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HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT AND THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL CONCEPTS: KOSELLECKS PROPOSAL AND ITALIAN RESEARCH1,2 S.

Chignola3
Abstract: The article analyses different forms of the theoretical paradigm of German Begriffsgeschichte. It focuses on the coherently formalized proposal made by Reinhard Koselleck, showing its relevance for the main Italian schools of interpretation. Koselleck is able to move beyond the historicist framework of Begriffsgeschichte on the basis of a theory of the Sattelzeit or Schwellenzeit located between the eve of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century capable of orienting the reconstruction of the history of political concepts. This presupposition, which refers to a theory of the Vorgriff or historical conceptual reconstructions, draws upon and elaborates a key theme of the logic of the social sciences that was put forth by Max Weber. The possibility to adhere or not to this residual Weberian moment explains the two different modalities in which conceptual history has been interpreted in Italy: one pointing at the reconstruction of the conceptual framework of the nineteenth century, the other aiming at the philosophical-political reconstruction of the genesis, the historic limits and the crisis of the political concepts of Western modernity.

Social History and Begriffsgeschichte Discussing the problems and the methodology of the history of political concepts (Begriffsgeschichte), Reinhart Koselleck identifies at least three main stages of its development. In the beginning, the history of political concepts was conceived as a hermeneutical instrument capable of providing a better understanding and a more accurate interpretation of historical sources. The history of political concepts was, at that stage, a complement to social history. Later, the history of concepts was reinterpreted by the authors of German constitutional history (Verfassungsgeschichte) as a means of preventing unwitting projections on the past of concepts and categories that are taken from contemporary discourse on law. Conceptual history argued that there were complex issues raised by the application to medieval law, for instance, of the obvious distinction between public and private, or by translating the term polis with state, to name just a few examples whose historical meaning was
In memory of Sandro Biral. For their help and suggestions in the writing of this paper which I have discussed in a much shorter version at the EHESS, Paris (October 1999) and then on several occasions at the University of Padua (19992000) I would like to thank Melvin Richter, Kari Palonen, Giuseppe Duso, Jacques Guilhaumou, Raymonde Monnier, Pim de Boer, Jan Ifversen, Janet Coleman, Dario Castiglione, Pierangelo Schiera, Mario Piccinini, Gaetano Rametta, Sandro Mezzadra, Maurizio Ricciardi and Christian Brtsch. All translations are my own. 3 University of Padova, Italy. Email: chisa@sis.it
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HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXIII. No. 3. Autumn 2002

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radically changed by the use of modern terms and their logical framework. However, eventually, the history of political concepts has also turned into a critical approach to the history of ideas, unmasking the limits of the latters methodological presuppositions. According to Koselleck, ideas cannot be understood as stable entities, ready to be applied to different historical figures without modifying their nucleus. Even though Koselleck does not openly take a position, his critique obviously aims at Arthur O. Lovejoys theoretical premises.4 With this scheme, Koselleck reconstructs the development of the German 5 paradigm of the history of concepts. However, he also exposes the main issues raised by his approach. The history of concepts, as it has been conceived by Koselleck and by the Heidelberger Arbeitskreis which planned the 6 monumental Lexikon of German political concepts, points to the reconstruction of the different historical uses of political words and concepts which ought to clarify the meaning these concepts assume in the common use we make of them. The projects goal is to give us a better control over the vocabulary we employ within our experience of political reality. To do this, the history of political concepts has been involved, right from the beginning, in the elaboration of a comprehensive theory of history and concepts that reaches well beyond the historicist presuppositions of German intellectual history. A political concept is not an idea, i.e. it is not an entity with a permanent theoretical core which adapts itself to the course of history; and history,
4 R. Koselleck, Begriffsgeschichte und Sozialgeschichte, in Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt am Main, 1979), pp. 10729. See in particular, pp. 11415. The text has also been translated into English: R. Koselleck, Futures Past, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge MA, 1985). See A.O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being. A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge MA, 1936). 5 See H.G. Maier, Begriffsgeschichte, in Historisches Wrterbuch der Philosophie (Stuttgart, 1971), Vol. 1, pp. 788808. 6 Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, ed. O. Brunner, W. Conze and R. Koselleck (Stuttgart, 197287). On this collective work and on the Heidelberger Arbeitskreis, see: W. Conze, Zur Grundung des Arbeitskreis fr moderne Sozialgeschichte, Hambrger Jahrbuch fr Wirtschafts- und Gesellschaftspolitik, 24 (1979), pp. 2332; K. Tribe, The Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe Project: From History of Ideas to Conceptual History, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 31 (1989), pp. 1804; J.J. Sheehan, Begriffsgeschichte: Theory and Practice, Journal of Modern History, 50 (1978), pp. 31219; M. Richter, The History of Political and Social Concepts. A Critical Introduction (Oxford, 1995). About Melvin Richters book see also the discussion among D. Gordon, D. Armitage and J. Smith, now printed in History of European Ideas, 25 (1999), pp. 937; M. Richter, Begriffsgeschichte Today. An Overview, Finnish Yearbook of Political Thought, 3 (1999), pp. 1327; Ch. Dipper, I Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe dalla storia dei concetti alla teoria delle epoche storiche, Societ e storia, 72 (1996), pp. 385402; P. De Boer, The Historiography of German Begriffsgeschichte and the Dutch Project of Conceptual History, in History of Concepts: Comparative Perspectives, ed. I. Hampsher-Monk, K. Tilmans and F. Van Vree (Amsterdam, 1998), pp. 1322.

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which inevitably refers to the problem of historical experience and to that of a differentiated social ontology of time, cannot be reduced to the undifferentiated and homogeneous course of natural chronology. Chronology is, in fact, entirely devoid of history. Koselleck argues also that not all words are historical concepts (and, even less so, fundamental concepts, Grundbegriffe), and that not all experiences of time make history, but only those that experience the fracture between present and future, between the space of experience (Erfahrungsraum) and the horizon of expectation (Erwartungshorizont). The space of experience and the horizon of expectation are, according to Koselleck, the two polar expressions that determine the framework in which history is possible.7 To illustrate this position he revisits some of the main questions raised by Heideggers existential hermeneutics (even though some say that Hans-Georg Gadamer had an even stronger influence on his work), and by Carl Schmitts interpretation of politics. Drawing a fundamental distinction between Geschichte and Historik, Koselleck uses the former to refer to empirical historiography, which studies past, present and even future realities. Geschichte recollects and elaborates data in historical records. Historik, on the other hand, stands for a reflexive science, which reconstructs the formal criteria of historical acting and suffering8 in a quasi-transcendental manner, and thus acts as a theory of the conditions of all possible history.9 Whereas Geschichte refers to the dimension
7 R. Koselleck, Erfahrungsraum und Erwartungshorizont zwei historische Kategorien, in Vergangene Zukunft, pp. 34975, especially p. 351. 8 See L. Scuccimarra, La Begriffsgeschichte e le sue radici intellettuali, Storica, 10 (1998), pp. 799, in particular p. 57; but also De Boer, The Historiography of German Begriffsgeschichte, p. 15, who considers Carl Schmitts Verfassungslehre to be the putative father of the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe and of Kosellecks historical model. Rather than attributing it to Heidegger, like Dipper, I Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, p. 388, Pim de Boer ascertains the great influence of H.G. Gadamer on Kosellecks work. On his relationship with the Begriffsgeschichte, see H.G. Gadamer, Begriffsgeschichte als Philosophie, Archiv fr Begriffsgeschichte, 14 (1970), pp. 13751; H.G. Gadamer, Begriffsgeschichte und die Sprache der Philosophie (Opladen, 1971). About this: S. Chignola, Storia concettuale e filosofia politica. Per una prima approssimazione, Filosofia politica 4 (1) (1990), pp. 535, particularly pp. 256. 9 See R. Koselleck, Historik und Hermeneutik, in Hermeneutik und Historik, ed. R. Koselleck and H.G. Gadamer (Munich, 1987), now reprinted in R. Koselleck, Zeitschichten. Studien zur Historik (Frankfurt am Main, 2000), pp. 97118. But on the concept of Historik and on its development, see the contribution of H.W. Hedinger Historik, in Historisches Wrterbuch der Philosophie, Vol. 3, pp. 1132 ff. About the Historik-theme in Kosellecks reflection see also R. Koselleck, Im Vorfeld einer neuen Historik, Neue politische Literatur (1961), pp. 578 ff.; R. Koselleck, ber die Theoriebedrftigkeit der Geschichtswissenschaft, in Theorie der Geschichtswissenschaft und Praxis des Geschichtsunterrichts, ed. W. Conze (Stuttgart, 1972), pp. 1028, in particular pp. 11 ff.

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containing all historical facts, Historik, as a science, deals with the framework of presuppositions that makes history possible. Following section two of part I of Sein und Zeit, in which Heidegger investigates the ontological foundation of Daseins existentiality in temporality, historicity must be attributed to the fundamental destination of Being; actually, the very possibility of any historiography is based on this assumption.10 Following this existential analysis, both the problem of history and the possibility of historiography are parts of Beings historicization and of the temporalization of experience: how history can constitute a possible object for historiography can be established only by moving from the mode of being of what is historical, of historicity, and its striking roots into temporality.11 The problem Koselleck inherits from Heidegger is that history can be, and that the modes and the specific quality of the temporality of experience that divides natural chronology from historicity have to be dealt with. Time, which is invisible as such,12 acquires thickness and a historical dimension only in relation to the political-existential coordinates that, to the historian, make it visible as a carrier of human meaning and as a catalyst of collective experiences. According to Koselleck, the historicization of the experience of time, i.e. the making of history, depends on five central antitheses which also constitute the transcendental categories of his ontology of finitude:
1. 2. 3. 4. the couple you must die/you can kill the couple friend/foe the couple internal/external the couple parents/child (here Koselleck recovers the Heideggerian category of Geworfenheit, and integrates it with Hannah Arendts concept of nativity, in order to establish both the constitutive finitude of time in human life, as well as the alternation between generations, as necessary conditions for the possibility of infinite histories) the antithetical couples of hierarchical relationship (beneath/ below; master/servant; strong/weak, and so forth)

5.

seen as existential articulations of the problem of power and domination, and as modalities of the historical formation of subjective expectations of liberation and the organization of counter-power.13 These categories, representing
Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tbingen, 1827), I, 2, 45. Ibid., I, 2, Kap. V, 72. 12 R. Koselleck, Storia dei concetti e concetti della storia, Contemporanea, 1 (1) (1998), pp. 1124, p. 12. 13 Koselleck, Historik und Hermeneutik, pp. 118 ff. On the logic of the Koselleckian Gegenbegriffe and on its limitations, see J. Coleman, The Practical Use of Begriffsgeschichte by an Historian of European Pre-Modern Political Thought: Some Problems, History of Concepts Newsletter, 2 (1999).
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the existential determinations14 of the historicization of experience (in the Heideggerian sense), make history possible. They determine the historical field of all actions, which (authentically or inauthentically, next to, together or against other human beings) express the surplus of possibility that determines the essence of human finitude. The antithetical nature of the definitions reflects that, within the temporal finitude in which a horizon reveals tensions, struggles, fractures, inconsistencies open up, which, as situations, remain unresolvable, but for whose diachronical solution all the unities of action have to be activated, either to keep on living or to fade with them.15 Historical time is opened up to the twilight zone of the existential tensions that cover the subjective and the collective experience(s) of finitude (Heidegger) and to the system of forces the possibility of fusion in friendship, the fractures, and the polarity of extreme hostility that defines the existential coordinates of politics (Schmitt).16 The boiling magma of crude temporality in political struggle, and the experience of time as the ontological matrix of finitude (and in both cases only in the impossibility of resolving the contradiction that exposes the structure of origins), constitute the very possibility that history can be thought of as a space containing infinite possible histories. One of the main conceptual presuppositions of the history of ideas is thus being deconstructed. According to Koselleck, it is impossible to project the system of transformations of the historical meaning of words, ideas and concepts onto the linear surface of chronology. Since it is the experience of historical time which interacts with the shift of meaning producing the historiogenetic scansion of the present, past and future time cannot be assumed to be the carrier of a continuous transmission of constant quantities as is presumed by the history of ideas. Time which has something to do with the subjective and collective experiences that produce history cannot be taken as a mere indicator of the historical transformations of ideas.17 In the course of separation between the space of experience and the horizon of
Koselleck, Historik und Hermeneutik, p. 109. Ibid., p. 110. 16 C. Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen (1927, 1932) (Berlin, 1965). On Schmitt, see the important study by C. Galli, Genealogia della politica. Carl Schmitt e la crisi del pensiero politico moderno (Bologna, 1996), pp. 733 ff. It is well worth reflecting on the fact that the very authors who introduced Carl Schmitt to the Italian debate (mainly Gianfranco Miglio and Pierangelo Schiera) also introduced the German Begriffsgeschichte and German social and constitutional history by editing and translating the texts of Otto Brunner, Ernst W. Bckenfrde, Otto Hintze and Reinhart Koselleck. Scholars from Miglios school edited and translated the contributions Democracy, Politics, Progress and Freedom from the Grundbegriffe. 17 Cf. M. Richter, Begriffsgeschichte and the History of Ideas, Journal of the History of Ideas, 48 (1987), pp. 24763.
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expectation, ideas, words and metaphors act as instruments and carriers of the conceptualization of the very experience of history.
The history of concepts has always to do with social and political situations or events, provided that the latter have been previously conceptualized and articulated in the language of historical sources. In a stricter sense, this procedure interprets history through the concepts which have crossed it in different moments.18

The conceptual dimension is inherent to history. Koselleck fully recognizes the Hegelian stigma of the formula history of concepts, which he corroborates with Immanuel Kants logical assumption that there can neither be an experience without a concept, nor any concept without experience.19 History can be investigated only if historical experience has been conceptualized and has become available through historical testimonies and documents. The history of concepts is something radically different from a mere Hilfsdisziplin for social history.20 One of the main challenges Koselleck faces is, I believe, precisely the emancipation of the history of concepts from the historicist paradigm of German constitutional history. For the latter, the recognition of the specificity and the autonomy of the vocabulary of historical sources means, first of all, that it is possible to recover the original constitutional structures and semantic contexts which it focuses on, but without imposing upon them schemes which derive from the modern understanding of law and the constitution, and thus without reflecting instances such as that of unity and sovereignty, constituent power, the monopoly of the use of force by the State, the difference between public and private law, and so on.21 Even though there is nothing wrong with schemes derived from modern understandings of law and constitution, Koselleck argues that this is not the real problem of historicity. To show why, he adopts and re-elaborates some observations already formulated by Max Weber which show that a too-limited understanding of history (and, according to Koselleck, of the history of concepts) risks being empty and essentially optional within the horizon of the sciences of culture. This is, of course, the reason behind Kosellecks polemic with Otto Brunner: to be critically aware of not imposing modern concepts and categories onto the language of historical sources can be pushed to an extreme where the very science of history
Koselleck, Begriffsgeschichte und Sozialgeschichte, pp. 1201. Koselleck, Storia dei concetti e concetti della storia, pp. 1112. 20 On the contrary, this was its proper original meaning. See: Maier, Begriffsgeschichte; Chignola, Storia concettuale e filosofia politica. 21 See for example, O. Brunner, Neue Wege der Verfassuns- und Sozialgeschichte (Gttingen, 2nd edn., 1968); O. Brunner, Land und Herrschaft. Grundfragen der territorialen Verfassungsgeschichte sterreichs in Mittelalter (Vienna, 5th edn., 1965); O. Brunner, Sozialgeschichte Europas in Mittelalter (Gttingen, 1978); E.W. Bckenfrde, Die deutsche verfassungsgeschichtliche Forschung im 19. Jahrhundert. Zeitgebundene Fragestellungen und Leitbilder (Berlin, 1961).
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becomes silent, when, in the name of the pasts autonomy the historian is forced to reconstruct concepts as they were, renouncing any interpretation or refusing to trace the histories starting from them.22 At stake are the theoretical assumptions that determine the very logic of the sciences of culture. Koselleck draws on Max Weber, according to whom:
there is no pure objective critical analysis of cultural life, or what is perhaps narrower regarding our purpose but means much the same of social phenomena, independent of specific and unilateral points of view from which they have been chosen expressly or tacitly, consciously or unwittingly as objects of research, and analysed and organized in the course of exposition.23

He adopts Webers argument in favour of the theoretical Vorgriff which has to precede all use of historical sources and every attempt to trace histories (of concepts, too), if they are meant to be meaningful to us. However, we shall have occasion to come back to this soon. First, we ought to consider Kosellecks attempt to emancipate the history of concepts from its auxiliary role with regard to social history. The possibility of detaching concepts from their original context (of course, only after having reconstructed and analysed the particular meaning they assume there), of reconstructing the succession of their transformations in the course of history, and of knitting them into a meaningful narration, means that a philological methodology is raised to the level of the history of concepts whose function is to supply the cultural sciences with a hermeneutic that facilitates the interpretation of historical sources.24 However, according to Kosellecks theoretical
22 R. Koselleck, Begriffsgeschichtliche Probleme der Verfassungsgeschichtsschreibung, in Gegenstand und Begriffe der Verfassungsgeschichtschreibung, ed. H. Quaritsch, Beihefte zu Der Staat, Heft 6 (Berlin, 1983), pp. 721, p. 13: Meine These lautet, da auch eine stringente, gerade eine stringente Begriffsgeschichte ohne gegenwartsbezogene Definitionen auskommt. Das ergibt sich auch aus Brunners Werk. Eine quellensprachlich gebundene Darstellung der Verfassungsgeschichte wird stumm, wenn die vergangenen Begriffe nicht bersetzt oder umschrieben werden. Sonst handelt es sich um eine Textwiedergabe alter Quellen in Verhltnis von 1:1. But on this point, and on the historicist residue in the history of concepts see also: I. Veit-Brause, A Note on Begriffsgeschichte, History and Theory, 1 (1981), pp. 617. See: Chignola, Storia concettuale e filosofia politica, pp. 223; S. Chignola, Storia dei concetti e storiografia del discorso politico, Filosofia politica, 11 (1) (1997), pp. 99122, especially pp. 1067. 23 M. Weber, Die Objektivitt sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer Erkenntnis (1904), now in Gesammelte Aufstze zur Wissenschaftslehre, hrsg. von J. Winckelmann (Tbingen, 1982), pp. 146214, p. 170: Es gibt keine schlechthin objektive wissenschaftliche Analyse des Kulturlebens oder was vielleicht etwas Engeres fr unsern Zweck aber sicher nichts wesentlich anderes bedeutet der sozialen Erscheinungen unabhngig von speziellen und einseitigen Gesichtpunkten, nach denen sie ausdrcklich oder stillschweigend, bewut oder unbewut als Forschungsobjekt ausgewhlt, analysiert und darstellt gegliedert werden. 24 Koselleck, Begriffsgeschichte und Sozialgeschichte, pp. 1278.

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model of a concept, in order to obtain scientific knowledge, once the meaning of a set of concepts has been reconstructed in its original frame of experience (which, of course, has to be articulated by the very means of them), the synchronic analysis (the constitutional historiography of Otto Brunner) still needs to be interwoven with histories that follow a diachronic time-line and allow for the reconstruction of the multi-layered transformations which the singular constellations of concepts inevitably underwent. Only then can we trace their history. It is crucial to understand that the integration of the synchronic level (defined by the semantic consistency of the concepts within their specific historical context) and the diachronic level (the system of transformations, innovations, misunderstandings and shifts of meaning which history as a science inevitably produces in the understanding and explanation of these concepts) have to have a theoretical anticipation (Vorgriff) as a starting point, and that this anticipation has to be anachronistic. Or rather, were there neither need nor possibility of verifying the perspective that determines any historical hypothesis, it would hardly make sense to talk of history.25 To argue in this way, Koselleck recovers some crucial observations from Max Weber, mainly: (1) his distinction between chronology and history, and the assumption that culture has to be understood as a finite section of the senseless infinitude of the becoming of the world, whose sense and meaning are attributed and always from the point of view of man;26 (2) consequently,
See Chignola, Storia dei concetti e storiografia del discorso politico, pp. 1058; I. Hampsher-Monk, Speech-Acts, Language or Conceptual Histories?, in History of Concepts: Comparative Perspectives, ed. Hampsher-Monk, Tilmans and Van Vree, pp. 3750, especially pp. 478. This is, in my opinion, what definitively makes the research programmes of Koselleck, J.G.A. Pocock and Q. Skinner mutually untranslatable. For a debate between them see the essays now published in The Meaning of Historical Terms and Concepts. New Studies on Begriffsgeschichte, ed. H. Lehmann and Melvin Richter, German Historical Institute, Occasional Paper N. 15 (Washington DC, 1996). Koselleck directly polemicizes on another occasion where speech-act theory is assumed to be fundamentally distinct from the history of political discourse (contra Quentin Skinner) in R. Koselleck, Social history and Begriffsgeschichte (1986), now in History of Concepts: Comparative Perspectives, ed. Hampsher-Monk, Tilmans and Van Vree, pp. 2335, 26: No speech-act is the act itself. The consequence of this statement is drawn at pp. 345 of the essay. A history of political discourse has to remain subordinate to social history, which directly concerns facts and things. Quentin Skinner, in his turn, recently denounced the misunderstandings implicit in the positions which ascribed to him (but, it has to be remembered, starting from explicit statements advanced by him) a prejudicial rejection of the possibility of there being a history of Rhetoric and Conceptual Change, Finnish Yearbook of Political Thought, 3 (1999), pp. 6073, especially pp. 623. 26 Weber, Die Objektivitt sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer Erkenntnis, p. 180: Kultur ist ein vom Standpunkt des Menschen aus mit Sinn und Bedeutung bedachter endlicher Ausschnitt aus der sinnlosen Unendlichkeit des Weltgeschehens. But see also p. 184: Endlos wlzt sich der Strom des unermesslichen Geschehens der Ewigkeit entgegen. Immer neu und altes gefrbt bilden sich die
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the idea that it is not the facts or the connections of things but rather, the conceptual connections of problems27 that serve as the basis of the sciences of culture; (3) the assumption that a point of view is necessary in order to define the field of research, and metaphorically to force the sources to speak to us,28 that is, if historiographical representations are to make sense, such sense can only consist in the significance that the reconstructed history assumes for us;29 and lastly, (4) a very specific view of science, and of the science of history, based upon the logic of modern science, whose aim it is to recompose different histories in a more comprehensive framework and to formulate a theory of modernity starting from the sense these histories make to us. On this basis, Koselleck makes his methodological proposal and, as we shall see, he remains very closely attached to it.30 In order to understand the methodological hypothesis that supports the individual histories of the concepts presented in the Lexikon it is important to keep in mind that, according to Koselleck, each Begriffsgeschichte has to start from a strong theoretical anticipation. Only then can a determined interest in, and a strong sense of the present 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 conceptualize his consciousness of time through the elaboration of a cultural construction of the present, of a past related to it, and of a future which, starting from the present, can be organized in terms of collective action. The original editorial intention of the Lexikon der geschichtlichen Grundbegriffe underwent an evolution after the death of Otto Brunner and Werner Conze which brought it closer to the methodological assumptions of Koselleck (who eventually conferred upon the project its definitive
Kulturprobleme, welche die Menschen bewegen, flssig bleibt damit der Umkreis dessen, was aus jenem stets gleich unendliche Strome des individuellen Sinn und Bedeutung fr uns erhlt, historisches Individuum wird. 27 Ibid., p. 166: Nicht die sachlichen Zusammenhnge der Dinge, sondern die gedanklichen Zusammenhnge der Probleme liegen den Arbeitsgebieten der Wissenschaften zugrunde. 28 Ibid., p. 170; p. 182. 29 Koselleck, Begriffsgeschichte und Sozialgeschichte, p. 115: Ein solches Verfahren steht unter dem Vorgebot, vergangene Wortbedeutungen in unser heutiges Verstndnis zu bersetzen. Jede Wort- oder Begriffsgeschichte fhrt von einer Feststellung vergangener Bedeutungen zu einer Festsetzung dieser Bedeutungen fr uns. Indem dieser Vorgang von der Begriffsgeschichte methodisch reflektiert wird, wird bereits die synchronische Analyse der Vergangenheit diachronisch ergnzt. Es ist ein methodisches Gebot der Diachronie, die Registratur vergangener Wortbedeutungen wissenschaftlich fr uns neu zu definieren. 30 This has also been noted by J.L. Villacaas Berlanga. See his Historia de los conceptos y responsabilidad poltica: un ensayo de contextualizacin, Res Publica. Revista de la historia y el presente de los conceptos polticos, 1 (1998), pp. 14174, especially pp. 142 ff.

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theoretical co-ordinates),31 and came to reflect this strong historical thesis. In fact, the Lexikon attempts to organize a vast selection of materials, and to make sense of, without losing sight of, the historical validation which inevitably ties historical semantics to social history.32 The concepts whose histories are developed and analysed in the Lexikon are not lemmas or sample items of a mere collection (Sammlung). They are indicators of historical change, which at the same time are also its concrete factors, since they play an important part in the formation of consciousness and in the behavioural control of social actors; the lexicographic analysis is thus immediately linked to social history.33 This explains why Kosellecks entire project presupposes that not all words are concepts. Historical concepts are only those in which the hard core of collective experience of time is deposed and stratified, the history of concepts cannot be the history of words (Wortgeschichte) but only of that shady zone of convergence (Konvergenz) between concept and history at which a specific modality of historical experience is condensed, perpetuated or renewed.34 Taking into account the stratography of the meanings sedimented in the use of concepts, Koselleck argues that it is possible to identify the variation of the different historic positions collectively held with regard to the connection between events and structures, the overlapping of antinomic logics and distinguished fragments of experience, without losing sight of the directions determined by the progressive emersion of the modern world. In fact, Koselleck draws the political and
R. Koselleck, Richtlinien fr das Lexikon politisch-sozialer Begriffe der Neuzeit, Archiv fr Begriffsgeschichte (1967). On the prehistory of the Lexikon see W. Conze, Histoire des notions dans le domain socio-politique (Rapport sur llaboration dun lexique allemand), in Problmes de stratification sociale: Actes du colloque international (1966), Publications de la Facult des Lettres et Sciences Humaines de Paris-Sorbonne, Srie Recherches, t. 43 (Paris, 1968), pp. 316. About this, Richter, The History of Political and Social Concepts, pp. 26 ff.; Scuccimarra, La Begriffsgeschichte e le sue origini intellettuali, pp. 44 ff. 32 The idea that Kosellecks proposal can reconcile the history of concepts and social history was attacked by Wehler. See: H.U. Wehler, Geschichtswissenschaft Heute, in Stichworte zur Geistigen Situation der Zeit, ed. J. Habermas (Frankfurt am Main, 1979), Vol. 2, pp. 70953 (especially p. 725); H.U. Wehler, Probleme der modernen deutschen Sozialgeschichte, in Krisenherde des Kaiserreichs (Gttingen, 1970), pp. 31323. 33 R. Koselleck, La storia sociale moderna e i tempi storici, in La teoria della storiografia oggi, ed. P. Rossi (Milan, 1983), pp. 14158, especially p. 157. 34 R. Koselleck, Einleitung, in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, ed. O. Brunner, W. Conze and R. Koselleck (Stuttgart, 1975), p. XXIII; Koselleck, Begriffsgeschichte und Sozialgeschichte, p. 127. For a critical discussion of the meaning of concept in Kosellecks Begriffsgeschichte see H.E. Bdeker, Concept Meaning Discourse. Begriffsgeschichte reconsidered, in History of Concepts: Comparative Perspectives, ed. Hampsher-Monk, Tilmans and Van Vree, pp. 5164, in particular pp. 54 ff.
31

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constitutional coordinates of modernity from his analysis of the different concepts which constitute the very framework of modernity. His theory of transition thus subsumes the theoretical Vorgriff, and makes it possible that history as a science is recomposed as a history of concepts. If it is true that the primary goals of the Lexikon, as they have been stated by Koselleck, are to enhance our scientific control over the linguistic extension of fundamental concepts, and at the same time to gather a huge mass of information on the history of the German political vocabulary,35 then it is at least as important to notice how this information allows us to define the rupture (or the diverse ruptures) within the semantic sedimentation of the German political lexicon. In fact, only the ruptures confer sense and direction to the reconstruction of the history of the individual concepts, and end up guiding it. Between the end of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century, we can witness the progressive democratization of political concepts, whose meaning breaks off from the stndische Welt of the ancient European constitution, the political and philosophical legitimation of critique as a veritable court of law, in which the individual as a rational being has the possibility to challenge history, delivering the ancient regime to its crisis.36 In short, we can assist the setting in motion of that formidable process of temporalization of experience, which (to say it within the most condensed scheme of philosophy of history), translates the apprehension caused by the present into a prognostic future. Only if we understand this intention can the singular begriffsgeschichtliche analyses of the German political vocabulary, of which the Lexikon is made, be understood as parts of a whole. The drastic acceleration of time which in the course of the eighteenth century swept through the orders of European thought, made it impossible to experience or think of the present . . . as present, and carried a future in which the present, which has become unapprehendable, has to be recovered on the plane of historical philosophy in order to be, at least in this way, anticipated, dominated and realized.37 The process of acceleration of historical experience is what upsets the conceptual frames by means of which history has been lived and interpreted until then, and this gives rise to a new beginning, starting from the disconcerting detection of pasts future.38 A series of irreversible processes such as the democratization (Demokratisierung), the temporalization (Verzeitlichung) and the acceleration (Beschleunigung) of historical experience, which are recorded by the changing meanings of concepts which
Koselleck, Einleitung, p. XIX. See R. Koselleck, Kritik und Krise. Ein Beitrag zur Pathogenese der brgerlichen Welt (Freiburg-Munich, 1959). 37 R. Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft der frhen Neuzeit, in Vergangene Zukunft, pp. 1737, especially p. 34. 38 R. Koselleck, Historia magistra vitae. ber die Auflsung des Topos im Horizont neuzeitlich bewegter Geschichte, in Vergangene Zukunft, pp. 3866.
35 36

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inevitably are or can be labelled as being political and ideological, mark, according to Koselleck, the transition which makes of modernity the epoch of modern political concepts. This transition the complex system of transformations it involves, its pretension to renew historical experience as such, and the question whether, on the universal level of Weltgeschichte, modernity really is consistent as an epoch defines the logical space in which the histories of the individual concepts have to be organized. They are mobilized in order to verify a very strong research hypothesis that aims at the transformation of historical narrative into scientific understanding: the history of political concepts embraces that zone of convergence in which the past and its concepts enter modern concepts. It needs a theory, without which it is impossible to understand what unifies and what divides in time.39 The re-composition of social history and the history of political concepts is, at least to this extent, an effect of the analysis leading to the recognition of the semantic depth and the thickness of historical concepts. They are catalysts and organizers of specific experiences of history, disposed along an axis of historical meaning that is determined by the theoretical Vorgriff, the idea that there is a transition to modernity. Concepts provide for a differentiated, non-linear, and sometimes even antinomical scansion of the different stages of the process of commutation,40 in which the concepts of the experiences of ancient politics and of the stndische Welt are translated into the modern vocabulary of politics, and in which their meaning changes radically (even when there appears to be a strong continuity of their semantic support, as for example with words such as democracy, people, right, State etc.). However, this very process also provides a strong contribution to the definition and self-interpretation of political modernity. The analysis of the history of concepts unveils a social and collective process realizing a determined dimension of historical experience the modern world as such. Reconstructing the specific differences between the ideal-type of this historical experience and the preceding experience(s), the history of concepts determines the ideal-type of past historical experience. The commutation process asserts the possibility of a linear translation of the different meanings that concepts assumed in the course of history, and thus the possibility of projecting their history back in time, shedding light on the entire process of the transformation of political experience and vocabulary. From the point of view of a historical science, this gives rise to an idealtypical interpretation of a structural (and thus inevitably abstract) process,
Koselleck, Begriffsgeschichte und Sozialgeschichte, p. 127: Die Begriffsgeschichte umfat jene Konvergenzzone, in der die Vergangenheit samt ihren Begriffen in die heutigen Begriffe eingeht. Sie bedarf also einer Theorie, ohne die das Gemeinsame und das Trennende in der Zeit nicht erfat werden kann. As Dipper observed, hardly any of the Lexikons contributors develops this strong theoretical assumption. 40 Koselleck talks of an Umwandlungsproze zur Moderne, as commutation process. See Koselleck, Einleitung, p. XIX.
39

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which is entirely based on a historicizing presupposition rooted in the present, whose constitution heavily depends on the presence of past histories. As Max Weber argued:
what becomes an object of research and how far this research has to stretch into the infinity of causal connections, that is determined by the researcher and by the ideas of value which dominate his time; in what way? In the method of research the point of view which directs him is determinative for the formation of the conceptual means which he employs, whereas in their application the researcher is bound, here as everywhere, by the norms of our thought.41

As far as Kosellecks methodological proposal and the way the history of concepts operates in it are concerned, the autonomy and singularity of non-modern contexts which come in contact with the analysis, paradoxically end up being denied for the very reason that they are made fertile for a history connecting present, past and future in a unitary (even though Koselleck sees it as being antinomical and non-linear) commutation process, designed to provide us with an insight into the thick genealogy of the present by means of historiographic representations. Concepts and contexts of experience which are not familiar with the modern concept of history such as ancient or medieval experiences, as Koselleck himself shows42 are thus being historicized because they are inserted in the river-bed carved out by the modern concept of history (or of history as a science) which is meaningful for us, i.e. for those who came after Max Weber.43 Kosellecks attempt to go beyond the limits established by Otto Brunners constitutional history whose aggressive anti-modernism tends to interpret the pre-absolutist constitutional structures of the German territories as being constitutively incomprehensible within the conceptual framework of modern statehood in order to demonstrate the limited historicity of liberal political categories44 reaches its highest point. The conscious attempt to reopen
41 Weber, Die Objektivitt sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer Erkenntnis, p. 184: was Gegenstand der Untersuchung wird, und wie weit diese Untersuchung sich in die Unendlichkeit der Kausalzusammenhnge erstreckt, das bestimmen die den Forscher und seine Zeit beherrschenden Wertideen; im Wie?, in der Methode der Forschung, ist der leitende Gesichtspunkt zwar . . . fr die Bildung der begrifflichen Hilfsmittel, die er verwendet, bestimmend, in der Art ihrer Verwendung aber ist der Forscher selbstverstndlich hier wie berall an die Normen unseres Denkens gebunden. Denn wissenschaftliche Wahrheit ist nur, was fr alle gelten will, die Wahrheit wollen. 42 See Koselleck, Historia magistra vitae. 43 See Koselleck, Begriffsgeschichte und Sozialgeschichte, p. 115: Indem dieser Vorgang von der Begriffsgeschichte methodisch reflektiert wird, wird bereits die synchronische Analyse der Vergangenheit diachronisch ergnzt. Es ist ein methodisches Gebot der Diachronie, die Registratur vergangener Wortbedeutungen fr uns neu zu definieren (emphasis added). 44 See J. Nicholas, New Path of Social History and Old Path of Historical Romanticism. An Essay Review on the Work of Otto Brunner, Journal of Social History, 70 (1969); R. Jtte, Zwischen Stndestaat und Austrofaschismus. Der Beitrag Otto Brunners

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the problem of the transition between the different conceptual orders, to reintroduce the possibility of a historicization in order to recompose the different histories, claims to be scientific because of its ability to close the idealtypical circle of imputation that links different concepts, the meaning they assumed in different historical contexts and the complex transformations which contributed to the formation of the modern world. Only on the level of generalization achieved by the history of concepts is it possible to identify the temporal ratio, which exists between event and structure, the coexistence between duration and change.45 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. The task Koselleck assigns to the history of concepts is to contribute to an inventory of concepts sufficiently formal and sufficiently general (based on the empirically available reservoir of possible meanings which have been developed in the course of history), which allow the description of lasting constitutional possibilities, but also of their transformation and their interrelations, and can cast light upon the historical structures without losing touch with their immanent identities and their transformations. (Only) in this sense, can social history be exact, and it is this very discovery that Koselleck acknowledges as Webers.46 Kosellecks proposal for a history of political concepts thus represents a high fulfilment of Max Webers methodological heritage.
The conceptual apparatus which the past has developed by means of the elaboration, i.e., by means of the conceptual transformation of the reality immediately given and its insertion in those concepts which conformed with the situation of its knowledge and with the direction of its interest,
zur Geschichtsschreibung, Jahrbuch des Instituts fr Deutsche Geschichte, 13 (1984); O.G. Oexle, Sozialgeschichte Begriffsgeschichte Wissenschaftsgeschichte. Anmerkungen zum Werk Otto Brunners, Vierteljahrschrift fr Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 71 (1984), pp. 30541; H. Boldt, Otto Brunner. Zur Theorie der Verfassungsgeschichte, Annali dellIstituto storico italo-germanico in Trento, 13 (1987); J. Van Horn Melton, From Folk History to Structural History: Otto Brunner (18981982) and the Radical Conservative Roots of German Social History, in Paths of Continuity. Central European Historiography from the 1930s and the 1950s, ed. H. Lehmann and J. Van Horn Melton (Cambridge, 1994). On Kosellecks conservatism see also F. Oncina Coves, Experiencia y poltica en la historia conceptual, Res Publica. Revista de Historia y el presente de los conceptos polticos, 1 (1998), pp. 10319. 45 Koselleck, Begriffsgeschichte und Sozialgeschichte, p. 128: Auf welcher Ebene der Verallgemeinerung man sich bewegt, und das tut jede Sozialhistorie, die Dauer, Trends und Fristen erfragt, das kann nur die Reflexion auf die dabei angewendten Begriffe sagen, die das zeitlich Verhltnis von Ereignis und Struktur oder das Nebeinander von Dauer und Vernderung theoretisch klren hilf. 46 Ibid.

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stays in unbroken contradiction with what we can and want to obtain from reality as a new knowledge. In this struggle the progress of the work of cultural science is realized.47

Starting from the Weberian challenge that the progress (or recession) of cultural sciences depends on their capacity to elaborate the pasts conceptual framework and to reach a better understanding of the present that is, starting from the possibility either to adopt or to object to the Weberian legacy in Kosellecks model of a Begriffsgeschichte, two different research perspectives have evolved in Italy. History of Political Thought and the History of Political Concepts In Italy, the history of political concepts has not been employed to develop lexicographical works, neither has it been used to reconstruct a political vocabulary.48 It has been an occasion to import the German discussion on constitutional and social historiography. Also, some contributions to the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe have been translated, seminars have been held and journals have been published. However, above all the history of political concepts has given rise to research projects and to anthologies characterized by their strong unitary framework of analysis, which has been elaborated as a strategy for its autonomous use and which, I believe, is quite unique. The main centres of study and research on the history of political concepts in Italy today are the University and the Istituto Storico Italo-Germanico in Trento, which publish the journals Scienza & Politica and the Annali dellIstituto storico italo-germanico, as well as the universities of Padua and Bologna which publish Filosofia politica the first part of each issue of which presents Materiali per un lessico politico europeo (elements for a European political lexicon) as well as some of the main anthologies. The universities of Milan and Bologna host more general editorial projects, which aiming at the general public publish political dictionaries that take into account specific aspects of the history of political vocabulary.49
47 Weber, Die Objektivitt sozialwissenschaftlicher Erkenntnis, p. 207: Der Gedankenapparat, welchen die Vergangenheit durch denkende Bearbeitung, das heit aber in Wahrheit: denkende Umbildung, der unmittelbar gegebenen Wirklichkeit und durch Einordnung in diejenigen Begriffe, die dem Stande ihrer Erkenntnis und der Richtung ihres Interesses entsprachen, entwickelt hat, steht in steter Auseinandersetzung mit dem, was wir an neuer Erkenntnis aus der Wirklichkeit gewinnen knnen und wollen. In diesem Kampf vollzieht sich der Fortschritt der kulturwissenschaftlichen Arbeit. 48 This also occurred in France. For the French development of the history of concepts as a histoire linguistique des usages conceptuels, see J. Guilhaumou, De lhistoire des concepts lhistoire linguistique des usages conceptuels, Gnese, 38 (2000), pp. 10518. 49 See I concetti della politica: Libert, Progresso, Democrazia, Politica [the Italian translations of the following contributions to the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe:

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However, the fact that German constitutional historiography has disembarked in Italy, along with the translations of Bckenfrde, Brunner, Hintze and Koselleck, and the first important research on the modern State, were mainly due to Pierangelo Schiera and his students and collaborators at the Istituto Storico Italo-Germanico in Trento. Their translations and the discussions they aroused opened the way for further research on the general history of the modern State that were to include comparative perspectives and that assumed that political concepts and their history represent the material usevalue of the doctrines. At first, this research adopted the Koselleckian premise according to which the German political lexicon documents a process of ideologization, of democratization and of politicization of political concepts between the end of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth that unveils the drastic changes in historical experience. In fact, the horizon of experience became mobile and was temporalized by the discovery of the possibility of foreseeing the future in the past and impressing the present onto the patterns of the philosophy of history. Early Italian research in conceptual history thus focused its attention upon the ideological changes produced by the constitutional theories of the nineteenth century, and argued that political theory had to be studied through the filter of political doctrine.50 Through the description of the link between theory and practice, between the theoretical imagination and concrete political practice which occurs in the process of the ideologization of theory, historiography was able to recover the material use-value of political concepts, to cast them into the intermediate space between thought and action, between theoretical speculation and the course of history, and to evaluate the concepts both as indicators of the historical process and as its concrete factors. Between theory and practice, political doctrine takes shape on the level of the production of knowledge and the practice of government, in which the hegemonic process that guides the constitutional processes is asserted.51 The field itself thus offers grounds for research not only in the historiography of political theory but also in social and juridical history. This research aims at the historicization and the contextualization of the concepts of the political lexicon within a system constituted by both ideological and political
Freiheit, Fortschritt, Demokratie, Politik], ed. L. Ornaghi and V.E. Parsi (Venice, 19913); see also Lessico della politica, a series edited by Carlo Galli (Bologna). 50 See I concetti fondamentali delle scienze sociali e dello Stato in Italia e in Germania tra Otto e Novecento, ed. R. Gherardi and G. Gozzi (Bologna, 1992); Saperi della borghesia e storia dei concetti fra Otto e Novecento, ed. R. Gherardi and G. Gozzi (Bologna, 1995); P. Schiera, Considerazioni sulla Begriffsgeschichte a partire dai Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe di Brunner, Conze e Koselleck, Societ e storia, 72 (1996), pp. 40311. 51 See P. Schiera, Il laboratorio borghese. Scienza e politica nella Germania dellOttocento (Bologna, 1987); G. Gozzi, Modelli politici e questione sociale in Italia e in Germania tra Otto e Novecento (Bologna, 1988).

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structures and processes which guide the articulation of specific historical phases. Tracing the history of concepts therefore means analysing them within their material context of use and then evaluating the contribution that the concepts and the political doctrines made either to the rise or to the obstruction of constitutional processes. If an area like that of political doctrines has not yet evolved, or if political concepts cannot be contextualized within such an area, it obviously is necessary to distinguish between the theory and the practice that came before, and those theories and practices that are the results of the processes of the ideologization of political theory. It is also necessary for the area of the constitution to be invested with processes of controversial political polarization, which temporalize the processes that determine the recognition of problems relating to the constitution or to government, and their priority within the political agenda.52 All of this is needed to reconstruct the hegemony achieved by those concepts of the political lexicon that are deployed in both or all opposing political camps, and thus become authentic Kampfbegriffe. Having said this, at first the Italian approach to the history of concepts had adopted large parts of Kosellecks model. It investigated the concepts as elementary components of doctrine, and historicized them by contextualizing them within the framework of the processes of the ideologization, politicization and temporalization of the political-historical experience. These began to be revealed between the end of the eighteenth century and the mid-nineteenth century. The Istituto Storico Italo-Germanico in Trento, therefore, promoted seminars and research initiatives which concentrated mainly on constitutional history and on those themes which reflected a major social, political and practical involvement of the concepts, such as in the field of science, or that of the immediately applicable theories of public administration, of Polizeiwissenschaften, of Statistics and of Staatswissenschaften, the general administrative law. In each of these fields, historical constitutional research used the history of concepts as its main instrument to contextualize political theory and the concrete governmental arrangements that were set according to those theories.53 In summary, the first direction that the Italian reception and re-elaboration of the history of concepts took and coherently developed was based on the following theoretical premises. (1) It evaluated the elements of the political lexicon or rather the concepts taking into account the permanent dynamic relationship they install with their social context, inasmuch as they refer to
See the accurate M. Ricciardi, Lavoro, cittadinanza, costituzione. Dottrina della societ e diritti fondamentali in Germania tra movimento sociale e rivoluzione, in Saperi della borghesia e storia dei concetti fra Otto e Novecento, ed. Gherardi and Gozzi, pp. 11959. 53 Schiera, Il laboratorio borghese; I concetti fondamentali delle scienze sociali e dello Stato in Italia e in Germania tra Otto e Novecento, ed. Gherardi and Gozzi; Saperi della borghesia e storia dei concetti fra Otto e Novecento, ed. Gherardi and Gozzi.
52

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power games and to the struggle for hegemony that express the material constitution (Verfassung) of a given historical epoch. (2) It thus analysed concepts in view of a coherent historicization capable of revealing the fundamental mechanisms that determined the passage between theory and practice within a specific historical phase. (3) It attributed paramount importance to the understanding of the historical significance of the convergence of political theory and the processes that determined the modern state, focusing on the roles played by science (Wissenschaft), the process of constitutional recognition of the doctrines and theoretical knowledge (the institutionalization at university level of the political and administrative disciplines, the birth of political science, the theoretical framework for founding universities, scientific academies, or Grandes coles). (4) With regard to social or constitutional history, it saw the history of concepts as an auxiliary discipline that allows a reconstruction of the general logical mechanisms and the political, economic and institutional strategies on which the vicissitudes of the constitutional transition between the nineteenth and twentieth century are based. (5) All this coherently pursued the aim of an accurate historicization of thought in view of a more precise reconstruction of the constitutional framework of the modern state. However, starting from the effects which modern political philosophy had on the constitutions (the way in which philosophy anticipated, integrated or planned the system of logical references that determined the modern state), and thus following Schieras initial work but also relying on the very historians he had introduced into the Italian debate (mainly Otto Brunner, but also Otto Hintze, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck), a second direction of research responded in a rather more philosophical way to the emergence of a European political lexicon. Begriffsgeschichte as Political Philosophy For this second direction of research the problem of the choice of concepts was resolved following much the same methodological reflection undertaken by the German Begriffsgeschichte, and is considered following Brunner as the history of modern political concepts. Its task is to reconstruct genealogically the system of categories and of political concepts, and to assess the effect they have had upon the organization of reality. Indeed, this effect was so powerful that it ended up determining a logical framework that is almost impossible to dismiss, and that produced the illusion of the objectivity and the universality of modern political concepts and categories that stands as the very basis of the projections of typically modern concepts and categories onto (previous) ideological and semantic contexts, in which they were unknown and make no sense.54
54 See G. Duso, La logica del potere. Storia dei concetti come filosofia politica (Roma-Bari, 1999).

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In fact, the possibility of isolating the age of modern political concepts from further research into the Western tradition of political philosophy, and to represent it as a circumscribed and determined (Id like to emphasize the Latin derivation terminus, limit, boundary) historical reality, inevitably depends upon a historical reconstruction of its very concepts of time. This means, however, that the basic assumption of the continuity of the processes that transformed the elements and the logical structure of the political lexicon, becomes meaningless.55 Assuming that modern politics do not reflect an eternal essence, but rather are defined by actions determined by a conceptual framework that heavily relies upon its historical and temporal location, and that cannot be represented outside the categories that produced it, it becomes possible to question the limits of politics. Modern politics, rather, the system of concepts forged by the doctrine of social contract as the only means to overcome the void that religious and civil wars left behind,56 presents itself as a logical and historical organization of reality that is radically de-termined. It is part of a theoretical dominion, on the margins of which it is, however, possible to track and to reconstruct its constitutive procedures. This makes it possible to follow an alternative approach to the history of concepts, one that questions the modern political lexicon and does not attempt to recompose it as a coherent whole but rather aims at its critique and deconstruction.57 Contrary to what one might think of as the most obvious goal of a history of concepts, according to this critical interpretation, the histories that reconstruct concepts along a sequential time line contradict the methodological premises of Begriffsgeschichte. Recognizing the limited historicity of political concepts, the (essentially modern) political concepts reveal the limits of their pretended universality and objectivity, which makes it very hard indeed to reconstruct the framework of the entire Western political experience on their basis.58
55 On this crucial point see G. Duso, Historisches Lexikon e storia dei concetti, Filosofia politica, 8 (1) (1994), pp. 10920; G. Duso, Storia dei concetti come filosofia politica, Filosofia politica, 11 (3) (1997), pp. 396426; Chignola, Storia concettuale filosofia politica, Chignola, Storia dei concetti e storiografia del discorso politico; S. Chignola, Tra storia delle dottrine e filosofia politica. Di alcune modalit della ricezione italiana della Begriffsgeschichte, Il Pensiero politico, 2 (2000), pp. 24264. 56 See Il contratto sociale nella filosofia politica moderna, ed. G. Duso (Bologna, 1987; now 3rd edn., Milan, 1998). 57 Recomposition here means the reconstruction of a map of fundamental concepts thought of as a set of linear histories of concepts that can be drawn from antiquity to the contemporary world. 58 With reference to this theoretical assumption, the Gruppo di ricerca sui concetti politici (www.unipd.it/concetti) has recently developed a specific interpretation of the history of the concept of power. See Il potere. Per la storia della filosofia politica moderna, ed. G. Duso (Rome, 1999).

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This alternative interpretation gave rise to a second line of research, conducted mainly by the Gruppo di ricerca sui concetti politici moderni (research group on modern political concepts) that has been active at the Istituto di Filosofia of the University of Padua since the end of the 1970s.59 Under the direction of Giuseppe Duso, the group has been re-elaborating the Koselleckian idea of Begriffsgeschichte in a twofold direction. To begin with, Kosellecks methodological proposals have been radicalized. We have already seen that Koselleck upheld a notion of historical science, the contingency of which he never questioned (even though he wrote an important history of the concept of history). In fact, Koselleck had to assign a founding value to some general meta-historical categories (the categories, rigorously formalized and therefore immanently modern of historical time, i.e. past, present, future or those of experience and expectation) in order to define a framework that could make the histories of concepts that crossed different historical semantic contexts still meaningful. However, epochs such as classical antiquity, that did not know the philosophical and historical originally eschatological and Christian, and only later modern and secularized distinction between experience and expectation, are impermeable to such an interpretation.60 Secondly, the historical and semantic torsion of Kosellecks model has been challenged. The objective of the Padua Group has not been to reconstruct a social history of words, or to evaluate the processes which attributed to them their political added value and which, through the force of collective action, made concepts out of mere words. That was the aim of the Trento Group. Neither has the Padua Group been trying to dissolve the logical coercion of modern political concepts through extenuating procedures of contextualization. Its main problem has never been historical, but rather that of the genesis of the conception of political philosophy as the modern science of politics.61 From Kosellecks model the group adopted mainly the (originally Nietzschean) idea that concepts do not have a history, and further radicalized its logical and theoretical consequences.62 That concepts have no history, but nevertheless they contain it, means that concepts cannot be conceived of as entities remaining unchanged in space and
www.unipd.it/concetti See also Alessandro Birals review of Kosellecks Future Past. A. Biral, Koselleck e la concezione della storia, Filosofia politica, 2 (1987), pp. 4316. Also, A. Biral, Storia e critica della filosofia politica moderna (Milan, 1999). 61 Chignola, Storia dei concetti e storiografia del discorso politico; Duso, Storia dei concetti come filosofia politica. 62 See R. Koselleck, Begriffsgeschichtliche Probleme der Verfassungsgeschichtsschreibung, in Theorie der Geschichtswissenschaft und Praxis des Geschichtsunterrichts, ed. W. Conze (Stuttgart, 1972), p. 14: Begriffe als solche haben keine Geschichte. Sie enthalten Geschichte, haben aber keine. This theme is developed in Duso, La logica del potere, pp. 334.
59 60

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time, that instead they are projected, evolve and change; in relation to different historical contexts they pass along the chronological and temporal plane of history. That concepts do not have history means that they do not contain a rational core with a history to track. Again, to relinquish this supposition would mean to contradict the theoretical premise of Begriffsgeschichte itself and to assume that concepts are universal entities, constant through all events, if only in constant transformation. In fact, only on behalf of modern concepts is it possible to state that they have a history. Their origins can be defined historically and they appear at the same time as the formal categories of time itself which make a historiographical representation possible in the first place. If the history of concepts were to be limited to tracking the histories of ideas or words, it would but assume, dogmatically, the objective frame of reference and the co-ordinates of modern science. That would mean that it would eternalize and universalize the theoretical devices of modernity and imperialistically subsume entire history within its categories. Thus, the prerogative of conceptual history cannot be to recompose the European political lexicon by reconstructing the histories of individual concepts. Nor can it be to guarantee a linear translation of ancient concepts into modern ones through a universal dimension of historical science pretending to be able to evaluate the continuity and change of the contextualization of Western political experience. Rather, the point is to question the specificity (or the partiality) of modern political categories and to criticize them once they are deprived of their supposed universality.63 Following this line of research, the study of the political lexicon cannot be anything other than a critical genealogical study of the specificity and of the determined meaning of the political categories of modernity, of the process that brought about the eternalization and the naturalization of a determined scientific understanding of political science as such, and which conditions our historical, theoretical and philosophical approaches to political action.64 On the basis of these assumptions, the research of the Padua Group has been pursuing two directions: (1) it has carried out research on the Trennung between ancient and modern which has brought them to anticipate the Schwellenzeit; (2) it has questioned the modern idea of achievement, and reopened as a philosophical reflection the question of politics, focusing on the excess of the question of justice with regard to the coherent formal logic of political concepts that historically neutralized it in formal juridical terms.65 The political revolution of modernity was produced by moral philosophy and by the mechanical politics of the social contract. This context a context
Duso, La logica del potere, pp. 323. A. Biral, Platone e la conoscenza di s (Rome-Bari, 1997). 65 Il contratto sociale, ed. Duso; Il potere, ed. Duso; Filosofia politica e pratica del pensiero. Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, Hannah Arendt, ed. G. Duso (Milan, 1988); Biral, Storia e critica della filosofia politica moderna; Biral, Platone e la conoscenza di s.
63 64

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that has to be understood in substantially logical terms rather than in temporal or historical terms gave birth to the categories and the concepts that eventually produced the radical change of politics in the late eighteenth century. In fact, the long-lasting horizon of Christian Aristotelianism, based on the ideas of mediation and of prudential actions, dissolved when, at the height of their crisis (due to the religious wars and to the rise of bourgeois individualism), the consolidated typologies of natural order were replaced by a new epistemological foundation of action. Modern political science rejects the logic of natural government that had been implicit in the self-government (or self discipline) of the wise and free who had learned to dominate their passions, not only for themselves but also in the political arena. In refusing to consider men as being naturally different regarding their wisdom or their inclination to command or to obey the modern science of politics erases classical (political) anthropology by attempting scientifically to integrate the principle of equality with the foundation of political order. The interpretation more geometrico of ethics and of human behaviour is aimed at creating the (explicitly artificial) conditions for peace by neutralizing all ethical-religious conflict. The capacity to anticipate and to forecast, in theory, human conduct which pure wisdom can no longer control is the basis of modern law. In fact, the skills and practical wisdom needed for the exercise of selfgovernment replace a world dominated by knowledge and virtues with one ruled by scientific certainty. This is very clear if one considers the metaphor recurring from Cicero to Jean Bodin that was used to illustrate the gubernator rei publicae as the helmsman of the ship representing the state. For centuries this topos reiterated an order of politics which, because it referred to a whole composed of parts (the natural differences among men, between father and son, between male and female, between the nobility and the plebeians, between the different orders and stats of the corporate-class society), required of its governor the virtues of wisdom and of mediation. However, it is precisely the radically practical dimension of prudential and phronetical virtue which disappears with the introduction of equality anticipated by the doctrine of the natural rights of each individual that makes it impossible to conceive of an order founded on the immediate legitimacy of the government of the best.66 In the context of the wars of religion, wise men are not those who strive for moderation and who bring counsel to the public debate, but those who understand that anarchy and insurrections can only be stopped by suppressing all debate and by calling on a unitary and sovereign power that possesses the right to define good acts as he pleases, as long as he defines them the same way for all subjects of the public arena. Legality becomes, through an ironic
66 Biral, Storia e critica della filosofia politica moderna, pp. 10920; Duso, La logica del potere, pp. 5666.

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twist of history, the only possible earthly form of justice. The power of the state is the only guarantee of peace and of the equality of its subjects. The separation between internal and external and between public and private manifests the Trennung between the modern and the ancient world. Only in the modern world can individuals, made equal by the power which frees them from subjection and dependence on other men, exercise reason in private even in a critical manner, as Koselleck correctly recalls without interfering one with the other. The society of modern man, as opposed to the society of the ancients (politik koinona, societas civilis), can no longer be represented as a whole composed of parts, ruled by the prudential and phronetic logic of government. It is a space in which individuals, freed from subjection and dominion, can lead their own lives according to their wills as long as they obey the laws and are respectful of the equality and liberty of others. The distinction between the modern societas sine imperio the free association of rational egoistic individuals who negotiate the reciprocal recognition of their equality and their equal independence entrusting its realization to the legal form and the ancient societas cum imperio, in which government implies the internal differentiation founded on the inequality of parts, represents the most fundamental axis that determines the artifice of the social contract whose epoch coincides, according to the Padua-interpretation of Begriffsgeschichte, with the epoch of modern political concepts and its constitutions. Thus, the theories of the social contract the system of concepts and the fundamental logic of sovereignty are at the very basis of the conceptual constellation of political modernity. Within the latter, the problem of justice is replaced by the problem of legitimacy, and ultimately by the problem of legality. Men are equal in will and they are free: the political expression of men, as a collective body, must be represented as the expression of a unique will, since there no longer are constitutive differences or parts that could be taken into account. That means, however, that the uniqueness of the sovereign will cannot be produced in terms of real representation. As soon as the supposition of equality dissolved the immediate legitimacy of government, its legitimacy came to depend on rational procedures. According to Duso, one way of describing the dissolution of the ancient world and the birth of the modern is to conceive of it as the end of government and the birth of power. According to this proposal, the fundamental concepts of modernity mainly: individual, equality, subject, liberty, will, rights, representation, legitimacy, sovereignty that in antiquity were not conceived as such, though some of the terms had been in use for a long time, respond to the transition of politics now thought of according to the modern science of ethics and through the categories of the legal form. In modernity, the political coincides with the juridical. The political lexicon becomes a logical device that refers each concept to others and builds a coherent whole in which no concept has a founding external reality. There are no values or concrete historical

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realities that could substantiate the constituent procedures in which the political concepts organize reality. According to this interpretation, the problem in understanding the European political lexicon is not to reconstruct the history of the individual concepts, but to analyse the logic that shaped their unitary significance. It thus regards a decisive point that needs to be confirmed. As already mentioned, in this research project the historical-conceptual perspective does not function as a simple methodological option. The instruments (the concepts) and the modality of research (the perspective of conceptual history) are determined by their object (the modern political lexicon). It is the object of the research that defines the plan of its fundamental elements, or provides the list of the concepts that are necessary to understand modern politics, or to interpose an interpretative perspective that assumes its absolute discontinuation with all that historically preceded it. It is not the case that the second consequence of the torsion of the political lexicon, according to which the scientific determination of the sphere of ethics constitutes the basis of the distinction between public and private, is due to the ideologization of thought that tends to bend concepts into vectors of the organization of reality. The distinction between theory and practice is entirely modern inasmuch as it perceives the latter to rely on the former. Political modernity, unlike ancient political thought, is based on the supposition that it is possible to form a perfect and rational model of action, which then can simply be applied to concrete historical relations. Again, the Trennung between theory and practice takes place on the doctrinal level of the social contract, according to which the task of political thought is finally to construct a rigorously rational theory modelled on the precision of the mathematical sciences that could justify, in absolute rational terms, the necessary distinction between the sovereign and his subjects. As political theory, modern thought destroys the classical political experience affirming the excess of the idea of the good and the just in all actions, as in the Platonic experience. Instead, it affirms itself as the means to a rational organization of practice and as a structural principle legitimizing political obligation. In the modern world there can be no relationship of commanding/ obedience that is not legitimate in exclusively rational terms. We have arrived at the foundations of the epistemological revolution of modern political science (and of its concepts). This process has at least two important consequences regarding the methodology of conceptual history. (1) It is impossible to assess ancient thought without causing a hypostasis of the categories of modern political science. There is nothing like an ancient theory of politics, if by that we mean something similar to the logical device that modern thought believes to be able to mould reality. Quite to the contrary, the experience of ancient political philosophical thought ought rather to be thought of as being focused on the

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question of the just and the good that has been dismissed and concealed by modern political science because of its potentially subversive and destabilizing nature. (2) Only those sources in which the constitution of modern political theory is clearly crystallized need to be investigated. It is not aiming at a complete history of individual concepts, or at the study of the single (isolated) items that could compose a lexicon of political concepts, but rather asks for a critical analysis of the logic that presided over its creation. Modern political theory rose from the ashes of the politik episteme of the ancients, shattered by the authors and in the zones characterized by high theoretical density which had their more immediate effect on constitutional practice. To conclude: the second approach to Begriffsgeschichte has favoured a critique of the modern political lexicon, starting from the radical premises of conceptual history. The idea that the lexicons categories and the effects of the depoliticization and the expropriation of action made it possible to operationalize the concepts against the background of the rise of possessive individualism, are neither universal nor objective and this means that:
1. rather than dealing with the history of individual concepts, it is necessary to deal with the process that formed the unitary logical framework of modern politics, which has been determined by the reciprocal resonance of modern political concepts; it is important to track this process as a set of transformations intending to bury classical ethics and politics and to found the coherently modern political science; it is important to assess this process through an analysis of the high moments of modern political philosophy in which the theoretical framework that eventually had a strong impact on constitutional levels was formed; it is important to recognize that philosophy is anchored beyond the crisis of the modern science of politics, a modern science of politics that has not been able to untangle the knot that is at the core of the modern project, namely, to resolve the question of the good and the just through its formal and inevitably empty juridical interpretation.

2.

3.

4.

By tracing the genealogy of modern political categories, this approach de-structures the ideological deadlock that immobilized the relation between modern political science and its very own representation of the conceptual issues of its history. Even if it is reconstructed in terms of the rigorously conceptual structures of modernitys politics, it unveils the radically aporetic nature of modernitys neutralization of the question of the good and the just. Sandro Chignola UNIVERSITY OF PADOVA

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