Reconstructing The History Of Political Languages

Reconstructing the History of Political Languages: Pocock, Skinner, and the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe Melvin Richter History and Theory, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Feb., 1990), 38-70. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0018-265628199002%2929%3Al%3C38%3ARTHOPL%3E2.O.C0%3B2-%23 History and Theory is currently published by Wesleyan University.

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RECONSTRUCTING THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL LANGUAGES: POCOCK, SKINNER, AND THE GESCHICHTLICHE GRUNDBEGRIFFE

MELVIN RICHTER

This paper compares the program and findings of a notable German lexicon, the Geschichtliche Grundbegrlfle, or GG, to the work of J. G. A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner.' Often treated together as the leading figures of the "Cambridge School," Pocock and Skinner offer instructive alternatives to the method developed in the GG.= This comparative analysis has been undertaken in the hope of beginning a discussion that may prove useful both to German historians engaged in Begr~sgeschichte(the history of concepts), and to those writing in English on equivalent subjeck3 Much recent scholarship in both German and English has been concerned with political language treated historically. As for the GG, this emphasis is stated in its subtitle: Historisches Lexikon zur Politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland [A Dictionary on Historical Principles of Political and Social iunguage in Germany]. The GG provides extended histories of many concepts which at stipu1. Geschichtliche Grundbegrifte. Historisches iexikon zur Politische-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland [Basic Concepts in History. A Dictionary on Historical Principles of Political and Social iunguage in Germany], ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck (5 vols. to date; Stuttgart 1972-). 2. Neither Pocock nor Skinner uses the term "Cambridge School." Others often associated with them include John Dunn, Stefan Collini, Anthony Pagden, Richard n c k , James 'A~lly,and Donald Winch. The most nearly complete bibliographies in print at the time of writing this paper are included in the important reconsiderations by Iain Hampsher-Monk, "Review Article: Political Languages in Time-The Work of J. G. A. Pocock," British Journalof PoliticalScience 14 (1984), 112-116; and in Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics, ed. and introduced by James H. n l l y (Princeton, 1988), 342-344. Cambridge University Press publishes two series worth noting in this connection. Skinner is among the editors of both series: Ideas in Context, ed. Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, Skinner, and Wolf Lepenies; and Cambridge Zxts in the History of Political Thought, ed. Raymond Geuss, Skinner, and Richard n c k . A volume in the Ideas in Context series listed above: The iunguages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, ed. with an introduction by Anthony Pagden (Cambridge, Eng., 1987). A volume dealing specificallywith concepts and containing several contributions by Skinner is Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, ed. Terence Ball, James Farr, and Russell L. Hanson (Cambridge, Eng., 1989). 3. Since relatively few German- or English-speaking historians know each others' work, this paper is rather more expository than its author would have wished. But any other strategy would have made what is said here even less intelligible to one or the other.

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lated times have constituted in German the specialized vocabularies, the semantic or linguistic fields used to discuss politics, government, law, and ~ociety.~ As one contributor has remarked, the GG is among the few referente works since the Encyclopédie to have been written with a specific set of theoretical concerns in ~ i e wAs . ~ yet the GG has not been treated in relation to those authors writing in English who also understand themselves to be investigating the histories of political languages. The background to the GG needs to be sketched for English-speaking historians in the same way as the Cambridge context of Pocock and Skinner needs to be filled in for German historians. This paper seeks to locate both bodies of work in relationship to one another. Its object is to determine the extent to which their methods and conclusions are compatible, and may be used to complement lacunae or help resolve difficulties on one or the other side. It asks whether ostensible conflicts derive from genuine differences of principie, or from avoidable misunderstandings. For, as will soon appear, work on both sides has proceeded in almost total ignorance of the extent to which their interests and lines of inquiry converge or might come to do so. Begrflsgeschichte includes much of what is treated in English by historians of political and social thought, as well as by those practicing the history of ideas, intellectual history, and the history of philosophy. Yet Begri@sgeschichte has its own matter and methods, devised to address distinctive problems, defined within a problematic that differs somewhat from project to project. As used here, the generic term designates the study of concepts in the texts of individual thinkers and bodies of thought in the past. Such histories of concepts are being written by German scholars in three major lexicons still in progress. They share at least one family resemblance, which distinguishes them from most work in English. Al1 three German works analyze thought in the past by tracing the history of concepts rather than by the use of alternative u~iitsof analysis (individual authors or texts, schools, traditions, forms of argument, unit ideas, styles of thought, modes of discourse). What is treated as a concept, and how its history is written, cannot be described, much less defined, apart from the programmatic goals and methods of these separate projects. But even more important to a full understanding of them are the problems in fact addressed, as well as the techniques and sources actually applied in the execution of these programs. Thus Begrflsgeschichte as a genre is best understood as related sets of practices developed since 1967 in three lexicons: the GG, the Historisches Worterbuch der Philosophie [ADictionary of Philosophy on Historical Principles],ed. Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer (6 vols. to date; Basel, 1971-), hereafter cited as the HWP; and the Handbuch polititisch-sozialer Grundbegrfle in Frankreich 1680-1820 [ AHandbook of Political und Social Concepts in Frunce, 1680-18201, ed. Rolf Reichardt and Eberhard Schmidt (7 vols. to date; Munich, 1985-) here-

4. For a discussion of such specialized linguistic domains in different cultures, see John Lyons, Language and Linguistics (Cambridge, Eng., 1981), 301-332. 5. Horst Günther, "Begriffe in der Geschichte," Archiv für Begrflsgeschichte 1 (1979), 100.

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after cited as the Handbuch. Of these three, the GG and Handbuch emphasize political and social concepts. Because the GG is virtually completed, in what follows 1 shall be referring for the most part to its version of Begrgsgeschichte when 1 use this term. The Handbuch differs so much from the GG that it cannot be treated here in detail. Its alternative methods and theoretical goals comprise another project, dealing with political and social concepts in French rather than German, and conducted for the most part by a different set of German and French scholars. Conceived and directed by Rolf Reichardt, a former student and Assistent of Reinhart Koselleck, the GG's principal theorist, the Handbuch seeks to combine German Begrgsgeschichte with the investigation of mentalités, as practiced by the French Annales school, and with the political lexicometry of the Institut National de la langue franfaise at Saint C10ud.~The Handbuch studies the role of language (including theories both of language and of its origins), as well as the semantic theories, political concepts, and mentalités of the French Enlightenment and Revolution.' Its alternative strategies and objects of inquiry are valuable additions to the agenda of historical research involving the study of language. Moreover, the addition of such a work on French political and social concepts now raises the exciting possibility of analyzing comparatively the political and social vocabularies developed in early modern and modern German, French, and, it is to be hoped, English. The GG's program was first announced in 1967; its first volume appeared in 1972.8At the time of writing, the sixth and seventh final volumes of text are about to be completed, along with the Register, or index volume. When the project is finished, it will encompass some 120concepts covered in almost 7,000 pages. Thus far articles average fifty pages; the most important contributions often exceed a hundred pages. In my view, this lexicon is not only one of the great reference works of al1 time, but also ranks high among the most original contributions made by German historians since 1945. The GG's findings can and should be put to use in other fields of history. By charting the development and locating past uses made in German society of political and social concepts, the GG illuminates their use in present-day vocabularies as well. The history of political concepts is better fitted than any other historicai treatment to meet the needs of present-day political philosophers writing in English who engage in conceptual analysis. For them a contextuai history of

6. For the work of the Institute, see its two volumes: Equipe 18Pme et Rdvolution, Dictionnaire des usages socio-politiques (1770-1815) (3 vols. to date; Paris, 1985, 1987, 1988). 7. In another place (Richter, "BegrigSgeschichteand the History of Ideas," Journalof the History of Ideas 48 (19871, 254-258), 1 have compared the GG and Handbuch, both products of German historians with discrepant yet not altogether dissimilar notions of how to combine BegrigS- and Sozialgeschichte (social history). A more detailed comparison of the GG and Handbuch, along with examples of articles, is to appear as part of my book-length introduction to Begriffgeschichte, which will be published by Harvard University Press. 8. Reinhart Koselleck, "Richtlinienfur das Lexikon politisch-sozialer Begriffe der Neuzeit" in Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 11 (Heft 1, 1967).

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concepts may be useful in many ways. It may enable a political philosopher today to see the relationship between past uses of a concept and those in the present, or to perceive the dependence of a present conceptual usage upon institutional or other practices in the past. Again, on the basis of contemporary relationships or associationsamong concepts, a philosopher might assume intuitively that some particular connection or opposition among them is logically given. Knowledge of how concepts were used in the past may show that present-day intuitions about such relationships among concepts in our own political vocabulary are contingent rather than necessary. Among the GG's findings is the unreliability of information about political and social terms provided in major national dictionaries such as the Grimms' Worterbuch. The dates given for the first use of political and social terms are often off by a century or more. And because the national dictionaries tend to use literary rather than political sources, more often than not texts and semantic entries meant to show the range of usage in political terms are inadequate or misleading. Such findings should raise analogous questions about the reliability of the Oxford English Dictionary as a source of information about political and social concepts in English. Much more work on their history and uses would have to be done before satisfactory answers to these queries could be given. It is regrettable that as yet such first-hand research does not figure in the programs of English-speaking historians of political thought, for they are scarcely in a position to evaluate the accolades being accorded to the second edition of the OED.

Begrgsgeschichte has developed out of older German traditions of philology, the history of philosophy, hermeneutics, legal and other special histories, and historiography. Its immediate predecessors are the German specialties of Geistesgeschichte and Ideengeschichte. But consciously rejecting these models, the editors of the GG have sought to connect conceptual to social and political history, to provide contextualized analyses of concepts and the history of their uses, both in books of theory and in political life. The GG takes political and social thought seriously, refusing to reduce concepts to mere reflections of something allegedly more basic, whether material, such as the economic mode of production, or ideal, such as earlier German theories of the Zeit- or Volksgeist -that is, some overriding spirit, or national cultural pattern at a given time. Concepts are treated in the GG as contested intellectual constructions, which both register and shape what changes and what persists in the structures of societies. The program calls for relating conceptual change to structural transformations of government, society, and economy in German-speaking Europe during the century when such processes were first greatly accelerated. These changes occurred, it is postulated, from approximately the middle of the eighteenth century to that of the nineteenth, now often referred to as the Sattelzeit, a term coined by Koselleck. During that time, Koselleck argues, distinctively modern political and social concepts

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were reformulated or created. The major hypothesis of the GG postulates radical but persisting shifts in the political vocabulary within a relatively short period of rapid change. This merger of conceptual with social history marked a deliberate break with earlier German styles of analysis. Practitioners of Geistesgeschichte (like Dilthey and Rothacker) and of Zdeengeschichte(like Meinecke and his school), although concerned occasionally with political, and more rarely, social ideas, rarely sought to determine which concepts were in fact used or contested by determinate groups, strata, orders, estates, or classes. Nor did previous German efforts center, as the GG does, on periods of rapid change, crisis, conflict, and revolution in areas of national life other than the purely intellectual, philosophical, or cultural. Methodologically, the GG criticized prior German practice in the history of ideas for "treating ideas as constants, which although articulated in different historical forms, do not themselves ~hange."~ The GG itself has sought to develop a more precise method, which would make it possible to specify the experiences, institutions, and practices conceptualized, as well as the horizons of expectation on the part of those using these concepts rather than others. Such investigations are meant to answer historically, rather than conjecturally, questions about the political and social functions of concepts, and the strata that used them. In short, the GG is meant to provide synchronic analyses of language, situation, and time, as well as diachronic analyses of continuity, alteration, and innovation in these political and social vocabularies. Perhaps the earlier form of historical research that came closest to anticipating the GG's objectives was a specialized branch of medieval history.1° Since the end of the nineteenth century, German medievalist historians had engaged in philological criticism of their textual sources.ll Their purpose was to recover for use in interpreting texts those meanings of medieval concepts subsequently lost or altered. This line of inquiry was carried forward by one of the three original editors of the GG, Otto Brunner. Attacking earlier work as anachronistic, Brunner investigated such concepts as "land" or "territory" (terra, Land) and "rule," "dominion," or "lordship" (dominium, Herrschaft) as used in medieval and early modern documents. In Brunner's view, previous studies of land tenure and authority relationships had been distorted by the use of categories that conformed neither to linguistic usage in the past, nor to those actual practices registered by the concepts then in use. Thus the social reality of the past could be accurately described only after historians had retrieved the meanings of concepts actually

9. Reinhart Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft ((Fankfurt, 1979), 115; translated by Keith Pibe as Futures Past (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 80. 10. Gerd van den Heuvel, "Begriffsgeschichte, Historische Semantik"in Handbuch der Geschichtsdidaktik, ed. Werner Boldt and E Baumgart (Dusseldorf, 1985), 194. 11. H. K. Schulze, "Mediavistik und Begriffsgeschichte" in Historische Semantik und Begrigsgeschichte, ed. Reinhart Koselleck (Stuttgart, 1979), 242-261.

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employed in documents during the period under investigation. Brunner held that the interposition of such modern terms as "feudalism," "society," and the "state" had distorted both the problems historians of the Middle Ages set themselves, and their empirical findings. Because of illness and age Brunner played a relatively small role in the actual execution of the GG. The continuing group that was to do so originated in a workshop for modern social history organized at Heidelberg by another of the GG's editors, Werner Conze.lZA great organizer of collective work in a university milieu hostile to them, Conze turned this group into the basis for two apparently discrete research enterprises: one, a series of books now numbering over sixty, Zndustrielle Welt [The World of Zndustry], which studies changes in society and economy during the period of industrialization; the other, the GG, to be directed jointly by Conze and Kosseleck.13This continuing group was to be crucial to the lexicon. In an early statement (1966), Conze declared that the GG would integrate social history into its treatment of concepts and conceptual change.14 This need to combine social with conceptual history likewise dominates the first programmatic article by Reinhart K o s e l l e ~ kKoselleck's .~~ own brilliant work in Begrlflsgeschichte has been developed in his contributions to the GG, some of which rank among its longest and best: "Revolution, Rebellion, Aufruhr, Bürgerkrieg" ("Revolution, Rebellion, Riot, Civil War"); "Geschichte, Historie"; "Krise." A collection of other essays, some of which state and apply his theory of Begriflsgeschichte, is available in English translation.16 The history of concepts, long among the subjects of Geistesgeschichte, now was linked in the GG to changes in the political, social, and economic structures of German-speaking Europe. To maintain such a balance between concepts and structures required that the two younger editors become genuine converts to each other's original concern: Conze to Begr~flsgeschichte;Koselleck to social history. They did so. Earlier Koselleck had written Kritik und Krise, a brilliant and controversial doctoral essay in intellectual history, which presented a hostile interpretation of the Enlightenment drawn in part from Carl Schmitt's Le~iathan.~' But Conze, who directed Koselleck's Habilitationschrift, insisted that Koselleck choose 12. W. Conze, "Zur Grundung des Arbeitskreis für moderne Sozialgeschichte"in Hambürger Jahrbuch für Wirtschafts- und Gesellschaftspolitik 24 (1979), 23-32. 13. Koselleck has identified fourteen collective enterprises organized by Conze. See the memorial of Conze's life and work in Historische Zeitschrjft 245 (1987), 529-543. 14. W. Conze, "Histoire des notions dans le domaine socio-politique"in PtublPmes de lastratification sociale, ed. Roland Mousnier (Paris, 1968), 34. 15. Koselleck, "Richtlinienen,"91. 16. Only two articles, neither by Koselleck, from the G G have been translated into English: "Polizei," transl. Franz-Ludwig Knemeyer, Economy and Society 9 (1980), 172-196; and "Economic Liberalism," Economy and Society 13 (1984), 178-207.1 owe these referentes to Keith Tribe, "The Geschichtliche Grundbegrige Project," in Comparative Studies in Society and History 31 (1989), 180-184. 17. Reinhart Koselleck, Kritik und Krise: Eine Studie zur Pathogenese der bürgerlichen Welt (1st ed.; Freiburg/Munich, 1959). Critique and Crisis (Cambridge, Mass., 1988). Carl Schmitt, Der Leviathan in der Staatslehre des Thomas Hobbes (Hamburg, 1938).

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a subject combining social and administrative with conceptual history, already prominent in Kritik und Krise. The result was Preussen zwischen Reform und Revolution [Prussia between Reform and Revolution] (2nd ed., Stuttgart, 1975), a ground-breaking book of over 700 pages, dealing with the Prussian General Code as the embodiment of a social theory that reconceptualized citizenship, replacing birth by property, and group membership by individual rights. A classic of modern German social history, it remains, along with Brunner's work, among the best demonstrations both of how the history of concepts can illuminate social, legal, and administrative history, and of the great gains that come from adding sources drawn from these disciplines to the usual repertoire of political theorists treated in Anglophone treatment of poiitical ~oncepts.'~ There was another intellectual legacy as well. Hans Robert Jauss, a founder of Rezeptionstheorie, has recalled the situation confronting students of history like himself and Reinhart Koselleck at Heidelberg in the years just after 1945.19 Their intellectual world was defined by Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger. Any student beginning the study of history had to confront anew the formidable heritage of German Historismus. The accepted view dismissed what was called positivism in the writing of history. This was found as unacceptable philosophically as it was distasteful aesthetically. Interpretation and hermeneutics were held to be at the heart of history no less than of philosophy. Crucial in the development both of Begrzgsgeschichte and Rezeptionstheorie was the Heidelberg seminar of Hans-Georg Gadamer, who together with Erich Rothacker and Joachim Ritter was a founding editor of the Archiv für Begrzrsgeschichte. Koselleck, who as a student regularly attended Gadamer's seminar, recalls that Heidegger often appeared there. Koselleck later stressed the political consequences of a society's expectations, hopes, prognoses, and historical horizons. These concerns may be traced back to Heidegger and Gadamer, who also provided a central hypothesis that the GG investigates through the detailed analysis of political and social concepts: that in modern European societies during the Sattelzeit, there occurred a crucial shift in the conception of time, along with a reorientation towards the fut~re.~O 18. When Koselleck's book appeared, Mack Walker called it "one of the half-dozen most important historical studies to appear in Germany since 1945." Journal of Social History 3 (1969), 184. Walker treated the book purely as social history. Thus he made little of the connections later established between conceptual and social history in Koselleck's essays and in the GG. Koselleck's 732page book is the source of many telling concrete illustrations of points made methodologically in his essay "Begriffsgeschichte and Social History," in FuturesPast, 73-91, translated from Vergangene Zukunft, 107-129. A more recent treatment is "Sozialgeschichte und Begriffsgeschichte" in Sozialgeschichte in Deutschland, ed. Wolfgang Schieder and Volker Seiiin (2 vols., Gottingen, 1987), I,89-109. 19. Hans Robert Jauss, "Antrittsrede," Heidelberger Akademie, May 30, 1981. Cited in an essayreview by H.-U. Gumbrecht of R. Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft in Poetica 13 (1981), 349, note 2. For an admirably clear assessment of Jauss's contribution to Rezeptionstheorie (a mode of interpretation that turns attention away from the authors' intentions to what the text means to audiences and readers), as well as Jauss's indebtedness to Gadamer, see Robert C. Holub, Reception Theory: A Critica1 Introduction (London, 1984), esp. 36-45, 53-82 and passim. 20. David Carr, review essay on Futures Past, History and Theory 26 (1987), 198-204.

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Gadamer's influence is no less evident in Koselleck's insistence that Begrtffsgeschichte must be carried on through the analysis of texts in terms of the author's self-understanding, as well as the spatial and temporal horizons bounding thought. Later, along with Jauss and a circle largely made up of literary critics, Koselleck participated in a series of meetings and books which explored meaning in texts, considered primarily in terms of readers' interpretations or res pon se^.^^ Another and autonomous development that had helped create the distinctive project of the GG originated at Heidelberg at a later date: the structural conception of Sozialgeschichte introduced by Werner Conze, who came to Heidelberg in the mid-1950s. This was broad enough to include the history of concepts. According to Jürgen Kocka and Wolfgang Schieder, Conze was the first German social historian to greet enthusiasticallythe emphasis upon slowly changing structures studied in the long-term by Braudel and other French historians of the Annales school. Such interest in structures also had German antecedents and precedents. In addition to Brunner, Conze's teacher, Ipsen, had earlier moved in that direction.12Koselleck insisted that the diachronic history of concepts was no less crucial to the GG's program than a synchronic treatment. In his ovrn work, Conze had long connected the history of language to that of social formations. Now he conceived the innovation of using teams to execute diachronic aspects of the project. But it could not be presupposed that there already existed enough scholars capable of forming such teams, sharing the project's goals, and willing to subordinate their individual research interests to it. Thus Conze's creation of an organized and well-financed continuing group was crucial. The GG originated in a style of historical inquiry that stressed hermeneutics and hence the importance of the conceptual apparatus, horizons, and selfunderstandings of historical actors. However, as the result of incorporating social history into its framework, both Brunner and Conze helped shift Begriflsgeschichte away from a philosophical and hermeneutic method towards another incorporating social history of a sort more acceptable to historians. Whereas Heidegger and Gadamer practiced a philosophical variety of Begrzssgeschichte, their concerns with language were primarily ontological and epistemological. The GG's program specifically renounced any such intentions. This was to be a historical work. Heidegger and Gadamer, as Koselleck has written recently, never adapted their respective frameworks to take adequate accounts of the work actually done by historians.13 The concepts to be studied in the GG's

21. KoseUeck regularly took part in meetings of those associated with Jauss and Iser at the University of Constante, published in the series Poetik und Hermeneutik, as biennial volumes of studies in Rezeptionstheorie.Koselleck was the co-editor with Wolf-Dieter Stempel of the volume GeschichteEreignis und Erzahlung (Munich, 1973). %o of his own contributions have been translated in Futures Past, 91-104, 105-115. 22. See Koselleck's memorial of Conze's life and work (fn. 13) and K. Pibe's '"hanslator's Introduction," in Futures Past. 23. See the talk @venat Heidelberg by Koselleck on the occasion of Gadamer's eighty-fifth birthday, along with Gadamer's rejoinder: "Hermeneutik und Historik" in Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschqften:Philosophische-historischeKlasse (1987), Bericht 1.

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version of historical semantics were to be related to structural continuities and changes in government, society, and the economy. The methods, sources, and criteria for evidence were to be those accepted by historians, not philosophers. Thus in some ways, the editors of the GG embraced rather than combatted the principal tendencies of historical studies in the Federal Republic, as the interests of the newer generation shifted away from their elders' hermeneutical emphases and preoccupation with political and military history.14 The GG's project is to test the hypothesis that the basic concepts used in the political and social language of German-speaking "old Europe" (Alt Europa) were transformed during the period Koselleck calls the Sattelzeit, between approximately 1750 and 1850. Thus in the GG, Begriffsgeschichte is used to track the advent, perception, and effects of modernity in German-speaking Europe, where it is presumed to have taken on a distinctive form. The GG treats the accelerated speed (Beschleunigung) of conceptual shifts in meaning, considered as both effect and cause, during this period. The method assumes that concepts both registered and affected the transformations of governmental, social, and economic structures. Changes in them were perceived, conceptualized, and placed within one or another historical horizon only after struggles among groups about their meaning and evaluation. The GG combines the study of the language used to discuss state, society, and economy with identifications of the groups, strata, orders, and classes that used or contested this language. This program requires contributors (occasionally individual~,more often teams) to look back as far as classical antiquity, and forward to the conceptual usages of our own time. The GG's objective is to identify three types of political and social concepts, each defined in terms of German usage of the present day: 1) concepts long in use, such as "democracy," the meaning of which may still be retrieved and understood by a speaker of the language today; 2) concepts such as "civil society" and "state," whose earlier meanings have been so effaced from usage since the Sattelzeit that they can now be understood only after scholarly reconstruction of their prior meanings; 3) neologisms such as "Caesarism," "fascism," or "Marxism," coined in the course of revolutionary transformations they helped shape or interpret. What is specifically modern in such concepts? High on the agenda of the GG are a number of hypotheses about conceptual developments during the Sattelzeit: 1) Verzeitlichung, the disposition to insert modern political and social concepts into one or another philosophy or horizon of history set out teleologically in terms of periods, phases, or stages of development. 2) Demokratisierung (democratization) of political and social vocabularies, which prior to this period had been specialized and relatively restricted to elite strata. During the eighteenth century, profound changes occurred in the manner of reading, what was read, the political messages delivered, and the size of the audiences to which they were 24. For a brief summary, see Jorn Rüsen, "Theory of History in the Development of West German Historical Studies," Germanic Studies Review (1984), 11-25, and Georg Iggers, The German Conception of History, 2nd. ed. (Middletown, Conn., 1983).

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directed. 3) Zdeologiesierbarkeit (the ease with which concepts could be incorporated into ideologies). Under the systems of estates and orders characteristic of Europe during the ancien régime, political and social concepts tended to be specific and particularistic, referring in the plural to well-defined social gradations and privileges such as the liberties of the Bürger (citizens) of a city. But beginning in the eighteenth century, those older terms remaining in use began to become more general in their social reference, more abstract in meaning, and hence took the linguistic form of "isms" or singular nouns like "liberty," which replaced such prior usages in the plural as "liberties." These abstract concepts easily fitted into open-ended formulae which could be defined according to the interests of movements and groups competing for adherents. 4) Politisierung (politicization) of concepts. As old regime social groupings, regional units, and constitutional identifications were broken down by revolution, war, and economic change, political and social concepts became more susceptible to use as weapons among antagonistic classes, strata, and movements. To test such wide-ranging generalizations, the editors of the GG insist upon three methodological principles: 1) that the resources of Begrzysgeschichte and social history be used conjointly. Only by using both types of history can continuities, modifications, and innovations be detected. 2) Because language is both an agent and an indicator of structural changes, research into the history of concepts must adapt to its own purposes a battery of methods derived from philology, historical semantics, and structural linguistics. When identifying and tracing concepts, Begr~gsgeschichtein the GG alternates between diachronic and synchronic analyses of language; makes use of both semasiology (the study of al1 meanings of a term or concept) and onomasiology (the study of al1 names or terms in a language for the same thing, or here, concept); and analyzes the 3) Concepsemantic fields of the language's political and social vo~abularies.~~ tual usage and change are to be established by analyzing materials unusually broad in range, discrepant in origin and appeal, and covering as many social formations as possible. These sources include major thinkers in German philosophy, political, social, and economic theory, jurisprudence, theology, and less often, literature. Information about usage of political and social terms by elite and other groups, strata, and classes is to be gathered from newspapers, journals, pamphlets, reports and speeches in assemblies; in documents originating in governmental, administrative, and legal bureaucracies; and in memoirs, correspondence, and diaries. Finally, it is requisite for contributors to survey systematically dictionaries (German, bilingual, and multilingual) in each period treated comparatively, as well as apposite entries in encyclopedias,handbooks, and thesauri. No previous work had so successfully utilized such materials as sources for establishing past political and social vocabularies. The GG is full of extraordinarily rich discoveries, insights, and generalizations about the language of politics. It is an indispensable resource for anyone dealing 25. These terrns are explained in rny "Conceptual History and Political Theory," Political Theory 14 (1986), 621-627.

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with political and social theories, as well as the functions performed by their vocabularies, applied within specified institutional and societal contexts. The GG's theoretical program provides a unifying framework; the quality of its contributors' scholarship is unusually high. This is in no small measure due to the extensive use in its longest articles of collaborative work by teams of specialists who understand what the GG is meant to do. As must be expected from multi-authored works, articles vary considerably both in achievement and in their authors' adherence to the GG's program. It will long remain the measure of what has been achieved by scholarship in its field. Critics of individual articles characteristically overlook the importance of having in one work detailed treatments of what is known about the history of political and social concepts in German-speaking Europe. These conceptual histories now serve as points of reference and departure, from which others can continue revising, correcting, and adding to the findings of the GG. Yet just because of its achievements, certain problems in the GG as a work on political and social language have become apparent. Many of these difficulties derive from its lexicon format, which was adopted reluctantly, but there turned out to be no practica1 alternatives as a scholarly and publishing enterprise.2Toremost among the unresolved problems is the question of how to proceed from an alphabetical inventory of individual concepts to the reconstruction of integrated political and social vocabulasies at crucial points of development in political languages. If concepts are to be grouped synchronically as constituting the specialized vocabularies of such languages, at which periods or intervals ought concepts be brought together? What should serve as the basis for diachronic comparison of concepts, as another part of the GG's program proposes? It is clear that what is most needed is continued work on the GG's findings after its completion. This should inquire into the linkages and oppositions among concepts hitherto treated in isolation. Probably work already done will have to be supplemented by new research focused on problems left unresolved by the completion of the project. Before any judgments can be made about the adequacy of the GG's program and method, a considerable amount of analysis will be required. More than twenty years of research, almost seven thousand pages of findings are or soon will be available to those seeking to answer the questions posed when this project was

26. Koselleck's original proposal was for a single-volume dictionary from classical antiquity to the present. This was to be organizedin terms of connected subjects rather than alphabetical articles. But as the project expanded from one to eight volumes, it became clear that in order to make progress on the project as a whole, the concepts would have to be published in individual volumes ordered alphabetically.However, once the lexicon is completed, there is a possibility that there will be a publication in paperback of articles grouped by subject rather than alphabetically. Given the prohibitively high price of the hard cover format, such a step would make the GG much more accesible to scholars. See Keith Tribe, "The Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe Project: From History of Ideas to Conceptual History,"Comparative Studies in Society and History 31 (1989), 180-184; and "Introduction," in Futures Past.

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undertaken. Certainly the first order of priority is to make a systematic assessment of the extent to which the studies now available in the GG confirm, disconfirm, or confirm in part the GG's hypotheses about the nature of conceptual change during the Sattelzeit. Another set of issues grows out of questions posed by Anglophone inquiries into the effects of different political languages upon perceptions and consequent action of those using one or another of the conceptualizations available. Which concepts were restricted to particular groups? Which were held more generally? What was the range of political languages? To what extent was communication facilitated or impeded by conflict over the concepts and conventions of political and social discourse? And in terms of the consequences for action- individual, group, governmental- what difference did it make how structural changes were conceptualized? Serious efforts to answer these questions could utilize the unparalleled materials gathered in the GG and fit them into new patterns, including some adapted from programs developed by Pocock and Skinner. It remains to be seen to what extent their work is compatible with that done in [email protected] would be the consequences of trying to combine the resources of these two bodies of work in German and English on the language of political thought?

Pocock and Skinner have been studying the complex interactions among political and social language, thought, and action, as well as seeking to develop an adequate historiography of these subjects. They describe their own programs and methods as "strictly historical," a term they apply to the work of few others in their field of study.17 In view of the salience and quality of their work, it seems appropriate to examine the projects and performances of these scholars originally trained at Cambridge University. As with contributors to the GG, it would be easy, although misleading, to create a specious unity or group identity in political terms or even programs of research. In fact it is questionable whether al1 the individuals usually linked together as the "Cambridge School" comprise a group as cohesive as that name implies. But although engaged in dialogue, and sometimes disagreement, the two most prominent Carnbridge-trained historians of political thought, John Pocock and Quentin Skinner, share enough in their methods and subject matter to justify grouping them together and comparing them to the GG's version of Begriflsgeschichte. Much about these German- and English-speaking historians may be clarified by comparing how their projects came into being, what they were rejecting in previous modes of dealing with political and social thought and language, and by their respective theoretical and research programs. Most important is the ques27. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Eng., 1978), 1, xi.

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tion of the extent to which their respective programs have in fact been realized. To compare these German and Anglophone groups may point up what is distinctive about each way of approaching history through the study of language. The German project continues its inquiry into the nineteenth century, thus treating the very great changes from early modern thought into the ages of the French and industrial revolutions. Pocock and Skinner have seldom ventured beyond the late eighteenth century. That there would be great contrasts between these two bodies of work might be expected from the fact that they originated in discrepant national political experiences and practices, as well as in significantly different traditions of writing history, philosophy, the history of philosophy, and the philosophy of history. Yet there are a surprising number of common historiographical and substantive concerns shared by these two sets of scholars studying the historical role of language. The title of Pocock's collection, Politics, Language, and Time (New York, 1971) could have served as the English title for the translation of Reinhart Koselleck's VérgangeneZukunft. The attacks made by the editors of the GG upon previous treatments of political and social thought in the styles of Geistes- or Zdeengeschichte resemble those made by the Cambridge-trained historians against unhistorical treatments in English of the same s u b j e ~ t s . ~ ~ Thus it may be that German- and English-speaking historians of thought and language can learn from one another about research methods, or else about how to utilize previously neglected types of materials. But the most exciting gains would come if it turned out that the organizing principles of one group's scholarly practices could help expand or unify the work of the other. The GG has sought to connect concepts to the social and political formations that used them; it has asked how theorists have conceptualized the accelerated, sometimes revolutionary changes in the structures of political, economic, and social organization in modern societies. Such inquiries could add dimensions now missing to the more restricted linguistic and political contexts emphasized by Pocock and Skinner. On the other hand, Pocock has identified many of the different political languages available to theorists in early modern Europe, and stressed the significance of their using any one or a combination of them. Skinner, while adding additional political idioms, such as Stoicism, to Pocock's repertoire, has more often stressed that theorizing occurs as linguistic action within historically defined contexts which constrain considerably the types of political legitimations available to theorists. Thus the contributions of Pocock and Skinner, carefully elaborated both methodologically and in detailed studies, may help in unifying the GG's treatment of German political language (the subtitle, it should be remembered, of the GG)by calling attention to issues central to the GG's purposes, but not specifically identified as such in either its theory or execution. Yet there are two puzzles about this comparison. First, although conceptual analysis figured prominently in the linguistic or analytical school which domi28. Richter, "Begrigsgeschichte and the History of Ideas," 248-249.

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nated English-speaking philosophy for three decades after 1945, none of its members seems to have thought of writing a history of concepts, as did German philosophers and historians.'Second, although the history of political thought receives far more attention in English-speaking universities than in German, it was to be German historians who were to set new standards for historical investigation of political and social language. Why was this the case? Perhaps answers ought to be sought in the connections after 1945 among the study of history, philosophy, and the social sciences in English- and German-speaking universities respectively. Postwar philosophy at Cambridge was at first positivistic, and then turned to the analysis of ordinary language. In both phases, the study of philosophy was unhistorical when not antihistorical. By the end of the 1950s, Cambridge philosophy was dominated by the late teaching of Wittgenstein, who had disavowed the positivism of his earlier 7i-actatus.British philosophers at this time, whether at Cambridge or elsewhere, tended to be matter-of-fact, apolitical, skeptical, and deflationary. Insofar as they thought at al1 about political philosophy, to which they paid little attention, most university philosophers tended to attribute the traumas of twentieth-century history to imprecise and misleading modes of thinking on the part of foreigners. This constituted a negative justification for their own program. They would expose errors committed by philosophers, who, ignoring what there was to be learned from scientific procedures or everyday language, had sought to be profound and succeeded only in being dangerously murky and misleading. By the 1950s, logical positivism had begun to be superseded by "the linguistic turn" in philosophy. In both these positions, the history of philosophy played a relatively rninor role. Like other varieties of continental philosophy, hermeneutics was virtually unknown. British analytical philosophers tended to assume that the meaning of a text could be determined simply by reading and rereading it. There was no need to ascertain historically what its writer may have been intending to do by taking a position at a past time in a given setting. Cambridge philosophers in this respect did not differ much from their Oxford contemporaries. Both sought to identify language games, and to unpack and analyze the use of concepts in ordinary language. Thus T. D. Weldon, an Oxford don, wrote in a 1956 collection edited at Cambridge:

.

talk about linguistic analysis and language games . . has a strongly deflating tendency. . . [Plolitical theorizing which was popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries . . was a highly sophisticated language game which teachers played regularly with their pupils and with one another. The purpose of playing this game . . was to give an apriori endorsement to the moral and political principies which the educational system inaugurated by Dr. Arnold impressed on the minds of those who were destined to be r u l e r ~ . ~ ~

.

.

. ..

.

29. T. D. Weldon, "Political Principles,"in Philosophy, Politicsand Society, ed. Peter Laslett (Oxford, 1956), 25. 1 once tried to test this stereotype of British Idealism by investigating the actual political attitudes of the philosophers and students summarily written off by Weldon. M. Richter, The Politics of Consciente (London and Cambridge, Mass., 1964), chapters V, IX, X.

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Weldon's analysis derived from his defining knowledge in terms of "evidence gained by observation and experiment [that] could either confirm or refute them" (Ayer and Popper's variants of Vienna Circle positivism), and upon an emphasis upon linguistic analysis and language games (late Wittgenstein, Ryle, and Austin). In Weldon's view, his own philosophical method relieved him from any need whatever to engage in historical research to confirm or refute his own assertions about Victorian thought. It did not occur to him to seek historical evidence for what seemed so obvious an application of what had been established by philosophical argument. Among Cambridge historians, the emphasis upon political history remained dominant, except among those few affected by Marxist theory. Historical method was not much discussed. The practice of most historians was empiricist, suspicious of theory, rather resembling an earlier French generation of historiens historisants. Economic history was vigorously pursued, but its focus was relatively narrow. Social history remained closer to Trevelyan than to what was beginning to be written by the Annales school. Only with the coming of a new generation would demography, local, family, and labor history attract the attention of historians. As for sociology, this not only remained outside the Cambridge curriculum, but was generally ridiculed by historians. Thus there was little basis for linking what previous generations had thought either to determinate social groups, or to structures-political, economic, or social. At Cambridge, as elsewhere in Britain, ordinary language or analytical philosophy was among the most prestigious intellectual activities in the humanities and social sciences. Perhaps most important for the future development of historians of political thought at Cambridge would be the philosophy of language developed by Wittgenstein, Austin, Searle, and Gri~e.~O But the possibility of such a reviva1 of historical inquiry seemed far off in 1956 when the editor of a volume called Philosophy, Politics and Society declared that: "For the moment, anyway, political philosophy is dead."31 The author of this pronouncement was Peter Laslett, a member of the Cambridge history faculty. In the 1950s and 1960s Laslett was to play a key role in creating a distinctive Cambridge view of how the history of political thought ought to be written. His editorial and historical work on Filmer and Locke broke new ground. He successfully challenged earlier views that Locke's real opponent in his 7ívo neatises was Hobbes, and that the Second Treatise was written after the Glorious Revolution in order to legitimize it. By editing a collection of Filmer's writings, and recreating the historical situation when Filmer's patriarchical arguments were the principal theoretical alternative to Locke's own political views, 30. Skinner refers to the developmentof his own philosophical interests in his "Replyto my Critics," Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics. 31. Philosophy, PoliticsandSociety, vii. As Laslett commented in the successor volume published 1964, that statement was cited more often than any other: Philosophy, Politics and Society (second series), ed. Peter Laslett and W. G. Runciman (Oxford, 1964), vii. For a sketch of the situation of political theory and its history in the 1950s, see Political Theoryand Political Education, ed. Melvin Richter (Princeton, 1980), 6-15.

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Laslett demonstrated the importance of the First Peatise, devoted by Locke to refuting Filmer. Thus Laslett showed how misleading was the assumption that the history of political philosophy could be written as a dialogue between the established members of a later canon, in this case, between Locke and Hobbes. Political texts can be understood only by thorough historical analysis of their contexts. While preparing his own landmark edition of Locke's ikio Zkatisesof Government, Laslett established contact with a number of postgraduate students throughout the 1950s and until the middle of the 1960s. The method and philosophical basis for what subsequently has come to be regarded as the Cambridge approach to the historical study of political thought was developed by them following Laslett's lead.32This gifted group shared a view of historical method also influenced to varying degrees by their interactions with analytical philosophers of language at Cambridge and elsewhere. But not al1 of those thus affected by Laslett's work were well received by the Cambridge history faculty. With so little institutional support for the new initiatives, it is ironical that the work of those then around Laslett should be regarded by outsiders as constituting the "Cambridge School." Despite opposition, Laslett provided a new impetus in Cambridge for work on both political philosophy and the history of political thought. Philosophy, Politics and Society, the collection he had published against the tide in 1956, became a series, with five published volumes edited by Laslett together with W. G. Runciman, Quentin Skinner, and James Fishkin. The last of them appeared in 1977.33Already in the second volume (1964), papers by John Rawls, H. L. A. Hart, Alasdair MacIntyre, Bernard Williams, Richard Wollheim, and Runciman provided clear signs of a reviva1 of political philosophy. Isaiah Berlin's muchcited essay, "Does Political Theory Still Exist?" provided cogent reasons for answering the question affirmatively, and as Laslett commented, marked the end of the "Weldonism" found in the series's first volume. As for the historical aspect of the subject, this second series contained an augury of the future in J. G. A. Pocock's "The History of Political Thought," one of his first proposals about how to demarcate and write that subject. After making such notable contributions to political philosophy and its history, Laslett left these subjects in order to turn to historical demography and sociology. He founded the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, which in time became a world center for such studies. The members of his Locke seminar showed little interest in combining their work on the history of political thought with the new fields being investigated by the Cambridge Group. Thus at Cambridge there occurred no synthesis of social and iritellectual history analogous to what was being attempted at Heidelberg. This 32. Among those involved with Laslett during this period were Philip Abrams, John Dunn, J. G. A. Pocock, W. G. Runciman, J. H. M. Salmon, Gordon Schochet, and Quentin Skinner. 33. Laslett and Fishkin are planning a sixth volume on intergenerational justice, and a seventh volume may also appear. (Personal communication from Peter Laslett.)

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was not dueto lack of communication. Laslett met Conze on a number of occasions when he was told about the GG and the conception of social history it incorporated. However, the direction taken by German social history under Conze's leadership seemed mistaken to the Cambridge Group. Laslett made no efforts to link his previous interests in political theory to social history. Thus reviva1 of interest in the history of political thought at Cambridge came from an unlikely source, the history school. This had long included the study of political thinkers as part of its curriculum. The reasons for the continuing presence of this subject had long been forgotten. Pocock, who had studied history and political theory for five years in New Zealand before beginning graduate study at Cambridge in 1948, has recalled that in both settings the history of political thought was presented as that of a canonical series of authors (Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, Marsilius, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Burke, Hegel, Marx). Alone among the major branches of historical study at Cambridge, the so-called history of political thought was defined by the activity of reading a set of prescribed books. But it was not clear what united these works. And so this study was carried out largely by philosophical commentary on the interna1 coherence of the prescribed authors. Yet the study of political thought at Cambridge was part of the course of study in history, not philo~ophy.~~ Elsewhere in the English-speaking world, the situation was not much different. In the United States, where political thought was studied in political science departments, as well as those of history and philosophy, similar confusions existed about the relationship among the special histories of political thought, philosophy, and the history of ideas.35The history of political thought as then written tended to take one of three forms: 1) constructing mythical dialogues about "perennial problems" among thinkers designated as the members of a canon or curriculum; 2) treating selected texts as constituting a line of development often identified with the development of liberalism, or the "western political tradition;" 3) an eclectic mixture of texts, contexts, and philosophical commentary as in Sabine's then dominant textbook, History of Political Theory (New York, 1945). Prompted in part by Laslett's work, Pocock, later joined by Skinner and his contemporary, John Dunn, condemned any history of political thought confined solely to the ideas found in a canon of "major" thinkers. In their view, to do

34. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time, 4-5, and a personal communication. 35. Pocock has suggested that the canon in political theory was created both at Oxbridge and in the United States, where it had a different line of descent. The British genealogy may be traced in S. Collini, D. Winch, and J. Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics (Cambridge, Eng., 1983); the American, in John Gunnell, Political Theory: Tradition and Interpretation (Cambridge, Mass., 1969). An analogous study of the canon in American philosophy is Bruce Kuklick, "Seven Thinkers and How They Grew," in Philosophy in History, ed. Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge, Eng., 1984), 125-139. Another valuable mapping of this ground is Maurice Mandelbaum, "The History of Ideas, Intellectual History, and the History of Philosophy," History and Theory, Beiheft 5 (1965), 33-66.

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so was to write illicit pseudohistories of political thought in terms of an invented dialogue about perennial issues or enduring problems. Four other modes of writing the history of political thought then current in the English-speaking world were later dismissed by Skinner in an article These were: that brought him instant fame but few friends outside CambridgeSJ6 1) the history of ideas treated as "unit ideas" by Lovejoy and his school; 2) any treatment of a political theorist that was purely textual, specifying neither a political context nor a contextual set of intentions; 3) analyses of texts written in terms of "influences," or "anticipations," which for the most part turn out to be not historically demonstrated, but rather anachronistic attributions by those subscribing to a later theory, concept, or school; 4) the treatment of political thought as a superstructure determined by the objective needs and interests of a ruling social class. If al1 these modes of dealing with past political thought are unhistorical, what have Pocock and Skinner proposed as genuine history in their place? Pocock no longer describes himself as an historian of political thought, but rather as one of "discourse," meaning by that not the concerns or methods of Foucault or Said, but: "speech,""literature,"and public utterance in general, involving an element of theory and carried on in a variety of contexts with which it can be connected in a variety of ways. The advantage of this approach is that it enables one to write the history of an intellectual .activity as a history of actions which have affected other human beings, and have affected the circumstances in which they have been inf~rmed.~'

Pocock now begins with the assumption that humans communicate by language systems which help constitute both their conceptual worlds and authority structures or social worlds. These conceptual and social worlds act as contexts to each other. An individual's thought is both "a social event, an act of communication and response . . . and a historical event, a moment in a process of transformation of the s y ~ t e m . "Thus ~ ~ Pocock would have the history of ideas give way to a history of the languages in which thinkers have written. To establish the meaning of a political text, to discover what its writer actually said, intended, or conveyed, is to establish the discourse or discourses in which the text was written. From this general statement, Pocock has gone on to identify a number of theoretical languages available to early modern British political theorists. At various times he has also called them "paradigms," "vocabularies," "rhetorics," and most recently, "discourses." Each entails a set of linguistic conventions placing constraints on how politics might be conceptualized, and on the ways in which its institutions and practices might be legitimated. 36. Quentin Skinner, "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas," History and Theory 8 (1969), 3-53. 37. This occurs in a valuable set of short statements by Pocock, Skinner, Collini, et al. in "Intellectual History" in History Ioday 35 (1985), 52. 1 owe this reference to Professor Istvan Hont. 38. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time, 14-15.

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In his now classic first book, Pocock dealt with the language of the "ancient constitution," which attributed the liberties associated with English political, and above all, legal institutions to customs of a continuous, uninterrupted a n t i q ~ i t y . ~ ~ Pocock has argued that this language of precedents provided Edmund Burke with many, although not all, of his arguments against the French R e v o l ~ t i o n . ~ ~ Another language prominent during the English Revolution was that of apocalyptic prophecy, which Pocock argues Hobbes had to confront in the neglected third and fourth books of Leviathan. Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, 1975) identified still another early modern political language, "civic humanism" or "classical rep~blicanism."~~ Originating in republican Florence in the fifteenth century, this political language migrated to England in the . ~ ~ the eighteenth century, "civic seventeenth century via James H a r r i n g t ~ nDuring became the preferred discourse of opposition groups both in Great humanism" Britain and its American colonies. The purpose of his analysis is to show how this conceptual language led to action of a sort that would otherwise not have been meaningful to its adherents, or comprehensible to us. It also identifies the problems understood by the respective theorists as most urgently requiring answers. As Pocock came to the end of his chosen periods of study in British political thought and action, he discovered in the Scottish Enlightenment an unresolved conflict between the languages of civic humanism and the natural jurisprudence of Grotius and Pufendorf. This, in his view, is still another language, that of property and rights. It provided the Scottish Enlightenment with new defenses against civic humanisrn. The Scots thus could vindicate commercial society, as well as commerce (which to classical republicans appeared as corruption), and the division of labor (which they perceived as incompatible with civic independence). Pocock is now writing a detailed commentary on Gibbon, considered not as a British equivalent of Voltaire, but rather as the representative of a previously unidentified variety of Enlightenment, conservative, Northern European, and not incompatible with a Protestant theology found in Holland, Germany, and England.43

39. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Hktorical Thought in the Seventeenth Century [1957]. A Reissue with a Retrospect (Cambridge, Eng., 1987). 40. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time, 202-233; "Introduction," Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Indianapolis, 1987). 41. For replies to critics, see "The Machiavellian Moment Revisited," in Journal of Modern History 53 (1981), 49-72 and "Republicanism and Ideologia Americana," Journal of the History of Ideas 48 (1987), 325-346. 42. Among Pocock's most complex and rich readings of any author is his "Historical Introduction" in his The Political Writings of James Harrington, ed. J . G. A. Pocock (Cambridge, Eng., 1977), xi-xviii, 1-152. For an interesting analysis of the space devoted to individual thinkers in The Machiavellian Moment, see J . H. Hexter, review essay on Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment, History and Theory 16 (1977), 306-337, esp. 311-312. 43. Pocock's most powerful statement to date is his "Conservative Enlightenment and Democratic Revolution: The American and French Cases in British Perspective,"Government and Opposition 24 (1989), 81-105.

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Thus in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many and varied languages were available to those theorizing about politics. To what extent were these political languages mutually exclusive? Pocock has always maintained that more than one discourse, vocabulary, or idiom may be found in a single text. As for the natural language in which it is written, this may contain many types of political discourses. Despite their variations, they do not preclude communication, although they may make it difficult. Of course, there are connections to be made among languages and those groups, parties, or audiences who have adopted them. While Pocock in telling his story, and sorting out his languages, makes such connections, he has not devoted much systernatic attention to his units of political and social analysis: to parties, groups, elites, movements, or audiences; o r t o political, social, or economic structures at the time his theorists were writing. Pocock's histories are for the most part linguistic, detailing how the field of political action has been defined for theorists and actors alike by what he now prefers to cal1 discourses. Yet it is wortk noticing that Pocock, although emphasizing the relationship between language and political theory, has never been willing to stake his historical findings upon any one theory of language. Indeed "language" most often serves in his work as a metaphor rather than as indicating dependence upon linguistics, semantics, historical philology, or philosophy of language, much less continental specialties such as hermeneutics, semiotics, or the "archaeology" of Foucault. In his writings on method, Pocock is playful, describing what he is doing by loose translations into the technical terms of linguistics (earlier: vocabularies, idioms, languages; now: Saussure's langue and parole); philosophy (earlier: language games and speech acts in the English analytical mode; now discourses, although without explicit reference to French discussions such as those of Foucault or Derrida); Annales history, moyenne and longue durée, mentalité; even his earliest metaphor, Kuhn's paradigm, the use of which Pocock has regretted, but never enough to Hexter has called attention to "the conceptual apparatus that Pocock uses to provide markers of continuity and changes in men's perceptions of politics and time," "the recurrent use of the same words in similar though modified senses. . . . for about 275 y e a r ~ . "This ~ ~ concern was perhaps more prominent in Pocock's earlier methodological work. In 1966 he wrote: Any stable and articulate society possesses cancepts with which to discuss its political affairs, and associates these to form groups or languages. There is no reason to suppose that a society will have only one such language; we may rather expect to find several. . . . Some originate in the technical vocabulary of one of society's institutionalized modes

44. Al1 of these terms recur (as synonyms?) in his most recent writing on method: "Introduction: The State of the Art," in Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge, Eng., 1985), 1-34; "The Concept of a Language and the mitier d'historien: Some Considerationson Practice," in Theiunguages of Political Theory Ni Early-Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge, Eng., 1987), 19-38. 45. Hexter, review essay on The Machiavellian Moment, 312, 314.

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..

of regulating public affairs. . Others originate in the vocabulary of some social process which has become relevant to p o l i t i ~ s . ~ ~

Pocock's later treatment of conceptual language often displays great scholarship and imaginative insight. Yet readers familiar with the carefully articulated method of the GG for dealing with just the conceptual and semantic issues singled out by Hexter may find Pocock's procedures relatively eclectic, unsystematic, and not always consistently applied. On such points, the GG's method of tracing concepts could add greater precision to Pocock's project of writing the history of political discourses. A disciplined history of concepts could greatly help the analyst seeking to follow Pocock in distinguishing the component parts of different discourses in the same text, or in demonstrating how the concepts that constitute a given discourse may migrate to another. In my conclusion, 1 shall discuss how Pocock's successful mapping of political discourses in the early modern English-speaking world could serve as a model for those seeking to reconstitute historically German political and social language (Sprache). But here it is worth stressing that not only are the techniques used in the GG compatible with Pocock's goals, but also that this lexicon's findings and method, if applied to the history of political concepts in English, could have facilitated the execution of Pocock's projects in the past. No one should conclude from this account that Pocock as an historian is uninterested in the history of political vocabularies from the Renaissance through the eighteenth century. His work has called attention to those concepts most prominent in each of the political languages he has identified and contrasted. As Keith Thomas has written, in the course of putting together "an oeuvre of formidable consistency," Pocock has "provided an exemplary model of how historical study is the indispensable condition of interpreting the political texts of the pa~t."~' Few, even among his critics, would accuse him of subordinating his historical practice to methodological discussion. Pocock's performances, it would be generally agreed, exemplify, for better or worse, his program of distinguishing sharply between the work of the philosopher of language and that of its historian.48 Not everyone would make the same judgment about Quentin Skinner, whose critics not infrequently accuse him of imposing his philosophical theory of language and action upon a subject to which it is inappropriate and unhelpful. Such critics describe Skinner as obsessed with legislating his own methodological prescriptions, which are so Procrustean as to be useless to the historian of political thought. They charge that because of his emphasis upon correct method,

46. Pocock, "The History of Political Thought," in Philosophy, Politics and Society (second series), 195-196. 47. Keith Thomas, New York Review of Books (February 27, 1986), 36. 48. Pocock, "Political Ideas as Historical Events: Political Philosophers as Historical Actors," in Political Theory and Political Education, ed. Melvin Richter (Princeton, 1980).

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he believes himself to be the first to write a genuinely historical account of political t h o ~ g h t . ~ ~ But in fact Skinner does not claim to be the first either to formulate or to practice the method he champions. Minimizing his own originality, he acknowledges his indebtednesses: "one way of describing my original essays would be to say that 1merely tried to identify and restate in more abstract terms the assumptions on which Pocock's and especially Laslett's scholarship seemed to meto be b a ~ e d . " ~ ~ In fact Skinner is far more individual and original than he admits here. Few historians of political thought can match his philosophical competence. He writes with extraordinary precision and clarity, both as philosopher and historian. As an historian of political thought or "ideologies," as he for somewhat mysterious reasons prefers to cal1 them, Skinner is a careful and thorough researcher, concerned both to work with primary materials, especially in Latin, and to reassess the secondary works interpreting them. Yet not a few reviewers of his Foundations of Modern Political Thought were dubious about the relationship between the methodological precepts Skinner has declared and defended adamantly, and the findings yielded by his own historical performance, impressive as it i ~ . ~ ' Skinner himself credits J. L. Austin's theory of speech acts with having provided him with the key elements of his developed theory. But it was R. G. Collingwood who first suggested to Skinner how the history of political thought ought to be written: "not as a series of attempts to answer a canonical set of questions, but as a sequence of episodes in which the questions as well as the answers have frequently ~ h a n g e d . " ~ ~ Collingwood also attacked British historians who dismissed political thought as "cant," mere rationalizations of interest or political position. Skinner also found in Collingwood grounds for rejecting analytical philosophers who assumed the meaning of a text written in another age could be retrieved simply by reading it carefully. In the analytical theory of speech acts developed out of Wittgenstein, Austin, and Searle, Skinner found the framework for his own philosophical theory. Linguistic conventions, language games, are the key to recovering what it was an author could have been up to in writing what he did rather than something else. The meaning of every utterance, spoken or written, must be understood as an action performed in order to achieve the agent's intentions. This technique

49. Kenneth Minogue, "Method in Intellectual History: Quentin Skinner's Foundations," Philosophy 56 (1981), 533-552, reprinted in Meaningand Context. To this, Skinner has replied: "This position strikes me as self-defeatingly incoherent. . . . it remains a jolting non sequitur to suppose that we can hope to remain in a state of pre-theoretical innocence simply by treating philosophical ignorance as bliss." Skinner, "Reply to my Critics," in Meaning and Context, 233. 50. Skinner refers to the scholarship of Peter Laslett, especially 7lvo 7ieatises of Government by John Locke, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge, Eng., 1960), and Patriarchia and Other Political Works by Sir Robert Filmer, ed. Peter Laslett (Oxford, 1949). 51. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. This is a point made even in the otherwise admiring review by Keith Thomas, New York Review of Books (May 17, 1979). 52. Cited by Skinner in his "Reply to my Critics," in Meaning and Context.

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of analysis allows the historian to determine the extent to which authors accept, reject, or ignore prevailing linguistic and political conventions. Such explanations of the meaning of a text by the author's action within a set of conventions produce three advantages over other modes of interpreting texts: 1) they provide the author's intentions within historical context; 2) they are non-causal in the sense that they redescribe the linguistic action in terms of its ideological point, rather than as caused directly by any force from outside such as class interest; 3) they enable historians to understand how original or conventional is a linguistic action in ways not open either to those who study texts in isolation from their context, or else to those who study context without taking into account . ~ ~engage in studies of "ideologies," the historian must linguistic c o n v e n t i ~ n sTo establish their conventions by studying the minor figures, rather than relying exclusively upon the major or canonical writersSs4 "Ideology" as used by Skinner is meant to be a neutral term, referring to any set of linguistic practices shared by many writers: vocabularies, principles, assumptions, criteria for testing claims to knowledge, problems, conceptual dist i n c t i ~ n sIn . ~practice ~ Skinner tends to subordinate the historical investigation of vocabularies and conceptual distinctions to an emphasis upon the general conventions governing "ideol~gies."~~ Yet his analysis of such rules might be furthered rather than impeded by more detailed investigation of the history and uses of concepts. Such inquiries, meant to further Skinner's own program of inquiry, could take the following forms: Which were the most significant terms actually used to express conceptual distinctions? When and why did shifts occur in meanings of these terms, the concepts they designated, and the arguments in which they were used? To what extent did theorists seek to prompt shifts in meaning of concepts? How successful were they in persuading their audiences to accept the changes they recommended? When and why were neologisms introduced? To what extent were they incorporated into the linguistic practices of theorists, queried or rejected by them? To answer such questions, the research programs of the GG and Handbuch could add much to assertions made by Skinner and others about the historical uses of abstract terms, as well as help to identify the first uses and reasons for new conceptualizations. As for strict historical treatment of the general conventions governing "ideologies," the Handbuch has called attention to the special 53. 1 here follow the account given by James Tully in his introduction to Meaning and Context, a revised version of "The Pen 1s a Mighty Sword: Quentin Skinner's Analysis of Politics," British Journal of Political Science 13 (1983), 489-509. 54. For an analogous discussion in the German literature of the place that ought to be given major authors, see Richter, "BegrigSgeschichte and the History of Ideas," 256-267. 55. Tully, Introduction to Meaning and Context. 56. In his chapter "Rhetoric and Liberty," (Foundutions, 1, chapter 11), Skinner makes important points about the study of language in the tradition of rhetoric, which he carefully distinguishesfrom that of scholasticism. He points out that both traditions made it possible for protagonists of Republican liberty in Italian city republics "to conceptualise and defend the special value of their political experience" (Foundations, 1, 27). But no explicit attention is given to the concepts, to continuities and shifts in their meanings and uses.

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histories of theories about the nature of language and semantics. These could add much to the insights thinkers in the past had about the rules of discourse to be observed or challenged. Skinner has been primarily interested in applying to the history of political thought a philosophical point deriving from the analytical philosophy of language: the rule-governed character of language games, or general conventions of discourse. Skinner's imaginative application of this philosophical theory to the history of political thought emphasizestwo points not usually made together: theorists may manipulate the conventions of their ideology in order to legitimate arrangements; however, once a set of conventions have been used in this way, it sets distinct limits on the types of legitimating arguments open to theorists. This second point deserves greater emphasis. Skinner first made it in his analysis of Bolingbroke, and has subsequently drawn out its impli~ations.~' Thus the problem facing an agent who wishes to legitimate what he is doing at the same time as gaining what he wants cannot simply be the instrumental problem of tailoring his normative language in order to fit his projects. It must in part be the problem of tailoring his projects in order to fit the available normative l a n g ~ a g e . ~ ~

Skinner's principal historical work to date is The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, a two-volume study of European political thought from about the end of the thirteenth through the sixteenth century. This work is meant to provide an example of his method in action, thus showing how to write "a history of political theory with a genuinely historical chara~ter."~~ To do so entails a history centered less on the classic texts, and more on the history of "ideologies." The best known theorists can be situated, the point of their arguments understood, only after thus establishing the conventional linguistic assumptions of their societies. Skinner identifies his principal substantive concern as indicating "the process by which the modern concept of the State [capitalized by Skinner] came to be formed." He understands "the modern concept of the state" to be that provided by Max Weber. Because in fact the basis of government shifted from the power of the ruler to that of the State, the State could "be conceptualised in distinctively modern terms - as the sole source of law and legitimate force within its own territory, and as the sole appropriate object of its subjects' allegian~es."~~ Skinner charts carefully, and with considerable originality, the diverse modes of thought that converged in this concept. The centrality of this theme is further underlined in Skinner's conclusion to

57. The second point is to be found, using virtually the same words, in "Language and Social Change," in Meaningand Context, 120. So far as 1 know, the only thorough analysis and application of this point by Skinner occurs in "The Principies and Practice of Opposition: The Case of Bolingbroke versus Walpole," in Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and Society in Honor of J. H. Plumb (London, 1974), 93-128. 58. Skinner, Foundations, 1, xii-xiii. 59. Ibid., 1, xi. 60. Ibid., 1, x.

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his second volume, where he turns from the institutional developments prompting this conceptual change, from the concept of the State ("history"), to the word "State" ("historical semantics.") Thus the use of the words "State" and I'État in the sixteenth century confirms the Foundations's central thesis: "The clearest sign that a society has entered into the self-conscious possession of a new concept is, 1 take it, that a new vocabulary comes to be generated, in terms of which the concept is then articulated and disc~ssed."~~ It might appear that this is the point where Skinner's method most closely approximates that deployed in Geschichtliche Grundbegrtge, in short, a contextual history of concepts. In that case, he would have defined his task at least in part as retrieving the concepts constituting the vocabulary in which the concept of the state came to be articulated and discussed. Yet in his methodological writings, Skinner's maxims would seem to stand in the way of investigating in genuinely historical terms the concepts of a newly acquired vocabulary. In an earlier dismissal of the history of ideas as formulated by A. O. Lovejoy, Skinner stated baldly that it is always a mistake to attempt writing the history of an idea.62 Literally understood, this would both make Begr@sgeschichte in al1 its forms appear to be a mistake, and add to the difficulty of understanding Skinner's own treatment in the Foundations of how the concept of the modern State came to be created. In 1989he himself published a thirty-six page chapter on "The State."63 Skinner's original point was Wittgensteinian: concepts are tools. To understand a concept, it is necessary to know the full range of things that can be done with it. This is why there can be no histories of concepts; there can only be histories of their uses in argument. In his contribution to a popular symposium on "What is Intellectual History?" Skinner states "the deep truth that concepts must not be viewed simply as propositions with meanings attached to them; they must also be thought of as weapons (Heidegger's suggestion) or as tools (Wittgenstein's term)."64 It is not immediately apparent how an historian could write the history of the uses of a concept in argument without having taken a position on the identity of the concept, without having charted continuities and shifts in the meanings carried by the concept (as distinguished from names or terms for it). Here it does not help to repeat that meaning is identical with use. For how could the historian distinguish any concept deployed in an argument from other concepts nearly synonymous or easily confused with it? Nor is it clear how experience or belief can be "conceptualised," a term so frequently used by Skinner, without creating concepts, the history of which then can and ought to be charted." As has been noted,

61. Ibid., 1, xi. 62. Skinner's critiques of Lovejoy occur in "Meaningand Understanding in the History of Ideas," 35-39, and more cogently, in History Today 35 (1985), 51. 63. Ball, Farr, and Hanson, Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, 90-131. 64. "What 1s Intellectual History?" History Today 35 (1985), 51. 65. See Foundations, 1, 27 for a statement that makes conceptualization of political experience central to Skinner's analysis.

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he has himself written just such a history, preceded by a repetition of his statement that "if we wish to grasp how someone sees the world - what distinctions he draws, what classifications he accepts - what we need to know is . . . what concepts he p~ssesses."~~ However, ~kinnerhas clarified his position: "Since 1 believe that to understand a concept requires us to understand (1) what can be done with it as well as understanding (2) the terms used to express it, my only doubt is whether there can be histories of (2) that exclude (l)."" Here Skinner seems to acknowledge the difference between writing a history of terms designating concepts but with no reference to their contexts (as in the Historisches Worterbuch der Philosophie), and a history specifically designed to provide both the contexts and uses in argument of concepts, as well as identifying the different terms designating them (as in the GG). He would now modify what earlier could have been taken as condemnation of any and al1 histories of concepts. Skinner's previous position apparently derives from two objects of his earlier criticism: Lovejoy's use of "unit ideas,"68and Raymond Williams's K e y w ~ r d s . ~ ~ On the basis of errors he claimed to detect in both these targets, Skinner formulated a set of methodological maxims. They were very general in their scope, interdicting histories of concepts. In Skinner's earlier view, unacceptable consequences follow from Lovejoy's project:

.

[Tlhis kind of history of ideas. . tends to leave us with a history almost bereft of recognisable agents, a history in which we find Reason itself overcoming Custom, Progress confronting the Great Chain of Being. . [Tlhe rnain doubt about the method has been that in focusing on ideas rather than their uses in argument, it has seemed insensitive to the strongly contrasting ways in which a given concept can be put to work by different writers in different historical periods.'O

..

1s this set of errors inherent in every attempt to write a history of concepts? Would it rule out the GG as fatally flawed? In print, Skinner's recent statement (in 1988) appears to have repeated rather than retracted what he had said before: 1 can best restate my objection by observing, in Wittgenstein's phrase, that concepts are

66. This phrasing occurs in both the 1988 and 1989 versions of "Languageand Political Change," Meaning and Context, 120; Ball, Farr, and Hanson, Political Innovation, 7. 67. From a letter from Skinner to Melvin Richter. 68. History Today, 51. In the same symposium on "What 1s Intellectual History?" Stefan Collini, who identifies himself with Skinner's position, nevertheless writes: "Lovejoy's own practice was, as is so often the case, better either than his preaching or than the imitative practice of his disciples, and his most famous work, The Great Chain of Being, remains an extremely impressive tour de force. (History Today 35 [1985], 47) The same point has been made more vigorously by Francis Oakley in his defenses of Lovejoy against Skinner: Omnipotence, Covenant, & Order (Ithaca, 1984), 15-40; and Journal of the History of Ideas 48 (1987), 242-245. 69. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabtrlary of Cultvre and Society (London, 1976). The first title Skinner gave his treatment of Williams was "'The Idea of a Cultural iexicon," Essays in Criticism 29 (1980), 205-224. It has undergone two revisions, the first as "Language and Social Change," in The State of the Language, ed. L. Michaels and C. Ricks (Berkeley, 1980), 562-578; the second, with the same title, in Meaning and Context. 70. Skinner, History Today 35 (1985), 51.

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tools. To understand a concept, it is necessary to grasp not merely the meanings of the terms used to express it, but also the range of things that can be done with it. This is why in spite of the long continuities that have undoubtedly marked our inherent patterns of thought, 1 remain unrepentant in my belief that there can be no histories of concepts; there can only be histories of their uses in argument." Despite the ostensible import of this recent statement, Skinner's objections do not extend to the GG's way of writing the history of concepts. What he in fact continues to attack "is that type of history which assumes that we can treat the morphology of concepts in isolation from questions about agency and explanat i ~ n . " 'In ~ unprinted comments on Begr~zsgeschichte,Skinner does not identify the history of concepts as practiced in the GG and Handbuch with Lovejoy's history of ideas. He seems to acknowledge that in defining the method to be used in their lexicons, Koselleck and Reichardt deplored the absence of context in previous German histories of ideas. The GG disclaims ontological assumptions (that concepts have some enduring, essential quality), as well as epistemological assertions (that al1 thinking must be done through concepts). In his own 1989 history of the concept of "The State," Skinner's treatment of his subject is thoroughly documented by references drawn from the Foundations. Again his conclusions and method are rather more conventionalthan those that might have been expected by readers of his metatheoretical papers. Despite some telling statements drawn from less familar figures, Skinner's emphasis falls upon major theorists such as Marsilius, Machiavelli, Bodin, Hobbes, Locke, Bossuet; and upon standard characterizations of contending traditions such as republicanism and absolutism. To what extent is Skinner's account a history of the uses in argument of the concept of the state? For the most part he supplies the context of argument by placing individual theorists either in the republican or absolutist category, rather than tracing the concept as used in the language of struggles among contending groups, movements, or power-holders. And there is a strongly teleological or Whig assumption of an historical development towards the absolutist state justified by Hobbes, or towards Max Weber's definition of the modern state. Yet this extended essay in conceptual history displays once again the high leve1 achieved in the Foundations. For Skinner is an unusually accomplished and thorough historian with the virtues and (to his credit) many of the views of his distinguished predecessors in the history of late medieval and early modern political thought. These fields do not often recruit scholars as brilliant and significant as Skinner. Yet his metatheoretical projects seem to stand in an uncertain relationship to his actual performances, which, along with those of Pocock will now be contrasted to analogous work in Begriflsgeschichte. Despite Skinner's program, which includes study of political vocabularies and conceptual distinctions, he has tended in practice to emphasize the general con71. Skinner, "Reply to my Critics," in Meaning and Context, 283. 72. Skinner's comment on M. Richter, "Conceptual History (Begrgsgeschichte) and Political Theory." Personal communication, a letter postmarked June 4, 1985.

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ventions of political language, while passing over its conceptual vocabulary. Perhaps he will now shift to his own version of conceptual history. As for Pocock's analyses of political languages, he often treats change and continuity in their conceptual repertoires. Yet he has not developed a systematic method for studying the history of concepts that constitute the "discourses" he places at the head of his agenda. Nor do these Carnbridge-trained historians regularly treat disagreements arising in times of conflict among historical actors about the vocabulary, semantic theories, and theories of language appropriate to politics. Yet such linguistic contestations are especially apt to arise among those representing competing social and political groups.'= It is a serious defect not to consider systematically the relationships of the language used by theorists to their political and social affiliations. Such a procedure makes it difficult to treat adequately political ideologies (in the more usual sense), which merit inclusion in those contextual analyses emphasized by Pocock and Skinner. Both ought to consider the case made by Reinhart Koselleck for including a non-reductionist type of social history in the definition of intellectual ~ontext.'~ This makes it possible to answer questions indispensable to determining historical context and reception. How else can the message intended by the writer of a politically significant text be understood without identifying its audience, reconstructed with at least as much historical care as has gone into determining the intentions of both the author and other writers? How can the uptake of a message by an audience be explained without examining its composition and interests? The issue of bringing in institutional and social history begins to emerge when Skinner's treatment of how the state was conceptualized is compared to Koselleck's in Prussia between Reform and Revolution. Among the most marked differences are those in the materials judged relevant to such histories. In his Foundations, Skinner's work, although strikingly broad in its coverage of theorists, has little to say about their institutional and legal contexts. Koselleck's monograph, which is done at far greater length on a more limited subject, identifies the individuals and groups contending for the power to define such crucial terms as citizen, property, status, and the state itself. That concept in its Prussian form is treated by Koselleck as itself presupposing the prior existence of many other concepts: "Consider what must enter into the word 'State' for it to become a concept: rule, domination (Herrschaft); jurisdiction, the body of citizens (Bürgertum), legislation (Gesetzgebung), the judicial power

73. For a review of reviews of the Foundations, see J. H . M. Salmon, "Theory in Historical Context," History of European Ideas 4 (1983), 331-335. Salmon agrees with the conclusion, similar to my own, of L. Mulligan, J. Rlchards, and J . Grahain, in Political Studies 27 (1979), 95-113. 74. See Koselleck's "Einleitung," GG, 1; and the two essays by Koselleck. One has been translated in Futures Past, 73-91, from brgangene Zukunft, 107-129. The most recent is "Sozialgeschichte und Begriffsgeschichte," in Sozialgeschichtein Deutschland, ed. Wolfgang Schieder and Volker Sellin, 2 vols. (Gottingen, 1987), 1, 89-109.

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(Rechtsprechung), administration, taxation, and the ar~ny!'~~ Thus concepts taken from a number of technical languages had to be merged to produce the concept of the State, which crystallized and registered specific historical experiences and institutional patterns. By using the broad range of sources prescribed by the GG's method, it has been demonstrated that even in Prussia the concept of the state was neither unambiguous nor uncontroverted. Indeed the principal protagonists were not only themselves self-conscious about language, but called the attention of their publics to how great were the practica1 consequences of ostensibly legal and administrative disputes about how to define key political and social terms. Such matters are treated by Skinner, but from a present-day analytical perspective, rather than in terms of actual perceptions by historical actors of the political consequences of linguistic strategies. One commentator has noted that Begrigsgeschichte in the GG "is situated at the conjunction of these three fields: history of ideas, historical semantics, and Those who admire what has been achieved by Posociology of kn~wledge."~~ cock and Skinner might well consider adding historical semantics and the sociology of knowledge (as done in the GG) to histories of "discourses" and "ideologies." Nothing in their methodological principles bars Pocock and Skinner from undertaking studies of context which specify those groups and movements to which individual theorists understood themselves to belong. Another lacuna in the treatment of political thought by Pocock and Skinner, who prefer to deal with individual theorists, is their lack of interest in perceptions and evaluations of structural changes by groups, movements, or parties. In periods of rapid transformation, the history of the language used to characterize transformations of structures merits inclusion in the context to be analyzed by historians of political and social language. Pocock himself has provided one such notable study: that dealing with the conflicting ways in which English and Scottish theorists registered the advent of commercial society in the eighteenth century. But such analysis of the linguistic aspects of structural change is for the most part lacking in his work, as in that of Skinner. Although both Pocock and Skinner stress language in their respective treatments of the history of political thought, their research programs do not include any systematic consideration of philosophical and political controversies in the past about language. Often such discussions were occasioned by contested usages in political discourse. The GG analyzes such disagreements about political language in periods of conflict and crisis. The Handbuch has identified controversies about the alleged abuse of language before and during the French Revolution. First the old regime was charged with using language to dorninate its subjects. Then the revolutionaries, once in power, sought to transform the language into one of citizenship, and were in turn charged with abusing words and perverting language. Skinner and Pocock could with profit add analogous discussions to 75. Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft, 119-120; Futures Past, 84. 1 have provided my own translation of this passage. 76. Irmline Veit-Brause, "A Note on BegrifSsgeschichte,"History and Theory 20 (1981), 63.

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their consideration of political discourse. Then they could include in their histories those views about the origins and functions of political language held by actors in the past and theorists of language contemporary with them. The history of political thought ought to be connected to the history of theories about language. Indeed many of those individuals who figure in the history of political thought are no less prominent in the special histories of theories about the nature of language and ~ e r n a n t i c s . ~ ~

Pocock and Skinner, using different techniques, have approached the history of political language through identifying the principal early modern idioms used in English, as well as making imaginative use of the philosophical theory of speech acts. Negatively, both in their writings on method have sought to identify and interdict modes of analyzing texts that produce anachronisms or readings historically unjustifiable. Positively, both have sought to make intelligible what theorists in the past understood themselves to be doing when they wrote their texts as they did, and argued against ways other than their own of legitimating politics. Pocock's achievement has been to identify more fully than anyone before him the range of alternative and competing political discourses available to seventeenthand eighteenth-century writers in the English-speaking world. Skinner has put on an altogether new footing two types of historical inquiry not systematically pursued before him: 1)treating political theories in terms of those historical contexts and linguistic conventions which both facilitate and circumscribe legitimations of political arrangements; 2) describing and making intelligible such theories or "ideologies" as intentional speech acts. Yet Skinner's metatheoretical writings have regarded with suspicion any history of concepts. Although Skinner himself now appears ready to reopen this question, the historical and linguistic accounts of political argument produced by him differ considerably from the GG's project of reconstructing political and social languages by charting the histories of the concepts that have constituted their vocabularies. An analogous lack of attention to the history of concepts is to be found in Pocock's actual work. And so, in conclusion, the question with which this paper began must be raised once again: how compatible are these German and Anglophone modes of treating political language by rigorously historical methods? In my view, there are no major 77. See, for example, the connection between Locke's theory of language and his political theory as stated by Hans Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of iunguage and Intellectual History (Minneapolis, 1982), 79-80. Also indispensable for considerationsof such relationships in English is Hans Aarsleff, The Study of iunguage in England 1780-1860 (Princeton, 1967). In his introductionto the Handbuch (Heft 1,86-148), Reichardt supplies a notable list of primary sources for the actual uses of political language, sources exclusive of political theory. In the same volume of the Handbuch ( ~ e f 1,t 149-189), Brigette Schlieben-Lange has written a remarkable introduction to lexicographicaland semantic practices in the intense development of dictionaries during the French Revolution.

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obstacles to bringing them together. They shwe considerably more with each other than with more modish alternatives that dismiss the very notion of historical reconstruction. The Begrtgsgeschichte of the GG could profit much from the general questions put by Pocock and Skinner. As the result of twenty-five years of practice within the format of an alpliabetical lexicon, Begri@sgeschichte needs both to return to its original problematic, and to consider other major ways of understanding the point of writing histories of political language. The GG's underlying assumption is that it is possible to map synchronically the key concepts that comprise a complex society's political and social vocabularies at a time of rapid changes in its structures. The GG's individual histories of concepts, placed carefully within their contexts, as well as its project of characterizing, comparing, and contrasting the entire vocabulary at significant points of time, add much to the sources, methods, and the questions investigated by Pocock and Skinner. On the leve1 of sources, the GG, and now the Handbuch, have demonstrated how much can be contributed to the historical study of political language by the systematic use of such sources as contemporary dictionaries, books on synonyms, encyclopedias, as well as works by those already functioning as iexicographers, theorists of language, and semanticists. Another example of how those working in the Anglophone mode might profit from considering German methods is the GG's non-reductive use of social history in conjunction with that of concepts. In comparison, Pocock and Skinner seem relatively insensitive to units of analysis larger than the individual ~heorist or school of thought. This may be due to earlier Cambridge antipathies to the social history and unhistorical sociology of the 1950s and 1960s, as well as to a philosophical theory of linguistic action that limited the scope of inquiry to individuals regarded as actors in speech situations. It may also be that the relationships between politics and language studied by Pocock and Skinner have been affected by their specializations in late medieval, early modern, and eighteenthcentury history. In both cases their inquiries end before the massive structural changes which cannot be ignored by those who have had to deal with the political vocabularies developed in the wakes of the French and industrial revolutions. The GG's longest article, that on the concept of revolution, includes those earlier periods, but goes on to trace the concept's history and political functions up to our own time. Nevertheless, there is much in both the metatheories and practices of Pocock and Skinner that should be applied to the analysis of the GG's findings. Pocock's identification of the political languages in early modern and eighteenth-century Britain is a particularly valuable technique of analysis and comparison. With it as a model, the data in the GG could serve as a base for mapping the principal political and social languages used in German-speaking Europe. Thus the GG's findings could be re-analyzed synchronically in terms of the political languages employed during the Sattelzeit at intervals selected in terms of their significance in German history. Pocock's admirably nuanced treatment of the varieties of Whiggism could serve as a guide to analogous histories of German political lan-

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guages put together from data taken from the concepts treated separately in the GG.78Conflicts about the meaning and proper usage of concepts among the proponents of the various languages would also emerge from such a procedure. Social and economic languages present in the GG might or might not turn out to diverge significantly from those used to discuss politics and government. Not the least of the questions common to Pocock and Koselleck could also be treated: how did the temporal categories imbedded in these languages or discourses affect the theories and concepts of those using them? The re-analysis of the GG could also be greatly facilitated by the issues raised by Skinner about political thought and theorizing as forms of linguistic action. The high degree of contextual analysis demanded by the GG's method is compatible with answering those questions so carefully posed by Skinner: which linguistic conventions in given contexts were used to define the legitimations offered for political and social actions? Which legitimations were excluded by the continuing use of just these vocabularies and linguistic frameworks? By utilizing the information provided in depth by the studies of concepts in the GG, these queries, emanating from Skinner's framework of inquiry, could be answered with great specificity. It would be particularly interesting to carry questions drawn from Skinner's method into that period from about 1750to 1900, when, according to Koselleck, there was a proliferation of ideologies (in his sense of the term). Skinner has also raised questions about the effect of general linguistic conventions upon available modes of legitimating political arrangements. His treatment could be complemented by a method frequently used in the GG: the identification and analysis of the functions of illegitimation in political discourse. This is the technique of bringing the GegenbegriTe (polar opposites) of concepts into the analysis of how the concepts themselves were used. Often these Gegenbegr13e will be found to be performing important negative or delegitimizing functions vis-A-vis csmpeting concepts used by other groups defined as adversaries. Thus negative concepts often do important work in political and social a r g ~ m e n t . ~ ~ Finally, two questions must be addressed briefly: 1) whether concepts are the unit of analysis best fitted for writing the history of political thought; 2) whether Begrflsgeschichte ought to be added to the already large repertoire of competing conceptions of this activity already being argued by those writing such histories in English. As for the first issue, Terence Ball has just made a powerful argument in favor of developing and applying what he calls "critica1 conceptual history"

78. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History, 215-310. This model study goes beyond the American Revolution into the British reaction to the French Revolution, and as far as Macaulay in the nineteenth century. 79. For a semantic analysis of three significant sets of polar opposites, see Reinhart Koselleck, "Zur historisch-politischenSemantik asymmetrischer Gegenbegriffe"in VergangeneZukunft, 211-259; "The Historical-PoliticalSemantics of Asymmetric Counterconcepts" in Futures Past, 159-197. Examples of the proposed procedure may be found in Melvin Richter, "Towards a Concept of Political Illegitimacy," Political Theory 10 (1982), 185-214; and "Aristotles und der klassische grieschische Begriff der Despotie" in Festschrift für Wilhelm Hennis, ed. U . Matz, H. Meier, K. Sontheimer, and P.-L. Weinacht (Stuttgart, 1988), 21-37.

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to political the~ry.~O But in Germany the first book-length work on historical semantics in many years has launched a root and branch attack on the GG's choice of concepts as the unit of a n a l y s i ~This . ~ ~ author, Dietrich Busse, a linguist, offers a set of proposals perhaps most closely approximating Foucault's theory of discursive practices. As yet Busse's work remains on the programmatic level, as have earlier criticisms in principle of the GG other than those found in the Handbuch. Judgment may perhaps kr reserved for the day when such exercises in metatheory are applied to actual historical cases. No other work has come close to matching the GG's great contributions to the study of political and social language. This is not to deny that the lexicon format, as well as some of the GG's metatheory are responsible for important deficiencies in the work. Pocock's and Skinner's reasons for preferring to work with "discourses" or "ideologies" rather than concepts merit serious discussion. But as 1 have argued, their own work is not incompatible with the GG, and in important respects could be improved by incorporating its program, methods, and findings. However, no such work on the history of political and social concepts in English is available. Although some praiseworthy work has been done, a strong case remains for at least some historians of political thought to turn their attention to a conceptual history of political theory written in English during the periods treated by the GG and Handbuch. To do so would make it possible to attempt a comparative analysis of political and social concepts. To what extent did the meanings and uses of these concepts converge in English, French, and German? As yet English-speaking scholars have not done the work that might serve as an adequate basis for responding to this query. Until they do, al1 students of the history of political and social thought will be the poorer. City University of New York Graduate School and Hunter College

80. Terence Ball, lbnsforming Political Dkcourse: Political Theory and Critica1 Conceptual Hktory (Oxford, 1988). See also the Editors' Introduction and James Farr's essay in Ball, Farr, and Hanson, Political Innovation and Political Change. 81. Dietrich Busse, Historische Semantik (Stuttgart, 1987).