Contributions to the History of Concepts

This thematic section of Contributions to the History of Concepts takes up the necessity – and at the same time the problematic nature – of studying metaphors as a part of conceptual history. As Frank Beck Lassen argues in his article, “Regular, Dependable, Mechanical: J.F. Struensee on the State of Denmark,” not only concepts but also metaphors must be considered by historians of political thought as politically significant figures of speech. Metaphors may constitute condensed political arguments, the applications of which play an important role in the continuous semantic struggle over the definition of political reality.

The importance of bodily and mechanical analogies in everyday political argumentation has been seldom discussed in the academic literature. This article is based on a contextual analysis of the uses of bodily and mechanical analogies in parliamentary and public debates in eighteenth-century England, as they can be retrieved from full-text databases of printed literature. The author demonstrates the continuous use of bodily analogies for much of the century particularly in defence of traditional conceptions of a unified political community. The article considers the expanding use of mechanical analogies as well, tracing their evolution in political debates and the effect of the American and French revolutions in their usage.

Newtonian science and mechanics left an important imprint on the Scottish Enlightenment. Even though the usage of mechanical metaphors, especially that of a “state machine” per se, were rare in Scottish philosophy, its conception of the human, animal and political bodies as mechanisms that function according to regular principles, or laws, helped to shape many of the theories that have now become popular in various fields of Scottish studies. Most research in these fields focus on the conceptions of history related to theories of economic advancement. In this article the author suggests that the theories produced in the Scottish Enlightenment were also nuanced attempts to describe how historical mechanisms operate.

The aim of this article is to explore the different uses of the state-machine metaphor in Germany during the 1750s and 1760s. It focuses on the debate around the ideal state and especially on the views of one central writer, Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi (1717-1771). It has been argued that in this debate the functionality of the state was measured according to the efficiency and simplicity of the machine and that the best form of state was that which provided the fastest and most precise implementation of the final cause (happiness) and encountered the fewest obstacles on its way. At the time, unlimited monarchy arose as the form of government that best fitted this description, with Fredrick II and Justi being usually referred to as the ideologues of this mechanical authoritarian order, often described as “enlightened absolutism.” However, the author argues that Justi's position in this debate must be reconsidered since his writings show that he never denied the possibility of constructing a complex state-machine based on the separation and balance of powers. In fact, he was an admirer of England's mixed government as described by Montesquieu. Ironically, then, the author who most contributed to the dissemination of the state-machine metaphor in Germany was also the one whose usage of it was most exceptional.

This article examines the de facto rule of Johann Friedrich Struensee from 1770 to 1772 in Denmark, in which an effort was made to implement administrative reforms inspired by the ideas of French materialism and Prussian cameralism. Metaphors, particularly mechanical ones, had an important role in Struensee's attempt to legitimize his actions. Based on theoretical premises first presented by Hans Blumenberg, this article investigates two issues: first, how explicit and implicit mechanical and machine-like metaphors were used by Struensee to indicate the ideal architecture of the Danish absolutist state in the 1770s; and second, how his opponents made use of the same metaphors to describe what they saw as Struensee's illegitimate reach for power.

In spring 2007, Slagmark, a Danish intellectual history journal devoted an entire issue to the growing field of the history of concepts (in Danish, begrebshistorie), thus contributing to the international reception of German Begriffsgeschichte. As an attempt to reintroduce conceptual history to an audience of intellectual historians in Denmark, the compilation is worth a closer look. Th e volume focuses primarily on theoretical issues and on the work of Reinhart Koselleck. Strikingly, compared to the empirically-oriented Swedish introductory volume, Trygghet och äventyr (2005), edited by Bo Lindberg, and the extensive volume, Käsitteet liikkeessä (2003), produced by a group of Finnish scholars, the Danish volume concentrates on Koselleck’s work per se rather than on its various applications in different national contexts. In fact, only one of the articles in the volume addresses historical uses of concepts, namely a Danish translation of Koselleck’s “Zur antropologischen und semantischen Strukur der Bildung,” first published as an introductory article in Bildungsbürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert II (1990), and republished in the collected volume Begriff sgeschichten (2006).