Conceptual History: Begriffsgeschichte

Mario Wimmer, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Abstract

Conceptual history is a mode of historical inquiry concerned with the problem of the change in the semantics of particular
concepts. The article outlines its historical formation in both the disciplines of history (R. Koebner, O. Brunner, C. Schmitt, R.
Koselleck) and of philosophy (R. Eucken, R. Eisler, E. Rothacker), its further institutional and intellectual development, as
well as an overview of the major methodological issues. This article also puts conceptual history in the context of other elds
with similar methodological concerns such as the history of ideas and mentalities, intellectual history, historical episte-
mology as well as Luhmanns sociology.

Conceptual history is a eld of historical study concerned with
the problem of the change in the semantics of particular
concepts. It engages with a general problem in the writing of
history: the difference between the language of the sources and
the analytical categories of the historian, more specically the
change in semantics over time, as every historical-empirical
approach has to deal with the problem of the changing
semantics of historical sources, be they texts or other artifacts
from the past.
This problem has a long history in historiography.
Conceptual history is one specic epistemological formation in
this long history of a more general problem, the study of the
historicity of the conditions of the emergence of meaning and
sense, experience and perspective. Ever since the formation of
the historical disciplines in the late eighteenth century the
criticohistorical reading of written documents has been one of
their basic tools and tasks. These issues have been the subject of
international debates e.g., as language and written matter as the
necessary condition of historical thought (a widely discussed
issue in historical methodology in classical textbooks from
Johann G. Droysen to Charles Langlois/Charles-Victor
Seignobos), the problem of symbolic (Ernst Cassirer) or
intellectual (Johan Huizinga) forms, or under the label of the
linguistic turn (Richard Rorty). Since the 1960s this universal
challenge of historical thinking was reconsidered as the study
of discourses and their various institutional structures and
material conditions that contribute to the emergence of
historical formations (epistemes) of cultural production
(Michel Foucault), or more recent debates in labor history on
how the experience of class consciousness is structured by
language (Jones, 1983; Scott, 1974; Rancire, 1989).
Ever since conventional representation has become prob-
lematic at the beginning of the twentieth century, with
a transformation for example witnessed by the ctional Letter
of Lord Chandos (Hofmannsthal, 2005) and, anticipated by
Friedrich Nietzsche, this crisis of language became thematic in
such different contexts as philosophy of language, pragmatism,
Gottlob Freges logic, Edmund Husserls phenomenology,
Ferdinand de Saussures linguistic, or Freudian psychoanalysis.
In other words: the situation between history and its language
had signicantly changed and generated fresh scholarship on
the problem. In the German context it has been conceptual
history or history of concepts (Begriffsgeschichte) that dealt with
the phenomenological problem of historical sources and their
language in a particular way: Scholars deemed past events or
a set of historical conditions that are incorporated as
condensed experience in concepts or notions. The language of
the sources contributes to their formation; thus, we need to
engage with the historicity of the concepts of analysis with
respect to the language of historical sources. As a consequence
conceptual history studies the changing semantics of concepts
or notions over time. Indeed, it is not self-evident that concepts
do, or at least can, have a history. It is only if we acknowledge
the event-character of discursive practices that concepts them-
selves can be read in historical context.
While Begriffsgeschichte is still a well established eld in the
history of philosophy and philosophical terminology, nowa-
days most historians along with political and social scientists,
linguists or cultural theorists prefer an approach that allows for
a broader engagement with semantic constellations and
discursive practices. This is not the only sense in which the
history of concepts is not a strictly formal discipline but a set of
methodological tools that can follow different historical,
philosophical, or cultural paths. Since the 1980s there has
been a gradual shift from the study of individual concepts
toward a more general interest in the systematic study of
language, or as Willibald Steinmetz (born 1957) recently put it,
semantic situations as a basis for historical-social, cultural,
and conceptual understanding. Conceptual history and, the
larger eld of so-called historical semantics, enjoyed their most
formative phase in parallel with the development of historical
metaphorology, i.e., the study of the change of metaphors over
time though, the latter is often ostracized. (Bdeker, 2002)
All these approaches share specic goals and certain charac-
teristics with the history of ideas, discourse analysis, the history
and philosophy of science, as well asin different ways
lexicology and the linguistic study of semantic change.
Initially, conceptual history was mostly considered
a German approach, which is commonly traced back to two
monumental projects, the Historisches Wrterbuch der Philosophie
(Dictionary of Philosophical Terminology) and the lexicon
Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (thereafter Grundbegriffe, Basic
Concepts in History: An Historical Dictionary of Political and
Social Language in Germany), as well as the work of the
historian Reinhart Koselleck (19232006), one of the most
inuential German historians in the twentieth century and an

548 International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 4 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.03074-9

original theorist of history. The project of the Grundbegriffe was
derived from comparative studies of the semantic changes in
122 basic sociopolitical concepts in different European
languages (with a focus on German) around 1800, in some
cases reaching back to antiquity. The understanding of basic
concepts (Grundbegriffe) for the encyclopedic project of the
Grundbegriffe was distinguished not only by its exclusion of
concepts that dene or categorize (Leitbegriffe), keywords
(Schlsselwrter), catchphrases or slogans (Schlagwrter) (for the
history of buzz-words see Bauer, 1920; Bahner, 1963), but also
by the attempt to at least try to consider multilinguism and
thus reference texts not only in German (Old, Middle, and
modern), but also classical and medieval Latin, classical Greek,
French, English, and Italian.
Only a few publications in English provide a good starting
point and introduction to the eld: Melvin Richters The History
of Political and Social Concepts (1995); the more focused books
by Niels Akerstrom Andersen (2003) and Niklas Olsen (2012);
several introductions to the oeuvre of Koselleck give broad
contextualizations (see also the 1989 special issue of History
Workshop Journal on Language and History, in particular
Schttler, 1989).
Conceptual History before and after Koselleck
To my knowledge, the use of the word Begriffsgeschichte goes
back to G.W.F. Hegels lectures on the Philosophy of History
where he introduced it as a variation on reexive history, as
a form of cultural and intellectual history that denes its
objects close to philosophy. This rather particular under-
standing of the history of concepts has not prevailed. The
German tradition of Begriffsgeschichte has instead other origins
in the elds of philosophy and history. Rudolf Euckens (1846
1926) History and Critique of Basic Concept of the Present Day
(1878) along with his History of Philosophical Terminology (1879)
were among the rst publications in the history of concepts
published in German language, though different from our
current understanding in terms of its conception and approach.
Another early example in the study of the historical formation
of philosophical concepts was Rudolf Eislers (18731926)
single-authored Dictionary of Philosophical Terminology and
Notions rst published in 1899. Eisler was an Austrian philos-
opher, who remained a private scholar without a university
career due to antisemitic prejudices in German-speaking
academia. Yet, although between 1943 and 1948 four new
philosophical dictionaries would appear in German, none with
success, and until the rst issue of the new periodical Archiv fr
Begriffsgeschichte (Archive for Conceptual History, edited by the
German philosopher Erich Rothacker, 18881965) was pub-
lished in 1955, the revised edition of Eislers multivolume
Wrterbuch remained the standard reference for academic
philosophy besides the fact that it was not systematic in its
philological approach to the history of philosophical
terminology.
Rothackers Archiv for its part was meant to be a collection of
studies in the historical semantics of mostly philosophical
concepts as a resource for a future encyclopedia of conceptual
history. Indeed, its contributors were and still are mostly
philosophers and intellectual historians. For decades it served
Conceptual History: Begriffsgeschichte 549
as a platform for vivid discussions and intellectual exchange in
both the elds of conceptual history and historical metaphor-
ology. Most contributions gave crisp, sometimes comparably
narrow historical overviews on certain concepts occasionally
grouped around thematic issues, but it also allowed for long,
almost monographic articles on important topics, among them
the remarkable book-length essay by Hans Blumenberg,
Paradigms for a Metaphorology. This essay not only earned him
a university position but became an instant classic and was later
published as a book in its own right (Blumenberg, 2010
(German 1960)).
It was only in 1972 when Joachim Ritter (190374),
Karlfried Grnder (19282011), and Gottfried Gabriel (born
1943) initiated the multivolume Dictionary of Philosophical
Terminology when Rothackers vision of a complete historical
survey of philosophical concepts began to become reality.
Nonetheless the editors began to present their own project as
a complete reedition of Eislers Wrterbuch, even though the
many volumes of the Archiv had done much of the spadework.
By the time that the last volume of the Wrterbuch was pub-
lished in 1997 it had become one of the most important
enterprises of German Geisteswissenschaften after World War II;
it contains about 6000 entries on 3670 philosophical concepts
by more than 1500 authors. What distinguishes their various
contributions is that they do not aim at xed and dogmatic
denitions of philosophical concepts, but every article
discusses the origin, evolution, and transformation of the
meaning of a concept or notion through systematic reference to
source texts.
In the discipline of history, as opposed to philosophy, the
situation was similar only in one respect: Again, conceptual
history was pioneered by a German-Jewish scholar, Richard
Koebner (18851958), whose work was again marginalized by
his German colleagues even though his approach also fol-
lowed, at least to some degree, in their then dominant German
Research of the East (Ostforschung), which since the 1920s
contributed to the planning of ethnic cleansing of local indig-
enous populations and settlement of Germans aiming at
Germanizing Central and Eastern Europe (Michael Burleigh,
1988). Koebners work in the eld started with his Berlin
dissertation on the concept of marriage in late medieval Ger-
many (Koebner, 1911). His Habilitation on the history of
Cologne in 1919 involved discussions of several methodolog-
ical problems in conceptual history; it was followed by a series
of articles on various concepts. In 1934, after he was forced out
of Nazi Germany and accepted a position at the Hebrew
University in Jerusalem, he published his last article in German,
a groundbreaking study on conceptual problems in cultural
history. However his seminal article Semantics and Histori-
ography (1953) together with other important contributions
to the eld of conceptual history (on the history of the concepts
of Western Civilization, Empire, or Imperialism) should
have inspired those German historians, who during and
following World War II established the seemingly new eld of
Begriffsgeschichte. Instead, they often referred to older studies in
German literature and linguistics as demonstrated in detail by
Jan-Marco Sawilla (2004) thus Koebner and his work were
and mostly remain ignored except for the homage paid him
by Koselleck on the occasion of a talk on the history of concepts
he delivered in Israel (Koselleck, 2006; the article was recently
550 Conceptual History: Begriffsgeschichte
also published in German translation in Joas and Vogt, 2011).
Similar claims could be made for other exiled German scholars
such as Paul Oskar Kristeller, Ernst Cassirer, or Karl Mannheim.
Concepts in the History of Ideas
Early conceptual history had also structural similarities with
new disciplines emerging in the early twentieth century, such
as the history of ideas and mentalities. In Germany it was
most prominently the work of Friedrich Meinecke that was
driven by a similar interest in the change of political ideas over
time (e.g., Meinecke, 1924). The work of the American
philosopher and intellectual historian Arthur O. Lovejoy
(18731962) in the history of ideas shares various similarities
with the study of the history of concepts. His attempt to
identify what he called unit-ideas, or individual concepts, as
well as the study of their change over time suggests an
approach rather concerned with intellectual and cultural than
social and political history; precisely because of the reduction
of his argumentation to ideas or concepts as basic units of
historical study. In his famous The Great Chain of Being (1933)
he outlined and pursued an approach that in many respects
shared interests with research in the history of concepts and
German History of Ideas.
The so-called Cambridge School (Quentin Skinner, J.G.A.
Pocock, among others) in intellectual history followed in some
respects the model set by Lovejoys history of ideas. However,
there were few afnities with German Begriffsgeschichte. Indeed,
Pocock admitted to not even being aware of the German
studies in the history of political language until he was invited
to contribute to a workshop on the occasion of the completion
of the Grundbegriffe. (Lehmann and Richter, 1996) Nonethe-
less, different attempts have been made to nd common
ground between these different approaches, even though the
main bone of contention always was and still remains the
relation between the internal logic of political language of the
past and its external reference to history proper (what Kosel-
leck liked to call Sachgeschichte); in other words: a focus on
intellectual and political language on the on side of the
channel, and the attempt to relate semantic change to social
and political history. While the Cambridge method was based
on language philosophy (Ludwig Wittgenstein (18891951),
John L. Austin (191160) among others) and exclusively
focused on the analysis of political language and its relation to
political theory, the German approach engaged emphatically
with the dynamic between the history of concepts and their
relation to experience of the historical past and not only in that
respect to social history at large. (For a comparative approach
of Anglo-Saxon and German conceptual history see Palonen,
2004; Leonhard, 2004.)
The French Approach: the History of Mentalities
and Philosophy of Science
In France at the turn from nineteenth to twentieth century an
interdisciplinary group of scholars formed around the philos-
opher Henri Berr (18631954). The groups intellectual gravity
shifted toward historical study and Berrs ideal of synthesis. This
collaborative spirit contributed to the founding of the journal
Annales (in 1929) by the eminent historians Marc Bloch (1886
1944) and Lucien Febvre (18761956). They involved them-
selves in the historical study of mentalities, thus also paying
attention to relation between language and history (see also the
considerations of Barthes, 1981). In a rubric of the new journal
Febvre published a series of articles (e.g., on frontier, civili-
zation, or work) under a separate section entitled Les mots et
les choses (Words and Things). Bloch and Febvre were both
engrossed by historical-comparative linguistics as well as
Saussurian structural linguistics. Their colleague Berr also edited
a volume on the history of the concept of civilization with
contributions by Febvre, Marcel Mauss, and Emile Tonnelat,
among others. The volume was a signal of a different method of
writing the history of a concept as it aimed at transnational
comparisons and was critical of the idea of progress. Although it
belonged to the tradition of the Enlightenment encyclopedia,
even the Encyclopdie franaise, edited by Febvre and Anatole de
Monzie, can be viewed as an early project in the history of
concepts insofar as it followed a radical humanist, theoretical,
and, only to some extent, historical conception of a total
synthesis of diverse elements that allowed for a comprehensive
thinking of our world (Schttler, 2005).
Surprisingly, one can nd hardly any connection between
German conceptual history and the major studies in the
history of scientic concepts in French and American History
and Philosophy of Science. Discourse analysis and the work
of Michel Foucault (192684) may be considered one of the
few exceptions in this respect, even so the work of the French-
American tradition of historical epistemology continued to
be as ill-informed of the project of Begriffsgeschichte as
German and other international scholars in this eld are of
the works of Georges Canguilhem (190495) or Ian Hacking
(born 1936). Ever since the introduction of an historical
apriori, i.e., the historicity of the conditions of possibility of
perception, by Edmund Husserl (18591938) to the philos-
ophy of science, French, and later North American, historians
and philosophers of science have become concerned with the
history of scientic concepts. Thus, Gaston Bachelard (1884
1962) argued convincingly that knowledge could only be
adequately understood if studied empirically through its
constituent concepts in their historical context and develop-
ment. The earliest examples of studies in the history of
scientic concepts are Canguilhems books on the emergence
and development of the concepts of reex (Canguilhem,
1955) and of evolution (Canguilhem, 1952). Both books
make compelling cases for a new way of writing the history of
science as a history of scientic concepts rather than a history
of theories that employ those concepts. It was Foucault who
steered this approach toward an analysis of institutionalized
modes of speaking, its rules, and arrangement as well as the
historical conditions for the possibility of statements; he was
less interested in individual concepts so much as what he
termed discursive practices and formations. The Canadian
historian and sociologist Rgine Robin (born 1939) in turn
adopted this approach for the quantitative study of historical
semantics, including microanalyses of individual concepts.
The Canadian-French analytical philosopher Hacking
engaged in this tradition when he published his study on The
Emergence of Probability (1975). Ever since then Hacking has

made important contributions not only to the methodology
but also to the actual history of scientic concepts inspiring
studies by Lorraine Daston (born 1951), Peter Galison (born
1955), and others on concepts like objectivity, probability, or
empiricism.
The Lexicon Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe
Returning to the eminent historian of conceptual history,
Reinhart Koselleck, let us remember that although he
considered himself an academic outsider, he would become
not only the executive editor of one of the big collaborative
projects in twentieth-century humanities, but also one of the
leading scholars in the history of concepts; and certainly the
strongest voice in attempting to develop a theoretical and
methodological basis for Begriffsgeschichte in the larger
context of a social history of politics and the public sphere. In
Kosellecks understanding, Begriffsgeschichte was not only
concerned with political or social events and circumstances
(Koselleck, 1985(German 1979): p. 85) articulated in the
language of their respective historical sources, but the basic
concepts also indicated the process of transformation into
modernity; only this nexus of approaches would allow
a deeper understanding and reexive use of our language
today. In that sense, evolving concepts would embody novel
experiences and relate to shifts and ruptures in semantics. The
transformation of basic concepts of around 1800 (the so-
called Sattelzeit, which translates to English as saddle-time
or threshold) introduced a temporal dimension to the
formation of meaning; according to Koselleck they are Janus-
faced: they capture both past and future perspectives of this
period of transformation. Koselleck assumed that around
1800 key concepts changed and new concepts emerged,
which embodied historical time, for example development,
revolution, or the famous history as such (history in the
collective singular), and that this change in semantics would
parallel a new understanding of European modernity.
This close connection between the language of the sources
and our present understanding of past events was predomi-
nantly informed by the work of both the Austrian medievalist
Otto Brunner (18981982) as well as by the political theorist
Carl Schmitt (18881985). Brunners book Land and Lordship,
originally published as a study in German Volksgeschichte, was
concerned with the language of sources in opposition to an
approach that employs concepts from legal and constitutional
theory in order to write the history of the State. Brunners work
became seminal for the methodology of German conceptual
history and in a reedited version that replaced the ideological
Nazi terminology like race, people, etc. by neutral notions like
structure (Gadi Algazi, 1997) is to date considered a classic
in medieval studies. Koselleck emphasized that without the
work of Brunner the lexicon would have been unthinkable,
(Koselleck, 1972) Schmitt for his part had been Kosellecks
mentor during his dissertation work on Critique and Crisis at
Heidelberg; it was Schmitt, who suggested focusing on the
changing of the two title concepts alongside others like war,
civil war, and revolution. The historical study of the change
of meaning of concepts aided by crisp historical arguments and
original theoretical points became distinctive features of his
Conceptual History: Begriffsgeschichte 551
oeuvre. Critique and Crisis was received as a contribution to both
history and sociopolitical theory, but criticized for its politically
conservative attitude (most prominently by Habermas, 1977).
Although often not considered part of a school, Koselleck and
his early work was perceived as being part of a politically
conservative group of German historians. (cf Olsen, 2012)
With his habilitation Prussia between Reform and Revolution
(1965) Kosellecks work became reasonably independent from
the early political and methodological circumstances
mentioned above. He nally committed to the historical
discipline. From now on he insisted on the necessity of theory
for the historical discipline by coining a whole set of meth-
odological concepts, which were based on his research in
historical semantics and translate a set of philosophical ideas
from the phenomenological tradition (like horizon, life world, or
historicity) into methodological tools for historians, such as
Erfahrungsraum (space of experience) and Erwartungshorizont
(space of expectation), Sattelzeit, among many others; all of
which became cornerstones of his methodology of conceptual
history (Schinkel, 2005). However, the practice of conceptual
history certainly departed to some extent from Kosellecks
presumptions and guidelines, in some cases to the extent that
sections or whole articles were rejected by the editors because
of their methodological dissents (cf introduction to the
Grundbegriffe).
From 1972 onward, Koselleck coedited, together with the
historians Werner Conze (191086) and Otto Brunner (1898
1982), the eight-volume encyclopedia dedicating most of his
research and intellectual engagement to this project. In accor-
dance to the imperative that history is to be rewritten, Koselleck
instead revised and adopted not only the methodological
framework of the Grundbegriffe but started to rethink concep-
tual history from within the more general context of historical
semantics and the need for theory in the historical discipline.
Consequently, in his later work he returned to a concern that
was already present in his early writings (Olsen, 2012): the
dialectic between his reections on historical semantics and an
anthropological theory of history that reframes conceptual
history (Hoffmann, 2010).
Critique, Transformation, and Resumption of the
Encyclopedia of Basic Concepts in History
The project of the Grundbegriffe and Kosellecks early work in
the history of concepts were both highly acclaimed and the
subjects of severe critique. Probably the strongest criticism
came from Kosellecks colleague at Bielefeld, the social histo-
rian Hans-Ulrich Wehler (born 1931), who, like others,
claimed that not only did conceptual history not contribute to
the urgent questions of the historical discipline but also that it
was an intellectual dead-end and would have no impact. His
colleague at Stanford, James Sheehan (born 1937), joined him
in the critique of the Grundbegriffe (Sheehan, 1978) but mostly
of its conception and methodology. For Sheehan, the corpus of
sources was insufciently representative and not diverse
enough to plumb the depths of popular culture and everyday
life (Ldtke, 1995).
Besides all efforts to the contrary, the focus and perspective
of the Grundbegriffe remained on German history. It was also
552 Conceptual History: Begriffsgeschichte
criticized for its attention to the origins and evolution of
a concept rather than situational semantics and diachronic
differences, as well as narrow range of reference in canonical
texts, authors, and published sources. The attempt to include
newspaper articles, journals, pamphlets and records was not
particularly successful despite many extensive citations, which
should document the language of the sources and give voice to
their right of veto (Koselleck). Substantial critique and
enhancement came mostly from inside the eld (e.g.,
Kittsteiner, 1991; Steinmetz, 1993; Busse et al., 1994; Lsebrink
and Reichardt, 1997; Palonen, 1997; Reichardt, 1998), yet,
even by Koselleck himself, who kept revising the theoretical
framework of conceptual history.
However, any critique should repay its subject in the
same coin, and at least two major critical responses almost
outweighed the Grundbegriffe in their ambition and
conception: the Handbuch politisch-sozialer Grundbegriffe in
Frankreich: 16801820 (Companion to Political-Social Basic
Concepts in France), directed by Rolf Reichardt (born 1940)
and published in 20 volumes; and the Aesthetic Basic
Concepts. Historical Dictionary in Seven Volumes, conceptual-
ized under the institutional umbrella of the East German
Academy of Sciences, and edited by the literary scholar
Karlheinz Barck (19342012), Martin Fontius (born 1934),
Friedrich Wolfzettel (born 1941), and Burkhart Steinwachs at
the Berlin think-tank Zentrum fr Literaturforschung (ZfL),
nally released in 19922005. Currently, the ZfL continues
research in the eld with an emphasis on both interdisci-
plinary research and conceptual history of the sciences
(Mller and Schmieder, 2008).
In contrast to the Grundbegriffe, the Companion had strong
preference for diachronic differences, included a much
broader variety of sources, and thus offered a survey of the
most signicant social and political concepts in France from
the beginning of the Enlightenment to the Restoration. Its
interest lay largely in the literary, social, and political
conception of reality. The long introduction spells out the
methodological rigor with which the whole enterprise was
undertaken: it focused on the changes in language and
meaning before, during, and after the French Revolution by
using a methodological mix of the quantitative techniques of
lexicometry together with the analysis of historical semantic
of concepts including a standardized set of sources ranging
from literary texts, newspapers, journals, tracts, and
pamphlets to folk songs, popular images, and other products
of mass print culture, all in order to pay attention to the
social history of the illiterate majority. The handbook of
aesthetic concepts, on the other hand, programmatically
allowed its authors an expansive methodological and
conceptual freedom. It aimed at balancing the history of
aesthetic thought through the history of its somewhat 170
major concepts. Yet, it was by no means comparable in its
theoretical ambition, and thus did not attempt in establishing
an independent method neither applicable for the project
nor for conceptual history at large.
The problem of semantics was also addressed in social
theory, mostly as part of a theory of modernity that sustained
the assumption of a major transformation around 1800.
Kosellecks colleague at Bielefeld, the German sociologist
Niklas Luhmann (192798), introduced the concept of
semantics to his social theory of communication in order to
deal with the production of meaning or sensemaking within
social systems (Luhmann, 1995). Meaning for him is the
selective realization of possibilities within a given social
system; semantics in that sense are structures within a concrete
system that allow for the preservation of certain premises of the
production of meaning. According to Luhmann, semantics
evolve in retrospective adaptation to the autopoietic evolution
of social structures (Stheli, 1997).
International Trends in Conceptual History
Today, the practice of conceptual history belongs to a broader
understanding of historical semantics as well as to political and
intellectual history. It has become an international endeavor
absorbing many different national traditions, most prominently
those of Finland, the Netherlands, and the Spanish-speaking
world, with the respective agship-projects often modeled
after the Grundbegriffe. Bibliographies for the growing scholar-
ship are available at http://www.hpscg.org/bibliography (last
updated 2008) and http://www.historyofconcepts.org/database
(currently updated). Curiously, Russian conceptual history
mostly remains the domain of German-speaking scholars.
(Thiergen, 2006; Sperling, 2012) Recently, the import of
German historical scholarship to China also includes historical
semantics. (e.g., Wan-ting, 2012) All these national traditions of
conceptual history aspire to international comparison but are
mostly busy with the groundwork in their respective national
contexts. On a methodological level historians like Willibald
Steinmetz (born 1957) advocate a nonnominalistic approach
that deals not only with concepts but the historical semantics of
different kinds of condensed past experiences (including
popular and visual culture as well as unpublished source
materials) in a transnational context. Along these lines not only
counterconcepts (Junge and Postoutenko, 2011) but also blind
spots and eclipses can play a signicant role. (Hlscher, 2009).
Similar claims have been made for the necessity for a historical
semantics that pays attention to performative and discursive
practices, as well as for the historical-semantic inquiry into the
imaginary (e.g., Koselleck, 1985; Wimmer, 2012) and the visual
(Kohle and Reichardt, 2008).
For research in the historical semantics in the premodern era
the situation is slightly different. As the concept-oriented
approach reaches its limits for research in this period, the
analysis of historical semantics is the most protable route
forward. The existing canonical corpora of medieval sources
that have been edited since the nineteenth century (and which
were digitized early on) have become the resource of quanti-
tative scrutiny in the historical semantics of premodern Europe.
This applies mostly to Latin medieval discourse; a similar
scrutiny of vernacular languages remains a desideratum (Jussen
et al., 2008). Whatever the case, the problem of multilingual
communication in premodern times, necessarily suggests
different research strategies.
In recent periods, new and easily accessible technologies
like Google book search and the experimental Ngram toolbox
(Schmidt, 2012) have become available, which allow for
large-scale literary computing that triggered a revival of
quantitative approaches to historical semantics. Digital

humanists like Franco Moretti (2013) have argued for a new
form of macroanalysis (Jockers, 2013) of so-called big data in
the humanities, which as the huge collaborative editorial
projects of the nineteenth century have a tradition of dealing
with large corpora of texts (Bloch, 1994) but have developed
few methodological procedures for dealing with them. At this
point it seems unclear whether the new technological possi-
bilities will allow for hermeneutic innovation that can replace
or revolutionize critical and close reading or will only change
the ways we access, select, and connect texts. However, the
data deluge will not put an end to the necessity for theory but
will ultimately urge us to rethink the data (as well as the
algorithms that process and read these digital materials)
theoretically and historically.
Besides the Archiv mentioned above to date, several journals
have appeared concerned with research into historical seman-
tics and the history of concepts, i.e., the US Journal for the History
of Ideas (since 1940); the French Cahier de Lexicologie (since
1959); Italian Journal of Interdisciplinary History of Ideas (since
2012); the German Forum Interdisziplinre Begriffsgeschichte
(since 2012); the Finnish periodical Rediscriptions. Yearbook of
Political Thought and Conceptual History (since 1997); the inter-
national journal Contributions to the History of Concepts (since
2005); and the Journal of the History of Ideas in East Asia (since
2011). In particular the latter pair provides platforms for an
international community to publish original empirical and
theoretical research.
Today conceptual history is mostly understood and prac-
ticed within a broader constituency of the study of semantic
change, to some extent taking issue with the methodology of
discourse analysis. One of the major concerns seems to trans-
gress national traditions and languages in order to provide
transnational and transcultural analyses of semantic change
(for the international debate see Hampsher-Monk et al., 1998;
for Finland see Ahonen, 2006; for Italy Chignola, 2002),
including regions that have so far not been subject of study,
such as Russia (Sperling, 2012) and former colonies like India
(Pernau, 2012). Future approaches might include the study of
traveling concepts (Przyrembel, 2011) or even blind spots
(Hlscher, 2009), which allow for transcultural comparison
without perpetuating reigning models of power and meaning.
Another trend will probably be a conceptual history of the last
century, as there exists relatively little research on the history of
concepts in the twentieth century.
Finally, the research experience in the eld may open even
more perspectives on social and cultural history and the history
of everyday life as well as historical metaphorology and
discourse analysis with the common goal of maintaining an as
wide horizon as possible for fruitful future research in the eld.
The aim of conceptual history should, maybe paradoxically,
become to do without a telos, in order to engage in new ways
with contingency, singularity, and the very meaning of the
event as to keep the writing of history open for a history that
goes beyond the limits of rationality.
See also: Discourse Studies; Hermeneutics; Historical Thought
and Historiography: Current Trends; History: Theories and
Methods; Intellectual History; Linguistic Turn and Discourse
Analysis in History; Linguistic Turn; Luhmann, Niklas
Conceptual History: Begriffsgeschichte 553
(192798); Metaphor, Role in Social Thought: History of the
Concept; Modernization; Political Thought, History of; Schmitt,
Carl (18881985); Science, History of; Semantic Differential;
Semantics; Semiotics.
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