Contributions to the History of Concepts

The work of Pierre Rosanvallon is discussed here from the perspective of the conceptual history of “politics” (La Politique) and of “the political” (La Politique). In Rosanvallon's early work in the second half of the 1970s, there is a marked defence of the autonomy of politics, as a manifestation of contingency, against the language of “society,” then dominant in the social sciences and philosophy. Since the 1980s, Le Politique become a fashionable concept in French political thought, a phenomenon brought about by the reception of both Schmitt and Heidegger, in opposition to mere la politique. Although Rosanvallon can partly be linked to this fashion, he differs from his more philosophical colleagues in two respects: his concept of the political is more historically informed and he refrains from showing contempt for the activity of politics.

This article takes a close look at the iconographic construction of the so-called “otherness” in Spain between 1936 and 1945. During this three year period of civil unrest, the Franco regime set out to cast the defeated half of the war as an inimical “other.” In this process of building an impression of the “other,” the “New State,” created after April 1, 1939, played an important role, since in many ways the existence of this enemy “other” could favour unity between the rest, or “us.” The State used mandatory education as an efficient socialization tool in this process. The text looks at the different ways in which the image of the “other” was used in books that taught History, Civic Education and Patriotic Education in primary school.

Ferdinand Tönnies's oeuvre Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, published in 1887, has been seminal for the social and human sciences in general, and is no less interesting for intellectual historians and theoreticians of concept formation in particular. Tönnies subscribed to the belief that terms could be rendered less ambiguous, defining the words Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft more narrowly than their contemporary usage. In so doing, he sought to reconcile a heterogeneous agenda initially consisting in offering a diagnosis of vast historical developments and later consisting in providing heuristic tools to analyze individual relationships. This article examines the origins of the concepts and their politicized transformation prior to and subsequent to the publication of his work. As such, it takes on the transformation of Gemeinschaft during the romantic era and its revival by Germany's nationalist right wing and contrasts it with its appropriation by left-leaning communitarian movements in the English-speaking world. The polysemy of the terms in the German language accounts for their semantic evolution, for amalgamations of meanings within Tönnies's conceptual system, and for conundrums in translating the work into English or French. Although the terms were erroneously supposed to have been immediately applicable as ideal types, their adaptation, inter alia by Max Weber or by Talcott Parsons in the form of pattern variables, has been important in the reception of Tönnies's work in the social sciences.

The article examines, through the use of conceptual history, the semantics of ruling and government in Europe. The author identifies the discourses that have been constructed in order to answer the question of what can be ruled and governed in European cultures and shows how their prominence and timing have varied in different political cultures.

Erfgoed: de geschiedenis van een begrip Amsterdam University Press, the Netherlands, 2007. Frans Grijzenhout (ed.). Volume 5 in the series Dutch History of Concepts, Amsterdam University Press

Historisk tidskrift för Finland Vol. 92, nr. 1, 2007. Theme issue on conceptual history entitled: Concept, Language and History

Contents Volume 5 (2009)