Conceptual History

Introduction. Conceptual History Introduction Conceptual History Challenges, Conundrums, Complexities Willibald Steinmetz and Michael Freeden The purpose of this book is twofold. To begin with, it serves as the lead volume to an ambitious series of volumes on conceptual histories in Europe. But it also is an opportunity to reflect on the state of the art of conceptual history in a post-Koselleckian era. Does current conceptual history respect its founders and their intentions? What are its most prominent trends? On what is it still missing out? And how does it have to change when practised on a European scale? The practice of conceptual history, like its subject matter, is simultane- ously discontinuous and intra-referential, scattered and centripetal. In fact, over the past twenty years its study has been experiencing a rebirth. Its practi- tioners are multiplying; its investigations have spread across many languages and cultures – within Europe and beyond; its assumptions and contentions are becoming more nuanced; and it has entered into a fertile mutual give-and- take with neighbouring disciplines. Moreover, it has embraced the digital age: leafing through yellowing dictionaries has been (partly) replaced by recourse to searchable databases.1 From being a somewhat esoteric venture within the domain of history it is fast becoming one of the most important avenues to studying not just intellectual history and political thought but a broad spec- trum of discourses ranging from comparative religion, emotional lexicons and welfare state policies to the natural sciences and science and technology studies.2 Before delving deeper into the opportunities offered and challenges posed by conceptual history, two basic questions need to be addressed: Why concepts? And why Europe? Concepts can be seen as focal points of interpretation and understand- ing; as identifying regularities and differences in human discourse; as win- dows through which we can appreciate how comprehensions of the world 2 Willibald Steinmetz and Michael Freeden are organized and brought to bear on action; as milestones in the changing course of the evolution of knowledge; as constraints on the messiness of human thought and enablers of its transformation; and as rational and emotional containers of social logic and imagination. Their history is the history of all this and more, both on the micro-level of human interaction and on the macro-stage of national and international upheavals, revolutions, transactions and order. The main body of work to which conceptual historians all over the world continue to refer is the volumes of Reinhart Koselleck’s monumen- tal Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe.3 These volumes cover in alphabetic order the social and political concepts in the German language in modern times. For Koselleck, basic concepts express what a discourse is talking about, and some concepts attain the status of ‘inescapable, irreplaceable part[s] of the political and social vocabulary’.4 One of Koselleck’s main findings is that in the late modern era these concepts became more abstract and general, and also more future-oriented. Conceptual history traces the modifications occurring in the meanings of such concepts, always within a particular social and cultural context, and always in a state of potential contest with one another. It is, in his words, a ‘record of how th[e] uses [of past conceptualizations] were subsequently maintained, altered or transformed’.5 Hence, the method identifies the many layered meanings contained in the actual usages of a con- cept. Koselleck argued that concepts consist of aggregative meanings that are reflected in later usage, and this was expressed in the famous phrase the ‘simultaneity of the non-simultaneous’. While Koselleck was more interested in long-term, diachronic change, the method is equally applicable to shorter time frames and to synchronic comparisons within one community of language users, or between languages. There is already much debate and research on how to apply conceptual history and what it is that we are conceptualizing, but less on what the practice of conceptualizing concepts itself entails. We need to know what concepts can and cannot deliver, and how they convey information, as part of the discipline of conceptual history. The emphasis on conceptual change should not rule out a parallel emphasis on the performativity of concepts. That means, among others, looking at their intricate structure, at their illo- cutionary force, and at the emotional clothing in which they are articulated. It even means deducing concepts indirectly from non-textual evidence such as that provided by art, architecture, dance, photography, political emblems or body language.6 And conceptual absences too demand their own investiga- tion. These are only some of the complexities that make conceptual history so fascinating a topic, and they will be discussed in the present and the following volumes of our European book series. Introduction. Conceptual History 3 But why Europe? This question immediately entails another, preliminary one: What is ‘Europe’ from a conceptual history point of view? Where do we consider the European conceptual space to end, given the fact that, since the onset of modernity, major European languages like Spanish, Portuguese, French, Russian and above all English have been spoken, and are still being used, as second or indeed first languages in many parts of the world? And how do we contend with the fact that European languages have been and continue to be in constant interchange with non-European ones? What is at stake here is the spatial scope of our project. Should we extend our view to the totality of linguistic contacts between speakers of European and non- European languages or, rather, restrict our inquiries to uses of concepts in the political communities which, together, make up the geographical province conventionally called Europe? Without pretending that the two approaches may be as neatly separable from each other as this alternative suggests we have chosen the second option. Our main reason is a pragmatic one. Jumping immediately to the global level in a discipline that is just about to move beyond single-nation or single- language studies would be rash and could, possibly, overstrain the resources and network-building capacities of the editors and contributors to the book series. The decision to concentrate on conceptual histories in Europe, however, does not preclude looking at how those histories were affected by events happening outside Europe, by people migrating into Europe or by transla- tions and conceptual transfers originating in non-European world regions. Non-European linguistic and extra-linguistic developments will thus have a legitimate place in our volumes in so far as they have had repercussions on European ones. Even with these restrictions in mind the task in front of us is ambitious enough. Our venture of writing conceptual histories on a European scale fits well with similar projects underway for other world regions. The most advanced, and also the nearest from a cultural point of view, is the Iberconceptos project, which explores parallel and diverging uses of concepts in the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking worlds on both sides of the Atlantic.7 Also far advanced are two competing South Korean projects on conceptual histories and transfers within the East Asian region and particularly between China, Korea and Japan.8 More recently, similar attempts have been made to explore the histories of certain clusters of concepts or semantic fields in parts of Asia, the Middle East and Africa.9 The introduction of Western concepts in the respective Asian and African languages during the colonial and postcolonial periods is an important, though never exclusive, research topic in those projects. Given the present state of research, choosing a world-regional rather than a global approach seems to be the appropriate step. 4 Willibald Steinmetz and Michael Freeden When we turn to Europe as one among several world regions we do not thereby wish to claim the existence of a European special path, let alone a European model. The assumption from which we start is that the mechanisms and patterns of conceptual change to be discovered in Europe will be as multiple and diverse as in any other world region. One might perhaps argue that since the Middle Ages the European conceptual universe, despite its diversity, has been more homogenous because of the common traditions of Greek, Latin and Judeo-Christian texts;10 yet a similar point could easily be made with regard to, for instance, common traditions forming the base of the modern Chinese, Korean and Japanese conceptual worlds. Another argument in favour of European exceptionalism might be that a large number of basic concepts that nowadays serve to order our modern worldview – concepts like ‘politics’, ‘religion’, ‘science’, ‘law’ and ‘economy’ – happen to be of European origin. This, however, is the result of the contingent fact that, since the 1920s, English has acquired the status of a global lingua franca,11 but it cannot be attributed to any supposed specific quality of European concepts themselves. In short, rather than searching for European exceptionalisms, we will treat Europe as just one interesting case among others from which one might learn more about how to approach transnational and, eventually, global conceptual history. We regard Europe as one of several provinces suitable for studying mechanisms and patterns of conceptual change – no more and no less. The following paragraphs of this introduction, as well as the entire volume, address the main issues currently preoccupying conceptual historians work- ing on European languages. As the lead volume to a new book series, it has no pretensions to offer an exhaustive panorama of European political and social concepts. Particular concepts such as liberalism, democracy and regionalism are merely mentioned here as brief case studies to illustrate certain contro- versies.

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