Contributions to the History of Concepts

The field of modern European Jewish history, as I hope to show, can be of great interest to those who deal with conceptual history in other contexts, just as much as the conceptual historical project may enrich the study of Jewish history. This article illuminates the transformation of the Jewish languages in Eastern Europe-Hebrew and Yiddish-from their complex place in traditional Jewish society to the modern and secular Jewish experience. It presents a few concrete examples for this process during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The article then deals with the adaptation of Central and Western European languages within the internal Jewish discourse in these parts of Europe and presents examples from Germany, France, and Hungary.

The debate between metaphor theorists and conceptual historians has been intensifying in recent years. This article takes this debate beyond the bias toward Blumenberg's metaphorology, and starts from the interaction view of metaphor as formulated by Max Black. The article opens with a theoretical framework that reformulates Black's notions of metaphorical resonance and emphasis. It adapts them to the requirements of Conceptual History, and adds a third, historical criterion for metaphoricity. It then applies these suggestions to the history of the metaphor play/game/Spiel/jeu within twentieth-century political thought. Here, the focus lies on the role this metaphor plays in the conceptual relations between the ideas of political order, conflict, and immanence.

The article advocates the importance of studying conceptual meaning and change in modern mass media and highlights the significance of conceptual intermediality. The article first analyzes anger in Hindi cinema as an audiovisual key concept within the framework of an Indian national ideology. It explores how anger and the Indian angry young man became popularized, politicized, and stereotyped by popular films and print media in India in the 1970s and 1980s. The article goes on to advocate for extending conceptual history beyond language on theoretical grounds and identifies two major obstacles in political iconography: the methodological subordination of visuals to language in the negotiation of meaning, and the distinction of emotion and reason by assigning them functionally to different sign systems.

Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe Reloaded? Writing the Conceptual History of the Twentieth Century Guest editors: Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann and Kathrin Kollmeier

Introduction Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann and Kathrin Kollmeier

Some Thoughts on the History of Twentieth-Century German Basic Concepts Willibald Steinmetz

Is a “History of Basic Concepts of the Twentieth Century“ Possible? A Polemic Philipp Sarasin

History of Concepts, New Edition: Suitable for a Better Understanding of Modern Times? Alf Lüdtke

Reply Christian Geulen

Matthias Kroß and Rüdiger Zill, eds., Metapherngeschichten. Perspektiven einer Theorie der Unbegrifflichkeit [Histories of Metaphor: Perspectives of a Theory of Nonconceptuality] (Berlin: Parerga Verlag, 2011), 259 pp.