Reinhart Koselleck, Begriffsgeschichte and Social History

 Reinhart Koselleck, “Begriffsgeschichte and Social History,” in Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (NY: Columbia University Press, 2004), 75—92.

The article examines the relationship between conceptual and social histories—history meant both as “past” and “story about the past.”

At the first sight, this link is complicated, as social history studies process and structures—those phenomena which are not directly reflected in actions, something which is expressed in words. Yet, the relationship between the two is more complex: “Without common concepts there is no society, and above all, no political field of action.” (p. 76) Koselleck regards three levels of this relationship:

1. To what extent Begriffsgeschichte follows a classical critical-historical method, but by virtue of its greater acuity, also contributes to the tangibility of sociohistorical themes. Here, the analysis of concepts is in a subsidiary relation to social history.

2. To what extent Begriffsgeschichte represents an independent discipline with its own method, whose content and range are to be defined parallel to social history, while both disciplines mutually overlap.

3. To what extent Begriffsgeschichte poses a genuine theoretical claim without whose solution an effective social history cannot be practiced. (p. 76)

To prove the usefulness of Begriffsgeschichte as a method for social history, Koselleck analyzes an example of how concepts of “Stand,” “class,” and “citizen” were used in a Prussian document dated by 1807. He argues that a historical analysis of these concepts helps to understand “the diversity of levels of contemporary experiences”—in other words, helps to formulate research problems that deepen our research:

Surveying the space of meaning in each of the central concepts here employed exposes, therefore, a contemporary polemical thrust; intentions with respect to the future; and enduring elements of past social organization, whose specific arrangement discloses a statement’s meaning. This activity of temporal semantic construal simultaneously establishes the historical force contained within a statement. (p. 79)

In other word, any investigation of the meanings of social and political concepts inevitably leads to social or political research: “The moments of duration, change, and futurity contained in a concrete political situation are registered through their linguistic traces.” (p. 79) And further in the text:

The semantic struggle for the definition of political or social position, defending or occupying these positions by deploying a given definition, is a struggle that belongs to all those times of crisis <…> Since the French Revolution, this struggle has become more acute and has undergone a structural shift; concepts no longer serve merely to define given states of affairs, but reach into the future. Concepts of the future became increasingly new-minted; positions that were to be secured had first to be formulated linguistically before it was possible to enter or permanently occupy them. (p. 80)

Consequently, without first addressing the semantic nature of terms involved in a historical period under study, our research will be unable to discover the tensions/important developments of its phenomena. Interestingly, this is what Michel Foucault did in his study of governmentality, starting with analyzing the semantic meaning of a number of concepts and then moving on to much broader conclusions.

Koselleck then moves on to consider Begriffsgeschichte as a research discipline of its own: “More precisely, its methodology lays claim to an autonomous sphere which exists in a state of mutually engendered tension with social history.” (81) Its research field, then, becomes “the contemporary space of experience and horizon of expectation, and also <…> the political and social functions of concepts, together with their specific modality of usage, such that (in short) a synchronic analysis also took account of situation and conjuncture.” (81) The aim of such research is to “translate” past concepts into contemporary understanding.

To achieve this aim, Koselleck suggests that we should approach concepts in their diachronic, i.e. historical, perspective. In order to understand the concept Bürger, e.g., he studies all previous concepts in which this concept was involved (Stadtbürger, for example) and all concepts to which it had a direct relationship (Stand, for example). (p. 82-83). This lexical/semantic research is done on a linguistic level, initially without extralinguistic excursions at all, therefore, it liberates itself from the subordinate link to social history. But after this, its now equal partnership with social history becomes even more productive.

Such an analysis is required, because semantic meanings change not only because of the social transformation, but also because they start to embody new expectations. Koselleck writes:

The temporal question posed by a potential Begriffsgeschichte with respect to persistence, change, and novelty leads to the identification of semantic components, persisting, overlapping, discarded, and new meanings—all of which can become relevant for social history only if the history of the concept has been first subjected separate analysis. As an independent discipline, therefore, Begriffsgeschichte delivers indices for social history by pursuing its own methods. (84)

Concepts should not be mixed with words: each concept is associated with a word, but not vice versa. While a “concept is connected to a word, <it> is at the same time more than a word: a word becomes a concept only when the entirety of meaning and experience within a sociopolitical context within which and for which a word is used can be condensed into one word.” (85) The concept emerges, then, when nothing else can express the bundle of meanings and references, both contemporary and historical, which it brings together in itself.

Koselleck then returns to his point that concept do not simply reflect the socio-political reality, but create it:

A concept is not simply indicative of the relations which it covers; it is also a factor within them. Each concept establishes a particular horizon for potential experience and conceivable theory, and in this way sets a limit. (86)

The practical importance of Begriffsgeschichte lies in the very fact that it looks at historical concepts through the lens of semantic analysis and is able, thus, to restore their contemporary meanings, rather than impose on them our today’s meanings. If we keep in mind that concepts were able to shape the course of historical events, then here is the point when Begriffsgeschichte becomes an instrument of ultimate importance for historians, for it gives them access to one of driving forces of the historical process unavailable by other means.

Begriffsgeschichte is also important as an instrument for criticism of ideologies. Here once again Koselleck’s and Foucault’s views run parallel to each other. Koselleck argues that “there is always a certain hiatus between social contents (86) and the linguistic usage that seeks to fix this content. Transformation in the meaning of words and of things, change of situation, and impulse to rename things, all of these correspond diversely one with another.” (87) It is this hiatus that Begriffsgeschichte focuses on in its practical research. If one wants to understand a history of secularization, his or her methods would be: registering alternative names of certain phenomena (he uses the example of Säkularisation, Verweltlichung and Verzeitlichung), historical contextualization through a study of the domain of church and constitutional law, emergence of neologisms, and finally the “ideological currents that crystallized around the expression.” (87) In this respect, counter concepts (Gegenbegriffe?) indicate different political and social forces who invest in different versions of the future.

In the third section, “On the Theory of Begriffsgeschichte and of Social History,” Koselleck discusses what further benefits conceptual history can offer to social history. By the fact that Begriffsgeschichte unites synchronic and diachronic analysis, Koselleck argues that it can demonstrate semantic relics which all concepts inherit from their past usages, references or meanings (he refers to Bund, which used to have a religion-related meaning and which Marx and Engels reproduced in the Communist Manifesto). It, thus, helps social history to evaluate the influence that certain social phenomena exert even after having been long gone (he uses the term the contemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous (Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen)). (90)

The fact that concepts are able to retain semantic relics, which keep on influencing the socio-political reality, is due to the nature of the language itself:

Each word, even each name, displays a linguistic potentiality beyond the individual phenomenon that it at a given moment characterizes or names. This is equally true of historical concepts, even if they initially serve to conceptually assemble the singularity of complex structures of experience. Once “minted,” a concept contains within itself, purely linguistically, the possibility of being employed in a generalized manner, of constructing types, or of disclosing comparative insights. The reference to a particular party, state, or army linguistically involves a plane potentially including parties, states, or armies. A history of related concepts leads to structural questions that social history has to answer. (90)

Moreover, if a social historian wants to pursue something more complex that a simple empirical descriptive research, i.e. “to think conceptually,” he or she will be obliged to turn to a study of concepts, because social structures determine not the exact course of events, but rather a variety of possible historical developments, which is hard to see for us (as we are in the end of a chain of events which is called history). But since concepts express possible historical developments in the past (e.g., at some point in the mid-20^th century Britain could choose fascism, communism or a number of other –isms, but rather chose liberalism. It does not mean that fascism or communisms were not possible “futures” of the British pasts: its social structures had their potential, at least theoretically. As Britain chose liberalism, they turned almost invisible, but conceptual history helps to bring them back to the light).