man, while swearing allegiance to his queen, lost his right hand. 233
Stubbes fiction, while far less explicit than Hobbes’s, created an ob-

scene figure for the power vacuum the Queen’s virginity represented. Into
the gap either the Popish Spanish or the traditionally threatening French
might step. Stubbes’s poem was especially targeted at Alençon, with whom
on and oF negotiations were being conducted, and in whom the Queen had
expressed real interest. Images of snakes and poisons seeping into the Tudor
body politic through the tubes and pipes of the female body characterize this
work and The Jew of Malta, an equally seditious work woven around a tissue of
rumours about the poisoning of the Queen by her Jewish doctor, whose neck
was sacrificed to Royal decorum.
The specificity of instances in which the language of Roman pollu-
tion surfaces, prompts us to ask why, especially concerning Hobbes’s vale-
dictory poem to the Cavendish house, these themes were so prevalent in
his work. Did he fear in the struggle between the favorites, Somerset and
Buckingham, an analogous dynastic crisis? Playing perhaps on the tolerance
of James for literatures which elevated his Mother, Mary Queen of Scots, at
the expense of Elizabeth, Hobbes called for reflection on the fragility of dy-
nastic monarchy under the aegis of the Royal Marriage. To the trope of seep-
ing poisons he added the powerful Boccaccian spectre of a gulf, into which
houses or temples might be plunged and ships swallowed up, cataclysmic
events that accompanied sacrilege and violation of the gods in Virgil and
Horace. In Boccaccio’s Il Corbaccio we have an earlier instance of hyperbole
and gigantuanism to express the potentially devastating eFects of female
procreative powers and their capacity for pollution. Chorographies such as
the specific presence of Dudley in Hobbes’s poem, a well known knight in
Eliza’s day, sending a probe down the hole to test the waters, and the specific
absence of Mary Queen of Scots, who in fact visited Buxton spa on two occa-
sions to take the waters, suggest that Royal marriage arrangements were on
Hobbes’s mind.
Marriage, love and honor were persistent general themes of Jacobean
drama. Sir William Davenant, of whom among the poets in Hobbes’s cir-
cle we have the best evidence of his views, was the maestro supremo on the
subject of love and honor, although largely misinterpreted on the subject.
Davenant, who in 1650 specifically acknowledged his debt to Hobbes’s epis-
temology and psychology as laid out in De Cive, seems to have shared these
assumptions much earlier. The Queen’s Poet, long interpreted as a harmless
234 sycophant, seems to have been engaged in critical reflection on Neoplatonist
principles of love and honor as seen in oGcial royal propaganda.
The impact of Alexandrianism had been, such as importing English

literary culture oF the backs of the French who had initiated the movement,
was not the only concern of Alexandrian poets faced with a brave new world
of empire and syncretism. They also had to reckon with Hellenistic cults
of kingship. It is hardly surprising that royal propagandists capitalized on
the resources of a tradition in this way, quarried with spectacular success by
Bodin and French theorists of absolutism, once poets had laid the ground-
work. Alexandrianism moved between the atomistic metaphysics, sensation-
alist psychology and utilitarianism of the Stoics, Epicureans and Sceptics,
and Neoplatonist idealism as a reaction. A profound belief of the Hellenistic
materialists in kata physin, “the life according to nature” or an understand-
ing of the limits of the possible, as the first principle of ethics and politics,
ruled out grandiose political theory for them. As a result, Stoics, Sceptics and
Epicureans evinced a wide range of diFerent positions, some in support of
monarchy, some in support of republics, depending upon the circumstances.
Neoplatonism, by contrast, was wedded to divine kingship.
Davenant’s dramatic disquisitions on love and honor, like the poetry
of Suckling and Carew, marshal Stoic sensationalism against Neoplatonist
abstractions in a serious moral enterprise to establish that the good man
and good citizen are one and the same. Davenant like Carew, demonstrates
Alexandrian preferences for the sensual and the real against Platonist ab-
stractions. Mocking the Platonist conceits of Henrietta Maria’s court, he
describes the figure of the Eunuch as the perfect expression of Platonist ide-
alism, referring salaciously to the symptomatic irony of Jermyn’s impreg-
nation of the Queen’s maid, and probably knowing his friend Carew’s story
about intercepting a tryst between the Queen herself and Jermyn, Lord St-.
Albans.11 Comments on the hypocrisy of the French, whom Davenant refers
to in 1638 as “having made our gentry drunk” and “perfuming their very
shadows,” point in the direction of Gondibert, Davenant’s anti-Platonist
attack on giants and spirits and his condemnation of Virgil whose land-
scape is peopled by spectres and “shades.” Metamorphic Hermegild and
riddles of sense that it describes aGrm Davenant’s Alexandrian sensation-
alist psychology. Like the magnificent sensualism of Carew’s Rapture, a
Virgilian trope executed in the manner of Horace, Davenant’s poem alerts
us to an axiom of the cavaliers: that sexuality is an aGrmation of sense
both moral and physical. Investigations on love and marriage of high 235
moral seriousness by Carew and Davenant, in the circumstance of royal

marriage negotiations that divided the court, focused on marriage as that
which unites the metamorphic anarchy of reproduction with the rule of
law. Like Jonson they deplored infidelity, as not only morally decadent, but
socially corrosive.
To bewail Virgilian classicism and French hypocrisy was all of a
piece. The French, importing Italian styles to create for their own monar-
chy a pagan imperial style which transcends sectarian struggle, had over-
played their hand. English courtiers who imitated French imperial rhetoric,
demeanour and dress, forgot the most basic principles of the marriage-con-
tract analogue: that the relation between rulers and ruled must be a marriage
of hearts and minds. Davenant, like Suckling, Carew, Newcastle, Hobbes and
later Charles Cotton, may be numbered among “the sons of Ben” (Jonson),
distinguished for their moral seriousness. They thought that the function of
the government was to create the conditions in which moral behaviour could
be developed. A rising tide of critical comment against the French and the
artificiality of the court were accompanied by a search for the authentic, the
nascent and the “Gothic.” The tendency of city and country dwellers likewise
to view courts as sites for scheming Machiavellis was reflected in Jonsonian
depictions of provincials burlesquing the bookishness of courtiers and an-
tiquarians. Charles I’s own program for the pacification of the countryside
through the creation of a rural magistracy and constabulary, by which mem-
bers of the Cavendish family who served as sheriFs of the Peak benefited,
probably contributed to this search for positive images of provincials. Not
all of the “sons of Ben” shared an unambiguous view of rural provincial-
ity, however, and Davenant himself, in his character’s “Sir Furious Inland”
and “Sir Solemn Trifle” expressed obvious misgivings. Debate over the role
of common people ranged from those who simply saw them as a rabble or
mob, Davenant’s general position, and the views of Hobbes who, while em-
ploying the same language, empowered them to covenant and consent in
cases where the survival of the state required it. This was Hobbes’s classical
solution to the Caudine Forks dilemma. The volatility of dynastic monarchy
led ineluctably to representative government as the only viable expression of
the marriage contract/social contract homology. It was a path that Hobbes
oGcially refused to take, leaving it to his successor Locke, but the implica-
tions are there.
236 The degree to which religion lay at the heart of the dynastic dilemma
receives extraordinary testimony in the explicit religious tracts that some of
these poets undertook to write. Suckling’s An Account of Religion by Reason

(1637) anticipates by half a century the deism of Dennis and Locke. Davenant,
Carew Waller and Suckling, sensationalists whose explorations of the aesthet-
ics of sense perception in some cases made them outstanding poets, showed
uncanny prescience in their diagnosis of abstractions. Davenant could mock
the young Palatine wit his Genevan band (in the language) of may-poles and
main-stays, equalling the abstractions of self-castrating Puritanism with
those of Platonism. Puritanism was a heresy which represented the full equal
of Platonism in the sense in which Diogenes Laertius employed the term:
sects premised in division and schism. Davenant’s juxtaposition of primitive
Christianity that “hath the innocence of village and neighbourhood”, com-
pared with the religion of the sects cloaking Reason “in dark School clouds”
is worthy of Hobbes’s Historia Ecclesiastica written decades later.
Davenant, Suckling and Carew appreciated that Platonism, later
known as “Enthusiasm,” and Puritanism, later known as “Fundamentalism”
shared the same set of errors: abstraction and literalness; life by “the Word.”
Puritanism cannot be “lived” because it is “by the book” any more than
Platonism, whose “ideas” are merely generalizations or abstractions. Both
Platonism and Puritanism are operationalized by deception. Hobbes saw his
task to deceive the deceivers. Leviathan was his book. More Machiavellian
than his friends, perhaps, Hobbes understood the necessary connection be-
tween fundamentalism and the foundation of states. The birth of nations,
from natus, brought with it aspirations to freedom as of right. Nationalism
was indeed a work of fancy, as Hobbes saw and instructed Davenant, involv-
ing a new birth, separation, new beginnings and perhaps divorce, all facili-
tated by “life by the book.” If oral traditions of memory and rote, perpetuated
in the rhetoric of the court and its poets, facilitated secret machinations that
were ultimately destabilizing, print culture and the republic of letters led in-
eluctably to the democracy of reading and writing. “Life by the book” pro-
vided a set of legitimations powerful enough for new beginnings, and a lot of
rhetorical claims masquerading as facts.
democratization of the state cult 237

Invented and institutionalized in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the
early modern national kingdom was theorized in the seventeenth.12 The
court produced chronicles and other mnemonic devices to enhance the in-
stitutionalization of kingship as a set of ceremonial performances. With rep-
etition and the aid of memory, practices became rituals. Hobbes’s discourse
on memory in both Leviathan and the Answer to Davenant applies his theory
of memory, imagination and pictura poesis representation to historiography,
to render in history a further resource for the state cult.
The debate over the comparative merits of print culture as opposed
to scribal publication also concerned the guardianship of public information
and control of the state cult. Should it be monopolized by courtiers in pri-
vately circulated manuscripts, or made accessible to the print-reading pub-
lic? Hobbes flags his own position in the opening sentence of chapter four
of Leviathan, where he disparagingly remarks: “The Invention of Printing,
though ingenious, compared with the invention of Letters, is no great mat-
ter.” Hobbes’s failure to gain admission to the Royal Society, devoted to the
wider promotion of knowledge through public libraries, a project for which,
as Quentin Skinner convincingly argues, Hobbes had no enthusiasm, was
consistent with his view on the significance of the printing press.
This was however a hotly contested topic and Michael Drayton opens
his Preface to Poly-Olbion bemoaning to “the Generall Reader” the restriction
of public information reserved for the curiosity cabinets of the savants: 13
In publishing this Essay of my Poeme, there is this great disadvantage
against me; that it commeth out at this time when Verses are wholly
deduc’t to Chambers, and nothing esteem’d in this lunatique Age, but
what is kept in Cabinets, and must only passe by Transcription… ; such
I meane, as had rather read the fantasies of forraigne inventions, then
to see the Rarities and Historie of their owne Country delivered by a
true native Muse.
Drayton protests against the arcana imperii tradition of state secrets
and royal mystique, an impression strengthened by the frequent mention
of Machiavelli and Bodin in Selden’s somewhat hostile commentary on the
poem published with it. Richard Helgerson, in his magisterial account of
chorographical histories, notes that arcana imperii could also include maps:
238 “in Philip II’s Spain, Pedro de Esquival’s great cartographic survey of the
Iberian peninsula was kept in manuscript, locked in the Escorial as ‘a secret
of state’”.14
Drayton’s first song connects his account of the counties of England
and their muses to the fabulous heroic tradition. Reference is made to the
genealogies of Homer and Hesiod, to the principles of metamorphosis and
the transmigration of souls, as if this particular local chorographical work
is simply a local variant of a larger history of the world. Drayton commends
the pastoral tradition of Orpheus, of nymphs and of popular pagan religion,
condemning those
possest with such stupidity and dulnesse, that, rather then thou wilt take
pains to search into ancient and noble things, choosest to remaine in the
thicke fogges and mists of ignorance, as neere the common Lay-stall of
a Citie; refusing to walke forth into the Tempe and Feelds of the Muses,
wheere through most delightfull Groves the Angellique harmony of
Birds shall steale thee to the top of an easie hill, where in arificiall caves,
cut out of the most naturall Rock, thou shalt see the ancient people of this
Ile delivered thee in their lively images: from whose height thou mai’st
behold both the old and later times, as in thy prospect, lying farre under
thee; then convaying thee, downe by a soule-pleasing Descent through
delicate embrodered Meadowes, often veined with gentle gliding Brooks;
in which thou maist fully view the dainty Nymphes in their simple na-
ked bewties, bathing them in Crystalline streames; which shall lead thee,
to most pleasant Downes, where harmlesse Shepheards are, some exer-
cising their pipes, some singing roundelaies, to their gazing flocks…
The elements of Drayton’s disarming case are complex. Evoking the
country-house language of Horace, he claims to be able to meld local lore to
a cosmopolitan heroic tradition. At the same time he evokes Machiavelli’s
famous claim to be able to map the past and future from the high prospect
of Mount Parnassus. Here Drayton gives entrée to Selden, the antiquarian,
who, like his friend Hobbes, was obsessed with the history of paganism as
a resource to mobilize against priestcraft and in support of a state-centered
collective identity.
Entitling his comments symptomatically “Illustrations,” Selden
gives Drayton’s claims careful attention: 15
If in Prose and Religion it were justifiable, as in Poetry and Fiction,
to invoke a Locall power (for anciently both Jewes, Gentiles & Christians 239
have supposed to every Countrey a singular Genius) I would therin joyne

with the Author.
Selden claims to have researched the tradition of Brute, traveling
to the Abbey of Beccensam on the way to Rome.16 Absent from the Greek
and Latin authors, he claims, “This Genealogie I found by tradition of the
Ancients, which were first inhabitants of Britaine.”17 Selden, while referring
to “the whole Chaos of Mythique inventions,”18 gives surprisingly careful
consideration to the biblical, Hesiodic and Homeric genealogies. He alights
on the metamorphic idiom to which the opening song appeals, connect-
ing it to the transmigration of souls, or “Pythagorean transanimation,” a
“Romane” rendering of the Greek metamorphosis. Selden, preoccupied with
the Druids, wonders “whether Pythagoras received it from the Druids, or
they from him, because in his travels he converst as well with Gaulish as
Indian Philosophers.”19
Institutional theorization and borrowing take place under pres-
sures of some kind. The conversion of kingship from the arcana impe-
rii of the Royal household and its aristocratic extension to constitutional
monarchy may have been driven less by the march of democracy than we
tend to think. Transition from the heroic orator king of the medieval pe-
riod, to the silent and distant monarch, statue-like, preferably hidden, of
Bodin’s ideal, an imitation perhaps of oriental monarchs recorded in trav-
elers’ tales, may simply reflect the exigencies of institutionalization. The
more people clamoured for the presence of the monarch, at royal entries,
shows and assemblies, the more necessary for the theurgic king to conceal
his mortality and vulnerability. The greater the pomp and ceremony, the
wider the distance between fact and fiction became, and thusly had to be
bridged. The gap of credulity yawned before monarchs on both continents.
If royal ceremonies easily lent themselves to parody in staged burlesques,
by the seventeenth century the royal masque was a state controlled event.
Royal secrets, marking the boundaries between those in power and those
out of it, became a feature of the cult of the king. Resistance to the arcana
imperii in turn gave way to assemblies with all the forms of power and
none of the substance, while the business of government continued being
conducted behind the scenes. At least in this respect, the French analysts
were open. Nor did the anti-democrats see unanimity of interests as the
threat which the mob posed. Quite the contrary – the interests of the com-
240 mon people were too diverse and too unpredictable to allow them to enter
politics directly.
The reaction of Thomas Hobbes and John Selden to sentiments of

intense localism, reflected in the ideals of country-gentlemen writing re-
gional histories, like Drayton, may simply have reflected their observation of
the ungovernability of such a disaggregated collection of interests. Selden’s
particular form of antiquarianism preserves the private erudition of the ar-
cana imperii for public purposes. Hobbes fears additionally that his sense-da-
tum psychology is now going to be employed by Davenant to support the
diversity of unordered individual experience against the hegemonic church.
But this too poses a threat to sovereignty. The great advantage of public his-
tory, in the form of king lists and chronicles of courts, was that it admitted
no intruders from the private sphere. What “modern” historiography rep-
resented was an intrusion of private interests into the public space. In other
words, the attack on the arcana imperii of the royal cult was not politically
innocent. When, at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the
Whigs in England vociferously tried to demonstrate that the French posed
a threat, they targeted the closed nature of the royal cult to expand the cir-
cle of power. At the same time, Locke, in the form of sensationalist psychol-
ogy, provided an epistemology for popular rule and equality of representa-
tion, and was confined as yet to the propertied classes.
notes 241

1
See Noel Malcolm (1981).
2
Noel Malcolm (1981), 298, 303, and 306.
3
In the same way that Virgil’s Aeneid updated Homer, by appending the foun-
dation of Rome and the history of its heroes, Edmund Spenser’s View of the
Present State of Ireland, transported Virgil’s founders to England, providing
spurious genealogies for the crown in the descent of Brutas from Aeneas and
the descent of British kings from Brute.
4
George Chapman in the Preface to his famous translation of Homer main-
tained that “Homer (saith Plato) was the Prince and maister of all prayses
and vertues, the Emperour of wise men … Onely kings & princes haue been
Homers Patrones … O high and magically raysed prospect, from whence a
true eye may see meanes to the absolute redresse, or much to be wished exten-
uation, of all he vnmanly degenerencies now tyranysing amongst vs. (1589),
iii-v.
5
From the Greek, oi neoteroi; see Cicero, Att. 7.2.1. 50 BC ; poetae novi, Orat. 161,
46 BC; cantores Euphorionis, Tusc. 3.45 (45 BC); and Horace, Sat. 2.5.41 on less-
er men who aped the fashion.
6
A brief synopsis of the career of Callimachus serves to indicate how close-
ly the Alexandrine movement among the “moderns” imitated its precursor.
Callimachus, during his dispute with Apollonius Rhodius, wrote Ibis, “a wil-
fully obscure poem in mockery of Apollonius, which gave Ovid the idea for
his poem of the same name”. Prominent among Callimachus’ pupils was
Eratosthenes of Cyrene, head of the Alexandrian library and the first to call
himself philologus, whose works comprised, Platonicus, On the Means and
Duplication of the Cube, On the Measurement of the Earth, Geographica, and a
short epic Anterinys or Hesiod, which dealt with the death of Hesiod and the
punishment of his murderers. Aristophanes of Byzantium, who succeed-
ed Eratosthenes as head of Alexandrian Library, edited Hesiod, Alcaeus
and Alcman, published the first edition of Pindar and helped formalize the
Alexandrian canon. See Oxford Classical Dicionary (Hammond and Scullard,
1970), 43-4, 184-6.
242
7
Virginia C. Kenny treats the country house poem as it “explores the themes
of individual retreat and national expansion where they occur in the same
work” (1984), ix.

8
James R. Jacob and Timothy Raylor (1991), 213.
9
Sir William Davenant (1651), preface. The standard modern edition is David
F. Gladish (1971).
10
William D’Avenant and David F. Gladish(1971), 249.
11
See Thomas Carew (1949), xiii-lix for an overview of Carew’s life and work
and xxxv for Preferment at court as a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber extraor-
dinary (April, 1630). Also see G. Clarke, Esq., formerly Lord of the Admiraly
and Secretary to Prince George of Denmark, who relates: “Queen Henrietta
Maria. – Thomas Carew, Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, going to light
King Charles into her chamber, saw Jermyn Lord St-Albans with his arm
round her neck; – he stumbled and put out the light; – Jermyn escaped; Carew
never told the KIng, and the King never knew it. The Queen heaped favours
on Carew” (1879), 244.
12
See Lawrence M. Bryant, (1992).
Michael Drayton, Poly-Olbion , or A chorographicall Description of the
13
Tracts, Riuers, Mountaines, Forests, and other Parts of this renowned Isle of
Great Britaine (London, Mathew Lownes et al., 1613) reprinted in (1931), v.
14
Richard Helgerson (1992), 146.
15
Drayton et al. (1931)
16
Drayton et al. (1931), 22.
17
18
19

Bryant, Lawrence M. 1992. “Politics, Ceremonies and Embodiments of
Majesty in Henry II’S France.” In European Monarchy, Its Evolution
and Pracice from Roman Antiquity to Modern Times. Stuttgart: Franz
Steiner Verlag.
Carew, Thomas. 1949. The Poems of Thomas Carew, with His Masque Coelum
Britannicum [Sic]. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Chapman, George. 1589. Achilles Shield Translated as the Other Seven Bookes of
Homer out of His Eighteenth Booke of Iliades. London: John Windet.
Clarke, G. 1879. Hiborical Manuscript Commission, Seventh Report.
D’Avenant, William, and David F. Gladish. 1971. Sir William Davenant’s
Gondibert. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
D’Avenant, William, and Thomas Hobbes. 1651. Gondibert: An Heroick Poem.
London: Printed by Tho. Newcomb for John Holden.
Drayton, Michael, John William Hebel, Kathleen Mary Tillotson, and
Bernard H. Newdigate. 1931. The Works of Michael Drayton. Oxford:
Printed at the Shakespeare head press & published for the press by
B. Blackwell.
Hammond, N. G. L., and H. H. Scullard. 1970. The Oxford Classical Dicionary.
2d ed. Oxford [Eng.]: Clarendon Press.
Helgerson, Richard. 1992. Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of
England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Jacob, James R., and Timothy Raylor. 1991. “Opera and Obedience: Thomas
Hobbes and a Proposition for Advancement of Morality by Sir
William Davenant.” The Seventeenth Century (6).
Kenny, Virginia C. 1984. The Country-House Ethos in English Literature, 1688-
1750: Themes of Personal Retreat and National Expansion. Sussex and
New York: Harvester Press; St. Martin’s Press.
Malcolm, Noel. 1981. “Hobbes, Sandys and the Virginia Company.” The
Historical Journal (24):297-321.
244 abstract
In this article the author examines the way in which concepts of citizenship
and rights have been transmitted not only by conquest, but also by the imi-
tation of Greek and Roman models. Also, the article discusses the way in
which early modern empires, modelling themselves on the classical Roman
empire in particular, bring these two elements together. Extensive historio-
graphical work on the reception of European thought in the New World has
been produced on both sides of the Atlantic and some important contribu-
tions that deal with the impact of the New World encounters in European
thought have recently been made. However, the author argues that little work
has been done on classical modelling as a vehicle for the transmission of
concepts. The long tradition of classical learning, revived in the European
Renaissance, made Latin the lingua franca of Europe, and school curricula
across Europe ensured that members of the Republic of Letters were exposed
to the same texts. This, together with the serviceability of the Roman model
as a manual for Empire, ensured the rapid transmission of classical republi-
can and imperial ideas. The author takes England and the British Empire as
a case study and provides a variety of examples of classical modelling.
keywords
Classical modelling, citizenship, empire, country house poems, transmis-
sion of concepts, Hobbes.
245
Book Review
redescribing political concepts:

history of concepts and politics
Sandro Chignola
Università di Padova
Kari Palonen. Die Entzauberung Der Begriffe. Das Umschreiben

Der Politischen Begriffe Bei Quentin Skinner Und Reinhart Koselleck.
Münster: LIT Verlag, 2003.
In order to understand Kari Palonen’s last book one must begin

from its ending. In the book’s last section the author provides an in-depth
explanation of the thesis that guides the theoretical reconstruction produced
in the first three hundred and fifty pages composing this volume. Two of
the propositions contained in the end section are advanced rather radically:
on one side the necessity to value the historiographical and “methodologi-
cal” contributions by Skinner and Koselleck as fundamental to set in course
a decisive movement of “de-essentializing” the categories commonly used in
political analysis; on the other, the possibility, enabled by the critical recog-
nition of such paradigms, of going beyond these concepts by tracing a new
perspective regarding what politics effectively is.
The disenchantment (Entzauberung) of concepts and political dis-
course, in Kari Palonen’s view, as well as in Skinner’s and Koselleck’s, op-
erate as a necessary preliminary to a correct approach to historical sources,
whose consequence would be to free concepts from the spell that binds them
to the transmission lines whereby the history of ideas traditionally fashions
its narratives of continuity. Furthermore, this approach would also serve as a
privileged access route for an interpretation of politics in which the aspects
of contingency and mobility are conceived as decisive.
It is not simply the case of Palonen adopting a Weberian term in ref-
erence to Skinner and Koselleck and applying it only to a very precise recon-
struction of their work, as this had already been done in one of Palonen’s pre-
246 vious works.1 If in Das ‘Webersche Moment’ Palonen defined the “Weberian
moment” of politics (also identifying J. G. A. Pocock as one of the authors
redescribing political concepts
who adopts this theoretical stance), he now resorts to Weber in order to trace
a more general conceptualization of the political having contingency as the
constitutive characteristic of this form of action.
Politics, modern politics in particular, which is supposedly based on
what Nietzsche described as the death of God and the subsequent downfall of
foundations and values, appears to be integrally linked to the clash between
conflicting possibilities. It is therefore non-neutralizable either through pro-
cedural or technical means.
In Die Entzauberung der Begriffe Palonen again relies on Weber to
identify the emergence of a thinking on contingency soon to inform an en-
tire age of philosophical speculation on politics, as testified, in his own words,
by the works of authors as diverse as Schmitt, Plessner, Arendt, Benjamin,
Sartre or Oakeshott. The autonomy of politics, its richness, refers directly to
the interior of the “Weberian moment” which, in Palonen’s interpretation,
can be isolated in the Western tradition as a non-neutralizable contingency
of action, as a syntax of change, transformation, and possibility.
The Weberian “inexhaustibility of reality” renders the argumen-
tative structures of a politology structurally inoperative, or, at least drasti-
cally regressive, as Palonen calls it following Weber. The Weberian anal-
ysis brings to light a concept of the political whose categorical profiles
remain nominally linked to the finitude of action, in other words, a Beruf
of the political, or of the objectivity of social sciences. Politics is openness
to the possible: Möglichkeit is more real than reality because it is not sub-
ordinated to any particular normativity since it is irrevocably connected to
the contingency (not deficiency, not a gap, but full potency) of action.
This argumentative scheme becomes the backdrop of Palonen’s
new book. The theoretical writings of Skinner and Koselleck enter stage
to call attention to the issues still worth keeping unresolved in the critical
confrontation among the “entpolitisierenden,” essentialist, foundationalist,
and normative tendencies found in contemporary political science
(from communitarianism to neo-contractualism, from the hegemony of
analytical philosophy exercised by English-speaking political science to
the explicit penchant of the theory of communicative action for stability)
and to strengthen a historical perspective based on temporalization that
constitutionally keeps concepts and categories in tension.
In Quentin Skinner’s own writings there are references to the per- 247
formative function of language. Referring to Austin and Searle and in accor-

dance to Wittgenstein, Skinner adopts the theory of linguistic acts as a means
for interpreting discourse capable of preserving its aspect of concrete action.
According to Skinner, to interpret a political text – and little does it matter if
a “classic” is at hand or if it is an anonymous intervention in the living irre-
ducibility of linguistic-communicative exchange – is to figure out what the
subject, who was expressing himself through it, actually meant and did.
This leads us away from the methodological perspective of the his-
tory of ideas, and the very idea of the text’s transcendent “meaning” as the axis
around which the normative hypotheses of political theory turns, toward the
possibility of thinking politics taking into account the many modalities of
action that language brings to expression. Politics coincides with a concrete
form of action; the words (vocabulary) and argumentative forms of which it is
made of, along with strategic discourse, make it impossible to think that the
problem of conflicting interpretations can be considered solved. Language
expresses, directly and without leaving anything aside, the political nature of
humankind, its intrinsically linguistic and conflicting nature.
Palonen studies this choice of method in Skinner’s historical work,
which has focused on the identification of a specific neo-Roman tradi-
tion of republicanism, in his theoretical work, and also in his recent re-
search on the reception and transformation of classical rhetoric. Under
the guise of the rhetorical figure of paradiastole (redescription), Skinner re-
covers the modes of a concrete subversion/redescription of the topoi of dis-
course whereby he identifies the dynamic traits of political communica-
tion and its constant renovation, which renders argumentative structures
subordinated to the speaker. Skinner traces in this, beyond the hypothesis
of authorship, the true subjectivity of the political. Through redescription,
concepts, legitimacy arrangements, and modes of discourse that are tradi-
tional become adapted to the specific strategic objectives pursued by the
author, whose argumentative machine sets in motion a system of coordi-
nated contingencies it helps establish.
This brings us to the question of comparing Skinner and Koselleck.
For as much as Palonen argues in favor of integrating their methodologies,
both are in fact unsuitable for a theory of history. However, there remains a
tension caused by Koselleck’s assumption that politics is a process of con-
stant temporalization of experience. In the second part of the book, Palonen
248 submits Koselleck’s oeuvre (historical works, methodological writings, arti-
cles, reviews) to the same careful scrutiny bestowed to Skinner in the previ-
ous section, highlighting common elements that bind both authors together:
the history of concepts, categories for a new “Historik”, a geology of time lay-
ers identifiable in the Western political lexicon – all of which cooperate in
Koselleck’s endeavor to denaturalize chronology and de-essentialize politi-
cal theory.
It is not accidental that Palonen highlights in Koselleck’s work the
effects of mutation and change that, he says, define the evolutionary line of
the Western political lexicon. According to Koselleck’s view, history appears
only when temporalization becomes part of the experience of the world and
thus causes a shift in the horizon of expectation in relation to the space of
experience, in such a way they no longer coincide. Political concepts become
historicized as indicators – and as material factors – of change, and thus as-
sign a specifically historical quality to the human experience of time. In this
way, collective action gains consistency and politicallity – the former because
collective action becomes subordinated to the nature and structure of repeti-
tion, and the latter because it also becomes marked by the dynamic and al-
ways debatable aspect of conceptual definition.
This is what Palonen believes to be so relevant about Koselleck’s lat-
est work. 2 De-naturalization and differentiation are the factors Koselleck
considers decisive in the temporalization and politicization of experience.
According to Palonen, to study the history of concepts does not mean to de-
fend a political lexicon historically reconstructed and recomposed beyond
its crisis, but to truly assume transformation and crisis as the revealing ele-
ments of the specific quality of politics, in order to open the theory to a field
in which the lines separating natural law and universal normativity can be
definitively erased or removed.
Through his conception of the specific “politology of time” (Politologie
der Zeit), 3 which assumes the contingency of action and the immanent plural-
ity of positions and definitions inherent to the conflictive character of inter-
pretations, Palonen moves beyond Skinner and Koselleck. The methodologi-
cal paradigms of the history of concepts and of historiography, in Palonen’s
formulation, are able to recover the instances that rebuild political theory
according to the dynamics of constant redescription that constitutes its his-
tory. Political confrontation, with its inherently non-neutralizable conflictive
character, immanent temporality of contestation and refutation, and perma-
nent semantic and rhetorical redefinitions, must be assumed in Weberian 249
terms as the stage of an inexhaustible polytheism of values in which diFerent

positions in regard to power and action elaborate strategies to conquer the
world of collective praxis.
The constellation of politics for Palonen is in constant fibrillation
– it possesses a dynamic of its own. In order to capture it, political science (or
the science of politics) must adapt itself to definition profiles variable at the
historical perspective and to rhetorical temporalizing practices without es-
sentializing contents, concepts, and categories. Once de-essentialized, con-
tents, concepts, and categories become simple products of action; at the same
time, elements of organization and semantic indicators of action and its tem-
poral evolution. They cannot be thought of as if – and this is Palonen’s main
underlying thesis – they were not connected to the concrete dynamics that is
always prior to and follow from innovation and change.
250 notes
1
Kari Palonen (1998).
2
3
Kari Palonen (2003), 310.

Koselleck, Reinhart. 2000. Zeitschichten. Studien Zur Historik. Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp.
Palonen, Kari. 1998. Das “Webersche Moment.” Zur Kontingenz Des Politischen.
Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag.
. 2003. Die Entzauberung Der Begriffe. Das Umschreiben Der Politischen
Begriffe Bei Quentin Skinner Und Reinhart Koselleck. Münster: LIT
Verlag.
253
announcements
u I Seminario de Historia Comparada de los Conceptos Políticos en el

Mundo Iberoamericano. April 10-11, 2006 in Madrid. Coordinators
and participating researchers of the Iberconceptos Project will be
meeting in order to evaluate the preliminary results as well as the-
oretical, empirical, and comparative issues of the project in which
scholars from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Portugal,
and Spain analyze the concepts that were crucial in the making of
the political language of modern Iberoamerica.
u Quentin Skinner Conference in Madrid. March 30, 2006, at the Centro
de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales de Madrid. In his first ac-
ademic visit to Spain, Quentin Skinner will deliver a talk entitled
“Three Concepts of Liberty?” at the conference-colloquium organ-
ized by Javier F. Sébastian.
u Concepta 2005 - A group of approximately 25 ma and phd level students
from Finland, Denmark, Greece, Russia, England, and Brazil at-
tended the first summer course on conceptual history organized
by the Concepta research training program, held at the Helsinki
University from August 16-31, 2005. Opening lectures by Martin
J. Burke (City University of New York) and Jan Ifversen (Aarhus
University) provided an in-depth presentation of the traditions and
methodological practices of conceptual history and were followed by
several case-studies by Kari Palonen (University of Jyväskylä), Pim
den Boer (University of Amsterdam), Henrik Stenius (University of
Helsinki), Pauli Kettunen (University of Helsinki), Matti Hyvarinen
(University of Tampere), Pia Letto-Vanamo (University of Helsinki),
Pasi Ihalainen (University of Jyväskylä), and Risto Alapuro
(University of Helsinki). Furthermore, students had the opportuni-
ty to present and receive commentary on their ongoing research in a
series of workshops which concluded the summer course. Response
from the students attending the course was stimulating and prepa-
254 ration for next year’s Concepta summer course to be held in Uppsala
is already in progress.
announcements
u Journée d’Études: La sémantique historique – geneses et pratiques com-

parés (Allemagne, Anglaterre, Espagne, France, Italie). October 14,
2005 at the Centre de Recherches Politiques de Sciences Po (cevipof),
98, rue de l’Université, 75007 Paris. Jointly organized by Cevipof and
the Centre de Recherches Interdisciplinaires sur l’Allemagne (cria,
ehess, Paris), the journée proposes to examine the theoretical and
empirical premises of conceptual history, the history of discourse,
linguistic history of concepts, and the history of ideopraxis. It is
open to students interested in intellectual, cultural, and social his-
tory, and will be composed of lectures and discussions by Alexandre
Escudier, Lucien Jaume, Jörn Leonhard Javier Fernàndez Sebastiàn,
Jacques Guilhaumou, Pierre-André TaguieF, Sandro Chignola,
Catherine Brice, Gil Delannoi, and Michael Werner.
u The Committee on Conceptual and Terminological Analysis (cocta), a re-
search committee of the International Sociological Association (isa),
will be organizing sessions at the isa’s annual congress to be held in
Durban, South Africa, in 2006.
The thematic sessions are: Contingency and Directionality, The
Concept of Modernity, Concept Formation and the Critique of
“Orientalism”, On the Concept of Gift Exchange in Modern Society,
and On the concept of the “Good Life” in Contemporary Sociology.
For a complete description of the sessions, call for papers and dead-
lines visit the website: http://www.ucm.es/info/isa/congress2006/rc/rc35_
durban.htm.
255
recent and upcoming publications
u Pasi Ilahainen. 2005. Protestant Nations Redefined – Changing Perceptions

of National Identity in the Rhetoric of the English, Dutch, and
Swedish Public Churches 1685-1772. Leiden: Brill. October.
u Christian Koller. 2005. Fremdherrschaft: Ein politischer Kampf begriF im
Zeitalter des Nationalismus. Frankfurt/M-New York: Campus. (for
more information see www.campus.de/isbn/3593378639).
u Douglas Howland. 2005. Personal Liberty and Public Good: The
Introduction of John Stuart Mill to Japan and China. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press. November.
u João Feres Júnior. 2005. A História Do Conceito De Latin America Nos Estados
Unidos da América. São Paulo: edusc.
257
research projects and networks
u The Grupo de História das Idéias e Conceitos Políticos (ghicp) has just
launched its new website: http://ghicp.iuperj.br. The ghicp is a network
of Brazilian researchers in the fields of social science and history
committed to the discussion of the relationship between the history
of concepts and the history of social and political ideas and to the im-
provement of the methodologies employed in the theories and his-
tories of social and political thought. The website is the most recent
of the initiatives undertaken by its members to foster the exchange
of knowledge, experiences, and bibliographical references among re-
searchers from institutions based in Brazil and abroad. The website
features information on ongoing individual and collective research
projects, as well as access to bibliographical references, articles, dis-
cussion pieces, event announcements, and useful links.
u Creation of the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Political Thought and
Conceptual Change.
On June 23, 2005, the Academy of Finland awarded 23 Centres of
Excellence for the period 2006-2011. Among the 7 new ones is the
Finnish Centre of Excellence in Political Thought and Conceptual
Change, the first politics-related Centre in the history of the
Academy’s programme. The Centre is located at the Department
of Social Sciences and Philosophy of the University of Jyväskylä.
Professors Kari Palonen and Tuija Pulkkinen serve as leader and
vice-leader of the Centre.
A website with more substantial information on research teams,
events, visiting programme and so on will be presented later in the
autumn at the website of the University of Jyväskylä http://www.jyu.
fi/indexeng.shtml
The Centre will provide an organizational framework, a locus of in-
tellectual encounters and discussion as well as an administrative ba-
sis for its 30 members and their research teams. Research will be
258 conducted by the individual scholars and through their mutual co-
operation within research teams. The Centre encourages individ-
ual initiatives and personal profiles and promotes debate among

diFerent perspectives. The Centre consists of the following re-
search teams: Political Thought and Conceptual History, Politics
and the Arts and The Politics of Philosophy and Gender, Political
thought and conceptual history, Politics and the Arts, The Politics of
Philosophy and Gender, and Redescriptions. Yearbook of Political
Thought and Conceptual History, which forms a fourth independ-
ent pillar of the Centre.
uThe United Nations Intellectual History Project (UNIHP).
Ideas and concepts are a main driving force in human progress, and
they are arguably the most important contribution of the United
Nations. Yet, there has been little historical study of the origins and
evolution of the history of economic and social ideas cultivated with-
in the world organization and of their impact on wider thinking
and international action. The United Nations Intellectual History
Project (www.unhistory.org) is filling this knowledge gap about the UN
by tracing the origin and analyzing the evolution of key ideas and
concepts about international economic and social development
born or nurtured under UN auspices. This “future-oriented” histo-
ry project was designed to review the ideas and concepts that have
emerged over the last half-century of United Nations debate, reports
and actions in the economic and social arenas. The logic was that a
broad ranging and independently researched UN intellectual history
should not only provide an antidote to contemporary and ahistorical
triumphalism (the end of “the end of history”) but also act as a guide
for navigating the shoals of future challenges and crises to the in-
ternational system. The UNIHP began operations in mid-1999 when
the secretariat, the hub of a worldwide network of specialists on the
UN, was established at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International
Studies of The City University of New York’s Graduate Center. All
fourteen of the volumes on economic and social development have
been commissioned and are being published by Indiana University
Press, in addition to one that will become the standard reference
on the UN, published by Oxford University Press. The latest publica-
tions are UN Voices: The Struggle for Development and Social Justice,
259
which is based on 73 oral history interviews recorded by the project;
and The Power of UN Ideas: Lessons from the Last 60 Years, a brief

summary of the project’s main conclusions. The project is active-
ly disseminating its findings through publications, seminars, and
conferences as widely as possible in order to stimulate debate on the
importance of the UN in the 21st century and to stimulate additional
exploration of the UN’s record by academics and graduate students,
by journalists and policy analysts, in both industrialized and devel-
oping countries.
ISSN :: 1807-9326
Contributions to the History of Concepts is a biannual publication of the Grupo de Pesquisa
submission guidelines
em História dos Conceitos e Teoria Política e Social do Instituto Universitário de Pesquisas
do Rio de Janeiro (IUPERJ) and of the History of Political and Social Concepts Group
(HPSCG). Its goal is to publish methodological and substantive research on the history of
concepts and related disciplines, such as the history of political thought, intellectual history,
and political theory, and to contribute to the dissemination of information about scholarship, Articles should have a maximum length books
publications, and events in these fields of inquiry. of 7,500 words or 50,000 characters including
bibliography and notes. Book reviews and Schaffer, Frederic C. 1998. Democracy in Translation:
author’s summations should have a maximum Understanding Politics in an Unfamiliar Culture. Ithaca:
length of 3,000 words or 20,000 characters Cornell University Press.
including bibliography.
editors–in–chief CONTRIBUTIONS is published biannually, journal articles
with issues coming out in February and
João Feres Júnior – IUPERJ, Brazil September. Manuscripts may be submitted for Honneth, Axel. 1992. “Integrity and Disrespect:
Sandro Chignola – Università di Padova, Italy review at any time. Principles of a Conception of Morality Based
Please include your full name, address, on the Theory of Recognition.” Political Theory
telephone, e-mail address, and institutional 20 (2):187-202.
assistant editors affiliation in the first page of the submitted copy.
Thiago Gomide Nasser – IUPERJ, Brazil Also include a 200-300 word abstract if submitting edited book
an article.
Meggin Lindgren All texts submitted for review should use Ball, Terence, James Farr, and Russell L. Hanson,
Times New Roman font, size 12, and be double- eds. 1989. Political Innovation and Conceptual
international editorial board spaced throughout. Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Notes and citations should be numbered Press.
Terence Ball – Arizona State University, USA consecutively using Arabic numerals and should
Mark Bevir – UC Berkeley, USA be placed at the end of the text (endnotes). book sections (chapters)
Complete bibliographical references should be
Pim den Boer – Universiteit van Amsterdam, Netherlands included following the endnotes. In reviews and Koselleck, Reinhart. 1996. “A Response to
Martin Burke – The City University of New York, USA summations, references to the pages of the book Comments on the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe.”
Janet Coleman – London School of Economics, UK under review should be placed in parenthesis. In The Meaning of Historical Terms and Concepts: New
References to other works should follow the same Studies on Begriffgeschichte, edited by H. Lehmann
Giuseppe Duso – Università di Padova, Italy guidelines as articles. and M. Richter. Washington D.C.: German
Iain Hampsher–Monk – University of Exeter, UK Titles of books and articles appearing in the Historical Institute.
body of the text must be italicizedt Titles should
Lucian Hölscher – Ruhr–Universität Bochum, Germany not be abbreviated, except in the case of frequent CONTRIBUTIONS is not responsible for the
Jan Ifversen – Aarhus University, Denmark reference. opinions expressed by its contributing authors.
For words and phrases in languages other Submissions should be sent via e-
Uffe Jakobsen – University of Copenhagen, Denmark than English please use italics. Words in Greek mail as attached MS Word documents or
Marcelo Gantus Jasmin – IUPERJ / PUC–Rio, Brazil can either be left in the Greek alphabet or another compatible format to the editors
transliterated. Long quotations in other languages of CONTRIBUTIONS, João Feres Júnior
Reinhart Koselleck – Universität Bielefeld (emeritus), Germany should be translated. (jferes@iuperj.br) and Sandro Chignola (sandro.
Jörn Leonhard – Universität Jena, Germany Gender-specific language should be avoided, chignola@unipd.it). Paper copies are not required.
unless only one gender is intended. All other electronic correspondence,
Hans–Jürgen Lüsebrink – Universität Saarland, Germany Centuries should be fully spelled out – “the announcements concerning upcoming events
Raymonde Monnier – CNRS, France nineteenth century” - and hyphenated if used and publications, and any other information that
Vincente Oieni – Iberoamerikanska Insitutet, Sweden adjectivally – “nineteenth-century France.” might interest our readership should be sent to
Double quotation marks should be used Thiago Nasser (contributions@iuperj.br).
Kari Palonen – University of Jyväskylä, Finland to indicate quotations; single quotation marks
Elias Palti – Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Argentina for quotations within quotations. Periods and
commas should precede quotation marks, except Regular mail and faxes should be sent to:
Cícero R. Resende de Araújo – Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil when a page number follows the quotation.
Melvin Richter –The City University of New York (emeritus), USA Placement of other punctuation marks will Contributions to the History of Concepts
depend. If they belong to the sentence or phrase AT/ João Feres Júnior
Javier Fernández Sebastián – Universidad del País Vasco, Spain being quoted, they should precede quotation Instituto Universitário de Pesquisas do Rio de
Quentin Skinner – University of Cambridge, UK marks; otherwise they should be placed outside Janeiro - IUPERJ
quotation marks. Rua da Matriz, 82 - Botafogo
Patricia Springborg – Free University of Bozen–Bolzano, Italy For bibliographical references, please 22260-100 - Rio de Janeiro - RJ
Heloisa Murgel Starling – Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil conform to the following illustrative examples: (021) 2537-8020 Fax: (021) 2286-7146
Henrik Stenius – University of Helsinki, Finland Visit our website at contributions.iuperj.br
Karin Tielmans – Universiteit van Amsterdam, Netherlands
Björn Wittrock – Uppsala University, Sweden
Wyger Welema – Universiteit van Amsterdam, Netherlands

Contributions1 2

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Contributions1 2

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

in this issue

Conceptual History in the United States:

number 2, volume 1 :: october, 2005

conceptual history in the united

Americans, homossexuals – and has been reluctant to fund research on the

conceptual history in the united states: a missing “national project”

conceptual history in the united states: a missing “national project”

word “liberalism,” by comparison, occurred in none of the database’s texts. 20

conceptual history in the united states: a missing “national project”

conceptual history in the united states: a missing “national project”

of independence. Those declarations, in turn, with their appeals to “natural

conceptual history in the united states: a missing “national project”

conceptual history in the united states: a missing “national project”

he writes in German, the Oxford-based Leonhard is interested in how con-

Appleby, Joyce Oldham. 1992. Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical

conceptual history in the united states: a missing “national project”

(1639-1800) [Electronic text, images, and search engine.]. Readex.

conceptual history in the united states: a missing “national project”

animadversions upon Mr. James Harrington and the Oceanistical model.

on the notion of historical

The concept of a bridging period such as a Sattelzeit depends ﬁrstly on the

reinhart koselleck’s construction of the sattelzeit

reinhart koselleck’s construction of the sattelzeit

reinhart koselleck’s construction of the sattelzeit

get around it by positing a reverse continuity to Hegel: for Heidegger alles

reinhart koselleck’s construction of the sattelzeit

However, sotto voce, this characterization is not completely accurate,

reinhart koselleck’s construction of the sattelzeit

ing archives. Revolutions are often accompanied by burning archives, if only

reinhart koselleck’s construction of the sattelzeit

Ariès, Philippe, and Michel Winock (collaborator). 1980. Un Historien Du

the notion of modernity in

the study of the meaning of languages, concepts and discourses in relation to

the notion of modernity in nineteenth-century spain

nalists and intellectuals.

the notion of modernity in nineteenth-century spain

the notion of modernity in nineteenth-century spain

the notion of modernity in nineteenth-century spain

impression of a desire to oFer to posterity a series of sketches of an era that was

the notion of modernity in nineteenth-century spain

a decree in La Gaceta de Madrid in which we read that:

the notion of modernity in nineteenth-century spain

the notion of modernity in nineteenth-century spain

the notion of modernity in nineteenth-century spain

the notion of modernity in nineteenth-century spain

the notion of modernity in nineteenth-century spain

Salmerón, González Serrano, Gumersindo de Azcárate and Francisco Giner

Revuelta González (1999), 126–9.

the notion of modernity in nineteenth-century spain

Elorza, Antonio. 1970. El Socialismo Utópico. Madrid: Alianza Ed.

the notion of modernity in nineteenth-century spain

for a critical conceptual

This article aims to be a contribution to, preliminary as it is, a project of con-

the Brazilian case, if not to other national contexts.

for a critical conceptual history of Brazil

expectation’ can be articulated. The historian is thus compelled to con-

for a critical conceptual history of Brazil

ent, a political viewpoint, which is not always made clear in Begriffsgeschichte

Not only is critical theory helpful in revising Begriffsgeschichte’s

for a critical conceptual history of Brazil

for a critical conceptual history of Brazil

for a critical conceptual history of Brazil

The proposition I have advanced is highly schematic and requires