Chignola-History of PolConc

HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT
AND THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL CONCEPTS:

KOSELLECK’S PROPOSAL AND ITALIAN RESEARCH1,2
S. Chignola3
Abstract: The article analyses different forms of the theoretical paradigm of Ger-
man Begriffsgeschichte. It focuses on the coherently formalized proposal made by
Reinhard Koselleck, showing its relevance for the main Italian schools of interpreta-
tion. 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 his-
toric 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 con-
cepts (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 con-
stitutional history (Verfassungsgeschichte) as a means of preventing unwit-
ting 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
1 In memory of Sandro Biral.
2 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 occa-
sions at the University of Padua (1999–2000) — 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 Brütsch. All
translations are my own.
3 University of Padova, Italy. Email: chisa@sis.it
HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXIII. No. 3. Autumn 2002
Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2005

For personal use only -- not for reproduction
518 S. CHIGNOLA
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 latter’s
methodological presuppositions. According to Koselleck, ‘ideas’ cannot be
understood as ‘stable entities, ready to be applied to different historical fig-
ures without modifying their nucleus’. Even though Koselleck does not
openly take a position, his critique obviously aims at Arthur O. Lovejoy’s
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 con-
ceived by Koselleck and by the Heidelberger Arbeitskreis which planned the
6
monumental Lexikon of German political concepts, points to the reconstruc-
tion 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 project’s goal is to give us a better control over the vocabu-
lary we employ within our experience of political reality. To do this, the his-
tory 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. 107–29. See in par-
ticular, pp. 114–15. 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 Wörterbuch der Philosophie
(Stuttgart, 1971), Vol. 1, pp. 788–808.
6 Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache
in Deutschland, ed. O. Brunner, W. Conze and R. Koselleck (Stuttgart, 1972–87). On this
collective work and on the Heidelberger Arbeitskreis, see: W. Conze, ‘Zur Grundung des
Arbeitskreis für moderne Sozialgeschichte’, Hambürger Jahrbuch für Wirtschafts- und
Gesellschaftspolitik, 24 (1979), pp. 23–32; K. Tribe, ‘The Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe
Project: From History of Ideas to Conceptual History’, Comparative Studies in Society
and History, 31 (1989), pp. 180–4; J.J. Sheehan, ‘ “Begriffsgeschichte”: Theory and
Practice’, Journal of Modern History, 50 (1978), pp. 312–19; M. Richter, The History of
Political and Social Concepts. A Critical Introduction (Oxford, 1995). About Melvin
Richter’s book see also the discussion among D. Gordon, D. Armitage and J. Smith, now
printed in History of European Ideas, 25 (1999), pp. 9–37; M. Richter, ‘Begriffs-
geschichte Today. An Overview’, Finnish Yearbook of Political Thought, 3 (1999),
pp. 13–27; Ch. Dipper, ‘I Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe dalla storia dei concetti alla
teoria delle epoche storiche’, Società e storia, 72 (1996), pp. 385–402; P. De Boer, ‘The
Historiography of German Begriffsgeschichte and the Dutch Project of Conceptual His-
tory’, in History of Concepts: Comparative Perspectives, ed. I. Hampsher-Monk,
K. Tilmans and F. Van Vree (Amsterdam, 1998), pp. 13–22.

KOSELLECK’S PROPOSAL AND ITALIAN RESEARCH 519
which inevitably refers to the problem of historical experience and to that of a

differentiated social ontology of time, cannot be reduced to the undifferenti-
ated 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, Grund-
begriffe), 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 expecta-
tion’ 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 Heidegger’s existential her-
meneutics (even though some say that Hans-Georg Gadamer had an even
stronger influence on his work), and by Carl Schmitt’s 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 suffer-
ing’8 in a quasi-transcendental manner, and thus acts as a ‘theory of the condi-
tions of all possible history’.9 Whereas Geschichte refers to the dimension
7 R. Koselleck, ‘ “Erfahrungsraum” und “Erwartungshorizont” — zwei historische

Kategorien’, in Vergangene Zukunft, pp. 349–75, especially p. 351.
8 See L. Scuccimarra, ‘La Begriffsgeschichte e le sue radici intellettuali’, Storica, 10
(1998), pp. 7–99, in particular p. 57; but also De Boer, ‘The Historiography of German
Begriffsgeschichte’, p. 15, who considers Carl Schmitt’s Verfassungslehre to be the
putative father of the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe and of Koselleck’s 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 Koselleck’s work.
On his relationship with the Begriffsgeschichte, see H.G. Gadamer, ‘Begriffsgeschichte
als Philosophie’, Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte, 14 (1970), pp. 137–51; 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. 5–35, particularly pp. 25–6.
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. 97–118. But on the
concept of Historik and on its development, see the contribution of H.W. Hedinger
‘Historik’, in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Vol. 3, pp. 1132 ff. About the
Historik-theme in Koselleck’s reflection see also R. Koselleck, ‘Im Vorfeld einer neuen
Historik’, Neue politische Literatur (1961), pp. 578 ff.; R. Koselleck, ‘Über die
Theoriebedürftigkeit der Geschichtswissenschaft’, in Theorie der Geschichts-
wissenschaft und Praxis des Geschichtsunterrichts, ed. W. Conze (Stuttgart, 1972),
pp. 10–28, in particular pp. 11 ff.

520 S. CHIGNOLA
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 inves-
tigates the ontological foundation of Dasein’s existentiality in temporality,
historicity must be attributed to the fundamental destination of Being; actu-
ally, the very possibility of any historiography is based on this assumption.10
Following this existential analysis, both the problem of history and the possi-
bility of historiography are parts of Being’s 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. the couple ‘you must die/you can kill’
2. the couple ‘friend/foe’
3. the couple ‘internal/external’
4. the couple ‘parents/child’ (here Koselleck recovers the Heideggerian
category of Geworfenheit, and integrates it with Hannah Arendt’s
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)
5. the antithetical couples of hierarchical relationship (beneath/ below;
master/servant; strong/weak, and so forth)
seen as existential articulations of the problem of power and domination, and
as modalities of the historical formation of subjective expectations of libera-
tion and the organization of counter-power.13 These categories, representing
10 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen, 1827), I, 2, § 45.
11 Ibid., I, 2, Kap. V, § 72.
12 R. Koselleck, ‘Storia dei concetti e concetti della storia’, Contemporanea, 1 (1)
(1998), pp. 11–24, 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).

the ‘existential determinations’14 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 friend-
ship, 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 pos-
sibility 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 con-
cepts onto the linear surface of chronology. Since it is the experience of his-
torical 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
14 Koselleck, ‘Historik und Hermeneutik’, p. 109.

15 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 Begriffs-
geschichte and German social and constitutional history by editing and translating the
texts of Otto Brunner, Ernst W. Böckenförde, Otto Hintze and Reinhart Koselleck.
Scholars from Miglio’s 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 His-
tory of Ideas, 48 (1987), pp. 247–63.

522 S. CHIGNOLA
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 pro-
cedure interprets history through the concepts which have crossed it in dif-
ferent moments.18
The conceptual dimension is inherent to history. Koselleck fully recognizes
the Hegelian stigma of the formula ‘history of concepts’, which he corrobo-
rates with Immanuel Kant’s 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 his-
tory 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 Ger-
man 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 con-
texts 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, accord-
ing 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 Koselleck’s polemic with Otto Brunner: to be critically aware
of not imposing modern concepts and categories onto the language of histori-
cal sources can be pushed to an extreme where the very science of history
18 Koselleck, ‘Begriffsgeschichte und Sozialgeschichte’, pp. 120–1.
19 Koselleck, ‘Storia dei concetti e concetti della storia’, pp. 11–12.
20 On the contrary, this was its proper original meaning. See: Maier, ‘Begriffs-
geschichte’; Chignola, ‘Storia concettuale e filosofia politica’.
21 See for example, O. Brunner, Neue Wege der Verfassuns- und Sozialgeschichte
(Göttingen, 2nd edn., 1968); O. Brunner, Land und Herrschaft. Grundfragen der
territorialen Verfassungsgeschichte Österreichs in Mittelalter (Vienna, 5th edn., 1965);
O. Brunner, Sozialgeschichte Europas in Mittelalter (Göttingen, 1978); E.W.
Böckenförde, Die deutsche verfassungsgeschichtliche Forschung im 19. Jahrhundert.
Zeitgebundene Fragestellungen und Leitbilder (Berlin, 1961).

‘becomes silent’, when, in the name of the past’s 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 per-
haps 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 unwit-
tingly — as objects of research, and analysed and organized in the course of
exposition.23
He adopts Weber’s 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 Koselleck’s 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 interpre-
tation of historical sources.24 However, according to Koselleck’s theoretical
22 R. Koselleck, ‘Begriffsgeschichtliche Probleme der Verfassungsgeschichts-
schreibung’, in Gegenstand und Begriffe der Verfassungsgeschichtschreibung, ed.
H. Quaritsch, Beihefte zu Der Staat, Heft 6 (Berlin, 1983), pp. 7–21, p. 13: ‘Meine These
lautet, daß 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 übersetzt oder umschrieben werden. Sonst handelt
es sich um eine Textwiedergabe alter Quellen in Verhältnis 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. 61–7. See: Chignola, ‘Storia
concettuale e filosofia politica’, pp. 22–3; S. Chignola, ‘Storia dei concetti e storiografia
del discorso politico’, Filosofia politica, 11 (1) (1997), pp. 99–122, especially pp. 106–7.
23 M. Weber, ‘Die “Objektivität” sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer
Erkenntnis’ (1904), now in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, hrsg. von
J. Winckelmann (Tübingen, 1982), pp. 146–214, p. 170: ‘Es gibt keine schlechthin
“objektive” wissenschaftliche Analyse des Kulturlebens oder — was vielleicht etwas
Engeres für unsern Zweck aber sicher nichts wesentlich anderes bedeutet — der
“sozialen Erscheinungen” unabhängig von speziellen und “einseitigen” Gesichtpunkten,
nach denen sie — ausdrücklich oder stillschweigend, bewußt oder unbewußt — als
Forschungsobjekt ausgewählt, analysiert und darstellt gegliedert werden.’
24 Koselleck, ‘Begriffsgeschichte und Sozialgeschichte’, pp. 127–8.

524 S. CHIGNOLA
model of a concept, in order to obtain ‘scientific knowledge’, once the mean-

ing of a set of concepts has been reconstructed in its original frame of experi-
ence (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 trans-
formations, innovations, misunderstandings and shifts of meaning which his-
tory as a science inevitably produces in the understanding and explanation of
these concepts) have to have a theoretical ‘anticipation’ (Vorgriff) as a start-
ing 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,
25 See Chignola, ‘Storia dei concetti e storiografia del discorso politico’, pp. 105–8;
I. Hampsher-Monk, ‘Speech-Acts, Language or Conceptual Histories?’, in History of
Concepts: Comparative Perspectives, ed. Hampsher-Monk, Tilmans and Van Vree,
pp. 37–50, especially pp. 47–8. This is, in my opinion, what definitively makes the
research programmes of Koselleck, J.G.A. Pocock and Q. Skinner mutually untranslat-
able. For a debate between them see the essays now published in The Meaning of Histori-
cal 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. 23–35, 26: ‘No speech-act is the act itself.’ The consequence of this statement is
drawn at pp. 34–5 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 Concep-
tual Change’, Finnish Yearbook of Political Thought, 3 (1999), pp. 60–73, especially
pp. 62–3.
26 Weber, ‘Die “Objektivität” 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 wälzt sich der Strom des unermesslichen
Geschehens der Ewigkeit entgegen. Immer neu und altes gefärbt bilden sich die

the idea that it is not the ‘facts’ or the connections of things but rather, the
‘conceptual connections of problems’27 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 sci-
ence of history, based upon the logic of modern science, whose aim it is to
recompose different histories in a more comprehensive framework and to for-
mulate 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 indi-
vidual 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 com-
pelled 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, flüssig bleibt damit der Umkreis
dessen, was aus jenem stets gleich unendliche Strome des individuellen Sinn und
Bedeutung für uns erhält, “historisches Individuum” wird.’
27 Ibid., p. 166: ‘Nicht die “sachlichen” Zusammenhänge der “Dinge”, sondern die
gedanklichen Zusammenhänge 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
Verständnis zu übersetzen. Jede Wort- oder Begriffsgeschichte führt von einer
Feststellung vergangener Bedeutungen zu einer Festsetzung dieser Bedeutungen für uns.
Indem dieser Vorgang von der Begriffsgeschichte methodisch reflektiert wird, wird
bereits die synchronische Analyse der Vergangenheit diachronisch ergänzt. Es ist ein
methodisches Gebot der Diachronie, die Registratur vergangener Wortbedeutungen
wissenschaftlich für uns neu zu definieren.’
30 This has also been noted by J.L. Villacañas Berlanga. See his ‘Historia de los
conceptos y responsabilidad política: un ensayo de contextualización’, Res Publica.
Revista de la historia y el presente de los conceptos políticos, 1 (1998), pp. 141–74, espe-
cially pp. 142 ff.

526 S. CHIGNOLA
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 inevita-
bly 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 indi-
cators of historical change, which at the same time are also its concrete fac-
tors, 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 Koselleck’s 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 posi-
tions 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 progres-
sive emersion of the modern world. In fact, Koselleck draws the political and
31 R. Koselleck, ‘Richtlinien für das Lexikon politisch-sozialer Begriffe der

Neuzeit’, Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte (1967). On the prehistory of the Lexikon see
W. Conze, ‘Histoire des notions dans le domain socio-politique’ (Rapport sur
l’élaboration d’un lexique allemand), in Problèmes de stratification sociale: Actes du
colloque international (1966), Publications de la Faculté des Lettres et Sciences
Humaines de Paris-Sorbonne, Série ‘Recherches’, t. 43 (Paris, 1968), pp. 31–6. 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 Koselleck’s proposal can reconcile the ‘history of concepts’ and ‘so-
cial 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. 709–53 (especially p. 725); H.U. Wehler, ‘Probleme der
modernen deutschen Sozialgeschichte’, in Krisenherde des Kaiserreichs (Göttingen,
1970), pp. 313–23.
33 R. Koselleck, ‘La storia sociale moderna e i tempi storici’, in La teoria della
storiografia oggi, ed. P. Rossi (Milan, 1983), pp. 141–58, 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
Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte see H.E. Bödeker, ‘Concept — Meaning — Discourse.
Begriffsgeschichte reconsidered’, in History of Concepts: Comparative Perspectives,
ed. Hampsher-Monk, Tilmans and Van Vree, pp. 51–64, in particular pp. 54 ff.

constitutional coordinates of modernity from his analysis of the different con-

cepts which constitute the very framework of modernity. His theory of transi-
tion 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 infor-
mation 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 reconstruc-
tion 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 mean-
ing breaks off from the ständische 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 cen-
tury 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 past’s future.38 A series of irreversible processes
such as the ‘democratization’ (Demokratisierung), the ‘temporalization’
(Verzeitlichung) and the ‘acceleration’ (Beschleunigung) of historical experi-
ence, which are recorded by the changing meanings of concepts which
35 Koselleck, ‘Einleitung’, p. XIX.

36 See R. Koselleck, Kritik und Krise. Ein Beitrag zur Pathogenese der bürgerlichen
Welt (Freiburg-Munich, 1959).
37 R. Koselleck, ‘Vergangene Zukunft der frühen Neuzeit’, in Vergangene Zukunft,
pp. 17–37, especially p. 34.
38 R. Koselleck, ‘ “Historia magistra vitae”. Über die Auflösung des Topos im
Horizont neuzeitlich bewegter Geschichte’, in Vergangene Zukunft, pp. 38–66.

528 S. CHIGNOLA
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, ‘mo-
dernity’ really is consistent as an ‘epoch’ — defines the logical space in which
the histories of the individual concepts have to be organized. They are mobi-
lized in order to verify a very strong research hypothesis that aims at the trans-
formation 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 impos-
sible 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 ständische 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 defini-
tion 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. Recon-
structing the specific differences between the ideal-type of this historical
experience and the preceding experience(s), the history of concepts deter-
mines 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 vocabu-
lary. From the point of view of a historical ‘science’, this gives rise to an ideal-
typical interpretation of a structural (and thus inevitably abstract) process,
39 Koselleck, ‘Begriffsgeschichte und Sozialgeschichte’, p. 127: ‘Die Begriffs-
geschichte umfaßt 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 erfaßt werden kann.’ As Dipper observed, hardly any
of the Lexikon’s contributors develops this ‘strong’ theoretical assumption.
40 Koselleck talks of an Umwandlungsprozeß zur Moderne, as commutation process.
See Koselleck, ‘Einleitung’, p. XIX.

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 applica-
tion the researcher is bound, here as everywhere, by the norms of our thought.41
As far as Koselleck’s 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 ‘his-
tory’ 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
Koselleck’s attempt to go beyond the limits established by Otto Brunner’s
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 “Objektivität” sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer Erkenntnis’,
p. 184: ‘was Gegenstand der Untersuchung wird, und wie weit diese Untersuchung sich
in die Unendlichkeit der Kausalzusammenhänge erstreckt, das bestimmen die den
Forscher und seine Zeit beherrschenden Wertideen; — im Wie?, in der Methode der
Forschung, ist der leitende “Gesichtspunkt” zwar . . . für die Bildung der begrifflichen
Hilfsmittel, die er verwendet, bestimmend, in der Art ihrer Verwendung aber ist der
Forscher selbstverständlich hier wie überall an die Normen unseres Denkens gebunden.
Denn wissenschaftliche Wahrheit ist nur, was für 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 ergänzt. Es ist ein methodisches
Gebot der Diachronie, die Registratur vergangener Wortbedeutungen für uns neu zu
definieren’ (emphasis added).
44 See J. Nicholas, ‘New Path of Social History and Old Path of Historical Romanti-
cism. An Essay Review on the Work of Otto Brunner’, Journal of Social History, 70
(1969); R. Jütte, ‘Zwischen Ständestaat und Austrofaschismus. Der Beitrag Otto Brunners

530 S. CHIGNOLA
the problem of the transition between the different conceptual orders, to rein-
troduce the possibility of a historicization in order to recompose the ‘different
histories’, claims to be ‘scientific’ because of its ability to close the ideal-
typical 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 his-
tory 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 interrela-
tions’, 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 Weber’s.46
Koselleck’s proposal for a history of political concepts thus represents a
‘high’ fulfilment of Max Weber’s 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 für Deutsche Geschichte, 13 (1984);
O.G. Oexle, ‘Sozialgeschichte — Begriffsgeschichte — Wissenschaftsgeschichte.
Anmerkungen zum Werk Otto Brunners’, Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und
Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 71 (1984), pp. 305–41; H. Boldt, ‘Otto Brunner. Zur Theorie der
Verfassungsgeschichte’, Annali dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento, 13
(1987); J. Van Horn Melton, ‘From Folk History to Structural History: Otto Brunner
(1898–1982) 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 Koselleck’s conservatism
see also F. Oncina Coves, ‘Experiencia y política en la historia conceptual’, Res Publica.
Revista de Historia y el presente de los conceptos políticos, 1 (1998), pp. 103–19.
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 Verhältnis von Ereignis und Struktur oder das
Nebeinander von Dauer und Veränderung theoretisch klären hilf.’
46 Ibid.

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 cul-
tural science is realized.47
Starting from the Weberian challenge that the progress (or recession) of
cultural sciences depends on their capacity to elaborate the past’s conceptual
framework and to reach a better understanding of the present — that is, start-
ing from the possibility either to adopt or to object to the Weberian legacy in
Koselleck’s model of a Begriffsgeschichte, two different research perspec-
tives 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 con-
stitutional 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
dell’Istituto 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 Euro-
pean political lexicon) — as well as some of the main anthologies. The univer-
sities 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 “Objektivität” sozialwissenschaftlicher Erkenntnis’, p. 207: ‘Der
Gedankenapparat, welchen die Vergangenheit durch denkende Bearbeitung, das heißt
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 können 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 con-
cepts as a ‘histoire linguistique des usages conceptuels’, see J. Guilhaumou, ‘De
l’histoire des concepts à l’histoire linguistique des usages conceptuels’, Gènese, 38
(2000), pp. 105–18.
49 See ‘I concetti della politica: Libertà, Progresso, Democrazia, Politica’ [the Italian
translations of the following contributions to the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe:

532 S. CHIGNOLA
However, the fact that German constitutional historiography has disem-

barked in Italy, along with the translations of Böckenförde, 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 discus-
sions 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 ‘use-
value’ 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 dras-
tic 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 phi-
losophy of history. Early Italian research in conceptual history thus focused
its attention upon the ideological changes produced by the constitutional theo-
ries of the nineteenth century, and argued that political theory had to be stud-
ied through the filter of ‘political doctrine’.50 Through the description of the
link between theory and practice, between the theoretical imagination and con-
crete 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,
1991–3); 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’, Società e storia, 72
(1996), pp. 403–11.
51 See P. Schiera, Il laboratorio borghese. Scienza e politica nella Germania
dell’Ottocento (Bologna, 1987); G. Gozzi, Modelli politici e questione sociale in Italia e
in Germania tra Otto e Novecento (Bologna, 1988).

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 neces-
sary 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 consti-
tution 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 Koselleck’s model. It investigated the concepts as ele-
mentary 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 administra-
tion, 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 fol-
lowing theoretical premises. (1) It evaluated the elements of the political lexi-
con — or rather the concepts — taking into account the permanent dynamic
relationship they install with their social context, inasmuch as they refer to
52 See the accurate M. Ricciardi, ‘Lavoro, cittadinanza, costituzione. Dottrina della
società 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. 119–59.
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.

534 S. CHIGNOLA
power games and to the struggle for hegemony that express the material
constitution (Verfassung) of a given historical epoch. (2) It thus analysed con-
cepts in view of a coherent historicization capable of revealing the fundamen-
tal 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 recog-
nition 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, scien-
tific academies, or Grandes Écoles). (4) With regard to social or constitu-
tional 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 constitu-
tional 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 frame-
work 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 Schiera’s initial work but also relying on the very histori-
ans 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 genea-
logically 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 cat-
egories 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).

In fact, the possibility of isolating the age of modern political concepts from
further research into the Western tradition of political philosophy, and to rep-
resent it as a circumscribed and determined (I’d 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 reli-
gious 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 recon-
struct concepts along a sequential time line contradict the methodological
premises of Begriffsgeschichte. Recognizing the limited historicity of politi-
cal 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. 109–20; G. Duso, ‘Storia dei concetti come filosofia
politica’, Filosofia politica, 11 (3) (1997), pp. 396–426; 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 modalità della
ricezione italiana della Begriffsgeschichte’, Il Pensiero politico, 2 (2000), pp. 242–64.
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).

536 S. CHIGNOLA
This alternative interpretation gave rise to a second line of research, con-

ducted 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, Koselleck’s methodological proposals have been
radicalized. We have already seen that Koselleck upheld a notion of ‘histori-
cal 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 cat-
egories, rigorously formalized and therefore immanently ‘modern’ of histori-
cal 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 his-
torical — originally eschatological and Christian, and only later modern and
secularized — distinction between ‘experience’ and ‘expectation’, are ‘im-
permeable’ to such an interpretation.60
Secondly, the historical and semantic torsion of Koselleck’s 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 coer-
cion 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 Koselleck’s model the group adopted mainly the (origi-
nally 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
59 www.unipd.it/concetti
60 See also Alessandro Biral’s review of Koselleck’s Future Past. A. Biral,
‘Koselleck e la concezione della storia’, Filosofia politica, 2 (1987), pp. 431–6. 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 Verfassungsgeschichts-
schreibung’, in Theorie der Geschichtswissenschaft und Praxis des Geschichts-
unterrichts, 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. 3–34.

time, that instead they are projected, evolve and change; in relation to different
historical contexts they pass along the chronological and temporal plane of ‘his-
tory’. That concepts do not have history means that they do not contain a ration-
al 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 con-
stant 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 refer-
ence and the co-ordinates of modern science. That would mean that it would
eternalize and universalize the theoretical devices of modernity and imperia-
listically 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 conti-
nuity 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 sup-
posed 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 pur-
suing 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 con-
cepts 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
63 Duso, La logica del potere, pp. 32–3.
64 A. Biral, Platone e la conoscenza di sé (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 sé.

538 S. CHIGNOLA
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 eventu-
ally 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 individual-
ism), 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 differ-
ent — 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 founda-
tion 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 ‘self-
government’ replace a world dominated by knowledge and ‘virtues’ with one
ruled by scientific certainty. This is very clear if one considers the meta-
phor — 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 éstats 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 legiti-
macy 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 under-
stand 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. 109–20; Duso, La logica
del potere, pp. 56–66.

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 pri-
vate’ — 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 (politiké koinonía, societas civilis), can no longer be rep-
resented 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 associa-
tion 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 legal-
ity. 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 can-
not 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 transi-
tion of politics now thought of according to the modern science of ethics and
through the categories of the legal form. In modernity, the ‘political’ coin-
cides 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

540 S. CHIGNOLA
realities that could substantiate the constituent procedures in which the politi-
cal concepts organize reality.
According to this interpretation, the problem in understanding the Euro-
pean political lexicon is not to reconstruct the history of the individual con-
cepts, 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 inter-
pose 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 eth-
ics 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 supposi-
tion 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 mathe-
matical 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 com-
manding/ 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 meth-
odology 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 some-
thing similar to the logical device that modern thought believes to be able to
mould reality. Quite to the contrary, the experience of ancient political philo-
sophical thought ought rather to be thought of as being focused on the

question of the just and the good that has been dismissed and concealed
by modern political science because of its potentially subversive and de-
stabilizing 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 (iso-
lated) 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 politiké 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 cri-
tique of the modern political lexicon, starting from the radical premises of
conceptual history. The idea that the lexicon’s 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 neces-
sary to deal with the process that formed the unitary logical frame-
work of modern politics, which has been determined by the reciprocal
resonance of modern political concepts;
2. it is important to track this process as a set of transformations intend-
ing to bury classical ethics and politics and to found the coherently
modern political science;
3. 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 lev-
els was formed;
4. 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.
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 con-
ceptual structures of modernity’s politics, it unveils the radically aporetic
nature of modernity’s neutralization of the question of the good and the just.
Sandro Chignola UNIVERSITY OF PADOVA


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HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT

AND THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL CONCEPTS:

Social History and ‘Begriffsgeschichte’

HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXIII. No. 3. Autumn 2002

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which inevitably refers to the problem of historical experience and to that of a

7 R. Koselleck, ‘ “Erfahrungsraum” und “Erwartungshorizont” — zwei historische

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the ‘existential determinations’14 of the historicization of experience (in the

14 Koselleck, ‘Historik und Hermeneutik’, p. 109.

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expectation’, ideas, words and metaphors act as instruments and carriers of

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model of a concept, in order to obtain ‘scientific knowledge’, once the mean-

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theoretical co-ordinates),31 and came to reflect this strong historical thesis. In

31 R. Koselleck, ‘Richtlinien für das Lexikon politisch-sozialer Begriffe der

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constitutional coordinates of modernity from his analysis of the different con-

35 Koselleck, ‘Einleitung’, p. XIX.

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inevitably are — or can be labelled as being — ‘political’ and ‘ideological’,

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which is entirely based on a historicizing presupposition rooted in the present,

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History of Political Thought and the History of Political Concepts

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However, the fact that German constitutional historiography has disem-

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structures and processes which guide the articulation of specific historical

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Begriffsgeschichte as Political Philosophy

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This alternative interpretation gave rise to a second line of research, con-

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that has to be understood in substantially logical terms rather than in temporal

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Sandro Chignola UNIVERSITY OF PADOVA

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